Misrule

And so an era comes to an end. Misrule has been operating on the Serendipity platform since its inception in about 2003, including an earlier version that got swamped by spam comments and had to be taken down all together. I hope my tech guy might still have those posts archived somewhere—something to ask him about next time I see him.

But the time has come to move Misrule on to the more flexible and easier to format WordPress. At the new address, I'll be able to add all the documents—my interviews and articles and so on—that are currently languishing on the VERY homemade root website (misrule.com.au) and have a much zhooshier looking site and blog. The site is now live, although there's very little there as yet, and it will change A LOT as I am looking into installing a fancier theme, and will be working on the overall design with my dear friend Donna Rawlins. I intend to keep the blog name the same, and while I'll keep these posts up here at Serendipity, I will be starting from scratch at WordPress. I don't know if this will cause any problems in terms of search engines and so on finding the new blog, but if you could add the new address to your reader, that would be a big start in terms of knowing how to find me.

So here it is. misrule.com.au/wordpress  Any advice from you all about any of the above would be gratefully received. I have some plans for revitalising the life of old Misrule, including publishing interview with authors about the craft of writing. In fact, there's one nearly ready to go, with John Larkin, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

And so, onward and upward! Thanks, Serendipity, it's been fun. See you all on the new site.

Happy new year, everyone! I had a lovely, if too short, break over Christmas and into the middle of January, and am now back on deck at the Day Job. The exciting news from that front is that WestWords now has its own Facebook page, with a Twitter account (once we decide on a username, as WestWords is taken by a non-Tweeter, dammit) and (fingers crossed) our own website to follow very soon.

So if you're on Facebook, please hop on over and Like! us! I'm hoping we might get 100 likes in our first 24 hours. No reason why, just excited that after 4 years, we now can promote the amazing work we've been doing for the young readers and writers of western Sydney.

And if you're reading this, Jodie? Thanks, dear and dogged colleague!

Like our logo? It's by the wonderful team at XOU Creative.

It was, of course, related to the day job, but this is in fact a school that, curiously, I have a strange kind of long-standing connection with.

More than ten years ago, when I was working on the Nestlé Write Around Australia program at the State Library of NSW, I got my dander up one day reading yet another tribute to private schools in the Sydney Morning Herald. This time, they reported on the end of year speech given by the principal of some posh eastern suburbs or north shore or wherever the hell it was school. Truly. The principal's speech given at the speech night. Featured news. But only if it's a private school. So I took up my pen (actually, that's sheer rhetoric; I wrote it on a computer of course) and wrote a letter to the editor that went something like this:

I look forward to the day that the end of year speech made by the principal of Rooty Hill High School is front page news in the Herald.

They published it.

The next day, the principal of Rooty Hill High School, Christine Cawsey, also had a letter published in the paper, thanking me and saying she'd be delighted to supply said speech any time the Herald cared to run it.

I was horrified, because to be honest, I wasn't even 100% sure when I wrote the letter that there WAS a Rooty Hill High School. I chose the name because Rooty Hill is such an iconic western Sydney suburb and I just knew that it would have the right resonance for the point I was trying to get make. But when Chris's letter was published, I was mostly just worried I'd inadvertently offended her, and the school and the students.

So I rang her. And she laughed and said nothing could be further from the truth. What had happened was some of the school's senior students had read my letter (extraordinary enough, because as we know, kids don't read any more, especially not newspapers and especially not kids from a suburb like Rooty Hill and even if by chance they did it would especially not be the Sydney Morning Herald*) and rushed into her office saying, Ms Cawsey! Ms Cawsey! Is your speech going to be in the paper? and so alerted her to it (because school principal really DON'T have time to read the newspaper, especially not the letters page, although knowing Chris as I now do a little, I bet she would have got to it eventually). And so she wrote her response.

And we laughed more about the whole stupidity of the media's bias towards public schools and how we'd, together, struck a blow against it, and that was that.

I heard or read Chris's name often enough over the years—she's been president of the public schools' principal association and was and is often asked to comment on a variety of issues to do with (public) education, on the radio, in the papers—but as far as my personal association with the school went, that was kind of it.

Until I started in the Day Job.

I don't write about the day job all that much on this blog. It's tricky—writing about work is always tricky, for any blogger, but made particularly so by the fact that WestWords (aka The Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project—like our fancy new name?) is hosted by a local government council, and there are very very strict media protocols for council employees, which I am, even though our project is a regional one funded by Arts NSW (of which, more anon). But it's been a good week for WestWords** and for me as a result, and I don't think there'll be any objection to this particular post.

Back in the early days of WestWords (it's been 4 years now!), early in 2008, one of the first people to independently contact me to find out more about the project was Honor White, the teacher librarian at—Rooty Hill High School. I met with Honor at the school, and we chatted about the project, and she gave me some contacts and ideas about who to talk to in the education department and it was all really lovely and supportive. And then I mentioned the great SMH Speech Night Letter Incident, and was delighted to learn from Honor that Christine Cawsey was still principal of the school. So I popped my head into Chris's office and introduced myself, and bless her, she remembered me and the Incident.

Since then, I've been invited every year to the school's annual creative writing competition presentation, and then this year, the connection kicked up into a whole other level.

Back in April 2011, we attempted to run a series of weekend poetry slam workshop, in partnership with Miles Merrill's Word Travels company, leading up to a poetry slam night at Blacktown Arts Centre as part of Blacktown's youth week events. It was a big investment for us, and a lot of work, but we just weren't getting any kids to enrol in the workshops. It was looking like the whole thing was going to crash and burn, until I got an email from  the Head Teacher English at—Rooty Hill High School.

