Melbourne Writers Festival'

You'll be able to catch me here at the Melbourne Writers' Festival:

Saturday 22 August 2009
Time: 2:30 PM
Venue: ACMI 2
Event Name: VISIONS OF THE CITY
Panelists: China Míeville, Margo Lanagan, Jack Dann
How do we imagine the city in fiction? Catastrophic metropolises, decaying ghost towns, cities hidden beneath cities: to launch Overland magazine’s Melbourne Futures issue, China Miéville, Margo Lanagan and Jack Dann discuss how the city features in their work. Chaired by Overland’s Rjurik Davidson.

Master Class for Progressive Writers

Last weekend the Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers was held. I had a great time, and it was really inspiring to spend three days with the participants and the guest teachers. Two of the participants have blogged about it:

Simonne Michelle-Wells says:

The Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers, conceived and facilitated by Overland Associate Editor, Rjurik Davidson was as inspiring as it was constructive. We were blessed, not only by Rjurik’s witty wisdoms, but those of prominent industry professionals, Tony Birch, Cate Kennedy, and Lucy Sussex.

Read the rest here.

Koraly Dimitriadis writes:

I was a bit thrown when I got an email from Rjurik Davidson, associate editor at Overland, congratulating me on being accepted into the Overland master class for progressive writers. I knew the short story I submitted was progressive, but I guess I didn’t have enough faith that my story would get me a place in the class. After getting over the initial shock of it, I was flattered, excited and nervous at the same time. I was nervous about meeting the other eight writers selected and worried that they would all be intellectual and political and use difficult words that I’ve never heard of. Not only that, but I was terribly nervous about being in the same space as three writers I highly respected: Tony Birch, Cate Kennedy, and Lucy Sussex.

After attending the classes, I have to say, it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. In fact, it was one of the most inspiring and educational three days of my writing career. The other eight writers, Angela Meyer, Alec Patric, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Ilia Rosli, Daan Spijer, Warwick Sprawson, David Azul, and Simonne Michelle-Wells, provided invaluable feedback on my short story. Rjurik was excellent in the way he conducted the classes, spending time on each of our stories and dissecting structure, plot and character to make our stories the best they could be. Classes were challenging and informative as ideas were bounced around about the best ways of weaving politics into fiction.

You can read the rest here.

Review of Domine

Dave Conyers has reviewed my story "Domine", reprinted in Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt's the Years Best Australian SF Volume 4. Dave, in the Irish SF magazine Albedo One, writes:

Domine’ by Rjurik Davidson is an improved effort from an up and coming Western Australian short story writer, with a science fiction piece concerning a middle aged man coming to terms with a father barely out of his twenties. Their strange age differences an outcome of the relativistic space travel undertaken by the father, who has recently returned to Earth for 'shore building and a tighter less-indulgent narrative style this story could have been really good...

Probably the most intriguing aspects of the fourth volume of The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy are the choice of stories, as they all tend to lean towards a certain style. Most contributions are from authors who are stronger on character and language than on plot, pace and creating a sense of the fantastic.

In a recent interview Congreve stated that he sees himself and Michelle as collectors rather than editors of stories: if he could edit stories the line up would be very different. Perhaps the better Australian authors not represented need better editors, or to spend more time getting the words right. If so we might see very different tales in Volume 5.

The selection also tends to suggest that the local small press science fiction and fantasy magazines have become niche markets, even within their own genre. As an aside this certainly doesn't seem to be the case with horror publications, as is evident in the diversity of stories collected in Brimstone Press' competing series, Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror.

Despite the state of the Australian speculative short story industry, Congreve's and Marquardt's latest offering remains one of the better Australian anthologies released in 2008.

I've known Dave for a long time, though I haven't seen him for years (hence he still thinks I live in WA). I suspect here we get an interesting example of a divide that runs right through the SF world: the differing aesthetics of readers who like traditional genre elements (plot, pace, sense of wonder) and those who are literary, concerned with deep character, theme, mood, language. Dave falls on the former side of the divide. And it seems to me that writing literary SF is probably not a great career move. It's a form of marginalising yourself doubly. First, you marginalise yourself from the literary mainstream which often sneers as science fiction, then you marginalise yourself from the bulk of SF genre readers who are often attracted to its pulpish elements. You end up with a very small readership indeed, unless like Ballard, Le Guin and others, you can reconnect with the literary mainstream. Or if you're really smart, you write science fiction which is able to hide the fact that it is science fiction (here I'm thinking of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or Margaret Atwood's work). Otherwise you are likely to end up like Thomas M. Disch - a great and ignored writer.

It seems to me that there are a number of writers I know who run this risk: in terms of Australians, someone like Ben Peek might be sitting in this space. Peek's Twenty Six Lies One Truth is a smart novella which owes much to experimental or 'postmodern' fiction, and yet I suspect its main readership came from the SF community, the place where Peek made his name.

