Skip to main content

Writing the Personal



Notes from the Emerging Writers' Festival, 2013

Sure, we all have something to say, but why would people want to read it? This Town Hall session discussed blogs, memoir and biography. Specifically, how to make writing about oneself interesting to others. Why do we want to read your travel stories, your disasters in love, your encounters with cancer, your intimate meanderings? Along with the crucial question: how does one avoid pissing off friends and family so much that they will no longer speak to you?

The panel certainly had great credentials for writing the personal: Fiona Wright, author of a collection of poems, Knuckled; Walter Mason, travel writer, Destination Saigon; Anna Poletti, author of Intimate Ephemera-Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture and Luke Ryan, comedy writer and author of soon to be published You’re Only as Sick as you Feel.

The session was hosted by blogger, Lily Mae Martin. She blogs at Berlin Domestic, where she pokes around exploring issues concerning the body, art, motherhood and the domestic. 



Panel members for Writing the Personal
(L-R) Lily Mae Martin, Fiona Wright, Walter Mason, Anna Poletti & Luke Davies



Rather than a run down of each panellist, here are the most compelling issues explored:

The panelists made a case for owning and writing your own life.

Fiona Wright sees ‘Writing as an act of self determination.’ She says ‘nobody else can tell you what your story is if you tell it yourself.’ As Walter says ‘I like to confess things so other people don’t find them out!’ Luke did not want to be ‘framed by cancer world. I want to get as much out of this tumour as it’s getting out of me!'  he said. Anna said that ‘Winning and maintaining the trust of reader is the first and main challenge for writer.’ To do that, a writer has to ‘establish the stakes, that is, the courage it takes to write, and put this in the writing itself.’

Shared spaces pull the reader in, so write about events surrounding your experience, for example festivals, celebrities or momentous events. Others stories are part of the conversation you are entering into, says Lily Mae. As Anna mentioned, this idea of sharing is also one of the appeals of the zine, By inserting an original photo as a cover, or sealing the zine in an envelope, the reader must unwrap the text and receive the writer’s gift.

Let yourself look stupid and vulnerable, and ‘avoid snark.’ ‘If you have the choice between making someone else look stupid, or yourself, always choose yourself,’ advises Walter. Explore the spiritual, he says, even if this is risky.

Danger zones: characters that walk the fine line between fiction and reality. Fiona’s sister did not speak to her for 8 months after reading one of Fiona’s poems which she felt sailed too close. As Fiona says: ‘Writing the personal is such a risky business, because I like writing that is dangerous, that puts something at stake.’ Having said that, Fiona admitted that she now shows her stories to all the people involved before publishing them. 

In writing the personal, we need to take risks and be brave. This session couldn't solve the dilemma of how one can write honestly without pissing people off. Sometimes, the truth, or our version of it, is not going to be received well. To finish on a quote from Jeanette Winterson: ‘The saddest thing is that I wrote a story that I could live with.’ As she embarks on her memoir, her own (and owned) personal story, she asks the reader: ‘trust me now.’

© Anna Sublet 2013
First posted at http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au/blog/
Written as part of Post Graduate study at Victoria University: 
"The VU Blog Squad is an official team of reporters who cover the Emerging Writers’ Festival, every year, on our blog. They are writers and students from Victoria University. "


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Widening Crack

The little flame in our forty-year-old wall furnace, the one that was supposed to hold tight, hang on and persist, was being extinguished, again and again. The pilot light had become unanchored, blown away and shut down. We were in lockdown, in a Melbourne winter.  We had been bunkered down in our homes on and off over the last two years. We had sat tight as we amassed days upon days of lockdown. At one stage, the summer came. We had mask-free beaches, we had open cinemas and bars.  But then, another Covid gust gutted us in 2021 and shut us back inside. Here we were, like a little pilot flame, buffeted and blown away but still holding out for better days. I would walk past the heater to find that the fan was blowing cold air into the small home. Each time we re-lit the pilot light, it didn’t last long before it was gone. Still, we kept holding onto hope as we sat through the days of rising case numbers and deaths. The gas technician (essential worker; exemption) was on his hands and kn
Post a Comment
Read more

The Waiting

Morning walk.  I wake too late to do my nature writing workshop so I decide to get out into nature instead! Head off at about 7 am, sustained on half a cup of hot water with lemon, a banana and a snack KitKat. Make it to the backbeach in time to see the gold coming up from behind the sand dunes, flowering light from the lighthouse. Tiny black and white wren on the rocks, the Plover family just foraging. A heavy gull takes off when I approach. It flies past me, sits and waits, and flies back as it senses I’m no danger. I take photos and slow-mo videos. I can hardly make out the flying birds as they rise into the dark clouds.  I keep stopping to look at things. At one point I lie with my back in the sand on the edge of the dunes. All around the waves continue coming in and the birds call. What would I do without this?  At the lighthouse, Galahs wheel and screech, their pink bellies exposed as they fly above me. A couple fall behind, screeching ‘wait for me, wait for me!’ Further around t
Post a Comment
Read more

Currawongs Spinning me Home

When the branches of Eucalyptus botryoides fall, as they often do, they root again and continue to grow. The tree is its own ecosystem. Currawongs, sleek black birds with their flash of white at the tail, build their nests, made of sticks and lined with soft material, high up in trees like this.  Some months ago, I stood in shock as arborists began to cut this tree on the next block down, over two days of vicious chain-sawing and woodchipping. I filmed the screaming tree, as it shuddered, shook and then gave way, limbs falling with the ‘thunk’ of a human body.  The tree danced a ballet for its dying and the currawongs lost one of their homes. Many love the currawong for its song, a mix of honey, with a note of uplift, a soaring whip almost, mellifluous on the updraft, ringing from up high. It sounds like an entreaty, a lament and an invitation. The onomatopoeic word, currawong , depicts the sound of their call.  Decades ago, for me these birds were synonymous with NSW, and it was a st
Post a Comment
Read more