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The Invisible Thread

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

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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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SOMETHING SPECIAL

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Receiving the award for Outstanding Service to Writing and Publishing in the ACT and RegionSome days everything falls in a heap, and that’s what happened to me yesterday. Plans went awry and I scrambled to get to the announcement of the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards. I arrived as they were announcing the last award. Massive fail. Most particularly because they had created a special award just for me. And I missed it.

Thanks to much hand waving and pointing by the likes of Penelope Cottier and Craig Cormick I was invited on stage to receive my award. Here’s a little of what was apparently said earlier (which I only read via email today): ‘In a one off, the Writers Centre has decided to present the Outstanding Service to Writing and Publishing in the ACT and Region Award to Irma Gold for her work with The Invisible Thread anthology…Irma has shined a light on the incredible literary scene that Canberra has had and still has today.’

What an incredible recognition of the last four years work. I feel so honoured that I am really at a loss for words. But it also doesn’t feel quite right accepting these awards (last month I was awarded a Canberra Critics Circle Award for The Invisible Thread) when there are so many others behind the scenes who have made the publication such a success. So I’d like to take this opportunity to name just a few of those who should share in this award.

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Woven Words

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Whenever people talk to me about Woven Words the word ‘magic’ seems to crop up (read a review here). And I can’t help but agree that it was indeed a night on which magic happened. You never quite know how an event is going to unfold. Woven Words was, in some ways, a grand experiment.Read More »Woven Words

All About Ava: An Interview with Sara Dowse

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Sara Dowse grew up in Hollywood and at the age of seven spent the weekend with a 22-year-old Ava Gardner. At the time Ava was considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, and Sara’s encounter with her was profound, though perhaps not in the way you might imagine. Sara wrote about her experiences in ‘One Touch of Venus’, published in The Invisible Thread anthology, and will be reading her work at Woven Words on 27 April. I spoke to her about ‘Aunt Ava’ and a whole lot more besides.
AvaIrma Gold: The two scenes you recall from that weekend are both vivid and sensual. In the first of these you describe playing in the pool with Ava as a ‘baptism, an initiation into something else’. Can you explain why the experience proved to be so significant?

Sara Dowse: I was trying to capture the whole complex business of initiation into womanhood. Water is, symbolically speaking, feminine. Hence the pool. Unlike older, more traditional cultures, ours has a paucity of rituals, and those we do have tend to be idiosyncratic. In orthodox Jewish culture, for example, the one that shaped my grandmother and great-grandmother, they had the mikvah — the ritual bath a woman submerged herself after each menstruation, before her wedding and after childbirth. I had experienced nothing remotely like that but, still, somewhere in my unconscious those connections were either being made at the time or at the time of writing. Curious that I used the word ‘baptism’ — which only goes to show how far I removed I am from those strictly orthodox Jewish traditions. In any case, it’s all about sexuality really.

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