Pen Hanley

  • When I was chosen to be a blogger in residence at the ACT Writers Centre I planned to supplement those once a month blogs with more frequent postings on this personal blog. But I’m going to have surgery soon (nothing serious) and I’ve been psyching myself up for that and doing all the things I wanted to do before being incapacitated for six weeks, and the weekly blogs I’d planned – even though I had a million ideas for them – just didn’t get written!

    My interior life is rich and tumultuous, and I felt happy. For a writer it’s a matter of always learning – through both absorbing other people’s art and/or practising one’s own, and I’ve just been in a phase of drenching my brain with other people’s work while not doing much of my own, merely living in the present and appreciating the joy of others’ creative efforts and of nature – wet and wild as it’s been in this Canberra winter. My submitted novel MS went up a rung of the ladder towards acceptance to a place I was told very few MSS get to, so here’s hoping. (more…)

  • https://actwritersblog.com/2016/08/01/food-blogging-more-than-a-love-of-food/

     

     

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    Australia to Z


    ‘Refugees live in a divided world, between countries in which they cannot live and countries which they may not enter.’ Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born Holocaust survivor, writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, said this. He believes that it is the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.

    After World War II the international community set up a system for helping refugees, those who could not return to their countries ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion’ (United Nations). (more…)

  • My first blog as a Blogger in Residence at the ACT Writers Centre is up on the CAPITAL LETTERS site. It is on screenwriting. Future posts will be on writing and refugees, prisoners’ writing, the health of writers (all that sitting, for one detrimental thing!), food blogging, writers dreaming … all topics I’m interested in and things I really want to do more research on. They won’t be once a week, more like once a month, because there are three other Bloggers in Residence, but you can get access to their posts through the same URL below. And between ACT Writers Centre posts I’ll write my personal ones here more often.

    You can find it here: https://actwritersblog.com/2016/05/24/diving-into-the-river-screenwriting-in-the-digital-age/  

  • IsabellaBlow‘You must write every single day of your life. You must read every single day of your life. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy head. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories … may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.’

    That’s from Ray Bradbury (www.Aerogrammestudio.com – accessed on May Day, 2016) and it reminded me of that walking work of art, Isabella Blow, (pictured) English stylist, wearer of outrageously wonderful hats, and famous nurturer of young people’s potential. I also thought of Australian hat maker, Rosie Boylan, more of whom below. (more…)

  • Writers' daily rituals
    Writers’ daily rituals

    Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), prolific author of crime novels plus the novel Carol, recently made into a film directed by Todd Haynes, was a prolific drinker and smoker as well. She smoked a packet of Gaulloises a day. Famously not very good with people, Highsmith had an intense connection with animals.

    She loved cats. Snails made her feel tranquil.

    ‘She eventually housed three hundred snails in her garden in Suffolk, England, and once arrived at a London cocktail party carrying an enormous handbag that contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails – companions for the evening, she said (p. 12).’

    Such details of writers’ habits can be found in Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (Knopf, 2013), the book published from the author’s blog, Daily Routines.

    (more…)

  • chapbook2Style is ‘the mirror of an artist’s sensibility’. That was what Truman Capote thought. I think style is what comes naturally because it’s an expression of who you are, a projection of your personality. Edith Wharton wrote about the ‘unassailable serenity’ of being at home in ourselves, just as the French talk about being ‘happy in one’s skin’ and when we express this self acceptance with clarity, that is our style.

    I heard a young Police Officer say on TV: ‘Oh yes, we got a massive haul of … I mean, a significant amount of cocaine …’ He started off in his own voice, with his own style. This came across instantly with all his enthusiasm of being proud of a job well done, along with his instinctive expression of an exciting narrative. But then he corrected himself to talk in the way they must be trained to talk to the media, which was dry and boring.
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  • Boy,LostCroppedJPGBoy, Lost (University of Queensland Press, 2013) is a fascinating and compelling memoir by Kristina Olsson and her luminous prose elevates it to an even higher level. This book feels transcendent with a mother’s love. The author gains profound insight on her journey to trace the steps of her mother and of her lost brother, and she shares these with her readers in a gripping narrative.

    As Yvonne, the author’s mother, boarded a train on Cairns railway station in 1950, attempting to escape from a brutal marriage, her abusive husband appeared and snatched her baby son Peter from her arms.

    Later the authorities persuaded Yvonne that the boy was better off with his father and that in any case, as a deserting wife, she had no rights, nor any means of financial support. Yvonne was pregnant with a second child when she escaped. Some months later, Peter’s sister (the author’s older half-sister) is born ‘to a mother already grieving the things she cannot give her: a father, a brother, a home.’ (p. 68)

    (more…)

  • shakespearetoastShakespeare introduced 1,700 words and many phrases we still use today. He coined assassination, for instance, from the 8th century Arabic assassin.

    Even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected, are Shakespeare’s too, as are useful, moonbeams, subcontinent. [Without him we wouldn’t have the phrases] laughing yourself into stitches, setting your teeth on edge, not sleeping a wink, being cruel to be kind, and playing fast and loose.

    In my English Honours degree we studied all the plays and many sonnets but that was a long time ago and it’s great to read a neat summary of some of Shakespeare’s achievements. Ben Crystal reminds us of the above list of words and phrases in his Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a taste for the bard (Icon, 2016). It’s an engaging, funny, accessible little book for a reminder of or an introduction to Shakespeare’s genius with language.

    When I was little we had the book Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. It was a favourite and in King Lear I remember the picture of Cordelia, appearing to be asleep, wearing what I thought was a beautiful pale green nightie, her blonde plait hanging down her back. The caption said: ‘And Cordelia ended her life in prison.’

    At five or six I couldn’t make any sense of the plot from Romeo and Juliet and I asked my older sister, why couldn’t they just agree not to see each other if it was going to cause so much trouble? No matter how she tried to explain romantic love she couldn’t make me understand such irrational behaviour.

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  • Tim ParksI’ve been fond of English writer Tim Parks since he cheerfully admitted to ABC Radio interviewer Margaret Throsby that he had had ‘enough rejection slips for his novels to paper Buckingham Palace with!’

    Parks wrote seven novels over six years before one was accepted for publication. Rejected by twenty publishers, Parks tells us in Where I’m Reading From: The changing world of books (Harvill & Secker, 2014, p. 130) that his seventh novel eventually earned him a £1,000 advance. This anecdote is appealing because it gives hope to writers who are struggling to gain a publisher’s contract.

    Yes, there are now alternative ways of getting one’s writing into print. We can be liberated from the gatekeepers in the publishing industry. But some writers still want to be published in the traditional way, not least because of the time it takes to self-publish and to generate enough publicity to prevent one’s work being another drop in the ocean of self-published works, and to get on top of the technology to do all this.

    Tim Parks has written seventeen novels and ten non-fiction books plus much translation, and prolific amounts of literary journalism, including Where I’m Reading From.

    This book contains over thirty thought-provoking essays. In one, ‘Does Money Make Us Write Better?’ Tim Parks tells us that with an advance like that, clearly he wasn’t writing for the money. He was about to give up after that seventh novel so it wasn’t that he was in it for the pleasure of writing.

    (more…)

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