Category: Books

Fairy tales and Privilege

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m still dreaming about fairytales.

Today’s dream is strongly influenced by a book that’s been on my coffee table for a while. It’s on my coffee table to remind me about certain constructs it discusses. Until I finish thinking through these constructs, it will stay there. It’s been on my coffee table for two months now, because that’s how much is in it that helps me think things through. What is this mysterious book? It’s White Christian Privilege and it’s by Khyati Y. Joshi. https://bookshop.org/a/1838/9781479840236

It reminds me (and is a very good introduction to the understanding of) what it means to be from a majority culture background (or not) in the US. I’m not from that background, so it also helps me see how and why I am who I am and have certain in experiences in relation to those who are from that background.

None of this is why I’m thinking about the book today. First off, I’m thinking about the normative nature of American White Christian Privilege in the publishing world, along with that linked (and older) standard White British Privilege. And today, just ‘cos, I’m not thinking about how the White Australia policy’s legacy in Australia mean I’ll never be quite White, or Christian, or American. All these things have had some large ramifications for my life so far, and no doubt will continue to do so but… today I’m thinking about its influence on how we see fairy tales, or, more precisely, fairy tale retellings.

Fairy tales have always been explained using European views. This goes back to the beginning of fairy tale analysis. Folk motifs and tale types revolve around European culture. This cultural heartland for fairy tales has been mostly carried over into US scholarship. Fairy tales are defined by Europe and retold in cultures where we need to factor in White American privilege.

This means that some tellers are valued more than others – it helps a writing career to have privilege. American writers are more heard than Indonesian writers or writers from Eswatini. There is a hierarchy of countries in publishing, where one is in relation to those privileges makes most of us invisible and unless one is visible. A few extraordinary writers are visible regardless. Rabindranath Tagore and Stanisław Lem and Tove Jansson are good examples of this. Despite the Tove Janssons of this world, there are core cultures that are more visible, secondary cultures (like Australian) that are rather difficult but not at all impossible, and then there are writers from most of the countries of the world who, even in English translation, are not visible. How many of us have read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s work, for instance. Not me… yet – I need to get hold of it and read it. Every year I spend some time identifying amazing writers I haven’t yet read because they’re not buffered by much of that privilege. I keep discovering many great works and brilliant writers and my life is forever enriched but… none of this is what I’m thinking about today.

Today I’m thinking about how we define certain types of story as fairy tale and we (scholars in the field) generally don’t automatically think “Why is this story classified with these other stories?” It’s culturally problematic to define all story types from around the world in a certain way. It’s great for many reasons (seeing who uses what kind of tale, finding out how stories spread) but it operates in the same way as that White Christian Privilege.

Joshi spends a lot of time explaining that this privilege is not a layer of opportunity and gloss on top of everyday life: it’s the fabric of everyday life. Equally, getting rid of the cultural context for, say, a story taken from the Talmud, or something from the Dreamtime, and reducing it to common denominators, is putting the cultural interpretation of mostly-White, mostly-Western scholars and fiction writers above most of those who tell and use the stories.

They may be fairy tales, and seen as fairy tales, but what if they aren’t? What if they’re part of an immense and complex songlines that cross a whole continent and that predate our knowledge of the fairy tale by thousands of years (at least) and tens of thousands of years?

My questions include the critical one: what do we do to stories when we strip away all of this meaning from them? My answer is that we lose how they’re told, why they’re told, who has cultural responsibility to tell and interpret them and we lose the capacity to see why and how this responsibility is important for the story itself. So many Jews are taught how to read Talmud. We can take stories apparently out of context, and give them relevant contexts in the retelling – this is a part of the upbringing of many of us but… in a world of White Chrsitian Privilege, it’s more likely that someone (even someone Jewish, who lacks this specific training) will see those stories as fair game for retelling from a White Christian perspective. The story derived from this approach will sell better than something with the original contexts still attached, but its culture of origin will be compromised.

There are many ways of handling this.

One is to maintain the commonalities (especially theose that allow the story to be included in those scholarly indices that bring the world of folk tale and folk motif together) but to make sure, as scholars, that the cultural base of all tales are understood. Stories from pre-colonial Australia would, then, always have notes saying where the story was collected, which songline/s it belongs to, and whether the story has been reinterpreted to meet international tale and motif expectations.

Another approach is to read more books by people who come from different backgrounds, and to look for books that address cultural issues as part of the storytelling. My current coffee table book for this is This all Come Back Now (ed Mykaela Saunders) https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/This-All-Come-Back-Now-by-Mykaela-Saunders/9780702265662 .I was happy to give a story for the Other Covenants volume, sharing my rather peculiar background (ed Lobel and Shainblum) https://bookshop.org/a/1838/9781953829405. Some of the stories fit within a general normative context (not all, but enough to make it readable) but both volumes as a whole question all contexts and present more varied cultural background.

There are other approaches, but two are enough for one day. It boils down to knowing where we (as readers) fit in relation to various types of cultural privilege and for us (again, as readers) to reach out beyond that and to read work by writers who come from a range of backgrounds. Our reading is richer and our life is more interesting.

Also, and this is my favourite side effect from questioning privilege, when we ask about how we interpret fairy tales and looking at what stories have been drawn into that net that are not actually fairy tales, doors open to enormous numbers of brilliant writers. Many haven’t yet been translated into English, but the more we read beyond our tiny cultural boundaries and the more we question our privileges, the more publishers will say “That sold well. Let me try another translation of a famous writer from this background.” The more we work on living in a bigger world, the more that bigger world has to offer us.

Charming Synchronies

personby Gillian Polack
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Yesterday I found my research self and my fiction-writing self in perfect synchrony.

