Category: Covid Life

Life and Museums

personby Gillian Polack
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The weeks after a PhD is done are always peculiar. There’s a backlog of life and it rushes in and floods the everyday. This is me, right now. Ironically, New South Wales is also flooded right now.

My backlog of life includes so much to write and so much to read and (this weekend alone) six panels at one of my favourite science fiction conventions. Add the 25 pages of forms to fill in (only five to do this weekend) and seeing friends at last and… it’s a tad busy.

I have a new publication this week, along with a bunch of my favourite people. You can find it here: Issue 90 – My Favorite Museum – Journey Planet I’ve actually written about museums a lot. I wanted to work in one, but things became complicated and I never did. One of the books I’m writing (the non-fiction) includes analyses of museums.

One of the most reassuring things imaginable for me is to visit a museum and analyse and tear apart the exhibits and think about their cultural impact. This is nothing new. I first did this when I was about seven. There was a display of old irons and children’s clothes in a country museum and I looked at them and looked at them and there was nothing in writing that explained them and no-one to ask, so I told my parents (with such seriousness) that this was wrong and they could do better. I remember listing the information needed to describe those irons and clothes. I knew what I needed to know and I was upset that it wasn’t there.

I didn’t know I was going to be an historian then. I started collecting limestone from various places and thought I was going to be a palaeontologist and a writer. Then I was going to be an opera singer and a writer. Then a museum curator and a writer. Then I reached high school.

At high school I told I was too young to know my future. I said, “But it has to include history and writing.”

I was told, “No, you’re doing science.”

I was very argumentative. I did maths, but dropped the science and did every single history and English subject I was allowed, plus music and French. This worked.

I’m the person who has history and writing as core parts of her life, still… and I still love looking at the work in museums and I am even more opinionated about these things than when I was seven.

Even this month, when life is flooding me, I can stop and think about museums. There is one particular exhibit I’m hoping to see later this week: a seventeenth century German bearded jug. If I get to see it, I might report on it in a fortnight. Maybe. It depends on the flooding receding just enough to make reports possible.

More on living Jewishly in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I don’t normally share here what I’ve posted elsewhere, but I wrote something quickly for Facebook and realised that it meant more than I realised and so I’m sharing it. I suddenly saw that what I thought was unique and personal, told a story about Australia and Australians and the different places Jews hold in this country. It’s not a full picture, or even close to a full picture. It’s how much of Jewishness is out of sight in Australia and how some of us handle this.

In other places I am still the person I always was, in Canberra no-one wants me to give talks to to be seen in public. Most people don’t hate me, but folks who have known me for years and even decades have recently started demonstrating a whole bunch of reactions to my being Jewish. For some, I’m hurting others simply by being myself: a couple of people have recently informed me of how privileged and white I am and how much of the cause of problems (both in Australia and elsewhere) can be blamed on me. For others, I’m a low priority in their life where previously I was a close friend, and when these old friends cluster or when a group of those who think along these lines get together, if I say something it will be instantly contradicted before anyone stops to consider what I actually said.

A part of this is because I’m forever-unwell and Australia does not handle illness with much style. Most of the change has, however, happened since COVID (which taught so many of us to not be our best selves) and especially since October 7. There are whole social groups and work-related groups I’m now simply not reminded of or invited to because I’m Jewish, and there are others I may share as long as I do not assert myself too much. The most amusing part of the whole shebang (and it really is amusing) is that I am not considered an expert on much at all in the circles that do not want me round. Given that I have two PhDs and another one about to be submitted and all kinds of books written and conference papers delivered and research done and talks delivered and… I am an expert in those topics, this is a very peculiar kind of wilful blinkering.

All of this is local. It has led to big lifestyle changes and those led to some thoughts on Facebook. Those thoughts (with amendments) are the rest of this post.

I’ve talked before about being a giraffe. My giraffehood comes from being the first Jew many Australians have met.

“Oh, I’ve never met a Jew before,” a person informs me, and looks at me as if I am in a zoo. This is why I call it being a giraffe. I’m willing to talk openly about my Jewishness, so I’m a giraffe who answers questions. The questions and comments used to be mostly kind and fair. They are less so right now. At the moment, after the surprise that I’m actually Jewish, I’m informed who I am and what I think and how horrid I am if I don’t use the words they tell me to use and announce my self-hate at once. Once a week, without fail, I’m told that either I worship Satan or murder children. (For anyone wondering, I have not done or ever have wanted to do either of these things.) These questions and comments, when experienced several times a week, make me feel as if I’m on show.

Today something provoked a very different memory.

In the days before COVID and before the current rise in antisemitism (so any time until the end of 2019) I gave talks and was on panels at a couple of larger functions a year on average. Every single time, it being (mostly) in Australia people would chat with me in the foyer or over coffee afterwards. Australians chat over drinks. It’s a part of who we are. Mostly the discussion leads with comments like “I didn’t know Australia had any Jews before” or, on one very special day “Do you really have horns?” When I was much, much younger, children would actually feel my head for those horns.

Every second chat (again, on average) someone would look around to make sure that everyone else was out of earshot. They would confide in me. Sometimes they had Jewish parents but were brought up Christian “for safety”. Sometimes they were happily non-religious, but knew that their parents had been Jewish and were curious. I have enjoyed many conversations about how OK atheism for different branches of Judaism with this group of interesting people and even more conversations about why parents would choose to leave the Judaism behind and even to hide it. Sometimes those who confided in me were practising Jewish but didn’t know anyone outside their family because it was safer to be not-Jewish when out in the world. Most of these individuals had parents who were Holocaust survivors. Some were from other backgrounds but their families had also memories of persecution, often very recent. The real discussion began when they discovered we could talk about these things but that it wasn’t the whole story. I was brought up to understand that the persecution is a part of our history but (sorry Cecil Roth) the lachrymose version of Jewish history hides so much more than it explains. My history self is working on this reinterpretation of Jewish pasts for the next little while, and that’s partly because it was so important to the individuals who came to me and talked about Jewishness in secret.

