On Friday 1st and Sunday 3rd September, Vision Australia Radio presented a special Fathers Day edition of its Cover To Cover literary program, featuring the work of Elwood Writers. If you missed the program, there’s now an opportunity to hear the podcast at your leisure here.
We hope you enjoy the stories. We welcome feedback, so if you have any thoughts you’d like to share, please voice them in the comments field below.
Happy listening! from Elwood Writers.
Next Friday, the work of Elwood Writers will feature on a special Fathers Day edition of Cover To Cover on Vision Australia Radio. In the meantime, here’s another opportunity to listen to last year’s Mothers Day edition of the program, also featuring the work of Elwood Writers:
We’re thrilled to share the podcast of the special Mother’s Day edition of Cover To Cover from Vision Australia Radio. The entire program featured work from the Elwood Writers. And thanks to Tim McQueen and Vision Australia Radio, we were given the exciting opportunity to read our own work on the air.
Here’s the podcast link:
https://www.podbean.com/media/player/zc2fq-5f2e5d
We’d love to hear what you think of the program. Let us know in the comments section below. Happy listening!
Elwood Writers are going to be on the radio again! This time it’s for Fathers Day 2017: Jenny, Barry, Margaret, and Helen will be shining a light onto many facets of fatherhood through a selection of their literary work, including pieces of poetry, fiction and memoir. Their stories will be broadcast on the Cover To Cover program, Vision Australia Radio on Friday 1st September at 8:00 p.m., and repeated on Sunday 3rd September at 1:30 p.m.
Tune in!
There’s a handy frequency-finder here and the program can be live streamed around the world here. VAR broadcasts in Perth too. Details here. For Melbourne listeners, the Vision Australia digital radio service is on your radio under ‘VAR Digital’. Or if you’ve got an old school wireless you can listen in at 1179AM.
Margaret is pleased to be a contributor to the anthology ‘Jewels of San Fedele’, which comprises the work of 14 women who attended a writing retreat in Italy, 2016. The ‘experiential’ classes were designed to have students deepen their work. Margaret’s two stories are excerpts from a memoir in progress.
‘Jewels of San Fedele’ is edited by D Ferrara and Patricia Florio, and is available from Amazon at the following link:
A piece of microfiction from Barry’s site:
He stopped swimming, and floated in the middle of the pool. I watched him closely, the long thin line of body broken by the blue of his swimming trunks. Then I imagined the trunks gone. It was easy, really, but almost unbearable. He started to swim again, towards me, then tumbled over at the end, and started up the other way. And he kept on, lap after lap. It was good to watch. Mesmerising. But that’s all it was. Over and over. I became a little bored. Maybe not bored, but it wasn’t going anywhere, so I went inside to break it up, and I bought a coffee and a sandwich from the vending machines. I took them back out to the pool, to where I’d been sitting. But it had all changed. The water was flat and still. The pool, empty. He was gone, the swimmer. He would have…
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“There is no plot, and there doesn’t need to be.”
A review of Margaret Drabble’s ‘The Dark Flood Rises’ from Jennifer’s site:
Margaret Drabble’s most recent novel weaves around De Beauvoir’s observation that with people living longer ‘their idleness [is] all the harder to bear . . . mere survival is worse than death’. The main character in this book is Fran, in her seventies, ‘too old to die young’. She is not idle – she works as an inspector of nursing homes and is thus in a position to muse about the various arrangements of the characters in this book – all connected by blood or friendship. There is no plot, and there doesn’t need to be. Each character has a different way of coping with their ‘long journey towards oblivion’, (from D.H. Lawrence’s The Ship of Death).
The book’s title comes from this poem:
Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.
The title, for this reader, also suggested…
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Scrivener is a project management system for writers. You can access it easily on the Internet and it all seems pretty generous: 30 days free trial and those are not consecutive days, but the days you actually use the package.
