Category Archives: Misrule

General children’s- and youth-literature related posts.

Writers, writers everywhere…

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Yup, it’s (been) that time of year again—Sydney Writers’ Festival and the many and varied events that go along with it. It’s a busy time of year for me—made slightly less so by the fact that the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards dinner didn’t happen this year, and also by the fact that I piked on the opening night party, which I remain sad about (I could possibly have embarrassed myself by gushing all over Jeanette Winterson if I had gone) but sometimes you just need to stay home and hunker down with the kitties.

On the other hand, it was made a madder time for me by the fact that the Children’s Book Council somewhat bizarrely decided to hold its bi-annual (that’s every two years, right?) conference on exactly the same weekend as SWF. And so, sensibly, my friends at the Centre for Youth Literature in Melbourne decided to hold a round table discussion about literature programming for young people on the eve of the CBC Conference. And so although I wasn’t able to go to Adelaide for the CBC, because of my commitments to SWF, I did go make a flying overnight 24 hour turnaround visit to attend the CYL roundtable.

Have you had enough acronyms yet?

So yeah, crazy busy. But well worth it.

And these things do have a way of working themselves out. Take for example the fact that I am usually committed to MCing the SWF School Days in Parramatta and Penrith in the week leading up to the main Festival, which in the usual way of things would have meant that I could not have gone to the CYL Round Table. However, as the obnoxious and pretty well worse than useless NAPLAN tests were held in that week, the schools’ days were pushed out until the week after the Festival, so I could do all of the above. You follow? What a schedule.

So, this is what my Sydney Writers’ festival looked like: I didn’t see a single panel/session I wasn’t involved in. Bummer. However, I did attend the western Sydney final of The Rumble—the youth poetry slam that The Day Job was involved in, and our awesome kids  from Rooty Hill HS won both the team and solo prizes. Go Nicole and FourPlay!

From there I dashed over to The Wharf for a panel on writing in western Sydney, of which, the less said the better. (If you were there, you’ll know why. If you weren’t, buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about it.)

Sunday was my crazy day, as always, with three back-to-back sessions. The first two were easy enough, in that I was introducing writers—my lovely friends from the UK, Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham, and then the inimitable John Flanagan:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The third I was what they call a participating chair, with my dear friend Margo Lanagan and Mette Jakobsen, whose first novel, The Vanishing Act, is a marvel and if you haven’t read it, then get to it. This panel was called Islands of the Imagination, as both The Vanishing Act and Margo’s latest novel  Sea Hearts, are set on islands, and share a number of tropes and themes (absent mothers, grief and loss, mourning children, abandoned husbands…) It’s always hard to tell how a panel that you’re chairing is going—I felt a bit rusty on this one, to be completely honest, but people seemed to like it, and M and M had kind words to say, so hopefully it was OK.

The schools days, though, are a breeze and a pleasure. I’m sure they’re not a breeze to organise—So Many Logistics!—but as MC, it’s a case of Know Thy Authors and have fun with the audience. I MC the secondary and primary days at Parramatta Riverside Theatres, and the primary school day at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith. It’s not just a fun gig, it’s a good opportunity to promote The Day Job and to talk to teachers in the breaks—I’ve got one potentially very exciting program to discuss with a librarian from one of the high schools in the south-western region of Sydney once I get back to my desk next week. This week. Tomorrow.

What a cast of characters! Three lovely women—and me!

 

L-R: Lucy Christopher, me, Jane (JC) Burke and Vikki Wakefield.

Two lovely men—and me!

Me in a Mal Peet (l) and Eoin Colfer (r) sandwich.

Two Olivers!

 

Jeffers (l) and Phommavanh (r).

And I didn’t get photos, but there was also the lovely Tristan Bancks and Emily Rodda. (Is there a plural for lovely?)

So that all happened, and then Bam! We were lucky enough to have the wonderful Swiss-Italian writer Davide Cali (here for the CBC conference) in Sydney, so of course, lunch was required:

Here Davide is signing a copy of his book Ten Little Insects (a riff, in graphic novel form, on Agatha Christie‘s And Then There Were None [aka Ten Little Indians]) for Susanne Gervay. Davide is also a cartoonist, and he adds a little extra to every signed book. Looking on are Susanne, Wayne Harris, Julie Vivas and Donna Rawlins. Also at the lunch, but not in the photo, were Davide’s Australian publisher Andrew Wilkins and Ursula Dubosarsky.

So, you know, INSANE, but wow, what a lovely way to go mad. Writers, writers (and illustrators!) everywhere—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

OK, maybe with more sleep…

In a related world…

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Somewhere filed away are the first drafts—rough, meagre things that they are—of my first attempt at writing a thesis for my Masters degree. I was in my late 20s, newly married (though not for long), and desperately in love with the books I was writing about, and the field that I had entered into with all my heart and passion. Like a starry-eyed reality TV contestant, I had thrown in my day job (as a secondary English teacher) and set my course on the wild seas of children’s literature.

And it was all, more or less, because of Diana Wynne Jones.

I’ve written and spoken many times over the years about how Diana’s novel The Magicians of Caprona changed my life. I’m not going to repeat that story here—you can read all about it in this paper (in fact, I’m going to assume you have), which I gave at the conference dedicated to Diana’s work, held in Bristol in 2009.

This post is being written as part of the memorial activity for the first anniversary of Diana’s death, on March 26 2011. Sharyn November, Diana’s great friend and American editor of recent years, has organised a blog tour and this tumblr in order for those of us who loved Diana, and her books, to share our memories. And so this is my contribution to that memorial, a(nother) tribute to the writer whose work has meant more to me than perhaps any other in my life.

So it’s the early 1990s, I’m in my late 20s (just), I’ve just got married, and I’ve chucked in my teaching job and am spending most of my days deep in the related worlds of Diana Wynne Jones. Actually, I’m sitting at a tiny desk in front of an early model Apple computer (one of the ones, if memory serves, where you have to keep swapping the software disk with the write-to disk, so it’s slow and cumbersome work). I’m in a sun-lit rooftop flat on the top of a glorious old house in the Sydney suburb of Gladesville. Outside there’s a camphor laurel tree that’s grown taller than the flat on the top of the house—and the house is towering, enormous, so the tree must be more than one hundred years old. (We know it’s a feral plant, the world’s hugest weed, but we love it anyway, because it gives a home to possums and brings in a daily cacophony of rainbow lorikeets.)

