Bookblog #67: Gravitas and verve



Ivor Indyk, editor, Heat 19: Trappers Way (Giramondo 2009)
Davina Bell, Julia Carlomagno and Rachael Howlett. editors, Harvest 2 (Col. Mustard Productions 2009)

A couple of nights ago I had a hugely reassuring phone call from one of the editors of a literary magazine -- not one of these -- that has accepted a couple of my poems (notice how casually I slipped that information in!). 'We like your poems very much,' said the editor, 'but the proofreader said we had to contact you about a problem with the syntax.' I'm tempted to tell you every word of the conversation, but I'll settle for saying that I love that proofreader (really a copy editor, I think), not just for challenging my syntax but also for recognising her or his own importance in the scheme of things.

With each new issue of Heat, I worry that such confident checkers are a dying breed, or at least that such checking isn't valued enough to allow adequate time and resource for it. How else do Taiwain or rigourous slip through, or punctuation that veers from Mr (correct in Australia) to Mr. (correct in the USA) between one story and the next, and even within a single story? I'm sure my proofreader would have intervened if I'd started a sentence, 'As a boy my grandmother would ...', as Mark Mordue does here in 'Dead Women', an otherwise magical piece of writing about his childhood.

Compulsive grumpy-old-editor comments aside, there's a lot to enjoy in this issue. [I first wrote, 'there's a lot of joy in this issue,' but actually it's a bit grim all round: much death, disability, betrayal, violence and despair.] I like the way Ivor Indyk makes himself almost invisible. There's no word from him, no editorial note telling us how to read what he has put together. Even the phrase that serves as the title for each volume seems to be chosen more or less at random from among the first couple of items. In this case, Trappers Way is the street where Judith Beveridge and the late Dorothy Porter lived for some months in the 1980s, as narrated in the former's elegiac memoir, 'Remembering Dorothy', the most directly personal and effective piece in this issue. It's not the only memorable piece. Roslyn Jolly shares the pleasures of a literary academic visiting Malta for the first time and visiting sites she knows from the Acts of the Apostles, John Henry Newman's letters and the Odyssey, while her husband mutters ('helpfully'): 'It's not real.' There are a number of memoirs and stories of childhood: Mark Mordue's triptych is wonderful; Mark O'Flynn's 'The Milkman's Horse' and Mandy Sayer's 'The Meaning of Life', both fiction, are utterly convincing portrayals of a child's experience participating in a parent's work life, though the former has a final surprise moment that is not so much a twist as wilful sabotage; David Walker's memoir of his mother, 'Beautiful Strength', feels in some way unfinished, as if it's a reworking of notes for a larger project, but if that's what it is the larger thing promises to be worth the wait. Dorothy Johnson's 'Quicksilver's Ride', probably the best thing by her that I've read, is narrated by an old disabled man who is bullied by a group of young teenagers, but it too manages to convey something of the terrors and joys of childhood. [The links in this paragraph are to the online versions of the pieces on the Heat web site.]

I believe that Heat arose partly as a righteous response to The Hand that Signed the Paper's winning the Miles Franklin Award, revealing – as some see it – the parochial ignorance of parts of Australia's literary establishment. It still has a kind of straight-backed commitment to diversity and excellence, dare I say a Baby-Boomer seriousness. 'Oh,' one can say, 'I haven't read The White Tiger, but I've read Aravind Adiga's pieces in Heat.' Harvest had a different germination, and largely gives voice to a younger generation. In Heat, writers of a certain age mine their childhood memories for lost treasure; in Harvest, it's possible to speak of the beginning of a relationship as a happy ending, and the pleasures of Cairo Jim are remembered as from the recent past.

Every story in Harvest is kicked off with a full page four-colour illustration, and there's barely a spread without an elegant visual splash. There's plenty of white space, so the writing has room to breathe. In the list of contributors, the editors describe their interview/chat with first-time novelist Anya Ulinich as having happened amid 'loud country music, clanking coffee cups and wayward accents', and the whole journal has a little of that feel. Not that it's noisy or clanking, but it does feel as if it's grown from a confident literary community. I especially like that it has a featured poet in each issue, with a personal commentary by Geoff Lemon, the poetry editor.

Posted: Mon - May 4, 2009 at 10:10 PM           |

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