They had a whole bunch of kids interested in the poetry slam, but they couldn't, or wouldn't, come to the workshops on Saturdays. Either they couldn't get there under their own steam (public transport infrastructure in western Sydney being even crappier than public school funding), or their parents couldn't commit to driving them into Blacktown three weekends running, or they just lacked the confidence to step outside their (emotional and geographical) comfort zone. (Remember, Rooty Hill is a suburb of Blacktown, but it's also its own community—Blacktown is HUGE!—and many of these kids don't travel far from home at all, ever.)

And so we took the workshops to the kids, and to the school.

I collected two amazing slam poets from Blacktown Station and we drove to Rooty Hill High (past the Rooty Hill RSL, so big it ran a mock campaign to get its own postcode!), where Bravo Child and Tom ran the most fantastic workshop with a large group of some of the most wonderful, self-aware, open and brave teenagers I've ever met in my life.

The kids loved Bravo and Tom, who were fierce in their admiration for and support of these kids—about 6 of whom turned up at our first big venture into evening youth events, the inaugural Blacktown Youth Week Poetry Slam—The Rumble.

It was SUCH a night! We had about 40 audience members turn up—awesome numbers, trust me—and these amazing young people got to perform alongside experienced and professional performance artists, including Miles and Michael Simms, a national slam champion from the US. We even had a primary school student—the younger sister of one of the Rooty Hill High kids—perform the speech she was to give at her school's public speaking competition. She was tiny and awesome. Bravo coached the kids again before the event, and I still remember how emotional the whole night made me.

But that wasn't it. After our event, Miles stayed in touch, and ended up going to the school himself for a follow up workshop, and from that, a core group of three students—G, I and S (excuse the initials but I have to be really careful about identifying them without their permission) ended up performing at—get this!—the Sydney Writers' Festival.

The Sydney Writers' Festival. I kid you not.

I wasn't there—which I will always regret—but these three amazing young people from western Sydney got up and performed their stuff—about who they are, where they come from, where they want to go in life—in front of 400 people at the Wharf as part of Sydney Writers' Festival.

And what were they most excited about?

They got to meet The Chaser in the Green Room.

I love those kids.

Right about now, I have to mention their drama teacher, Anjelica. Anjelica is only in her second year out, as we teachers (and ex-teachers) say—her second year teaching. She's young, she's tiny, she's talented and dynamic and so committed to these kids it makes me weep. She has most recently organised for the company that is touring Kevin Spacey's Richard III to hold their secondary drama student workshops at Rooty Hill, and all those kid will get to go and see the production and attend a Q and A with Spacey and the company. And she's set up a drama club at the school—with plans to take it regional—which brings me to where I was tonight.

At a high school drama production.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Anjelica, written by her wonderful drama kids, thanking me fore the opportunities they'd had through WestWords and the poetry slam, and  inviting me to their first production. It was such a gorgeous, heartfelt invitation, there was no way I could have, or would have wanted to refuse. And I'm so glad I could be there.

With, apparently, only about 6 weeks of rehearsal, students from across several years, rehearsed and produced an abridged version of Othello. Not only that, they also wrote their own (hilarious, if somewhat anarchic) play called The Trial of BB Wolf and Curly Pig, in which BB Wolf (played with astonishing comic timing and utter conviction by our afore-mentioned slammer, 'I') is plaintiff against Curly Pig, whom he accuses of attempted murder for that pot of boiling water in the fireplace...

Honestly, the Pig V Wolf play was a delight and a hoot, but with minimal props or set, and, it has to be said, experience from the cast, their reduced Othello was actually extraordinary.

We were in the school's dance studio—a double classroom, really, so the "stage" was about 5 feet deep and as wide as a classroom (less, actually—there was "wing" space as well). Some of these young people had never acted before. Our slammer/wolf 'I' played Roderigo with equal parts humour and pathos. Cassio had the flair and charisma of an adolescent Toby Schmitz. Iago stalked the stage with menace and threw a mightily sinister glance over his shoulder every time he left the stage. Desdemona was sweet and loving and frightened; Emelia moved from frustrated and slightly desperate to deep grief and anguish and guilt—she made me weep. And Othello hit his stride in the beautifully choreographed scenes of demented jealousy and rage—his presence grew with every scene.

The set:

The highly multi-cultural cast turned the racial elements of the plot upside down and inside out.

Oh,
and I sat next to Chris Cawsey, the (still) principal of this amazing
school. I bet she was wishing, as I was, that the Herald (and the
Telegraph and the rest of the world) were there to report on the small
triumphs made every day by the likes of teachers like Anjelica, and kids
like 'I' and his peers in schools tucked away in suburbs with
unprepossessing names; like Rooty Hill.

_________

*Sarcasm

** We've had triennial funding confirmed from Arts NSW—project secure for 2012-2015! plus we will soon have our own dedicated website, woot woot!

I'm writing this on a Mac.

Pretty much everything of value I've ever written, I wrote on a Mac. Book reviews, articles, blog posts, aborted attempts at novels and short stories and picture books—written on a Mac. A book proposal I'm currently working on. My Masters thesis: perhaps the hardest, certainly the longest thing I've ever written, written on a Mac. (This Mac, in fact.)

