Softly and Suddenly

by Sean M Whelan and the Interim Lovers

Softly and Suddenly sees Melbourne poet and performer Sean M Whelan reunited with long-time collaborator Andrew Watson and band – The Interim Lovers – to produce an album that settles somewhere between post-rock record and spoken word CD. In a series of six Fits we are presented the story of Ballard and Betsy, two inner urban Melburnians in the throes of a surreal affair, whose tale unfolds against the Lovers’ backdrop of sparse guitar, percussion and keening violin. Together Whelan’s words and Watson’s music carry the listener along in undulating waves towards the album’s haunting close.

The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse The Hunting of the Snark, in which the suite of poems has its beginning. Elements are freely and playfully borrowed, pressed into service either literally (Betsy gives Ballard a blank map) or metaphorically (Ballard at one point feels like he’s “wearing three pairs of boots”). Softly and Suddenly is not a retelling, and doesn’t require knowledge of the original (as Whelan himself discusses in interview), but will reward a (re)reading of Carroll’s work, which provides the key to much of the imagery (such as Ballard’s vision of “a Butcher and a Beaver… playing chess”).

Opening track The Landing is an instrumental, and sets the musical and emotional tone for what follows. A simple seven-note guitar figure loops over the squeaks and bleats of Watson’s violin and the lazy throb of bass guitar. Over several minutes these build in intensity to a triumphal peak, driven by snare and cymbal, before ebbing away again. The music shares a good deal with the unhurried, expansive instrumentals of bands such as Dirty Three and Explosions In the Sky, and is eminently listenable in its own right. From the second track (I Love The Things That Haven’t Happened Yet) these atmospheric arrangements make way for Whelan’s delivery. His voice sits a long way forward in the mix, in front of but not overpowering the accompanying tracks, clear and comprehensible. This clarity is testament both to Whelan’s skill as a performance poet and to the quality of production on the album.

Over the course of five tracks and twenty-five minutes Whelan narrates the exploits of the whimsical (or perhaps disturbed?) Betsy and her rather more prosaic suitor Ballard. The poems work as a continuous narrative, events and images recurring as the story progresses. Following his lover’s disappearance, a disconsolate Ballard (having spent the week “putting all the food in his cupboard into alphabetical order / because he didn’t know what else to do with himself”) struggles to make sense of their meeting and subsequent, sudden parting. Both characters seem more archetypes or embodiments than individuals (the mysterious, sensual feminine and the analytical, technological masculine), and Whelan leaves physical description to the imagination (save for Betsy being “all smiles and Fifties floral dress”). This doesn’t detract from the work – rather, it allows the focus to fall on what the couple do and how they feel, not who they are.

By contrast, the setting is unequivocally specific, taking in a swathe of Melbourne’s inner east (from Preston to Alphington) before winding up outside of Daylesford. Unreal things happen in these real places – this might be the Melbourne of a Marquez or Murakami, where birds and cars spell out secret messages, and women are mysterious creatures capable of disappearing at will. Then again, it could just be love, elevating the everyday into the extraordinary.

With his relaxed delivery and ability to slip in and out of rhyme with ease, it is hard not to be carried along by Whelan’s storytelling. Softly and Suddenly is a charming tale, a bedtime story of sorts for the lovelorn and poetic. The sentiment which lingers after the last bars have died away is one of hopefulness, if not happiness – a sense that there may yet be a little wonder left in the world.

Softly and Suddenly is available from Collector’s Corner, or by contacting Sean and the Lovers through their Myspace page. You can read Sean’s thoughts on the album in interview at the Overland blog.

By Tully Hansen.

page seventeen is taking a break over the Christmas and New Year period, so this will be our last post for a while. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas with lots of excellent reading and listening material and look forward to catching up in 2011.

First Taste

by Tiggy Johnson

ISBN 978-0-9808136-0-9

‘First taste’ will be launched by Emilie Zoey Baker, this Sunday, 28th November, from 3pm at Caffe Sospeso, 428 Burwood Road, Hawthorn. All welcome.

Tiggy Johnson writes in straight, honest language. The poems collected in First Taste are not for academics, they are for readers, as all poems should be. Johnson draws a narrative bow and fires us through the trials of life, from love to loss, from birth to death, and laughter to sorrow.