I was a different kind of giraffe for these folks. I was the Jew they could talk to safely. I never tell enough about them for anyone to be able to identify them. I have many conversations after panels and after giving talks or keynotes, and these people were among the many. Their privacy is important. No-one hides such a large part of themselves without very good reason. I use my not-very-good memory to forget their names and where they live. I would have to work hard to remember those details and I simply don’t try to remember. This has led to me being very forgetful of names and addresses and friends have to always remind me, over and again. This is not a large price to pay for the safety of others.

Occasionally (like now) I will mention their existence. I’m often and usually the first person they have every spoken to outside their immediate family about anything Jewish.

The number of people who shared their confidences with me diminished somewhat when the Australian census changed its collection style. The number of people who admitted to being Jewish in Australia also dropped dramatically. It was no longer possible to guarantee addresses and names would be detached from information collected and so identifying as Jewish carried different baggage to earlier. I suspect there are many Jewish Australians whose background is not known to the Bureau of Statistics any more. I once estimated that there were around 200,000 of these people, but there is no real way of knowing. Since I don’t think those who let me know they’re Jewish are more than the tiniest % of those who don’t talk about being Jewish Australian, I know the thoughts of a few dozen people, not of everyone who hides their Jewishness in Australia.

The number of confidences diminished to zero after October 7, but this is partly because I’m no longer invited to give many talks. I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Canberra or East Coast Australia, or my expertise is no longer valued, or people want to avoid problems, so I’m not invited to the sort of meetings where someone can seek me out quietly and find out more about their heritage.

What I miss most about those conversations is the recipe-swapping. I have two really wonderful Crypto-Jewish recipes that I’ve dated to the 17th century from a person who identified publicly as Latin American Catholic. I gave them information about books and websites where they could place their heritage and understand it better without having to break their public face. This was a win-win. Once a year I cook a 17th century Jewish recipe from that hidden tradition, to celebrate how much this person knew (and still knows!) and how amazing it was to hear about it. (I also cook these dishes to honour those who were murdered at the command of the Inquisition, and this is my normal public reason for cooking: today is not normal.) At moments like that I understand why I might be a safe person to talk to about things.

Since October 7 and the diminution in places in Australia that want to hear me, there has, as I’ve said been no-one sharing these secrets. This means that there are fewer people who touch base with those who are isolated and scared. Those who found comfort in me chatting about how to write family stories or how to teach cultural differences respectfully or how to interpret foodways or all those stories about the Middle Ages are not going to talk to a rabbi or visit a community centre when hateful slogans are painted on the walls or there was a fire bomb or anywhere where there is a crowd chanting Jewhate slogans outside.

Australia has always been somewhat antisemitic. It was also one of the important places where Shoah refugees came. It’s always had a Jewish population that feels safer unseen. Moments when strangers can reach out and share their identity are so very important, given all of this.

I think one of the reasons I was considered safe might have been because it’s not been wise to wear a magen david in Canberra for about 20 years, so I wasn’t flamboyantly Jewish… I was just Jewish. Or it may be for another reason. Thinking back, I had my first conversations along these lines when I was pre-teen, so it may be something about the way I hold myself. I honestly don’t know. Several people have said it’s because I talk so much, so maybe it’s that.

When I first started having those conversations I used to feel so guilty, because I couldn’t understand why these people hid their identity. I always kept everything secret because someone had asked it and because I respected them.

These days, life in Jewish Australia is far more problematic. I can see the wisdom in being a hidden Jew.

Deadlines

personby Gillian Polack
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I have many files open on my computer today. By tomorrow night, if all goes well, most of them will be closed and in my past. I am, you see, in the final throes of the PhD. I submit my thesis on Thursday.

The thesis is around 75,000 words long and will, like most Australian PhDs, be examined as a written text. There is no oral component, just as there was no major field component. All the skills training and short courses I took, I took along the way, and part of the PhD (though not part of the 75,000 words) is to sum my training and presentations and new skills up. This is not part of the examination. It’s part of the paperwork that accompanies it. I have four forms to fill in today and two tomorrow. This, also, is part of the system.

This PhD is different to all other PhDs that I have done in one important way. I was quite ill the whole way through. I keep finding bits of my brain spattered on the page and then spend however-long-it-takes working out what stupidities I’ve said and how to fix them. Also, I am looking for corruption from the word processors and sharing a document over and over. The footnotes were a mess and are now sorted. That’s something. Most of my time today and tomorrow will be spent the same way as most of my time yesterday: working through the document, one sentence at a time, and making sure it makes sense.

What’s something else entirely is repeated text where the memory of an earlier version has crept through. I first encountered this corruption as a problem when I worked on much larger books when I was in the public service. It’s never a problem with short stories or novellas (for me, anyhow) but the moment something has more than, say, 20 drafts and is over about 60,000 words, I need to be aware and do a re-read. I have already copied and pasted to reduce the memory of umpteen versions in a single file, but that is no longer the magic cure it was with older word processors.

I never have this problem when I only work on something for six months, and when I don’t write as many drafts. Books are more easily written using the Mozart method, where everything is perfect from the very beginning, I suspect. I cannot write that way at all these days – illness intervenes.

In fact, I’ve never been able to write academic prose that way. Three supervisors scolded me when I wrote my very first PhD. One complained about wanting to turn the pages. The others merely said it was too readable and not scholarly enough. All the rewrites for that thesis were an attempt to make it, as I was instructed “Less discursive and less interesting.” I’m more scholarly these days, because I’m around forty years older and my brain is now officially turgid, but I still write fiction more easily than any of the academic disciplines I work in.