The flat itself is an add on. For the few years before I got married and moved up here, I’d lived in a bedsit in the same house—it was a room of the original house closed off with a kitchenette and the world’s tiniest bathroom stall, and lord knows how even then I managed to fit myself, my books, my boyfriend and my cat in, but manage I did. The house where bedsit and rooftop flat were is a magnificent Sydney California Bungalow, but twice as big as the average suburban Californian, rearing out of the garden on huge Sydney sandstone foundations, looking out, like an anchored and squat Castle, over an enormous, tiered garden and wild parklands that run down to the Parramatta River.

I have so many stories from that house—stories of cats and possums and a rottweiler called Rommel, there on Her Majesty’s Pleasure until the landlady’s son was released and able to reclaim him.* It was in this house I learned the magic of the garden; where I learned that herbs love to soak the sun down to their roots;  that tomatoes self-seed, and that you can break off an impatiens and stick it in the ground and it will continue to grow. It was here I first had total and complete responsibility for another life, or perhaps nine lives—my cat Bridie, rooftop dancer who lived to be almost 20, despite encountering in the next house after this her very own Throgmorten. Here that I started to think I was becoming an adult. And it was here I started to imagine the story of my own life—and without knowing it, at the same time, was growing away from the life my new young husband had imagined for us.

People think that the books that shape you the most are the books you read in childhood. I am sure that’s true, I believe that to be true very sincerely, but it’s not true that it can’t happen also in your adult life. Because side by side with the stories I was living, were the stories of Cat and Janet and Gwendolen, of Tonino and Angelica, of Nan Pilgrim and Charles Morgan and Brian Wentworth and those girls with their dank-coloured knitting. And of Christopher Chant and The Goddess—Chrestomanci and his beloved Milly—and all the related worlds they—and I—inhabited. And though I didn’t know it at the time, they were to make all the difference.

One of the most important aspects of writing a literature thesis, I think, is choosing a text (or texts, or author) that you can live with for a very long time—live with, read and re-read and never tire of and still find something new in it to exclaim over and ponder and then, at the end, to come out of the experience loving it as much, if not as more than you did on the very first day. The more time I spent with Diana’s books—I was also working on The Time of the Ghost and A Tale of Time City, trying to find an elusive thread between temporality in those books and Chrestomanci’s related worlds—the more time I wanted to spend, not just in Diana’s books, but in children’s books generally, including what we were only then just starting to call ‘YA’, absorbing them into my being, understanding them and the place they have in the world, and then bringing them back to the ones for whom they were intended.

Of all four of the Chrestomanci books then written (this is a good decade or more before Conrad’s Fate and The Pinhoe Egg) that I was hoping to include in my thesis**, Charmed Life in the one I most clearly remember reading over and over again. In many ways, and despite the importance of The Magicians of Caprona for me personally, and no matter how much I love other DWJ books—The Time of the Ghost, Howl’s Moving Castle, Fire and Hemlock, that Chinese puzzle of a novel—I think if I had to choose a favourite Diana Wynne Jones book, then Charmed Life is it. It’s the one book I remember returning to over and over as I tried—and ultimately failed—to write that thesis the first time. It’s a book that now, if I pick it up, I can open at almost any page and find the words sing out to me as familiarly as my own voice.

Everything you need to know about Charmed Life, and everything that will make you want to keep reading, is contained in its opening paragraph:

    Cat Chant admired his elder sister Gwendolen. She was a witch. He admired her and he clung to her. Great changes came about in their lives and left him no one else to cling to.

Then comes the Saucy Nancy disaster, the loss of Cat and Gwendolen’s parents, and the first of those many ‘great changes’ that come about.

You don’t need me to recap the story—three pages in, we know that Gwendolen is a force to be reckoned with, potentially dangerous and without a shred of kindness in her.

But if you have by chance forgotten, it turns out that Gwendolen is not, after all, much of a witch, but she’s smart and venal enough to have figured out that Cat is in fact an incredibly powerful nine-lived Enchanter, and she’s been sucking the magic out of him his whole life. She may indeed be the most purely, and deliciously, evil character in all of children’s literature—largely because she is still a child herself. Bad seed, indeed.

It’s testament to Diana’s powers as a writer that we see all this through Cat’s eyes—he is the closely focalised third person narrative subject of the book, to go all thesis-y on you for a moment—but Cat doesn’t know it, doesn’t feel it, doesn’t understand it, until the final chapter of the novel. He’s the perfect, and perfectly drawn,  naïve child protagonist, and Charmed Life is as an perfect example of how third person protagonist-focalised narrative can be as unreliable as any common or garden unreliable first person narration you can think of. Cat doesn’t get what’s happened to him—who he is, who Gwendolen is, what the implications of all of that are—almost until the very last page of the novel.

And if you’ve forgotten the last page of the novel, just take a half hour and go and read the final two chapters. You might have forgotten some of the minor characters, and incidents, but don’t worry—you’ll be surprised how easily they come back to you. The final two chapters are set in the forbidden, magical garden outside of Chrestomanci Castle. Cat and Janet, the girl Gwendolen has displaced from a related world who everyone except Cat appears to think is actually Gwendolen (you understand—you’ve read it) have gone to the garden in a last desperate effort to return Janet to her own world—and for Cat to escape his miserable life and go with her. They’ve stolen dragon’s blood—Cat’s most daring and dangerous act—which will open the gates between worlds. It takes them ages to even enter this forbidden space—eventually, they have to stop looking directly at the place they’re aiming to be and come at it at a kind of an angle: “Try keeping it in the corner of your eye and not going straight to it,” said Cat. And when they do finally make their way in, the garden seems to spin and turn around them, through time and the seasons and space itself, as they move towards the gates at the centre of the garden, where Cat casts the dragon’s blood and the final battle (and yes, I use that phrase deliberately) begins, and eventually, ends.

Of all the chapters of Charmed Life, the last two were the two I spent the most time going over and over, reading and re-reading when I was writing that first attempt at a Master’s thesis. And every time I found something different, something new, something surprising, something that made me understand this story in a whole other, deeper, more exciting way than the last time I read it.

I’ve already alluded to one of the books that this final chapter has resonance with—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, of course. There’s the sacrificial stone and plenty of Christian allegory lurking around (when I put this to Diana in the interview I did with her in 1993, she exclaimed, Dammit! I’m turning into CS Lewis!). It’s rich with allusion and allegory—bread and butter for a youthful wannabe academic—but as I return to re-read the chapters now, I find it’s the mastery of the writing that impresses me.

