I’ve gone with the theme of underrated women writers, across genres: novels, science writing, humour writing and memoir/history. These writers aren’t underrated in the sense of not being recognised at all – in fact, they’ve had some extraordinary praise and accolades. But they’re not read as widely as I think they deserve to be. And they’re all terrific examples of women writers who can more than hold their own.

Sybille Bedford

A Legacy and Jigsaw

Sybille Bedford died a couple of years ago, less well known than she should have been. She lived an extraordinary life and wrote extraordinarily well about it, using the material of her life in her novels as well as her non-fiction. Her first novel, A Legacy, about two intertwined upper-class German families (one bourgeois, one aristocratic) in the years before the First World War, was described by Nancy Mitford as ‘one of the very best novels I have ever read’ and by Evelyn Waugh as ‘new, cool, witty and elegant’. Hilary Mantel more recently called it ‘a fabulous monster of a book’ and declared that ‘in my novel-crowded house it’s one I could never lose’. It’s an absorbing literary page-turner, rich with eccentric character vignettes, laced with a wry wit, and boasting a plot worthy of soap opera. And it’s all based on the lives of her own family.

Equally good, in my view, is her 1989 novel Jigsaw, an almost-autobiography. She grew up with her father, after her parents’ divorce, in a crumbling grand house near the French border, where there was no money for groceries but a valuable wine cellar. From the age of ten, she lived with her beautiful, charismatic, stunningly neglectful morphine addict mother, in Italy and the south of France, where her friends and neighbours included the Huxleys (she went on to write a two-volume biography of Aldous).

I regret to say that it’s been a few years since I last read these books, so I’m short on details. But what I really love about Sybille Bedford is that she’s a master stylist, but also a master storyteller – an absolute pleasure to read, both for the gorgeousness of her sentences and the sharpness of her observations, and for the vicarious thrill of being thoroughly caught up in her characters and their stories.

Cordelia Fine

Delusions of Gender

Cordelia Fine is a Melbourne-based writer (and neuropsychologist) and yet, most of the attention she’s received for her books (this one and a previous book on the brain, A Mind of its Own) has been from overseas. She’s been reviewed in The New York Times and The Guardian and interviewed by Salon. Yet, the book seems to have had little attention here. She’ll be appearing at the Melbourne Writers Festival next month and Delusions of Gender was just shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, so hopefully this means her local luck is changing. I’m reading this book now, and so far I’m intrigued by her thesis and hooked on her style – intelligent, impeccably well researched, but also conversational and genuinely funny. Here, she looks at how the notion of biological brain differences is being used to explain and excuse inequality between the sexes, taking apart some of the oft-cited studies that are being taken seriously by social commentators and policy-makers, and shows up how flimsy the findings are. What’s most striking is that these kinds of studies and the ‘evidence’ they find are being used to structure our society, education, relationships and the way we bring up our children.

Maria Tumarkin

Traumascapes, Courage, Motherland

Full disclosure here: Maria is a friend. But she’s a friend I made through my love of her writing, which I’d been raving about in print for a few years before I met her. I was introduced to Maria through her first book Traumascapes, about the cultural and emotional impact of places where significant traumas have happened – including Port Arthur, the Berlin Wall, the site of the Bali bombings and Ground Zero in New York.

What I love most about Maria’s writing is the way it draws you in. Storytelling is at the heart of her books, and the stories she tells are all, variously, about aspects of what it is to be human. Her books pose questions, but don’t offer neat conclusions – they take you along on the meandering and often messy journey of discovering the answer. And she doesn’t confine herself to a particular genre: she combines memoir, history, philosophy and literary references, using them all to illustrate and explore her ideas.

In Courage, her second book, she explores the notion of courage – what it is, and what it isn’t, too – and, along the way, looks at the myth of the ‘hero’. And in Otherland, she writes about returning to the former USSR, where she lived until the age of 15, with teenage daughter Billie – wanting her to understand something of her origins. Along the way she not only learns that the country she left no longer exists, but that you can’t force someone to experience what you want them to. It’s a complex, deeply moving book about identity, motherhood and belonging.

Honestly, though, I just love the way she writes and thinks – this beautiful recent Meanjin essay on immigrants and storytelling demonstrates how good she is. As Robert Dessaix said in his review of Otherland, Maria is ‘never a bore’.

Sloane Crosley

I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number

Anyone who knows me may well heave a sigh here – I love this woman’s writing and I’ve blabbed about it to anyone who’ll listen. Sloane Crosley, a publicity director at Random House, is also a terrific humorist, and her quirky, charming personal essays about muddling through everyday life and making mistakes along the way are great fun. Topics include working in a publishing company for a boss who threw manuscripts at her head and turned her into a quivering mess (and trying strange, doomed-to-fail ways to get her boss to like her, like gifting her cookies iced in her likeness); locking herself out of her apartment twice in one day; and reluctantly agreeing to be bridesmaid to an old high school acquaintance (she turns out to be a passive-aggressive Bridezilla who changes her surname, along with her husband-to-be, to ‘Universe’, so they can be ‘Mr and Mrs Universe’). HBO has optioned her first book for a series, and Crosley is writing it – they’ve tipped her as ‘the female Larry David’. Underrated here in Australia, but a big deal in her native US.

Martha Gellhorn

The Face of War (collected war journalism), The View From the Ground (collected peace-time journalism), The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another, Martha Gellhorn: A Life (Caroline Moorehead)

Yes, Martha Gellhorn is an iconic literary figure, famous as Hemingway’s third wife, and known as a female war correspondent at a time when it was rare. But how many people actually read her? She was an excellent writer and brilliant observer whose reports, rich with novelistic detail and determinedly non-objective, often read like ‘new’ journalism, years before it was supposedly invented. In fact, it was journalism as advocacy – with a focus on the human, the lives of ordinary people and how they were affected by larger events.

After Hemingway stole her commission to cover the Allies’ landing in France on D-Day, she went anyway, stowing away on a hospital ship and landing on the beach carrying a stretcher. She was there at the liberation of Dachau. (‘Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see, if you are lucky.’)

Though non-fiction was her strength, she also wrote novels and short stories, which you can find in second-hand shops if you’re lucky. (I highly recommend The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn.) And I loved her travel narrative, Travels with Myself and Another, about her worst travel experiences, from navigating remote islands on a small boat, to Africa, which she loved, and touring China with (an unnamed) Hemingway. It’s a window into a past world obliterated by ‘progress’.

There was so much more to her life than five years with Hemingway. If you’re interested, read Caroline Moorehead’s excellent biography, Martha Gellhorn: A Life. (And avoid Carl Rollyson’s awful Beautiful Exile.)

Jo Case’s essay on what is Australian literature appears in Issue Six of Kill Your Darlings, available here.

Stead appeared on a panel with Mandy Sayer (Love in the Years of Lunacy) and Mardi McConnochie (The Voyagers). Her novel, based on her own experiences, is set in a housing commission camp in the 1940s. One reason she wrote it as fiction, she said, was because ‘I’m quite old and I can’t remember anything … so I had to make a lot of it up.’ She went on to say, ‘I believe in some hardship in people’s lives; it makes you grow strong.’ And indeed, despite her quips about being old, what was most striking about Stead was not her age (I think she’s in her seventies), but her poised wit, her straight-backed deadpan delivery and a frankness that fairly dared you to pity or judge her as she mentioned things like her mother’s addiction to pharmaceutical drugs, or leaving school aged 12 and working ‘every day of my life since’.

