On a bus to Adelaide airport returning to Melbourne for a weeklong conference we passed The Women’s Temperance Society Teetotallers Tea Rooms, and my memory kicked into gear. As memory does when jogged by surprise.
I was thirteen when I was confirmed into the Catholic Church. One Sunday in Spring. When the weather had warmed sufficiently for people to wear open heeled shoes.
In one of those rare events in my childhood, my mother took me shopping and let me choose. Turquoise with a pointy toe and the tiniest heel. Backstraps, too, as was the fashion. Such sophistication until on the Sunday when I encountered a sea of other communicants all dressed in clothes better suited to a First Holy Communion. White lace and black patents. But given we spent most of the service seated in our pews or kneeling on the hard rail below my feet were concealed, except when we walked up and down the aisle to receive our blessing and certificates.
Most, if not all, signed a Pioneer Total Abstinence Certificate in which we promised from the age of 18 never to consume alcohol again. I took this pledge seriously until the temptations of my first ever serious boyfriend led me astray in my nineteenth year.
He and his offers of brandy crusters with a coating of sugar crystals wreathed around the glass’s lip. This conference was confirming. A combined effort through IABA, the international Association of Biography and Autobiography and ASAL The Association of for the study of Australian Literature it was a literary event indeed. A hybrid between I person and online presentation the technical glitches and timing logistics could be troubling but overall, it worked well. I made friends with a few like-minded souls and learned a great deal about the world of writing ad its links to life writing. Funnily enough I didn’t pay to much attention to the topic in preparing my own paper, but it fitted well enough with the issue of truth and lies, a central theme where people explored the nature of fiction non-fiction, speculative fiction, literary lives and all sorts in between.
My husband joined me for the pleasure of a holiday and while I conferenced by day he explored Adelaide. We stayed at the Adina Treasury a hotel on the outskirts of the CBD near the city square. A few blocks from Rundle Mall the heart of this city. The equivalent of Victoria Street in Melbourne, the far end of the Flinders Street clocks where we have our markets. Funny how so many cities structure themselves similarly.
And as I trawl through the notes I took over the days there are gems that stand for me underlined. Angela Meyer’s references to her re-reading Helen Garner’s Spare Room, ‘the ‘hallucinatory relish of materiality’ against one young woman who was troubled by a question in which her interlocutor asked about materiality in her research in motherhood and place and she had no idea what it meant.
I recognise now, like so many of these words, they stand for what they are. Materiality as in of the material world, which is what Meyer referenced in Garner’s careful selection of details, the many ‘portals’ through which she enters the world of her friend who is dying and her emotional response to caring for her. Garner’s frustration given her friend makes what she considers whacky and unrealistic choices about her dying.
A narrative of ‘care and exhaustion’. We get caught up in a story in which we lose ourselves and Garner takes us there by externalising her emotions in the objects she describes. Which I doubt was an active and conscious choice. More an instinctive one built through years of practice as a writer.
Literary folks exploring books once written have a way of suggesting the writer did this intentionally as if they knew exactly what they were doing when Garner for instance emphasises the honour of making of a bed for a friend, the white sheets. The turned corners. Objects loaded with the significance of death, dying illness and exhaustion.
It puts me in mind of a conversation I once heard when Elizabeth Jolley was addressing an audience about one of her books. Not sure which one but let’s say Mr Peabody’s Inheritance about a man in a retirement home. How an audience member asked Jolly about her allusions to lesbianism. Jolley had no idea what she was talking about and asked the woman to place the association.
‘You know, the scene where the two women are changing the sheets on the bed.’
This reader linked the sheets with the two women engaged in the making up the bed. And So we talked of the ways I which acts of daily care can feel as though they last forever. And another woman Adele Murham spoke about Anais Nin’s diaries and cheered to Lauren Berlant’s wonderful quote: ‘The female complaint of loving men even when they were disappointing.’ “Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking”
And Victoria Cirelli’s quote ‘We are trapped in meanings that circulate like blood’. And Shereen Recuperio who failed to understand the term materiality but spoke on an arcane surject Matricentric psychogeography. She too referred to the notion that ‘remembering becomes an ethics’. We owe it to the past of our lives as well as to ourselves to remember where we came from. Not to behave as though the past does not matter even as it might indeed be ‘a foreign country’ where they do things differently.