All the rubbish I've written, too—Made on a Mac. All the hours in chat rooms and on Facebook and Twitter, reading blogs, searching for links for this blog, uploading photos and downloading videos—all on a Mac. Reading the news. Reading gossip. Emailing friends all over the world, sharing ideas and arguing about books and education and politics and love and family and all the things that matter to me most. All on a Mac.

I've used PCs as well—several times over the years in the course of work, and I've always tried not to be too much of a Mac bore (although I have always appreciated that joke: What can a PC user do that a Mac user can't? Shut up.) but your first love stays with you and my first, and I'm guessing last love, as far as technology goes, is the Apple Macintosh. 

I learnt how to use a computer on what may have been a Mac Plus in an empty classroom at
Lurnea High School, where I mocked up worksheets and quizzes using what
must have been the most basic, original Clip Art library.

And yes, look, packrat that I am, I still have one of those early Mac-generated documents...

I'm not so
good on remembering model names of Macs (although with John Birmingham's
#myapplehistory hashtag trending on Twitter, maybe I need to go and do
some research...), but it was one of those small, boxy early models
where you had to eject the floppy disk that contained the software in
order to insert the floppy disk to save your work. Tell the young folk that
today... (I guess it was an Apple II—this was 1987.)

The first Mac I owned—or co-owned—was a similar early model, although perhaps by then it had an internal memory drive. This would have been around 1991, when I was a newly-wed, because I remember it was the recipient of my first attempts at my MA thesis, and I can picture its spot in the flat on the top of the house in Gladesville perfectly, just as I recall writing essays for the MA coursework by longhand in the bedsit downstairs in the same house. Somewhere I still have printouts from those early thesis drafts (the topic was temporality and the young hero in Diana Wynne Jones's Time of the Ghost, A Tale of Time City and the  Chrestomanci novels) and they were on tractor paper. (Remember those bastard printers, how they always misfed?)

I don't remember buying that Mac, but I do remember buying the next one. By that time, Voldemort and I were in our lovely semi in Marrickville, and his elder brother was working for Apple, and we managed to get a new model—the LC 520—at a staff discount.  I recall that, for the time, it had pretty much all the bells and whistles you could hope for, and also that my ownership of it was almost as shortlived as my marriage. (Voldemort, in a spectacular display of entitlement, took the computer with him when he went, despite the fact that I was no longer teaching full-time and was trying to build a freelance writing career as well as finish my MA. What's that old expression about leaving the world as you entered it...? )

Anyway, ancient history, and it must be remembered that the next Mac—an LC 475—was bought for me out of a great act of love and kindness and a gesture of practical support. I'm told this kindness made my father cry, and not even the Leaving had done that.

After the 475 came the huge, outrageously heavy clunker Power Macintosh, which I bought just before I moved to the north coast in my own post-marriage Leaving. I remember being so excited about it that I made my dad bring it down to me at those same friends' house the night before my going-away party, and I still feel guilty to this day for that—it was so heavy for Dad to move alone, and such an imposition on those friends. Oh, but who could resist the siren call of the fabby new Mac!

That Mac lasted me about 6 years, but overlapping that came my first laptop—a graphite blue shell-shaped iBook SE, which I took with me on my Churchill Fellowship. I nearly left it in a telephone booth on my first night in London, but fortunately some very kind people who came in after me saw it and returned it to me—lucky, lucky me! And I kept that gorgeous thing until the mid 2000s, when I upgraded to the machine on which I type this personal history of the Mac—my 15 inch shiny silver MacBookPro lappy.

Well, it's not so shiny now—this is the keyboard after five years of my finger nails tapping away:

and the truth is, she's slowing down quite a bit and I think soon it will be time to upgrade again. And in the way of all those previous Macs, I'll find a welcome home for it, and so it will go on.

And yet for most of this quarter century of Mac lust (which has also included 3 or 4 lovely iMacs I had at The School Magazine, 2 iPods, an iPhone [soon to be upgraded] and an iPad), I suppose I only really heard anything much about Steve Jobs in the past ten or so—and only really knew anything substantial about him in very recent years. I suppose I first heard about him when he lost his job and then during his time with Pixar, but I wouldn't have paid much attention.

I'm not one for hero worship (except, I suppose, for writers and activists, and writer-activists I admire). I don't know much about Steve Jobs the man, nor even much about him as a businessman. He strikes me in all I have read, in the videos I have seen today, that he was a decent man with his fair-share of hard-won wisdom; clearly, he was touched with genius, and not just a genius of intellect, but also of imagination and aesthetic. And for that alone, I mourn his passing.

But it's more personal than that. Quite simply (and eventually), the man brought me the world in my pocket. I know he didn't invent the internet, and perhaps it's true, as Hugh Riminton suggested on 702 this afternoon, that if he hadn't created all that he did, someone else would have. But honestly, I don't know about that. Someone else might have invented something else that more or less does what the Mac computer does, what the iPod and iPhone and iPad do, but the point is, no-one else did what Steve Jobs did and now he's gone. And I am unaccountably sad about it.

Voldemort used to marvel at how unafraid I—a girl who could barely count—was of the computer. I used to say, well, it's not going to blow up on me, is it. (I was a bit surprised myself, to be honest.) I realise now that it was the genius of Steve Jobs—and his partner Steve Wozniak, and all of their creative and technical teams—that made a computer system so seamless and approachable and practically usable that there was nothing to be afraid of, but much to not merely use, but to enjoy. (Also—pretty!)

