Leah Swann
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Writers in Residence, by Writers Bloc...

5/1/2020

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We really miss going to bookshops and writers festivals and chatting with our friends about what we’ve been reading. And we totally got inspired by what the team at Isol-Aid did with their music festival on Instagram and thought it might be fun to try something similar with writers, reading from their new books and giving us an update on what they've been reading in isolation.

Sounds fun right? And you don't even have to get dressed up to attend as you can watch from the comfort of your own home on Zoom or YouTube. You can watch the broadcast on your phone, your computer or any Smart TV or Chromecast/Apple TV.


Online Events Online Festivals Online Film & Media Festivals
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Melbourne...

11/5/2019

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This indigo city which is not grey,
is not a thing but a situation
or atmosphere or layers of living,
beginning with the earth that hoards the bones,
artefacts and lost words of ancient folk
who are not my ancestors and to whom
I wish to pay my respects, for over
their unknowable songs, their past of togetherness, all one-ness, we laid
our history of separate histories;
 
single doorways, gates and grates and ghettoes
of unique belief, of language, even
our forensic presence – footprints, fragments
of hair, skin that falls into the ever-
transmuting light, which is not grey but the
shimmering colour of a dove’s wing (think
of the NGV, its moat and water-
wall, the stone like fresh-cut lead,
that stuff has crystals in it you know -- it’s not grey but
indigo.) We plait ourselves into this
place which offers itself, clean of account -
we each know our discrete moment walking
the swirling corridor of Collins Street
in that renowned wind, past 101 and
churches with dusty hides like elephants.
This indigo city which lies beneath
skies of milk or cobalt or Prussian blue or
oppressive thunderclouds, such unspent force;
elsewhere El Greco painted skies like ours.
This theatre of breath and cloud is not
grey, which has neither black’s eternal might
Nor the polar finality of white
and is indeterminate, is nothing;
nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
Smog and sunlight, air the hue of opals,
veils of light shuffling through our laneways like
a deck of cards, this ‘devil’s colour’ stands
alone, until it reveals its secret
on the ubiquitous necks of pigeons;
indigo forfeits itself from alone
 
to all one-one iridescence in the sun.
First published in Reflecting on Melbourne, Poetica Christie Press
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The Easter Hare

4/21/2019

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This is a story I wrote many Easters ago which was later published in my short story collection Bearings. Recently someone got in touch to say they read it every Easter which was lovely to hear ... thought I'd post it today.

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Ben Okri and The Uses of Enchantment

5/26/2017

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​The article I wrote on Ben Okri found a home in Meanjin. Read it here:

  Ben Okri 

Pick up a copy of the autumn edition as it is full of good things, as ever, including pieces by Katharine Murphy, Frank Moorhouse and the late John Clarke. He is so missed.

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Do we lose or gain when an anonymous author is exposed?

10/10/2016

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Unveiling Elena Ferrante

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​World famous author Elena Ferrante was not on my radar until an editor put The Days of Abandonment into my hands and said:

“No-one knows who she is. Except her publisher.”
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Really?

At home I opened Ferrante’s novel and was swept up in the story of Olga, and a voice that I had never before encountered in literature, not like this, not so pure, nor raw, nor so comprehensive. From its pages unspooled a kind of female darkness, a rage, startling in its consistency and in its near-flawless execution. And though I’d never read anything quite like it, the voice was familiar; it was the voice of friends weeping in cafes; of wives screaming in helpless fury at philandering husbands, the hurt and outrage of a woman passed over and sinking into invisibility.  Olga’s emotions are so extreme they teeter on madness and they’re laced with poison too - the vengefulness of the woman scorned. That phrase is of course familiar; we all know that there’s something true about it, but it’s another thing to see it fully realised on the page, page after page, till you find yourself hoping that Olga can pull herself together.

I saw immediately how anonymity might make such writing possible, indeed, might even be its foundation stone. It is, as Virginia Woolf said, a refuge for female writers:

            “Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled 
             possesses them.”

Ferrante's stayed anonymous for  seven novels, including the bestselling Neapolitan quartet, and has managed to avoid the personal aspect of marketing that most creators have to participate in, for worse or better. A recent article by Konrad Marshall in The Age's Good Weekend  touched on my own ambivalence about this:

  “Today we are all brands. We define our philosophy by what we                          retweet. We refine our image with the perfect selfie…We curate our reality through the comments, shares and likes we bestow on Facebook..."
 

 All this endless, self-conscious curating! Self-consciousness - and its close friend, self-censorship, and its flip side, self-doubt - these can so easily block creativity. We are not brands, though our works might be. Branding is a shortcut between reader and writer, between audience and  artist, part of the public transaction; one has to switch gears cleanly between one and the other. But sometimes it’s not quite possible. Author Nikki Gemmell found she could not write her 2003 novel, The Bride Stripped Bare, until she permitted herself to publish anonymously. She’d read Woolf’s statement that for most of history “Anonymous was a woman.”

