The May Nutshell
Evergreen, artists, unbanning books, and Voracious Readers
Dear Reader,
I write this lying on the yoga mat. It’s been a month of plot twists.
First, a routine scan one morning. The GP kindly called with my results that same afternoon — I was lumbering home with three-bags-full from Woolies, dumped the shopping on the pavement to take the call and with my index finger blocking my other ear-hole so I could hear him over the traffic, I received a merciful all is well.
Fifteen minutes later, the GP rang again with a grave and apologetic Actually . . . To quote a magnificent line in the novel I’ve just finished reading, everything plummeted “like a sandbank collapsing inside me”*. All was not quite as well as I’d have liked.
Four days later I saw a surgeon, and nine days after that I was heading to an operating table. This sounds like a real emergency but is more an example of Australia’s public healthcare system at its most efficient. I was lucky. I behaved as I’d have expected to in the lead-up: made jokes, told everyone I didn’t need any help, and anaesthetised my worries with fiction.
On the operating table I panicked that the general wouldn’t work, that maybe I was too stubborn or something, but the world went perfectly dark and when I woke I was like a machine being switched on. There was the world again, getting on with things. A nurse asked if I’d like a Zooper Dooper, and I said yes, please and lime, please, and felt as happy as a child.
The surgeon told me to expect pain but I didn’t feel any. I felt tender and relieved, and sheepishly lucky, and every time I felt sorry for myself my mind returned to the lime Zooper Dooper. The plot twist came on the third day of recovery while I was putting on socks: my back went. And when it goes, it really goes. Here’s that pain you were meant to feel!
Hence, I write this lying on the yoga mat, willing my spine to relax for a second so I can get this newsletter out.
If there’s one thing I enjoy doing on a yoga mat…
It’s reading. My post-op botched-back choices have been spot-on for taking my mind off the pain; head propped on a pillow, hard-wood floor beneath the mat oddly comforting. The Sitter by Angela O’Keeffe is the recent winner of the Christina Stead Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin. It’s a single-bite but layered story narrated by a ghostly Hortense Cezanne, wife of the artist Paul and painted many times by him, as she observes an Australian woman who has been trying to write a novel about her, in France, as Covid is emerging. I found it both bold and elegantly careful, like Claire Keegan’s work, and when I finished and found I wanted more I decided it was because the author had been so precise and perceptive about the creative process that I’d become greedy: please tell me more about this thing we do! Hortense as narrator is compelling but limited in how much of her story she can tell, and ultimately that feels like the point.
I believe my family’s old art gallery hosted the first British solo exhibition of Paul Cezanne in 1925, which included Madame Cezanne in Blue. (No, I don’t have a sneaky Cezanne lying around, just a lot of old exhibition catalogues.)
I tried to go straight into another Australian art-based novel after The Sitter but only lasted forty pages (too much ennui, too little sense of humour), so instead I turned to arty podcasts and found something by casual browsing that after two episodes has me hooked: Death of An Artist, Series 2, on Jackson Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner. I’m now even more keen to get around to Angela O’Keeffe’s debut novel, Night Blue, from 2021, which I understand is largely told in the voice of Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’. (Thank you, weird bookish magic.)
This week I devoured Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood much like the untiring plague of mice in this profound and riveting novel, which again places itself in the early time of Covid. Plot-wise, I suppose it’s quiet — it’s set in the middle of nowhere in a convent and the shape of the story defies a dramatic crisis / resolution — but it absolutely filled my cup. It felt truthful. It tells and is riddled with backstory, and is defiant and compassionate and its own thing. I felt the author’s presence, I think, though I don’t know Charlotte, only some of her other work, and that presence was clever and experienced and reassuring but not all-knowing or arrogant. I loved The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend, but this is the one I can see myself reading again. There are lines and passages to stop and stare at.
Last book recommendation: Evergreen by Matthew Cordell.