Diana’s writing is a bit like Cat and Janet’s journey to, and through, the magical garden. You can’t always come at it front-on—not if you want to really get to it, and get the most out of it. It’s not that her stories are inaccessible—though some are more opaque than others, and plenty of nervous adults have thought them too difficult for children. But they’re not easy, either. As Sharyn says, you have to have your brain turned on when you read Diana’s books.

I think what I’m trying to get at is that Diana deals in her work with the unexpected—and so too is her writing frequently unexpected, and all the more thrilling for it. How many times have you read a story by Diana and thought you knew what was coming next, only to have your expectations completely overturned—and yet been delighted by the utter rightness of her narrative choices? How often have you found yourself laughing aloud with delight and surprise at a sentence that you never saw coming? (And never ever let us forget how just completely funny Diana’s stories are, even when they are as serious as murder.) Here’s one of my favourites, again from Charmed Life. It’s from Chapter 14, when Janet and Cat have broken into Mr Saunders’ rooms to steal the dragon blood, and discovered that the mummified baby dragon is anything but… This is after they’ve made friends, more or less, with the creature, said goodbye and leave the very much alive dragon looking “like a dog whose master has gone for a walk without it”:

    “I think it’s bored,” said Cat when he had shut the door.
“It’s a shame! It’s only a baby,” said Janet. She stopped on the first turn of the stair. “Let’s go back and take it for a walk. It was sweet!”
Cat was sure that if Janet did any such thing, she would come to herself to find the dragon browsing on her legs.

I’ve never forgotten that phrase—browsing on her legs. How perfect, and yet how perfectly unexpected.

How often, for that matter, has a DWJ character surprised you—surprised themselves, indeed, but surprised you, the reader, and who they turned out to be. Take Gwendolen, for instance. We know, as I’ve already noted, that she’s a bad’un from the start—but who would have predicted, in a children’s fantasy novel that is in so many respects so quintessentially English, that this wicked child would turn out, in fact, to be a sociopath who is completely willing to kill her own brother not once, but nine times over. (She’s already killed her parents, of course.) Who would expect that? And who would dare write it?

Anyone who comes to a novel by Diana Wynne Jones thinking they’re knowing what they’re getting on any level is in for trouble. She destroys the arrogance of the good reader, by being better. Better at story, and better at knowing people and what they are capable of—their capacity for casual wickedness and stupidity as well as their capacity for great love, kindness, forgiveness and intelligence. Diana didn’t suffer fools, not gladly, not at all, and neither do her books.

It’s not just that Gwendolen is allowed to be fully and completely evil—and get away with it. (Get, indeed, rewarded for it—she goes back to the related world where she’s a liveried queen, carried about by servants, or more likely slaves, bestowing largesse and punishment with equal arbitrary callousness.) No, it’s the end to Cat’s story that has always fascinated me.

Cat has gone almost the entire novel without having the first clue that he is one of, if not the most powerful enchanter in the world. Worlds. You know what I mean. He finds out in the very final chapter of the book, when he and Chrestomanci have been captured by the pack of rebellious witches and warlocks, determined to destroy them so they can use their magic untramelled, to be as wicked as [they] want. It’s a crisis of unimaginable magnitude, and on Chrestomanci’s urging, Cat at last feels his magic—the magic he was looking for head-on his whole life, expecting it not to be there (Try keeping it in the corner of your eye and not going straight to it)—and there it is. It’s a stand-up-and-cheer moment; he releases himself and Chrestomanci, the forces of good from Chrestomanci Castle are summoned, and the battle is on—and won.

But in all the action, Cat doesn’t get a minute to draw breath and absorb this new truth about himself. The last we see of him, he’s sitting on the grass, everyone has been enjoying the Blytonesque picnic that is, after all, the very English spoils of war, and the final conversation has been had that wraps up all the unanswered questions about who knew what when (with a nod to that other great English storyteller, Agatha Christie). And everyone else—with the possible exception of Janet—thinks everything is explained and fine and let’s go on to the next thing. But poor Cat—even in the very last sentence of the book, Cat is almost in tears—still a little lonely and fearful—and not understanding very much at all, really, about himself and what he’s just discovered and what his life is going to be like from now on.

Really, what happens, is that Cat’s story only begins at the end of the novel.

And I think that’s true of so many of the truly great children’s books.

The great children’s novels gets the child through those high and wild narrative seas, fraught with danger and fear, and delivers them safely, but on some equally wild and rocky shores, safe but uncertain, hopeful but going into the unknown. In the great children’s novels, there is supper waiting for them (and it was still hot), but it’s not the end of the journey, as it was for Sendak’s (much younger) Max. The heroes of the great children’s books end their journey at the start of the new—adolescence looming, with all its terrifying promise of adulthood beyond. For the lucky ones, there are still adults there who will help them through; there’s family, if not the one they were born into, and friends, including siblings, whether real or Related…. The great children’s novels get the protagonist to enough knowledge of themselves and to the point where they are just equipped enough to embark on the truly wonderful and difficult journey to eventually separate from family.

This where we leave Cat—a long way from adolescence, much less adulthood, but at the first step of that journey. This is where Diana’s great friend Neil Gaiman left Bod at the end of The Graveyard Book. Harriet M. Welsch. Matilda. Mary Lennox. The children of Narnia. Skellig‘s Michael. Tom, from the Midnight Garden.There must be many more.**

In all honesty, I’d never really thought this about children’s books (In my end is my beginning) before I started writing this post, and it’s a thesis I’m going to have to think about and test more over the weeks and months to come. Let me know what you think. Am I right, or did I just make it up?

Huh. See what Diana did there? She made me turn my brain on.

So whether or not I’m right about this, this I know I am right about: Charmed Life is a perfect children’s novel. I don’t think it’s a difficult book—it’s in some respects no more difficult than the succession of great 20th century children’s novels that come before it, none of which may be much read by the average reader, but are still cherished by what Farah Mendelsohn calls The Reading Child*** today as much as they ever where—but it does repay a thoughtful and intelligent reader. It is completely deserving of classic status, and is as simultaneously typical and marvellously ground-breaking an example of the great children’s novel as you could hope to find.

I never did finish my thesis on Diana’s books. I kept working, kept trying to configure my brain to understand at the level I wanted to, and I was getting there… and then that young, short marriage ended and I gave in and filed away those rough and meagre chapter drafts and I concentrated for a while on surviving getting up every morning, and then on making that life in children’s books that, frankly, has given me more joy and satisfaction than I could ever have imagined.