The title poem is a journey through vast desserts, tracing a shared life through cakes – from a first taste of butterscotch pudding to an older person’s appetite for anzac biscuits and blueberry muffins. The poem draws a parallel between tastes and life, as we get older the rich sweetness of life is replaced by the safe and bland.

Coburg High continues the exploration of reminiscence as the narrator passes a set of buildings that once meant so much. A flood of memories rushes the page familiar appropriate to any reader who attended high school.

The introductory set of poems concludes with I remember as the narrator recounts childhood memories such as bowling her eldest brother middle stump and then never being allowed to play again. The sequence of memories concludes with a harsh reality ‘I don’t remember / ever missing it’.

The second “set” of poems is themed around pregnancy. Week sixteen removes the gloss painted over pregnancy as Johnson describes with brutal honesty the fatigue entering the second trimester.

Baby’s health is everything is a song of frustration. In spite of the best initial intentions the speed of the world and the ever presence of commercials push a mother into the fast food aisle of life. The poem closes with a sad resignation.

It’s like… should be essential reading for all males in order to gain an understanding of the horrors of morning sickness. This piece reminded me of Dr. Robert Winston who, in ‘The Body Human’, while sitting in a rubber dinghy in rough sea swell explains the feeling of morning sickness as “at first you think you’re going to die. Then you’re afraid you’re not.”

The facts injects a twist of humour into the pregnancy themed section. Through the agony of labour the narrator can “laugh” –

Like

whispering to your husband

you were sure the baby

was going to come out of your arse

only to discover later

there is no such thing

as a woman in labour

whispering.

daddy’s girl takes the up till now light hearted collection into the darkness of loss. The piece imagines the thoughts of a father on what would have been his daughter’s fifth birthday. Johnson describes the images of a child at play, but the dark tone creates a soft focus dream like picture, the poem concludes with a resounding stanza,

he tries to avoid wondering

how different his memories might be

if you’d been born

just two days before

Solitaire continues the dark path by recounting the final days of a loved one lived out in a nursing home. The poem explores the regrets of missed Mothers’ Day lunches and draws a vivid image of ambulances that arrive without any sense of urgency.

Shopping for girls is a return to the earlier theme of an individual trying to stand against multi-national commercial pressure, similar to the exploration is Baby’s health is everything the poem traces the ever increasing pace of growing up experienced by today’s children.

The collection draws to a close with Concluding and Dear Dad. Johnson brings the collection full circle as she explores the end of life. Concluding takes us into a hospital ward as a father endures one last visit from his daughter and grandchildren. The pain is expressed with sorrowful lucidity in the stanza –

We don’t stay long

you’re too tired to say more than thanks

to the kids

for their homemade birthday cards

and the cupcakes

you won’t touch.

Dear Dad is almost a tanka in its brevity. Straight to the point, it expresses the only regret of a surviving child as being that the end had to come.

The collection reads as a whole with a natural progression and delivers clearly and without any airs of pretension that we are the sum of our experiences, there is pain in birth and relief in death. But, regardless of whatever life can throw at us, butterscotch sauce is a cure-all.

Ocean Hearted, by Graham Nunn.

Another Lost Shark Publications.

I always enjoy a poetry collection that not only allows me to indulge in good poetry but takes me on a narrative journey. Graham Nunn’s Ocean Hearted is a collection that took me places, brought back memories of growing up by the seaside, and offered up visions I’ve yet to see. I was drawn into the collection from his opening poem ‘Grounded’.

In a crowded bar on Merthyr Street

he trembled like a sailor

having seen the slope of the world and its infinite

smallness, having returned

with the illusion he had not changed, but friends

had grown old and disappeared

into home and heartbreak.

All of us at one time or another, have returned, whether from a weekend away, a short holiday or an even longer absence. And once back, tried to be reabsorbed into our home/ town/ country. Nunn captures that stranger in a familiar land feeling without that nostalgic softness that often intrudes in others’ attempts.

Several of his poems, on one level look at landscape, particularly that of the river and sea. He uses the senses to capture the exactness that often is missed when a poet attempts to describe landscape. In several poems the landscape became more than a place, it became ‘place’ and therefore an integral part of the poem, such as this from ‘Riversongs’

It was good to wake this morning, knowing nothing except

there was a river, lacquered blue, streaked with light, shallow

over sand flats where flathead slouch and whiting shiver in schools

‘Good Friday, Brunswick Heads’ brought back memories I thought long forgotten.