My research self is looking at old tales newly told, from a number of angles. I’m focusing very closely on how writers build the world for their novel. One of my favourite techniques is to look at the various roles food and foodways play. There’s not enough work in this field for me to rest on the work of others, so I spend a lot of my time in an alert state, watching different kinds of narratives and checking the role food and foodways play so that I can deepen my research.

Over time, this alert state has given me a lot of questions that need answering. For instance, in K-drama, there are a number of ways people drink and they are connected to different drinks The most formal ‘proper’ way of drinking was easy to determine, but it wasn’t until I obtained flavoured soju and drank some that some of the more casual ways people drank became clearer. Flavour, mouthfeel, level of alcohol all play as much of a part in how characters drink on K-drama as tradition and courtesy.

For my fiction, I begin with recipes and the food itself. Then I start thinking about what the appropriate ways of presenting the food are. This approach was sparked 30+ years ago when a favourite writer had people throw food that would have been dripping with honey, in a social group that has given us no historical evidence for treating food that lightly. Several possible messes entered into my visualisation of the scene: honey everywhere, and the very important personages acting as ill-disciplined overgrown children. I talked to the writer about the scene and she had not considered either aspect. The throwing was in the modern American cultural sense of being light-hearted and the characters were demonstrating how close they were to each other.

This was the first time I discovered just how much of our own culture we place in our constructed worlds and how, unless we consider things really carefully, we echo what we think we know and it is our own way of doing things.

I started to do two things at that point.

The first was to find out what my own cultural nuancing is and where it comes from. How do I assume people eat and drink in various circumstances?

Just like almost every other fiction writer, I draw the worlds for my novels from places I’m always ready a bit familiar with and many of them echo my life and experience. The difference is that I do this while aware. That state of alert becomes increasingly handy. I watch television and go to movies partly to continue this dialogue with myself.

This helps inform the second thing I do, which is research and teach. My most recent research thingie (I hate the words “outcome’ and ‘output’; ‘research monograph’ doesn’t work when the book is available very cheaply to anyone who wants to read it and is written in ordinary English) is, of course, Story Matrices. (At this point I’m supposed to remind everyone that it’s Hugo eligible and to suggest that you think of nominating it. I normally don’t do this, but in the case of Story Matrices, I want people to read it and they can’t read it if they don’t find out about it and the Hugos are a really good way of letting people know a work exists and that it’s worth a look.)

So how did everything come together? The soju and my thoughts about it gave me an ‘aha!’ moment for my research. One of the writers I’m focusing on always gives precise cultural places for drink, another does but they’re historically incorrect, and the third doesn’t at all.

This ‘aha!’ moment made me realise I have not worked on drink for either of the novels that I’m slowly, slowly writing. The novels will be out way after the new research, because the new research takes priority, due to there being income attached. I do love it, though, when they talk to each other while I imbibe someone else’s foodways.

Reading and Rereading

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I grew up in a United States — perhaps a whole world, but I’m staying with my experience — that was a youth culture.

Older people ran things, of course, and still do, despite the youngish tech billionaires of the day, but the concept of what is cool and good and the thing to do is built around youth.

And of course, I am from that generation that said “never trust anyone over thirty.”

I am considerably over thirty now.

This is not a rant about what’s wrong with young people. I like young people. Generation Z reminds me of my activist and hippie youth.

I think they’re smart and have a lot of great ideas and we should listen to them.

But one thing I keep figuring out is that I understand things more deeply now than I did at 19. Or, for that matter, at, say, 27.

We writerly types tend to also be readers and one of the things that comes up regularly is re-reading books that mattered passionately to us when we were young.

Catch-22I have, in fact, just checked Catch-22 out of the library. I wrote a major paper on it in college. I read it again in 2001 after the September 11 attacks and the launching of “Homeland Security.”

I’ve just started my re-read. It’s possible that Heller will be one of the few male “literary” writers of the 20th century that I will be able to keep reading.

I read so many of those guys when I was young, working around their misogyny, identifying with the male characters and learning to despise certain kinds of women. I can’t do that anymore. It was destructive then; it’s just too painful now.

But there are writers who shouldn’t be thrown out with the bath water, so to speak, even if they are “of their time” as the polite term has it.

Rereading books is how you discover which ones to keep. Continue reading “Reading and Rereading”…

Australia Reads

personby Gillian Polack
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Today’s title is not a description of the unexpected (Australians are literate!) but of an annual event. We’ve been heading towards it for weeks. it’s this week, on 9 March. Schools and libraries specially have whole programs, and Young Adult writers are in particular demand. My big Australia reads function this year was talking about fantasy novels with Wendy Orr and Rik Lagarto for Libraries ACT. It will be put up the Libraries’ Facebook page on the day, and then readers in Canberra will be able to compare note and argue and chat about the books we talk about. We will probably join in the discussion. Of course we will. That’s what book discussions are for.

Australia Reads/Australian Reading Hour is an annual event where a lot of Australians read for a single hour on the same day. We’re not told what to read. We do, however, talk about books a lot in the lead-up. Some people buy a book they’ve been dreaming of, specially to read that day. I’ve done that, this year. A lot of the fun is in comparing notes and suggesting titles and worrying if we will get hold of our dream book in time or if we should find an alternate book, just in case. I always emerge from This lead-up period and from the day itself with a long list of books I need to take a look at. This is such a good feeling.

There are Ambassadors for Reading to encourage Australians to read something that day. I am one. Let me show you. https://australiareads.org.au/authors/gillian-polack/ It’s not my best quote ever. Every year I want to improve it and change it and every year I say to myself, “It’s probably better to spend the time reading.” And so I do. I’m very proud to be an Ambassador.

