No group hugs please

Saw M.J. Hyland at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday. She's the author of three novels - This is How, Carry Me Down, and How the Light Gets In. She also lectures in creative writing in Manchester where she lives now. She's not an Aussie though she has Australian connections having, studied English and law at the University of Melbourne.


I'd only read How the Light Gets In which I won't go into now because I am meant to be writing about craft and Australia's indigenous population for the huge double issue of GC we're putting together. Suffice to say it was an amazing debut novel, very original and worth getting your hands on. You'll loan out your daughters to worthy causes before they grow into teenagers after meeting the central character in this book.

Anyhoo, M.J. (we're on first name basis now) was talking about trying to instruct her students on good writing and how hard it is now that they all have blogs and access to amateur publishing websites and the like. Argggh, the ongoing blog bashing that feeds my paranoia. (I am thinking this while rushing through writing this post hee hee.) I took some notes but not direct quotes. Suffice to say she felt they were publishing what I believe she termed as "shoddy shit" and receiving group hugs from family, friends and cyberspace pals in response and they were shocked when her slightly more biting critiques were put forward.

Her message here was that good writing cannot be produced in half an hour and that many of the students spin words like fairy floss, and just as quickly, for the Net but that revision and rewriting is the cornerstone of the real deal.

She tooks three years to write This is How (a copy of which I picked up in Readings special MWF bookshop at Fed Square) so she is clearly not one to be rushed. She also received a nomination for the Man Booker prize in 2006 for only her second novel so - yeah - Mrs Underhill will give her words some thoughts.

I don't normally write notes from a one hour talk like this one but, as a character in a project I am tentatively working on is a writer and a festival regular, I thought MJ's real life reactions would come in handy for dialogue. As I started this project almost a year ago and am only five chapters in I am already doing well on any three year plans I might have and can definitely NOT be accused of rushing.

PS: Hosting the Hyland talk at MWF was Michael Williams, Head of Programming at Melbourne's new Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. He was bloody funny!

Mrs Underhill has just seen THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

And so I must applaud the artistry that is and has been for forty years or so the great GRACE CODDINGTON!

See more about The September Issue at http://www.theseptemberissue.com/#/home

Mrs Underhill Book Club kicks off with a bang and a snowball

I think it's safe to say that the first IN THE FLESH meeting of the book club went off with a bang and a riesling last night. Thank you to the three book babes who came along. Many topics, outside of Middlesex, were tackled, from the inane (housework) to the profane (adult women having sexual fantasies about characters in Twilight). The main thing was that, as well as a pop quiz about the book (thank you Oprah.com for having the author, Eugenides, on the show at one point and posting Q & As with him afterwards) we also discovered the delights of chocolate covered snowballs and a shared love of Yumis Tuna Mousse.

Yes - if you come along to a future meeting you will be able to taste such literary delights yourself.

So ... next book is Disgrace with the aim to finish around 3 October and then the aim to meet up sometime after that though comments from members 'in the ether' are more than welcomed. Chime in with interest via email or via the blog, http://mrsunderhilldotcom.blogspot.com/ - and we'll be chowing down on some good words soon.

Life illuminated. No wonder I love books ...

Let’s say I list five books here for you and you can see why these bricks of paper and words mean so much to me, how they can alter one's life, dance in one's head and why I can’t see them going the way of the dinosaurs just yet:

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Meet Me at Mike's by Pip Lincolne
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Number one carries a plot outline (stolen from Wiki) where a South African professor of English loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his cherished daughter.

This book is going to be the next one to be read by the Mrs Underhill Book Club. Try and finish it by 3 October. The ‘communal' reading of this book forges connections between old and new friends, stimulates conversation beyond work, kids, clothes and current affairs and allows us to see how other people’s heads tick.

Number two is a really gorgeous craft project book featuring the work of 25 different Aussie makers, spearheaded by Melbourne gal Pip Licolne.

This book took me to Brunswick Street Fitzroy yesterday to meet the author and have her bewitch me with her magical eyes. It gave me a chance to see how an open heart and soul affects those around them and showed me a new concept when it comes to the idea of business success.

Number three is written by one of those characters of history that you wonder whether the world is capable of producing anymore. Living in the 1700s, Walpole (son of Britain's first Prime Minister) built Strawberry Hills, a gothic mansion, folly type thing that he seemed to have built stage by stage, sometimes creating façades out of cardboard and so forth from what I can gather.

This is part of a three gothic tales book I ordered on good old Amazon recently. It’s giving me the chance to read a learned and academic intro from an expert in the field of gothic literature plus be reminded of the mad, bad and completely outrageous minds that have gone before us.

Closing the last page on number four - The Little Giant of Aberdeen County – ends an intense reading period I’ve gone through in the last fortnight to finally finish a couple of books I was reading at once. This book is about a girl with a health condition that makes her grow to giant proportions. It’s about acceptance, herbal remedies, euthanasia, it’s about quite a bit. I kept picking it up and putting it down. As Keith Gessen from The Nation said about a Mrs Underhill Book Club book (Middlesex) recently, this one “is a book that's almost impossible to dislike even as you're bored by it”.

And, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, well that was described to me by the gal at Readings in St Kilda as a book that “scared the pants off her” – a great selling point to my way of thinking. However, it’s one that I again picked up and put down. It’s a bit about England after WWII, it’s a bit about class wars, and about old country houses and about poltergeists. What made it special to me though was that Sarah Waters was on the Book Show (Radio National) so I got to walk to the shops (listened to it on an MP3 podcast) and hear her talk about the research that went into it, the mountains of info she gathered about the period and the things that drew her to the topic. Pretty bloody entertaining while you’re walking around the IGA trying to decide which mayonnaise you’ll purchase!

So there you see it – why wouldn’t you make books a big part of your life? If you dive in and use them as more than words on paper, but as living organisms with tentacles reaching out into the world, you begin to live a much bigger life and tip toe through the heads of so many other earthlings … and you don’t necessarily have to even leave the soft drink aisle or even your bedroom.

Oh, did I mention I am reading an instalment of Stephen King's On Writing each night before I start my 'real' book? No wonder I get both no sleeping and no writing of my own done!

Swapping thread for words?

So I have swapped the laptop for the sewing machine that I recently inherited. This weekend’s projects – an apron, napkins and a cushion cover. Don’t worry. It’s just a phase!

Mrs Underhilll Book Club meeting # 4

Some of us recently finished reading MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides. I'm not going to instigate any discussion points right now although I really do need someone to explain to me why the brother's name was "chapter eleven". And I did enjoy looking up info about Tiresias who was the son of Everes and the nymph Chariclo; he was a blind prophet, the most famous soothsayer of ancient Greece. And I still have on my TO DO list the research topics of Edward Gibbon and the journals of Madame de Stael to keep me occupied. Suffice to say there are two things to be tackled right now:

1) Do any of the readers want to meet in the flesh for a wine and cheese discussion of MIDDLESEX? (Welcome to have it at my place.) Or shall we do it online?

2) Do we have a suggestion for the next book and some inspiring discussion notes to go along with it?

Email me here (or don't, some of you I am just keeping in the loop in case you are keen now and then to participate) or log on and comment on the blog: mrsunderhilldotcom.blogspot.com.

Remember to feel free to pass this on.

This is Thriller!

So a couple of people have asked me if the previous post, WRITING AT NIGHT, was based on true events. While I have imagined eyes outside the sunroom - no - this has never actually happened to me and I pray to God it never does. I don't think my heart would re-start. I'll take it as a compliment though that it was rooted enough in reality. In fact it was a little exercise set by a friend after attending the Cleary Horror Seminar. I left it to the last moment, of course, so it was rushed and hammy but, hey, it was fun.

Speaking of Cleary, I had a constructive four hours of cleaning my office on Friday (internet connection was down and this job had been on the TO DO list for about three months so the universe gave me no choice) and I discovered notes from that seminar including books and films to follow up.

If you're in the market for an old fashioned fright then look into The Penny Dreadfuls. Apparently, when tracing the history of suspense novels and stories, much is owed to these nineteenth century British publications which, according to good old Wikipedia, usually contained "lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing a penny".

As it goes the stories were mostly reprints or rewrites of Gothic thrillers such as The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, as well as new stories about famous criminals. Some of the most famous of these penny part stories were The String of Pearls: A Romance (which introduced Sweeney Todd), The Mysteries of London (inspired by the French serial, The Mysteries of Paris) and Varney the Vampire. I SO have to get my hands on that one. The library doesn't have it but good old Amazon does so come on down Mr Postman.

Also recommended by Mr Cleary was Polidori's The Vampyre. I can't get that at the library so I am purchasing a collection instead which sounds dead fascinating: Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre.

(On the vampire sideline for a second, I am slowly and steadily getting access (don't ask) to Season 2 of True Blood and, now that we have a new flash telly, the blood sucking, nipple biting, swamp stalking action is only going to be all the more gruesome and delicious. Already buff chests will fill the 40 inch screen and I'll have to have a flat lemonade and a cool bath afterwards.)

Then Cleary recommended looking at the story of Ed Gein (27 August 27 1906 – 26 July 1984) whose murderous ways inspired characters such as Norman Bates in 'Psycho', Jame Gumb from 'The Silence of the Lambs', and Leatherface from 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. Hmmm, I think I'll leave Mr Gein's story alone for now although it is interesting to see how screenwriters lift the stories from the daily news and transform them into screen nightmares.

The final Cleary recommendation, for those on a scary slope, was the script for the film, Don't Look Now. That movie was REALLY creepy. Don't think I could watch it again but apparently the author, Alan Scott, is a master so, while I haven't tracked down the document yet, I'll give it a red hot go (tips welcome!).