And it stops my breath. It was a

morning incapable of cold, I never once thought of the rocks

pulling me into darkness and doing it now, I’m back there

staring at my wading boots, wondering,

the placement of them?

I recall rock fishing with my family as a child, and watching as my father was taken by a wave. Those seconds when everything froze – the sea, sky, land, all silent – then life returned. My mother screaming, us children not knowing whether to cry or not, and then my father swimming ashore –  abusing the loss of his fishing rod and the fish he swore he’d hooked just before the wave. Nunn in his poem has taken me back to that moment.

Other poems in the collection look at endings; of relationships, of life, of friendships, even the seasons.  His poem ‘Heyford Street’ offers a snapshot of the childhood home, once again without seeing through cloying nostalgic rose-tinted glasses.

Ash-grey asbestos roof tiles overlapped in patterns

reminiscent of a snake’s scales and downpipes

held emaciated fingers to the sagging eaves.

I like the honestly Nunn offers. He is a great observer and it’s the little details that he puts into a poem that resonate, gives it life and connects with the reader. I also enjoyed how he dealt with the simple domesticities of life, often setting them one minute by calm seaside breezes and next, storm-tossed skies.

From ‘Moored’:

At the window of this cheap motel

I turn to the dawn and spit.

The rain from yesterday falls bleakly

in the gap between our hearts.

What really intrigued me was how water, either represented by the river or the sea, was so much a part of his poetry.  Even the poems based on relationships, had an ebb and flow. Often as a reader I was floating with the current, allowing his words to wash over me, suddenly there would be a surge, poems such as ‘News on the phone’ and ‘Last tricks,’ a wave pulling me under and forcing me to the surface for breath.

Kevin Gillam states Nunn writes with a photographic eye and painter’s sensibility.  He does indeed do that, giving us all those details that give a poem depth, but for me there was also an honesty that added reality. I have read and re-read this collection, finding something new each time and I’m looking forward to the discovery of my next reading of Ocean Hearted.

The Nine Flaws of Affection

by Peter Farrar

Ginninderra Press

Peter Farrar feeds words onto the page like a priest delivers the Eucharist. Each word is selected specifically to add to the arch, and just enough words are used to reach resolution. Peter Farrar, as the medium of the stories, has removed all unnecessary words, including some personal pronouns, leaving us with nine portraits of debilitation delivered with extreme priority. Each story has proven itself among the best literary journals in the country, including Overland, Wet Ink, Etchings and Page Seventeen.

            The nine flaws are detailed in the stories of the collection, nine portraits of the seriously disenfranchised, victims of loss either through war, betrayal or simply, life.

War takes its toll in Anzac Day where the true courage faced by veterans nearing the end of their lives is conveyed, not the ‘John Wayne saves the day’ type tale but the real anguish of those sent to their possible deaths by absent leaders. A grandfather recalls his time to his adult grandson, Farrar draws parallels of fear within the two lives lived fifty years apart and under different circumstances, one struggling with the memory of war, the other facing the difficulties of life.

The First Casualty is a returned service man, or rather, mostly returned. Missing his legs and one arm he lies in bed building up the courage to ask his father to help him die. The father acts as a representation of society’s inability to face the consequences of war, being so uncomfortable around his returned son that he needs scotch to be able to face his him.

Journey With My Father is a frank and honest story of a man who’d grown up with his father missing in action in Vietnam. As the father is found and his remains are repatriated any hopes of closure are dashed as new wounds are opened.

These stories go beyond the typically didactic ‘war is hell’ as they examine the true costs of war as borne by the individuals effected. Costs that remain long after the last shot is fired.

Betrayal is examined in Comas, Two Thirds of the Truth and Dust. In Comas we are placed within the frustrated head of a coma patient listening to family members in his hospital room but unable to speak. His story is only shared within his thoughts as his parents argue and his brother threatens him to remain quiet.

Two Thirds of the Truth starts as a road story then seamlessly twists into a tale of infidelity. Two men drive away from Melbourne seeking new lives. The driver is fleeing an unfaithful wife. An accident leaves the passenger unconscious, within his wallet is a photo of the driver’s ex-wife. The driver repays the betrayal by setting the scene as if the passenger was driving alone. The passenger is left to wake in utter desolation and face the consequences from which he was attempting to drive away.