            “And with that simple sentence, my recalcitrant novel was unlocked.”

(She was unmasked before her book even went to print, to her great distress.)

Elena Ferrante told her publishers at the start of her career that if books had something to say, they would sooner or later find readers:

            “I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern                           that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an  intense                   life of their own.”

Twenty years later Ferrante remained, till last week, a celebrated writer who’d managed to keep her veil, engaging with her readers purely through her art as Saul Bellow and many others also have preferred or would prefer, if they had the choice. Yes! What luxury, what joy, to communicate purely through an artistic language of one’s own devising! And while as a reader I'm fascinated by biography, it seems to me as a writer that to communicate only through art should be possible. And  so I felt, as did many, protective of her secrecy.

Years ago, I drew a simple cartoon: an angel, labelled ‘Art’ stood in the path of a huge truck labelled ‘Commerce,’ and I thought of it last week when I read that Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project, had been warned that his new novel might damage the Rosie brand. What? A writer has success and then is stranded in the straitjacket of his brand?  Are we losing sight of what art is?

To behold a free woman who uses a veil at will is powerful experience, according to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run With Wolves.  Estés describes seeing, when she was eight, her cousin preparing for her wedding. When she put on the veil, she became remote, immortal:
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 “She was only of herself, contained and powerful, and just out of reach in a right way.”
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This was part of Ferrante’s achievement. But Ferrante, it would seem,  is no longer out of reach.

 Investigative journalist Claudio Gatti claimed last week that Elena Ferrante was an Italian translator, based mostly on financial evidence.  Citing Ferrante’s quote that she would use lies ‘to shield my person’ when necessary, Gatti claims that the author has:
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               “in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and                    let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.”

There was a mystery, said Gatti, and he went after it. And perhaps this is what's so objectionable about the whole affair.  A journalist is hunting and uncovering one kind of truth, while a novelist may be working to reveal  something more ephemeral. In this particular case, the journalist has destroyed the protective condition  the novelist finds necessary explore these emotional truths. Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel  that novels are a form of inquiry  into different aspects of existence; such as the tedium of everyday life in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. But maybe this kind of novelistic intelligence is less graspable in our cultural landscape, as Kundera suggests:


           "Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you                         think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the  question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or  Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.” ​


Pseudonyms are fragile, (and sometimes constructed to deceive, as in our own history of Helen Darville, Wanda Koolmatrie, Elizabeth Durack and the infamous Ern Malley hoax) and so maybe Ferrante’s unmasking was inevitable.  Our age doesn’t permit mysteries. If anyone veils anything, it’s ripped off. Half the time it’s ourselves , giving up our details to corporations for delicious new apps, posting our own images, obeying magazine articles urging us to turn ourselves into brands. In France, burqas are literally banned. There's a rumour that Pokemon Go is really about mapping every last secret space on the planet. And when it comes to artists, one of our central preoccupations seems to be matching the biography to the work. Ah yes, we say, this author writes about poverty so beautifully because she grew up with a single mother. And so on. We seek evidence for brilliance in the material realm, in facts, rather than in the imagination.

But what has transpired this week is that many readers, and other writers, are just as invested in her anonymity as Ferrante herself. It was part of her contract with the world. 

Ferrante was that rarest of things; a celebrated artist who was anonymous. The tearing away of her veil is not just a loss for her, but for all creators everywhere.
 
 
 
 


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Behind the scenes of the book trailer...

5/16/2016

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​Making the book trailer for Irina: The Trilogy

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It was early spring 2015 when we made our way into the forest to film a book trailer to promote Irina: The Trilogy, a golden book that contains all three adventures. It was exciting to be heading towards our deep forest location with a crew, an actor, and a 'wolf.'  We'd see what Irina could look like on screen --  a dream realised. The tall trees glittered with bits of  shining sunlight.
Brigita was playing the role of Irina. In our makeshift outdoors change-room she put on a simple white dress and a crown of fern fronds, and became: Irina The Wolf Queen. And I felt that thrill of delight when something comes together, and looks right. This was magic.
I'd wanted to make  a book trailer that would invite people to see into Ragnor's enchantments and battles; a world that has its roots re-wilding, inspired by the archetypal wisdom of fairytales.  

But who could make a trailer that would suggest this world? I approached some film-maker friends, Annika Glac and Marcus Struzina of Glass Kingdom Films, who made the feature films Belladonna, and Bunny (glasskingdom.com.au) When they said  they could do it on our budget, I was so excited! They understood the aesthetic -- not too pretty, not too Disney, but rough and beautiful and natural. This is how we once lived and how part of us yearns to live still. 
We gathered the elements. A real wolf was out of the question. Could we splice in some footage from somewhere? Hire someone’s husky? A white wolf would be good…
And then we learned that a friend had a stunning white dog who had been rescued, called Apollo. On the day of the shoot, we had to keep Apollo on a lead as he loves to run through the forest, and does not always come back! On the day, he seemed to accept his role by Brigita’s side, and he brought his wonderful, canine presence to the final film.
We had chosen costumes from Rose Chong’s in Fitzroy, and we made a wild crown. We found a magnificent tree to serve as a backdrop, and on our way we passed a patch of blue flowers so beautiful that Annika insisted we add an extra shot to our planned series.