Each PhD is in a different discipline and each discipline has a different style. I like the referencing system for this one the best, but ethnohistory is so much easier for me to write than literary studies, for instance. My brain is not configured correctly for literary studies.

What happens on Thursday? I submit the thesis, a bunch of forms and reports and then I wait. The earliest I’m likely to hear about results is 10 weeks from submission. The longest I’ve ever had to wait for results was three years. Three years is not typical of Australian examinations! Most people know within three months. Those three years cost me my first career… no-one wants to employ someone who has no idea what the examiners think about their research.

What will I do with all the time I have after Thursday? I have a vampire novel that needs finishing. I am so tempted to add footnotes and a bibliography to it. Or maybe recipes. How many vampire novels contain recipes? I will ponder this important thought while I work through 75,000 words, gradually and gently.

 

PS Australia is still counting votes. This is the most interesting election in years, and I wish I had time to talk about it. My electorate still doesn’t have a final result.

A Week in the Life…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m in the final throes of the thesis-writing. In five weeks, my thesis will be submitted for examination. This means the complete thing needs to be done by this Friday. Sounds fine? Except… this Saturday is Passover. Some friends helped me with some of the shopping and I’ve ordered everything else for delivery plus the fresh stuff at the market), but I need to have the flat clean (since I will be hosting) and the kitchen made as proper as I can. I come from a family that had special dishes for the festival, but my health makes a whole bunch of things not possible and complete kashruth is one of them. I do a best-I-can version, which is not at all suitable for anyone religious.

I do some thesis, do some Passover prep, meet another deadline, deal with the latest panic (my mouse died over the weekend, for instance and my printer is currently sulking), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, do some of my exercises, wonder if I’ll get any sleep, worry about my mother (who has COVID, as do two of my close friends), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, and so on until I can sleep. It will all be sorted by Sunday, and then I will quite possibly not wake up for 36 hours.

Tomorrow I have coffee with a neighbour. Normally I would ask to not do anything extra this week, because I’m already doing 18 hour days, but he’s very seriously ill and can be quite difficult even when he’s well and I cannot leave it long. So… tomorrow.

I will have to send someone a note about a Wednesday meeting. It’s with a local candidate. We have elections on 3 May, you see. I really need to talk to him and I’ve tried and tried and failed and failed and finally he comes to the Jewish Community Centre and it’s the Wednesday before my thesis has to be sent and before Passover. His timing is so bad.

He should have asked to see us last week, or left it until the week before the election. The timing suggests that he really doesn’t see antisemitism (or us, as the local Jewish community) as a high priority. Also, his office gave me the run around when I offered to talk to someone about why things are the way they are at the moment – and this is part of my academic expertise and I can be really useful… The staff of two politicians have given me the run around. I so miss my previous self, who was asked about things! Anyhow, I’ve decided not to offer my knowledge and understanding to politicians any more. I’d rather meet my deadlines and enjoy cooking for Passover.

Other people are asking me about things, which is a bit of a relief. My big insight for today is that it’s actually very easy to identify who is marching for hate and who is marching with hope that they can improve the wrongs of the world. It’s not what side people take (the good side of history that so many people claim right now… not actually how most of the world operates).

The way people march tells us so much. Look at the body language and listen to the slogans. Do the slogans provide methods to effect change, or are they declamations that lead nowhere. Does the group prevent others from passing, or block access to anywhere? How angry are the people, and what reasons do the slogans give for any anger? Do marchers stop and talk and listen, or do they simply shout, or do they accuse strangers of… almost anything. Telling strangers who the strangers are and shouting in their face is the issue here: actual change agents talk and listen, because change happens when people can see they’re a potential part of solutions. Those marches that breathe fire and brimstone and don’t take a moment to stop being angry, those marches where (as happened this week) a group surround a single stranger and bullies them – they’re the marching equivalent of Nazis in the 1930s. This doesn’t mean their cause is terrible: it means that these particular people are bullies.

Look at how people march and what specific goals they aim to achieve with the march, and whether not even a small part of those marching bully anyone watching or anyone trying to get past and you get a good notion of whether they really care about others… or whether they are informed by hate. If you don’t want to carry that hate with you, you need a way of winding down.

My way is often thinking about food. I have learned a whole new bread-making method in the last few weeks, entirely to handle the antisemitic hate I encounter. This week is not about that bread, however: now that I’ve sorted out how I will obtain all the things for cooking, I have most of a menu for Saturday night.

We begin, of course, with the ritual things. I have horseradish (it cost an arm and a leg, but I have some – it’s simply not in season in autumn) and matzah. I will serve the matzah with charoseth. My father’s charoseth recipe is wonderful: apples and almonds and sweet wine made from Concord grapes and enormous amounts of cinnamon.

After the charoseth, there will be the traditional eggs and potatoes, to be dipped in salt water. I have organic free range hen’s eggs from my local egg farmer ($25 for 60 large eggs, for those tracking the prices of eggs), and also a little packet of quail eggs. There will be no chopped liver – I have the ingredients (the liver is in the freezer) but intend to eat it on Friday week.

After that, of course, chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah dumplings) both of which I make according to old family recipes. The main course is roast chicken (with lemon and garlic) and vegetables. The roasted vegetables will be potato and lotus root. I haven’t decided all the side dishes yet, but there are two types of pickled cucumber, and the same kind of ancient olives that grew near Jerusalem around the time the Temple fell. There is a story behind why these olives grow in Australia, and that story has family connections.

