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.

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.

Although we were talking about hobbies (perhaps the favourite word of second-language teachers), the conversation reminded me of one of my favourite author bios I’ve read lately – that of Arthur Phillips, author of The Song is You, The Egyptologist and Angelica. It begins:

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion.

Whoa, you think; this guy’s gotta have something good to say. Then comes the  first cynical thought about such a bio, even if it belongs to a man the Washington Post called ‘one of the best writers in America’: that his publisher’s marketing staff must love it. It’s quirky and loaded with references that positively burst with ‘this book will be good to read’ juice. But of course marketing staff love it – so do we. Hello! … I mean, he’s won Jeopardy! five times.

Many writers who do time in other industries feed those experiences into their writing. Anton Chekhov used his experiences as a doctor in his fiction, and Peter Conrad said of Portuguese novelist and doctor António Lobo Antunes that he ‘discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses.’ And then there are writers who let writing and living intertwine in symbiotic (and sometimes dangerous) ways: see Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell’s Angels era, during which he spent a year with the infamous bikers.

Of course, what a writer does when they’re not writing is just one small part of the reader–writer romance – one snifter in the goop of why we lay our money down on the counter to buy any book, magazine, chapbook or access to an online publication. Just like plot, character, cover design, blurb copy or a couple of press mentions, the writer’s life experience is but one element that can bridge the divide between ’something I wouldn’t read’ and ’something I must read’. However, when it’s a juicy one, it can pay off. I certainly got excited when reading author of Love Machine Clinton Caward’s bio:

After quitting his first job as a bank clerk and being retrenched from his subsequent position as a plumber, Clinton Caward became a barman, landscape gardener, pizza cook and floatation tank maintenance technician before moving to Nimbin with his pregnant girlfriend to train as a Rebirthing Therapist.

Damn, you think. There’s no way that’s going to be a boring book.

King originally posted a comment at the original HTMLGIANT post:

I love Gary Lutz and Mike Young, but I ain’t buying this mag. Three women writers in the entire contents of two issues? And it’s a new mag?

…

I’m sure the editor, or someone, will come along and insult me, call me bitchy names, mock my face, etc in “defense” of the contents and for pointing out such obviousness, but it’s plain and simple: here we go again, repeating the old exclusive boy’s club traditions of what we thought was fading. Shall we all retreat to Black Mountain and sit at Olson’s feet whilst we write poems for Pound? Oh, I’ll shut up; that’s my job.

Butler later wrote a post in response, titled ‘Language over Body’ (and imagine what another Butler would have to say about that):

When you are reading or editing an issue of a magazine, do you perform a contributor penis and vagina count, to verify a decent mix? Do you perform a race count? Do you verify the range of the letters in the last names?

While these questions did inspire me to conclude that, indeed, none of the writers in Kill Your Darlings‘ first issue had names containing the letter ‘X’, they also got me thinking about commissioning and literary journals. I originally came across this kerfuffle via Brian Spears’ post at The Rumpus (which was titled, more modestly, ‘Diversity in Voices’). Spears, the poetry editor at The Rumpus, responded in seriousness to Butler’s questions, offering that:

When I put together the poems for our National Poetry Month project, I solicited work directly, and I aimed for diversity not only in gender, but also in ethnicity, age, stage of career, sexual orientation and poetic aesthetic. Focusing for the moment on gender, I finished with 16 men and 15 women …

Out of interest, I had a look at the Kill Your Darlings balance in Issue One, which is 11 to 8, in favour of male writers. I suspect that this minor margin will reverse in direction in the next issue, and will do a little tumble and weave each time we publish a new issue. Like Spears, the editors at Kill Your Darlings are guided in their commissioning by the wish to publish writers at different stages of their careers, be they household names or writers discovered through their blogs; writers with different stories to tell and ways of telling them.

Beyond that, the comment’s not mine to make, but the question of diversity in journals is an interesting one, and closely linked to the project of each individual journal. I only have to think of Peril, the Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine; or Roomers, a magazine for residents of rooming houses; or Overland’s blog, whose front page features a post that begins ‘I am a wog, and I’m proud of it’, or another that begins ‘My friend Cadie, a Garawa woman…’, to know that diverse voices and stories are represented in the Australian journal market.

(From here onwards, I’ll concentrate on the male–female debate, but obviously many of these points are well worth considering with regard to the representation of edit: other minorities.)

