Pen Hanley

  • Only Marcus knows: Sex in fiction

    —

    by

    Pen
    in

    ‘The sex in your novel I can understand,’ said a friend as we stood in adjoining lanes in the shallow end of Civic Pool. ‘The sex in A.S. Byatt’s novel you’d need a PhD in English Literature to understand.’ ‘I’ve got one of those,’ I said, pulling my goggles into place. ‘Can I borrow it?’ ‘I’ll bring it tomorrow,’ he said, before swimming away. And that is how I came to have A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, all 618 pages of it, about to topple off the tower of books on my bedside table. But I too gave up on it,…

    … read more

  • Slowing down – A beautiful book on sustainable living: Mark Boyle’s The Way Home

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , , , , , , ,

    The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology. Mark Boyle. (Oneworld Publications, 2019) It’s a surprise to learn that Mark Boyle has a degree in Economics and Marketing. He lives in rural County Galway in a dwelling he built himself. He chooses to live without electricity or running water. He has no car and of course no phone – landline or mobile – but the thing that really brought home to me his hard-line stance is this: he won’t use matches either. Once you’d spent the hours and labour (not to mention generating blisters) on making a fire with…

    … read more

  • Thinking women, hope and regeneration

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , , , , , ,

     Am I advocating escapism? It’s been hard to find anything uplifting to say in the last few weeks. The last time I read John Milton (1608-1674) was in English (Hons) many years ago. But I just came across a quotation from Paradise Lost that seems like a sanity-saver in the world we’re enduring now. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’ I can imagine a certain homeless lad I see often, camping endlessly outside Dickson Woolworths, waiting for a Government flat to come up – or any of…

    … read more

  • After She Left – Penelope’s adventure with the idea of patience

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , ,

    At a quarter of a century between novels, and not for want of trying, I now have the authority to write about the value of patience and persistence. I wrote the first draft of my new novel After She Left over ten years ago. It was the creative component of a PhD. The theory component involved getting my head around a lot of French Postmodern theory and that took up most of the time, along with writing a commissioned non-fiction book on the side, which my employer said was six months’ worth, but which took about two and a half…

    … read more

  • Anne Pender’s Seven Big Australians

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , ,

    Transforming comic genres In Seven Big Australians: Adventures with comic actors (Monash University Press, 2019) Anne Pender paints an unforgettable portrait of the lives of Australian comic actors: Carol Raye, Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon and Denise Scott. She brings to life careers that span from the Second World War to the present. These portraits are also a portrait of the times, giving insights into Australian society just after the Second World War and of the tremendous social change in Australia from then until now. Because the author interviewed her subjects over a five-year period,…

    … read more

  • Recipes for happiness

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , , , , ,

    That warm glow of excitement and satisfaction It’s been a while since my last blog post and I make no apology. I don’t write them for click-bait – they’re for contemplation and the odd laugh. I’ve been working – writing non-fiction – and, of course, reading. One thing I read expresses precisely my situation about books to be read. New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman admitted in that journal (4 December 2018) that she was ‘criminally behind on the books I want to read, and my job consists of reading books, so I can only imagine what most readers feel.…

    … read more

  • Powerful and uplifting – Magic Happens: The Story of Painting with Parkinsons by Nancy Tingey

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , , ,

    Artist and curator Nancy Tingey was the first person I interviewed for my history of the Churchill Trust, Inspiring Australians (2015) and it was a wonderful story to begin my research with. Nancy founded the group, Painting with Parkinsons in Canberra in 1994. Her husband Bob had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years before when he was 46. Nancy Tingey began the group she called Painting with Parkinsons ‘just [as] an idea for a fun thing to do’. Her beautifully produced book, Magic Happens, outlines the journey of Painting with Parkinsons, with insights of some class members, teachers and…

    … read more

  • Summer books and summer heat

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , , ,

    After finishing the rewrites of my novel just before Christmas it’s been an orgy of reading. Among recent books that have impressed me are Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean; Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson; and D.B.C. Pierre’s Release the Bats. There’s also beautiful, strong writing in another of Elizabeth Harrower’s trenchant, insightful and bleak novels about relationships, In Certain Circles. But I’ll focus on the three non-fiction books here. Democracy in Chains Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America (Viking, 2018) tells the story…

    … read more

  • ‘Life is not for doing the doable.’ – Tim Ferguson

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , , , ,

    There are remarkably few books or courses on how to write humour. Most people think that it can’t be taught. Tim Ferguson disagrees. He holds regular classes on how to write narrative comedy, in Australia and other countries, and has written a book on it, The Cheeky Monkey: Writing narrative comedy (Currency Press, 2010). I did one of his weekend courses recently in Canberra and it was fantastic. Tim Ferguson is generous, smart and a fabulous teacher. He’s a humane and witty guy who shared the secrets of comedy and the milieu of comic writers and performers in Australia with…

    … read more

  • Envying Georges Simenon

    —

    by

    Pen
    in , ,

    It’s been aeons since I wrote in this. I’ve been writing heaps, but not here. There have been paid writing and editing jobs plus rewriting a novel, ‘After She Left’, which will be published in May. And all this time I haven’t been able to get Simenon out of my mind. I haven’t even read many of his novels, and none of the famous Maigret series, but I feel sick with envy at his productivity. (What is the noun of prolific? Prolificness? Prolificity? – Suffice to say that Simenon put new meaning into the adjective, prolific.) The reason behind his…

    … read more

Join 900+ subscribers

Stay in the loop with everything you need to know.

Sign up