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!
Recent activity at Jennifer’s blog:
A couple of years ago I wrote about composer Messaien’s, The End of Time, written while incarcerated in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. Last week, the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) reminded us of the music of those composers who did not survive – composers who were Jewish victims of Nazism. Three of these composers were in their 40s when they died/ were murdered, and one was only 26. We can only know their early and mid-career music, and must imagine what they might have created had they lived their natural life-spans.
All of the music in this concert was for wind instruments, some also with piano. The first piece was a wind quintet by Pavel Haas, written when he was in his early twenties, some years before the war. Although I play a wind instrument, I sometimes don’t like the medium of…
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Here’s a piece from Jennifer’s blog about Australian pianist Eileen Joyce (1908 – 1991).
What was it like to live in the golden age of the piano virtuoso, in the first half of the 20th century – before the rise of hi-tech recording and challenges to the piano’s central position as queen of keyboard instruments? What was it like to come to that world from an impoverished childhood – particularly if you were a woman? These questions come to mind when one contemplates the life of Australian pianist Eileen Joyce (1908 – 1991) who grew up in Boulder, a West Australian mining town.
I’ve been thinking about Eileen Joyce after attending Julia Hasting’s musical play, Fame Fortune and Lies: the life and music of Eileen Joyce, performed as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Julia is an accomplished pianist and an actor and she combined these two skills magnificently to give an outline of Eileen Joyce’s life, illustrated by performances of appropriate…
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Laundry, a piece of short fiction from Barry Lee’s blog:
There are too many choices, and he can’t decide, so in the end he stays home and does some laundry. He sits outside on the battered chair and watches the washing drying on the line. While he watches, he smokes cigarettes and drinks milky coffee. He’s forgotten the ashtray so he flicks the ash onto the ground. He remembers how he used to drink his coffee black and long because that’s how they drank it in the American police shows on TV. Sharp artificial scents from the laundry reach him. As the fabrics dry, the smell softens into flowers and sweet afternoons. A friend phones. Just for a chat, they say. He tells them he’s been busy today. Busy, busy. Another friend calls soon afterwards. He tells them the same thing. He wonders why they called. He remembers his first mobile phone, and plays with his toes. The washing moves…
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A review of Madeleine St John’s “A Stairway to Paradise” from Jennifer’s blog:
With the adaptation for theatre of her novel The Women in Black, the writer Madeleine St John has been rediscovered. She would now be well into her seventies, but she died of emphysema some ten years ago. Having enjoyed The Women in Black, centred around a store very much like David Jones, Sydney in the 1960s, I recently picked up another novel by her, A Stairway to Paradise.
This book has been described as ‘a dissection of desire’ and, although some reviewers see it as about a love triangle, I think that, far more, it is about the nature of desire and love. It is set in London – probably in the 1990s, the exact time doesn’t matter. Two men, Andrew and Alex, both married, love Barbara. But the desire between Alex and Barbara is the focus of the novel. Andrew, Alex’s squash partner has done what is perhaps…
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If you weren’t lucky enough to be in Adelaide for the recent Writers’ Week, you can experience it all through the podcasts of every session, now available here on Soundcloud:
Just close your eyes and imagine a warm, breezy day by the banks of the River Torrens and let the words wash over you…
When ‘writing process’ was first mentioned, I thought it meant how you put sentences together, how you might start with rough notes and turn them into a carefully crafted story. I see now that it can be considered in a broader way: how do you go about writing?
Discipline is tremendously important for me. I think it comes from a life of having music practice hanging over me. Sometimes ‘hanging’, sometimes something that I passionately wanted to do. But I’ve always had to fit it into my life – somehow. How could I fit writing into my life?
It was very hard until I decided to cut my paid working hours from full time to three days a week. This gave me two precious days a week for writing. I treated it as another job that I do on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. So, when friends asked, which are your days ‘off’? I would say, I don’t have any days off. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I write. I make sure that I’m at my desk by 9 am – usually much earlier. If a friend wants to meet for lunch on one of these days I work at the Public Library and we meet at a café near there, for just an hour – like a lunch hour.
I spend most of my ‘writing’ time sitting at my laptop. For me it is a kind of tactile process. Moving the fingers on the keys seems to stimulate my brain! But I walk a lot, usually alone, and I ‘write’ then – imagining my characters, having conversations with them. Ideally, I start a writing day with a 45 minute walk, much of it along the waterfront.