We had our main shot in front of the tree; another where Irina wears a royal cloak, the romantic field of blue flowers, and an image of the cell where Irina is trapped at the beginning of Irina and The Lost Book: Marcus had the inspired thought of shooting it after dusk, next to a small stone wall, lit from above. 

And what about the score?  The amazingly talented Marcus and Annika composed something of their own, using bagpipes, which I loved for its evocation of an archaic, rustic   atmosphere.
My heartfelt thanks goes to Brigita, who plays Irina The Wolf Queen, to Adam -- and his dog, Apollo, for standing in as one of the wolves of Ragnor; to Annika and Marcus for inspiration, understanding and hours of work and their nephew Gulliver; to my friends Tony and Julia,  son Amos and husband John, who carried heavy equipment in and out of the forest, and made ‘wind’ by using reflectors as great fans when the wind machine broke down! 
Watch the trailer:  irinathetrilogy 
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Books stitch the universe together...

5/16/2016

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​“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.”           Ray Chandler, Farenheit 451


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A Valentine's Day gift to you: a free story from Best Australian Love Stories

2/15/2016

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The story behind the story...

Late summer, 2014, I wandered into an antique shop and came out with a handful of postcards, some of them over one hundred years old. I was intrigued by the muted palettes, their dry texture and faintly bookish smell, and the scratchy copperplate handwriting on the reverse of the cards, often with no message, just a name, as though the postcard said it all. The images were pretty and sweet and kitsch, and strangely appealing. Ephemeral relics of a different people, a different sensibility, a different world. I spread them out on my desk, wondering why I'd bought them. 

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A week later, I heard there was a call-out for submissions for a new anthology of love stories by the Melbourne publishing house, Inkerman and Blunt. And  a character presented herself: a woman called Mallory who buys vintage postcards for her boyfriend for Valentine's day, but really, they are for her, because she's longing for something, she doesn't know quite what it is  -- she's in her thirties with a child and she's never been  'in love' before, in that mad and powerful way that sometimes grips us so intensely it seems to wipe out every other thought and feeling. And then a man she knows slightly takes her hand to demonstrate an old folk dance, and it happens, only she is committed elsewhere....

As a Valentine's Day present, you can read the story below.

You can buy a copy of Australian Love Stories at a reduced Valentine's Day price: here ​

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New Review for 'The World to Come'

2/12/2016

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''The World to Come, edited by Patrick West and Om Prakash Dwivedi, is a collection of 21 short stories written by authors from across the globe. It features a diverse set of themes that range from love to the apocalypse. The stories are incredibly creative and thought-provoking, and offer a glimpse into people’s differing perspectives on what the future holds for the human race.''

 Read the rest of this review: here

Watch the trailer: here

Buy the book: here

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Paper? Cloth? A fancy box? A short fiction on making boxes...

12/22/2015

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The First Fold 

When the decahedral box defeats me, I look through the box-making instruction book for something easier. I’d planned to make this decahedral box for my geometry tutor, to reflect our multiple dimensions. I’d fill it with chocolates, to thank him for mysterious words like vertex. Using models made from dowel, he pulls triangles from squares and reflects squares into triangles. I could kiss his feet from awe. You don’t obey these strange compulsions. Resisting impulse is what makes us or unmakes us, depending on your philosophy.

Pinwheels are lovely for storing teabags. Use Japanese rice papers; gold cranes on aqua lakes, a repeat of violet fans on a translucent parchment ground, red dragons, that sort of thing.

 Try for a smooth curved line when making cylindrical boxes for bottles and neckties, and remember to push the end of the pleats into the first fold. (Ah, the first fold. The first container is the womb, where we make our first folds. The second container is the life. We make our lives outside the womb. We enfold ourselves like babushka dolls. We enfold. And we unfold. And then we fold up, into the final box known as the coffin.)
 
The paper blossom is suitable for presenting candy. The folds make an eight pointed star and look like a celestial diagram. Fold forward along broken lines. Suck slender straws of striped sweetness straight from the blossom.
 
A book-style box has many uses.   Choose vintage orange, put lettering in a sixties font, or move on to making steampunk boxes from leather and brass. Design your own book covers! The artist still matters!
 
None of my boxes will ever be finished because my folded curves are inexact, and unrepeatable. I lack patience, I am sanguine, I am as rubbish at making paper boxes as I am at learning geometry.
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Containment, boundary, structure, shape: these make something out of tangible and intangible things. I also want to say, who cares about the packaging? It’s what’s inside that counts.
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