Computers are a huge part of my life and my Macs have given me great pleasure over the years. They've been my workplace and my entertainment and my travel companions and my conduit to the world. I'm not overstating that. My life and work and leisure are all the better and easier and more pleasurable for them.

And so farewell, Steve Jobs, far too soon. We'll never know what that brilliant mind of your might have brought our way, but I for one thank you and honour you for the great things you achieved in your 56 years.

This quote has been doing the round today, but it's just so damn apposite that I repeat it here.

Vale. And thanks for all the Apples.

Amber Benson, Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on her new(ish) career as a writer and her love of, among numerous writers, Diana Wynne Jones. (And if anyone has read her middle grade novel Among the Ghosts, I want to hear from you.)

My goodreads review:

Now, what is an online literary festival, I hear you ask. Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure—at least, I wasn't when I first heard about it on Facebook and Twitter. But as I've checked it out, it appears that, over 2 days this weekend (UK time), a series of blog posts from a huge range of writers will appear every half hour or so. If you go here, you can see the line-up: and if you're like me, you'll be squealing with pleasure at the wonderful names that are there. Adele Geras! Hilary McKay! Malachy Doyle! Mary Hoffman! Susan Price! and so many many others.

I am also reliably informed that there will be:

• Amazing Blogs!
• Stunning Videos!
• Exciting Giveaways!
• Fascinating Interviews!
• Mind-Boggling Competitions!

So check it out. Follow it on Twitter (hashtag #ABBAlitfest) or subscribe via your preferred RSS reader. It should be brilliant fun.

Garn the poms!

The talk was interesting, although I knew a fair bit of the Travers story, but it was a real treat to see the archives. These are available for the public to access, by the way, as are all the items held at the Mitchell. And I forgot to take my copy of Lawson's book (originally titled Out of the Sky She Came, the new edition is called Mary Poppins, She Wrote) and Valerie kindly offered to sign it if I send it to her, which I will do.

An added treat to the night was I at last got to meet Matthew Finch, who I've been corresponding with for a while. I'm not sure how to best sum up Matthew—he's been an academic, primary school teacher and is a writer with a steady stream of freelance from work. Matthew has a particular interest in creativity in education and is on a self-funded tour around the world to check out innovative programs in and out of schools. Matthew got in touch with me when he read a post I wrote about Patricia Wrightson after her death last year, and then to ask me more about the Paint the Town Read early literacy strategy I'm involved with in the Day Job. He's specifically here to check out Paint the Town Read, which he tells me is a world-leader in its whole-of-community approach to early literacy. He was at the Paint the Town Read reading day at Auburn last week and was totally blown away by it. Matthew's taught in areas of London with a similar demographic to Auburn and he was deeply impressed at the way parents and community members, such as the proprietor of the local Michele's cafe, were engaged with the project. He's off to Parkes next week, where Paint the Town Read began, to speak to Rhonda Brain, the project's creator, and the PTTR team out there.

There's not actually a central website for Paint the Town Read, so I'll link to the Blue Mountains version, Paint the Blue Read.

Matthew and I headed out after the Travers session and found a cafe in the QVB where we chatted over toasted sandwiches about teaching, the limitations of the curriculum and the hideous effect systemic standardised testing is having on schools and education, and we swapped stories about the kinds of creative arts programs we've seen and been involved with. You should check out his blog; it's an eclectic compendium of interviews (he has very wide-ranging interests!) and reports on the projects he's been seeing on his world jaunt.

This is one of the best things about the work I'm involved with—meeting like-minded people from all over the world. We're planning on treating ourselves to a night at Mary Poppins, the Musical before Matthew heads off to whatever his next destination ends up being!

And here, for your enjoyment, is a picture of Mary Poppins by Mary Shepherd, stolen from the State Library website.

given the title, I also brought in the question of Whither the
Children's Book in a world when YA and the cross-over gets all the
attention

Because not a lot seems to be about the children's book, these days. The children's novel, to be precise. YA gets vastly more of the blog space, media attention and arguably, reviews—although the picture book probably gets a fair bit of review space as well (and Shaun Tan's done a hell of a lot to make the picture book an acceptable topic of conversation in adult society). And increasingly, I've noticed that when a children's novel does get critical attention, it's suddenly claimed as being young adult.

It happened to The Graveyard Book. It happened to When You Reach Me. And these are both classics examples of children's literature, as far as I am concerned. I've argued the toss on this online and elsewhere, especially about The Graveyard Book, which people seem to want to claim as YA primarily, I think, because it deals with death and because of the extremely scary opening scene where the family is murdered (oh shut up, that's not a spoiler). My argument about The Graveyard Book is this: it ends at the point where most YA takes up: Bod has to leave the graveyard to find his agency, and we don't get to see that process. The rest of the novel—Bod finding who he is in the context of the only family he knows, through adventures that are often perilous, coupled with the exploration of friendship—is the classic stuff of the children's novel.

The claim for When You Reach Me as YA puzzles me even more. Thematically, it shares nothing in common with the typical YA novel, but is firmly in the tradition of the great children's novels—Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time. Andre Norton's Octagon Magic springs to mind for some reason. I'm also thinking of The Game of the Goose and the lesser known The Games Board Map—children's novels with a puzzle to be solved at the heart. There's no subtext of the achieving of subjectivity, such a classic feature of the YA novel. These are all novels about children, with the concerns of children at their heart—friendship and family and belonging and home.

