The first of five...

"ANTARCTICA" - Claire Keegan (Ire / UK 1999)

        This is the first of Claire Keegan's published works, a collection of unrelated short stories, and looking like they were written between when she was in her late 20's and early 30's, to some acclaim, and reprinted several times, this edition being in 2023.

        There's no doubt in my mind that Keegan knows how to put a story together, and of the 15 I only skipped over 2 I found that didn't get me going, the rest good to excellent, set mainly in Ireland (where she was born in 1968), in England, and in USA where she has spent a lot of time, including university.

        A couple of my reactions -  males, whether brothers, fathers, husbands - mostly seem to come away looking a touch like shite, several stories have sex as a key or background element of the storyline (she was in her late 20s - back when sex and aspiration  are the primary driving forces of life?), and one or two alluded strongly to the poor treatment of children.

        The story "Men and Women" was probably my favourite, like all of them, cleverly put together, with an obvious mastery of the English language.

        I'm now looking forward to the following ones, that I'll do in date order just to get a feel of the development of her writing, but I don't know anything about any of them, except "Foster" (her fourth), which I'll read again anyway as it's been a while. And I want to hang onto the sense of context.

        Find a copy if you're into short literature, we can all learn much from talent.

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What am I ?

        I'm 87. Couple of weeks ago. No fanfare, no message from the King. But it makes you think. About getting "old". I've given up climbing on the roof. I struggle with eating nuts. And seafood. Garlic is off the menu. And chilli. Not much else. Forty degree (plus) days. They're absolutely no fun at all any more.

        But, I still love the fun of writing, sitting alone, pen at the ready, with ideas, people, words, dancing around in my head, a compulsion. Some may say addiction. Makes me feel 17 again-->

        But of late I've been asking myself - Now that I'm not defined by my occupation (geez, it's been 23 years!), what am I? For the past 50 years I've seen myself - outside of work - as a Writer, except for back when I was getting smiled upon by the Gods of Words and Blurbs and Serious Marketing and I thought I was an Author. 

       So, I'm older now. I know better. I see the world (and myself, and my addiction) more clearly.

        Truth is, I'm really a teller of stories. A Storyteller. Sometimes even maybe no more than a Recorder. An Explorer who Records, ever since The Ghost got stirred into life and I went chasing after stories stories stories, some cut straight from Real Life, some totally made up, some a bit of both and sometimes hard to tell which is which - Fiction stories, Ancestor stories, Travel stories, Scraps-of-passing-life stories. It's been brilliant.

        And I can't stop myself from looking for more. I have piles of e-files with bits of notes that I'll never get to in the time I have left. I must cull out some more of the better ones and put them in The Scrap Heap (over right). Give them half a chance to fire up some one else's Ghost. Which is what I also love to do, see up-and-comers (and old timers!) get on with this marvellous business of exploring and recording and making stuff up in (hopefully) an entertaining way.

        And if anything, the all pervading objective has been to be entertaining. I rarely get any feedback from my stuff - price you pay if you're a loner who likes being a loner - so I can only live in hope that you've been getting something entertaining - maybe sometimes enlightening - from what I've put on the page these last 50 years. Maybe I should turn on the Comments and see what happens!

        Ummm, that's all, just a few passing thoughts...

              Cheers.....

                     Trev

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Revisiting thoughts on ss writing

          Just in case it can help someone who's struggling, I've had some more thoughts on putting fiction on the page - well, how I go about it anyway - making notes on it while I've been doing my current short story. And I think just about everything below would be how I go about a novel as well. Except that it's 2 years rather than 2 weeks.

        1) I get the idea, mull it around in my head for a day or two.

        2) I open a blank Word file and put a title at the top - anything relevant will do for the start as it may change later - then save the file as that title to my /Writing Shorts WIP folder.

        3) I set the file's font to Courier New, 11 point, with 1.5 line spacing. This is best for roughing out and with multiple print-offs later it saves on printer ink.

        4) I type a heap of ideas, roughly in the sequence of the story, doesn't matter how it sounds, get the feeling down as fast as I can, and leave big spaces between the bits for later scribblings.

