What I Loved: Debut novels by short story writers

This morning I finished 'Find Me' by Laura Van Den Berg.

'S*@! that's a good book,' I said.
'That's good,' my partner said. 'You needed one of those.'

He's right. I've had a course of finishing books that I know are skilful or accomplished, but I haven't actually enjoyed; or books that I've read because they're easy and I had no expectations about them. This is the first time in ages I've felt fired up about a book that I've just read.

Maybe the last time was when I finished 'A loving, faithful animal' by Josephine Rowe. This is what I'd started writing about that back in March -

I was so sure I'd love this book that I was already promoting it pre-release. Having devoured Josephine Rowe's short stories in 'Tarcutta Wake' and 'How A Moth Becomes a Boat', I was confident that her debut novel, 'A loving, faithful animal,' would be a must have that would end up on one of my Favourite Book shelves.

And I was right.

This is one of those books that I didn't stop to think about too much - partly because I read it in just a couple of sittings and partly because it's compelling, not in a frantic way, but more like I wanted to listen to it. Like when you catch up with a friend you haven't seen for a while and things have happened to them, not necessarily all bad but certainly big, and you want them to have the space to talk without being interrupted - would you like another cuppa or do you feel like a glass of wine is absolutely appropriate, to remind them that you're there, but otherwise it's their time. That's how I felt reading this book.

I don't know how these two women write the short stories that they do - their voices and characters are sharp, complex and poetic - and now they've each written a novel as punchy and dense as their short stories.

I have a deadline to meet and a meeting to get to but I just needed to take a few minutes to post about these two writers and their debut novels. You should read them.

What I Loved - A loving, faithful animal

I was so sure I'd love this book that I was already promoting it pre-release. Having devoured Josephine Rowe's short stories in 'Tarcutta Wake' and 'How A Moth Becomes a Boat', I was confident that her debut novel, 'A loving, faithful animal,' would be a must have that would end up on one of my Favourite Book shelves.

And I was right.

This is one of those books that I didn't stop to think about too much - partly because I read it in just a couple of sittings and partly because it's compelling, not in a frantic way, but more like I wanted to listen to it. Like when you catch up with a friend you haven't seen for a while and things have happened to them, not necessarily all bad but certainly big, and you want them to have the space to talk without being interrupted - would you like another cuppa or do you feel like a glass of wine is absolutely appropriate, to remind them that you're there, but otherwise it's their time. That's how I felt reading this book, and then after I'd finished I did more reflecting.

Rowe writes from five different points of view and captures each family member's voice with distinctive tones and details as they confron set through they struggle with confront another  Christmas/New Year event.

I love that we have these young writers setting work in tough, rural environments and sharing very Australian stories from their overseas locations - Rowe is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, and while living in London I met Evie Wyld, whose novels have won major awards here, in the UK and in the US.

Also enjoying local and international attention is Italian-born, Melbourne-based Mark Brandi, who draws on his experiences growing up in a remote country Victorian pub, and another inner-city Melbourne writer whose rural upbringing is a major influence on her work is Else Fitzgerald, who also happened to introduce me to Josephine Rowe's work.

It's a logophile's community with personal links for me - in 2013 I went to a reading at Evie Wyld's south London bookshop (that ended in quite a late night at the pub over the road) and in Melbourne I've met with Else and Mark as part of my Words Out series, as well as Angela Meyer who, along with Chris Flynn, gets a "thank you for being so sturdy and transpacific in your friendship," from Rowe.

Such talented writers whose skills, commitment and attention to detail are creating important, powerful stories that should reach readers far and wide.

