Pen Hanley

  • Annie March’s wise words

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    My favourite newspaper is The Guardian Weekly. I tried googling Annie March, a woman after my own heart who writes the most wonderful letters sometimes, published in their Reply section. Google suggested Linked In but the illogical, Catch-22 nature of Linked In made it impossible to get her email address. (If I want to contact Annie March, ‘type in her email address here’: duh!) I love everything she writes. But she’s a Cassandra – no one will listen. So I wanted to spread a sample of her succinct and humane words of warning a little wider. They relate to Ivan…

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  • Adelaide and a new Barbara Vine

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    After a few days of Conference early mornings and late nights, organising interviews for rural health experts and liaising with them and journalists, I realised yet again how much I love the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission to you lovely people from Canada, the UK and the US who discourse with me about my blogs). Their journalists and producers invariably take the time to learn the facts and get to know the important things before interviewing the person. I was in Adelaide doing this for my work Conference, as mentioned in last blog. But a couple of years ago I did…

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  • Bush Nurses

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    This is an instance of my literary and professional worlds meeting, which is wonderful! Penguin books published a chapter of mine in their recent book, Bush Nurses. So I’m pasting a word from the Editor: attached is a link to Bush Nurses on the Penguin site http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781921901393/bush-nurses

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  • Professional and literary worlds

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    Thank you for your interest in my blog, and yours are really interesting – work has been too busy to respond properly but after the Conference is over, I will. Huge Conference is on now – more than 1,000 delegates. So, I am in beautiful Adelaide in the Media Room of the biggest venue (Adelaide Convention Centre) I and probably you have ever seen. So no proper bog this week, just an apology of sorts because semi-frantic with interviews and writing about rural health so no time to do my own writing, not even a blog! Head crammed with things…

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  • On sitting, standing, walking, and Tim Parks

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    We sit too much, those of us who write for a living. Or use the computer for a living. Hmmm, that’s a lot of us. Some health writers are even suggesting that we stand at our desks. But long ago I read that the best thing we can do for our legs is walk with them and the worst thing we can do is to stand on them. I write for an NGO four days a week – to leave one day a week for my own writing, which would normally be fiction. But now with a non-fiction commission I…

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  • Words Simenon would never use

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    Siri Hustvedt, in the last paragraph of her Author Note in Living, Thinking, Looking begins the paragraph with “Every book is for someone”. True. And of course every blog is for someone. There are many contemporary words I dislike. But blog is one I like. A combination of Biography and Log. And it, like a ship’s log, should be regularly updated. Someone somewhere will read this log and know what conditions were like for the person writing it at that particular time. As alluded to a fortnight ago, busy-ness is the salient condition for me (and for so many) here…

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  • “Busy-ness”: an update on writing and living

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    I haven’t updated this for a long time because of much busy-ness: Chaucer wrote, “Great peace is to be found in little busy-ness”. He was correct. But who is not too busy these days? So sometimes I take a Sunday off and do nothing. (Sundays will be my time for blogging from now on.) Of course my doing nothing is busy compared with some people’s idea of doing nothing. When I say I do nothing, I mean I take the time to sit in the garden, do yoga, read a non-work book, meet friends and perhaps tidy my wardrobe. What…

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  • Some favourite books I’ve read recently

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    Non-fiction By Hook or By Crook David Crystal.  Harper-Collins, 2007 Anything by David Crystal is wonderful – he writes erudite and funny books about the English language. This one has entertaining snippets such as the following. A best words competition in The Sunday Times in 1980 came up with: melody and velvet (tied in first place). Then gossamer and crystal (tied), then autumn, peace, tranquil, twilight, murmur, caress, mellifluous, whisper. I always liked the name Snitterfield. David Crystal tells us that Shakespeare’s grandfather had a farm here, in the mid 16th century. Crystal describes alternative versions of Shakespeare performed by…

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  • Quotations about language, literature and life

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    ‘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.…

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  • Who am I?

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    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!…

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