        5) Print it off, back it up, make a desk-top short-cut, put that in my Current folder on the side of the screen. (Backing up - I NEVER use the Cloud, but I keep a good-sized USB stick always plugged in, which I swap every few weeks. Better than having it in some basement in Romania. Pedantic I know, but I leave nothing to chance).

        6) I put the draft and a biro in one of those clear plastic A4 folders with the press stud flap, do a name tag in texta on a scrap and slip that in too.

        7) At any time of the day, when the thoughts or lines or paragraphs comes to me, I scribble that down and shove it in the folder, or do it straight onto the draft somewhere.

        8) When it's my solitary writing time, I sit in my recliner with the draft on a stiff back-board and a sandwich and a Johnnie Walker-laced coffee at hand, get in the zone and write write write, whang in notes all over the place, anywhere they'll fit, lots of loops and lines and arrows, scribble scribble scribble.

        9) First chance I get, I type it all up, fill it out and make more notes as I go, then do 5) above. Then 7), 8), and 9), over and over. Bit by bit it gets cleaner and better, with less and less changes.

        10) One day when I think it's finished, I print it off and put it away for a fortnight, then drag it out and do another edit. Or two.

            Okay, that's about it. Give it a try if you reckon you have a short story in you. And everybody does. Well, you and I do, the others just don't yet know the fun of putting it on the page.

            Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Going exploring...

        I don't usually explore a particular writer, prefer to jump randomly into anything half interesting, regardless of whose name is on the cover. There's just so much great stuff out there waiting to be discovered. And a novel is about novelty.

        There have been some exceptions - Russell Hoban, William Golding, Tim Winton, Spike Milligan, Roddy Doyle, but not many more - and it's always been as a result of reading a random book of theirs, loving it, and then chasing down some more from the same person.

        But I'm currently out on a limb, from a mixture of gifts and blurbs, and have started on the five books of Claire Keegan, which I've sorted into date-of-first-publishing order.

        Keegan was born in Co Wicklow Ireland in 1968, went to US aged 17 to study English and politcal science, came back to Wales in 1992 and did her MA in creative writing, all of which should do heaps for anyone's writing career.

        I already had "Foster" (her third, 2010) which I read and loved (reviewed here a while back) after falling over the excellent movie of it (titled "The Quiet Girl") and mentioned this to Smudge, who promptly rounded up "Antarctica" (1999), "Walk The Blue Fields" (2007), "Small Things Like These" (2021) and "So Late In The Day" (2023) as Chrissie presents. A full set. Which is the "gifts" part of it.

        But it was the exuberant blurb on "Foster" that originally sucked me in, how (Irish born) Keegan's first book "...announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction...", was the LA Times Book of the Year, and won her the Rooney Prize For Literature, and her second book "...was published to enormous critical acclaim..." and "...won her the 2008 Edge Hill prize for short stories, awarded for the finest book of stories in the British Isles."

        You just have to sit up a bit and take notice of that! And okay, with blurbs there is always an element of "Yeah? - well, we'll see.")

        So stay tuned, reactions will be along soon, as she tends to keep everything short. Which I have no problems with if it's quality. In fact, prefer it.

        Cheers...

                T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Just finished being gobsmacked by...

"EUROPE ON 5 KIDS A DAY" - Murray Edmonds (Aust 2013)

        Subtitled - "The Travel Diary Of A Hopeless Romantic & Father Of Five On An Epic Jaunt Through Europe In 1968" (there is no double underline for "Epic" but there damn-well should be), put together by his eldest son with the help of a couple of the others.

        In early 1968 Murray Edmonds (yep, he's my late elder brother) bundled up his wife and five kids and boarded an Italian cruise ship in Fremantle WA and set off on a multi-month journey of discovery around Europe on a budget that could only be described as optimistic. And we're not talking grown up kids either, the eldest turned 11 during the trip, and the youngest turned 3.

        Landing in England, they bought a very second-hand Ford Cortina and shoe-horned in two adults, five kids, several suitcases, sundry kit, and two blow up matresses. The Cortina blew a starter motor in Holland in week 6, and had to be push started for the next fortnight, with the help of passing tourists, concierges, and desk clerks. There should be medals for these kinds of enterprises.