Links to Words Out: Mark Brandi, Else Fitzgerald and Angela Meyer

What I Loved: 'Artful' by Ali Smith

Monday night
It's been so long since I've sat up late, unable, or unwilling, to put down a book, but tonight I'm firmly in 'Artful' by Ali Smith.
I've got my reading lamp clipped to the back centimetre of pages - it's the one I bought in Readings, Malvern, after the manager and I inspected and compared the two brands they had available. We were two amateurs reading attributes on the back of boxes - they could have been 14 letter ingredients for drugs for all we knew - and I don't know why the decision took so long when they were both the same price ($19.95) but it was quiet in the shop and eventually I chose one brand over the other. And I chose pink - pink! and now, in the thoughts, quotes and fantasy of Ali Smith not only am I a Reader again, but while my lover, who wakes for work at 5.15am, snores lightly beside me - a sound I find comforting because I know how much he needs rest to get through the hours he spends on his feet - I'm slipping in and out of our bed, my LED light flicking shapes across the shoes and shorts that he's left on the floor. I'm a thief on her first mission, a nervous accomplice. I dropped a pencil on my desk and it rolled into a handbag, colliding with something hard - who knew a pencil could clash so loudly? My frustration at dropping a sharpened pencil in the dark, at having to take a break from 'Artful' because it seems that not only am I alert and keen for Smith's words, it seems that also for the first time in a long time I feel the urgent need to write. But my words these days are never my stories. They're ways to share others' writing, to promote the skills of others and yet there, there are the side page notes, those jots that make little sense until you pick through many filled notebooks and somehow find lines that can be related to each other and form the basis of a paragraph or an idea to explore. So there's some hope for me, Writer.
But for now it's 10.13pm on a Monday. It's time to put away this notebook and the blunt, second choice pencil and go to sleep. I've finished 'On time' and in the morning, if I'm awake early enough and have the time, I might bring a cup of coffee to bed and read the next section, 'On form,' before the day of writing for others begins.

Tuesday morning
After handwriting that note I kept reading. I finished 'On form' at 10.47pm and I liked turning off my pink light at that point because my alarm goes off at 6.27am and somehow after reading 92 pages in one sitting the idea of exactly 7.5 hours sleep seemed sound. Of course that required starting my slumber at that very minute.
I should have known that because I'd started reading something that is "part fiction, part essay" and "a revelation of what writing can do," there was no chance of falling asleep quickly. Or, as I felt at 2.07am, if at all.
At which point I tried listening to a podcast to put me to sleep, but Kevin Barry talking with Debra Treisman and reading 'The Saucer of Larks' by Brian Friel in noise cancellation headphones was a poor choice. Both the conversation and the story are entertaining - Irish accents and insight, the Atlantic coast of Ireland - and saw me through until 2.58am.
At some point I fell asleep, then woke with our first alarm at 5.15am and went back to sleep. I woke again at 7.33am (I had reset my own alarm) and made coffee. I kept the blinds closed, pretending I wasn't skiving when I should be working, and went back to bed with Ali Smith. I read the next section, 'On edge,' and have forced myself to put it down and get to my desk. But only so far as to think and write about the work by this author who is, as said by Alain de Botton

"a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense."

The final section is 'On offer and on reflection.' I can't wait to go to bed tonight.

What I Loved - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Sometime last week I looked at the state of my room and decided something really needed to be done. The various notebooks, recycled paper impromptu to do lists and post-its are immune. There’s no way of changing how I work so that just needs to be overlooked - that said it’s been a disturbing interval between real output that perhaps I should be looking at shaking the work approach up a bit. But the immediate “issue” was the towers of books. 

I’d been using some sort of logic to look like I was organising or categorising them but I couldn’t even stack them neatly anymore. I’d started a pile on a stool on my partner’s side of the bed, even though he’s probably read about 6 books in our 14 months together, and most of those when we've been on holidays. 

If a tidy room = a tidy mind, and vice versa, I was due for a thorough reconfiguration.

So I decided that the most effective and immediate strategy was simple: cut off the major supply. I’m sorry Stonnington library service – if there is any correlation between your funding and the volume of loans, I’m about to register a wee dip on your weekly report. Until I have finished all of the books I own/have on loan from my mum, I am not going to borrow any more books.

It’s so refreshing when you make a powerful decision, one you know will bring immediate benefits. Especially when you get home from returning all of the offenders you really want to read, only to realise that one has managed to endure.

I was packing to come away for a quiet long weekend and saw one spine with a sticker on it, FIC FOW, and what a one to escape the sweep up: ‘We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves’.

Everyone should read this. Readers, thinkers, animal lovers, humanists, sisters, parents, students…if the population was a Venn diagram of demographics this book could be one where they all overlap. It’s such a compelling story in utterly remarkable hands.

I don’t ‘review’ books here, I only share stories that have really meant something to me, either as a reader or as a writer. Often both, definitely both in this case. 

As a reader? 

The ultimate tribute is when you can’t put a book down, will surrender sleep in order to finish, and can’t do much else for a while once you have. I sat in the swivel chair by the window looking out on the steady rain that is probably ruining many people’s long weekend plans and enjoyed my tears’ trail. It’s a beautiful experience, to be moved to tears, or laughter, or in this rare case, both, by words on a page.

