Last week my wife and I headed down to Glenelg, South Australia where I was one of the lucky authors taking part in the ONCE UPON A FESTIVAL at IMMANUEL COLLEGE.
Lots of schools were involved and it was great to catch up with a number of writer and illustrator colleagues who I haven’t seen for a while and to meet new ones.
Festivals and school visits are increasingly rare things for me these days so the two days of OUAF were busy and a little tiring but a lot of fun.
I gave six presentations overall: one to a big group (215 students from 10 schools) on Don’t Call Me Ishmael, three talks to smaller groups on Just a Dog and Eric Vale Epic Fail and two Writing Workshops.
All went well but my favourites were the Just a Dog/Eric Vale talks to Grades 3-6. Lots of laughs.
A big thank you to festival director Dr Kylie Booker for inviting me and making me feel so welcome and spoiling us all. Congratulations to everyone who helped make the festival such a pleasure to attend and such a success.
A big cheers and thank you as well to my fellow presenters some of whom (George Ivanoff, Mike Lucas, Belinda Murrell, Charlotte Barkla, James Foley, Kate Isobel Scott, Lili Wilkinson, Megan Daley, Wai Chim) are seen below. You are all awesome!
(Of course because I took all the selfies I managed to get myself prominently in every shot.)
After the festival was over my wife and I stayed on and spent a relaxing weekend at beautiful GLENELG.
And took a bunch of photos.
Back home in Brissie now enjoying our Haigh’s chocolate frogs!
Last week’s blog was about showing your creation to the world and not knowing how it will be reviewed. Because I’ve been preparing a talk on Don’t Call Me Ishmael, I was reminded of the following scene.
It’s from the second book of the Ishmael trilogy. Ishmael and the boys are in Grade Ten where their favourite teacher Miss Tarango is attempting to teach Shakespearean Sonnets.
Orazio Zorzotto (also known as The Razz, Razza or The Razzman) writes a love poem – a sonnet of dubious appropriateness entitled Hot or What!
It ends with this rhyming couplet:
You fry my brain. You turn me on. You light my fuse. Cos YOU DA BOMB!
See what I mean about dubious appropriateness?
Orazio (whose whole persona is of dubious appropriateness) of course thinks it’s a masterpiece and eagerly shares it with the members of the debating team. This is a mistake.
He receives his first review from Ignatius Prindabel. It’s not what you would call ‘glowing’.
Enjoy! Or perhaps not. I’ll wait till the reviews come in …
Throughout the reading Prindabel had sat glowering at Razza like a hawk. Now he looked from Bill to Scobie and from Scobie to me, pushed back his hair on his high forehead and frowned. Since it was obvious that no one else was going to speak, Ignatius Prindabel decided to give us his considered opinion.
‘Well that’s just crap.’
Razza’s eyes widened and his jaw fell open like it had dislocated. ‘What?’
‘That poem – it’s just crap.’
‘Wh … what are talking about Prindabel?’ Razza said looking around for support. ‘It rocks – it’s a wicked sonnet man, just like the ones Shakespeare wrote – it’s got fourteen lines and everything.’
‘Yes it has,’ Ignatius agreed, ‘fourteen lines of crap.’
‘What would you know about poetry anyway, Prindabel? It’s got all the stuff Miss talked about – it’s got your rhyme, your quatrains, your repetition, your imagery … man, it’s even got similarities and a rhyming cufflink.’
‘Well Orazio, I admit that I may not be an expert on poetry but I know crap when I hear it. Oh, by the way, I think you might mean “similes” not “similarities” … and about your rhyming couplet, explain this to me; if she’s the bomb like you say in the poem, then shouldn’t you be lighting her fuse rather than the other way around or was that just an example of your mixed metaphor?’
Razza threw up his hands in disgust. ‘Man have you been tongue-kissing the USB ports on your computer again Prindabel? Haven’t you ever heard of “poetic licence”?’
‘And what’s that precisely? A licence to kill poetry?’
Bill, Scobie and I exchanged a few secret glances. For once in his life Prindabel actually seemed to be holding his own against Razza.
‘You know what I think your problem is Prindabel? You’ve got too many calculators stuck up your arse to appreciate the subtleties of language. You talk about crap,’ Razza said. ‘Well I’ll tell you what’s crap, Prindabel …’
It was the moment of truth. If the Champ was going to avoid an upset, then now was the time to produce the killer punch. Razza’s eyes flicked around everyone at the table, then they carefully lined Ignatius up.
‘You’re crap – that’s what crap!’
Ignatius let Razza’s barb sail harmlessly passed his chin then he turned casually to Scobie. ‘Did you know, that if you put a group of monkeys in a room with computers and keyboards and leave them there for eternity, that it’s a mathematical fact that eventually, just by chance and the laws of probability, they’ll end up producing the entire works of Shakespeare.’
Razza groaned loudly. ‘And your point is Prindabel?’
‘No point really,’ Ignatius said, turning to face Razza, ‘I was just wondering how many minutes it would take a baboon with a crayon to come up with your poem.’
Razza went to speak but instead snatched his poem from the desk and stalked from the room. Ignatius locked his hands behind his head, put his feet up on the desk and rocked back on his chair smiling crookedly at us.
‘You know what?’ he said happily. ‘I’m beginning to really like this poetry stuff.’
……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Heading off to Adelaide now to attend the Once Upon A Festival at Immanuel College. Looking forward to it. Will write about it next week.
