by ·2 Comments

Hello again. The title of this post is a quote by American writer Daniel Hillel, and it resonated with me the other day when I read it in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: some instructions on writing and life. Bird by Bird is one of my favourite writing books, and I often go back to it, especially in times of self-doubt caused by long periods of waiting for publishers to get back to me. The chapters on ‘Radio Station KFKD’ – Lamott’s analogy for the negative voices that fill a writer’s head – are laugh-out-loud funny, even after you’ve read them as many times as I have. Anne Lamott taped Hillel’s quote above her desk to remind herself to keep ‘dancing’ during the rough patches, which is a good thing to remember. Like Anne Lamott, the way I ‘dance’ is by writing … and also by singing, especially with other people. I would have lost the plot a long time ago if it hadn’t been for my singing groups.

Over the last few months, though, I’ve mainly been busy with paid work and PhD matters, but things are beginning to calm down now. Not that I’ve been idle on the creative writing front – a few weeks ago, I put in an application for Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island, near Seattle. Hedgebrook (www.hedgebrook.org) is a unique residential program that supports the creative process of women writers, and ever since a friend went there in 2010, I have fantasised about the Amish-inspired cottages, the food baskets, the quietness of the woods, and the conversations over shared meals at the end of each day. I’d love to be offered a Hedgebrook residency for 2014, where I could have some focussed writing time to develop my next manuscript, a fiction project. Residential retreats – especially ones where you don’t have to cook – are so important for writers like me who don’t have long stretches of time to write, to think, or to dream.

I also had a ‘20 Pages / 20 Minutes’ session with Rob Spillman from Tin House Books (US) at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. I’ve found these ‘speed-dating-style’ editorial sessions very useful in the past, and this one was no exception. Rob Spillman gave me some excellent advice on how to improve the opening of my memoir, and he also recommended I contact an agent in New York because he thought my writing would appeal to an American audience. Oh, yes please! We talked about Hedgebrook and other American-based writing programs – like the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and the Tin House Workshops in Oregon – and Rob said my writing was good enough to get me into any of those places. I walked away from the editorial session filled with renewed hope for the future. Bring it on!

Another piece of exciting news is that the first book from my HarperCollins Varuna group has been published. Heather Taylor Johnson’s Pursuing Love and Death looks fabulous and it will be the first ‘pleasure’ read I allow myself after finishing my PhD in early February. Yes, the end is in sight, folks – I recently had a breakthrough moment where I suddenly understood how to structure an academic thesis and the exegesis isn’t half as scary as it was. Thank goodness for that. Until next time …

by ·2 Comments

Hello again. It’s spring in Armidale, and I’ve just returned from a fabulous annual writing retreat at the coast with my dear friend, Edwina Shaw. We both brought full manuscripts to be edited and checked over, and although Edwina and I spent many hours sitting on the veranda of our cabin reading and making corrections on each other’s work, we still managed to walk along the beach and swim in the surf and eat delicious food and drink beer and laugh long into the night and sing ‘Speed Bonnie Boat’ and light a candle for Helen Greaney, a beautiful 93-year-old woman who died last week (and we even had time to debate Hemingway’s use of ‘and’ in lengthy sentences). And the best thing is that when Edwina finished reading the completed draft of my memoir – yes, you read that right: the completed draft – she thought the new narrative structure worked really well. Hooray! Edwina thinks I still need to do a little cutting and ‘rejigging’, but the final HarperCollins-submission-ready-draft is rapidly approaching.

A huge motivation to finish the memoir came my way in early September, when I heard that Heather Taylor Johnson – one of the other Varuna HarperCollins Award winners – had her manuscript accepted by HarperCollins. It took ten months for the team to reach a decision, but it was well worth the wait because Heather’s book is going to be published in Australia and probably in America as well. Heather is so happy. She’d just gotten off the phone with her editor when she sent the news through, and after I forwarded my congratulations, I thought to myself: ‘I want that feeling, too, but it’s never going to happen if I don’t finish this draft.’ So I did it. I worked like a madwoman to get it done before the 20th September (the final deadline I set for myself), and posted the manuscript to my ASA mentor, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, with a great sigh of relief. Judith has two other manuscripts to edit before she can look at mine, so it may be a while before I receive her feedback, but she was so pleased that I’d finished and said: ‘You can be thrilled, Helena, to have brought yourself out the other end of this draft.’

I am thrilled.

Life has responded accordingly. Since I sent the manuscript to Judith (and escaped from the confines of my writing area), the world has opened up before me. First of all, a washing machine unexpectedly arrived into my life, just as my old Simpson spun its last load. Then, last week, I heard I won a Varuna Fellowship for my next project – ‘The Bakery Stories’ – a novella which explores the story of the Dutch Jews during World War II. I’ve been working on ‘The Bakery Stories’ on and off for about five years now (as a way to build up a publication record) and it’s such an affirmative ‘Yes!’ to be awarded the fellowship to further develop this project.