As a writer? 

Here is a case study of acknowledging and throwing out the rules of structure-

“Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.” (end of Prologue)

“And I’ve reached a point here…where I don’t see how to go further forward without going back…Which also happens to be the exact moment when the part I know how to tell ends and the part I’ve never told before begins.”

“I’ve told you the middle of my story now. I’ve told you the end of the beginning and I’ve told you the beginning of the end. As luck would have it, there is considerable overlap between the only two parts that remain.” (p. 284 of 308)

Voice. Do you need any more than the paragraphs above? If you do, or just so that I can share more-

“So now it’s 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat.

Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected Prime Minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break...

...The only part of this I was aware of at the time was the ‘Breaking Away' part. In 1979 I was five years old, and I had problems of my own. But that’s how exciting Bloomington was – even the suffering children could not miss the white-hot heat of Hollywood.”

Character:

One of my favourite bit parts is Ezra, the caretaker of the student apartment building.

“We sat around our own table, an island of sad refelction in an ocean of merry din. We drank Todd’s Sudwerk beers, and shook our heads over Ezra, who’d once wanted to join the CIA but hadn’t managed in his first (as far as we knew) commando operation, to free a single monkey.”

“The secret to a good life, “ he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”

As a person? 

Like the other components I can’t express this without quoting directly from the text about which I’ve been trying to write.

What I’ve tried to describe before when calling myself (as a character) an unreliable witness, with “The fiction we use to make fact fit,” is better addressed by Fowler with, “Language does this to our memories – simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

“In everyone’s life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.”

And for anyone who’s ever sat in that dreadful mute hospital hiatus-

“I remember an aquarium in the waiting room. I remember fish whose beating hearts were visible inside their bodies, whose scales were the colour of glass. I remember a snail that dragged itself along the sides, the mouth in its foot expanding and contracting endlessly as it moved. The doctor came out and my mother stood to meet him. “I’m afraid we’ve lost him this time,” he said, as if there would be a next time.”

Deep breath.

Anyone who’s read my ‘reviews’ knows how much I love reading the acknowledgements and it’s not surprising that Karen Joy Fowler opens hers with, “Many, many thanks are due here.”

Right back at you Fowler, for giving us this book, which I’ll be okay about returning to the library as I know they have a waiting list for it and it’ll be in someone else’s hands soon so there’ll be one more person who will “…see so much of America today.”

What I Loved: Get in trouble by Kelly Link

This collection is outrageous. I never thought that I'd be hooked by stories with superheroes, Summer People, Sleepers or Ghost Boyfriends, but I've just finished it and I'm telling you, readers, to get your hands on it.

In hindsight there are a few hints that this is going to be a trip before you even start reading:

1. The title: what reader isn't at least a little bit mischievous; who wouldn't want to know what kind of trouble we're talking about and who gets in it
2. Michael Chabon calls Kelly Link "the most darkly playful voice in American fiction"
3. Neil Gaiman says "she is unique and should be declared a national treasure"
4. Her author photo: she looks like she's just holding in a great story under that smile, but only just; her eyes lock in with the confidence that she can hold your attention and that tattoo, well I'm just intrigued at how stating the obvious seems like something with more possibilities and stories behind it
5. Acknowledgements: I love reading these - it's where a writer really has the free space to be themselves and speak as an individual. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays...are all spaces for writers to explore, expose, polish and propose, but here, this page or two, is where stripped down personality can really show. And in this case you get a peek into the community behind these stories. Link thanks people for borrowed ghost stories and discussions about evil pants and television shows, and I've never seen an Arts Centre thanked for providing "a desk, some elk, a bear, and conversation" before, but here it is.

If I'd done much research before reading 'Get in trouble' I probably wouldn't have touched it. On Goodreads, as well as the obvious Short Stories and Fiction groups, it's been added to Fantasy, Magical Realism, Science Fiction and Horror and I guess I'm one of those "people who don't read fantasy fiction but have #insertyourownexample"* that the panel at the Bendigo Writers Festival "Fantastic" session talked about.

Those tags could easily have been more than enough reason for me to leave this book in the library when I have so many other stories to read, but boy am I glad I didn't.

*From ANZ Lit Lovers post - Bendigo Writers Festival #2

I do have one question about the book: On the cover, what does the key with 1584 mean? Maybe I can ask her at the Five Minute Story Slam (MWF)

What I Loved: The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

In interviews, artists are often asked who they'd like to meet or have at a dinner party, be they real people of fictional characters. I would like to go to the beach with Lena Gaunt.