(For the record, I had a conversation about this with Rebecca Stead at Reading Matters last month, and she is firmly of the opinion that she writes children's novels—and she says the letters she gets from her readers bears this out. So there.)

The only thing I can put the claim for such books to be YA down to is this—that they are books that are literary, meta-textual, substantial books full of ideas and complex plotting. They're books that need time to read and consider and digest—books that take, as a frustrated parent of a frustrated 12 year old reader once said to me, longer than an afternoon to read. But complex doesn't ergo mean older.

It's as if we've all forgotten what kind of books we read as children. It's as if the whole rich heritage of 20th century children's literature has become some kind of quaint historical anomaly. It seems to me that the huge emphasis on writing and publishing books for "reluctant readers" (often code for "boys") over the past 20 years has pushed the classic children's novel so far out of our collective consciousness that we don't even recognise it when we see it any more. If it's longer than 200 pages, if it has serious ideas and challenging language, it has to be for young adults—almost seemingly regardless of the age of the protagonists and the thematic interests of the story. And it bothers me enormously that the gifted, devoted, passionate child reader doesn't seem worthy of our attention any more.

Why am I banging on about this all of a sudden? There are two reasons: first, a long-standing concern and second, something I read today that really got up my nose. Here's the first: the second will come right at the end of this post.

Reason for Banging On the First.

Well, first of all, the near-demise of the children's novel, in this country at least, has been a concern of mine for more than a decade. It's not just that YA is sexy and dark and dangerous and so excites the blood of the "won't someone think of teh children" brigade (and yes, I get the irony that here they're actually NOT talking about children at all, but treating young adults as if they WERE children) and so gets all the media attention. (No, I will NOT link to the notorious Wall Street Journal article; that damn woman has had far more than her 15 minutes of attention and I won't be party to giving her a second more. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, google WSJ and dark and young adult and you'll find it. Don't say I didn't warn you.) It's more that the categories—children's and young adult—seem to have been pushed so far apart from one another, in awards in particular, that there seems to be this huge gaping space into which the children's novel, as we have known and loved it for about 150 years, has fallen.

If you're not sure what I'm taking about, go to the Children's Book Council of Australia's website and compare the shortlists for the Book of the Year Award either before there was a split between Older and Younger Readers categories, or even in the early years of separation of the age categories. Look at the books shortlisted in the 60s, 70s and even 80s for the 8-12 year old reader (what the Americans usefully call "middle school") compared to the Younger Readers shortlists of the past 10-15 years. Note how these days, there's only one or two really substantial novels for this age (what I've always thought of the "golden years" of reading), with the rest of the shortlist made up of short, illustrated chapter books, typically for the under 8 years olds, and even picture books.

I'm not saying that those other books, the chapter books and more sophisticated picture books, are bad books or should not have been selected as books of merit—I just look at those lists and wonder where are all the great novels for children? Isn't anyone writing them any more? Or is no-one publishing them any more?

Over the years, I've heard different views on this from Australian publishers. A decade ago, they were telling me they weren't publishing them because they couldn't sell them—apparently schools and libraries wanted the inheritors of the Paul Jennings phenomena; Aussie Bites and books with a wider market appeal—and it wasn't economical to publish literary fiction for that age. So the readers, like the child of that parent I mentioned earlier, who I spoke to when I was working in a children's book shop who said he his daughter needed books that lasted longer than an afternoon—those readers either had to buckle down and read more mature fare that they weren't really ready for, or stick with the classics, or read books from the US or UK, where they still seemed to be publishing real novels for the devoted child reader.

More recently, they tell me that the problem is that writing a really great children's novel is incredibly difficult, and they just don't see the quality manuscripts. Australian publishers tell me this; and Amanda Punter, the Penguin UK publisher on that Sydney Writers' Festival panel, said it too. I just remembered! Yes! That was pretty much the answer to my question—Whither the Children's Book? It's hard to do well, and we'd publish more if we saw more of them.

Maybe that's true—I suspect there is some truth to it. I can't imagine the level of gift it would take to write a Hazel Green novel or a Tom's Midnight Garden. But it's an odd argument at the point that once upon a time there weren't really any YA novels and plenty of wonderful children's novels—has it somehow become harder to write a great children's novel, or have writers turned their attention to other audiences?

What I am sure is true is that there are vastly more books published for young readers now, a greater variety and indeed, I've argued that there are more books for different kinds (and abilities) of young readers than ever before, and that's a great thing. (I made that point in answer to a question at the Sydney Story Factory panel on children and writing at the Sydney Writers' Festival, and I think it's true.) So maybe it's just that there are more books vying for incrementally less and less attention (see another recent post where I mentioned the shrinking of book review pages across the board in mainstream newspapers and the like).

But I can't help but think that there are fewer contemporary children's novels of the type you and I grew up devouring, and that's emphatically not a good thing. And to circle back to my previous point, for some reason when we do see those books, they somehow get shanghaied as young adult. Which they're just not. Which brings me to:

Reason for Banging On the Second.

This blog review of Oliver Phommavanh's second (and very wonderful) children's novel Con-Nerd, in which our goodly blogger describes this book and others of its ilk as "young-young adult".

Yup, you read it right. "Young-young adult."

Is that really what we're calling it now?

Heaven help me.

I don't mean to have a go at you, goodly Alpha Reader blogger, but for god's sake. It's not "young-young adult". There's no such THING as "young-young adult." It's a children's novel. A novel for children. There are still children in the world and they still need novels.

