Interview with the writer/director of 'The Forgotten Australians'

An article I did for The Armidale Express (10 December 2010) has been included in the National Museum of Australia's collection of stories about life in children's homes, and can be seen at http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2010/12/15/close-to-home/
It's an interview with Nicola Woolmington, the writer and director of a documentary called 'The Forgotten Australians' which was shown on SBS television on November 16.
Amazingly, I did three stories inspired by this film before finding out that Nicola had grown up in Armidale!
The first was a preview of the documentary highlighting the fact that it mentioned Armidale's St Patrick's Orphanage, and featured a local woman, Tracey, who was there in the 1970s. That stirred up a lot of community angst and was followed by two divergent takes on what it was like growing up at St Pats. Basically, one presented the views of various women who were there in the forties, fifties and sixties, who maintained that it was not such a bad place and even though there were only four nuns to care for eighty children, the amount of work the kids were expected to do was much like the chores that any child would do in a family at that time, and the nuns treated them in a 'firm but fair' fashion. The other corroborated Tracey's account - it was a harrowing tale of being overworked and physically and emotionally abused, told to me by a woman whose life story was written on her face and who repeatedly spoke of her five-year-old self as 'a horrible child' who 'got punished accordingly'.
So the interview with Nicola was the fourth (and I think, final) one on the topic, and it focused on the significance of her documentary, the long haul of bringing it to completion, the feedback she's received since it aired, and her background as an ex-Armidale girl who became a film maker.

What makes us love somebody

This thoughtful, beautifully cadenced discussion about what love is, from an old episode of the Philosopher's Zone, loaded onto my iPod when I switched to a new computer, and I found myself listening to it again today. The audio and transcript are available here. Do we love someone because of their particular characteristics? If so, why we go on loving them when those qualities change? Do we respond to them with an open heart because we appreciate and value what we perceive of their inner self? But if an authentic, autonomous self is not fully present - as with a child, or a senile parent - does that mean we can't love them? Jeanette Kennett from ANU steps through all these ideas and more.

Retreat to the Castle

My printed copy of Australian Book Review for June may not have landed in the mailbox, but the cover, contents list, and selected free articles are online now, including my Calibre Prize shortlisted essay, which is available here

I want to thank Helen Garner...

... not because I admire her writing (although I certainly do) but because of her wise words about not-writing at the 2008 AAWP conference. I had the most hideous day on Monday (at the desk, straining, unable to produce anything) followed by such a productive morning on Tuesday that I was skipping during my 5km walk at lunchtime. It was rereading Helen Garner's keynote speech that got me through the not-writing stage and out the other side. It's enormously reassuring and can be found at www.aawp.org.au/files/keynote-Garner.pdf

Back in chilly Armidale

It was a bit of a shock to return to minus degrees after several days of island life here, sitting on a verandah with a view of palm trees and Keppel Bay, chatting to people about writing instead of doing it myself...
I went snorkelling a couple of times (didn't see much) and traipsed over Kanomi trying and failing to find the highest point (they need to do more maintenance on their walking tracks). And of course there were the workshops. Four of them - Introduction to Life Writing, Memoir and Memory, Morning Pages, and Polishing & Publishing. The twenty participants were all attentive and well-behaved and applied themselves to the practical work with diligence and enthusiasm. It was much less daunting than I'd expected and I got to hear some utterly fascinating stories.

Calibre 2010 announcement of winners

Congratulations to the joint winners of this year's Calibre essay prize,

DR LORNA HALLAHAN - ‘ON BEING ODD’
DR DAVID HANSEN - ‘SEEING TRUGANINI’

Dr Lorna Hallahan is a social worker and theologian working as an academic in the School of Social and Policy Studies at Flinders University. She is a contributor to national and state disability policy debates who also writes and speaks regularly on ethics in human and health services.

Dr David Hansen is Senior Researcher and Specialist in the Art Department of Sotheby’s Australia. He spent twenty-five years as a public art gallery director and curator, in Warrnambool, Mt Gambier, Melbourne and Hobart.