I don’t know if there are Reading Hours in other countries, but if you don’t have one and would like to join us, please do! Any book, the hour of your choice (or 4 lots of 15 minutes if life is simply impossible, though an hour is best, it gives time away from a fractious everyday). People often ask me if there’s a book of mine I suggest for Australia Reads. This year it’s The Green Children Help Out, because we really need a bunch of cheerfully quirky superheroes to help us deal with destructive fools. Me, I’m reading The Tangled Lands, a new novel by Glenda Larke.

What book will you choose?

Publication in the time of COVID – another anecdote

personby Gillian Polack
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I want to introduce you to Poison and Light, but I have no idea how to do this. It was released during the first year of COVID and so most bookshops have not been interested in it: it’s available from online stores, mainly. It was a finalist for an award, but there was no ceremony for that award, so no-one noticed it there, either.

This is all ironic, because it’s the book I wrote for people who wanted this history with the panoply and the danger. It has a Code Duello, and costume drama, and hot air balloons, and tentacled aliens, and secretive printers, and evil conspiracies, and the main protagonist is the last refugee from old Earth.

There’s one special character in it who was going to get their own novel if this took off, because they are just so very cool. I say ‘they,’ because even though they publicly identified as male, they didn’t always privately identify as male. It’s their idealism and their amazing clothes’ sense and their even more amazing rapier skills that made me want to know more.

I’m not the only person to want more of Fabian. Instead of summarising my novel, then, I’m going to send you to a review of it. That way you can see what both the novel and Fabian look like to someone other than me: https://performativeutterance.wordpress.com/2021/03/03/poison-and-light-gillian-polack-shooting-star-press-2020/

Me, I wrote Poison and Light because I wanted to explore a world that wanted to hide its head in the sand by pretending it was in the eighteenth century. Some residents of New Ceres thought they were in a world where nobles ruled, gloriously. Others thought they were in a world with decadence they could enjoy. Still others are planning a revolution. You get some of all of this in the novel, but it was going to be a series if it sold well enough, and there was far more excitement in store in those later volumes that will now never happen. There are issues that would have emerged concerning failed terraforming, for instance (we need more novels about failed terraforming, given what we’re doing to our own planet right now), and of slavery, and of how much New Ceres could remain its independent and dangerous quirky self when the rest of the galaxy had recovered from the war. How does the dream of history hold up against reality?

The novel I’m working on now is set in that same universe, but back on Earth. Only one character overlaps. I’m sorry, but that character is not Fabian.

I used actual 18th century texts and ideas and stories to build the world of the novel. That novel was part of the research project into how fiction writers use history, and testing the concepts other fiction writers presented me with gave me far more insight into what they did than if I’d simply collated my interview notes. It doesn’t come up in History and Fiction, and nor should it. When I use novels to test ideas, those ideas become part of the novel. I still have to check those ideas against my research for my academic side.

This means you can read Poison and Light without caring a jot about Gillian-the-researcher. You can enter it for the strange future world and for the people. In a perfect world, my readers do this. They look at my characters and pick the actors they would love to be playing them. Which leaves my second last thought as, “I have no idea who would play Fabian.”

My last thought is that I need to write more about Poison and Light. It deserves to be seen.

How we understand the past ‑ from three directions

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m a bit late because things are suddenly very busy. I also have no time to write anything new. Let me give you something old…

This was first published on 11 December 2011 BiblioBuffet. I wrote for BiblioBuffet for 3 years, once a fortnight, and it was such a joy. You can still find all the pieces on the Wayback Machine.

One of the recurring tasks of the Medievalist who does other things (like write here, or teach, or write fiction, or even go to dinner parties) is to deal with the popular idiocies that abound about the Middle Ages. Flat earths, rotten food, chastity belts: popular ideas that have little or no grounding in actual history sometimes appear unending.

A little while ago, I reviewed a book about classical science. This book (unintentionally) reinforced one of those odd views about the Middle Ages. It assumed that there wasn’t much in the way of scientific progress or scientists during the period. James Hannam read my review and emailed me, suggesting I read his book on Medieval science, God’s Philosophers. How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science,which addresses precisely this issue. He kindly sent me a copy and he was right ‑ I needed to read his book. If you have an interest in what actually happened in science in the Middle Ages then you might also need to read his book. I don’t agree with all of it, but I’m very glad it exists.

The writer’s choice of form is shaped by the nature of their caring about history. Hannam cares passionately about science in the Middle Ages and he faced some of the same dilemmas as I do concerning popular misconceptions. This is why he wrote what he wrote.

In his introduction, Hannam lists many of the less-intelligent things, of the kind I listed in my first paragraph those I gave above, that I’ve found people think about Medieval science. His list gave me an immediate sense of not being alone. Hannam points to sources such as Richard of Wallingford and Thomas Aquinas and quotes Voltaire and others deriding the darkness of the mind in the Middle Ages. Through these quotations he demonstrates, passionately, where our rather negative view of Medieval science comes from. I shall refer to this introduction in class next time the subject comes up, because Hannam has all too obviously encountered the same sets of attitudes I have. He looks at those attitudes, and deals with them succinctly and clearly.

His views are not mine. They exclude women’s science, for instance, and I would have liked a better coverage of the science behind the spanking new technologies of the time, of distillations and spirits and advanced optics and more. I would especially have liked a close look at how the different religions of Europe combined to achieve major cultural transformation.

Hannam’s book is a popular history. It targets some widely-held misunderstandings about the Middle Ages and the role of the era in modern science. It carries its own burden of understanding, however. What do I mean by ‘burden of understanding’? We all interpret the world around us. We all carry a whole raft of material we use to help us in this interpretation, from assumptions right through to careful analysis. Hannam’s material is carried by his passion for the Middle Ages and the shape of his understanding of the Middle Ages. His Middle Ages isn’t mine: it is, however, still powerful.