Talking about where she gets her writing ability from, she shrugged that ‘it’s in the genes’, prompting session chair Matthew Condon to invite her to show the audience the small white badge pinned to her chest: YES I AM. At writers’ festivals, she said, she was regularly asked if she was related to Christina. ‘I thought it would save time,’ she concluded, to peals of laughter from the crowd. (In fact, she is Christina’s niece.)

Sayer and McConnochie have both written novels set between Sydney and other places, during World War II – both featuring separated lovers, music and exploring the way the war enabled changing social and gender roles. ‘We hardly know each other, it’s weird,’ said Mandy, after Mardi joked that they’d obviously been on ‘eerily parallel tracks’. And yet, the pair are very different writers with very different styles – resulting in two very different novels (which I recently reviewed together for the Sydney Morning Herald).

Sayer said the inspiration for her book (which she’d been writing over the past ten years) could be traced to a comment by her first husband, 20 years ago. ‘All of your work’s so girly,’ he’d said. ‘Why don’t you write about war or something?’ (She quipped that maybe she should send him a copy of the novel.)  McConnochie’s inspiration came from her book club, after they’d lamented the lack of contemporary literary love stories. ‘It got me thinking about what a literary love story might be.’

‘I wasn’t interested in the war, but in what the war did to Australian culture, and to the music,’ said Sayer. ‘Also the drugs, the liquor, the food – how Americanised we became.’ She pointed out that wartime was when ‘the underclass finally got a go’, with the entrepreneurial opportunities of sly grog and prostitution.

‘I’m not that interested in war as a subject,’ said McConnochie. ‘I tend to write about women, and wars are very male. But World War II was such a total war; everyone got caught up in it. I write about spheres of activity I can imagine being drawn into myself.’ Stead, who was living in Sydney during the war, recalled ‘the sky being black with Lancasters going up to the Pacific’ and the darkness of the streets at night – and the perils of driving when it was considered too dangerous to use headlights.

McConnochie spoke about the fact that both of her main characters – American sailor Stead and Sydney music student Marina – are fearless, and not thinkers. ‘Music is not a brain art form, it’s a heart art form. Music tells stories through the heart, not brain. It’s something that brings my characters together, it’s the language they speak.’

‘What she said,’ laughed Mandy, saying ‘I wanted to write in a way that the reader would feel the excitement and exhilaration I feel when I hear this music.’

While some of the discussion covered similar ground to that discussed at the Readings International Women’s Day event I blogged about here in March, there were also many interesting new points raised – and it was illuminating to hear what Stephen Romei had to say.

‘As a male literary editor, I stress that I am here voluntarily,’ he half-joked. ‘This is a serious issue and I do take it seriously.’ He said that after the VIDA figures on under-representation of women in several international literary publications were released late last year, he looked at his own books pages.

‘Non-fiction is where the problem is,’ he said. ‘In fiction, I’m fairly confident there would be an even 50/50 split between male and female authors reviewers.’ He said that he now tries to actively think of both genders when a non-fiction book comes across his desk. He used the example of military history to make his point, saying that most military historians are male, therefore he’s more likely to assign the book to a male reviewer. ‘I recently met a woman who is a military historian,’ he said. ‘I’ll use her.’

Stephen also repeated the point he’d made in his interview with The Book Show earlier this year – that women pitch to him less often than men, using the example of the John Howard autobiography, which six men offered to review, though no women. ‘If I wanted a woman to review it, I would have to try to think of who and approach them.’

Sophie agreed and said that when she was at Meanjin, the women she invited to write major non-fiction essays would often refuse, saying ‘I’m not an expert’, whereas the men would say “‘I’m not an expert but I’ll become one by the end of this essay.” You do have to push yourself in this kind of world or you’ll get left behind. One thing women can do is be pushier.’

Stephen had a different take on it. ‘I say good on you for saying I’m not an expert. I wish more men would do that.’ He said that he’d often received articles that clearly showed the writer wasn’t suited to the subject – and, reflecting Sophie’s observation, reported that these were generally from men. ‘Jumping on everything is not a good idea,’ he advised. ‘Know your strengths as a writer.’

Kirsten Tranter talked about the relation between gender and genre and whether women are marginalised more often when writing genre work. Sophie said she thought the work of female writers was more readily classified as genre when it contained genre elements – for instance, Alex Miller’s work is high romance but is considered to be serious literature. ‘It’s harder for women writers to work with genre elements and for it to be called literature.’

The discussion moved onto literary prizes – and the Miles Franklin. Sophie said that there are ‘lots of problems’ with the award and not just gender ones, calling its shortlists ‘often ill-judged’. (At the same time, I should say, she in no way disparaged the three books on this year’s shortlist, in fact stating that the shortlisted novels are ‘very good’.) The panellists agreed that the kind of debate and controversy attracted by these shortlists does no favours to the shortlisted authors, overshadowing their success, which should rightly be the focus.

Stephen said his major problem with this year’s Miles was the disparity between the long longlist and short shortlist, which reflected badly (and unfairly) on the quality of the longlisted works – particularly in the light of the judges’ comments that it was a poor year for Australian literature. ‘When it came to the shortlist, the judges made it abundantly clear that there were only ever three books in contention,’ Stephen said. Longlists, he said, were there in order to get two bites at the publicity cherry. ‘You have to weigh that against the reality of people who’ve worked hard to produce their books and are not just there to make up numbers.’ He concluded that a public longlist is not a good idea.

Sophie and Kirsten then mentioned the Australian version of the Orange Prize currently in the making, provisionally named The Stella Prize. The pair are working with a committee of Australian women (of which, I should declare, I am a member, along with KYD editor Rebecca Starford). ‘We wanted a prize that recognised women’s writing,’ said Sophie. ‘We were sick of just whingeing about the statistics and wanted to do something celebrating the work of women.’

‘So long as a literary prize is celebrating Australian writing, why not?’ said Stephen Romei, who pledged his support. In response to criticism that the prize is exclusionary, he pointed out that all prizes have some element of exclusion – for instance, a writer can’t win the Vogel if they’re 36 or over, and writers who don’t cover Australian life in any way are ineligible for the Miles.

Sophie Cunningham will be interviewed by The Book Show about The Stella Prize at 10am today (Tuesday 24 May).

And to become an official friend of The Stella Prize, or for more information, visit the Facebook page.

On the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day, over 100 bookish types packed among the shelves of Readings Carlton in Melbourne to hear a panel of Australian literary women talk about the very timely hot topic of the moment – the oft-suspected, recently proven underrepresentation of women in the world of books and writing.

The session was chaired by Rebecca Starford, editor of Kill Your Darlings. Participants were Sophie Cunningham, novelist, former publisher, commentator and recent editor of Meanjin; Louise Swinn, editorial director of Sleepers Publishing and a writer and reviewer; and Monica Dux, The Age opinion writer, author of The Great Feminist Denial.

The conversation began with a sobering reflection on those statistics recently released by VIDA (a relatively new US organisation for women and the arts), which revealed a stark gender bias in the pages of a wide range of literary institutions, including The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review and Granta.

Rebecca Starford presented the findings of her own mini-survey of the current situation in Australia, based on the records of trade magazine Bookseller & Publisher’s weekly supplement, Media Extra, over the first two months of 2011:

In The Age, 133 books were reviewed: 90 authored by men, 43 (or 33%) by women. Of the reviewers of those books, 72 were men, 61 by women.