Evergreen kept popping up in front of me, winning awards and staring at me with her big scared eye. She is like something from my childhood, longer text but still lavishly illustrated. This is a simple story that’s been told before, many times, but is now being told like this — and it turns out we still like it. It merges the scarier picture books I remember from childhood and the modern-day parenting style of encouraging resilience without dreadful horror — while Evergreen certainly thinks she faces real danger, and the illustrations match her anxiety, it is her perception that is on display here — she is actually safe, it turns out. The point is, she’s facing her anxiety, whether or not she is right to feel it. I love that nuance, and that it is not pushed or over-spelled. Set in the wilds of Buckthorn Forest where Granny Oak has come down with a terrible flu, with characters called Sprig and Squirt and Briar, there is a good old-fashioned twist after Evergreen’s perilous journey, and the artwork is nostalgic and funny and dramatic. It’s a gorgeous object, a keeper.
Unsuccessful Book Banning Still Hurts Us
This month the book banning that has been rife in American libraries reared its ugly head in Australia when a council passed a motion to rid local libraries of all children’s books with same-sex parents. It was the typical playbook: an unknown, possibly even single number of complaints about one book, a local council stacked with ultra-conservative religious people, no one actually reading the book in question — this simple equation was enough to blanket ban books in public libraries: they claimed the purge was already underway.
The New South Wales government was swift to intervene, threatening to remove funding (surely we can be more creative than that, I thought) and pointing out that the motion itself contravened library legislation: legislation that was written to ensure that libraries are for everyone. The motion was overturned at the next council meeting.
But this didn’t feel like a victory, exactly. It still hurt us as a society. It hurt families and kids, it hurt individual authors — even when we “win”, events like this can damage the children’s book industry by threatening the safety of certain stories, and by extension certain children.
YA author Will Kostakis was a superb spokesperson during the brief media storm. He raised the point that even when book banning attempts aren’t successful, they can force a writer to start self-censoring. When I think of all the draft decisions writers discuss on social media that seem geared towards pleasing everyone, abiding by rules, or avoiding criticism, rather than reaching any kind of personal truth or storytelling ingenuity, I can see how self-censorship could strangle the children’s book industry.
In Sarah L’Estrange’s excellent podcast series, Banned Books, on The Book Show, there’s an episode about how the censorship machine works in Iran. The scholar Alireza Abiz points out:
“One issue which is very important in censorship study is the lasting impact of censorship on the censored mind. So no matter if you change your environment, if you even start writing in a different language, you never get rid of that experience . . . every censorship regime acts differently and impacts differently on the creative minds of those who write and publish under that regime.”
This whole series is well-worth listening to.
An Invitation to Read Voraciously In July
I’m so happy to have a few Voracious Readers on board to read books and raise money with me for Cambodian literacy projects. There is still time to sign up for the readathon — as an individual, as part of my team, or with your own team — or to make a donation.
I’ll be reading a novel, a memoir, a children’s book and a work of non-fiction in July. My simple goal is to create a team of readers all using our collective love of books to pay it forward to Cambodian children. If you register you’ll receive a welcome pack from Chapters for Change and there are loads of giveaways and prizes for fundraising.
Please help us smash our fundraising goal of $1,000.
As I peel myself off this yoga mat, I wish you all well and I thank you for reading Voracious. Links to podcasts and radio shows are listed below.
So long, May; here’s to June. X
Listening recommendations:
Banned Books #5: The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree in Iran (on ABC Listen)
Triple J podcast: The council banning kids’ books about gay dads (featuring author Will Kostakis, Mary Lou Rasmussen, gender sexuality and education researcher, ANU Dr Rebekah Doley, clinical psychologist)
Why Bookshops Change Everything, a Ted Talk by my superb, funny ex-colleague Chris Gordon of Readings Books
Mice plagues, COVID, and a health scare: how Charlotte Wood crafted her tenth novel (on ABC Listen)
Death of An Artist podcast, Season 2 , about the brilliant artist Lee Krasner and her husband Jackson Pollock