Visual Diary #31

Country bikes, Fight Club, an elegant dog and a ramble.

Hi readers,

There are some new subscribers of late - hello! - I thought it might be time for an introduction in case you don’t know what you’re getting into. On this substack I tend to write about writerly life, the radical possibilities of children’s/young adult fiction, reflective nostalgia, place and personal mythology. I’m trying to maintain a weekly visual diary of everything that goes in by focussing on four things that stand out. Once a month I have a commonplace post to gather all the loose ends and links to things I might want to go back to (or have already gone back to), or songs/videos, gossip, art… this substack is nearly three years old. It’s always free but if you want to delve back you can take out a paid subscription. (Big thanks to those who have!)

Yesterday when I did the little radio bit about the Map of Lost Places before I went on air I was trying to explain my bio: uh, young adult fiction, but also nonfiction, also teacher, researcher, real estate writer? (I have lately been wondering if I should call myself a ‘real estate novelist’, like ‘Paul’ in Billy Joel’s Piano Man.)

The mapping projects in part come from writing realistic young adult fiction - giving my characters the same sense and love of place that I felt as a young person. I always create maps for my novels as part of the writing process, though they often change, and I have maps for novels I never finished (but not the other way around)

Girl Defective is my best example of place-writing because it is set in a named St Kilda, and draws heavily on both my experience of living there as an adult, and my fantasy of what it would be like to live there as a teenager (when we were kids if we ever drove through Mum would get us to lock the doors.) This is Sky living her cool life above the failing record shop on Blessington Street.

“At one am I went up to the roof. I sunk homebrew and peered over the palm trees and clouds and shingles. The sky was infinite and starry and I felt like I was in a movie. I played Them doing ‘Gloria’. The world was all black heat and a bad ass riff. Nancy’s stories roiled inside my head: bikers and club kids and vampires and red lipstick and visible tan-lines and five o-clock shadow and surprise couplings on fire exits. Out there Luke was pasting up pictures of his sister and bad things were happening to young girls. Out there, there were no rules and Nancy was doing more than I could dream of.” (Girl Defective)

GD took me two or three years to write, in part funded by a Creative Victoria grant. I was doing a lot of school visits at the time, and my son was 4,5,6. I walked around St Kilda with a notebook. I did a lot of remembering. I also did a lot of reading about how the suburb had changed from marshland to holiday site to sailor’s playground to place of ill-repute to gentrified to the mix of all things I feel when I walk around there now. Writing GD coincided with my wider interest in mapping, because at the same time my son was making sense of his world by drawing hundreds of maps and plans of our house and surrounds (then Castlemaine) … so everything converged. It was a really hard book to write. I wanted it to be a noir, but you can’t really have noir YA because of the whole hope-at-the-end thing … so it ended up a kind of kooky family story with queerish darkish tones, and because of the record store setting it is full of music. For the promo I had stickers of the cover girl (the cover by the amazing Sandy Cull was joint winner of the 2014 ABDA Best Designed Young Adult Book ), and I made a google map that strung a line from each site together like a broken verse novel.

Yesterday I was reading the first story in Yiyun Li’s collection Wednesday’s Child and these lines leaped out at me: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

Old novels really are like dead people mattering only to those who loved them. Sometimes I feel something like embarrassment about mine, like I shouldn’t still care about them, especially as they are out of print. And yet, sometimes when I pick one up and reread I remember the writing, what it was like to be living in the puzzle of trying to turn unknowing into knowing.

I find non-fiction easier, both to write and talk about - mostly because I can see the ending and it’s less personal (even when it’s memoir, somehow.) My nonfic has always been about trying to go deeper into something that fascinates me or dogs me, and sometimes I do it for money, but usually when I do it for money it’s less fun. I always love Mark Fisher’s title, The Ghosts of my Life. Aren’t we all haunted more and more as we go? The YA and the nonfic feed each other but I haven’t got to a point where one can finance the other. My YA is full of cultural references - I remember being inspired by Margo Lanagan’s source list from her brilliant collection Black Juice, and making my own for Everything Beautiful, lest anyone think it was just a flip romance between a fat angry atheist girl and a sarcastic depressed wheelchair boy:

I’m going to move onto the pictures now.

This last week I went away to write - and I did write, although not as much as I wanted to. It was a bit torturous to be honest. I also walked on the beach and bought a lot of opshop books. I watched Bones & All and Single White Female. This weekend, I’ve been sorting out my library. I have this future dream of owning a secondhand bookshop. This will most likely never happen, but still I buy all the books. I’ve done a bit of a cull and dust off and sorted out some bags for a market stall down the track. I am thinking about moving at the moment because we’re going into winter and this house is old and hard to heat, but ugh. I need one of those plug-in plushie suits. I walked past some kind of LARP, plushie/furry gathering at the park the other week -it was delightfully unsettling to see humans with their attached ears and tails, standing around eating sausages-in-bread. I should have drawn it but I didn’t. Maybe I will. I’m actually a week behind with pictures and may never catch up.

View from V-line train. I always think I will read and write but end up staring out the window.

Last scene of Fight Club (cue Pixies) - watched with W. I thought it held up and was better than I remembered - although very dark/colour grading and lots of hand-held ‘action’ filming that got a bit dizzying. I loved all the fourth-wall-breaks - and well, Edward Norton. It made me think of my youth and bad nineties relationships - how it was almost de rigueur for guys to be assholey. Who knew how to ‘do’ romance? It was so confusing. But then I remember how Kurt Cobain would talk about Courtney Love “Man, if I could get that girl to publish her poetry, the world would change.” After watching Fight Club this time around I wondered more about Marla’s story.

This is me and my friend riding around on bikes at night in the country without helmets or lights. Lawless! Wild!

And this is Bonnie showing me her tennis ball. She looks a little stout here but actually she is quite elegant.

If you’ve gotten this far - thanks for reading. Do you find writing hard? Do you write all over the map? I hope you’re having a nice break, getting some kind of break from the hurlyburly of modernity. Looking forward to discounted easter eggs.

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