In The Australian, 88 books were reviewed: 61 authored by men, 27 (or 30%) by women. Of the reviewers, 55 were men, 33 were women

Things were still skewed, but less so, at Australian Book Review. In 2010, 356 books were reviewed: 210 authored by men, 146 (41%) by women. The numbers of reviewers was fairly even. Interestingly, though, only 27% of the books by men were reviewed by women.

At Australian Literary Review, the stats were more damning. From October 2010 to February 2011, 51 books were reviewed: 41 by men; 10 (less than 20%) by women. Of the reviewers, 36 were men; 15 (29%) were women.

One of the explanations commonly offered for this disparity is that men are more willing to put themselves forward than women. Talking to The Book Show recently, (in a segment that was often cited during the night’s discussion), the literary editors of The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald all mentioned that they receive far more pitches from men than women.

Sleepers Publishing’s Louise Swinn reported that she receives more book-length submissions from men, though the submissions for the annual Sleepers Almanac anthologies of short stories are evenly split between men and women.

Sophie Cunningham, talking about her recent role as editor of Meanjin, had a particularly interesting story to tell – gender ratios “varied wildly” depending on the genre of the submission. “I had to work very hard to make sure that women were properly represented in non-fiction,” she said. “Because in terms of essays received, I was getting a lot more essays by men, if you keep memoir out of it. The pieces by women did tend to be a lot more personal and written out of their own experience.” Looking back on her time at Meanjin, Sophie said that while 52% of the essays overall were by women, 75% of the memoir pieces she published were written by women. (In that time, incidentally, 53% of the fiction and 35% of the poetry was by women.) Speaking specifically about Meanjin’s CAL-sponsored series of essays on cultural institutions, Sophie said it was difficult to find women to write these pieces. “Women often said, I’m not an expert, I don’t know that I’ve got the time, and were generally a lot more diffident about tackling those subjects where they were expected to be fairly aggressive in their analysis.”

Louise backed up Sophie’s point with a quote from Alizah Salario’s piece, ‘Twenty-Three Short Thoughts About Women and Criticism’ on Bookslut: “At her most basic, a good critic must possess a certain amount of chutzpah in order to believe other people will read – and care about – what she has to say. Call them audacious or simply arrogant, critics must have the confidence to write with conviction. They must demonstrate to readers why, of an infinite number of interpretations, theirs speaks a truth (but perhaps not the truth).”

Louise reflected, “I think maybe we’re not always encouraged to think that our experience can be the experience.”

Monica Dux said that though the VIDA statistics are “appalling”, she’s “not actually that surprised”, having spent the last couple of years of her life looking at women’s representation and writing about women. “It’s a reflection of society. I think we have this idea that writing is somehow more transcendent, and that it must be more noble.” She cited the current debate about the underrepresentation on women on boards as an example of where this situation is reflected in the wider world.

“I think that women actually need to push themselves out of their comfort zone, otherwise we’re stuck in this loop,” said Sophie. “I got really frustrated with the number of women who said, I’m not an expert. I tell you what, the men I was ringing up asking to write on subjects weren’t saying, I’m not an expert.” She said that she often tended to use good female non-fiction writers “several times over”, citing Sian Prior and Lorin Clarke as two of her go-to writers. She believes this likely results in her figures being “fairly skewed, in the way I think The New Yorker figures are … I think if you took Susan Orlean out of the mix at The New Yorker, you’d end up with about two [non-fiction women writers].”

Monica agreed with Sophie’s idea about the need for women to push beyond their comfort zones, drawing on her own experience as an opinion writer. “Those first few experiences of sending an unsolicited opinion piece were excruciating. Writing is, by its nature, very much about confidence.” She said she started writing “almost by accident”, as a result of some pro-active female editors who encouraged her. “There are people out there who are looking to publish women. You just need to be persistent and push.”

Louise reflected that, as a writer, she needs to “not take rejection so hard and just keep going”. A seemingly confident and polished public speaker, Louise admitted to being “incredibly nervous” about public speaking, and having done “lots and lots” of public speaking courses, as well as acting and singing classes, in order to feel comfortable performing in public. “At Sleepers, when we’re asking people to do events, we always have to ask two women for every one man,” she said. “You’ve got to start saying yes. And start pitching.”

Sophie said, “The men I’ve worked with – writers like James Bradley, a really fine writer and reviewer – would constantly pitch stuff at me.” She emphasised the effort she consciously put in to achieve gender balance at Meanjin and the importance of “as an editor, as a publisher, taking affirmative action really seriously. Doing the statistics.”

Louise held up a flyer she’d happened upon, for a series of seminars, running over the next few months, on VCE English texts. Of 15 set texts discussed, only two of these were by women. “These are kids going through school and this is what they’re reading,” she said. “And then we tell the girls that their voices are just as worthwhile.”

“I think it’s getting worse,” observed Sophie, pointing to the recent Triple J Hottest 100 furore as an example of the culture we currently inhabit. (For the first time ever, no female solo singers were featured in this list, put together from public votes.) And of course the panel all recalled the infamous “sausage-fest” all-male Miles Franklin shortlist of 2009.

I’ve done my own quick calculations (since the event) on how women have fared in general with the nation’s leading literary prize. Over the course of the Miles Franklin Award – which has run since 1957 – a woman has won 13 times. Three times this was Thea Astley; twice she shared the award (in 2000, with Kim Scott; and in 1963, with George Turner). The Miles has been awarded 50 times in all. Over the past decade (since 2001), two women have won, from the pool of 10 awards.

There’s much more to be discussed around this issue – and hopefully there will be further events and more public discussions. (For instance, on International Women’s Day, Melbourne’s The Wheeler Centre ran a terrific piece by novelist Kirsten Tranter on this very issue.) Perhaps, one year on, we should take another look at the statistics of women in print and see if anything has changed?

Jo Case is associate editor of Kill Your Darlings and books editor of The Big Issue.

(The Book Show also did the sums on the gender split of guests on the show, read the breakdown here)

Once upon a time, motherhood memoirs were carefully painted in pastel hues designed to flatter the artist– if they existed at all. But just over a decade ago, the unexpected success of darkly complex books like Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood (1997) broke new ground. Maushart exposed the myth of the instantly competent, serenely fulfilled transition to motherhood and the reality of the physically and emotionally demanding 24-hour role of ‘mother’. She was soon followed by UK novelist Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work (2001), a stark, intricately observed personal account of reconciling the pre-motherhood independent self with the post-pregnancy primacy of a new baby. Many women were relieved to read accounts of finding life with young children challenging, or unfulfilling, or even boring.

These days, the shelves are full of ‘bad mother’ memoirs. (Which is not exactly what the Maushart and Cusk books were – in fact, Cusk has called the genre she helped spawn ‘a toxic and dishonest form of writing’.) There’s even one called Bad Mother (2009), by US author Ayelet Waldman, who caused an uproar with her 2005 essay admitting that she loves her husband (Michael Chabon) more than her children. The controversy landed her on Oprah; the book was a bestseller.

Enter Amy Chua, America’s ‘bad mother’ of the moment, whose mega-sales are mirrored by her countless column inches and sacks of hate mail. In Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Yale law professor and parent of two stratospheric-achieving daughters outlines her hardline philosophy for raising children, along with its results. ‘A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids,’ reads the first line of the first chapter. She goes on to offer an insider’s answer to this tantalising question: ‘even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers’. (And for the record, she acknowledges up front that ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ are shorthand for certain parenting styles, and that ethnically Chinese parents can be culturally Western parents and vice versa.)