I did eventually finish my thesis, and graduated with my Masters, but it was a different writer and a different—although, dare I say it, related topic. I never thoroughly clarified my ideas about Diana’s books; in all honesty, I think I was too young! I was really interested in the question of the child at the age of 12 finding out about his or her hitherto unknown magical abilities. I was interested in time—as I mentioned, I was also trying to include Time of the Ghost and A Tale of Time City in the thesis—and I think now I was confusing the nature of thee related worlds in the Chrestomanci books with my lifelong passion for time travel stories. I can see now that they were two mostly different areas of consideration—and now I’m properly grown up, one day maybe I’ll go back to both of them, separately or maybe even find what that elusive thread of time that I thought was running through all the books was, or if it was there at all…

If you read the full transcript of my interview with Diana, you’ll see many traces of the areas I was interested in then. I still re-read that interview and am amazed and astonished by how generous she was, with her time, her thoughts and her imaginings. How lucky I was to have met her. How very much I miss knowing she is there.

I confess that when I started out to write this post, I thought that it would be much more personal—a reminiscence of the time I actually met Diana, when she was here in Australia. That was a very precious experience for me, as was the occasional correspondence I had with her in the year or two after her trip here, and then, so sadly, in the months before her death. But I can’t claim an unusual personal relationship at all (although I often wonder if she did ever wear the marcasite dragon I sent her to thank her for the interview…) and really, in the end, as for most of us, my true relationship with her is through her books. And that’s about as personal as it gets—and I mean that very sincerely.

Thanks again, Diana, for the books, and for this life. You will never know how far your legacy extends. Vale.

_______________________________

* (See that bit of loose wall cladding in the rooftop flat? That’s where Lexie, our landlady, reefed it away to toss the clothes her drug-addicted son was wearing the day he held up the TAB, to hide them when the police arrived to arrest him. They’re probably still there, mouldering away, although Lexie is long gone, alas, struck down by a car; Rommel also long since given over to the kindly ministrations of the vet after years of not being disciplined properly led him, an otherwise doleful and kindly creature, to bite a passer-by. I don’t know what happened to David, he of the hidden clothing, but he was a good man, all in all, and well-recovered from his demons when I met him, so I hope all is well with him.)

** (And for those of you who know the classic Australian children’s novel Seven Little Australians, this is why Judy had to die at the end of that novel—because at that time and place and society, there was no way that particular child could separate from her family and be who she truly was meant to be.)

*** Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition. Farah Mendlesohn, Routledge, New York, 2005

Viewing The Hunger Games

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I won’t pretend to be the world’s biggest Hunger Games fan. I’ve only read the first of the trilogy—which I thoroughly enjoyed, despite having some misgivings about some of the world-building—and while the news I heard about the film all sounded good to me (casting, the fact that author Suzanne Collins was involved in the screenplay) I wasn’t all that excited about seeing it.

Until this week. And suddenly, for some reason, I got on board with the buzz and when my good friend Nicola emailed me and said—hey, let’s go and see The Hunger Games—I suddenly became very excited indeed. (There may have been wooting involved.)

Then a fascinating conversation was struck up on the child_lit listserve (an email group I have belonged to for more than 10 years), with many members expressing anxiety about the forth-coming film. Now, many of those expressing concern were/are fans of the book, several have taught it in children’s lit courses, but felt a growing disquiet—and I hope I accurately paraphrase what has been at times a very serious and complex series of arguments—about how the audience would be positioned when viewing the film. Would the film’s audience be positioned as spectators of the Games themselves, rather than experiencing them through the eyes of Katniss, the first person narrator and protagonist. (I am going to pretty much assume you know the books, probably better than I do, but will also include some details that may seem obvious, given how successful the series has been. Hope that works for you!)

Would we, the viewing audience, be positioned as members of the audience in the Capitol? In other words, would we find ourselves cheering on certain Tributes and hoping for the deaths of others? Would we, in  other words, be entertained by the spectacle of children killing children? And now I look back at some of the emails, I should be accurate and say that what contributed in large part to the disquiet was the “hype” and marketing that came with the advent of the movie. (And as the person who raised the topic on the listserve pointed us back to her blog post of February where she first mused on her discomforts, I shall point you to that blog post here. Read it and then come back.)

I found the discussion fascinating, especially when an alternate position was put by a list member who found himself amused by what he described as the “pearl-clutching” of those expressing their disquiet (a phrase I love, although I do recognise the gendered nature of it… and yes, it did come from a male writer, and I think all of the disquiet was expressed by women). This poster talked about our “lizard brains” (where we secretly do want to kill people and be famous for it!) and why he DIDN’T see it as problematic that we would be enthralled by the spectacle. Another listserve member, an African American teacher from Detroit, linked the world of Panem to the world many of her inner-city students live in everyday, and to the recent murder of Trayvon Martin, the African American teenager killed by a neighbourhood watch-type vigilante for the crime, as Ebony put it, of “existing while Black”. Panem, Ebony argues, looks much more like her student’s world than does the world of Hogwarts.

It was a fascinating conversation that got distracted off the main point a bit by some arguments about the female gaze and the two-dimensional nature (as argued) of the male characters (Gale and Peeta), and a spirited defense of books like The Hunger Games and Twilight as spaces for girls to explore desire and romantic fantasy—god, I love child_lit!—in itself a really challenging conversation but one rather off the original point about audience perspective and complicity, which was what really challenged me about the discussion.

Because t never occurred to me to be worried about the movie, and I never once expected to be placed in the audience in the Capitol. Partly because of Collins’ involvement in the screen play—because as Nicole said, if the film DID do that then they would have %#*@ed it up big time. And we all know that Hollywood has done plenty of that! But while reading—and viewing—scenes of violence is always potentially an ambiguous experience, it just never occurred to me that my own essential moral/ethical position could be shaken, much less fundamentally challenged, by a film.

And call me morally bankrupt, but I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT.

In her blog post, Kerry (who I consider a friend, although we’ve never met, and whose opinion I deeply respect, and I thank her for making me think about these things) says this:

And here’s the thing that teaching the book made crystal-clear to me: it is ESSENTIAL that Katniss narrates. It may even be essential that she narrates in the present tense. The only way we as readers can avoid complicity in the horrific spectacle of the Hunger Games is to be inside that Arena, to be looking at everything through Katniss’s eyes.

