A Secret Life: Finding Vivian Maier

Many questions fleet across the mind of the person who chooses to follow some sort of creative vein in his or her life. And this happens every other stinking day. No?

Why the f*** am I doing this?
Is this original?
Is this worth the time of day?
Shouldn't I get a real job?
Do I believe in myself?
Am I good enough?
How the hell do I finish this?
Why the f*** am I STILL doing this?

I'd say this is a healthy way of going ahead. Self-doubt is a better editor and BFF than over-confidence. Ideas must be questioned and shaken down. Belief ought to be able to sail through cascades of depression. And our arch enemy and twin sister REJECTION must be embraced, strangled and sent packing.

But not for all of us, this quest for publication, sales, reviews, acknowledgement. Some of us are secretive. Alarmingly so.

The other Sunday morning I turned up to a Saint Germain cinema with three other people and saw a documentary called 'Finding Vivian Maier'. You might want to jot this down. Or follow the link, godammit, so much less romantic..

A young American guy called John Maloof, who grew up following his Dad around flea markets, bought up a stash of negatives and discovered a monstrous and brilliant body of work of an unknown American photographer called Vivian Maier. Her work, mostly street shots taken in Chicago, spanned from the uptight fifties to the cool seventies and opulent eighties, until she tapered off and died in poverty beside one of the great lakes. The documentary was about this young man's piecing together of Maier's secretive, sour and slightly manic life. It was about him trying to find the pulse of her decades of humble babysitting, and how this rubbed against her obsessively raw and telling images, all of which were hidden away within the stashes of newspapers and hats and brooches and boxes and negatives and rolls of undeveloped film she left behind in storage facilities to be auctioned anonymously.

The woman was a grand artist. Browse through her photographs and you will have humanity slap you in the face. Read a little about her life and you will feel queasy questions forming. Why did she live behind herself, as it were, her passion almost a hidden crime? Why did she never relate to the social world she documented so ably, except through the lives of the children she minded, occasionally roughly, and definitely in an unusual way.

Was she an abused woman whose oxygen came through this outlet? Did she ever try to obtain recognition and, if not, why not? Did she believe in herself (I think the answer is yes - her confidence is almost chilling).

It is an intriguing story, well told, compelling, saddening. No twists. Alarming work. It makes one wonder: what is the real driving force behind the artist? A perfection of the work and its aims? Can this be enough? Should this be enough? What did this woman feel about this life-force running through her? Did she not require the company of like minds? Or was her work made so much stronger for being shielded? An evolution without distraction, stories adrift and all the more powerful?

I confess I have always found photography to be so close to short story writing. Another language - yes - but the same boisterous, finger-shaking family at the table. Just think: the importance of framing, the capturing - even stealing - of a moment, the fact that there are a range of varying viewpoints and only one will give the dazzling result of a work that is infused, charged and possibly timeless.

Thank you John Maloof for finding Vivian Maier.

Vienna, an Island of Story

A couple of weeks ago I caught the midnight train to Vienna. As usual (this is Italy) my booked seat had been hijacked and I had to fight for another. As usual, I hadn't downloaded a map or bought a guidebook and didn't have a clue where I was going. My guardian angel took the form of a young Albanian football player who had drifted to Austria from Italy, so I was escorted into central Vienna where I - as tired short story writers do - fell asleep in a park.

This conference had been long time coming. Held every two years, the 13th International Conference of the Short Story in English is a celebration of the form, involving writers and academics who are shameless lovers of the short story. This year's event took place in Vienna, directed by Dr. Maurice A. Lee and his second-in-charge Sylvia Petter, with a dense and enlightening programme of lectures and readings, much coffee talk and discussion, after-hour readings and soirées, and a wonderful closure dinner ending a fantastic week. The Conference also produced an anthology entitled Unbraiding the Short Story and held a competition on this theme.

Hands up who wants to attend the next Conference in Shanghai?

Though I was torn between attending academic events and readings by fellow writers, I ended up taking part in an endless mix of sessions. Big-time writers such as Cate Kennedy and Robert Olen Butler were in attendence, so imagine my frisson when I joined Cate's workshop on dialogue (tongue-tied Catherine didn't produce a thing) and soaked it all up like litmus paper. Thanks Cate! Without sounding like a groupie I did go to Cate's reading as well, where she read one of my favourite pieces 'What Thou and I Did, Till We Loved' and had a bunch of us in tears.