These interpretations are linked to the form we choose to write in, the subjects we choose to write about and the approach we take to these subjects. Hannam chose popular history. There are other choices.

Not so long ago I looked at a scholarly writer whose passion led him into the life of Benedetto Blanis. The result was a book, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis, that was written from an expert (academic) vantage point but that is accessible to the wider public. It contains fascinating insights into Jewish life in Medici Florence. Because Edward Goldberg’s passion was more scholarly, the overview of Blanis’ life and times was not enough. His new book, A Jew at the Medici Court. The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo (1615-1621), contains the letters of Benedetto Blanis. Unlike the first book, this is not really for the wider public. It’s a critical edition of the letters, with English summaries and rather good notes. Unlike the popular book, we can see directly into Blanis’ life.

The wonder of a good scholarly edition is that the notes and the index and the scholarly apparatus (I am in love with the phrase ‘scholarly apparatus’) serve as tools to help the reader see something more clearly. In this case, it’s Benedetto Blanis and his world.

It’s a terrific companion volume to the first book and the summaries of the letters give the key information in each (which is good for readers who have insufficient Italian). Goldberg’s passion for the past is expressed through his wish for us to see Blanis and understand his life, and he gives us all the tools we need. The letters themselves are the pure magic. Goldberg was clever to realise this and facilitate the transit between them and the reader.

They’re a door opening to give us a peek into something amazing. Opening the volume at random, I read that Blanis has received his patron’s last letter. He’s extremely polite to his patron ‑ his language is full of courteous superlatives. He uses phrases like “deo gratia” ‑ this shows to me that the Christian and Jewish communities had common language. And all of this is to ask if he can send a package of clothing and some silk to Venice under Don Giovanni’s seal. It makes me think that the patronage relationship can be like that of a child at boarding school towards the family back home. “Send money.” Send food.” “Can I do this, please?”

A good history will give you a considered overview. A good critical edition of primary sources allows you to think differently and explore byways. here, the focus changes according to the life of the letter writer, not the thesis of the modern author ‑ this means that letters can throw up the most extraordinary bits of information. At this point I should give you an interesting tidbit to lure you into yearning after the book. Three times have I opened this volume to find something and three times I’ve found myself absorbed in the stuff of Blanis’ life, when he was trying to make a living, when he was trying to get out of prison, when he was describing a suicide, when he was carefully manoeuvring around politics that were bigger than he was. It’s an addictive, fascinating book.

In this instance, the first book illuminates the second ‑ Goldberg’s passion for history has given us a pair of volumes that work marvellously together.

A third book that’s led first and foremost by the writer’s passion for the (historical) subject is different again. It’s fiction, for one thing. Suzy Witten, in The Afflicted Girls shows her passion for communicating the horrid events of Salem in 1692.

This kind of book is harder for the historian to evaluate. I can read the letters presented by Goldberg and I can analyse Hannam’s approach to science, but the measure of success for history in a novel is how much the reader cares. And the historian as a reader of historical fiction or fantasy is a very difficult reader indeed. It’s not that I don’t read historical fiction: it’s that I’m a fussy audience for historical fiction.

Witten has been dutiful in her research, and it shows in the fine detail that colours the novel. What is missing for me is that (especially near the beginning) the fine detail is uncoloured by emotion. I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted at the Porter family’s “roll-top bright painted calash.” It’s not something that I know from my own frame of reference and Witten doesn’t always give enough information for me to interpret it within the frame of reference of the novel. It must be important, for the description occurs at the beginning of a chapter, but I don’t know the way in which it’s important. Is it presumptuous of the Porter family to paint in bright colours, or is it an entirely everyday thing? Are they rich, or struggling poor? Without any knowledge of how much it costs to buy and run a calash, I don’t know where it fits in the society of the novel. This means that, while the society of the novel is full of detail, I don’t always have the tools to assess that detail and Witten herself doesn’t always give me the tools. I can see Witten’s passion for the past and for brining readers the lives of this town at this time, and I hurt when they hurt (for it’s a strong narrative) but I do it from the vantage point of the present. It’s a distant viewing, not a close one. When Witten brings us close in (as she does on the very next page, when we learn that the use of a Boston dressmaker has social and emotional consequences) the past is far more alive.

By the time we reach the harrowing events of the witch trials, the past is more fully alive and the novel is powerful. Still, it’s interesting that Witten carries with her the baggage of description. Its excessive detail is her way into understanding what the past looks like and feels like. It’s her way of carefully documenting it. Documenting, however, works best in a book such as Hannam’s and fine documentation of detail works best of all in a book such as Goldberg’s. In a novel, that documentation works better when it has an emotive aspect. It is a path into the past for the reader and it’s important that this path show us how the specifics of the place and time were viewed.

Telling detail is, in fact, the reader’s link to the normative past, the typical day. Those small bits of information concerning daily life show how that normal everyday moment is seen by those who live in the world of the novel. When this small world all falls apart, we then have a frame of reference from which we can understand the emotional depths. This link between the apparently trivial and the narrative is something that’s much more difficult for nonfiction to achieve. It can bring us into the past and make us feel for the history of individual and to cry for the loss of their lives.

All three of these books-the popular history, the letters, the historical novel, carry us into the past. They use different methods and have different reasons for the journey, but they are how we, as readers, begin to understand the people who have gone before.