So maybe, after all, I am saying, will no-one think of teh children? But more than that—will no-one think of teh children's book?

So imagine how thrilled I was to discover that Notorious was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards! I haven't had the chance to read the book yet—it's longish, and looks like it needs some serious time to concentrate on it, and most of my reading is done in shortish bursts these days. Congratulations Roberta! It's such exciting news. And Roberta tells me she's planning on going back to her children's novel next, which pleases me very much!

And of course, which reminds me that I didn't blog the announcement of the shortlists for the children's and young adult books either. I have friends on these lists, which is wonderful of course, but they are both also just really strong, interesting lists, and while I have my personal favourites, I think any of them would be most worthy of the top gong. And the good news, of course, is that the $100,00 prize money is being shared around the shortlistees. So heartiest congratulations to the following—the winners are announced early July.

There's been a lot of talk over the years about the quality of critical thinking and reviewing in yer average book blog—concerns that I've shared at times. It's not so much the fangirl stuff that bothers me—overt expressions of enthusiasm are either irritating or delightful, I find—but more just plain bad reviewing. Like all of us, I have over the years read some outrageously uninformed reviews, where the blogger has revealed more about their own cultural ignorance than they've realised. I've read mean-spirited and nasty reviews, where the blogger has apparently taken great joy in demolishing a book and made it personal. I've made condescending reviews where all kinds of assumptions have been made about the writer and their motivations. And I've read plenty of just badly written, dull reviews that reveal nothing about the actual quality of the work.

I always put it down to the fact that yer average book blogger has never gone through any kind of editorial apprenticeship. They've never had to submit work to an editor in order to publish in the first place. They've never had their work edited even for house style, much less for content, tone, accuracy. And so they've never had any opportunity to learn from experienced reviewers the standards of critical writing: don't retell the plot; don't give away significant plot points (although to be fair, in the world of the intertubes, bloggers are pretty spoiler-savvy); "play the ball and not the man", ie, DON'T MAKE IT PERSONAL.

There's nothing new in any of that—if anything, if this blog post were just about book-blogging, I'd be about five years out of date anyway, although I still think a lot of these points remain salient. But hopefully most of us now read book review blogs with a pinch of salt and an understanding that they're not professional reviews—and at least they're not as bad as your average Amazon customer review...

But if bad reviewing were the domain of the amateur blogger—what are we to make of this? 

That link takes you to a review of Leslie Cannold's first novel, The Book of Rachael. The review is written by Theo Chapman. I don't know who he is; I don't recall seeing that byline before, but the trusty intertubes tells me (via LinkedIn) that he is a sub-editor, journalism lecturer and book reviewer for the Sun-Herald.

If you don't know anything about the book, it is a novel imagining the life of Jesus's sister, who Cannold calls Rachael. Cannold was inspired to write the novel after she found that while the names and other details of Jesus's brothers were recorded, there was absolutely no trace of any of his sisters—it was, as she explains in this interview, a shock for her to realise how completely they'd been forgotten. (I was surprised she was surprised, actually!) In the novel—and yes, this post will be full of spoilers, but honestly, if you don't know how the story of Jesus turns out...! Anyway, in the novel, Jesus, named Joshua, is in love with the woman known to history as Mary Magdalene—they are in fact lovers, although not married.  Rachael, some years Joshua's younger, is rebellious, fractious and challenging from early childhood. At 15, she falls passionately in love with Joshua's best friend, the soldier Judah Iscariot, who has been away fighting to Roman occupation, and they are married soon after.

There is another sister, Shona, who is raped and then forced, under
Hebrew law, to marry her rapist, who takes her away from her family and
continues to misuse her for years. And then Maryam, Joshua's lover, disappears with her father, and it is when Joshua leaves Nazareth in search of her that his ministry begins.

There's no doubting Cannold's feminist impulse in writing this book, and a fury at the injustice served to the women of this society permeates the narrative—Shona's fate being at the extreme (but not uncommon) end of the lot of women, the novel also canvasses the more prosaic daily injustices suffered by women in that time and society. We also see the worship of the Goddess Queen of Heaven by women such as the healer and midwife Bindy, to whom Rachael is for a time apprenticed. In Joshua and his father Yosef we have potentially anachronistic men who value and reward Rachael's intelligence and passion for learning by teaching her to read. (I say anachronistic, but cannot it also be possible that there were and have been such men at all times and places in history—men who did not share the mores of the day regarding the place of women? And if that is possible, then it seems entirely plausible to me that the Jesus of the Bible as I read it would have been just such a man. And anyway, the main thing is, this is a novel and Cannold makes it work in the fictional version of the historical world she has created.)

So it's a politically-driven novel, and while Chapman makes it out to be more of a polemic than I think it is, there's no question that this is a novel written from an unequivocally feminist position. I do think it's a bit of a stretch to say that Cannold has Jesus dying for his "feminist beliefs", as Chapman offers in the first paragraph, but that's something you could argue the toss over. Personally, as a feminist, I enjoy reading a novel that overtly takes on one of the biggest stories in the history of the world and recasts it within a feminist framework. (I would say that, my thesis being on feminist retellings of fairy tales, and having been raised by a feminist Christian mother.) I can equally understand someone not caring for the book on the same grounds—and I also demand more than pure politics in my fiction—I want a good story with characters and attention to language, and I get that from Cannold's novel, even while I at times found the narrative style almost oddly elliptical.