Throughout Tracy Farr's novel I felt like I was inhaling and absorbing story, smoke and music. I was in the dark, dull shades of Northern Hemisphere blues and grey and felt myself sinking with her into dazzling water, lovers and nightclubs.

I really like the structure of this work, the shifts from now (1991 Cottesloe) to the progression from 1910 on. And the travelling. I grew up in Singapore (more recently than Lena Gaunt's years in Asia) and have also travelled quite widely, sometimes escaping or searching for something I couldn't quite define.

The copy I read is borrowed from the library so I tried very hard not to mark it, but p.109 I had to fold over, to go back to the concept of Tape Recorder Memory:

"…it's not pure memory, it's retelling the story the way it's always been told. There's remembering what happened, then there's remembering how to tell the story, and that's like remembering the way the music is written down, and remembering how you've always played it."

I restrained myself for a while after that, simply enjoying the pleasure of reading.

The book really built for me. I was in it quickly but somewhere past the middle it was hard to put it down and get out of Lena's friendships, loves, dancing and music and loss.

"She was my grace note, my appoggiatura: she added to me, accented me, augmented me. Linked to me with the most delicate of curves, she was not quite there, then she was gone, leaving me bare, unadorned, raw, all alone again. The Italian appoggiare means to lean upon. We leaned upon one another, and when she was gone, for a long time I didn't want to hold myself up without her."

As the reader I was like "the filmmaker"- interested in the untold stories, the stories that hold secrets, absorbing what Lena tells us and the things that she leaves out.

This is a beautiful book and I was fortunate to read it in a beachside setting. I think it's quite fitting that I actually finished it while enjoying a cold beer in a hot bath and when I closed it I felt a strong urge to say thanks, to Tracy Farr and Fremantle Press, for sharing a work of fiction that is as powerful as if it were true, for giving us the life and loves of Lena Gaunt.

What I Loved: The China Factory (Mary Costello)

Last Monday morning I suddenly had an opportunity to get away for a few solo days to write, read and walk along the beach. Leaving home felt, not momentous, but worthy of a small tribute and I chose 'Spring and Fall' by Paul Kelly to listen to. It's an album that tells a story, compiled like chapters that stand alone but played right through chart a cycle of falling in and out of love. I heard him play it live in London in 2013, sitting in a hall full of Australians listening to one of my favourite musical storytellers sing a new album in the first half of the show, and then so many of my life anthems to sing along to in the second.

He seemed like an ideal choice for the drive to the Mornington Peninsula where I planned to read Mary Costello's debut collection, 'The China Factory'. I think it was Paul McVeigh who recommended this to me, but there are plenty of enthusiastic reviews out there so I can't be sure where I heard about it. The cover lists comparisons to Thomas Hardy, John McGahern, William Trevor and Alice Munro - serious claims, that proved utterly warranted.

"This is a writer unafraid of the graveside, or the bedside, of filling the space of the story to the brim." (Anne Enright, Guardian)

I'm not someone who can recite passages from texts or remember character's names. Even favourite books I struggle to recall any details one or two books later, which is both a blessing and a problem. I'm certainly not someone for your trivia team. Fortunately when I look at the cover of a book I've read I can recall clearly how I felt about the book and have the luxury of re-reading books that I know upfront I'm going to enjoy.

I've resigned myself to this failing and so was surprised this morning when I looked at the table of contents in 'The China Factory' - I knew the stories. I knew details and emotions and remembered so many powerful endings. She reminded me of Anne Sexton, many of whose two or four line endings have been a benchmark for me for a long time. In Costello's title story the ending wasn't a twist or a shock or any sort of ploy that showed the writer's hand. But the phrasing, the idea and the expression of how the protagonist felt, was haunting. I was almost reluctant to read straight on but couldn't not.

And now, looking at the contents list I remember how I ached at the end of 'You Fill Up My Senses'. I remember sitting on a bar stool in the last shape of sunset, the loud conversation of almost-drunk tradesmen and their girlfriends barely registering as I read 'The Astral Plane', savouring the words and my one beer and looking out across the bay thinking about what I'd just read.