How do you get started? I always need something to latch onto – it can be the tiniest phrase, maybe even a word, a fragment of an idea, a snatch of conversation. The idea for my novel came from a piece of music. When I’m working on something substantial I like to go back over the last bit I wrote – there is always a temptation to go back to the beginning. As Paul Mitchell once said in a workshop, it’s like the tide going in an out: you are drawn back with the current to edit yesterday’s work and from there you wash forward into something new. I like editing – trying to get the story just right, trying it this way and that, picking away like a dog at a bone.
I write in my journal every morning for forty minutes, or I try to. My first writing teacher, Kim Trengove, was a fan of Julia Cameron’s book, The Artists Way. Cameron recommends the ‘Morning Pages’ as a way of ridding your mind of the dross, and helping you uncover your real thoughts and feelings. Journaling also helps develop the ‘writing muscle’.
In writing memoir, the ‘pages’ help me drill down to my hidden beliefs, and uncover any fear being them. In clearing my mind of daily minutiae, I am better able to discover what actually lies there. Mentor, Kaylie Jones, says memoir is about creating the ‘eye’ that watches the “I”.
As I learn to detach, ironically I can go deeper into what I am most afraid to write, find a way to express it, and allow a structure or at least a pattern to emerge. Miles Davis once said: “You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” This is true for me. It takes me a long time to learn to write like myself; a long time to find my own voice. But any glimmer of that individuality emerging is well worth the effort. For in the single story, they say, lives the universal.
My writing process has always been pretty chaotic and unruly. Ideas for stories have been written on tram tickets, serviettes and gas bills. Ideas can come to me at the most inconvenient times, usually when I walk away from the page! They sometimes come through dreams – which I write down every morning. They’ve come from snatches of conversation – ‘Did ya hear about the bloke who shot his missus on the train,’ was all I heard one day running towards Flinders St station. I had a story deadline pressing, so that became the title of my story, as well as the opening line.
A lot of my stories are been based on my own experiences, sometimes challenging ones. I’ve found humour to be a great tool to help me write about certain things. I grew up watching the great female comics – Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett. They were strong women who seemed to be able to broach any topic, even taboo subjects and make it all funny. I like the quote ‘if they’re laughing, they’re listening.’ There’s power in that idea for me. I’ve found it a very cathartic and validating experience writing about things from the past and having people laugh and clap. It didn’t matter in the end that it began as a sad story, what mattered was that I found a way to tell it.
One of the hardest struggles I’ve experienced as a writer is sitting down to the page. Suddenly there’ll be a sponge in my hand or a load of washing that must be put on. I had a writer’s studio for a while at Linden Gallery and spent most of my hours there decorating it then filling it with writer’s meetings! But luckily, I’m a sucker for a deadline. As such, I set aside whole weekends to work on specific writing projects – story competitions, magazine submissions etc. I wake up, grab the laptop and work through the hours from my bed. If you knocked on my door at midnight, that’s where you’d find me – unshowered, still in my dressing gown asking you in for breakfast…and I’ll be smiling.
Haphazard is the word I would use to describe my writing process. I have tried to put structure to, and boundaries around, my practice, but after many years it still seems to resemble squiggly lines on a piece of paper. I’m not hugely disciplined and like many writers will procrastinate to the bitter end, and think up anything to do rather than sit down and actually write. I’m slow too. I walk a lot – fresh air and exercise is a wonderful guilt-free excuse for not getting it down on paper.
But here’s the funny thing – it happens anyway. As I stride along, ideas take a hold of me – like gremlins they whisper ‘go on, go there, I dare you.’ I am surprised by what I write. Often it is the thing I most want to avoid – or bury in a deep hole quite frankly. It’s what takes over when I am pondering other themes to explore or stories I want to tell. To my astonishment, the slow decline of elderly parents, the heartbreak of separation, the fear of drowning in the mire of daily struggles – there it all is poured onto the page.
These words take form in poetry. I love the intensity of making every word count. I struggle with it and despair. But sometimes, just sometimes, I see in the words a truth I’ve told.
And then I know why I write.
Elwood Writers 