I was going to make cakes (an orange-almond one and a choc-nut one) for dessert, but I think we’re skipping dessert and going straight to afters. The Passover meal I grew up with is far, far too large for modern Australia. A friend found me chocolate macaroons and I have dark chocolate, and the best organic dried muscatels from a local farm. I will have fresh figs with this, and maybe some other autumn fruit. I may make one of the cakes during the week… or I may not.

Tomorrow, to give me time away from my computer on such a busy day, I shall make bagels. That’s the last of the flour and yeast. Tomorrow lunch is the last of the rice and the last of the nori. Step by step I sort my world, and then I cook the big dinner on Saturday.

II live such a simple, slow life.

Baycon 2024 report

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

Baycon is my local science fiction convention and I’ve been attending it, more or less regularly, since the 1990s. It’s moved from one hotel and city to another over the years and I have followed, “as the tail follows the dog.” My attendance came to a screeching halt in 2020 with the pandemic. The last convention I attended in person was FogCon in February of that year. We knew that a nasty virus was afoot but nobody wore masks. We “elbow-bumped” instead of hugging. If anyone got sick, I never heard. Then came the lockdown, as we called it. Conventions switched to virtual attendance. Althought I’m a somewhat slow adopted or tech, I’d become used to video chatting back in 2013, when I took care of my best friend in a different state while she was dying of cancer. My husband and I stayed in touch (via Skype, if I remember correctly). Then when my younger daughter attended medical school on the other side of the country, we visited by video chat regularly. She moved back to this area for her residency. Her final year was 2020, during which her regular service rotations were replaced by caring for dying Covid patients. Needless to say, I became quite cautious about my exposure. So even when conventions began to move from virtual-only to hybrid to in-person, I reconnected slowly. Even when I was ready to attend a convention in person (2023, which shows you how long it took me), armed with masks, hand sanitizer, and rapid tests, the universe conspired to jinx my plans. It was hard. I missed my friends and all the chance encounters and spontaneous expressions of community. All this is a prelude to my first successful return to in-person conventions.

Baycon programming had asked potential panelists to suggest topics. Two of mine were accepted, including Writing Beyond Trauma. Here’s the description I wrote:

These are perilous times for many of us. As survivors or the loved ones of survivors, how has our experience affected us as writers? How do our stories transcend and heal? Escape? Educate our audience? Are there times when the pain is so great, the words simply will not come–what do we do when we have lost our voice and how do we use writing to regain it? In this panel, we will strive to listen respectfully and to leave time between each speaker to absorb more deeply what they have said.

As a survivor of complex PTSD, I’m passionately interested in how my experiences affect my writing but also how writing provides a path to healing. But trauma refers to much more than individual experiences: it includes community and membership in larger groups (such as race or gender/sexual minority, immigrant status, incarceration history). My co-panelists included two people of color, a Native Indigenous person (Ohlone) and a survivor of cancer. Several of us had lost people we loved to violence or lived with mental illness. Others had experienced genocide directed at our communities. As moderator, I wanted to make sure the discussion was safe, respectful, and inclusive. I reached out to my co-panelists before the convention to make sure I understood which topics they wanted to be included and which they would prefer to avoid. How might we tread the line between invasion of privacy and triggers while being open? One thing I did was to keep the discussion slow, with time to listen deeply to each person’s comments. On several occasions, I asked for a moment to let what someone had said sink in. Panelists shared strategies for unblocking the inner voice when it has fallen silent due to overwhelming pain and grief. These ranged from picking up a different medium of creativity like music or crafts to “putting fears on the page” to using “baby steps” to reconnect with the flow of words. The panel was rich, compelling, and deeply moving.

The same day, I was on a panel on Creating Original Worlds. When I was a young writer, world-building checklists were highly touted. I could never do that. My characters took me on guided tours of the worlds of my stories. My fellow panelists agreed that an organic approach to world-building is not only perfectly valid but works better for many writers. I’ve had the experience of not knowing what research to do until the story demands it. I loved the phrase “reality-adjacent” to describe taking real-world history, cultures, etc., and tweaking them. Alternate history is an example, as are worlds that are familiar except for the addition of a fantastical or science-fictional element. How a writer creates worlds also depends on whether they are a “pantser” or an outliner.

In the panel on Beta Readers and Critique Groups, the panel agreed that it was as important to know what advice to ignore as what to take seriously. We also agreed that while it’s nice to ask your mother/partner/child to read your manuscript, they probably aren’t the best source of helpful feedback. When approaching a trusted reader or critique group, it’s a good idea to specify what level of feedback you’re looking for, whether overall impact, sensitivity issues, or line editing. For myself, I rarely let anyone see my first drafts—second or third is usual. I still revise a lot because my rough drafts are very, very rough. I also value the community support of writers’ groups.

My last panel was Paying Forward, Backward, and Sideways, a love letter to those who have encouraged us. We told stories of more senior writers who mentored us, how our colleagues cheered us on (and vice versa), and our responsibility to the generation of writers after us. I was reminded of a quote from Samuel Goldwyn: “When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.”

In between all this, I hung out with friends I hadn’t seen in person in four years, had a delightful time in the dealers’ room (gift-buying destination!) and got to attend a few panels. My all-time favorite was The Worst First Page, in which panelists attempted to write truly dreadful first pages. Being great writers, they failed, often with hilarious results. One particular entry was so well done, the audience enthusiastically urged the writer to submit it for publication as a humor piece.

 

 

Not-Christmas and not-weather (mostly, sorta)

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

At this time of year I hear a lot about snow and sleet and the need for egg nogs to get through winter cold and gloom, and it’s very tempting to counter this with stories of the flooding in Northern Queensland and the heat and the incoming storms. The incoming storms today might mean we have a tolerable weekend, which is very important for those who are having big parties over said weekend. The storms, when they’re over, will be good for me because I am not a summer heat kind of person.