Fired up by these positive signs, and strangely energised after finishing the memoir, I developed an idea for a future writer-in-residence position with a local youth organisation. The possibilities of this project are so exciting they just about keep me awake at night, but because I need funding, I had to quickly pull together a Country Arts Support Program (CASP) Application. I sent it away just in time to meet the submission deadline, and will hear whether my application was successful in November.

Also, while still intoxicated by the potential of this writer-in-residence idea (and flying high about the Varuna win), I ran into a friend – another PhD student – on the path outside Dixson library at UNE. I’d seen this same friend in the lingerie shop in town the week before, when I was buying a new bra to celebrate finishing the draft, but it wasn’t really the place to have an in-depth discussion about our studies. This time I had a pile of books under my arm – like a proper post-graduate student – so we stopped to chat. I excitedly told my friend about finishing the memoir and about my writer-in-residence idea, and then I showed her the books I’d just borrowed – titles by Tom Wolfe and Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson – and we talked about the legacy of the New Journalists, and it was all so exciting I could barely contain myself, even though I was aware of raving and perhaps coming across as just a little manic. But my friend was beaming with excitement, too. ‘It’s all so perfect!’ she enthused at one point. She also suggested that my idea could be incorporated into my exegesis, which caused me to remember that I have to write my exegesis very quickly if I am to make 2012 my ‘Year of Completion’ – but even finishing my PhD felt like a cinch that day.

As we said our farewells, I remembered my Varuna news and told my friend about the fellowship. ‘Oh Helena!’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘You’re a writer … a real writer!’ And I looked at her and thought, ‘Yes, I am!’ After nearly nine years, I am finally ready to admit to myself – and to the world – that I am a writer!

And the possibilities of life suddenly seem endless.

by ·7 Comments

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am an emerging Australian writer of creative nonfiction / memoir, and I have set up this to blog to record the process of preparing my memoir manuscript to a publishable standard within the next six months. This memoir, currently titled ‘Iron Men: Alchemy at Work’ (a new title is needed, but has not yet been decided), explores the challenge of disaffected youth from a mother’s perspective. My work on this memoir recently won me a 2010 / 2011 HarperCollins Varuna Award for Manuscript Development. The award includes a ten-day residency at Varuna, the Writers’ House, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Every year, five lucky writers work with five senior editors from HarperCollins, and the aim of the program is to help each writer to bring their manuscript to a publishable standard through an on-going relationship with their editor. The finished work is then submitted to HarperCollins, one ofAustralia’s leading publishers, for first consideration.

I have just returned from Varuna (27th April-6th May, 2011) where I consulted at length with Senior Nonfiction Editor, Anne Reilly, who chose my manuscript from the long-list. Thank you, Anne, for giving me this wonderful professional opportunity! Along with the four other HarperCollins awardees – Sally Bothroyd, Tim Denoon, Anna Hedigan, and Heather Taylor Johnson – I conferred with my editor at the beginning and at the end of the residency, and have left Varuna with a blueprint of what further work I need to do. During the residency we also had information sessions with Sue Brockhoff, Head of Fiction, who explained the intricacies of the publishing process should HarperCollins accept our manuscripts.

Varuna is heaven for writers (thank you Mick Dark!). All the household / cooking needs are catered for (thanks to Joan and Sheila!), and writers are left undisturbed (thanks to Lis and Vera!) to write, read, think, walk, sleep, have baths, eat chocolate, drink wine … whatever! As well as writing over 65 000 words while I was there – yes, amazing! – I walked for hours each day around the streets of Katoomba. My editor, Anne, also enjoyed walking, so we ‘walked and talked’ through the mist and rain, up and down hills and discussed what the manuscript needs. The good news is that Anne thinks my memoir is ‘imminently publishable’, but the not-so-good news is that it basically needs to be re-written and re-structured. Sigh … Did I mention that I’ve already been working on this manuscript for three and a half years? Oh, well.

According to Anne, there are two types of writers – mapper-outers and arrow-shooters. Mapper-outers, as the name suggests, are those writers who plan their manuscript in great detail, a technique which works particularly well for genre writers. They always know where they are going and what they are doing. Arrow-shooters, the category I fall into, are those who shoot out the arrow (the idea that interests them) and see where it lands. The place I am in now is that I have shot out my arrow – and have a work-in-progress of 85 000 words – but now I need to incorporate some ‘mapping’ techniques to improve the content and structure. My aim is to merge some of the 60 000 words I wrote at Varuna with some of the current content. By the end of six months I will have a much better story and will have learnt how to put my heart – my emotional truth – into this work.

And how am I going to do that, and where am I going to start? More about that in my next post … but let me just say that so far it has involved pencils, cardboard, a laptop, tissues, long walks, lots of red wine, a trip to the movies to see ‘HOWL’ and two fantastic massages.

Helena