If you’ve read the weekend papers lately, or peeked in on the many furious online debates (see links above), you’ll already know the items on Chua’s list of things her daughters were never allowed to do, which includes: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, get any grade less than an A. You may know that her daughters were forced to practice their instruments for hours every day while Chua supervised; that Chua once threatened to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t play a piano piece perfectly; that she called her daughter Sophia ‘garbage’ for being disrespectful; that she put her three-year-old daughter out in the freezing cold for disobedience; and that she refused her daughters’ handmade birthday cards, asking them to redo them, and make an effort the next time.

Like many others, I read these accounts and was fascinated, appalled and self-righteous. But I also wondered I there wasn’t something more to it. Why would an obviously smart woman like Chua, with two serious books under her belt and a presumably savvy author husband, dob herself in so badly? There must be more to it than simply showing off her own bad behaviour (which she’d surely know would be read as such by most American readers) and excusing it with her seemingly exemplary results? (‘Other parents were constantly asking us what our secret was. Sophia and Lulu were model children.’) So I tracked down the book, and was unsurprised to read another, less sensational side of the story that rendered the experience of reading Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother less like the prurient, smug, slightly shameful experience of watching bad reality television (‘I am a MUCH better mother than that. What is WRONG with these people?’) * and a more nuanced reflection than you’d think on parenting styles and the pitfalls of extremes.

There are clues throughout, embedded in the theatrical accounts of hyper stage-parenting, that Chua is more self-aware than she seems, that she’s deliberately building herself up as a villainess begging for an eventual come-uppance. Her tone, as elder daughter Sophia recently pointed out in print, is deliberately self-mocking, often tongue-in-cheek. As a child who grew up in the Mid-West wishing for ‘a bologna sandwich like everyone else’ in her lunchbox, she’s finely attuned to cultural differences (in fact, one aside mentions that ethnicity is her ‘favourite thing to talk about’). The shocking incidents she relates are carefully selected and framed to have exactly that effect on the reader.

On the other hand, she does firmly believe that liberal Western parents coddle their kids – and, ironically, that their focus on nurturing their children’s self-esteem can have the opposite effect. ‘Chinese’ parents expect their kids to excel and thus send the message that they’re capable of excellence. ‘They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.’ While of course there are plenty of examples of this backfiring badly, she does raise some valid points worth thinking about regarding the flaws in the liberal approach. For instance, there are some highly credible tales of her daughters’ friends being bribed for B grades or to practice their instrument, and she has a point when she says that hard work is required to excel and kids rarely choose on their own to work hard or stick with something that’s difficult. She tells her daughters, ‘My goal as a parent is to prepare you for the future – not to make you like me.’ That’s something worth remembering.

The fine print of the book’s preface (talk about signposting!) reads: ‘This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.’ And indeed, it’s part parenting manifesto, part mea culpa, as Chua learns, through her rebellious second daughter, Lulu, that there is no one-fits-all parenting style.

‘In American culture, kids in books, TV shows and movies constantly score points with their snappy backtalk and independent streaks,’ she writes early in the book, comparing this to the Chinese reverence for obedience. ‘Typically [in America], it’s the parents who need to be taught a life lesson – by their children.’ Here, she’s setting the stage for the eventual showdown with her American teenager. In the end, despite all the emphasis on Chinese values, this is an essentially American book, with a typically American message. Chua ends up finding her own blend of two very different parenting cultures to create one that suits her beliefs, family and experience embodies the self-invention mythologised by the country her immigrant parents chose for her.

Her message for other parents is not, contrary to widespread belief, that Western parents should emulate ‘Chinese’ parenting in order to create their own ‘model children’. It’s that both parenting cultures could learn from each other.

*like Toddlers and Tiaras, not that I’d know anything about that …

Jo Case is editor of Readings Monthly. She has written about parenting for The Age and tries every day to strike the right balance between ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ parenting.

(Cross-posted from the Readings website.)

Kathy Charles, author of Hollywood Ending (and former entertainment publicist) wrote a ten-point manifesto on branding yourself as an author in the lead-up to the publication of her novel. One of the things she advocated was to find your niche by becoming ‘that writer who …’ (She positioned herself as ‘that writer who writes about dead celebrities’.) During our MWF session, ‘The Author as Brand’, she reflected that, with experience, this hasn’t always been a helpful strategy. Yes, she’s had lots of publicity, helped by a ‘sexy’ hook. (Note: in media language, ‘sexy’ has nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with pulling power.) But she’s also found herself in the experience, more than once, of wanting to talk about her novel, but instead being called to talk about celebrities – reflecting on dead icons or burnt-out starlets. And while Kathy has the publicity know-how to gently steer the topic around to her book (or at the very least name-drop it), it’s frustrating. She also half-rued the fact that she’s become ‘the author who writes about branding’, meaning her MWF session was on marketing rather than the book.

James P. Othmer, also on the panel, agreed wholeheartedly. He spent twenty years working in advertising, working his way up to creative director at New York’s Young & Rubicam – all the while dreaming of writing novels. After a lot of hard work and several stumbles along the way (including when his agent told him she was quitting to go to clown school), he finally got a publishing contract for his first novel, The Futurist, and quit the day job he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with. Perth’s UWA Press bought the rights to James’s second novel, Holy Water, because they loved it. The rights to Adland, his memoir of his time in advertising (and a look at where it’s going) were, he indicated, an afterthought. Yet, in all his interviews and at most of his festival sessions – both Melbourne and Brisbane – he was asked to talk about advertising. His publisher, he said, was a little frustrated, as they really love and want to push Holy Water.

In Brisbane, during a panel on America and how it influenced the writing of the panellists, James (who was joined by Joe Bageant and John Birmingham) said, with a sigh, ‘this is the first time here I’ve had a chance to talk about something other than Don Draper and The Gruen Transfer’ – a comment he repeated a few times during his session. (Making me cringe, as I’d excitedly talked to him on the way to our session about having just read the 1960s adman memoir that Mad Men was based on, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbour, and how much I’d enjoyed reading it in conjunction with his book. James was a perfect gentleman about it, but it was clear that he was weary of the whole subject.)

In a MWF session on young people and the media, Emily Maguire talked about the fact that she is known as a writer on young women and sex, thanks to her phenomenally successful non-fiction book Princesses and Pornstars and its young adult version, Your Skirt’s Too Short. This is, of course, fantastic, she said – she’s really interested in this subject and loves writing about it. And she gets lots of commissions as a result. But the flipside is that she’s interested in all kinds of topics, but the only subjects editors want her to write about fall under this umbrella subject. She’s pitched other stories to editors, but they never seem to be picked up. She acknowledged it’s not the worst problem to have – but it’s frustrating for a writer trying to move into other areas. Kathy Charles made the same point during ‘The Author as Brand’, saying she hadn’t thought about the fact that it might be hard to follow her own interests as a writer as a result of deliberately branding herself as a certain kind of writer.