And Heather Taylor Johnston discussing her book, Little Bit, spoke so eloquently on ways in which ‘the truth is slanted in different directions depending on who’s telling it’.
‘Once you start writing,’ she suggests it all becomes fiction or is it the truth. Our stories as ‘portals to the past’
There were many discussions about genre busting and frustrations at the constraints of the publicity world’s demand we categorise our stories for easy categorisation in the bookshops, for easy sale. And Aidan Coleman’s discussion of the poetry of one John Forbes in memory of my feelings referred to the power of the word ‘lullaby’.
Then Meg Bragshaw talked about the drama behind the fact that Dymphna Cusack used a Dictaphone in the days when such machines were rare. In 1947 the era of the so-called realist novel.
A quote the The Uses of Literatuire 2008, ‘It is in the ear rather than the eye that epitomises receptivity and understanding, as an orifice that can be perpetuated from all directions, that cannot be closed at will, that can be invaded by the sweetest or the most unspeakable of sounds.’
So she talked about techniques of perception, the ‘doing from the feeling’. Everyone who presented spoke about acknowledging country, And Barry Corr emphasised our need to explore the concept of the truth as a verb, not as a noun but as a process. He explored the journeys of Governor Philips to Richmond Hil during the invasion of Australia. He quoted Freud’s notion of the truth as it runs through the discourse, and Heidegger’s truth as a process of covering and uncovering.
And Chloe Green spoke in her keynote about ‘experimental writing’ and its success dependent on whether it passes the smell test. If it’s a success then it’s no longer an experiment and becomes a fact. She talked about The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s book about same sex partner violence as a choose-your-own-adventure in order for readers to place themselves in the scenes.
While Dashiell Moore talked about blackbirding in the pacific, the systematic use of islander peoples between 1847 and 1906 that has been disavowed. Labour trafficking in the Pacific. Ross Gibson’s idea of slavery as ‘cultural kidnapping’.
Jack Lindsay spoke of the autobiography of an idea, referring to the work of Jack Linsday, son of Norman, in 1926 ‘the past is changed by the future it changes. ‘My heart is dead 400 hundred years ago.’ Truth is a condition of mind, not an answer to a finite problem’. Pasternak’s thoughts on the fatalism of life.
And fate is often represented as a ‘she’ and feminised. Why?
And Kim Kelly who spoke of historical research talked of the degree to which ‘labels affect our perceptions’ They shape and control the narrative. And Gabirelle Keely talked of the use of informed imagination. In the pursuit of truth in biography. Kendrea Rhodes’ exploration of the Ballarat asylum ‘the lunacy department, the goals of mad studies. She described five waves of affective ambush in her research, And Lise van Konkelenberg asked the question who can speak in mad studies. ‘What does oppression feel like?’
‘ Oppression is closed doors.’ She quotes Spivak, when can the subaltern speak? Who can speak? She urged us to avoid the positivist narratives of medicine,
Knowledge is relational and should be such. And Chloe Riley with her reframing of Jane Eyre as autistic. Helen Garner’s notion that ‘ethical problems can be turned into technical ones.’
Eda Guyadin, Root and Branch writer, ‘A rock is a hard place, And a young woman poet, ‘Medusa works at KFC. ‘weightless as a thought.’