The judges – James Ley and Peter Rose – longlisted twenty essays and shortlisted seven essays, all of which are listed on the ABR website.

My shortlisted essay, 'Retreat to the Castle', will be published in ABR in June. It is a chapter of the creative nonfiction book manuscript I am writing for my PhD, about people's experiences of caring for someone with a terminal illness at home.

Literary agents - not as scary as you might think

Perilous Adventures has published the feature I wrote about literary agent Pippa Masson. It's in the second issue for 2010 at www.perilousadventures.net/1002/carey.html

Profile of Wendy & Rebecca James in today's Herald

My story about Wendy and Rebecca James, Armidale's writing sisters, is a two-page spread in the Sydney Morning Herald today (Spectrum, p.30-1). The photo of them is lovely but slightly misprinted. Never mind - the words are great!

swanning off to a tropical island

Yesterday, the school bus reappeared after two and a half weeks absence and whisked away my kids, leaving me free to sit at my desk and pick up the threads of my thesis. I read through the nine pages of fragments that constitute the chapter I need to transform into a coherent whole, and decided to start by filling in the bit at the top that said 'Insert brief introduction here'.
I'd typed two sentences when the phone rang.
It was Linda Hawryluk, one of the creative writing lecturers at CQUniversity in Rockhampton. Young (well, 30ish), an emigre from Sydney to her first academic appointment, Lynda has retained a trendy black look (clothes, hair, glasses) but is not as out of place up there as she might initially seem. She lives on the coast at Yeppoon and regularly flings off her inner city image and takes to the water with her board. She's become a passionate surfie and even presents on the topic at academic conferences. Somehow she's also snaffled the role of coordinating the writing retreats that CQU hosts on North Keppel Island and - unbelievably - that's why she's ringing me.
Her arrangements with the workshop presenter for a three day 'Memoir and Memory' retreat have fallen in a heap. Would I be interested in being writer-in-residence? It's quite relaxed, she assures me. Lots of free time built into the schedule, and a mixed-age group of people who fancy combining a holiday with doing a bit of writing on the side.
I'm alarmed on several fronts. I'm running out of time to finish my thesis - how many more side-tracks can I afford? I'd need to do a lot of reading up before I could spout about memoir - I actually wrote mine intuitively, applying the creative nonfiction principles I use in writing other people's stories. And although becoming a journalist has taught me to mask my shyness in order to get the job done, it's still there underneath and I'm not certain that even a tropical island will make standing up in front of 35 people for hour-and-a-half long sessions FUN.
But I'm unlikely to get this kind of opportunity dropped into my lap again, and who knows? I might like it. So from May 7-9 that's what I'll be doing. Impersonating a writer-in-residence.

Shortlisted for Calibre

MEDIA RELEASE – CALIBRE PRIZE 2010

Announcing the shortlist for Australia’s premier essay prize

Australian Book Review is pleased to announce that seven essays have been shortlisted for this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay.
Calibre is sponsored by Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund. The winner will receive $10,000.


SHORTLISTED ESSAYS
Lindsay Barrett: ‘The Shadow on the Steps’
Janene Carey: ‘Retreat to the Castle’
Eleanor Collins: ‘Ill-Timed Remarks: A Pathographical Essay’
Lorna Hallahan: ‘On Being Odd’
David Hansen: ‘Seeing Truganini’
Colin Nettelbeck: ‘Kneecapper: A Trip to Happiness’
Jessica White: ‘Hearing in Other Ways’

Made the ABR Calibre prize longlist!

I'm on the longlist for the Calibre essay prize with one of the stories from my book manuscript, A Hospital Bed at Home.
Even getting this far is a huge honour - the competition attracts some very impressive writers and previous winning essays have been exemplars of beautiful, subtle, insightful prose. One I particularly loved was Rachel Robertson's piece on family life and autism.
First prize is $10,000 and publication in Australian Book Review.