Books mentioned in this column:

A Jew at the Medici Court. The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo (1615-1621) by Edward Goldberg (University of Toronto Press, 2011) 9781442643833

Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis by Edward L. Goldberg (University of Toronto Press, 2011) 9781442613331

God’s Philosophers. How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam (Icon Books, 2009) 9781848311503

The Afflicted Girls. A Novel of Salem. By Suzy Witten (Dreamwand, 2009) 97800615323138



		

		
		
	


	

		

									
Nancy Jane Moore on What She Read in 2022
				

					
personby Crow, Editor
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Over on Ambling Along the Aqueduct, Treehouse resident Nancy Jane Moore discusses the books she read in 2022. She begins her report “The hardest thing about writing this report is that there are many books in my house that would make it if only I had found time to read them,” so if there’s something you think should be on this list, it’s likely sitting in a pile somewhere at her place.


Nancy’s “Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening” is Number 27 in the series of reports from Aqueduct Press authors, with more still on the way. Since these reports are never limited to books or other media from the calendar year, they offer a wide-ranging list of things you maybe never even thought about wanting to read or see or listen to. Check them out.


		

		
		
	


	

		

									
Meet The Wizardry of Jewish Women
				

					
personby Gillian Polack
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I promised to introduce my books to you, and it’s Chanukah (Happy Chanukah!) so I thought you’d like to get to know just one novel. It’s not my best, but it may well be my equal-most-important.


Being Jewish in Australia isn’t the same as being Jewish in the US, Canada, the UK or most of Europe. I’ve said this a lot, but, just once, I decided to tell about one type of Australian Judaism in fiction. There’s so much talk around that kinda assumes that most Jews are religious, or practising, or somehow high in their observance level. For the oldest branch of Judaism this is true for a very few, but not for the many. The many are wildly secular, yet still Jewish. I wanted to explore what this could mean in one family. A family with Secrets.


I created The Wizardry of Jewish Women to explore some of the magical adventures of that family.


Jews came to Australia with the First Fleet. In fact, those earliest migrants came as convicts on the First Fleet. They themselves came through England. Some were from England. Some were from families that had moved to England to escape persecution. Their Jewish practice was very English in style then. My father’s mother’s mother’s family weren’t First Fleeters – they arrived in the 19th century, but they were from that background. I tell everyone it’s scones-and-committee Judaism. It’s the closest you’ll see to Church of England in Judaism. Social change is high on the agenda, and university education is normative.


These days we’re a tiny minority in Australian Jewish communities, but once upon a time, we were the dominant group. Sometimes this was good, sometimes this was not so good. Always, it was interesting.


For The Wizardry of Jewish Women, I used recipes from my family, but the characters all came from backgrounds where they were Jewish by default, just like most of Australia is Christian by default. It’s such an Australian novel.


What still surprises me is that, as far as I can find out, it’s the first ever Jewish Australian fantasy novel. We’ve had Jewish writers of fantasy since our early colonial days, but Australian Jews are not the subject of fantasy novels. In fact, most publishers ask for Holocaust novels, or novels about the Ultra-Orthodox. These are obviously the novels that sell.


The good thing about Wizardry’s own life story is that whenever it looks as if it will go out of print, another publisher takes it up. Its print history is like a relay team with a baton. It’s never been taken up by a shouter-about-books or by reviewers. It’s interesting that what we think of as game changing can hide in plain sight – it’s only when critics see and publicly dissect something that what that novel does becomes visible to the rest of the world.


Still, this novel changed things for me. Since then, I’ve been able to write more of my background into my fiction. It liberated me, emotionally, from writing what others expected me to write and from building my world using solely building blocks from cultural majority backgrounds. If you read through my more recent fiction, you’ll find that, since The Wizardry of Jewish Women, I’ve become more and more able to reflect my own views of the world. I’m not there yet, but The Green Children Help Out (my most recent novel) informs me that I’ve come a long way since that first Australian Jewish fantasy novel.


One aspect of it has come back to bite me. The incident in the Parliamentary Triangle (Canberra has a Triangle, that began with a carved-out hill), the one with Molotov cocktails… was quite real. I was the president of the organisation that was attacked. Recent hate mail reminds me why I stepped down from Jewish leadership.


Fiction was part of the reason, but another part was a deep desire to walk this Earth without threats. Walking this Earth without threats is not going to happen. Being publicly Jewish has a cost. But at least it’s not Molotov cocktails right now. And I did excise the demons from that night by putting them into a novel… It’s not my best novel, but it was shortlisted for the popularly-voted Australian science fiction awards. That’s better than I expected for something that went where other novels dared not go.


		

		
		
	


	

		

									
Story Matrices, History and Fiction, and why I wrote them
				

					
personby Gillian Polack
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There is a constant buzz around concerning new books, old books, favourite books.


I’m part of that buzz. I write about books all the time. I analyse story and describe narrative. If I were someone who was confident about her work, I’d tell everyone my list of things to consider for prizes, but I’m not, and my big work this year is a little book, Story Matrices, looking at story and how we transmit culture through it. For me, its big achievement is that I’ve finally managed to find a way of explaining important things so that writers and editors can work with some terribly important concepts. Too many have (in my presence) said “I can’t handle this” about these ideas. Some still will say that they can’t handle things.” But writers are now coming up to me and saying, “I think I understand.” They understand how culture can be more safely tackled in fiction. They understand how to weave culture into their writing, just as people who read History and Fiction could see how history is used and what research for story is all about and…


I spend so much of my life trying to understand and then explain, that these two books are very important to me. What I want is people to read them and to argue with them and to annotate them and to find their own understanding of story. I want readers and critics to take what I’ve described and say “But” and “I can do better than this” and “Wait, I have an idea!”


Awards help people find the book they want to read next (so nominate the books you want seen), but the biggest reward of all is someone reading my books. Intelligently, Argumentatively. Not arguing with me, but with what I’ve written. Finding their own path through this argument.


