I know I won't be leaving here... with a tail
This news post has been shuffled about a bit, but, to begin again, I must share this link with my eldest daughter, who had an old copy of Coles' Funny Picture book when she was small.
As noted on the Speakeasy blog and elsewhere, the Franz Ferdinand Book Group is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This post and comments are an interesting sample of what's going down on their English tour...
The newest Meanjin is cram full of people from Sarsaparilla, who have done themselves proud! and RMIT's new Harvest mag is in the shops too.
Go find 'em - Laura Carroll's fine piece on Jane Austen's right to be single AND romantic, and Ampersand Duck's account of designing The Lost Dog are there for the reading. You have been told.
In other news, we will now be able to find out when our local member speaks in Parliament, via OpenAustralia.org. Link via Libraries Interact, authored by cyberlibrarian Kathryn Greenhill.
And finally, a blogger I know nothing of has, via Terry Teachout of About Last Night, reminded me of US poet Kay Ryan, and this very funny, though lengthy anecdote she shared quite a while back about the American poetry fest/bunfight, AWP.
Here's Ryan in the middle of an AWP panel on creativity, wrestling with the presenters' promiscuous use of the words 'mentor' and 'workshop':
Because it seems to me so deep and intimate, I have always had a very cautious feeling about this word mentor, as something far beyond the teacher of a class a student signed up for. It would be specific to two people who found some particular affinity, a relationship that would develop gradually. It would rarely occur.
When I was a young writer, for some years I only knew one poet, Rosalie Moore, thirty-plus years my senior. We got to be friends and she was encouraging to me, but we barely understood each other at all. We stayed friends until she died in her nineties.
Occasionally over the years someone would refer to Rosalie as my mentor and I always felt an electric shock, like red cartoon arrows flying off my body, like bristles. Rosalie wasn’t my mentor. She would agree with that. I just don’t think the word should be used casually. It should be deep. Some people have mentors, some never do. I didn’t.
Workshop. In the old days before creative writing programs, a workshop was a place, often a basement, where you sawed or hammered, drilled or planed something.
You could not simply workshop something. Now you can. You can take something you wrote by yourself to a group and get it workshopped.
Sometimes it probably is a lot like getting it hammered. Other writers read your work, give their reactions, and make suggestions for change. A writer might bring a piece back for more workshopping later, even.
I have to assume that the writer respects these other writers’ opinions, and that just scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter if their opinions really are respectable; I just think the writer has given up way too much inside. Let’s not share. Really.
Go off in your own direction way too far, get lost, test the metal of your work in your own acids. These are experiments you can perform down in that old kind of workshop, where Dad used to hide out from too many other people’s claims on him.
Said blogger pointed me to this lovely piece in the Yale Review on Marianne Moore. (And yes, I have tarted up this post - I started rereading the Ryan piece and simply had to sample it.) So thanks, Patrick and Terry.