I agree 100 percent with that. In my teaching, I talk a lot about the critical importance of finding the right narrative position for a story, and I think Kerry is completely correct in this assertion. It is essential that the story be told in the first person, and that it be in the present tense (the latter if nothing else but to maintain the suspense). Kerry’s concern, if I have understood her correctly, was in large part about how this narrative position would be replicated in the film.

I’d just add here that I also think—and it is ages since I read the book, so I am going on memory—that there is ambiguity in the book’s narrative perspective, and that is in fact an essential part of it too. We’re positioned to empathise with Katniss from the very narrative choices Kerry describes, and so once she is in the Games, we want her to win. We want Peeta to survive too, but we’re willing for him to die if he has to in order for Katniss to win. That essentially means we want 22—or 23—other children to die. We may be repulsed by this (and assuredly plenty of critics of the book are) but if we engage with the story that’s essentially the position we have to take by virtue of that very narrative position.

It’s the ambiguity of our desires in this respect (our “lizard brain” kicking in) that is what I think makes the book so interesting. And at certain points Katniss wants people to die—if only to save herself or others—so at that point I disagree with Kerry when she says “If we’re in the Arena, locked inside the head of a tribute, then we are not reveling in the spectacle of the Games”. I think at times we are, just as adrenaline and the fight instinct takes over Katniss and she is also, even if reluctantly, revelling in it. I think that it’s possible to both revel in the spectacle and, to again quote Kerry, be “aware of, alive with, the fear and horror and difficulties and pain of the Games”. I don’t actually see a contradiction there.*

But let’s go back to the question of narrative position.

Now, I’m no film student—apart from the obvious stuff anyone with an English lit degree and an enthusiasm for the movies knows—but it seems to me that the film very effectively replicates the first person, present tense narrative, and without the use of  annoying voice overs. It is almost completely positioned from Katniss’s POV, in the framing and the physical perspective. But even more so by the (at times giddying—Nicola had taken motion sickness medication as a precaution and was very glad she had) über-handheld-camera technique. And when we’re not viewing scenes from Katniss’s POV—the audience shots, and those scenes in the tech room where we see the active manipulation of the Games by Seneca Crane (with, it must be said, creative relish by his tech team, the one portrayed by the African American actress in particular)—there’s absolutely no way that the film asks us to admire their advanced technical virtuosity (or, rather, what they do with it), or ally ourself with the citizens of the Capitol—who, it must be said, are got to up to look like a ludicrous cross between the Rocky Horror Picture Show, an 80s music video and the worst decadences of the Weimar Republic.**

And there are no young people in the Capitol audience—no Hunger Games readers. I think it’s important to note that. If there are no young adults in the Capitol audience—who are there purely for the pleasure of the spectacle, unlike the people of the Districts, who, it is quite clear in both book and film, are forced to watch—then there’s no obvious point of connection for the young adult audience of the film.

So I rest quite easy that the film does not, as Kerry and others feared, make us the Capitol people, avid consumers of the carnage. At least, no more than the book does.

So having got all that out of the way, let’s just return to this:

I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT.

I thought the performances were uniformly terrific. Jennifer Lawrence is remarkable. Stanley Tucci is a gem (literally—did you SEE those teeth?!). Lenny Kravitz was understated and touching. That boy from Summer Bay (Gale) didn’t have much to do, but I believed him in every moment. Jesse from Bridge to Terabithia—Peeta—wore his knowledge of his shortcomings with dignity and courage. And all those unknown young people who played the other Tributes—especially Rue—also encapsulated their roles beautifully. Oh, and Donald Sutherland. Woody Harrelson? Oh yeah.

The film did for me what the book didn’t, entirely—it filled in the details of the world-building that seemed sketchy to me in the book. I no longer thought about the economy or the society or the technical advances of the Capitol that felt elusive to me in the book—the film did a grand job of showing them.

But mostly? I loved it. I was moved, entertained, challenged, angered, scared and triumphant. As a film, as an adaptation, I think it succeeded on almost every level. My quibbles? I remember there being more ambiguity around the love triangle in the book, and frankly, I just wanted Katniss to give President Snow a good kick in the how’syourfather. But they are small quibbles. It’s a film that remained true, and even improved, I feel, the book’s narrative and ethos.

What the hell. Go and see it and decide for yourself.

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*(I think this is especially true, in both book and film, in the scene where Rue points Katniss to the tracker jackers. We want her to set those suckers on to the Tributes below, even as we—if not she—are appalled by the thought, the action. I’m glad the film showed how difficult the physical action of cutting that branch off was, and I’m glad that even with the elliptical nature of the handheld camera, combined with Katniss’s hallucinogenic reactions to her own stings, we saw the result of Katniss’s act when we saw the bloated body of the dead Tribute. )

** And that’s also why I also depart ways with those who find the marketing, such as these fake ads, and the Capitol Couture site, problematic. I think they are gloriously witty and knowing and I think the very smart audience of YA (along with the very smart YA author Kristin Cashore) will enjoy them for what they are. Kids are smart, they don’t read, or view, the same way adults do, and they don’t relinquish their ethical position very easily.

 

 

 

Picking your brains

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Hello dear neglected readers…

In a little under a month, I am presenting my picks for this year’s CBCA Older Readers’ shortlist at the NSW Branch’s annual “Triple A: Anticipate! Appreciate! Applaud!” event (what we used to call the Clayton’s Shortlist back when I was on the committee). I am starting to narrow down on my list, but it’s HARD! And I hope they don’t want me to pick my Book of the Year tip, because I honestly haven’t yet got that short a shortlist! I think some of my absolutely favourite books from last year I would put in the children’s category (aka younger readers) but many books I think of as classic children’s books have been entered into the Older Readers category, where I’m afraid some of them might slip through the gap…

I’ve also noted that my list is so far very heavily weighted towards books by women (Happy International Women’s Day!) and I am as anxious to address my own biases as I hope those who claim there are none against women in literary awards are to examine theirs.

So, I want to know what you think. What for you were the outstanding YA books from 2011, and why. I’m not asking you to do my homework, I’m just anxious not to overlook something awesome. Have at it in the comments—I look forward to your thoughts. Thanks! And I might see some of you at the Triple A event and we can compare notes!