Facebook memories today threw up some photos from 2019 when The Things That Will Not Stand won the Prime Minister’s Award for Young Adult Literature.
The narrator of the book is a sixteen year old boy called SEBASTIAN. He’s currently near the end of Year 11 and at a University Open Day. Sebastian doesn’t really know who he is or where his future lies. He thinks he’ll probably study TOWN PLANNING simply because, well, ‘there will always be towns’.
Sebastian meets a girl at the Open Day called FRIDA. She’s a writer and story-teller. She can’t imagine anyone wanting to be Town Planner. When she learns that Sebastian also plays guitar and secretly writes poems and lyrics, she borrows a guitar and challenges him to play one of his songs for her, something he’s never done for anyone before. It’s one of my favourite scenes in the novel.
Here’s an edited version of what happens:
Frida is silent but her wide, expectant eyes tell me that she’s keen for me to begin. I don’t share any of her enthusiasm.
‘I’ve written a few things. Different kinds of songs. I don’t know which one to play.’
Frida thinks about it, then puts a hand beside her mouth as if she’s sharing some secret and whispers to me in her shredded voice.
‘Play the one that the Town Planner wouldn’t have the courage to play,’ she says.
Straightaway I know what song that would be. What I don’t know is whether or not I have the courage to play it.
I rest the body of the guitar as comfortably as I can on my right leg and begin to pick out the opening bars. My throat is tight and my fingers move like big clumsy sausages on the strings. I can’t see Frida and I don’t want to. I stare at a small patch of grass in front of me and try to forget that she’s even there.
I pluck the notes of a G chord and move to a C. It’s now or never. I take a breath.
And I’m singing.
The first words come out more air than sound. But as I continue my voice takes on some shape and form. By the time I complete the chorus and move onto the next verses it’s like I’m listening to someone else.
Eventually I strum the last chord, wait a second, then rest my hand across the strings to deaden them.
It takes a while for the outside world to reappear. The world where Frida has been sitting an arm’s length away listening to a song and words that I thought no one else but me would ever hear. It requires a real physical effort, but I force myself to look at her. She’s staring at the same patch of grass I was. She doesn’t speak. The silence grinds on for too long and I have to put an end to it.
‘So … I should probably just stick to Town Planning then, eh?’
There’s another long grind before a single word drops from her lips.
‘Maybe …’
Maybe? Who knew that such a tiny, insignificant, nothing kind of a word could hit with such a brutal force. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the chest and now I’m struggling to breathe as everything inside of me crumbles and falls away.
Frida looks up. A sheen of moisture is in her eyes.
‘… but only if you can plan a town that’s as beautiful as that song,’ she says.
And just like that, someone has reversed the film and I’m gulping in air again and all the bruised and broken things inside of me are being reassembled and rebuilt. Somehow bigger, better and stronger than before.
I can really relate to Sebastian. When I left school and was heading to Uni I loved stories and words and my secret dream would have been to become a singer-songwriter.
So naturally I enrolled in Commerce-Law.*
Winning the PM’s Award for TTTWNS was an amazing thrill and honour. (And a big financial bonus!)
But that doesn’t mean that everyone has loved it. You just have to scroll through a few reviews on Good Reading to see that some people don’t care for it much at all.
Take LEO for example:
“I’d like to give u a zero. But that’s not possible, so I’m giving u… a one”
Honestly- this book was probably not as bad as I said it would be/am still saying it is. I just had too many frustrations.
It wasn’t for me. 1/5☆
But then there are also people like CRYSTAL:
A MUST READ!!!
This book was so beautiful. I loved Sebastian, Tolly and Frida, especially Frida. Sebastian and Frida’s story left me bawling whilst their playful banter made my cheeks hurt from smiling. I absolutely adored Frida’s character. Her piercings, her hair and especially her way of coping with reality. This book was absolutely fantastic and I am so, so glad that I had the fortune of reading it.
The sweetest 4 hours of my life. 5/5☆
When you write a book and send it out into the world, it’s a bit like Sebastian taking a chance and playing that song for Frida. You don’t know if you’re going to end up feeling somewhat “bruised and broken” or feeling rebuilt “bigger, better and stronger than before”.
Thankfully for this book there have been more CRYSTALS than LEOS.
Cheers Michael
*I ended up quitting Com/Law after the first year and changing to Social Work and then I quit Social Work the next year and changed to Arts concentrating on English Literature. Which, because I loved words and stories, is what I should have done from the start!
The Things That Will Not Stand is filled with memories and connections to people, places and events from my time at University of Queensland. It has a special place in my heart. It’s a bit like a love letter to those days.
So in about 12 hours time at 3.00 am Thursday morning I’ll be talking via ZOOM to a class of Year 7 students at Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt, a GERMAN school in MEXICO about my book DON’T CALL ME ISHMAEL.
Never thought I’d type a sentence like that.
Anyway, as you can see below, I’ll be in some impressive company. At least virtually.
Not sure how it will all go.
The students I’m speaking to haven’t read the book yet and talking over Zoom and trying to engage people has its challenges, especially when English is not their first language.
And that’s assuming that the technology actually works as it’s supposed to.
And that I’ve calculated the time difference correctly.
And that I hear the alarm and wake up!
Oh well. Fingers crossed.
I’ll stop this post now and finish it after the session to let you know how it all went. Or didn’t go. As the case may be.
Michael Gerard Bauer Author 