"She closed her eyes. She knew she could not be without him. She remembered his shoulder touching hers, his imploring eyes, and she felt herself again in his gaze - poised, silent, immaterial - and she knew she would die a thousand times at this memory, at this confluence of hearts. She leaned towards the screen and through it was not an endurance at all, this presence, this plane, and as the night came down and the rain fell on the city it came to her that what this was - this man, this moment - what this was, most of all, was the resurrection of hope."

I mean really, how fortunate I was to have a view of a day dying over water, a house with a reading chair by a window and a bottle of Coopers to go back to after that.

This is a collection that reinforces the power of short stories. At the end I felt as moved as if I'd read 12 novels - such a testament to how much can be conveyed in 20 pages at a time. In the right hands.

Just as the Paul Kelly album places me in Sloane Square, almost at the point where I'd make the big life-decision to return to Melbourne, the cover of 'The China Factory' will now set me in a couple of quiet days in Sorrento where I found a writer to add to my author-love list, and was even inspired to continue on my own writing quest.


What I Loved - work I have read and must share

What I Loved: Love Begins In Winter

I'm not surprised that according to Goodreads I've been "currently reading" Love Begins in Winter (Simon Van Booy) for a year. It is a collection that whispers, 'Take your time. Savour me.' It's subtle, considered, and I stop all the time when I'm reading it.

"Grief is a country where it rains and rains but nothing grows. The dead live somewhere else - wearing the clothes we remember them in." 

I have to stop and think and appreciate prose like that.
And this...

"Los Angeles is a place where dreams balance forever on the edge of coming true. A city on a cliff held fast by its own weight."

And that's just the first story.

In the title story each chapter could stand alone as a short short - they feel complete - so it's almost a bonus that they flow to build the story they do. That the POV shifts feel natural but not contrived. This is a writer I will go back to again and again and notice new things each time.

I feel like I need to absorb each sentence that van Booy gives me, and it makes me want to write myself. He makes me want to strip whole paragraphs, pages even, right back to the essence that is poignant, significant and provoking.

As I was reading I was reminded of Vienna, thinking that was where I first started this book. I was alone sitting on a bar stool on a busy Friday night, and at one stage I ordered a drink in Spanish. The Austrian waitress answered me in fluent Spanish as though it was natural. When I'm away and alone there is marvel in everything foreign - supermarkets, train stations, a menu. I started Van Booy in Austria, but his observations and simple, succinct language helps me to see the details where I live with the same wonder.

Nicole Hayes shared a writing prompt with Writers Victoria recently: to write your way out of not writing by writing what you're not writing about. I've used this and found it really helpful for getting me  back on track with something that's stuck. And now I have Van Booy to help me start when I have no idea what I'm not writing about. I read a few pages and look at photos on my wall or people on the tram or in the cafe and I'm in the creative zone where everything is art and deserves to be captured and I want to be the one who does it.

I've just realised that I spoke Spanish in Innsbruck, not Vienna. And though I have now read the Love Begins in Winter collection,  I don't think my status on Goodreads will ever change.

If you need more convincing to get your hands on a copy, the Praise on IndieBound should help.

Oh okay, you can also read a hearty extract of the title story thanks to The Guardian, but you really should get a copy.


What I Loved - work I have read and must share

What I Loved: The Dangerous Bride (Lee Kofman)

I've just finished 'The Dangerous Bride' sitting in a sunny spot eating my muesli and feeling terribly indulgent for using working time this way. But I can justify the choice because this book is a fabulous resource for a writer, and although I've read it in only 2 days it's already sparked a lot of thinking about form, structure and tone that I'm sure will help my own work.

The story explores love, relationships, migration, sexual freedom, family, security, and above all (for me anyway) it is a quest that is informed and accessible - a brave and intelligent work.

Born with a broken heart, Lee survived open-heart surgeries in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and wonders if her fairytale-rescue fantasies, her emotional heart-breaks and fascination with love may be a natural result of these month spent in hospitals "where people died frequently and openly." At 10 years' old Lee was hit by a bus and needed more surgeries, and while she talks about hiding her physical scars during her sexual explorations, in her work it feels as though nothing is hidden.

"I led Noah into my writing cell turned love den, where my lover and I, unnerved by the newness of each other, spent unslept nights. For the first time, I felt Noah to be an intruder.  This hurt. I hoped wildly that after all that time apart, he would now push me onto the bed with a passion strong enough to exorcise my pain, and possibly my lover. Instead, he scrutinised the room, his protective arm around my shoulder. In the remaining daylight, under my husband's critical gaze, the place turned into a pumpkin."

