Book Review: The Reader by Dion Kagan (ed.) more

www.antithesis.unimelb.edu.au ——————————————— The following text was originally published in Fear: antiTHESIS Volume 20 (2010). This digital version of the text is an exact reproduction of the print version. antiTHESIS is an annual journal of criticism and creative writing edited by graduate students in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. For further information on the journal, please visit www.antithesis.unimelb.edu.au The Reader edited by Dion Kagan Melbourne: Emerging Writers’ Festival, 2009. 169 pages, $24.95, ISBN 9780646521923 Daniel Wood Over the last decade or so, one of Australia’s greatest literary success stories has been the phenomenal growth of Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival. Originally only a one-day zine fair, the Festival expanded into a weekend event in 2003 and a week-long event in 2009. Now we have The Reader, a collection of interviews and articles by the writers who participated in last year’s festival, with as-yet-unknown names jostling for pages alongside the likes of Steven Amsterdam, Lally Katz, and Christos Tsiolkas. It’s a great idea on paper, so to speak, offering the general reader both a peek under the hood and a glimpse into the future as the nuts and bolts of writing are laid bare by Australia’s up-andcoming litterateurs. Pry open the covers, however, and The Reader offers nothing so much as a gaze into the abyss where, amidst all the explanations of how to write a story in this genre or a script for that medium, altogether lacking is any self-awareness of why one might be compelled to write in the first place. ‘The [Festival],’ in the words of the editor, Dion Kagan, ‘is not so much about writers talking to their readers, but writers talking to other writers.’ Which, of course, is fair enough—or it would be if more of the writers in this volume had something truly worth saying to anyone, readers and writers alike. The problem is not a lack of varied expertise. ‘Instead of just paying lip service to diversity,’ Kagan continues, ‘[The Reader] showcases the full gamut of work and workers,’ and, true to his word, he gives voice to writers from a diversity of professions: novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, poets and others. The problem, rather, is a homogeneity of literary sentiment. With its content divided into seven sections— ‘The Craft,’ ‘The Story,’ ‘The Process,’ ‘The Industry,’ ‘The Writer,’ ‘The Mentor,’ and ‘The Circuit’—the repetition of the definite article is a symptom of the ague that besets The Reader. Despite the professional diversity of the forty writers showcased in this volume, there is little substantial difference between the written work of one and the work of the remainder. Not one of them seems to have questioned the value of the enterprise of writing, much less explored the hitherto uncharted avenues of writing that open up in the wake of such questioning. Some of them, admittedly, come close to the mark. ‘I want to write,’ says Olivia Davis in her brief essay on the fear of writing. ‘I have created a window of time. I sit down and turn on the computer. I wait at least ten seconds for an idea to come.’ But when nothing comes, her mind wanders, and she asks herself why she even bothers trying to write. ‘I write,’ she concludes, ‘because I want to touch . Daniel Wood 217 people’s humanity by sharing my own.’ Which is a response just tepid enough to dodge the awkward question of whether or not writing is the best way to satisfy that want—and, indeed, whether it is even capable of doing so. Similarly, Steven Amsterdam recounts his experience of being forced to question the enterprise of writing whilst working for a publishing company. ‘I’d look at the books,’ he says, ‘piled to the ceiling and waiting to be pulped, and think “why bother?”... casually asking [myself] if what I’m writing is important enough to justify the potential waste of paper.’ But, again, the focus of the inquiry is misdirected. The question is not how best to ensure that one’s work does justice to the paper it is printed on. The question is how best to do justice to the subject of the work itself—which involves, first and foremost, asking oneself why the subject demands attention as a subject at all. The truth is that writing is an obsessive-compulsive act. To write something with care and deliberation requires an extraordinary amount of time, and the willingness to spend that time writing requires both an obsession with one’s chosen subject and a compulsion to return to it again and again over the course of months and years until every possibility it presents has been utterly exhausted. Some writers, of course, dash off their work in a heartbeat before hungering after their next chosen subject, or else they devote the requisite time to their work but take pains to conceal its obsessive-compulsive origins as if embarrassed by them. Others, however, conceal nothing. They are obsessive-compulsive in their writing and they allow their obsessive-compulsion to shine through every word that is written. They make their writing known to be the product of an irritated conscience but at the same time they question the very capacity of writing to ameliorate the irritation from which it emerges. They at once insist on the necessity of their written words and yet recognise the inherent inability of those words to resolve the situation that made them necessary. Although writing of this second sort may or may not emerge as something finally disposable, writing of the first sort inevitably does because that is essentially how the writer brings it into the world. That The Reader is replete with advice on the practice of this disposable sort of writing is, unfortunately, a given. More unfortunate, however, is that too few of those who have produced this writing indicate that they are even aware of any other sort. Certainly, their work is all reasonably well-written and entirely readable. They can all string a sentence together competently enough and, from time to time, a paragraph shimmers with a nice turn of phrase. But beneath these structural and stylistic accomplishments, the underlying assumption throughout the whole compilation is that merely being readable automatically makes a written work worth reading; that a work need only be ‘well-crafted’ in order to justify its publication and thus attract an appreciative readership. It is as if the writers herein have deemed themselves unable to write something inherently compelling, much less something of any lasting value, and have settled instead for a goal no more ambitious than to write something competent enough to be published. ‘Writers talking to other writers’ equates here to the exchange of trivial 218 Daniel Wood tips and tricks rather than the sharing of deeper insights into the nature of writing itself: ‘writing’ as an act and ‘writing’ as the product of that act. For the writers of The Reader, writing itself seems to be only a form of amusement, a lark, with serious consideration given more to the business of publishing than to the substance of what is to be published. If the future of Australian writing rests in the hands of those who treat it like this, we’re in trouble. When writers talking to other writers only mutually reinforce their existing assumptions about what writing actually is, rather than asking themselves what it might someday be, literary innovation of a particularly Australian variety risks withering on the vine and rotting away altogether. Emerging experimentalists in the vein of Brian Castro and Gerald Murnane will have a much harder time finding a place here than they do at present; and without their efforts to question the entire enterprise of writing—to produce something that is not simply an amusing variation on something already extant—the conservative homogeneity of The Reader will be the mark of what lies in wait for us. The irony of this is that the very venue intended to help emerging writers will be the one that ultimately hinders them—or at least hinders those emerging writers focused strictly on writing rather than those more concerned with ‘emerging.’ At this late stage, overdue praise must go to those few writers in The Reader who stand as exceptions to the rule. In his article on book reviewing, Ryan Paine admirably confronts and catalogues his failures as a critic and assembles something of a manifesto for himself to honour in his future work. In her article on literary self-promotion, novelist Jennifer Mills takes a cold and refreshingly humble look at the emotional ambivalence she experienced following the publication of her first book. Angela Meyer carefully weighs books on literary craft against books on literary substance in her survey of useful resources for writers, and, in his interview with Koraly Dimitriadis, Christos Tsiolkas offers emerging writers some priceless advice that I wish more writers in The Reader had heeded before they sat down and set pen to paper: Don’t get into this if you’re looking for celebrity, don’t get into this if you’re looking for status, don’t get into this if you kind of like the idea of being a writer. Do this if writing is the one thing you must do in your life. ... If that is the reason you are continuing to do it, then you will find a way of developing. With only sixty-seven words spoken in the spirit of Rilke, Tsiolkas far more drastically undercuts the work of the other writers in The Reader than I have done in just over fifteen hundred. In the hope that this year’s emerging writers will heed his advice before they decide it’s the right time to emerge, I recommend reading The Reader for an understanding of the transience of those who write too soon without awaiting the compulsion to do so. Daniel Wood 219