Pen Hanley

  • ‘The whole quality of cycling is akin to swimming: the economy of effort, the defiance of gravity, the dancing rhythm, and the general need to keep moving, lest you sink or topple. As modes of propulsion, both could safely be classified as environmentally friendly. I enjoy the gliding, swooping motion of the bike as I enjoy the grace of swimming.’  Roger Deakin. Waterlog, p. 257.

    ‘Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.’  Richard Steele.

    ‘Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence. In it, we can say anything.  John Banville. ‘Authors on Writing’ www.guardian.co.uk/books 3 March 2009.

    ‘Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.’  John Updike.

    ‘I quote others only the better to express myself.’  Montaigne.

    ‘Language is the greatest resource of a culture. It is the repository of thought and the expression of dreams. No activity above the level of brute survival can be accomplished without language. When language is raised to the level of literature, one approaches heaven. Creating a program to develop writers is not a mere idyll for an English department. It is an act of cultural integrity.’  Rita Mae Brown. Starting from Scratch, p. 209.

    ‘Art only comes when there is abandon, and a world of dreaming and waiting and passionate meditation.’  Yeats.

    ‘Everything we think and say has a history.’  Andrew Sayers, opening the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas April 2011.

    ‘Without literature, human life is animal life.’  Randall Jarrell.

    ‘Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. … In reading good literature, I become a thousand men, and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and I am never more myself when I do.’  C.S. Lewis.

    ‘Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.’  V. S. Pritchett.

  • For me, books and writing come first, followed closely by the cinema. I’ve always been in love with words. I combined both of these passions by being a film critic for a few years, writing for various local arts magazines and reviewing films on 2XX and local ABC radio stations. I even went to the Cannes Film Festival once. It was while I was travelling in the area and before I started writing but I pretended to be a journalist and managed to get a Press Card, which got me into any film I wanted to see. It was bliss!

    This brings me to travel. I’ve travelled a lot in Europe, mainly in the Mediterranean areas, the former Yugoslavia etc, bits of the Middle East and a little in Asia and more recently in the US. I love boats and the water and I’ve done a bit of sailing, in the Mediterranean and Adriatic and up the Straits of Malacca. I sailed down the Nile in a felucca back in 1985. It’s the best way to travel, followed by the train. I’m also a fan of cycling and walking – two ways to get to know a place in a different way than speeding through it in a car.

    Wherever I go I’m always drawn to art. I’m passionate about colour and texture. I’m good at interior design and have transformed many an unprepossessing place into a harmonious, vibrant and cheerful-looking space. I practised art myself (painting, photography, off-loom weaving) before writing took over when I came to Canberra over 20 years ago. Recently I combined art and writing in my PhD (University of Canberra 2009) where I wrote a novel, Forty Shades of Green, about three generations of women artists and did a great deal of research in art history plus took some art classes for empirical experience. The novel is about history and creativity, migration and family secrets, and the conflict in women’s lives between love and freedom. I’m currently trying to get this novel published. Three excerpts of it appeared in Hecate (Vol. 35, nos 2/2, 2009).

    I also love music and yoga and the Argentine tango. The musician and teacher, Joaquín Amenábar, visited Canberra recently, and he states in his book, Tango: Let’s dance to the music! (2009), ‘…just as a musician in an orchestra uses his instrument to play a tango, we dancers can play the tango with the instrument that is our body.’

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