Structurally, this is a book that moves between non-chronological personal stories, meetings with people that are written as narratives, interviews that are captured with a lot of direct quotes, and extensive references to artists, literary characters and broader research into different forms of relationships. It's easy to imagine that creating, collecting and combining all of this material  could have resulted in an inaccessible mess, and I don't know how many drafts were completed or how extensive the changes made were, but the result is a really engaging, accessible exploration from an exciting voice.

In her acknowledgements, Lee says, 'Throughout the entire process of writing this book, Peter (Bishop) kept reading my confused drafts and helping me to deepen the work. Our lengthy conversations about what I was doing would leave me dazed and exalted.' Both he and Sally Heath (MUP Editor) should feel extremely proud of how their input has informed and shaped this work.

I hadn't heard Lee speaking until after I finished this book, and when I did listen to an interview I felt an even greater appreciation for her. Imagine learning English as an adult and having the command of language that she shows here. On the page I heard open yearning. I felt sadness, frustration and respect for all sorts of different reasons. Listening to her I was so pleased to hear her lightness, that the child seeking rescue hasn't been quashed, but it doesn't sound like need. She sounds more like a woman who won't be beaten or bitter; a vibrant, considerate woman who analyses and enjoys life, and I'm looking forward to meeting her.

I'm not strictly following Lee's 'Reading Diet' recommendations (or NaNoWriMo guidelines) at the moment, but perhaps my current appetite for a diverse range of writing is as close as I'll get to a non-manogomous relationship. Or at least as far as I'll admit to in public.

The verse novel

Yesterday Rowena Wiseman wrote about coming to terms with the fact that her latest work is probably going to be a novella. Fortunately she goes from 'dealing with it' to embracing the form and promoting  publishers currently publishing novellas.

I responded to her that when novella is the right length for the story, it's the right length for the reader. Maybe I'm more open to forms and lengths than "the market" but surely the examples Rowena lists as successful novellas are enough to validate the form. 

And as I happen to be reading a verse novel at the moment, I thought we should celebrate these too.

Poetry was my writing beginning, and still a form I treasure, perhaps even covet, thanks to my first love, David Malouf.

From 'Poem'

"You move by contradictions:
out of a moment
of silence far off
in Poland or January
you smile and your body
returns to my touch"

What hit me when I first read this was the line that offers 'in Poland or January' as though they are related, as though they could be alternatives when there is nothing that they share. Unless they are both far off. As a teenager this was remarkable, an opening to putting together all sorts of random thoughts and things, like the way I thought could translate if I could listen to rhythm and look at layout. 

It was incredible, too marvellous to speak of.

For poetry I'd always been more familiar with collections and anthologies than the verse novel, and read them with long pauses in between poems, or felt guilty if I didn't. I'd feel the author's hours or agonies searching for every word and placing it carefully, and if I finished a poem and moved on to the next, like turning a page in a novel, it felt disrespectful.

Then I read 'Rapture' by Carol Ann Duffy. I was on a train from Clapham to Haslemere and remember the journey just wasn't long enough. I was visiting family friends so I couldn't get off the train and ask them to leave me alone for another hour though I wanted to. This book was another marvel for me. Another world opened.

Recently I caught up with Melbourne poet Kristin Henry, who had taught me in short story classes more than a decade ago, which prompted me to read some of her recent work. And so I found her verse novel, 'All the way home'.

I'm still reading it, but this book is another marvel for me. Perhaps this time a stunning reminder rather than an introduction, but no less powerful.

I feel like we're in a time where forms are all sitting down to the table together - short stories and flash fiction and poetry - like an extended family. As I've been reading Henry's work I feel like the verse novel is the relative that sits alongside the anthologies, novels, best-of essays and poetry collections, and is the one that can hold court with everyone. There's the story arc, character development, plot, dialogue, all the bricks, but there's also scaling and refining that results in tightened, necessary prose. And that doesn't mean it is dense. Henry's poems are conversations and thoughts that we can all, as readers, access and respond to.

"This story is irresistible. Kristin Henry untangles the yearnings and frailties of the human heart. Her characters are real." Andrea Goldsmith

Yesterday was National Poetry Day in the UK, an event held on different dates internationally. Perhaps in the future we'll take time to acknowledge verse novels, and novellas, and and and...

Some of my published poetry:

The Road There

Feeding Need

What I Loved: Patient: The story of a rare illness

I was at a pre-program launch for the Melbourne Writers Festival a couple of weeks ago.  It was a civilised gathering in Aesop on Collins St, with wine from Mount Langhi Gihran.