Many thanks to Sylvia Petter and her team, who kept a very large and varied show on the road. I managed to see quite of few talks including those by fellow Australians Cameron Raynes on 'Pitch-Perfect Endings and the Oldest Story of All' and Andy Kissane speaking about 'Dreaming Australia: David Malouf's Dream Stuff'. And a range of readings by Adnan Mahmutovic, Alison Lock, Zoe Gilbert, Vanessa Gebbie, Jean Almeida. Milling around before and after - and in the biergarten beyond - I met up with literary mates Paul McVeigh, Alison Lock, Tania Hershman, Vanessa Gebbie, Nuala Ni Chonchuir and Alison MacLeod, and new short story friends Jose Varghese, Lucy Durneen, Anna Solding, Rebekah Clarkson, Bronwyn Mehan, Jarred McGinnis, Rhoda Greaves. The list could well go on.

For anyone outside the short story world conversation topics may have seemed a little repetitive (Have you read this? Who published that? How are sales going? I loved the second story in that collection!) however we did branch out to discuss other issues such as writerly tattoos, what time that mojito bar opens, and who's going to the open-air Frank Sinatra film later on?

But that might require another blog post.

For the Love of Short Stories

Some people love short stories. They just do. It's like loving apricots, or rainy days, or a good Traminer. It is an indisputable love, a love that is self-serving and self-perpetuating.

A bunch of these people gathered at Waterstones Piccadilly on 20th-22nd June for the inaugural London Short Story Festival - to listen, read, workshop, chatter, celebrate, share. It wasn't a fancy gathering. I'd say it was earnest and discreet. There were some big short story rock stars, as well as smaller people with just a story or two published. I think there was a good warm feeling in the air.

Organised by tireless short story champion Paul McVeigh and London's Spread the Word, there were talks about the weird and wonderful in the short story, about idea generation and the current boom in opportunities for short story publication, about compiling a collection, about voice, about approaching agents and publishers and writing for radio, about the current crop of brilliant Irish short story writers. These were delightfully chaired by - among others - Tania Hershman, Vanessa Gebbie, Paul McVeigh, Anita Sethi and Alex Preston.  There was a series of workshops with authors Claire Keegan, M.J. Hyland, Claire Wigfall, Frank O'Connor shortlister Colin Barrett and Jacob Ross, plus free writing workshops with expert teachers and a Speakers' Corner where stories were read to aficionados - by intriguing writers such as Ruby Cowling, winner of this year's White Review Short Story Prize. There were also special interviews with inspiring short story stars Claire Keegan, Jackie Kay and Colin Barrett.

I didn't manage to book tickets to all events but I did go to a good smattering (these were entirely affordable). Tania spoke to 'weird' authors Dan Powell, Adam Marek and Robert Shearman, who all read mesmerising pieces of their work. Vanessa spoke with a panel of 'gatekeepers' in the short story world, including Jacques Testard of The White Review, cool literary agent Carrie Kania and Jen Hamilton Emery of Salt Publishing. I was lucky enough to hear Claire Keegan read from her New Yorker story 'Foster' - I can still hear the lovely tones of Claire's voice and am reading her collection Walk the Blue Fields at the moment. I also participated in a workshop with M.J. Hyland who handed out a series of tricky (and daunting) writing exercises - to 'shorten the apprenticeship' that all of us are working through. And finally, I heard Frank O'Connor shortlister A.L. Kennedy, Helen Simpson and M.J. Hyland read from their work in a session aptly entitled 'In Praise of the Short Story', chaired by Alex Preston (wearing an excellent shirt).

Though I escaped a couple of times to cocktail down at Southbank or brunch with a friend, it was an intense weekend, spent within one of the most alluring bookshops I know, surrounded by the very books we are all trying to compose. It was indeed an inspiring, comforting, sometimes daunting Festival and I will be coming back next year. 

Congratulations Paul!

There's something very lively about short stories - you can be taken through a whole lifetime in just a few minutes. Festival Director Paul McVeigh

Connecting Writers: The Writing Process Blog Tour

What am I working on ?