I want to talk about the weather for about two hours, because I’m in the mood for it, but I shall stop here, because I’m so very kind. Also because I would like people to give me merely a paragraph on the state of winter darkness before moving on to more interesting topics in their own writings in this season. If I would like this then I should give you a mere paragraph on summer heat before moving on.

So… let me talk about the weekend. Weekends are always good to talk about.
I’ve been advised to avoid all the places where there are marches for this whole season, because there is often a component of people in those marches who are not entirely safe for anyone Jewish, so I have already done most things for the next week. I do not need to go to shops or near big streets where folks demonstrate politically.

This time of year is mostly a period of intense work for me, with a few really, really nice exceptions. 2023 is classic for me in this regard.

School and university (except for research students who don’t do Christmas) have already finished for the year. Both the calendar year and the academic year, in fact. We’re about to get the annual shutdown of most things. Everyone’s frantically preparing or on a plane to somewhere cool – I mean the latter literally. So many of my friends are heading north into winter.

This year, because I can see friends if we’re all careful (I’m COVID-vulnerable) I will have visits from friends who are on holiday but not headed north. I have chocolate to feed them, in case it’s too hot to cook. Much chocolate will be consumed. I’m thinking of getting some mint and making big jugs of iced tea (without sugar, because Australians are not so big on sweet things, on the whole) but that will have to start next week. I refuse to encounter crowds just for mint.

I celebrate Christmas for the same friends who celebrate my New Year. We’re kinda extended family for each other. I’ve already made sure that two lots of presents and some very nice port is at their place, because while they cook, I will finish a chapter. My personal race with time is that chapter – if I complete it I get the afternoon and evening of 24 December off.

That morning is the last market day in the year and I’m going to the market with one of my friends to make sure we have all the things needed both for the dinner and for the few days after. Me, I’m making sure there are lots of cherries. Cherries are so important for the whole end-of-year period. When I was in Canada for Christmas/New Year people had poinsettias, which weren’t the same at all. Mind you, they also had snow. Which was, of course, exotic.

If the weather is nice, we’ll be outside. If it’s not, we’ll be inside with air monitoring and tiny portable air purifiers. It’s perfectly possible to have nice events with the COVID-vulnerable. We proved it last year and we’re doing it again this. I’m hoping for outside for most of it, however, because a summer day with children is better outdoors. I like the years we go down to the lake and picnic and the black swans come to investigate all the presents, but this year we’re staying home. This means that when I am nicely relaxed and have eaten too much I can wander home and do some work, so that is good, too.

Unlike much of the US, Canberra does a pretty thorough shut-down over Christmas. This means no tradition of Chinese restaurants for anyone Jewish.

What I sometimes do in its stead these days is host an online chat with friends about the Toledoth Yeshuah. 25 December then is a big working day for me, except for an occasional detour via that really interesting by-product of antisemitism. The Toledoth came into being because of other times like this, and it’s interesting to see how we dealt with this stuff (culturally) in times past. So I will be exploring it, but unless anyone asks, I’ll explore it alone. It’s not a comfortable text, nor a comfortable tradition. Hate hurts.

Boxing Day is different. This year it will be my father’s 100th birthday. He died when I was 26, but I miss him and want to celebrate anyhow. I’m just 2 years younger now than he was when he died, which is, I admit, sobering. Friends are coming round to toast him during the day, but only a few friends. I shall watch a really bad comedy he enjoyed, or maybe one of his favourite Doctor Who sequences… I’ll decide on the day.

In my evening, which is morning in Europe and the day before in the US and Canada, I’ll open up a Zoom room where anyone who is at a loose end can drop in and tell bad jokes in honour of my father and generally catch up. If you would like a link to the room, contact me in the next few days and I’ll send it the moment it’s live. Waiting til the last minute means if I am unwell, which happens, I can sneak in some rest and start a bit later. I’m looking at beginning around 8 pm AEST (Australian Eastern Summer Time, which is UTC/GMT+11) and continuing for as long as there are friends who want to hang out.

Let me know if you’d like to be part of anything I do online during this time.

Also, I’d love to know what other people do over the long weekend, if they don’t have a regular Christmas for whatever reason. I’d love to hear about other kinds of Christmas!

Talks and ducks and coots and swans

personby Gillian Polack
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I writing several talks this week. I didn’t used to write talks: I used to simply deliver them. Because of the health issues I have, though, I can’t guarantee that, on the day I give a talk or when the talk is recorded for later delivery (this latter is what happens this evening) I will be able to think effectively and to speak cogently. Most of the time, now, then, I write things down. So many people want to read it as a written word, too, that I often have a small audience (this month through Patreon) that wants to see what I say.

I have two pieces for finish today. One is an academic paper. My academic self is quite different to my fictional self when it comes to talks. The academic self is more intense and only sometimes includes bad jokes. The paper is about where the history comes from in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver and is for a conference in Melbourne on Monday. I need to complete the overheads today and to do that, I need to know what I’m going to say, so it’s wise to finish the whole paper.

I have written almost all of the paper (and it’s already in the hands of someone who won’t be at the conference on Monday, but who needs to see it). All I need to do today with it is finicky finishing and the Powerpoint presentation. Academic work always contains much finicky finishing.

To do these last bits, I read the written word aloud, over and over. Each time I read a sentence, I listen to discover it makes sense in its place and whether words need switching or the sentence needs moving or if the whole thing has to be crossed out and replaced with something more sensible.

This is why most of my academic papers relate closely to my current research. I used to deliver more entertaining papers, but then I realised that the closeness of the editing for a good paper advances my thought on the research. Often it’s subtle advancement, but it’s always useful. My papers are less fun, but way more useful.