The ever-smiling hostess, Lisa Dempster, stood before us with a few pages of text that she barely referred to. Clearly, orchestrating a diverse and innovative program doesn't mean she's out of touch with any of the details.

I was grinning as she talked about the In Conversation session with Ben Watt. Maybe it was Lisa speeding up and (have I imagined this?) fanning herself talking about the lead singer of Everything But The Girl and his books? Maybe she, too, knew a boy that had given her an EBTG album a few decades ago?

Whether it's fair to 'blame' Lisa or not, the Ben Watt session was highlighted at my program planning session the next morning. Ticket booked I thought I'd better have a look at what he's been up to over the past 20+ years.

I borrowed Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness and started it late one night, just to knock over a few pages. It's a good thing I knew that this stuff happened a while ago and Ben is alive and touring and "well", because I was tense and teary in my 75 page quick opening read.

I'm wary of true stories in the actual people's hands. If they're not written well I'm saddened by the waste of a good story, and then I experience a little self-disgust for responding like that. But there's nothing to worry about here.

Watts' journey of dreadful physical illness includes more medical specialists than one hospital hires, surgeries and drips and hoses in and out of his body, and we learn all of this with blends of facts and his reflections. I never thought I'd be rooting for levels of his cell counts and blood culture tests, and I held my breath while they slow-bombed him with cyclophosphamide.

But where he really gets me is writing about other people. Several aspects are analogous to the prison experience, and "like a lone diver among sharks, I would watch the cool-eyed doctors and anaesthetists glide round my bed." During his first days in hospital he doesn't want to face other patients and their illnesses, but over time they become part of his community. We see the arrivals of long-term patients who know the drill, and newcomers who look as confused and dis-interested in others as Watts did at the start.

One morning a patient had been prepped and drugged for theatre, but was left waiting in the ward. He was stoned and couldn't stop giggling, "like a little boy in bed on the morning of his birthday." It infected the whole ward so patients gigged at anything, at the nurse apologising for the delay, the porter arriving with a trolley. For a few minutes these terribly sick men are like little boys in a mini-pageant. It's one of the many places Watts uses humour that is natural and a delightful release.

I'm not sure my nerves are ready for his recent memoir - "a remarkably intimate portrayal of his parents." This was enough on how his relationship with his father evolved during his illness to send me back to the tissues -

"We sat together with our little legs side by side, and just started talking in quiet voices - nothing demonstrative or loaded with meaning: just odd things about the car, about jazz and the cricket. I felt like we were boys. And I realised that was how he wanted it. He didn't really want to be my grown-up dad. He wanted to be on equal terms, conspiratorial and even-handed. Good fellas. Little musketeers. I told him I liked his shoes, and he said he would get me a pair. It was something concrete that he could do."

Interestingly I didn't have EBTG in my head while reading this, but couldn't shake James Taylor -

"I feel fine anytime she's around me now, she's around me now almost all the time. And if I'm well you can tell she's been with me now. She's been with me now quite a long, long time, and I feel fine."

I'd like to think that Ben and Tracey would be okay with that.

What I Loved - work I have read and must share

What I Loved: City of Bohane

I've just finished 'City of Bohane' and am full of expletives and remarkable wardrobing ideas. But I have no west coast future city of hoors and dream pipes near me, so the magic can't continue too long. And magic it is. Of the dark kind.

Last year I was lucky. I'd not read, or even heard of (why do I always feel like I'm confessing on here) Kevin Barry, but I went to a wordfactory 'Irish' event on a hot Saturday evening that happened to be during Pride in London, and Kevin Barry read. It was a brilliant short story and perhaps more importantly, his delivery is so animated and accented that once you've heard him, he's reading to you from the pages in your hands.

If you haven't read City of Bohane yet, let me pick a random page and sling you a sample…

"Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses." (p. 4)

"See him back there:
A big unit with deep-set eyes and a squared-off chin. Dark-haired, and sallow, and wry. The kind of kid who whore his bruises nicely." (p. 53)

I want to go on, to get you a line that's setting, maybe about the Back Traces, de Valera Street or Big Nothin'. But instead I'll leave you with the thirst to read it yourself, and a little help from Kevin to get you started.

Kevin Barry reading from City of Bohane from Transmission Arts on Vimeo.

What I Loved - work I have read and must share