Upcoming SMH story

Susan Wyndham, literary editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, has just accepted my feature about Armidale's writing sisters, novelists Wendy and Rebecca James.It will be in the Spectrum / Books / Interview section late April or early May. Rebecca's book Beautiful Malice is being released in Australia on May 3rd. She's the million-dollar-mum from the SMH story I had published in November.

Creative writing racket

Apparently the Sydney Morning Herald gets several hundred Letters to the Editor every day, and publishes about 25 of them.

This was one I sent in that wasn't printed...

Lisa Pryor’s nasty piece of tall poppy slashing (‘A novel idea turns creative writing into an academic racket’, Feb 27-28) warrants a response.

She claims creative writing postgraduates are ‘gutless… compliant, institution bound and approval seeking’ and lack the mettle to be great novelists.

I’d like to drop a few names here. Tim Winton. Nam Le. Ian McEwan. Kazuo Ishiguro. Kate Grenville. Tracy Chevalier. Andrew Motion. Danielle Wood. Wendy James. Nikki Gemmell. All graduates of creative writing programmes.

Pryor 'doesn't have a problem' with funding writers but seems to be arguing people without university degrees are a more worthy focus for the dollars. What sort of anti-intellectual cringe is this? Let's support the REAL writers, the ones from the working class who couldn't afford to go to uni, the unrecognised geniuses who scorned high achievement in the education system...? Because obviously anyone who does well enough at uni to get a PhD scholarship must be a hopeless approval-seeking teacher's pet...?

And her exhortation to ‘take a year off work to get on with it and write’? Oh, we all have a book in us - no need to hone our skills, be mentored, receive robust critiques from fellow writers - just sit down and pour it out onto the page.

Janene Carey Armidale

Don't believe all you read in the paper

IT ALL BEGAN WITH THIS...
Runaway books’ epic adventures

FOLLOWED BY THIS EMAIL EXCHANGE
(my screen name on BookCrossing is JPCArmidale)..

Hello JPCArmidale,
Are you the reporter who wrote the story for the Armidale express? If so,thankyou. I've made a lovely friend as a result from your article and the curiosity it inspired in a reader. The real story for the book has only just begun...
makemycake

Hello makemycake,
Yes you've rumbled me. I was checking out bookcrossing and noticed your recently released book, and thought it would make a nice story. Didn't think it would be front page (but then, the Extra is a free paper and we're short on news at this time of year! Also, the quote from the minister was good.)
Did you have more on the story that you wanted to tell me?
JPCArmidale

Hello JPCArmidale,
Nothing you're going to want to publish. I set the alert before I went on holidays, as I knew internet access was unlikely. I like to bookcross when holidays. We took our 11 month old and dog with our caravan and were extremely disorganised, particularly since we werent sure if our mobiles updated to daylight saving or not. Short story is I missed the midnight mass, and forgot to release it at church the next day and on Sunday. We came back home with book a fortnight or so later. A few days ago I recieved a private message on book cross from a reader inspired by your
article telling me of it's existence, at which point I felt a bit embarrassed that my stuff up had people, including the minister looking for something that wasn't even there. I have explained what went down to the member and we've exchanged a few letters and I've even sent her a book. So it was rather nice to gain a 'pen pal' out of it anyway. The book is currently on it's way to the minister and I've asked him to leave it in the church where I had intended all along. I've reset the alert for next week, but I won't say in the journal notes why. Hope this completes the circle
for you.
makemycake

Well makemycake, all I can say is Be sure your sins will find you out! (Numbers 32:23)
Fancy leading the good folk of Armidale astray like that via their trusty newspaper (circulation 10,000). AND a minister of the church. Still, at least you sound penitent and are making amends...
JPCArmidale

The story behind the story

Here's a link to the article CQU's publicity dept produced about my Rebecca James story:

So slack

In my defence, I'd like to point out that I have been waiting for my software developer husband to wrap a website around my blog, so that I can build pages for some of my articles.

But as they say, the builder's wife waits longest for her shelves (at least I think they say something along those lines...)

Anyway, now blogger-in-draft has pages, problem solved.