        So Mick, wherever you are now, this is one helluva read, which I couldn't put down, but left my slightly obsessive self continually traumatised. Only you would've come up with this one, and then talked everyone around you into it. A life-influencing experience for all of them I'm told.

        The footnote is - the survivors now tell me that his wife and the two eldest girls kept their own notes and diaries. I look forward to having a peek at those. His compiler son dedicates the book (very limited edition)...
             "...to his father for instilling in him at the age of 8 an epic wanderlust that has helped him live a life of discovery and adventure and to learn that you should never, ever take home and family for granted."

        Good one Mike.

               Trev

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Just finished being...

"TOO LONG IN THE BUSH" - Len Beadell (Aust 1965) 

        Another OpShop chuckout (why do people toss away such treasures?!), this is the first hand account by the surveyor Len Beadell and his crew, of the putting in of a 1,350kms east-west "joiner" road, through some of the most godawful country in Aus, between the north-south Adelaide-to-Alice Springs Hwy, and Carnegie Station deep in Western Australia. Mostly done in the summer of 1957/8.

        Even in the 1950s this area was so remote that Beadell and his team ran into bands of First Nation people who had never seen a European, let along a bunch of weary Land Rovers, a grader and a crawler bulldozer.

        Beadell always went ahead of the main party, looking for the best line, navigating by the stars at times as he fought his way through either endless sandhills, spiky spinifex, mulga scrub, or gibber outcrops, carrying everything he needed, dealing with anything up to four punctures a day from the mulga root stakes, vaporising fuel lines (it was mostly about 120 deg F in the shade), and only hot water to drink. And one day even that ran out. Not far from where one of the 1880s explorers died of thirst.

        It's a great tale, of ingenuity, endurance, and plain doggedness. Well worth a read. Shots below are of Beadell on the job, and the bulldozer. Tag is to the WIKI page.

        Cheers...

                T.R.E.

GUNBARREL HWY

Where DO they go?!

        The days. The days the weeks the years, zooming by like F1 revheads.

        I can't quite believe it's been over 3 weeks since I got to this on my list. Definiltely compounded by the age of my old PC. I change it over every five years on principle, nice shiny new Hewlett Packard desktop with all the latest clobber to drive you crazy. Thought its time must be coming up, checked the box of tricks, found it's actually over six and a half years old. Geez where does the time go?

        So, last ten days have been a non-stop wrestling match with HP and Microsoft and Adobe and Canon and more. NEVER seem to have the right driver for anything. AND MS doesn't support the previous version of Office anymore, so new one needed. AND HP doesn't have a disc tray OR an SD card reader built in anymore, so new peripherals needed too. Which have to be installed. AND the built in Windows 11 magically doesn't play the audio of MP3 home-made videos. It took me three days to finally ask Google the right question, thankfully just before I was about to fork out $80 for a software update, as what I really needed was a freebie download from the MS Store. Took 30 seconds. Job done.

        But at least now I have an enlarged vocabulary of swear words.

< >

        So, back to the fun stuff.

        Between the bouts of chaos I've been getting through my collection of Pascoe's short story publications - I had 5 of them in my last Xmas box, thought I'd better clean them up before the next lot arrives - and somewhere along the way it occurred to me that of the 20-odd stories in each, on average I find 4 great, 4 unreadable, and the rest okay enough to pick through. Then realised it's the great 4 and the unreadable 4 that are most important to analyse, to ask - why them? What makes - for me - a great story, and an unreadable story. What's the lessons? And again, this is just ME.

        First, superficially, size matters. It's a rare story over 3,000 words that can suck me in. A short story should be short, longer ones tend to wander about too much. Then there's - an old hobbyhorse of mine - paragraph length. I like short paras. No less than 3 on a page, preferably about 5. It gives the sense of action. Things happening.

        The only other things are the subject matter - there's a bunch of stuff I struggle with - politics, gratuitous sex, excess violence, drugs. Most other things can be woven into a decent yarn. Lastly the writing style. I won't say writing "quality" as that's way too subjective. And it's far too varied to pin it down any better. You know it when you see it, but one thing it has - I said it a couple of weeks back - is surprise. I love some unpredictability, in words and themes.

