Browsing Tag

Brooke Davis

All the happenings

8 July 2022

It almost feels like we’re back to normal with events again, and it was so lovely to recently head over to gorgeous Western Australia for the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival. I took a week beforehand to travel the coast from Bremer Bay to Margaret River and, my goodness, it is stunning! I knew that the beaches were all white sand and turquoise water but I didn’t realise that they were next-level stunning. World class, in fact. If anyone wants to hand me the job of WA publicist, I’m up for it! The weather was warm and we swam and hiked and explored and generally had the most glorious time.

 

I finished up with a weekend at the festival where I interviewed a bunch of lovely people for my Secrets from the Green Room podcast as part of a special partnership with the festival. It was so great to be hanging with my literary tribe again! The first ep with Claire G. Coleman is up now and – like all our guests – she speaks with brutal honesty about the writing and publishing process.

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Following her will be an ep with brother and sister duo Brooke Davis, of the international smash Lost and Found, and Rhett Davis, who won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for Hovering. It was such a delight being around these two lovely and very funny humans and witnessing their sibling bond. They both rated the green room soup as the best ever, and they weren’t the only ones to rave about it on the podcast. (Frankly, you may begin to think we have all gone a bit mad on soup, of all things.)

 

Third in line will be New York Times bestselling author Natasha Lester who I finally met after many years of online chat. We got very silly on the blue velvet couch in the green room and generally had a grand time. She is gorgeous inside and out, and I loved chatting with her both on and off the podcast.

Finally, I spoke with Australian literary royalty Craig Silvey of Jasper Jones and Honeybee fame. Because of a mix-up, we had to change the time of the interview to after the festival close on the final day. This meant we were the last ones left inside the locked building, bar the janitor. It felt like the beginning of a crime novel, but thankfully Craig did not murder me in the green room with a microphone stand. Stay tuned for these eps!

There have been more events since I’ve returned to Canberra. I had the absolute pleasure of being in-conversation with Ashley Goldberg about his debut novel, Abomination, at The Book Cow. Ashley took my editing course at the University of Canberra many years ago, so it is especially wonderful to see him publish his first book, and for it to be garnering such great reviews.

 

Ashley’s novel explores new territory for me as a reader. Abomination delves into the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Melbourne through the lives of two friends – atheist and secular Ezra and rabbi Yonatan – who are reunited by the sexual abuse trial of a former teacher. Neither of the students were violated by this teacher, and along the book pivots around this case,  it is really about the crises of identity that these two men are experiencing in different ways. The book explores identity, faith, family, love, belonging and what it means to be a good person. It’s such a thought-provoking and beautifully written book. I recommend you get yourself a copy!

Launching the Harry Hartog Tuggeranong store

During our chat Ashley revealed that he originally submitted his manuscript to the Penguin Literary Prize but it was not even longlisted. But guess who ended up publishing it? Penguin, of course, after his agent sent it through the usual channels. Publishing is full of weird stories like this – timing and luck is just as crucial as talent.

Last month I was also delighted to launch the beautiful new Harry Hartog store in Tuggeranong with crime author extraordinaire Chris Hammer and bookselling legends Robert and David Berkelouw. This bookshop is now my local – hurrah for that! A couple of weeks later, as part of their grand opening celebrations, I did a storytime event with my two latest picture books, Seree’s Story and Where the Heart Is. Meeting young readers has to be one of the best parts of this job, and I must give a special shout out to Yusuf from Bonython Primary who is on his way to becoming a published author.

A week later I passed the store and literally found my story. My novel, The Breaking, featured in a particularly gorgeous window display. Always a thrill! #findyourstory

 

Coming up I’ll be at the Canberra Writers Festival on 13 August. It’s great to be back out in the world talking books!

TREES, TRAINS & HOSPITAL TROLLEYS: WHERE WRITERS WRITE (PART 1)

7 July 2015

Writers write in weird places.*

I do all the standard things: scrawl notes in the middle of the night, while I’m out walking, when driving in the car (I pull over, of course, often bunny-hopping to my destination). I’m forever using the back of receipts or whatever I can lay my hands on (I’ve always been disorganised with notebooks, even though I’m always buying them).

editing in cafesCafes are hands down my favourite place to write but I’m not fussy. I’ll write any time, any place. This has included in the back of a tuk tuk in Chiang Mai as it veered all over the road, in a tent in Tanzania with the sound of hyenas scuffling outside, and in a hospital while I miscarried. It’s possible that only writers will understand that last one.

But perhaps the most bizarre experience was going into labour with my third child while writing a grant application for The Invisible Thread anthology I was editing. The deadline was just around the corner and I knew that if I didn’t finish it right then and there it wouldn’t happen. So I kept going, pausing every ten minutes to breathe through the contractions. I managed to finish the application and submitted it (cursing the absence of a special consideration category for completed-while-birthing-a-small-human). I shut down the computer, called my husband, went into hospital, and 90 minutes later had my little boy in my arms. Oh, and we got the grant.

946868After posting this more benign tweet, fellow writer Kaaron Warren suggested I collate a post of the strangest places writers have written. So I put the word out to my writer friends and their stories came flooding in, so many in fact that I’m going to split them into two posts. So here goes number one (you’ll see that hospitals emerge as a bit of a theme).