However, there’s clearly not much benefit in simply pointing out that some journals do a good job of recognising the worth in publishing diverse voices. There’s still the issue of what message an all-male magazine sends to female writers and readers, and the issue of what to do about it. If I were a writer researching where to submit my work, and I came across a journal that contained no work by women, would I consider sending my work there? Even if I believed the work was a match aesthetically, I’m not sure. Writing and submission and rejection are not to be undertaken lightly – as we know, writing is poorly recompensed at the sub-Rowling level – and it might seem like a waste of time to send work to the editor of such an apparently exclusive publication.

But what can be done in the face of such an odd line-up? In the slew of comments that followed these posts, many different plans of action surfaced. Among these were the old ‘read submissions blind’ rejoinder, which I find satisfying in the blind orchestra auditions stories. But that path isn’t useful at all if, as some commenters claimed, women aren’t submitting work in the same numbers as men. Butler himself claimed that he once received 224 submissions for a publication, only 4 of which were from female writers. However, Spears said that he had no problem at all in finding quality submissions from women, with which I’m sure many editors would agree.

It might seem unfair to focus thus sharply on a journal that is still finding its niche and audience, and whose editor, Gene Kwak, said ‘i solicited plenty of women. guys too’. Nevertheless, I still feel uncomfortable about an all-male contributor list. What I also find troubling is that the selection was defended by many (though not the editor, as far as I know) on the basis of, as Spears termed it, the ‘it’s the work that matters, not the writer’ attitude. This charming position seems to preclude any discussion about why the selector likes a particular work or selection of works. By not interrogating the standards by which the individual pieces are valued, the resulting publication takes on, as we see, a strikingly skewed character. In this case, WAC #2 seems to turn a blind eye to the struggle for equal gender representation in the artistic arena – not merely an ironically doffed hat, it’s a complete and utter stonewall.

In strictly objective alphabetical order, the longlist is:

Patrick Allington, Figurehead
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues
Jon Doust, Boy on a Wire
Deborah Forster, The Book of Emmett
David Foster, Sons of the Rumour
Glenda Guest, Siddon Rock
Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly
Thomas Keneally, The People’s Train
Alex Miller, Lovesong
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Peter Temple, Truth

While there’s not the very obvious omission of female literary heavyweights that there was last year (when Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Amanda Lohrey and Joan London all missed out), the gender imbalance is still curious, to say the least.

It didn’t take long for Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game and Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath to spring to mind as surprising books to be left off the longlist. And what about Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion? (‘It’s a mystery why Andrea Goldsmith is not a household name,’ wrote Jennifer Levasseur, reviewing the book in The Australian. ‘Her latest offering should be welcomed with the excitement that greets the best Australian novelists working today.’)

There’s a robust conversation about this online already (along with debates about the the interpretation of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’), with some of the best discussions happening in the comments sections of James Bradley’s blog and the blog of Stephen Romei, editor of ALR.

On the latter, former Miles Franklin judge Kerryn Goldsworthy was invited to comment on the gender issue. While she wasn’t particularly concerned about the make-up of this year’s longlist, apart from the omission of Cate Kennedy, she had been among those concerned about last year’s shortlist. She wrote:

The question of who’s writing ‘better books’ always comes down to the criteria that are applied in judging them, and I do think that a lot of the more traditional literary values are still skewed or coded ‘masculine’. Anyone writing a novel about private life, domestic life, family life or emotional life, anyone writing a short novel or a ‘small-canvas’ novel and anyone writing a novel whose main character is a woman (and I don’t mean some male fantasy figure like Lara … erm … Croft, I mean an actual warts-and-all woman) is often automatically, unconsciously disadvantaged in competitions like this, regardless of the quality of the writing. And not necessarily only by male judges, but by anyone who’s been taught to value ‘big’ books about ‘important’ subjects.

The conversation about gender and literary prizes is aflame overseas at the moment, too. Back in November last year, author, critic, editor and prize judge Lizzie Sturnick wrote a frustrated article in response to Publisher’s Weekly’s all-male Top 10 Books of 2009. The Publisher’s Weekly editors had explained the outcome thus: ‘We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration. We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz … It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.’