I had a conversation with an editor during the festival season in which I brought up this topic. ‘But that’s a good thing,’ the editor said. ‘Of course I’d commission a writer to write about the thing they’re known for, a subject they really know. Why would I commission them to write about something completely different?’ I could see what the editor was saying, and as an editor myself, I understand the logic. Of course it’s wonderful to have, for instance, commissioned a renowned feminist like Monica Dux to write about The Female Eunuch, as we did for Kill Your Darlings Issue Two, with results that delighted us. And there’s a sense of satisfied certainty when you commission a so-right pairing like that, which has such a good chance of yielding good results. But there’s also something exciting, I think, about allowing a writer to show a new side of themselves by tackling a different subject from their norm, particularly if it’s letting them indulge a secret passion. It’s a judgement call, but it can be a very rewarding one.

John Birmingham is one writer who it’s impossible to pigeonhole, or even categorise. He writes serious urban history (Leviathan); anecdotal humour (beginning with the iconic Felafel); fat futuristic thrillers; stunning, deeply human reportage-style essays that take the pulse of Australian culture. Yet, as he explained during his BWF session with James Othmer, his diversity has been hard-earned. ‘I wrote Leviathan to escape the gravitational pull of Felafel,’ he told the audience. He was initially reluctant to write and publish the ‘big dumb’ thriller he’d been plotting for fun in his downtime, because ‘having escaped one dumb genre, I didn’t want to get stuck in another dumb genre’. The interests he cited during the session ranged from loving Stephen King’s The Stand (the first book he ever bought) to being besotted with little-known American feature writers from magazines like Esquire and Vanity Fair, who wrote long features of 10-20,000 words. These various interests are represented in his body of work – and being good at one genre hasn’t stopped him from excelling at other, very different ones. I for one think our culture would be poorer without some of Birmingham’s excellent reportage essays – particularly a brilliant piece on the milieu of Pauline Hanson (collected in Birmingham’s Off One’s Tits and anthologised in Best Australian Profiles) and a deeply moving and insightful essay on the Australian recession in The Monthly last June.

During an IQ2 debate on racism in June, formidably brainy Pakistani-Muslim writer Hanifa Deen vented her frustration about being pigeonholed, in response to an audience member who asked why there are so few Australian Muslims in the media, talking about subjects other than being Muslim – subjects that form part of the fabric of our daily lives. Hanifa agreed heartily that this was a problem, using her own experience as evidence. Yes, she’s an Australian Muslim woman and she’s happy to be a voice for her community. But she’s also interested in many other things, and hates the facts she’s only ever asked to talk about her Muslim identity. ‘I wish someone would ask me to talk or write about literature, for instance,’ she said. ‘For instance, I love Mark Twain.’ (During the MWF, Hanifa was part of a session commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. One small step, perhaps.) This is a really good example of how pigeonholing can work to our disadvantage, confining certain writers and thinkers to the margins, or missing opportunities for stimulating and engaging new work.

Because it’s always exciting, I think, to have an opportunity to read or hear a really good writer on the topic of something they’re passionate about, something that fires them up.

Jo Case is Associate Editor of Kill Your Darlings.

On Saturday, KYD were hosting an afternoon of 15-minute events at Magazine – a Yarra-side shipping container, done up like a Fitzroy bar. One of those events featured Estelle Tang (our online editor) interviewing Ben Law and Michaela McGuire on humour writing. Just seconds into the talk, I was itching for my notebook, but had left it at the front of the stage and couldn’t get it without being excruciatingly rude (and ruining the video of the event being recorded by Ben’s mum, who was sitting next to me in the front row). So, I simply tried to commit two crucial moments to memory, scribbling them down post-session.

1) Asked about how she’d developed her ‘voice’ as a humour writer and if she’d consciously constructed it, Michaela said, ‘My style is dry and scathing, so I find if I’m a jerk about myself, it’s okay to be a jerk about other people.’ This rang true: it’s a golden rule of likeable humour writing, but she put it perfectly.

2) Ben Law, responding to a question about how he manages to write about people he knows without ruining relationships, quoted David Sedaris’s advice to him during an interview – Sedaris had said he tries to write about people who don’t read. This made the crowd laugh, as intended, but there’s a grain of wisdom in it too. (I guess I liked it because I’ve been guilty of applying that handy maxim myself.)

On a more serious note, Law added that he allows his family to vet his writing about them, and admitted he was lucky, as a writer, that they are generally pretty accommodating. He also said that even though his writing is very revealing – including writing about his mother’s descriptions of childbirth and what it does to a woman’s vagina – and it may seem that he has no boundaries, he does in fact have quite careful boundaries, with certain things he doesn’t say about his family and their experiences, things they want to keep private. I thought this was a really interesting point, and one I’ve heard before from renowned autobiographical writers – that good writing in this genre has the illusion of no boundaries, but is generally really frankness within particular (personally negotiated or judged) boundaries.

2. Never, ever categorise a gathering of fiction writers who use humour in their work as ‘Comic Fiction’. Or they will rebel.

Tony Wilson, Marie Munkarra, Andrew Humphreys, David Musgrave and Peter Rose made it abundantly clear during their session that they not only hated its title, ‘Comic Fiction’, they felt insulted by it. As I took my seat, a few minutes late, they were taking it in turns to talk about why they were unhappy. ‘You think comic fiction, you think “funny, and that’s all it is”,’ said Andrew Humphreys. ‘You don’t want to be seen as somebody who’s just trying to make people laugh.’ Tony Wilson said that as a writer who writes humour, he often ‘feels bludgeoned’, like he’s not being taken seriously as a writer, though he takes his work just as seriously as any other writer. ‘All of us would say we’re writing satirical fiction,’ he said, and the panel generally agreed they would’ve been happy if the panel was titled, ‘Satirical Fiction’. Andrew Humphreys (who said he writes ‘dark comic fiction’) joked in response to an audience member who asked what the authors would like their session to be called, that it would be, ‘Insecure Writers About Comedy Who Want to Be Taken Seriously’.

It was, despite the title fracas, a really interesting session, with a range of thoughts on using humour and fiction – and some interesting reflections on the role of humour by some of literature’s greats. Andrew Humphreys and Peter Rose admired Evelyn Waugh, particularly Scoop, and Humphreys controversially called Brideshead Revisited ‘Waugh’s worst book’. Rose said that in the modern age, ‘too much categorisation goes on’ and pointed out that ‘a strong pulse of humour’ runs through the works of many classic writers. Talking about whether they use autobiography in their work, Humphreys said ‘no one wanted to publish’ the most autobiographical book he’d ever written – the reason given was that the characters were ‘so horribly unlikeable’. Since then, he’s steered away from autobiography in his work.

3. Twitter has revolutionised audience feedback (and eavesdropping)

The session I chaired on Sunday, ‘The Author as Brand’, featured a lot of conversation about Twitter. Kathy Charles, panel member and author of Hollywood Ending, had said that Twitter is the literary community’s social networking tool of choice, so if you’re tossing up between that or Facebook, choose Twitter.

Browsing Twitter on my iPhone between sessions later that day, I realised I was basically listening in to people’s conversations about the festival via my feed – finding out (in snatches of 140 characters or less) what sessions people had been to, what they thought of them, and what had struck them most about the conversations onstage. But interesting though it was, it was no substitute for actual on-the-ground eavesdropping, in terms of finding out what people really think.