Dust is a bluesy story of how a strong man can be brought to an emotional bomb state by the seemingly unrequited love of a woman.

The saddest, and as such my favourite pieces of the collection regard losses caused by the transpiration of life. An old man relives his marriage through his paintings in The Twenty Faces of Lorraine. Farrar sketches with words the shaky pencil strokes of a husband doing one last drawing of his wife after her death and recounting the tales behind the other portraits hanging from his nursing home room walls.

When I Sang takes us into the ‘brotherhood bin of single people… all dumped in here so others can sort through and pick out something they like.’ Dreams of a young man’s singing career are reclaimed in a small bar after being suspended for mortgage and day job.

Affection is a story of loss and loneliness, not just because of the death of a mother but a whole sad life of isolation with Eleanor Rigby overtones.

Simply, The Nine Flaws of Affection is a fantastic collection. Peter Farrar manages to perform autopsies on ordinary characters, revealing the incredible sadness that thrives within, making their tormented lives extraordinary. I know these stories will haunt me until I read them again, and again.

Music for Broken Instruments

by A.S. Patric

Black Rider Press

RRP $1.99

 In order to write an nonsubjective review you have to read ‘from a distance’, evaluating every word, balancing every line, consider whether there is a consistent tone, whether the verbs active, etc. A.S. Patric’s words draw you in and set you floating in an ethereal bliss thus making it extremely difficult to review objectively.

 Patric literally opens with a King Hit, ‘drop a brick / into your soul / kick out the heart / of the old man / wandering, drooling / roaming your head / like a lost word / the dementia of your dreams’. These words demand attention by slapping you across the head like a mob gangster until, as Patric closes the poem, ‘the brick is a relief’.

 Paper Targets is about the angst of being a writer, or more specifically submitted works. This has, of course, been done many times before, but not in the style of A.S. Patric. Unfortunately to understand what I mean by this statement you have to take in the whole form of the poem, I cannot merely quote a few lines, so consider this a teaser.

 The meaning of a dream is an autotelic piece defying interpretive analysis, read it four times and you’ll come away with five different interpretations, and this is the point; sometimes it is simply the beauty of the words. This may be a difficult concept for students looking for meaning in the random tea leaves of poetry but is completely accordant with Poe’s The Poetic Principle and the entire Art for Art’s Sake movement. And why would you want to look further when you are given lines such as ‘when you need to get back / to reality in a hurry / just the old man / waving at you / in a cloud of flies / that we used to call God’.

 Q & Q closes the collection but leaves so much more open. The poem is a series of questions that if you typed into google could destroy the internet! ‘Are we more disconnected? / Are we more superficial? / Does the internet cripple the creative life?’ Questions fall upon questions into a concrete poem style spiral, spinning us out of the collection to seek our own answers.

 I started this review with an explanation of the difficulty, I’ll finish as an apologist; A.S. Patric pushes the very edges of poetry without falling into the self-serving chasm of esoteric avant-gardism, if this is music for broken instruments may they never be repaired.

 Music for Broken Instruments is available from the Black Rider Press (http://www.blackriderpress.com/shop.html ) website for $1.99 in an awesome retro typeset, that, as Maxine Clarke writes (http://web.overland.org.au/2010/05/28/poetry-review-%E2%80%93-music-for-broken-instruments ) begs to be printed.

It’s hard to believe submissions have closed and I’m off on my family road trip after one more big sleep. This will be my last post for a while, but Vicki Thornton, Acting Editor, will be taking over while I’m gone, so please make her feel welcome. It seems fitting to share Vicki’s thoughts on this short story before I go.

‘Nights’ by Suvi Mahonen was published in Page Seventeen, Issue 6. I was part of the editorial committee that year and when Tiggy asked if I would like to review a short story from a past issue I jumped at the chance to review this story. Published in 2008, and with all the words and stories and poems and novels I’ve read since, I still remember this story vividly.

Dani Harrison and her husband Mark are ready to start a family. They have bought a house, they are both young and in good health, a family seems the next step in their relationship. Mark, a nurse in the labour ward of a busy hospital, is more than eager for a child. Dani, an artist, is unsure how a child will fit into their life.

Once pregnant though, Dani looks eagerly forward to the new baby. The nursery is planned and prepared. However baby Patrick is stillborn, will never see the nursery his parents have lovingly decorated. In an emergency operation Dani is given an hysterectomy and returns home knowing she will never have children.

