Pollyanna

Earlier this week I went to Hobart. I discovered when I got there that I had left the power cord of my laptop back home in Mole Creek, neatly wound – I had a clear memory of rolling it – on my desk. My first reaction was to sulk. When I’d done that I realised there was no pressing work I had to do, so I could just enjoy myself, drinking coffee and reading. Making the most of the situation – and the mild autumnal weather – I suppose.

I sat all day the first day reading the latest Meanjin (Volume 68 Number 1 2009). It was a great companion and just what I needed.

This from an interview of Nam Le by Sophie Cunningham:

How do you judge others’ work?
…For me something has got to keep me wanting to turn the pages, not necessarily in a cheap charged way but just in a sense that I feel as though there’s an authority or a confidence or a strangeness that’s at work in the pages that makes me want to submit myself or relinquish some part of myself. Beyond that, I define it in negative relief, honestly. I define it by stuff that doesn’t jolt me out, stuff that doesn’t make amateur mistakes, by stuff that obviously takes care and doesn’t take easy outs.

Like your approach to your own work?
It’s so easy to hedge and to worry about sentimentality or melodramatic prose, but if you haven’t got the guts to risk sentimentality then you risk losing sentiment altogether. [As an editor] I’d always go for the raw and the strange over the polished and competent.

Nice words to have in my mind as I approach the revision of my book.

Writing As Therapy

People often make a sympathetic face when they learn I am writing a book about my mother's Alzheimer's. 'That must be therapeutic for you,' they say.

I find that condescending and insulting. How would they like it if I said to them, 'Oh, plumbing/social work/law/medicine, eh? That must be therapeutic for you,' as though all their training, experience and professionalism was cast aside in the drive to make themselves feel better.

I like writing or I wouldn't do it, but it's work to take my own particular experience and shape and form it so that a fragment gives the impression of being my whole life in a way that illuminates for the reader their own.

Lying on the sofa this cold wet Saturday afternoon, I read this in Robyn Rowland's essay in the current Meanjin:

The writing of poetry is lived. It is not something we do, but something we are. It requires a life of observation, an openness to experience, an ability to empathise, an engagement with the transforming power of image and metaphor. It requires a moment when the self is put aside, akin to meditation: an absenting of the self, so that the poem may appear...It also requires technique....Then comes the real work - the shaping, the editing.

If writing is personal, is it cathartic? When people say, 'it must have been really cathartic to write that', it irritates me. It's a statement that casts poetry into the realms of therapy and creative writing is not therapy. It's an art. One that requires practice and patience and skill. Yes, the writing might be therapeutic in that it might uncover for us our own understanding of what we feel or believe. But that individual experience needs to be made universal so that it reaches out to the next person.