After the conference, I’ll take the paper and compare it to the chapter it relates to and the chapter will suddenly make a lot more sense. Editing today, then, means editing next week and the week after. This is a good thing.

What about the talk? The talk is for Octocon, which is in Ireland over the weekend. On my Monday morning I will technically be in Ireland having delivered the talk and in Melbourne, delivering the paper, mere hours apart. This is why my talk is being pre-recorded. I will have pictures for the Octocon talk, and these I still have to find and put in order. Mostly, though, with the talk, I need to make it make sense for people who have not read the books I’m talking about (by Tolkien, by Australian writer Leife Shallcross, by Irish writer Peadar Ó Guilín, and by Naomi Novik), who haven’t studied the subject I’m talking about and who want a bit of lyricism or humour to entice them to keep listening. The subject is how space and boundaries are important to fantasy fiction. Right now there’s too much lyricism. It’s easy to wax lyrical about forests and rivers and borderlands. However, I don’t want the words to ripple and flow and to create an abstract design: I need them to make sense. I have 800 words to add, then the rest of this talk lies in the edits. More reading aloud. More making things make sense to people who don’t live in my brain.

At 10 pm tonight, I have a long meeting with someone in Montreal. She will walk me through the tech side of Octocon, sort out all the tech issues related to the talk, record the talk and… my day will finish early tomorrow. Tomorrow I have 2 meetings (one for work, one for fun) and need to finish the first draft of another talk. I have five conventions/conferences this month, only one face to face. I’m short on time because all this is as well as my research. It’s work I love, but it’s not paid, also, so other things have to happen to keep me in food and electricity. This fortnight those other things are my research (for which I have funding) and Patreon.

Also, if anyone thinks that chronic illness and disability disappear in weeks like this… they do not. This week is a very exciting juggling act. Furthermore, most of this work is not paid. It’s just part of the life of a writer. Each of us have different things we do. Because I’m partly an academic (mostly unemployed, but not entirely) and partly a writer, much of my life is spent explaining awesomely interesting subjects, but without the support of an academic salary. It’s not always terribly easy.

Welcome to the life of many writers. Some of us are ducks, some of us are coots, some of us are swans, but we all paddle madly just out of sight in order to stay afloat. Many of us (me, for example) battle significant everyday issues as well. Every book of ours you buy, every Patreon you support or Ko.Fi you buy, makes the paddling a little less frantic.

News and thoughts about the news

personby Gillian Polack
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Why do I have trouble announcing cool things? Why is it so very difficult to tell you all that I’m on two short lists?

The first list is for an Australian award for my book Story Matrices (edited by Francesca Barbini), and the second is an international one for the Sidewise Award (alt history) for my Medieval story in the amazing Other Covenants short story collection. The short story is “Why the Bridgemasters of York Don’t Pay Taxes,” edited by Andrea D. Lobel and Mark Shainblum (who I finally met, just the other day). Both lists are wonderful to be on. I’m unlikely to win either.

While both are most excellent, the Sidewise in particular is a wonderful moment. Even I can’t deny that.

There is a special, special honour in being listed along with these amazing writers. It’s taken me days to admit this. Partly this is because I’ve not had much comment either short listing. Six people have told me how pleased they are about the William Atheling one, and one of those six is my mother. Another is the editor. This means I feel a bit invisible. Partly this is because there are far better writers than me and it’s easier to talk about them than to talk about my own work. Also, partly this is because Australia is a bit odd. Some people get big shouts for all their accomplishments… I am not one of those people. One day I will discover why, but until that day comes, I will assume my writing is just not that good. There is a lot of encouragement for me to think that and very little for me to think otherwise. Except from German academics, but that’s another story.

However… there are things that no-one’s asked me about my short story and this is the moment to spill the beans. In order for me to spill the beans you need to know about my short story and about one of my novels. Bridgemasters was only released in December last year. The novel is The Green Children Help Out, which came out in 2021. The reason I thought my Bridgemasters story would go unnoticed was because the Green Children went pretty much unseen. There was, however, a much bigger reason for it going unseen than my self-doubt. COVID lockdowns and quiet hit me harder than some, because I was unable to go to any events face to face (I’m COVID-vulnerable), and in Australia it’s almost impossible to reach readers unless they see and talk to you, I’ve found. The story and the novel are linked. In fact, I wrote the Bridgemasters story (and a couple of others) as a testing ground for the world I was building for the Bridgemasters story. They’re quite different, but they’re set in the same alternate Earth. I wanted to know what sort of cultural underpinnings my English Jewish characters would have in this alternate Earth. I test these things in a number of ways, and I build the world gently and carefully, then I let it rip with a story or two. The other stories are in the volume of my collected short stories (Mountains of the Mind), which was also short listed for an award. I am obviously not good at learning.

I thought my Green Children novel was good, but I didn’t think my Bridgemasters story was anything more than a small fun piece, translating late Medieval Christian thought into a world inhabited by Jews that a very particular group of Christians are forced to protect. This just shows that some writers are not good judges of their own work. It also shows that being mainly confined to a tiny physical world for three years was not the end of the known universe. I’m working on a gentle and slow emergence. We’ll see if that changes anything.

I should just have said, “Look! Announcements!” If I win either (unlikely) I promise to do that. In the meantime, I hope a few more readers see my work and make up their own minds about it. Quite obviously I’m not the right person to advise on whether to read my work!