All my books are meant to be read actively. Maybe not all with argument – that’s the academic books – but with criticism and thought and feeling. And…


Maybe it’s time to do a blog series that introduces all my books. Today you’ve had Story Matrices and History and Fiction. Short academic works that people tell me are surprisingly readable. Over and over again I am told this. Every time, I hope that this means that the person telling me has frowned over one page and laughed at a comment and taken notes to find a book I mentioned and said, at some point, “Yes, this is what I needed to read right now.” And then they put the book down and think about what it says and how that applies to their favourite writers. And to their least favourite. And to the book they’re reading because the book club says to. And to the book they got from the library by mistake. And to the book their favourite bookseller says “You really need to read this.”


I love readers who think for themselves and have their own opinions. I won’t agree with all their opinions, just as they won’t agree with all of mine, but it’s such a joy to hear them. Of all my books, the two that were written to provoke interesting discussions are Story Matrices and History and Fiction. They’re short on character and plot, and long on research, but that’s fine, other kinds of books have character and plot.


I love it that some books are read because they’re like others and are comfortable, and we read others because they pull us into new worlds and light up our minds with concepts and humour. I’m not sure whether authors are the right people to describe their own books, but … I’m going to try. This post is the first in a series that may well last right up until the next author interview.


		

		
		
	


	

		

									
Interview: Amy Sterling Casil, Ron Collins, Michael Libling Part Four
				

					
personby Gillian Polack
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Welcome to the final part of the interview. It’s been a  great ride, and I shall miss it. The first question is short and the answers are brief, and the second question is amazing and immense: my guests give some excellent book recommendations, just in time for summer reading. (Or, for those of you who live on the other side of the Equator, winter reading.) This is what I saved most of the pictures for. The books of these writers are each and every one of the suitable to be on lists of reading and rather handy if you give presents at this time of year.




Keep an eye out for more interviews, next year.


Gillian


 


Gillian


Let me ask a less-askable question. I am actually part-academic (my new scholarly tome is this https://www.hpb.com/products/story-matrices-9781913387914) so even my non-academic questions can sound a bit pretentious. Over the years I’ve noticed that writers make choices about how much to include that kind of technical analysis in our work. How we focus on story, what story we choose. I’m not going to ask about that, though I’m happy if you want to talk about it.


I’m going to ask – how do you handle people like me, who read your work using such a different set  of lenses? Do you feed us chocolate and pacify us? Engage in heated argument? Run away screaming? Read everything we write that might relate to your work and remind us when you have new books that fit our interests? Or something else entirely?


I experience the first four most frequently. So many writers are happy with me as a fiction writer until they discover this other side to me and then… they metamorphose and I make Kafka jokes to a friend.


It’s less-askable because we don’t often talk about the relationship between those of us who write and those of us who sped our lives studying that writing.


 


Ron:


Hmmm. I don’t know how I “handle” people who read or talk about my work.  I can say with certainty that I don’t generally think a lot about the reader when I’m writing. I probably used to, but I’ve come to embrace the idea that I can’t let anyone else decide what I’m going to write or to say. I’m me. I need to write stories that matter to me, and if I do that then I figure I’ll make something that will hit a few folks where they live. Now, that said, the idea of being academically analyzed as a writer just kind of flummoxes me. I mean, good luck with that.


 


Mike:


I know there are writers who say not to look at reviews and whatnot, but I do spend a little time reading what readers and reviewers say about my work. I can’t say that reviews or other commentary have ever obviously influenced my writing going forward, but I find the process interesting and as long as I’m in the right headspace it’s kind of entertaining. Not that reviews don’t also disappoint and frustrate on occasion.


So, yeah, people are weird, including me. At the end of the day, critical or not, I try to just be happy someone spent their time with me. Of course, I stress the “try.”


 


Gillian:


One last question – can you tell us about five books we should read?


Amy Sterling Casil Femal Science Fiction Writer


 


Amy:


As to five books I think people should read, let me rephrase that. Most of these books are ones that I personally enjoyed, and which I found to be engaging with students while teaching.


1. An Anthropologist on Mars, by Dr. Oliver Sacks (1995) – This is probably the best collection of Dr. Sacks’ essays and I believe, was one of the his collections, if not the first. Our publishing industry is bad, and I’m sure you have all been following the news about the merger process with Penguin Random House and S & S – well, someone, somewhere, somehow picked up Oliver Sacks – I know most of these essays were originally in the New Yorker. This book covers stories ranging from Dr. Carl Bennett (in reality, Dr. Mort Doran), a Canadian SURGEON with severe Tourette’s Syndrome, to the final chapter, which is a case history of Temple Grandin, who is today, one of the world’s most famous people with autism (full autism, not Asperger’s). I can’t overestimate the influence that this book had not only on me, but on many students. It opens a window to the life of the mind for diverse minds – and his writing and approach is the exact approach I want to take: empathetic, and using Rogerian argument/methods.


2. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) by Stephen Jay Gould – Stephen Jay Gould wrote countless books, and many of them are collections of his essays in Natural History. To me, this book is special because it opened a window into the world of the pre-Cambrian Burgess Shale animals, including Wiwaxia and Hallucinogenia. I loved this book so much and it’s still in my one “box of books” which contains signed first editions (to me) – that I brought from California to Florida when we moved. Some of the descriptions of the animals are dated because of subsequent research. But it’s still an amazing glimpse into one of the earliest times of natural prehistory. And, I have a cool story about it – when I was in grad school at Chapman University, one of the full professors was a great enthusiast of the well-known UK novelist John Fowles. This professor (Mark Axelrod, rhymes with total prick) had established the “John Fowles Center” which was literally just words on paper. Our 10-student seminar was able to meet with Fowles, who traveled to Southern California – straight from Canada where he’d been able to view the Burgess Shale and study some of the animal fossils. Fowles was a great natural historian himself and so here we are in this 10-student seminar room and students are asking him questions. He mentioned having visited the Burgess Shale and I asked if he’d read Gould’s book. Fowles’ face immediately lit up and he said, “Yes, I have, it’s one of my favorite books.” It turned out that Fowles’ favorite of the animals was “Wiwaxia” – I said I also liked Hallucigenia. No one else in the room including  ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶k̶  Axelrod could participate, not knowing Gould’s book, the Burgess Shale, or the animals. This was further compounded by  ̶Ax-p̶r̶i̶c̶k̶-lerod having a mini-stroke when Fowles asked about the numerous blooming Jacaranda trees outside the second-floor conference room window and I said, “they’re Jacarandas, my aunt loves their pods but most people love the lavender flowers.” – Auuugggh! Ax-p̶r̶i̶c̶k̶-lerod totally hit the roof. And then Fowles and I went for a walk around the campus with him asking about plants he didn’t know and explaining the many he did – ha ha, much later Axelrod threw a book at my head in another seminar and gave me the most horrific “recommendation” letter anyone could ever receive and one which I could not, and never did use, featuring a comment like, “She will present a very appealing appearance in the classroom.”


3. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys – I was not assigned this book to read in undergraduate or graduate school, but I believe I did use it in some academic contexts. This book tells the story of Bertha Rochester, the “crazy lady” in the attic from Jane Eyre that terrorizes Jane and ultimately sets the house on fire, leading to Mr. Rochester’s blindness. I can’t praise this book highly enough. It’s a compelling story, masterfully-created, and it tells exactly how Bertha, a beautiful Creole heiress, becomes the “Crazy Lady in the Attic.” This features multiple voices throughout the book; it’s just amazing.


4. Sally Hemings (1979) by Barbara Chase-Riboud – I read this book from the library as a “book about a woman.” It tells the story of Thomas Jefferson’s slave and mistress, Sally Hemings and her relationship with him. This book influenced me powerfully and similarly to Wide Sargasso Sea, is a story of a woman’s life subsumed by being involved with a much more powerful man. I also recommend another book by Barbara Chase-Riboud, called Valide, which is the story of Abdulhamid, a French-Creole woman who was captured as a young teen and made part of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire’s harem – and ultimately becomes the ruler of the Ottoman empire through her survival skills and raw intelligence.


5.  Freakonomics (2005), by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt – I assigned this book in second-semester composition and rhetoric classes, and while it didn’t inspire the engagement and transformation of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars, it did make an impression and inspire students to look more closely at “commonly-held” wisdom. The original Freakonomics features Venkatesh, a U Chicago grad student who discovered the same business structure in streetcorner drug dealing as occurs in major corporations like McDonalds. Another “highlight” (or shall we say “lowlight”) of the Freakonomics universe is the phenomenon of Bagel Man, whose 20+ years of delivering bagels to large corporate and using an honor system for payment showed him that the higher up he went in the floors, i.e. up to the VP and C-suites, the more people cheated on paying – for example, paying $1 and taking 5 bagels. And then there was the Chicago Teachers cheating scandal (they were paid bonuses for better test results in their classrooms and the tests from their classrooms showed mathematical proof that the teachers were erasing wrong answers and coloring in the correct ones… This has been made into an entertaining movie with a feature by Morgan Spurlock and a much, much better and more fascinating one about Sumo wrestling cheating (yaocho) by the amazing Alex Gibney. Here is a link to the Alex Gibney portion of the film (how could I forget that? – Steven Levitt, the U Chicago microeconomist – is probably most famous for using math to expose the Chicago teacher standardized test cheating and in Japan – showing that Sumo was rigged which destroyed everyone’s minds along with revealing that the Sumo schools are so cruel and tough, young wrestlers have died). Dr. Levitt lost his infant son to meningitis – I corresponded with him  about that and about student responses to Freakonomics.


Of course there are many books of fiction which have influenced me – from Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison’s collected stories to… wait for it… the book that connects me and Bruce, the Instrumentality of Man by Cordwainer Smith.


For my own book, I would recommend Female Science Fiction Writer – and the audiobook version especially. There is a review from a harasser on the eBook right now. Amazon would never remove, as they won’t even remove reviews made by neo-Nazi white supremacists.


 


Libling Hollywood North


Mike:


Sheesh, get me gabbing and the floodgates open. (What was that baloney I said about me being more of a “listener?”) I get the feeling I’ve gone a wee bit overboard here…


I’m a sucker for author biographies and autobiographies, and many come immediately to mind. Act One by Moss Hart. Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey. Mordecai: The Life & Times by Charles Foran, and Salinger by David Shields. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and The Golden Age Of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee. …All have inspired to one extent or another. All have informed. And most have also proven disheartening, revealing a side to a much-admired author I not only never knew, but probably never wanted to know. While the aforementioned deliver in each of these ways, none has hit harder or stayed with me longer than And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles Shields. I loved the Vonnegut surrogates of his novels and the Vonnegut of commencement address fame, but the real-life Vonnegut is not quite so warm and fuzzy a character. As flawed as Vonnegut was, however—like who isn’t?—this beautifully researched and fast-paced bio brings him to life with a style and verve you won’t forget, no matter how painful or distressing the content. This is a perfect example of the need to separate author from art, a rule of thumb that applies to Salinger and Roth, as well.