‘The publishing industry is no better at ignoring gender than your average obstetrician,’ Sturnick acidly responded. Giving an insider’s view from one judging panel she’d been a member of, she said she’d watched as books by men were labelled ‘ambitious’ (which she interpreted as: ‘had shot high and fallen short’), while books by women had been called ‘small’, ‘domestic’ and ‘unambitious’. In a line that has since echoed around cyberspace, she wrote:

‘I just want to say,’ I said as the meeting closed, ‘that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.’

Interestingly, while Sturnick reported her experience of women’s fiction being judged as ‘small’ and ‘domestic’, a judge of another literary prize has come under fire for complaining of women’s fiction as ‘grim’. Daisy Goodwin, chair of the judges for this year’s round of the all-women Orange Prize said:

‘There’s not been much wit and not much joy, there’s a lot of grimness out there … Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing.’

She blamed publishers for ‘lagging behind what the public want’. It’s interesting, I think, that she’s based her analysis on reading the books entered to a major literary prize. It seems likely to me that publishers are basing their choices on what they think literary award judges (like herself) want. Sending in their more ‘ambitious’ books, perhaps?

‘If the books that are entered have been remarkably downbeat this year, it’s perhaps because editors of lighter books by women aren’t confident that they command the same respect as grim ones,’ retorted Jean Hannah Edelstein in The Guardian, remarking that witty, ‘pleasurable’ books by women are often marketed as specifically ‘women’s’ reading, decorated with pink covers and the like.

She went on to say that it was hard to imagine ‘our most beloved, funny female writers of the past’ (like Nancy Mitford) being in contention for The Orange Prize. Goodwin’s admonition for female writers to ‘cheer up, love’, she said, would be unlikely to be directed at a male writer: ‘Debates about who’s going to be the next Philip Roth are not coloured by criticisms of brilliant young male authors for not being cheery enough – I’ve not read any criticism that Legend of a Suicide, for example, lacks joy.’

Another writer, William Skidelsky, agreed with Edelstein, but put another twist on Goodwin’s remarks: she was only speaking the truth, he said. He reported ‘a growing feeling that, in order to be “serious”, novels have to be dark in tone … arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women’s fiction between frothy, commercial “chicklit” and more serious, “literary” work.’ This perception needs to be talked about, he said, as it’s affecting the kinds of books that are written and published.

Amanda Craig, one of the longlisted novelists, told Skidelsy: ‘There really is a sense that women writers have two paths – on the one hand, towards chicklit; on the other, the serious route. And if they take the latter, there’s a feeling that they have to be extra serious in order to be treated with respect.’

It’s an interesting debate. The Orange longlist, in full, is:

Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You
Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
Clare Clark, Savage Lands
Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds
Roopa Farooki, The Way Things Look to Me
Rebecca Gowers, The Twisted Heart
MJ Hyland, This is How
Sadie Jones, Small Wars
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Laila Lalami, Secret Son
Andrea Levy, The Long Song
Attica Locke, Black Water Rising
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Maria McCann, The Wilding
Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Amy Sackville, The Still Point
Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

Last year, there was a flurry of discussion following the all-male Miles Franklin shortlist, dubbed a ‘sausage fest’ by Literary Minded blogger Angela Meyer. It was a year when female heavyweights like Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Joan London and Amanda Lohrey released eligible, critically acclaimed, books that didn’t even make the longlist, let alone the shortlist. Miles Franklin judge Morag Fraser reported that she ‘walked out of our two-hour shortlist meeting without realising what we had done’ and that there were ‘no conclusions to be drawn’ from the outcome. And I’m sure that nobody in that room made a conscious decision to choose an all-male shortlist, but rather chose what they thought were the best books published during the period that met the award criteria, an exercise that will always be somewhat subjective – and the results of which, for Australia’s leading literary prize, will reflect something about the current values of Australia’s literary culture.

Former Miles Franklin judge Kerryn Goldsworthy observed as much on her blog, Australian Literature Diary, concluding that ‘if the dominant culture is a sausage fest, then, well, you know’. Meanjin’s Sophie Cunningham added an intriguing angle to the discussion. ‘What was the problem? Too modest in scope? Too domestic? The undermining of women’s writing involves the use of many such phrases.’ With the exception of Grenville’s The Lieutenant, the other books that were surprisingly left off the longlist could indeed fit these criteria, with their intense focus on relationships and domestic politics. ‘I think at the moment there’s a feeling that women shouldn’t write about domesticity about relationships, or about middle-class concerns,’ the wonderful UK writer Rachel Cusk – whose novels and non-fiction writing intensely explore domestic concerns – told The Book Show last month. Cusk recently wrote an article for the Guardian about this feeling: ‘Women … might cease to produce “women’s writing” not because they are freer but because they are more ashamed, less certain of a general receptiveness, and even, perhaps, because they suspect they might be vilified.’