Flowers and garbage and invisible illness

personby Gillian Polack
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Very few people wonder how those of us whose bodies are less capable of doing this or that get anything done. I am a very good illustration. I had glandular fever (mononucleosis to my US friends, I believe) in my mid-twenties and developed many of the vile long-term symptoms that people currently associate with Long COVID. In other words, I’ve had similar symptoms to Long COVID for nearly 40 years. This is not the only problem I’ve faced in my life, nor, indeed is it the biggest. It’s certainly the one that has invited the least inquiry. And the least understanding. Today I want to talk about how I’ve achieved anything at all in a life where I cannot guarantee even an hour without fatigue and pain. The physical side of it is one story and I don’t want to talk about that today. Today is, you see, an exhausted day, when I should be in bed wondering when I will improve a bit. It’s not a day I have to be in bed, however – those days when any exertion at all just makes things worse have become rarer as time passes.

I lost my time sense last night. That is, to me, a signal I need to live my alternate life. This post is brought to you from this alternate life. It’s a half day later than usual because I had to wait until I was able to do it.

This is how I handle days like this. If others have needs I fit in with them, but the next day is worse if I fit in. I suspect Friday will be a bed day because Monday night and Tuesday nights are brain fog days (with occasional windows of opportunity, one of which is right now), Wednesday is full of meetings and Thursday is full of unexpected medical stuff. I didn’t expect Wednesday and Thursday to be the way they are, which is how I can predict Friday. One thing I’m doing to prepare is (with the help of a friend) a big shop. One of the things I will be getting is reheatable food for Thursday to Monday. On Saturday I knew that yesterday and today would be a bit of a struggle, so on Sunday I prepared food for both days. This planning is constant. And I don’t always have the energy to do it.

There’s a lot of body-awareness and a lot of planning to get through the everyday and when one of these fall through things are like a deck of cards and I have to stop and start all over again. Currently I have enough income so that if the cards all fall down, all I need to do is drag myself to the computer and order enough home delivered food to get me through. Or open a tin from my cupboard. I lived on dolmades for 3 days recently, then I advanced to chicken and chips, because that was the easiest option and I wasn’t up to more. Then I was through that phase and was able to cook again.

Knowing I’m exceptionally busy on other peoples’ schedules this week means I can plan in advance. When anyone tries to spring something on me, they can set me up for a whole week of not being able to deal and I will hide it, generally, but there are people I really do not like because they never check if I’m able before springing things on me. If I had energy on the worst days, I could explain to someone who says “I have to see you” that it has to wait because I’m unwell. In fact, I do explain “I can’t do it now because…” but I can’t get into detailed explanations. Exertion can hurt and sometimes the little things like explaining (especially if there’s emotion attached) can hurt more than the large. This is why, oddly, the chronic fatigue is more of a problem in my life than more serious problems are.

The other thing that happens when my time sense gets derailed is that I drift off into byways. The path this post has taken is one of these byways. I meant to launch straight into “This is how I get novels and non-fiction written and research done and achieve as much as some people who have never had any sort of debilitating illness.” I think the tide of emotion carries my life forward at these moments. This post is an excellent example, in fact, of how this happens.

I use emotion to get work done at times like this. I sat down at my computer to write this post, having no idea what I’d write about at that point. I saw my research document open on the desk and just took a look before opening a new file. I edited three paragraphs. It wasn’t a lot, but over a week (even a really bad week) this adds up. Then I stopped and thought, “Why did I do this? Why didn’t I go straight to the blogpost?” My answer was, “It’s one of those weeks” and then “But I should tell people”. Because the sense that something is important gives me enough fuel to write. I will sit down quietly for a half hour as soon as this is posted, and then I’ll go shopping with a friend and make sure I have food for the coming life-sapped time.

I’m the sort of person who would rather work methodically, so when I’m less beleaguered, all my work is done entirely sensibly. On days like today, I allow the wind to carry me along, and take advantage of the moments I have. Little things, done when I can. That’s how I deal with the fatigue and the near-constant pain. I factor in the physical work I need to do to keep going and, month by month, I deal. I write whole novels this way, and do my research and when I can’t do anything except sit or lie down, I think things through. Slowly. My brain stutters at times like this. It’s bad for quick thoughts and insights – it’s wonderful for deep and slow unpinning of complex problems.

A few years ago, when I realised my strange lifestyle, I found a way of describing it. That description was more useful to friends who asked “Are you OK?” than to people like the one who emailed me a the start of Yom Kippur last year, and who wanted to meet urgently. It was a week far worse than this and I wouldn’t be up to a face to face meeting for weeks. I lost my Yom Kippur over that email and lost some days after it. The person who emailed would not have understood this from my metaphor. I needed more capacity to explain than I had… some situations are simply impossible, still.

My metaphor is not a new one. I say that life throws me garbage and, bit by bit, without pushing myself into more illness, I turn that garbage into fertiliser and it grows me the nicest garden. All my published novels are flowers, and Story Matrices, the book that has just been short-listed for the William Atheling Jr Award, is a rather nice rosebush. That book was written in a shockingly bad year, but the editor, Francesca Barbini, knew this and worked with me according to my actual capacity. She didn’t try to make me into something I’m not. She helped me create the best thing I was able to create in a year from hell.

Every paragraph I edit and every thought I have transforms this strange life into a strangely interesting life. Chronic illness isn’t the end of things… it does however, change things. And most people won’t ask or won’t know or won’t care. That’s part of the garbage being thrown. That garbage can be isolating and it can be depressing, but it’s excellent fertiliser.

Now all I need to do is find a publisher for the novel I wrote when I wrote Story Matrices. It’s the fictional approach to this isolation and strangeness and is a very different COVID lockdown novel to most. My way of dealing with the difficult is rather like a portal fantasy, you see, where you open doors briefly and visit worlds you can’t remain in because remaining is dangerous. My COVID novel is a quietly adventurous version of the portal novel that is my life. Glenda Larke (a friend with a marvellous new novel) was my beta reader and she told me that it was the best love story that she’d ever read. It needs a home, but writing it was the accomplishment. Just as the publication of Story Matrices was an accomplishment. Just as editing three paragraphs of my research and writing this blog post are accomplishments.

