Peter Bakowski Reads

As all writers know, books don't sell themselves. Writing and getting published are only the beginning of the process. How do you find readers? How do readers find your books?

This applies across all genres, but particularly I think to poetry. My guess is that the poetry section of the bookshop, tucked away in the back corner, would be the least visited.

Peter Bakowski, a Melbourne poet, meets that challenge head on. He takes his poetry directly to the public, specialising in readings in private homes for audiences of more than eight people.

About four years ago I heard that Peter was in Tasmania and I wrote to him asking if he could come to us in Mole Creek. It didn't work out that time but when Peter was arranging his recent trip to Tasmania for the Launceston Poetry Festival he wrote to me and this time we succeeded.

Farmdoc and I put our heads together and made a list of our friends who we thought would enjoy a potluck poetry dinner. We scraped together every chair and makeshift table we could find.

And our guests contributed plenty of delicious food and drink.


Peter is a relaxed reader and generous with his time and explanations. He provided a wonderful insight into his life as a poet and his technique. It was also lovely meeting his wife, Helen, and their son Walter.

Peter's aim is to 'write clear and accessible poems, to use ordinary words to say extraordinary things...about what it's like to be human.' His latest book, Beneath Our Armour, a collection of portrait poems, was short-listed for the Victorian Premier's Prize.

In The Shops

What does an author do in the afternoon when she should be working on her novel? Well, if it's the day her book first hits the shelves, she hits the shops in pursuit of it. These photos aren't wonderful, but she was over excited and the only camera she had was the one on her phone.

This photo was taken in Hill of Content bookshop in Bourke Street, Melbourne.

And so was this one


Unfortunately, when she got to Reader's Feast, at the corner of Bourke and Swanston Streets, there was a man trying to look at Bob Ellis's new book. She tried to be subtle - really she did - but he was engrossed and he was in her way. So, it was either push him or ask him nicely to move.

He was very nice in the end, and no readers had to be harmed in the making of this blog. Lucky for him, is all I can say.

Celebration

Yesterday I went to four sessions of the Melbourne Writers Festival, beginning at 10 am with Emily Ballou, Philip McLaren and Steven Amsterdam (pictured, from left to right, with apologies for my poor quality photo) reading from their work and talking a little about it.

The previous night Steven had discovered he'd won the Age Book of the Year with his first novel, Things We Didn't See Coming, so it made the morning extra special. I was so happy for him. My family had spent the morning emailing celebratory messages about it.

I have a story about Steven, who is a good friend of one of my daughters, that I'm not sure I have ever told him. Because that daughter stays with me when she is in town, Steven has my phone number in his mobile. One day I came home to find one of those accidental messages on my machine that you get when someone bumps their mobile while it's in their pocket. I listened to see if I could recognise the voice. It turned out to be Steven chatting in a gentle and caring way with an elderly female patient. He was a student nurse at the time. Because a lot of the nurses who looked after my mother when she was ill were not so gentle or caring, this overheard conversation made a great impression on me. It was such a lovely window into his nature.

I think Steven's novel is well deserving of this award but as a person so is he. Congratulations, Steven, on a great achievement! I hope there are many more to come.

I had really only gone to that session to hear Steven but I was thrilled to discover Emily Ballou, who read a few poems from her book, The Darwin Poems, which is an imagined verse-portrait of Charles Darwin's life. I have an interest in Charles Darwin to begin with, but hearing those evocative and beautiful poems read sent me straight out to the festival bookshop to buy myself an autographed copy of the book. It was still only 11 am, and I had the whole day ahead of me, but I felt I'd already had the true festival experience - that discovery by chance of a writer who quite takes your breath away.

This is the festival's second year at Federation Square. I don't like change, so last year I didn't enjoy the new venue because I was too busy looking back at the good old days of everyone being crammed into the Malthouse. I missed the intimacy.

But this year I loved the venue. The atrium is bustly, and all over Fed Square I saw people reading, or at least leafing through books, and talking with their mouths full about sessions and writers. It was nice to see books, reading and writing take so central a position in the city, even if it is only for a few days.

The Greatest Year

My writer friends and I are having a good year.

Last night Andrew McDonald's first book, The Greatest Blogger in the World, was launched at Readings in Carlton. It was a great launch for a great book.

The book is for kids aged about eight and up, which means it includes me. I can't wait to read it.

Andrew's a terrific writer with a killer sense of humour. I'm sure this book will be the first of many for him.

Reading

This blog is going to be about writing, so at first I assumed that meant the second post shouldn’t be about the book I’m reading. Then I thought, no it’s perfect. Writing must begin with reading. We are what we eat, Brillat-Savin, the 19th century gourmet famously said. And I think we are what we read too. I know I am.

My first reading consisted of books that were about people who were nothing like me. Beginning with my first school readers about those goody goodies, John and Betty, and their pets, Scott and Fluff. All these books were about people who lived in England or America or sometimes in the Australian bush.

I was a Jewish girl who lived in the suburbs of Australia. I spoke with an Australian accent and went to Sunday school where I listened to stories from the Old Testament and learned to read and write Hebrew. When my parents wanted to tell each other things they didn’t want my brothers and me to know about they communicated in Yiddish.

Which leads me to the book I’m reading at the moment. It’s called The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and is by the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Michael Chabon.

The premise of the book is that Israel doesn’t exist and instead a temporary Jewish state has been set up in Alaska where the language spoken is Yiddish. I love that I’m an insider here; that I get the joke about a gun being called a sholem; that I know what an eruv is, and that Chasids are called black hats; I understand why it matters what time sunset is on a Friday, and the significance of an addict tying off with a tefillin strap. But I also love Chabon’s use of language, and even though I’m not usually a crime reader, I love that the book is so plot driven.

I especially admire Chabon’s similes and metaphors. ‘His heart describes a sudden knight move in his chest,’ when he’s just been writing about chess. ‘He rose into the air like a charred scrap of paper…’ Here’s another one: ‘Around the grave site, black clumps of fir trees sway like grieving Chasids.’ There are lots more, but when you want to find them of course you never can.

Read it yourself.