I am working on my second short story collection and hopefully nearing the end. I’ve been working on it for over a year and have nearly twenty stories. One has won a competition, another was a short-listed finalist and is coming out in an anthology in July, another was long-listed and another has been accepted by a literary review. I still seem to have lots of ideas and am generating new work, but I am also at the phase where I am beginning to think of story order and how I would like the book to feel. My first collection came out in September 2013 with Indigo Dreams Publishing UK.

How does my work differ from others of its genre ?

Perhaps my stories have a broad range of locations as I come from Australia and have lived in West Africa and in several different places in Europe. I also like incorporating some colonial history when it seems relevant, as this is one of my great passions, and social issues like integration and migration. Crossing over into new cultures has been a big part of my life and that of many of those around me, so I have a deep interest in exploring this theme.

Why do I write what I do ?

I’ve always been attracted to both the short story form and the way language can be an important ingredient in its lingering effect. I love the power and verve of the short story. I love its precision and turning points, its resolution or open-endedness; the way it twitches on the page. With regard to subject matter, the compression of the short story works well for me – I can slide from one location to another, without the wearying depth of field that would be required for a novel. Each story is so exciting to write – it becomes your universe for the time you are creating it – and I also find that the fast and feisty rhythm of producing short stories is suited to my temperament and crazy lifestyle!

How does my writing process work ?

I am always listening for ideas. I love to feel a story beginning in my head and just live with it for a while or write a few notes (I think I have forgotten loads of ideas that way!). For me it’s really important to hop on the merry-go-round at the right point. First words are critical and the entry moment where you begin to unveil your idea to the reader must be subtle and resounding at the same time. I try to write in freefall, not searching too hard but letting voice come through and pitch establish itself. I think the story has to feel effortless and a little training must be involved – also dud stories must be abandoned! The most exciting part is having an uncertain idea about what will happen, and perhaps turning off on an unexpected tangent, then try to align the bones of the story and get to its beating heart. I also love a strong ending and like to try to steer towards this, although when it happens it is usually a moment of surprise for me too. I agree with what I think George Saunders said about the short story: Get in and get out. 

Thanks Alison Lock for this and I'll pass the baton to Rachel Fenton who will post next week..

The Bay of Noon: a Love Letter to Naples*

I recently went deep down south, down Italy's long and stupendous peninsula away from the windy, unpredictable spring of the north. A break from family, the screen, the current short story collection. As the trip involved a long train travel from the north I left equipped with what I thought was an appropriate novel for the journey. I’ve had Shirley Hazzard's *The Bay of Noon on my bookshelf for a good while now, having enjoyed The Transit of Venus (which I must reread) and People in Glass Houses (dealing with the raw truths of diplomatic life - right up my old alley).

But The Bay of Noon was almost too beautiful to savour while I was rocking on a night train and trying to dodge an unwanted hand (yes dammit!), or my blistery-eyed shunting out of Rome and further south. Then the scenery itself was absorbing with its great social drama, the volcano (!) and the hustle of history. Today's Naples is a world away from the post-war city Hazzard experienced, but so many  images remain resolutely the same. Let me find a few: 

On to the flanks of those palaces, smaller buildings had been grafted in every age except our own – in any unlikely opening, on any precarious ledge, apparently with the sole provision that they bear no resemblance to one another. Forgotten or overlaid, antiquity had been buried in the walls, making its laconic signal – sunken column, Greek, dark, smooth as silk, with acanthus capital; a Roman inscription, traces of a fortification, or crenellations that, centuries since, had been surmounted by a rooftop. In one vast courtyard was planted a colossal sculpture, Roman or Renaissance, of a horse’s head; another ended in galleries of disintegrating frescoes..

Hazzard’s narrator Jenny lands in post-war Naples traumatised by her past, particularly her too-close rapport with her brother. Her emotions are ‘cauterized’. As Hazzard did, Jenny works with NATO, installed in the ‘volcanic’ city liberated by the Americans.

The city itself was marked by a volcanic extravagance. Its characteristics had not insinuated themselves but had arrived in inundations – in eruptions of taste and period, of churches and palaces, in a positive explosion of the baroque; in an outbreak of grotesque capitals, or double geometrical staircases; in a torrent of hanging gardens poured down over terraces and rooftops, spilt along ledges and doorsteps.