The couple struggle to come to terms with what has happened. With the grief of losing their baby but also knowing that there will no other children to comfort them. The final scene of Dani finally returning to her painting. A figure of an old woman, unable to smile, alone, and with ‘a faint line indents the base of her stolid fourth finger’; shows exactly what she can not voice.

This story is more powerful because of what is not told. Relayed in past and present segments, it is thick with a tense silence between the characters. Mahonen looks at these ordinary characters, how they struggle with the isolation of their own grief as well as that of a couple. This story is heavy with loss. The loss of a child but also the loss of a relationship.

Ashley Capes is the Poetry Editor for Issue 8 of page seventeen.

 Stepping Over Seasons

by Ashley Capes

Interactive Press: ISBN 9781921479328 (pbk.)

RRP $25.00

Simply, Stepping Over Seasons is a fantastic collection of short poems that will appeal to both poetry lovers and readers who may have been burned by poetry in the past. Ashley Capes has captured themes such as love / loss / longing, suburban streetscapes, the plight of Outback Australia, and the anguish of the writer’s life, in poems that can be studied for their form or enjoyed for their content.

When you read Capes’ work a distinctive style becomes quickly apparent; he has an ability to form a poem around a seemingly ordinary object. As Justin Lowe writes on the back cover ‘You sense you could point to any object in a room and Capes would conjure the ghosts of a hundred pairs of hands.’ Capes creates a vivid image of an object and the reader is treated to a reconsideration. This object could be small, like the wedding ring in other objects, or an entire house as in shell, once filled with life and memories, the house is left empty;

            our house is a shell again,

            not precious

            and beach-like, just

            a knock for someone else to answer.

This poem, as indeed the entire collection, displays an honesty that is rare in contemporary poetry where so much emphasis is placed on craft and polish. Two poems late night and fujin’s bag expose Capes’ struggles with the life choices of a writer.

Late night compares writing to other arts such as music and movies, and the frustration that can be felt by trying to extract an emotional response with just lines. The twist is in the closing stanza of the poem is the artist’s dilemma, do we live life or create art;

            I guess the great lie of our time is capture-

            … everything can be caught, … so we don’t have to appreciate

            anything in the moment.

The angst of the writers life continues in fujin’s bag where the late night routine of the writer is contrasted with the everyday happenings around him, happenings that he is aware of and yet not a part of; his wife goes for a glass of water at 1 am, strong winds blow outside, all the while the writer is;

            still moulded

            to the desk, blinking

            back sleep, convincing

            myself, somehow

            that all this

            darkness is necessary.

A closing stanza that places in context the solitary life of a writers’ choosing; not book launches or festivals, not drowning in accolades and riches; but late nights fighting sleep while life continues around and without you.

 Capes’ skill in capturing the struggles of rural Australia has been acknowledged with a prize in the 2008 Ipswich Poetry Feast Open Poetry Section for farm and a commendation in the 2009 Rosemary Dobson Prize for small town.

Farm is weighed heavily in metaphors of death as small towns contend with drought;

            hills are bone-grey and a cold hand

            massages the empty river, no prayers

            swim this belly of dust,

            no whispers to quicken fruit.

Likewise, small town describes a vacated town, signs of whatever life the town had are now collecting dirt and any hope of a saviour has been replaced with moonlit dreams;

            no one lives down there

            where the surf plays dead

            and moonlight walks on water.

If I was forced to pick a favourite from this collection it would be by the curve. A poem of loss, the emotion is captured in the description of a simple tea cup ‘shoe brown inside’. The cup sits in a vacant kitchen, other standard cooking utensils surround it, but the cup stands out as it appears to wait for its owner’s return;

            but somehow your teacup

            shrugs off pain

            with a sweeping shadow

            cast low over the dish-rag,

            to me it looks like you might

            return any minute.

Capes has gathered not only wonderful poems but a great collection of objects and moments in Stepping Over Seasons, as he writes ‘everything can be caught’ but  I would add that not everyone has the ability to capture, certainly not as well as Ashley Capes can.

This review initially appeared on the Overland blog, on 12 May 2010.

Vicki Thornton is the Acting Editor of page seventeen for Issue 8.  Last Days of Summer (Mockingbird) is her first collection of short stories. 