        Okay, that's it. My old PC is in the wings waiting to be wiped clean and passed on to a mate, as it's been a great workhorse and has a lot of mileage in it still.

        Cheers.....

                T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Classic or what?!

"THE HOUSE IN GONDWANALAND" - T. R. Edmonds (Aus 2018)

        What can I say - this novel is an Aus Lit classic or I don't know my aorta from my elbow. And the author should be publicly pissed on for not having the balls to get up off his skinny backside and attack the world of commercial publishing so that it could've claimed its birthright.

        Why? - because not only is it a history of a now long-gone Time in Aus, of how we went about re-building our little part of the fractured world that existed for a universal nano-second between Glenn Miller and Bill Haley, but it rocks along, full of strength and passion, in that other battle we all had to fight after the war, to reconstruct our lives and loves and families. Sometime with mixed results, because we were all pretty average human beings.

        When I pulled this one out - my last re-read of the four - I thought I would find it to be the lesser of them, but about half way in - it's been 17 years since I read it - I was wishing someone else had written it, so I could cherish a copy for the right reasons. Because in fact it's the best, strong characters with just the right amount of complexity (all real people), and it moves constantly between action, personality, landscape, the changing historical time, and the resourcefulness of this cluster of dogged battlers who had the task of turning old wheat paddocks into some resemblance of suburban heaven, without the help of electricity, sewerage, Bunnings Hardware, or the bloody internet!

        I lived every word of this novel, and about 95% of me is in these pages - body, mind, soul, memories, philosophies, talents - and to be perfectly honest, I can't quite believe I wrote it. It's actually better than me. I know I'll never find this much of The Ghost in me ever again.

        Cheers...

                T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The uncertain craft of Freewheelin...

        The realisation of what this is came to me while I was into my current read - more on that soon - as I was impressed by the writer's attempt at UNPREDICTABILITY.

        Do you ever listen to a never-heard-before pop song and know exactly what the next line is going to be? - you can hear it coming, the rhyme and all. It's just about disappointing. Because it's so predictable. Freewheelin is about catching the consumer by surprise.

        The craft - in creative writing I'm talking here - of Freewheelin - and it's not expressed as "free wheeling" because that's way too formal - is when you get in The Zone, when you block out the entire outside world, and really feel what you are feeling, without dwelling on it, there's just you and the page/screen and you're so into it that you're thinking faster than you can type or scrawl.

        Okay, you leave a trail of misspells but it's truly belting out of you totally unfettered, and you don't pause to find some "exactly right" word, but you use any word that feels like what you're feeling at that second,  and sometimes it turns out to be exactly what you want, but even when its completely stupid in that context, it leads you to the right one when you edit, because it embodies the feeling.

        Dylan Thomas was the master at Freewheelin. He threw words down onto the page, revisited it later, or maybe not. Sometimes when I read his stuff I think maybe I'm looking at his Freewheelin draft...

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
    The night above the dingle starry,
         Time let me hail and climb
    Golden in the heydays of his eyes...

....and I think, geez if only I could do that. So I always try. Try to create some unpredictability. Is that an oxymoron? Try to let loose some unpredictability? I'm struggling here! Maybe it'll be clearer, or I'll express it better, after I think on it some more. Here inside this old head I know what I mean, but I probably need to talk it out. Wish I could.

        More ramblings soon....

            Cheers....

                    Trev

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Just finished loving...

"FOSTER" - Claire Keegan (2010 UK)

        At about 16k words, this small gem is somewhere between a long short story and a novella. Not that I care as it's a great read.

        One thing though - the movie is even better than the book, so if you see it going by on SBS World Movies, dive in and record it as it's totally faithful to Keegan's words, but just has that something in the way of emotion and the subtlety of the relationships - and the setting of 1980s (?) rural Ireland - that words on the page can't quite get hold of as well, of a young girl's blossoming time caught between two sets of adults.

        Claire Keegan (born into a farming family in Co Wicklow in 1968) has justifiably won a heap of awards for her short story / novella writings, and at least two of them have been made into movies.

        So, you could do worse than track down anything she has written, book or film, as always, there's lessons for all of us to learn from the experience.

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>