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Brooke Davis: As a kid, I wrote sitting in a favourite pine tree, and in a paddock full of long grass, and while watching the tennis at the Australian Open. As a teenager I wrote on long car trips around Australia with my family. I had to hold my notebook above my head and almost write upside down because that was the only way I wouldn’t get car sick. As a uni student I once tried to write at Oktoberfest in Canberra. It was the kind of experiment you do in your 20s: What level of genius will I come up with when drunk? You probably know the answer: No level of genius in any way whatsoever. These days, I’m writing on lots of things that move. Ferries, buses, trains, cars, bikes, my own feet, planes, trams. I like how the movement gives me the feeling (i.e., tricks me into thinking) that my writing is moving. But to be honest, the older I get the more boring I am about it. These days, I crave places where I can hole up in a corner somewhere and think I’m invisible while I look at all the weird and wonderful people, like a creepy ghost with a laptop. This mostly happens in cafes and pubs and parks. Maybe I should go back to climbing pine trees?

Rosanna Stevens: I am currently writing in the only place that has Internet for five kilometres: I’m sitting in a garden, in the dark, listening to the shouts of women performing a fire ceremony at a shamanic women’s mysteries retreat in Las Chullpas — an hour from Cusco in Peru. I am also surrounded by puppies. Come at me, deadlines.

Susanne Gervay: Post operative after major surgery with drips and drains, I couldn’t move with pain and I kept thinking, I have to finish my novel in case I die. That’s what I did. Write my novel, not die.

Tania McCartney: Probably the ‘weirdest’ place I’ve ever written is super ordinary — my bed. Sometimes, if I wake in the depths of night with some urgent prose, I’ll fumble for my phone, set it to video, hide under the covers and whisper the text into the phone for transcribing the next day. My husband sleeps right through!

Craig Cormick: That was probably on a trolley about to go into the operating theatre for day surgery, telling the anesthetist guy, ‘Just a moment, just one more moment, I have to write this down before I forget it.’ Second weirdest would probably be in Antarctica, sitting down to write some notes by the edge of a penguin colony (where you are not allowed to get closer than a few metres to a penguin), and looking up and finding all these penguins waddling up to check out what I was doing (clearly the exclusion distance rules that applied to us did not apply to them).

Lee Kofman: The most bizarre place I’ve ever written in was in my living room, this week, when I sat on the couch with both my laptop and my toddler on my pregnant lap, while my boy’s nanny sat close by my side trying to cajole him away. She wasn’t successful though. My child wrapped his arms around my neck, teary, while I kept typing away an essay I had to send to an editor within an hour. The nanny kept talking to my boy, he kept sobbing, and I kept writing, feeling trapped, guilty and loved. I really don’t know more bizarre place for me to write from than this metaphorical, yet very tangibly claustrophobic, space of motherhood.

SJ Finn: One of the more obscure places I’ve found myself writing is on a support boat for an outrigger competing in a marathon race, 72-kilometres long, in the Whitsundays. While the outrigger was a slender boat — full of women going hell-for-leather with a fat-ended paddle — the support boat (a tag-team arranged on its deck) was a large wooden affair, more like a fishing boat than one for leisure but without the fishy smell, or the equipment of nets and pulleys on its deck. As a support boat was paired to every rigger it made for a busy flotilla of twin vessels on a choppy sea. I can, however, be pretty sure there was only one writer. Head down in the beautiful wooden cabin for the entire 8 hours, I wrote as my partner coordinated the ‘changes’ (baton-relay-like) for the paddlers to get spells from the gruelling effort to get to the finish line. Head down amongst the yells and cheers and instructions (when paddlers saw their number held up they had to jump from the rigger and swim to the support boat, another teammate already swimming to replace them) I blocked all this frenetic activity out and became a little famous — at least among a bunch of very excited outrigger competitors — for doing so.

Paul’s view in Arnhem land

Paul DaleyWhen I was a full time journalist, I, like most, found myself writing in some unusual places. The great thing about journalism is that it conditions you to write anywhere, no matter the degree of discomfort and regardless of noise. There’s really no such thing as writers’ block when you’re punching out words to a deadline. So I found myself writing: in the backs of cars; in burnt out hotels; on helicopters; in too many bars; in frozen fields; from police stations and court foyers; while sitting in gutters and on roofs.

With my creative fiction I’ve been more choosy. I started my last novel with a few scrawls in a notebook on a sun lounge on a remote Greek Island and while most of it was written at my desk in Canberra, it developed in cafes, the National Library of Australia and in my dreams (that’s why, like so many writers, I keep a notebook by my bed). My last published short story I wrote in one take in an airline lounge. I began writing the current novel I’m working on while staying in a small bungalow in North East Arnhem Land (the view from my writing desk is pictured here) and I wrote some of it on a boat. I’m heading back to Arnhem Land soon to write some more. Sometimes I write at the kitchen bench between cooking the spag bol, feeding the dogs and overseeing homework. I don’t need aromatherapy and dolphin recordings or solitude. But I do have a lot of false starts and a rewrite a lot in my head, especially while I’m out in the bush with my dogs.

Part 2 of ‘Where Writers Write’ will feature Karen Viggers, Jack Heath, Nicole Hayes, Kirsten Krauth, Melinda Smith and a bunch of others. Stay tuned!

* Not all of us! For some writers routine is everything. Alec Patric, for instance, wrote to me to say, ‘When it comes to writing I’m pretty boring. Can’t really write anywhere else other than at my desk, same place every day. The habit, or ritual, is the only way it happens for me.’