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
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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
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.
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.
Monday, November 16, 2009
homage
To banish the blank page, I'm importing a post I contributed to the Australian Postgraduate Writers Network in 2008:
Walking at 6am through a world full of mist, I was accompanied by Inga Clendinnen, reading her lovely lucid prose into the earpieces of my iPod. She deftly defined the essay form; she reminisced about the freedom of children and dogs when she was growing up seventy years ago; she waxed playfully paranoiac about the wayward nature of laptop computers. When she spoke of how she would greet death, like the French essayist Montaigne, with nonchalance, I felt a pang, remembering her on the stage at the Sydney Writers Festival last year, looking like an aged bird, frail and thin with a razor sharp beak. I wished I'd lined up to have her sign her book, Agamemnon's Kiss, so that I could have exchanged some sort of greeting, made some gesture of admiration, before it is too late. But how to get beyond the corny "I love your work!" in such a fleeting, queue-driven encounter? Perhaps a fan-letter would be a better vehicle? What would I say?
What would be the point of this, other than to give her the creepy sensation that someone of whom she knows nothing is watching, listening, evaluating? I can't imagine actually sending a fan letter to anyone. How do writers find out how highly we esteem them, unless readers become writers and rhapsodise about those who have influenced them? What a strange, one-sided relationship there is between writers and readers...
Walking at 6am through a world full of mist, I was accompanied by Inga Clendinnen, reading her lovely lucid prose into the earpieces of my iPod. She deftly defined the essay form; she reminisced about the freedom of children and dogs when she was growing up seventy years ago; she waxed playfully paranoiac about the wayward nature of laptop computers. When she spoke of how she would greet death, like the French essayist Montaigne, with nonchalance, I felt a pang, remembering her on the stage at the Sydney Writers Festival last year, looking like an aged bird, frail and thin with a razor sharp beak. I wished I'd lined up to have her sign her book, Agamemnon's Kiss, so that I could have exchanged some sort of greeting, made some gesture of admiration, before it is too late. But how to get beyond the corny "I love your work!" in such a fleeting, queue-driven encounter? Perhaps a fan-letter would be a better vehicle? What would I say?
I remember that we met initially via the pages of journal articles and books when I was studying Latin American history in 1988. I was impressed by the clarity and complexity of your arguments and the precision and lucidity of your writing. When you reinvented yourself as a public intellectual and started speaking to me from Radio National, I discovered your views on more contemporary topics. Recently I have read your memoir, Tiger's Eye. Your description of the world of serious illness, peopled by characters horizontal and vertical, touched me. I wasn't so keen on your forays into fiction, though. I think your metier is creative non-fiction. But maybe that is just me, projecting my current preoccupation.
What would be the point of this, other than to give her the creepy sensation that someone of whom she knows nothing is watching, listening, evaluating? I can't imagine actually sending a fan letter to anyone. How do writers find out how highly we esteem them, unless readers become writers and rhapsodise about those who have influenced them? What a strange, one-sided relationship there is between writers and readers...
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