Bastardy

A couple of days ago I went to a fundraiser organised by some friends for the community environment park, CERES. They showed the documentary Bastardy, which is a portrait of indigenous actor Jack Charles, a wonderfully charismatic little man who was a heroin addict for thirty years. He was in and out of jail over that time. The documentary pretty much follows Charles over a number of years, from his time on the streets of Fitzroy and Collingwood to his return to jail and his final release. Bastardy is not a typical documentary, but rather a character portrait. There is little discussion of Charles' early years as a member of the stolen generation, or his time as a 'ward of the state'. There are no interviews with Charles' friends or family. Briefly covered is Charles' role in founding the first Aboriginal theatre company. Wonderful is director Amiel Courtin-Wilson's slow transformation from biographer to friend and accomplice. In the end it is Charles's infectious personality - his humour and character - that stands out. This from the film's website:

Born in 1943 Jack Charles was well and truly a child of the Stolen Generations and spent many of his formative years in the boy’s homes of Melbourne which he took on with his usual laconic outlook. “It was alright by me – I was happy to assimilate. The only trouble was I wasn’t ever going to fit in. I’m fucking brown mate.” In 1971 he founded the first Aboriginal theatre company Nindethana and has performed with the cream of Australia’s actors and directors including Geoffrey Rush, Neil Armfield, John Romeril and Tracey Moffat. His work has spanned feature films, TV series and hundreds of plays including The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Bedevil, Ben Hall, The Marriage of Figaro and the 1972 Bastardy, the play about the life of Jack Charles, which the film title comes from. Jack was awarded the prestigious Tudawali Award at the Message Sticks Festival in 2009, honouring his lifetime contribution to Indigenous media.

Moments from the end of June

1. Preparations for the Overland Master Class for Progressive writers proceeds apace. The selections have been made. All the planning done. As a result of all this, I've mentioned the whole notion of political writing to various people in the last few weeks. The response has been twofold: 1) "It's obvious that writing is political." 2) "Art is not an essay and so not political." It seems to me that both of these are true, but that most people don't hold both concepts at one and the same time. I've been considering a whole bunch of novels and films which I would consider both political and good artistically. Anyone got any good suggestions out there? Favourite books or films that are progressive?

2. The McKee Story seminar was definitely an event. It was impressive to see how McKee lectures alone for 10 hours a day (with 2 hours in breaks) and manages to hold it all together. Though he did look wrecked at the end of the weekend. He enlivens his performance - basically what's in his book - with anecdotes, personal opinions about issues of the moment, and jokes. Here's one I remember: If a man is standing in the forest talking, and there's no woman to listen to him, is he still wrong?

3. Took F to see Simon and Garfunkel last week for her birthday. As we walked to the Tennis Centre with B, I cried out: "Follow the trail of grey hair." It was nice to feel young at a concert. S and G were loose and lacking in energy and did not look well at all (maybe they were jet-lagged?). In fact, Simon looked like he'd just been dug up, and Garfunkel like some ancient weird Ronald McDonald ("Why is he being so nice mommy?). But still, what songs ... Favourites, of course, are Kathy's song, Sounds of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, America. Simon's section of the gig - his Graceland songs - was great. Here's a video of them, recently, doing America:

Springsteen - Thunder Road

Was it the fact that Springsteen played for Obama at some point that pushed him back into my consciousness? When I was a teenager, I used to listen to him: his working-class leftism, his lost-soul ballads always appealed to me, though I never much went for his stadium rock. Anyway, for some reason I dragged out some of his old stuff and I realised how beautiful some of it is, like this one - Thunder Road. As I was listening, I realised that the whole theme of escape/desire to escape runs through a lot of my stories. Everyone is always saying, "Let's get out of here. Let's escape..." They hardly ever do.

There Goes the Neighbourhood Book Launch

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Captain Rumble and I ended up at a party in Sydney after a writers' festival dinner. The party followed an exhibition curated by a friend of mine, Zanny Begg. Well, the book that emerged from the exhibition is being launched in Melbourne:

There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space
Melbourne Book Launch & Tea Party
Saturday July 4th
2- 4pm

Guest Speaker: Gary Foley

Brunswick Bound
361 Sydney Rd,
Brunswick, VIC 3056
E: info@brunswickbound.com.au
P: 9381 4019

Worried about the gentrification? Rising rents? Apartment blocks popping up on every corner and yuppies taking over your local neighbourhood? Well you’re not alone… There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space is a book produced in conjunction with an exhibition in Sydney which explores these issues. From Collingwood to Redfern to New York to Copenhagen people the world over are negotiating life in the city – squatting, living space, evictions, rents and so on. Come along to a launch of the book and a discussion about spatial politics in the city.
There Goes the Neighbourhood begins with a close study of Redfern before expanding into international examples to provide a detailed exploration of how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. This book has been published in tandem with an exhibition of the same name and many of the contributions come from participating artists in the exhibition: Brenda L. Croft (Australia), 16beaver (USA), Daniel Boyd (Australia), Temporary Services (USA), Jakob Jakobsen (Denmark), Lisa Kelly (Australia), SquatSpace (Australia), Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro (Germany/Australia), Evil Brothers (Australia), You Are Here (Australia), Michael Rakowitz (USA), Miklos Erhardt and Little Warsaw (Hungary), Bijari (Brazil) and Democracia (Spain). The book also includes contributions from key thinkers about the complex life of cities such as the Situationists, Mike Davis, Brian Holmes, Gary Foley and Elizabeth Farrelly.

There Goes The Neighbourhood is edited by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg from You Are Here, a Sydney based art collective which focuses on social and spatial mapping.
$15
Designed by Tom Sevil (Breakdown Press)
Printed by Break Out Print

For more information: http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/book.htm