I heard about it a couple of years ago when a couple of IT focussed guys at work raved about it as a way to write their novels. A story went around that the designer of Scrivener was writing a novel, but Scrivener itself was so successful that he abandoned his novel and lived off the proceeds of his software package. Full of scepticism, I downloaded the package and started to do the introductory tutorial. I persisted for about half an hour, then the ‘instructor’ announced something like, that’s the first part, now go and get yourself a cup of tea . . . This isn’t for me, I thought. I closed everything down and went back to using Word, keeping my work in folders, all embedded in a folder called ‘Writing’. Sometime last year I went to a workshop given by Toni Jordan – a writer I admire very much. She is very keen about Scrivener. If she uses it, I thought, I’d better give it another try. Writers’ Victoria advertised a workshop on Scrivener to be delivered by writer Alison Stuart. I gritted my teeth and enrolled. I took the workshop.
At the end of the full day workshop, I’m still not sure whether I will use it. I’ve got an idea for a novel-sized book and used that as a kind of ‘guinea pig’. I had a new thought about it this morning and went to the newly-created Scrivener file to make a note about it. That’s a good sign. But I still feel very constrained: you start with a Binder (like a big ring-binder folder) and in this you create whatever section you like, but if you’ve opted for ‘fiction’ you get choices such as ‘characters’ and ‘scene’. There’s an editing option (where you write stuff) and an Information section where you can store all the support material. I use old photographs a lot, you could also have pdfs of old newspapers, cartoons . . . whatever. It will be useful to be able to have a split screen and write with this stimulus material next to the prose you are creating.
Writers are described as either Plotters (plan it all out first) or Pantsers (write off the seat of your pants). I’m a Pantser. The book that I’ve just (perhaps) finished started when I looked at an old photograph and grew with loads of twists, turns, diversions into 90,000 words. I think I’d have to regurgitate a first draft in Word and then sort it all out with Scrivener. Yet – I did go to Scrivener this morning when I had a new idea. So, I’m still thinking about it.
I can see that Scrivener would be excellent for writing non-fiction: you could keep interviews, notes, articles right next to you as you write. It would also be good for a detective story – easy to keep track of clues. And the only way to learn about such a package is to use it – so I’ll give it a try, for 30 days, at least.
From Jennifer’s website:
A month or so ago I wrote of the first concert presented by an exciting new enterprise in Melbourne, the New Music Studio of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Just recently, in the Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre, the group presented music of Australian composer Tim Dargaville.
The first three pieces referenced Tim’s special interest in Indian music – particularly drumming. Indeed at the opening of Kolam, for saxophone quartet, Tim seemed to speak in tongues when he vocalised in a kind of drumming language. A kolam is a mandala-like drawing composed of a continuous line curving around a matrix of dots. The traditional mandala, fashioned with rice, was usually at the entrance to a home; it was walked on and disappeared by the end of the day, so the next day another one would be made. This idea of continuity was apparent in the shape of the…
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When I was growing up in the fifties, the World War II books of Paul Brickhill on our bookshelves were The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky and The Great Escape. The bare details on the books’ spines stood in contrast to the embossed books on the shelves, suggesting that the former belonged to my father who was a veteran.
At Adelaide Writers’ Week this year, I was curious to hear Paul Brickhill’s biographer, Stephen Dando-Collins, announce that Brickhill was not only Australian, but had been a prisoner of war (POW) in Germany as had my father and uncle. No wonder they made us kids sit up late for the TV re-run of Reach for the Sky. The film was based on my uncle’s friend Douglas Bader, a hero fighter pilot and real life POW.
As a prisoner of Stalag Luft 3 himself, the author Brickhill was fascinated by men who ‘struggling against impossible odds’. He determined that his first novel, The Great Escape, would be based on the events of the break-out from his own prison camp, wherein fifty escapees were shot dead. Brickhill knew that his novel needed a hero to focus the story. He chose real life escapee Roger Bushell, who became Big X for the movie. Steve McQueen played the lead role, somewhat sensationalising the actual escape, but cementing Brickhill’s career as an author.
Stephen Dando-Collins believes that Brickhill hit upon the need for heroes in a post-war Britain that was reeling from a broken economy, their cities in ruin. There was little evidence to the British in those days that they had actually won the war. Brickhill kept his Australian identity quiet so as not to jeopardise his authenticity as a storyteller. The objectivity of his ‘outsider’ status may have helped him shape Britain’s post-war self-image by creating its heroes.