No, what really really bothers me about this review is this:

The literary style of The Book of Rachael is pure chick lit and
at one level it's a story that can be enjoyed as a historical drama
set in the Middle East about 2000 years ago.

Brought to you by the fab gals (and guy?) at Alien Onion.

It was a different dinner this year, because the winners didn't know in advance. I wasn't thrilled with that decision—it's not the Oscars, and people might want to bring along family members if they know they are going to win (tickets are expensive!). And most people didn't prepare speeches (writers are superstitious folk!), which was as I expected. But despite all that, it was a fantastic evening—at the Opera House this year, gorgeous venue (but small) and I just wish I got the chance to spend more time with people.

My good friend Dr Anita Heiss gave the speech (which you can download here)—it was equal parts wise and witty and fabulous, much like Anita herself. Do read her speech—it's just a shame you won't get Anita's delivery!

The other reasons I was thrilled to be there were that my colleagues at Blacktown Arts Centre were honoured with a shortlisting (in the Community Relations Commission Award) for the play My Name Is Sud that was developed and produced at the Centre with members of the Sudanese community. The play didn't win, but it was an enormous honour, and the young people who wrote the play with the South African director and writer (and now my good friend and once upon a time student!) Robert Colman were able to be at the dinner. Robert actually came back from South Africa for the evening, which is an indication of what a significant moment this was for everyone involved.

The other reason was that the CAL Western Sydney Writers' Fellowships were announced at the dinner. These are the Fellowships that the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Limited are funding and  my day job project is delivering. The three Fellows were also at the dinner: Alli Sebastian Wolf, Vanessa Berry and Majok Tulba. I'm in the process of setting up planning sessions with these guys to develop the workshop component of their Fellowship. Each of them will be working with young people in western Sydney as part of their Fellowship. It's such an exciting development for the project—which actually got quite a few mentions at the PLA dinner, as it turns out.

And that was largely down to Libby Gleeson, who was awarded that night with the Special Award which in this case was for a body of work that includes not only Libby's writing, but her years of advocacy and support for the writing community. (I can't seem to find the citation, alas.) Libby didn't know she was receiving this award, and I can tell you, it was a long four months for me, not being able to tell her. Libby is not just a good friend of mine, she is the Chair of the Advisory Group to the day-job project, and Libby spoke warmly of the satisfaction the project gives her and announced our new name—WestWords. Do you like it? We like it! And lots of other people seem to like it too.

So here is a photo stolen from the PLA website of the new Premier (who made some rather startling statements about his enjoyment of literary experiences at the dinner!) and the new arts minister (who expressed genuine enthusiasm for his portfolio). The CAL Fellows are there (1st, 3rd and 4th on the left), as is Libby in the stripey jacket, along with Patricia Wrightson Prize (children's books) winner Sophie Masson (The Hunt for Ned Kelly) in the white jacket in the middle, and the lovely Cath Crowley peeking out with the curls, 2nd from the right. Cath, of course, won the Ethel Turner with her wonderful novel Graffiti Moon. And a shout-out also to Debra Oswald, writer of terrific teen fiction, who won the Script Award for the pilot of TV show Offspring (two to the right of Libby). (Great interview with Debra here.)

And all of that was before the Festival even began!

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I was MCing the Festival's school days at Parramatta and Penrith. Those days are the best fun, and I love introducing the speakers, and getting out amongst the kids at lunchtime and after the end of the day, talking to them and their teachers about the event. The big name this year was Cassandra Clare—rock star!—but the local writers (and Bernard Beckett, who almost counts as local, being from New Zealand) were terrific and really well-received too. (By the way, listen to this interview with Bernard on ABC Radio National's Book Show; he says some fantastic things about why he unapologetically writes for teen readers.)

Friday I chaired a panel with UK author Anna Perera and Penguin UK publisher Amanda Punter (I'm going to run out of adjectives to describe all the utterly delightful people I saw and worked with during SWF). The panel was called "When is a Children's Book  Not a Children' Book", which was actually about the YA/adult cross-over novel, but given the title, I also brought in the question of Whither the Children's Book in a world when YA and the cross-over gets all the attention. To b honest, I felt like this was kind of an old discussion, the whole YA/adult crossover thing, but then it clearly wasn't for the audience, and it seemed to go really well. People in the audience of the panel certainly seemed to enjoy it, and I got nice feedback from friends and colleagues in attendance. This session was recorded and will, I understand, be broadcast at some point on ABC Radio National's The Book Show.

I also did a one-on-one with Anna Perera on the Sunday morning. If you haven't read Anna's books Guantanamo Boy and The Glass Collector, I really recommend them—they deal with young men in very difficult circumstances with grace, intelligence and compassion. We talked about research, creating characters, finding voice and making hard decisions for your story. I really enjoyed the session, as did Anna—and so, I am told, the audience. And what a lovely woman Anna is. It was lovely to get to know her.