A Vagrant Thought

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Last year, I attended an “In Conversation” between author (and my friend and colleague) Libby Gleeson and Geoff Williams at the University of Sydney. Libby is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Education and Social Work, and the In Conversation canvassed her creative process as a writer of picture books and longer fiction for children and young adults. The session was extremely interesting for anyone interested in getting an insight into how a particular writer works. I also found it reassuring, as someone who teaches a course in writing children’s and young adult fiction, that many of the things I discuss with my students were reinforced by this highly acclaimed author.

So it got me thinking that I probably would do well to spend more time talking the specifics of craft with my writer friends, and if I’m going to do that, then why not publish them on the blog. Old Misrule suffers a bit from the cobwebs of lost inspiration from time to time, and this might also be a good way to freshen things up a bit (thus also the new WordPress site!).

So here is the first in an occasional series about writing. The title of this blog post comes from the epigraph to the novel The Shadow Girl, by John Larkin, the subject of this first interview. The quote goes as follows:

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

Mark Twain

Do I need a name for this occasional series? I love, love, love that show Inside the Actor’s Studio, and I am hoping to do something a bit like that here—including the Pivot Questionnaire that they do at the end (except maybe without the ‘favourite curse word’ to keep it PG). Shall we call it Inside the Writer’s Garrett? (I’ve made a temporary category with that name so people can search for it as I add more interviews to the blog, and I’ll add it to the post title as well if we agree to go with it.) Or is that just too silly! Anyway, if you have any ideas, let me know—and if you have any questions for me or the author, you can leave them in the comments and we’ll respond. (Hhmmm, I just realised I didn’t make that a condition of the interview, so I hope John doesn’t mind me dobbing him in like that! Also, he hasn’t actually done the questionnaire at time of posting, so I’ll add it in later, when he’s had a chance to respond.)

The other thing to say is this: Here Be Spoilers. I’m not going to spend ages providing plot summaries or explaining details of narrative choices beyond the basics, but there will almost certainly be spoilers in any of these interviews, so Caveat lector. (Yeah, I know that’s almost certainly wrong.)

Nota Bene: Please note that these interviews will not be promotional vehicles for specific titles. I will not necessarily be tying them to a particular book, although this first interview, with John Larkin, is primarily about his most recent novel The Shadow Girl, and I do indeed hope you all go and by and read it. But this is not intended a promotional opportunity, and frankly, I’d rather any writers or publishers reading this didn’t approach me for an interview, as a.) I am not sure how many of how often I’ll have time to do them, and b.) I really only want to do them if I’m inspired, rather than feeling obligated. (For instance, I’m reading page proofs of a new novel at the moment by one of my favourite Australian YA authors, and this writer has chosen a different narrative voice from their previous books, and I am quite keen to talk to them about this choice and the challenges involved in such a dramatic shift.) And similarly, I only want to talk to people if they are excited about talking about process, so if you do feel a compulsion to offer yourself up, make sure that you pitch what aspect of writing you’re exploring yourself and are keen to talk about and share. And I’ll think about it. 😉

So, onto the first interview.

John Larkin has been writing books for children and younger teenagers for about as

John Larkin

long as I’ve been writing about them—around twenty years, is my guess, and he’s published, according to his website, more than 23 books. (You can read more of his biography at the site as well.) And although our paths must have circled each other’s many times, I don’t believe I actually met John until I was asked to launch his collection of short stories, Bite Me! (I have a photo of us at the launch somewhere, but I can’t find it.) I also reviewed John’s memoir, Larkin’ About in Ireland, for Viewpoint. (And if I can find the file for that, I’ll post it too!)

John’s books have been largely characterised by their humour, which is something we discuss in the interview, and by and large by a fairly straightforward narrative style and structure. He went quiet for a few years, as far as publishing went, and when I saw him at the launch of The Shadow Girl, my first comment to him was, Hey, it’s been a long time between drinks!

And I know I said I wasn’t going to do plot summaries, but it probably will help if I give a bit of background to The Shadow Girl. The book was inspired by a homeless Year 8 girl John met at a western Sydney high school he was at as a visiting author. He didn’t get very much information about this girl, other than she more or less lived on the trains, but her story, sketchy as it was, stayed with him and became the inspiration for this novel.

And because The Shadow Girl is such a departure for John, in every way—tone, content, structure, even the age of the intended readership—I was keen to talk to him about how his writing had developed over the years and some of the choices he made for this novel. I started by explaining that I wanted to talk about…

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…process and craft rather than content, although content sometimes comes into it as well.

Well, they’re intertwined

Because I am interested in some of the plot choices you made, because I think they were risky, but I think you pulled them off…

Well, that’s nice to know!

So I wanted to start off talking about structure, because it is the one thing I have the most difficulty understanding—well, not understanding. I’m really interested in it. I did my masters in narrative theory* and I’m really interested in the mechanics of it, but I find it the most difficult one to work with students on. Largely because most of them don’t have a draft they’re working on, so I have to talk in really broad terms about the “big picture” elements of structure. So I’m interested in learning more about and hopefully communicating about it better. So tell me how you came to having the dual narrative.

How that came about… like a lot of stories, you let it percolate for a few years. Structurally, I originally started it in the third person, and I always intended to write it in the third person, past tense. Because that’s mostly what longer narratives use, it’s the general go-to narrative voice. I’d written pretty much the first chapter and I felt distant from the main character. And I didn’t want to reveal what she looked like, I didn’t want to reveal her name, so I thought the only way I can really do that is looking out through her eyes. And how could I make it even more immediate—by writing in first person, present tense. But that brought up a raft of new problems, because I wanted to move backwards and forwards through time, and the way that came to me to do that was to have me interview her. She’d had this life-threatening event, circumstances, and she was now looking to tell her story, and that’s how I came up with the idea of the café chats. The idea was I would interview her, do exactly what you’re doing now, have the transcripts typed and up and have them published. The other point of that was then have her be a less than reliable narrator. Occasionally she was going to tell me lies, the big one towards the end, where she let us have the denouement of the story when she was lying. I questioned her, believing she was lying, and she was convincing enough that I believed her, but then she felt guilty and came back and told me what really happened. So it was kind of fun to probe that kind of narrative voice and also to have a narrator who was economical with the truth.

But then that’s layered too, because the story is not written by her, it’s written by the fictional you.

Correct. And it also gave it a heightened sense of realism, because many people believe that those transcripts are real.

Really. Are you getting that kind of response from people?

Yeah.

Why—what do you think it is? This happens from time to time with fiction. It happened with Gary Crew’s Strange Objects, it happened with Tony Eaton’s Into White Silence…

And Life of Pi, as well.