It’s a fascinating and complex debate, and one we should continue to have, to keep us evaluating and thinking about the kinds of writing we value in our culture and why – or why not. Of course, I think both women and men should be able to write about any subject they fancy. But I also think that some of the best writing – in my subjective opinion – is that which examines human nature, human relationships, the intricacies of how we live our lives, and mirrors them back to us so we can better understand ourselves. And as domestic life will always be an area ripe for that kind of examination, I fervently hope that our most talented writers don’t feel obliged to steer away from that arena for fear of not being taken seriously.

Now, I’m the last one to suggest this doesn’t make good copy – Haigh’s journalistic credentials stand him in good stead here. For those with long enough memories, his essay stands in the clear tradition of Mark Davis’s incendiary Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism – all very self-righteous and frothing at the mouth at perceived cultural apparatchiks. But in Davis’s case I remember thinking he did at least have some salient points, and certainly the career of the reigning pontiff in Australian literary criticism at the time, Peter Craven, never seemed to quite recover from Davis’s rather withering analysis of his motives.

I can only speak for myself though in finding Haigh’s assessment of the current crop of literary reviewers well wide of the mark. To my mind, by contrast, it seems a veritable renaissance at present in Australia’s reviewing culture. When JM Coetzee’s latest novel Summertime appeared last year, I relished the wonderful extended analyses by the likes of Geordie Williamson, James Ley and Delia Falconer that appeared in various publications. Indeed (and again contra Haigh), whomever reviewers such as these decide to write about, I inevitably tend to read their reviews: I know I’m going to be entertained and instructed, as expected from all good criticism. Kevin Rabelais and Jennifer Levasseur regularly publish considered and well-researched pieces, and a raft of others – the likes of On, Bradley, Starford, Williams, Swinn and Case (I’m probably leaving several noteworthies out here – please don’t take offence!) – all bring intelligence and taste to their – yes – usually very modestly remunerated commissions.

Of course, there’s still the occasional punitive piece (seemingly something Haigh wishes more of) but most readers, I’m sure, think: ‘surely-there’s-another-agenda-going-on-here?’ The most recent example that comes to mind is Catherine Ford’s near demolition of Cate Kennedy’s debut novel The World Beneath late last year, all very peculiar coming from a fellow well-regarded short story practitioner whose own first novel seemed to find scant fanfare. And that Melbourne literary types now grace the glossy supplements under the heading ‘Page Turners’ suggests the marketing wing of the new Wheeler Centre might be overdoing the ‘writer-as-celebrity’ just a tad.

But overall I fear that Gideon, you’re just not reading the review pages these days! That is probably the thing for all of us to be really concerned about – that books seem to be getting shunted ever deeper into the recesses of our newspapers. But still there are glimmers of hope – Ben Naparstek seems to have upped the word count at The Monthly for his book reviews page, giving reviewers more space to do some sort of justice to their subjects. He even ran an extraordinary critique of a book written by his chairman’s wife – no shrinking violet this man! Over at The Australian Miriam Cosic regularly has well-considered pages. I could go on.

So: Ozlit seems to me to be in remarkable good health at present, despite Haigh’s diagnosis to the contrary. Lots of new (and sometimes very exciting) work, considerable marketing and (healthy) buzz surrounding both new and established writers, and, most of all, much good faith amongst all those who work in and care for the industry, not least amongst the ranks of professional book reviewers.

My great literary and intellectual hero, the late WG Sebald, remarked somewhere once that a writer must at all costs avoid the contemporary literary marketplace – fashions, literary ‘rivals’, etc. – and indeed his own fame accrued only slowly and amongst a small dedicated following (much like Cormac McCarthy’s, I might add). Now each writer has of course to handle the accoutrements of publicity, of forging a career as a writer, each in their own way – a by no means easy task to negotiate in a culture which puts such a small premium on the written word.

But, a gravy train? Haigh’s insinuation is a bit of an insult – to authors and reviewers alike. It’s one thing to kill your darlings, quite another to throw the baby out with the (damn fine) bathwater.

Martin Shaw is books division manager of Readings Books Music & Film and an editorial adviser to Kill Your Darlings.