December monthly blogger – Kathryn Heyman!

SoutherlyNews

Many thanks to the inimitable Walter Mason, for his exciting live blogging and though-provoking posts. This month, we have Kathryn Heyman blogging for us. Her bio is below: Kathryn Heyman is the author of five novels, the latest of which is Floodline (Allen and Unwin.) She has won numerous awards including an Arts Council of England Writers Award, the Wingate and the Southern Arts Awards, and been nominated for the Orange Prize, the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the Edinburgh Fringe Critics’ Awards, the Kibble Prize, and the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She’s written several radio plays for BBC Radio…

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Re/solved?

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By Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau It was inevitable, I suppose, that the first Southerly blog post of 2014 should involve the dreaded topic of the New Year’s Resolution (and in line with most people’s resolutions, mine is being put into practice now, after I’ve, erm, had a chance to get a feel for the upcoming year). Resolutions often involve quantitative changes that we hope will lead to qualitatively attractive outcomes. Cutting down on cigarettes involves subtracting a concrete number of gaspers from the currently consumed amount, but the benefits – the increased volume of oxygen in the breath, the return to…

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January monthly blogger – Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau!

SoutherlyNews

Enormous thanks to Kathryn Heyman for her excellent posts. What a wonderful way to end the year. To start 2014, we have the fabulous Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau. Her bio is below: Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau holds a PhD from UNSW. Her work, both critical and creative, has appeared in Poetry and the Trace (Puncher & Wattman, 2013) Southerly, Cordite, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Night Road (Newcastle Poetry Prize judges’ anthology 2009) and Computer Music Journal. Current projects include further development (in collaboration with Mark Havryliv) of the P[a]ra[pra]xis software suite, a realtime poetry and audio generator based on…

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In 2014 Writing Will Change the World

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by Kathryn Heyman “It is not enough to possess a virtue as if it is an art; it should be practised.” Marcus Tullius Cicero. For the last few weeks, I have been writing about the classical virtues and what they mean for writing and reading. Now, at year’s end, I want to reflect for a moment on creative practice, its pleasures and its purpose. Early in her writing life, Elizabeth Jolley wrote a letter to a friend speaking of how disheartening it was, knowing that her work was irrelevant, being certain that no-one cared what she wrote. So – given the effort and anxiety…

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Living up to Something

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by Kathryn Heyman In our culture, vice is sexier than virtue. The Seven Deadly Sins are the fun guys. Greed, lust, gluttony; who wouldn’t want to be at that party? Virtues, not so much. We somehow think of virtue as the quiet cousin, the one lurking in the corner of the party, tutting away at everything. What if, though, the holy virtues are the set of conditions which can help us really enjoy the party? Let me be clear here: when I say ‘holy’ I mean creative. For me, the nature of creativity is the nature of the divine. In…

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Why Write?

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by Kathryn Heyman When asked that question, Isaac Asimov  famously replied with: “For the same reason I breathe.”  I love the implication of necessity his response evokes: I write because I will not survive if I don’t. I write because it is my life source.  Recently, I did a SCUBA diving course. To my surprise, on my first dive, I panicked, unable to comprehend how I could breathe under water. My instructor touched his chest in a signal: just breathe. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t understand how breath worked, how I could get it to my lungs. I was pretty…

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Practical Wisdom

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By Kathryn Heyman At almost every party, there is someone who wants to be a writer. When they retire, they are going to write novels. Everyone has a book in them. It’s just a matter of persistence. You’ve got to ignore the haters. Look at Lord of the Flies – endlessly rejected and now, ha! Who has the last laugh, huh? Writers spend a lot of time at parties cornered by these people. Writers who also teach tend to be the ones smiling and saying, yes, that’s right, you should try, certainly, persistence is key, everyone can do it. But…

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