And as lovely as it was to meet Anna, I was beyond thrilled to meet Kristin Cashore, with whom I also did a one-on-one In Conversation. Kristin and I have been corresponding for a few years, since I first wrote to tell her how much I loved her first novel Graceling (and subsequently Fire). And not just me, but the nieces I gave it to. One of those nieces came along to hear the In Conversation, which happened when Kristin told me she was coming to Australia for a holiday and would be in Sydney the week of SWF. (I'm not THAT influential, but I guess my enthusiasm for Kristin and her books was clear to Festival Director Chip Rolley, who agreed to add her to the program on my recommendation.) Anyway, it was so amazing to meet her at last and we had such a lovely chat. And my niece Lucy did indeed come all the way up from Canberra to hear the session, with her dad, my brother David. It's actually the first time any of my family have heard me do a session like this, I think, so that was a treat for me too (although nervous making!). Lucy is in Year 12 and is doing Honours English, which requires her to attend literary events of some description or the other. She got Kristin to sign her program for evidence.

Again, Kristin and I had a terrific chat about her amazing fantasies. A friend in the audience recorded it for me (I couldn't find my iPhone, damn things are so skinny), and I hope she'll be able to get the audio to me. Apparently it's quiet but clearly audible. I'll put it up on one of those sound cloud thingys if so. Anyway, after that, David, Lucy, Kristin and I had lunch, and I managed to get this perfect shot of Kristin and Lucy on the iPhone, which I eventually found in the pocket of my book bag...

But wait! I wasn't done yet! One more session—a panel on children and writing, put together to lead into the launch of the Sydney Story Factory. This one was chaired by Catherine Keenan, Sydney Morning Herald journalist and founder of the Sydney Story Factory, and featured Markus Zusak, Robyn Ewing (Sydney University and me fellow PLA judge) and me. Robyn and I got in a few jabs about the way the curriculum and preparation for tests such as NAPLAN have side-lined creativity and the teaching of narrative writing in schools, even to the point that they are now using extra-curricula programs such as creative writing competitions as NAPLAN preparation. Depressing. But the session was good. The whole Festival was good. Maybe my favourite week of the year.

Something else pretty exciting happened as part of Sydney Writers' Festival this year. Back in April, during Youth Week, I was working on a poetry slam event for the Day Job. In partnership with Miles Merrill and his spoken word company Word Travels, we had initially planned to offer workshops to teens on weekends leading up to The Rumble—Blacktown's first poetry slam event at Blacktown Arts Centre. Unfortunately, we couldn't get kids to come to two consecutive weekend workshops, so we ended up going into Rooty Hill High School to work with their drama students. This is such a great school, with a strong creative arts program, and the kids and their drama teacher, Angelica, were amazing. About 5 of them ended up performing at The Rumble, and then with the encouragement of Miles and the Word Travels team, three of them came into town and performed at the Word Travels industry showcase on the Wednesday night prior to the Festival proper.

But that wasn't the least of it. These amazing young people came back on the Saturday night to the hugely popular spoken word event that Miles organises for the Festival every year—only initially intending to be in the audience—but they ended up performing in front of around 400 people. Apparently they were brilliant. Ack! I wasn't there! I'd had such a week—out every night, on Festival duty every day, and with a full Sunday ahead of me, I just couldn't face the drive back into town. (Remember, I live in the sticks now.) But Sumayyah, Imraan and Gavin, whose photo I can't publish here for obvious reasons—you are awesome. I'm glad you got to meet The Chaser team. I'm so proud of you, and I wish I'd been there.

And lest anyway be in any doubt—this was huge. Huge for these kids to have the opportunity to perform their own poetry at Sydney Writers' Festival. It might be the most exciting thing that's come out of my project to date. And we will be working with these guys and Rooty Hill HS again. So stay posted on that.

Oh! But! Speaking of extraordinary and exciting experiences... Also during SWF—and also something I didn't get to, because I was at Parramatta for the School Day, get this—seriously, this is also huge—writers shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize went out to Penrith High School, a selective high school with some very bright and talented students indeed. These writers at the top of their game ran workshops with students at the school—an unbelievable opportunity for these kids. And again, it was as a direct result of our project (WestWords, remember?) being out there making things happen for young reader and writers in western Sydney.

So that was Sydney Writers' Festival. Told you it was big. And while all of that was going on, my wonderful manager Jenny and my colleague Jodie and I were working on a HUGE funding application for WestWords. And then Jodie and I—while the funding application was still under way—headed down to Melbourne for the biennial Reading Matters conference.

I can't blog the whole thing here—if you were following it on Twitter (#rm11) you'll have got a flavour. This year's program is here, and if you google it, you'll also find quite a lot of blog posts like this one. My panel, on the Saturday, was on violence in YA fiction, and featured Denis Wright (NZ), author of Violence 101, Jane (JC) Burke (Pig Boy) and Kirsty Eagar (Raw Blue, Saltwater Vampires). Again, it was a really interesting discussion, and I believe it was recorded and will be on the Centre for Youth Literature website soon.

Highlights for me of Reading Matters: Ursula Dubosarsky talking about The Golden Day; Oliver Phommavanh on his scooter; Markus Zusak reading from his forth-coming novel; Kate Burridge on the history of taboo language; the panel on book covers and meeting the utterly gorgeous and delightful Brenton McKenna, creator of the indigenous graphic novel Ubby's Underdogs (Magabala Books). (Dinner at Sahara was pretty awesome too. As was my hotel—see the pic of the view following!)

And then back home to two cats who seemed to have barely missed me, and to that funding application. Which is now done, and submitted—phew!

So yes, a crazy few weeks, but crazy good. Festival season, hanging out with the gang, over for another year. And with the current funding submission in, I'm back to programming work. And that's a big yay.

I hope this wasn't too prosaic a post. Here's a photo of me and Anita and Libby from the Premier's to brighten things up!