The biographer says that Brickhill was drawn to other hard-drinking, chain-smoking, driven men like himself. These days he would be described as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In those days he was just part of the norm. But that’s a subject for another time.
The Hero Maker: A Biography of Paul Brickhill
Stephen Dando-Collins (Vintage)
Once again Adelaide delighted with its heady mix of festival fare. Writers from round the world took to the stage in the wonderfully situated Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens by the river. This year I was drawn to the writings of the chroniclers of our times – the journalists and social commentators who strive to show us the truth of complex human situations through both non-fiction and fiction. A highlight was the poetry reading session curated by Peter Goldsworthy, with six of Adelaide’s noted poets reading from their collections. I particularly loved the simplicity of Jules Leigh Koch’s and Cath Kenneally’s readings. Their observations on the small, often suburban details of life can be both profound and poignant. Leigh Koch’s Man in the Bookshop ‘tucks his thoughts away like a bookmark’ while one of Kenneally’s characters is ‘leaking at the seams’.
In US journalist Thomas Frank’s ‘Listen Liberal’ he explores the failings of the US left and the disintegration of the middle class. He believes the Democrats cannot find the policy or conviction to alter the economy and ‘the gravity of discontent keeps pulling to the right, and the right and the right’. Ben Ehrenreich and Mei Fong, respectively writing about the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank in ‘The Way to the Spring’ and the effect of China’s one-child policy in ‘One Child’, discussed the very real issue of bias and objectivity in telling compelling stories. Ehrenreich posed the question: How can you write about Palestine objectively when it is very clear there is an absolute imbalance of power? You cannot denude the truth, he purports, and you must be transparent about where you stand. Fong concurred that the reader wants to know the truth and you must give your reader a clear point of view. Of course bias is in her book by her very status of being Chinese and a woman.
Journalists Patrick Cockburn (Ireland), ‘The Rise of Islamic State’, and Janine di Giovanni (US), ‘The Morning They Came for Us’, both Middle Eastern experts, gave a sobering and thorough account of the chaos that is Syria, painting a clear picture of the major players involved and the likely outcome. On the other hand, two novelists have brought the stories of the marginalised to readers via fiction. Mexican author Yuri Herrera, ‘Signs Preceding the End of the world’, and Korean Krys Lee, ‘How I Became a North Korean’, explore the realities of displaced people. Herrera delves into the shadowy world of border communities where people are not ‘recognisable’ (no papers or passports) and must adapt to many migrants from different worlds living together. He deems ‘art allows us not to be hostage to one version of reality’. Lee wanted to write about the people she knows who are not just ‘North Korean’, but complex human beings. How do we know what it is like to be that person who is simply a stereotype to the outside world? she asks.
I enjoyed an entertaining session on Books and Reading with Keith Houston (Scotland), an expert on the history of the book, and Alberto Manguel (Canada) who has written extensively on books and reading. It was heartening to hear both authors emphatically stating that the book will survive, that libraries are our identity and memory, and can and must collect everything, including new technologies. Libraries must be preserved, they concurred!
Of course there was so much to sample of the Arts and Fringe festivals running concurrently. Watching the Berlin company Schaubuhne Berlin’s rendering of Shakespeare’s Richard III in German was a roller coaster of frenetic-paced, fantastic acting, to the accompaniment of heavy metal music, rapping, and with audience interaction and nudity (his) on stage. A phenomenal performance and for this writer quite thrilling as Richard limped off the stage, plonked himself next to me at the end of the row and asked ‘Do you mind?’ as Anne delivered her soliloquy over her dead husband’s body. No proscenium arch here!
Finally, as part of the Fringe Festival, a delightful concert of popular music by The String Family, mum, dad and two teens all on cellos or violins, had everyone’s toes tapping. Their story of life on the road for the past thirteen months, travelling around Australia, living in a caravan and winning the Australian National Busking Championship, had moments of great poignancy as they live out ‘the dream’. While missing the family and friends they have left behind, they have come to understand, first hand, the hardships of life on the land for so many Australians. Now there’s a book in that.
Elwood Writers 