Really? What do you think it is, this impulse that readers have to want it to be true? That blog you sent me—she wondered if the transcripts were true. That would never have even been a question for me.

I suppose in more recent years there’s been an increasing blurring of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction and this is taking that to the next level, I suppose. People are writing non-fiction that’s turning out to be fiction. So I’m writing what is clearly fiction and people are then reading it as non-fiction. Because it does say “inspired by a true story”. And I was clear that I wanted inspired rather than based on a true story, because I think “inspired” clearly lets us know that this is a work of fiction. But there are certain post-modern techniques that authors will use to try and have the reader think, this is real, isn’t it? This is true.

Were you consciously…

Oh yeah. I was consciously saying, let’s blur these boundaries a bit. Yes, I’m telling a story—and I tell some real—there’s some really clearly obvious works of fiction in the book, and that’s for me to remind the reader that you are reading a work of fiction. Sometimes that might be stretching credulity to breaking point, but I think it’s also important to let the reader know, don’t forget, yes it’s based on someone’s life but only very loosely.

So talk to me about the fictional you.

The fictional me was simply that was me put in that café situation. I asked the questions I wanted to reader to want to ask. If I told every aspect of the story that I wanted tot write, that book would be 1000 pages long. Having the fictional me in the café interviewing her certainly cut it down to a manageable 400-or so pages.

So it allowed you to leap certain things…

It allowed me to leap backwards and forwards through time. And what questions would the reader be asking at this point? So I was able to have those things as questions rather than narrative moments, because it would have just gone on and on and on. It’s tempting to write a 1000 page novel, but how many of us got through A Suitable Boy? It’s a big commitment for a reader. So cutting it down was also to help the reader get through it.

But it’s not just a dual narrative, it’s a layered narrative. There’s a fictionalised you in there, there’s a fictionalised girl inspired by a real girl, and then the fictional you takes the real girl in the novel and tells her story using fictional techniques, narrative techniques. There were a couple of things that struck me. One thing that struck me—when I’m talking to my students, we talk a lot about finding voice, and about writing dialogue, and about how good, strong dialogue shouldn’t need a lot of tags, because we ought to know who’s speaking and all of those basic principles, but what you can’t always say to them, what you can’t ever teach them, is how to do it well. That’s just practice…

Practice, intuitive. And trying to reflect real dialogue as well.

Uh-huh. So how do you do that?

The conversations that take place are as real as the conversation you and I are having now. So it’s not as if I’m actually making things up. Those things really happened. And that might sound bizarre, but… At one point, I bring her here, to the Macquarie Centre. I don’t name it, but this is the mega-mall in the ivy belt. And she goes to a café, having just survived the encounter with her uncle. Now, she’s sitting in the coffee shop, and she wants to get a sandwich and a hot chocolate, and the waiter who comes along was supposed to be a dismissive, arrogant young man, who thinks she’s cute, wants to ask her out, and realises she’s so young, wants nothing to do with her. That’s how I wanted to write him. He didn’t come out like that. When he turned up, he started being nice to her. And I’m going, I didn’t expect you to say that at this point. And that’s where creativity lives. It’s almost as if the writer is along for the ride and all I’m doing is sort of mopping up, writing down what my characters say. And that’s where fiction truly lives. When I’m not even controlling what the characters are saying, this stuff is happening and I’m just taking notes.

But there other things you are conscious of, you make conscious choices and conscious decisions.

That’s more to do with structure. So each chapter I’ll have an idea, OK, where’s she going? She’s coming from here to here, and there are a few dot points along the way. The rest is creative—let it go.

Do you plan those dot points out in advance? Do you plan the whole shape of the action?

I have a shape for the entire book. I have the opening line, the closing line, and a kind of loose structural breakdown of what each chapter will do and a few dot points of what may happen along the way. Sometimes you’re taken off course.

Have you always written like that?

No. Sometimes I just have an opening line, a closing line, and I just go for it. This one, because it was such a big story, I felt I had to keep a bit of a tighter rein on it. Stick to the story plan, but still allowing some room for creativity to roam.

So coming back to voice. Those transcripts, the interviews—you don’t use tags, there’s not even a visual clue, you don’t use different typefaces for the different speakers.** And yet it’s always completely clear all the way through who’s speaking. Was that something you had to work at, or did you hear her voice so strongly…?

Just heard her voice so strongly. And if this is meant to be a true transcript, these are how they are typed up. And sometimes she would speak over two or three paragraphs, but you had to know it was her. Her voice was so string to me. And now that dialogue tags weren’t allowed—the convention (of transcripts), I just couldn’t do them, in those transcript chapters, but I had to make it quite clear who was speaking.

But you could have prefaced it with initials…

I thought of that, but the idea is, it’s a secretary, it’s a typist listening and writing down what’s she’s hearing and putting down a new paragraph where there’s a change of speaker or an obvious pause.

But then you had to take her voice and take her back a couple of years, so she’s younger in the narrative chapters, and channel it through your fictional author voice, and there is a definite difference in the transcripts and the other chapters.

Well, in the transcripts, she’s almost 18, when we first meet her in the actual story, she’s just turned 15, when we meet her in the house. But then he wants to go back further, so we meet her when she’s in Year 3. So she must be the same character and she must have a similar intellect, but she must of course be more naïve. And all I had to do was think of this girl, put her in a Year 3 school tunic, often visualising my own daughters, and she was there. And again, I’m just then writing down what she’s thinking. And she’s still feisty as a young girl, but she’s still naïve.

So, the “inspired by”. Did they give a lot of back story at the school?

Not a lot. Just enough to break my heart. I mean, how is she surviving? Not only surviving, she’s prospering. And she was so intelligent and so eloquent. And it broke my heart to see her in this situation. And they weren’t prepared to reveal a lot to me, because in some ways the teachers were a bit complicit in what she was doing, because they turned a little bit of a blind eye to her travelling the trains, but she felt safer on the trains than she had done in foster care. Because she’d been subject to a certain amount of—I don’t know how much abuse she’d gone through, but what was happening in her life made her self-reliant, so I wanted a girl who was very, very self-reliant.

So that brings me to what I was talking about before, about the risky plot choices.

Right! OK! Fire!

So you didn’t go down, perhaps, what might have been the expected route, with her family context and all the rest of it. It wasn’t just a case of an abusive family she might have escaped, or been thrown out of, but, a crime family. So why did you make that choice?

I wanted the bad guy to be quite layered. I don’t know how he comes across to the reader, but I wanted him to have aspects of kindness to him. I didn’t want a stereotypical mafia hit man.