Jenny befriends local Gioconda and her Roman lover Gianni and we are invited to savour scenes of Italy's Fellini-esque film world. She also goes out with Justin, a Scotsman working in Naples, who reveals Jenny's stiff character from another angle. Through her friendship with Gioconda she is absorbed into the rich and tragic arc of local history, which by comparison makes her own life feel pale.

Whereas excavations of Gioconda’s past brought to light temples, palaces and tombs, with ornate interiors worthy of grand gestures and heroic renunciations, my own archaeology seemed by comparison like a mere scouring of some minor site – a hilltop encampment of the Hittites, say, or some beehive village of the Picts – yielding nothing more than a heap of domestic utensils and handful of weapons, few intact and none beautiful..

Hazzard’s language is mesmerising as she probes our absorption by place and the instincts that foster love. There are moments where love is hidden, where love collapses, where love bursts to unexpected and thwarted life. Through Jenny’s eyes she dissects Gioconda and Gianni’s rapport which she sees falter and twist and revive. Jenny's own growth and recovery accompany this close connection, as does the lush presence of Naples, a city that Hazzard, too, also began to call home. Through every page the voice of Naples is loud and melodious: 

Let me dream that you love me again

And let me die in my dream.

Capri! Capri! Not for me!

It wasn’t until I was home and back in the doldrums that I reread Hazzard’s Paris Review interview after finishing The Bay of Noon. I am addicted to these interviews and wanted to read more about Hazzard’s attachment to the grand city of the south. To my dismay I read that Shirley Hazzard has a house in Capri and is an honorary citizen there. Capri lay just off the coast from where I was staying! To think that perhaps the great writer – who lives between New York and Capri – might have been sipping a coffee at the local bar there! I might have wandered over and sat in her glow, foolishly asked the now eighty-year-old lady for an autograph. 

But alas, Capri remained on her platter of endless sea and I did not leave the mainland. This lazy author feared being crammed on a ferry with tourists and preferred a day on a secret pebbly beach.

Hazzard herself speaks of the delightful break that initiated her career as a writer

  

In 1960, I wrote a story--a simple story of a young poet, derived from an evening in that Italian garden. I sent it to The New Yorker, without keeping a copy. It was accepted by William Maxwell, and I received his letter standing in the big old kitchen of my friends' villa. Moments like that don't come twice..

Love and War and Rules for Writing

Italian Alpini in 1915

There is a road that I drive along many many times during the winter. A low flat bridge over water weaving around islands of rocks, stunted trees, the frayed shoreline and blue shoals glittering with the cold force of the mountains to the north. It is the Piave River, just down from Vittorio Veneto. At the end of 1918 (24th October-3rd November to be precise) this is where the Italians finally defeated what remained of the dishevelled, underfed and disunited Austro-Hungarian forces in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. This was the last conflict of the eleven Isonzo battles, a three-year stretch of bitter advances and retreats fought high in the Eastern Alps of northern Italy and on the vast Piave river plain. A few years back I translated dozens of information signs for alpine hiking trails over the old battle sites of the Great War. It was almost too much for this ignorant writer. Example: the forgotten and heartbreaking Battle of Ortigara, where 23 000 Italians and 9 000 Austrians died or were wounded in a fifteen-day advance and subsequent retreat! These were fierce, merciless battles where for the first time fortresses were blown to bits by Howitzer blasts, where gas was introduced, where barbed wire laced mountain tracks and tunnels were dug in the mountain bed and encampments blown to the stars. There are roads I cannot drive down because I still hear the cannons with their 22km firing range whistling across the valleys towards young men tormented by hunger, cold and dysentery, who just wanted to go home.

Reader, I have sons!

Hemingway in Milan 1918

On July 8th 1918, an eighteen-year-old American Red Cross volunteer was handing out chocolate and cigarettes to Italian troops on the front line. An Austro-Hungarian mortar knocked him unconscious and killed one of the Italian soldiers, blowing off the legs of another. When the young American awoke he was buried in the dugout and had shrapnel embedded in his thighs, groin, hands, scalp and feet. Somehow, though he would not remember afterwards, he dragged a third wounded Italian soldier to safety. (For his bravery he was awarded the Croce della Guerra). Severely injured, he was operated on immediately then transferred to the Red Cross Hospital in Milan where he spent three months recuperating before returning to the front. In hospital the young man fell in love with an American nurse seven years his senior. It was the young man's first love and he loved hard and deep. The two planned to marry upon their return to the United States. But there were arguments, a time lag; the nurse remained in Italy and fell for an Italian captain. She wrote a letter of adieu to the young devastated man. It was said that this act of abandonment established a behaviour pattern that would be repeated over and over throughout the man's life: he would always leave his lovers before they had the chance to abandon him.