I’ll never forget an incident from the coffee queue during the first MWF in which I’d been a (very nervous) chair. In front of me in the line stood one of the authors from the session I’d just chaired and a friend of hers, who said something like, ‘I don’t know who that young girl was up there,’ at which my ears pricked up, while the rest of me shrivelled in mortification. She continued to wonder aloud, going on to say exasperatedly, ‘why did she say X’s book was a blend of travel and politics? It’s not travel at all! Where did she get that idea?’ And that’s when, to my surprise and horror, I found myself looking her in the eye, and rather imperiously saying ‘do you realise that I’m that young girl you’re talking about?’ The author – who I quite idolised – said embarrassedly, ‘yes, I know’, while the friend’s face dropped, and she hurriedly assured me she didn’t have a problem with me, she just wondered who I was because I didn’t say my name, and the book under discussion – which she’d been heavily involved with – was, in her opinion, being miscategorised by its publisher.

Twitter is more careful than that. People are putting their names to their observations, and putting them in print, so you’re much less likely to find a frank criticism of your session – which is both good and bad, of course. But it’s still pretty fascinating as an overview of what people are doing and thinking.

4. Politicians speak the language of Hollow Men because they’re trying to say a lot without revealing anything

In ‘A Wordsmith’s Dream’, David Astle shared some thoughts on our current political situation, as seen through the prism of words and language. ‘The independent bloc have revitalised political language by coming in with a different vocabulary,’ he said, identifying this as a key component of their appeal – they talk like ordinary people. ‘I feel sorry for politicians,’ Astle said. ‘They’re trying to say so much without giving anything away. That’s why you end up with so much empty jargon; hollowed-out words.’ Kate Burridge agreed, observing, ‘If you don’t use a word, it dies. If you over-use it, it dies too.’

5. The Melbourne Writers Festival is a great place to pick up

Not all politicians and officials rely on empty jargon. In a refreshing and utterly charming move, the Melbourne City Council person who gave the speech at the MWF opening party on Saturday said that while she has a speechwriter, and she had that speech with her, she personally loves MWF and wanted to do her own instead. The crux of which was – her husband first kissed her after a Melbourne Writers Festival session many years ago and it’s a great place to pick up! She closed by saying she hoped ‘everyone in the room picks up tonight’, and was greeted with resounding applause. The Twittersphere was appreciative, with many branding her speech ‘best ever’ and one writer tweeting later in the night ‘I think I’ve picked up!’ I didn’t pick up, but went home to my husband … who I met working at a bookshop and first kissed at our work Christmas party (also many years ago), so I figure that was in the spirit of things anyway.

Jo Case is Associate Editor of Kill Your Darlings.

KYD editor Rebecca Starford left early to read over her questions for an interview with DBC Pierre today (for KYD Issue 3). Which led to a wine-fuelled chat about interview techniques, and more specifically, Robert Coleman’s interview with Bret Easton Ellis for Three Thousand, which is set to become a cult classic of journalism, sort of in the ‘so bad it’s good’ school. And no, I’m not being mean – Coleman freely admits it. And he’s a very good sport indeed to have published the interview, in which Easton Ellis, after having busted him for not really knowing what he’s talking about, proceeds to (very amiably) ‘teach [him] a lesson’ and turns the tables on him, becoming the interviewer. Despite not having researched his interview, he’s obviously a smart guy – and canny enough to know that this trainwreck of a profile is also a compelling read.

B – Be yourself, be your unclever self. Why can’t you just let go of the irony!? Let go of the ‘I’m with Bret Easton Ellis’ kind of vibe?

R – Okay, here we go … I’m going to put something out there.

B – Put it out there…

R – I haven’t read too much of your stuff.

B – GOOD! Finally! Finally, a journalist tells me this! Do you know how much more relaxed that makes me? Good!

R – Okay so I’ve read about three-quarters of Less Than Zero and I’ve watched American Psycho…

B – That’s your preparation?

R – Yep. So I’m not even close to the gushing.

Easton Ellis tells him, towards the end of the interview, ‘This, this right now, happens very rarely, and this is the only time it has happened in Australia. You get the more real me than anyone has gotten so far.’ And it’s true. It says a lot about the author, I think, that he responded so well to this kamikaze interview (in which he was asked what his ‘sex face’ looked like, among other things), yet bamboozled some of his more polished, professional ‘literary’ interviewers. He was famously scolded by Ramona Koval onstage at Byron Bay Writers Festival after he evaded her questions to talk instead about his crush on Delta Goodrem. And observers at the Wheeler Centre event (where he began by admonishing the crowd with ‘what are you doing here on a Friday night?’) reported that he didn’t make the job easy for onstage interviewer Alan Brough.

The Coleman interview reminds me of one of my favourite writers, Jon Ronson, who once told me that his secret weapon as an interviewer was that he looked so ordinary and unthreatening. That sometimes it’s useful when people underestimate you, because they relax around you, they let you in.

While I am a preparation fanatic, I’ve always remembered that advice, because I think there’s a grain of truth in it. It can be easy to, as Easton Ellis alludes, be so concerned with looking clever and professional that you don’t leave space for the surprising.

This can happen when, while madly swotting over an author’s book, you come up with theses for why they did certain things, or what life experiences are embedded in the text, and you ask overly leading questions that – if you’re honest with yourself – are designed to show what a clever reader you are, to elicit a response like, ‘I’d never thought of it like that, but you’re right’. (Yes, I’ve unwittingly done it, and I’ve cringed afterwards, whether I got the money shot or not.) Of course, it can be great to draw on buried themes within the text – but it needs to be because you want to know more about them, or you want to know the answer to a question you have, rather than because you want to point them out. And the other problem with too much reliance on research, or familiarity with the subject, is that you can assume too much – focus on the obscure but leave out the basic facts.

Too-clever syndrome can also strike when you’re over-attached to the questions you’ve prepared, using them as a guide rather than a script. The best interviews run like conversations – and like a good conversationalist, a good interviewer relies on the chemistry of a conversation at least as much as the content. Sticking to the script when the flow of the conversation beckons elsewhere is like the old joke of bringing a pre-prepared set of conversation topics to a date or a dinner party – stale and awkward.

The great thing about the Coleman interview with Bret Easton Ellis is the surprise factor – what it reveals about both parties, and especially Easton Ellis. It’s something you haven’t read before. I’m by no means an expert on the art of the interview, but I do think that surprise, or revelation, is key to the best ones.

The trick, I think, is to balance preparation (which shows respect for the author as well as helping to produce a good interview) with a shot of fearlessness – allowing the possibility of looking foolish by diverting from the script if the interview opens in an interesting direction, or asking a question that you might know the answer to, but your audience won’t. Or simply letting the interviewee talk (if it’s interesting, of course), watching to see where that thread takes you.

Which is how I found out that Jon Ronson (author of Them, a bestseller about extremists and conspiracy theorists and Men Who Stare at Goats) once thought that supernatural forces were moving his cat dish around his house. And following an unplanned and not-entirely-relevant side-conversation led ALP court jester Bob Ellis to tell me, of a One Nation gathering he observed during Pauline Hanson’s campaign, ‘They were ordinary bloody decent people, some of them wearing sandals and socks, some of them obviously in need of a FUCK, and none of them much under 40. But they were not an insubstantial movement and they were not a contemptible movement either.’

I’m glad I took time out from cramming for the MWF sessions I’m chairing this weekend to go to last night’s party. It’s just possible that the chance conversation I had – reminding me of the value of the unexpected, the need to wear my preparation lightly – might have saved me from some common traps. Here’s hoping.

Jo Case is Associate Editor of Kill Your Darlings.