But why have a criminal (family) at all?

It just spoke to me that way. And he’s only a small-time criminal. He’s not a major player. He wants to be bigger than what he is. For me, it just suited the character, that he had these shady deals happening around her, and it also spoke to the darkness of the corners of her life, that there’s things going on there, in her mother’s background, in her father’s background, in her aunt and uncle’s background, that you might call the dark shadows in the corner. I wanted not to completely reveal what was going on there, but I wanted to hint that this was a very shady man, but not quite as Tony Soprano as he wanted to be.

Because you could have gone down the “poor abused child”… and then I suppose, the risk in that direction is that it becomes the issue novel about…

That “it”. That thing. The abuse. The abuse becomes the thing. Whereas, for me, the potential abuse was just part of her story. I didn’t want this to be the poster book for an abused child, I wanted it to be the poster book for hope. That you can get out, that you can get help, and also that people are good. The people who are around her, the people she meets in a wider network, she’s wary of them, but they turn out to be good. And I think that in our experiences in life, I think the media is so negative, it focuses on the road crash of humanity, but if you look at your own encounters throughout each day, you’ll have nothing but really good encounters with people. I had a car accident recently. A woman hit me from behind. We became friends. And after that—I looked after her, made sure she wasn’t hurt, and then we spoke on the phone. There was no potential for road rage there from me, and in my experience, that’s humanity, it’s not this road crash. But because she’s experienced such bad stuff, and because she’s used to this train wreck of humanity, including the media, that once she gets out there and she realises that people are actually good… There are some bad people, and she encounters them, but mostly she’s surrounded by good people.

And people step in.

People step in, because people want to help. And I think that’s human nature. We do help people, and it does give us that squirt of serotonin, we do feel good when we help someone, and that’s what makes humanity wonderful, and I think humanity is wonderful. And it’s such negative perceptions we have of ourselves as a species, but I think humanity is good.

Now, when I saw you at the launch, and I said to you, it’s been a long time between drinks, John, and you said that you wanted to take your time over this book. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I think previously I’ve become very excited about certain projects, and I’d just find this quite comfortable voice—the voice of Spaghetti Legs, Pizza Features, Lasagne Brain, Goon Town, Growing Payne, we could keep going… and they were nice, little, funny novels that people read and laughed, and ah! Larkin’s funny, and—put it away. I feel I’d got to the stage of my career, for want of another word, where I really wanted to do something that meant something to someone, if only me. So whereas in the past I’d put bits of me into my books, I wanted to do something where I put all of me into it. Now, other times, I’d written books and I’d think, oh, that’s a good line, I’ll save it for that novel over there. So as I’m writing a novel I’m always thinking about what I’m going to do next. This one, I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to do next. Everything was going into this book. And that’s why I took a fairly long time to write it, but also, I wasn’t in any rush to get it out there. I wasn’t trying to beat some deadline to get it out before (say) CBC were coming up with their shortlist. I just said, this was the book I’m going to put everything into, it will get out when it’s ready. And that’s how I will work from now on.

I don’t mean this in a way that is critical of the previous work, because those books that you have just rattled all the titles off, are great examples of that kind of writing, but you have gone to another level with this.

And I was always being asked about that…

And it’s not that it’s more serious in content…

I know what you mean…

Which is sometimes an assumption that we make, that if it’s funny it’s not as substantial and that’s not true—and there’s plenty of humour in this as well…

Absolutely.

I don’t think you can write not funny.

That’s the thing. I knew that going in. But I had to pare it back a little bit, and I thought, there can be gags in here, and there can be huge moments of levity, but it’s always be tempered by what was happening in her life, which was tragic. So I suppose it was always finding the right story to tell, where that would take me to a new level. My former publishers, Mark Macleod and Lisa Heighton, were always saying, you need to go to the next level. I never knew what that meant, until I did this. Having written my Irish book, I thought that was the next level, because it was non-fiction, it was funny, and serious…

I reviewed that! For Viewpoint.

You did.

And do you know what I remember saying about it? That there were points at which I wanted you to go…

Deeper.

Yeah. That it was a little, you know, that you didn’t always have to finish with a joke.

And that’s probably been my writing. I suppose I’ve always—previously, the narrative has existed between the gags. This time, the humour is there to serve the narrative, not the other way round. And that’s what’s taken me to the next level, if I can use your phrase. The humour’s there to support the story, not the other way around.

The Shadow Girl, published by Random House Australia

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John was featured on Radio National’s Life Matters in October 2011. You can listen to the program here.

* Feminist criticism, narrative theory and the fairy tale retellings of Donna Jo Napoli, actually.

** Dear Blogger hopes that Dear Reader has noted the nod to The Shadow Girl’s untagged transcript in this interview.

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Welcome to Misrule on WordPress

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Hello and welcome to the brand new platform for the Misrule blog. If you have travelled over from the old site at misrule.com.au/s9y , thanks for making the move. If you’ve come across this as a new site, well, thanks for dropping by.

The history is, this is the third incarnation of the Misrule blog, which was previously hosted by two different versions of the Serendipity blogging platform. The original few years of posts had to be taken down after a disastrous comment spamming incident that saw thousands of spam comments arriving on the blog every day. A new version of Serendipity was then installed, which has served me well for many years, but it’s really not up to speed any more. It’s become almost impossible to format, and if I want to move text in from, for example, Word, well, forget it.

So here we are. As you might see from the menu, I am planning on adding pages to publish the many articles, interviews and review I have written over the years, so this site will also very soon supersede the very hand-made root website at misrule.com.au

Things will also change, as I plan to find a fancier theme for the site, and will be working with my friend Donna Rawlins on design. Well, she’ll be working on the design, I’ll be making noises as if I know what I’m talking about and refilling her wine glass.

And I also have plans to revitalise the blog, beginning by publishing an occasional series of interviews with writers about their craft. The first, with John Larkin, is almost ready to upload. I’ll be publishing those on the blog, rather than with the previously published interviews, which you’ll find under the “Interviews” link on the menu bar.

I’m also considering adding BuddyPress, a plugin that apparently acts as a mini social-networking site on your blog, but I need to look into it more. I don’t particularly want people to feel as if they have to sign up to yet another social networking site, but if it looks like a useful way for children’s and youth lit people to connect across WordPress sites, it might be worth doing. If anyone has any experience with it, please let me know.

So, here we are! Let the fun begin!