This young man was Ernest Hemingway.


Before Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms established his reputation as a groundbreaking modern American writer and showed his scathing opinion of war, he wrote this touching short story. It's a small, minor story with a sense of love and war, and an early display of the rules of writing that Hemingway would build into a lasting school of thought.

A Very Short Story

One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.

Luz stayed on night duty for three nights. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.

Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.

Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the Armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.

He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.

The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

Though this young rejected man went on to become a great and tormented writer, obedient to his craft but also to his passions, his women, his hunting, his alcoholic suffering, it could be said that - to the end - he stuck to the writing rules he learned as a cub reporter:

Use short sentences. 
Use short first paragraphs. 
Use vigorous English. 
Be positive, not negative.

There seem to be several lessons in all of this.


**worth reading: from The New York Times Archives (1940) 'Ernest Hemingway Talks of Work and War'

The Importance of Violets

Now that we are moving into a new season there is a chance that you may be feeling like a violet. I do.

It's time to inhale the air after the damp snowy chill of winter. It's time to watch green grass shooting up in the air, the cherry blossoms still in nobs on the tree, the wisteria with her first clutched fronds come from nothing. Springtime is astounding, even the vigour of the depleted earth around here is bracing to this jaded demi-writer with a mop..

So what has this gardening talk to do with short story writing? Is Catherine once more gazing out the window with her lucky stone between her fingers looking for an excuse? Or is her contemplation of gardening helping her dig up a new story idea?

Once again I'm citing Brain Pickings, where the other week I read a startling back-article about 'Networked Knowledge and Combinational Creativity'. Blogger Maria Popova gives the example of florilegium, 'compilations of excerpts from other writings, essentially mashing up selected passages and connecting dots from existing texts to illuminate a specific topic or doctrine or idea. The word comes from the Latin for "flower" and "gather". The florilegium is commonly considered one of the earliest recorded examples of remix culture.'

In this way, she speaks of 'recognising not only the absolute value of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also of content curation.'

How wonderful and exciting is that? Relational value. Content curation. Information architecture.

She then goes on to recount a story about Picasso, who was recognised by a woman in a park. She enthusiastically asks him for a portrait, asks him how much it costs, and is shocked when he tells her $5000.  
But what? It took you five minutes! 
No Madam, it took me my whole life.

Popova maintains that any creative product is a remix - or a cross-pollination of ideas or experiences from all fields. Perhaps not as adeptly as Picasso, we are all constantly drawing from every corner of our lives - to 'combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles'.

Interestingly, she makes the point that most artists believe themselves original, and that there is something holy about the creation process and its fruits. But for Popova 'it is something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don't really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing lives of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombinging them into incredible new creations...'

Combinatorial. Nothing is ever original. As though we are all grinning babes in the great big sandpit of life making our own turrets and tunnels with dirty hands.. looking for approval, believing our castles to be the bestest. Popova even believes that copying is an inherent form of admiration!

Of course this is all very encouraging for the writer who has had a hardworking break doing translations and now must do a brainshift to get back to story writing. Einstein said that his greatest breakthroughs came after playing the violin. Nabakov famously spent time with his butterflies before turning back to his work-in-progress.

And here are some more lucid, shimmering ideas:

I have found that all positions men take in their beliefs are profoundly influenced by thousands of small, often imperceptible experiences that slowly accumulate to form a sum total of choices and decisions. (designer Alvin Lustig)

Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content. (French molecular biologist Jacques Monod)


And this is where I think Popova elegantly reaches her bottom line, through this quote from her beloved Susan Sontag:

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Wonderful, no? I'm going to interpret that this way: I'm going out into the sun to do some gardening, then a long, brain-stimulating swim before I start some new work. Maybe later on, I'll join some dots.

* * *

Thrilled to hear that my story 'Magaly Park' from my new collection was a shortlisted finalist in the Labello Press International Short Story Competition.