The first two science fiction novels I read were Winston Juveniles culled from my grade school library: Find the Feathered Serpent by Evan Hunter and Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten. In fact, the author of both was Evan Hunter, whose most famous pen name was Ed McBain of 87th Precinct series fame, and whose real name was Salvatore Albert Lombino. These were the books that introduced me to the possibilities of time travel and I was hooked from the get-go. To this day, the sub-category remains my favorite type of SF. Again, it’s tough to single out one. Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line, Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, and the more recent All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai are memorable reads. But I don’t think any time-travel novel covers off all possible paradoxes better than David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. If time travel stories appeal, this is a must-read.


Most of my stories bring some element from my own life into play, hardly unusual for most writers of fiction. And no author in or out of the speculative field does this better than Bruce McAllister. His recent collection, Stealing God and Other Stories, is a Master Class in the craft of short fiction. And in many of these stories you’ll find the seeds of what would become his masterwork—The Village Sang to the Sea. Set in a small coastal village in Italy during the early 1950s, McAllister touches upon his life as a navy brat living in a world far removed from what most of us have ever known. A stunning mix of memoir and fantasy, I defy anyone to read this and not come away deeply moved. Wistful. Nostalgic. Eerily beautiful. Frankly, I could have listed this book five times.


Among my non-fiction recommendations are Hollywood Under Siege by Thomas R Lindlof, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel, Naming Names by Victor Navasky, Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson, and The Accidental Terrorist by William Shunn—the history of the Mormon church interwoven with the author’s own experiences as an LDS missionary in Canada and the terrorist act his mission precipitated. But if I were to name only one, it would have to be The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson—the story of the architects behind Chicago’s World Columbian Exhibition in 1893 and how H.H. Holmes used it to his homicidal delight. No piece of horror fiction can touch this non-fiction masterpiece for the dread it instils.


While my fiction tends to be cross-genre, incorporating quirky mainstream, fantasy, horror, and mystery, the novels I’ve enjoyed most over the years are westerns. Yeah, westerns! Not sure why this is, other than the fact I grew up attending Saturday matinees in the 1950s and 1960s, and western movies ran neck and neck with science fiction as top attractions. Yup, the spirits of Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Johnny Mack Brown reside forever within. And recapturing that time, place, not to mention unrivalled sense of awe and adventure, are Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, and my all-time favorite single novel in any genre, Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove. Yup, Lonesome Dove! It took a dozen tries before I got into it, but there was no looking back from that point on. The characters. The narrative and intertwining storylines. The unpredictability. The sweep. Forget it’s a western! Pure and simple, Lonesome Dove is everything great fiction should be. A few years back, in another interview, I quoted a blurb from the back cover of the 1985 paperback edition. Forgive me for doing the same here.  Lonesome Dove is “a love story, an adventure, an epic of the frontier … the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.” As I said then, I still say now: This pretty much nails it. Lonesome Dove does not disappoint.


As for selecting a novel of my own, it’s easy, since I currently have only one available, though a second is coming next year. Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels is set in my old hometown of Trenton, Ontario and is inspired by true events, including the town’s little known and frequently bizarre history. Like Bruce McAllister’s work, mentioned above, Hollywood North combines fiction and memoir. While the publisher(s) classified it as horror, I prefer how Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, described it: “A beautifully deceptive mystery and fantasy noir novel. The book is filled with humor and heartbreak and great homages to classic films.” My second novel, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife is an unsettling, off-kilter thriller. Character-driven, with sharp streaks of horror and dark humor, it’s coming from WordFire Press in fall 2023. But I think I’ve already mentioned this once or twice or twenty times.


 


 


 


Ron:


Five book recommendations…hmmm…


I’ve recently read three books that I’ve really enjoyed.


Duramen Rose, by Andrew L. Roberts is a stunning work of free prose fiction centered on World War I. I couldn’t let go of this story for days afterward.


I thought The Page Turners, a novella by DeAnna Knippling was a fun real-world fantasy with a touch of time travel in it—set on a train in the 1920. Wonderful.


I liked Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters for its dive into the transgender world. It’s stuck with me. Interesting story. Strong characters.


I very much enjoy N. K. Jemisin’s short fiction collection How Long ’til Black Future Month? Like most collections, some of its stories hit me more strongly than others, but it’s one of those collections I go back to and pick a story at semi-random to reread.


And I always like to recommend Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga, which I find great because it’s essentially a novel told in a bunch of short stories. Every story itself is fantastic (most of them were award winners, after all). But then together then combine to a whole that can transcend itself. So I love it for it’s technical merits as well as its science fictional artistry.


 


Gillian:


Last but certainly not least, something about my guests! (I asked them for brief bios, just in case any of you are terribly curious.)


Amy Sterling Casil is a science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction writer. She is a 5th-generation Southern California native and recent emigre to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Amy is a Nebula Award nominee who has published 48 books. Find her essays on Medium and visit her website at www.amysterlingcasil.com.


 


Michael Libling is a World Fantasy Award finalist whose short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and many others. His first novel, Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels, was published by ChiZine and Open Road Media in 2019. His second novel, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife, is forthcoming from WordFire Press in 2023. Creator and former host of the long-running CJAD Trivia Show in Montreal, Michael is the father of three daughters and lives on Montreal’s West Island with his wife, Pat, and a big black dog named Piper. Among other things, he claims to be one of only a handful of North American authors who has never owned a cat. You can find out more about him at www.michaellibling.com, where he has been known to blog on occasion.


Website: http://www.michaellibling.com


 


Ron Collins is a best-selling Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.


His SF series Stealing the Sun has topped Amazon’s Hard Science Fiction charts. His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.


He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to Analog, Asimov’s, Fiction River Anthology Series, and several other professional magazines and anthologies.


He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time.


Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com.


Follow Ron on Twitter: @roncollins13