Melbourne bookseller Leanne Hall won last year’s Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for her beguiling debut novel, This is Shyness. KYD associate editor Jo Case spoke to her on the eve of the book’s publication – about the book, the tenuous boundary between adult and young adult writing, the business of being a teenager, and her writing process.

J: Leanne, your writing in both your short stories and books is often realist in style but also has those fantasy elements which veer into the eerie. I wonder what it is about that kind of writing style that attracts you?

L: I don’t think it attracts me – I think it’s just the way I write. If I try to write straight stories, those other elements just creep in and I almost don’t identify them as being unusual or magical or slightly odd elements. To me they’re just in there, and it’s only when people read it that I realise that there are other strange things in there – and I’m like, but that’s not strange at all. It’s just there.

Honestly, when I do write my stories, I feel like I’m writing something really real. I feel like it’s just reality that I’m representing – which of course it isn’t. I don’t know what that says about my brain or what my everyday life is like.

J: Yeah, in everyday life you just walk into another suburb and it’s all dark.

L: It says a lot about me, doesn’t it? Like, that’s just normal, that’s how I experience the world.

J: No, I think it says something about your storytelling style. You’ve obviously written both adult and YA stories. Do you have a preference? And when you sit down and write, do you know which it’s going to be? Or does it just come out that way?

L: I think it comes out that way. I guess all my short stories have been adult in nature, but that just says a lot about the venues for short story publication in Australia. There’s very few anthologies or magazines or journals that will take stories that have a children’s or YA audience, so your only outlet are things for adults, so that’s what I write. But really it’s a matter of what you call it or how your present it. I mean, some teenagers could read some of my short stories, and that could seem like a story for them, but it’s just in a publication that adults are reading.

J: With This Is Shyness as well, if you put a different cover on it and marketed it a different way, then I think adult readers could be looking at it.

L: Yeah. I see it all the time in the bookshop, in my forays into the adult shelves – there are so many books that have teenage protagonists. It’s a really artificial distinction as to what’s YA and what’s adult, and it is just a marketing decision that’s made at some point.

J: Yeah, absolutely. And with this book, when you sat down, were you aware that you were writing a YA book or were you setting out to do that?

L: I was always aware that it was a YA book. Not only because of the age of the characters, but because I’m describing a wild and unforgettable night. Those nights only really happen for the first time when you’re in your teens. I wanted to write about one of those really, really crazy magical nights – and how you never forget that kind of situation.

J: And was that kind of the impetus for the book, writing about that kind of night?

L: The impetus was the characters’ names – I came across the characters’ names and I decided that they were really intriguing. And then I had to think about what kind of place those characters with those names would inhabit, and I came up with the Suburb of Darkness idea. I mean, really, that lends itself to a crazy night, doesn’t it?

J: Absolutely.

L: And also that nice, really distilled experience – really explosive – let’s just throw them in together and only give them 12 hours for all this stuff to happen and just make it be a crazy kind of explosion.

J: In many ways I thought this was a very innocent book, with all the adventure elements, and riding bikes, and being mugged for sweets, and finding the secret underground tunnels and all of that – it’s like a kind of an escape back into childhood.

L: I thought it was pretty funny to set a couple of maybe quite urban streetwise teenagers on a quest – on a quite old-fashioned quest for an object. To me that was the biggest joke, was to send these really quite cool teenagers on a quest for an object, which is such a dorky childhood thing.

J: And that object, it was a lighter – so it wasn’t about the object at all.

L: Yeah. And I also think they’re both obviously seeking an escape. The reason why they both have such an amazing night is, they just really want something different for themselves for a couple of hours. They kind of step out of their ordinary life, and meet somebody who doesn’t know who they are, be a different person for one night.

I did think a lot about the ideas of childhood and teenage years and adulthood, and innocence and the boundaries between them. Because the kids are so feral and they’re both living like children living a little like adults on their own.

J: It’s also kind of interesting that Wolfboy and Wildgirl seem to find a release in that reversion to acting like children, and that by the end, they’ve both decided or realised that they have to move on from their problems. It’s almost like by reverting to their childhood selves they’re able to move forward into their adult selves.

L: I guess I did think like that. In particular with the bike-riding. If you don’t ride your bike past a certain age, then you finally get on bikes again, and you’re a little bit bad at it … It feels weird to be an older teenager on a bike, when you’re supposed to be cool. But then it is so much fun, they can’t resist it. That bit was overt.

And I do remember that age when you’re supposed to stop playing with dolls, you’re supposed to stop play-acting. As a girl, maybe if you’ve been a tomboy or a rough-and-tumble girl you’re not supposed to play footy with the boys anymore on the oval at lunchtime. You know, like, you’re doing great things but in Year Seven all of a sudden you’re not allowed to play footy with the boys because it’s kind of not what girls do.

J: Is that you?

L: Yeah, I reckon. I went to an all girls’ high school, so it wasn’t that obvious. Though I do remember being devastated when I could sense that it wasn’t really that cool to have dolls or soft toys and to talk to them and dance with them. It’s like, Wow, I really have to give this up, I’m in high school now.

J: I remember that too! It’s awful. Where in Year Eight or something you’re still playing Barbies.

L: Yeah, I still wanted to right up until Year Eight or Year Nine if I’d had my way. I would still have been playing with dolls, but unfortunately it wasn’t that cool.

J: Maybe it’s the storytelling thing.

L: Yeah, yeah, you know it probably is, I think that is. That was definitely it because it was all about making up narratives involving these characters that just happened to be your toys.

J: Were you conscious of fitting in, when you were at school?

L: Oh yeah, yeah. I think everyone …

J: Everyone is, to some extent.

L: Yeah. I think teenage girls especially want to. Looks-wise, and clothes-wise, and taste-wise. They just really desperately want to fit in, to be the same as everyone else. It flips at uni – you want to be different from everyone else, an individual.

J: But in the same way as everyone else –

L: In the same way, yeah. But in high school you just desperately want to fit in.

J: One thing I also thought was really interesting is the juxtaposition of Wolfboy’s circumstances – which are quite heavy, serious experiences – and Wildgirl’s, which is that specific horror of that incident at school which seems really small, but for a teenage girl, is the end of the world.

L: Oh, it is the end of the world. I will never go back to school ever again. Everyone’s had that incident at high school – I can’t remember what mine is, but there’s always something where everyone turns against you some day, or you have your dress tucked into your undies and you have to go up on stage at assembly and receive a prize or something – some incident. And you really have that feeling of – That’s it for me, I’m not going back. I can’t face those people ever, I just don’t want to exist, and I’m going to move to a different city and have a different name and no one will know who I am.

J: Absolutely.

L: Which you know is of course a complete overreaction.

J: But it will be so real, too – and this is a dramatisation, of that moment, isn’t it?

L: But that stuff does happen in high schools. I’ve got a friend who’s a school counsellor and she’s had that exact situation – you know of the mobile phone picture getting out of hand and being passed around. Teenage girls are mean – they are mean cows. And we were mean cows, if I think back to some of the things that we did at high school. They will wage psychological warfare, and they will do it very creatively and effectively.

J: The innocence that I was talking about with the childhood – it’s kind of old-fashioned in the way that there’s that great chemistry between the characters, but it’s very chaste. Is that something you thought about?

L: It isn’t that I was trying to write chaste, I just felt there was so much tension between them, and they were so mistrustful of each other, and they desperately wanted to connect but at the same time couldn’t let go of their mistrust and insecurity, so they were kind of coming together and pulling apart. So I thought that it had to be delayed. I like the fact that they lust from a distance – I think that’s a great thing for characters to do, to want it but not get it.