There was Elouise Faichey’s extensive research into the Syme family and Jen Majoor’s quote about her sister’s display of ‘the vacuous positivity of an English governess’ in her denial of Jen’s queerness, She talked of Roland Barthes Noeme, the essence of the photo the occasion and the void, the studium the thing of interest and the punctum the sting. And Kate Douglas’s explorations of children’s literature through the book, Titan and the Wild Boars through an understanding of the experience of the 12 young soccer players lost in a Thai cave and saved through the Herculean efforts of many people. In 2028.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ many boys wrote in letters to their parents. Was it culturally coaxed or genuine. When do children get to speak. And my new fried Kira Legaan’s life in fragments, as a 55-year-old whose body is ‘a manuscript’. She talks of ‘somatic testimony’ How to make believable the unspeakable horror of being a survivor of ritualised satanic abuse by her father. She’s always bound to the trauma. The injuries of the past. Kate Douglas’s notion, here’s no such thing as ‘pure’ memoir. Elaine Scarry ‘my body as a map’ ‘The things that make us creative, make us vulnerable. She quotes Probyn ‘s work on shame. ‘writing takes its toll on the body’ the power of traumatic embodiment.
Shards of the past. And Nicholas Jose, Beth Yahp, quoting Joseph Conrad, ‘I like the idea of being made of parts.’ Manifold, having all firms and all colours. Identity multiply compounded. A heteronym, an invented multiple self. Daisy Simmonds. ‘Determination is the better part of youth.’
‘What withers internally when smothered by ideology’ Michelle Cahill’s poetry.’ I like the idea of being made of parts. I accept that the self is relational. Reinventing its selves in time.’ ‘Scrutiny over invasion.
In the quarantine ‘the pulsing hole into which we all shuffle.’
Beth Yahp. The crocodile theory, ‘spilling my father’s guts.’ Writing about family silences. History of movements as breaks in the narrative. Identity documents the bones of relationships of war and disappearance.
Post memory in reverse. Post memory poetics. ‘Is it possible to tell story without making a mark?’ Mother burned all Beth’s letters along with those of sisters as act of agency. Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades, non-telling text archives, poetics of relations, the right for opacity in everyone.
For Yahp, mother veiled, father defaced by Alzheimer’s.
Defacement a tearing of the surface.
According to Yahp, the fragment is both/and, containing the w/hole while being at the same time a part of the whole. It compels us to see both the w/hole and the hole: impulse to memory, impulse to amnrdia. Colonising the stories of others.
Lachlan Brown on the poetry of running. The running of poetry. Whilst he notices as he runs. The paradoxes of poetry, like running unencumbered but is this true. Poetry unencumbered versus formal constraints like need for running shoes. Murakami, with desire alone a commitment to running. The unlimited aspect of running with a vision towards the infinite. Think of poetry as transcendent but also constrained. Running as in thinking.
Jodi Vial with her poetics of place, the trauma of her life in Newcastle. ‘My body is pressed against a concrete wall, but I have no borders or boundaries. The water holds me as if it is endless. ‘the world is large. The body as archive. Opacity and disappearing points. Opacity is a two-way process.
And Jane Costessio talked about the archives of letter writing for Geraldine Halls aka Charlotte Jay, writer in the 1920- 1995 And Alexandra Grigori talked of exploring the life of her great grandmother and her seven sisters. Every one is a letter? A way to maintain family narrators.
HG’s quote on sisterhood, ‘a complex network of shifting alliances’, Josepeh Steinberg.
Filling the gaps with contestably informed input. Alex talked of speculative biographies as reflecting truth and perspective handwriting can also tell a story. Truth depends on perspective. Memories are contested and truth is bever universal.
And the lovely Joseph Steinberg
Definition of bullshit not so much false, or an active lie, as phoney.
Racel Spence reflection on literary lives the obscenity trials over Lady Chatterley’s lover. Somerset Maughan. ‘Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking backwards, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.
Did it really happen or was it made up. Use of strategy ‘what if?’
The level of writerly observation affects the levels of writerly speculation.
And finally Nichola Duddy on David Finnegans’s play Kill Climate Deniers
The Anthropocene as hyper object as in climate change.
How do we put the non-human world into the world. The crucial work of 21st century thesis. ‘the Anthropocene, not just address weakness but also strength in presence of the human. Ecological citizen ship. Auto-ethno-drama’. ‘Parody shot through with sincerity’. The shape of ideas.
Thoughts re the art of polishing a turd. Tensions between veracity and mendacity.
‘Literary criticism as bullshit.’