Chronic ill health isn’t the end of things. It does, however, require a series of reinventions of self, and the ability to say “If this is all I can do today then that’s fine.”

Why am I telling you all this? Because Long COVID is not going to go away. Some people will recover and some won’t. It’s quite likely you know someone who needs to know that this kind of chronic illness is not that end of world and that, over time, some extraordinary things are possible. They probably also need to know that the vast majority of folks around them will not see or even want to see what the new life entails.

Adjusting never stops. Seeing your own needs is essential. And once you know what your signals are (in my case, that loss of time and that drifting brain and the need to dump my once-wondrous rationality) and how to handle them (when to push, when to let things slide, how not to live on chips) life can become a lot better. Your garden will be all the better for the fertiliser. It won’t feel that way, however, because no matter what you do with the garbage being thrown at you, it’s still garbage. I’m still learning to celebrate the flowers and not be personally affronted at the garbage that is thrown in my direction.

Food memories

personby Gillian Polack
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While I was thinking about what I should write this week, I began some chicken soup. Boiling chickens are very hard to come by now, and that sent me back in time to four winters ago, when the bushfires kept me indoors and there was no COVID. I was making chicken soup then, too. The post was for BookView Cafe and when they fixed their website, it came down, alas. So… here it is again. It amuses me that despite my whole life changing over four years, I can still be relied upon to make chicken soup in winter. And I still play with time.

 

Today I’m a bit timewarped. My July and August are basically impossible, so I’m spending a freezing July evening pretending it’s an even more freezing evening in later July or maybe a milder evening in August. I hope to be back to writing a few days before I post later in the year: this means you’ll get timely blogposts then. Everything I write today is influenced by today, even if I try to take my mind into the world of two weeks’ time or a month’s time.

My hands are so cold I can’t even type properly. The heater is on and I’m making chicken porridge and chicken soup and still my hands are cold. Midwinter is midwinter is always, always midwinter.

My own chicken soup is my traditional way of getting through midwinter. I bought a cheap boiling chicken (the label proudly proclaims ‘steamer’ but it knows it’s a chook meant for soup) and I put it in the slow cooker with bone left over from my chicken porridge. That and four litres of water will take me through until this time tomorrow. That’s when I’ll add onion. Saturday I add carrot and take half the soup away. On Sunday I buy parsnip and celery from the market, top up the water by a large amount, and finish the soup off.

The soup I take off will have other things added to it, including tiny dumplings. I bought the wrappers yesterday. I’ve got some vegetables and sesame oil and other nice things and will shred the chicken currently working valiantly to make the soup. I’ll mix all this together for my dumplings. That’s lunch every day next week.

The rest of the soup will be a base for dinner. My next six nights’ worth of dinner, though, is that chicken porridge, with the chicken from it and various vegetable dishes on the side. The chicken is already in a bowl with its sauce, and I’ve made some pickled daikon. It’s a substantial meal, but also not too heavy. Full of garlic and warm tastes.

Just making these things has warmed my fingers up somewhat and I now have a big cup of tea, which makes them all kinds of happy. Happy fingers are a good thing when one has a lot of typing to do. Having most of my food cooked before the week is even better. All I need to worry about is more vegie dishes or salads on Sunday and I will be eating well and staying warm and have every change of meeting my deadlines.

This is Australia in winter. We’re at the start of the financial year and we’re impossibly busy and we turn to food. So many people are talking seriously about food right now, and getting their tax papers ready.

During my busy periods, I usually cook from Thursday to Sunday and then spend a few days finishing everything up. This is what happens in many Aussie households. My days are different because my working week is a bit odd and I have little control over when I get to shop, but a lot of my friends cook for the week ahead rather than cook on the day.

What strikes me is how many Australians cook. We are one of the countries that has farmers’ markets and takes fresh ingredients for granted. This need not have been the case. Our distances our so great and our basic cuisine so English that we could have made quite different food choices.

Not everyone cooks here, but those who don’t can be very apologetic. At functions where we ‘bring a plate’ those who bring a plate of their home cooking are seen as doing the right thing and those who’ve picked something up on the way are not bad people so much as people we look at and hope that this means they were busy rather than that they can’t cook.

I once went to a dinner party where someone had ordered the food in. For casual eating we all do that. We love our food, so we love many kinds of food, so it’s fine to order in for casual eating, but not for formal dinners. The host and hostess didn’t mention what they’d done and everyone was happy for the food was delicious.

The trouble our hosts faced that night is that we all ask questions about food. “What’s in this?” and “How do make that?” MasterChef is one of Australia’s favourite TV programs. I was the first person to cause a problem, for our hosts had no idea if a dish had nuts and I have a severe allergy.

“Try it and see,” suggested the host.

“How far is the hospital?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Then I won’t, today. It looks good, though.”

A few minutes later the person opposite me said, “This dessert is terrific. Can you share the recipe?”

The whole table was silent. I looked at the person asking. They had worked out that the food was not home made and that there was a recipe. Their child also had a peanut allergy (we’d chatted about it) and they were making a point… politely.

That was years ago, people are more careful about allergies. I get many fewer dinner invitations because a very few people prefer to avoid the whole issue, which is a funny cultural shift.

The other funny cultural shift is how the tendency for those with income to eat out or send for a home delivery or buy premade food from the supermarket make sense of US movies for us. I’ve noticed that the recipes shared on local fora are more often basic recipes, too, because not as may people know how to cook.

Still, a large percentage of Aussies cook. This still informs our foodways. I am not the only one cooking reassuring food this week to get through midwinter.