I think it’s important for people to know that even if that hot boy at school is not jumping on you, they’re still thinking about it, even as you’re thinking about it. It’s good for you to think about it. Everyone’s thinking about it.

J: How do you think your work as a bookseller has fed into your writing, or how you think about your book?

L: I think it’s about exposure to lots and lots of books – I almost exclusively read YA, two or three books per week. I read absolutely ravenously and it’s part of my job. And I think reading so much is really great grounding as a writer. But none of that stuff creeps in too much, because you tell the story you have to tell. You really don’t want to think too much about anything business-related or market-related, that would be stupid. It would lead to a soulless kind of book and experience.

J: It’s more on that subconscious level, knowing or being in touch with what’s out there.

L: Yeah. You grow to know what’s good and bad writing, through wide reading, and you get exposed to a wide amount of writing. You know what’s possible and what’s not. I think part of being a writer for me is kind of knowing what’s possible. You can tell a story in so many different ways. I’m only just starting to learn about all the different ways that you can tell a story, and there are billions, and it’s so interesting to read other peoples’ ways of telling stories, and feel like you can play around with it a little bit yourself, and I’m still so just learning, like I have no idea of what I’m doing.

This is an edited version of an interview originally conducted for Readings. Leanne Hall’s short story, ‘A Terror Story’, is published in Issue Two of Kill Your Darlings. This is Shyness will be launched in Melbourne on Thursday 12 August at Readings Carlton.

She quotes Wells Tower, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith warning of the dangers of the internet – all recommending that fiction writers work at a computer not connected. Wells Tower says:

‘As writers … we need to care hugely about each word, each syllable, its valences, its music, and we need readers who care enough and read closely enough to be susceptible to our art. I think the internet is noxious to this sort of aesthetic transaction.’

I see the wisdom in all of this. I agree with all these observations. And yet. My own experience offers a twist on this cautionary tale – not a rebuttal, but another dimension to what the internet can offer creative writers, beyond fact-checking and news gathering.

From the time I could form letters until the age of 20, I wrote compulsively, filling exercise books and stapling scrap paper together with invented stories. As a cousin recently reminded me, I used to turn up to family gatherings bearing stories I’d written about my relatives and force them to read them – into my early teens. At high school, I wrote stories about my friends and the boys we had hopeless crushes on under the desk during class. At home, I wrote pages and pages of ‘serious’ novels that eventually trailed off. And at university, I started a series of (now cringeworthy) short stories about tragic Adelaide characters. I had a couple of small successes – a placing in a competition, publication in an Adelaide newspaper.

Then I got a job at a publishing company, where I read through the slush pile and was jointly terrified by all those authors who were terrible and didn’t know it, and those who could write but were still nowhere near producing a publishable story. And I stopped writing for the next decade, paralysed by my new awareness. The few times I did try to write again, it was both forced (through my layers of self-doubt) and stilted. And all the fun – the pure joy of it – was gone.

A decade later, I was working at Australian Book Review, trawling through some literary blogs to get a sense of what might work for a blog I was starting for the magazine, when I took a few detours and discovered a network of bloggers who wrote about their personal lives in engaging fragments that bounced off and interacted with each other. They wrote about things like a building that intrigued them in their neighbourhood, or an aspect of work that they loved, or an incident with their kids that made them reflect on contemporary motherhood. It wasn’t just the things they wrote that fascinated me, and drew me back to their blogs – it was the way they wrote about them.

After a few weeks of coy lurking and dropping the occasional brave comment, I took the plunge and started up my own blog, on impulse – and almost against my own judgement. A large part of me thought blogging was self-indulgent and silly, that writing about myself was being an unnecessary show-off. I’d worked as a freelance reviewer and feature writer for many years by now and ‘I’ was a word that was discouraged, a word that editors struck out if you forgot and left it in. Most people I knew (including me) were sniffy about ‘I’ writing.

My first blog post was about making cupcakes for my son to take to class on his birthday at the end of a long work day, having not properly shopped for ingredients, with my husband deeming the final, laboured-over product (produced at midnight) a bit odd-looking. I have no idea why I wanted to write about this. Maybe it was because the thought of writing about ordinary life – of framing it as a story – had been percolating in the back of my mind. And so I made a joke of it, of my disorganisation and ineptness and the deadpan banter with my husband that actually kind of hurt (and my guilt about full-time work manifesting in this badly executed stint as a home-baking mother). When I finished, I read it through – this crafted but not pre-meditated fragment of my life – and I actually quite liked it. I set up an anonymous blog, posted it, sent the link to my mum and sisters, and went to bed.

At first, no one seemed to be reading my blog. Which was fine – I didn’t actively look for readers, though I did comment on those blogs I liked using my new identity. I continued to craft fragments of my life, for my own pleasure, and post them online. Then, after about a month, I got my first readers and gradually became part of a community of bloggers, all drawn together simply by the fact that we liked each other’s writing and ideas.

For the first time in ten years, I was regularly writing, and my writing was getting better. There was none of the pressure and expectation that had haunted me for the past decade. This wasn’t ‘real’ writing; this was a hobby. So, though I worked hard on my blog posts, I didn’t feel they had to be perfect. And while I do agree with Wells Tower that writers should labour over each word in a published work, this was a netherworld between draft and publication. And that lack of gravitas was what freed me to write.

Cate Kennedy says in her essay:

A writer is someone on the lookout, pretty well constantly, for patterns – patterns in speech and events, in forgetful self-disclosure, in the bigger existential narrative.

This is what I became during my time as a blogger – a person constantly on the lookout for stories, embedded in the fabric and seemingly inconsequential details of everyday life.

Two key incidents allowed me to make the leap between personal, creative writing on an anonymous blog and that kind of writing under my own name, out in the world. One of the writers I befriended through the blogosphere, Penni Russon, a published YA author, told me that she’d been talking to a friend about short stories and had shown her my posts as examples. I had never thought of them in that way before – and was blown away by the fact that a published writer I respected obviously thought I was good. Then Louise Swinn of Sleepers, someone I knew as a reviewing and book industry colleague, sent me a curious email, asking if I was the writer of a blog she’d stumbled on, and if I was, inviting me to submit to the next Sleepers Almanac. I was, I did, and to my absolute surprise and delight, my story was accepted and published – and then, in a twist worthy of a novel, republished with Penni Russon’s first adult story (which I had asked her to submit to The Big Issue, after discovering her via her blog) in Best Australian Stories 2009.

I no longer write my blog, and I have a very long way to go before I consider myself a ‘proper’ creative writer. But I am writing short stories – slowly, painfully, agonising over every word, sentence and draft – and have enrolled in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing Course. I had a non-fiction essay of the kind I used to publish on my blog published in The Age earlier this year. None of this would have happened for me had I not gained the freedom, practice and confidence in my writing that I did online.

I completely understand where Cate Kennedy is coming from. I think her Overland essay is important for sparking discussion about the subject of how the internet affects writers and writing. But I also think the internet offers opportunities – and not just the obvious ones of self-promotion and recognition, but opportunities for writers to dip their toes into the waters of creative writing, to experiment with shaping experience into stories. It can be – as it was for me – a stepping stone between the world of the mind and the world of official publication.

Kill Your Darlings has published several writers who have been discovered via the blogosphere, and has commissioned crafted, polished and extended pieces that have originated as blog posts.