Thornton’s style is sparse, her stories brief. Brief enough to fill the smallest moments in a day. Those moments between the usual domestic chores and family pressures, but though the stories are brief they have a depth and subtlety that can linger for hours or days. Longer.

In ‘For a Moment’ we are introduced to Billie, as seen through the eyes of an innocent unnamed girl; as someone wise, someone worth seeking out, someone to sit beside quietly and listen to. We also see Billie through the unforgiving eyes of the girl’s mother, as a homeless person, someone to distrust, someone to avoid. It’s all a matter of perspective. Billie might seem to be someone worthy of pity; she is poor, old and homeless, but she is also independent; free. She rejects the entanglements of the material world, chooses for herself how she will live and how she will die.

In ‘Aerodynamics of Love’, the writer experiments with structure as she dissects and deconstructs a relationship with perfect detachment. The structure itself gives added meaning to the story. Each word is necessary. Believable. There is no need for embellishment.

‘Cicada Song’ reads like a list. This is a story of summer holidays by the beach, a story of childhood. The memories are specific yet there is much for the reader to relate to. These are happy memories tinged with sadness and loss. In childhood, feelings—happy, sad— are equal and depend on each other for context. In adulthood, memories are often the same.

In ‘The Sweetness of Musk’ we are plunged into Jake’s world; a small rural town gripped by drought, where everything is either dead or dying. Jake is a child not yet tall enough to see over the lolly counter; naive to the world beyond the boundaries of his town and the future that awaits him, yet in some ways he is old beyond his years and all too aware of what it means to be mortal.

The characters who inhabit these stories are broken; bowed by circumstance, steeped in sorrow. Thornton lays bare their secret lives, exposes what is usually kept hidden from public view. It is human nature to hide parts of ourselves; to wear a mask. Thornton’s characters are people caught at their most vulnerable, with their faces naked and their private lives on show.

You probably won’t laugh while reading these stories, but you may feel uncomfortable, and you will think. Through her choice of topic, Thornton’s collection explores what it is to be human – the doubt, the struggle, the simple joys, the pain.

Lost shark, Graham Nunn is the judge for the 2010 page seventeen Poetry competition. He shares his thoughts on last year’s winners.

It’s a real privilege being asked to pull on the page seventeen jersey and judge the 2010 page seventeen poetry competition. I have recently been rediscovering issue 7 and want to say straight up that Nathan Curnow did a superb job of judging the competition last year. The winning poem, Black Swans by Chloe Wilson shows impeccable taste!

From first reading, the imagery in this poem draws you in, placing you firmly in the moment. You feel the thrill of discovery as you catch sight of their ‘swarthy plumage’ and hear their ‘soft honks and whistles’, but what gives this poem its incredible power is the way the author uses the imagery of the black swans to reflect on European invasion.

                                                 what did they make

                                                of the strange black bodies

                                                standing coy

                                                among sodden reeds

                                                or afloat

                                                on any flat water wide enough?

 This question gives the poem a haunting tone and is one that circles back on you long after reading. Chloe Wilson is most certainly a poet to watch. I had the pleasure of seeing her read at the Salt on the Tongue Festival in Goolwa recently and purchased a copy of her debut collection, The Mermaid Problem (which features the poem Black Swans). Very impressive!

And the poem that took out second place, Botanic by Ashley Capes (who has also recently joined the page seventeen team as poetry editor), is another stand out. Botanic is brimming with finely tuned images:

                                                 ‘cicadas and crickets in hymn’

                                                ’streets hum with threats,

                                                the casino is purple’

                                                ‘a monsoon of small change

                                                trickling

                                                in and out of vending machines’

In Botanic, Capes brings the natural and built environments together effortlessly, each reflecting the beauty in the other. And each time I read this poem, I lean in a little closer to catch the gossip, lurking in the stands of bamboo.

These poems, alongside the other shortlisted poems published in issue 7 have set the bar high for 2010. Nathan Curnow summed it up very nicely in his judge’s report when he encouraged aspiring entrants to, “Read critically. Pay attention to images, economy of words and to the arrangement of the poem on the page.” So, with these words in mind and the competition gates now open, I wait with anticipation for your entries… All the details are here.

Memories of a Friend by Lisa Fitzpatrick was shortlisted in the 2009 Page Seventeen Short Story and Poetry Competition and is hence published in Issue 7. Current Fiction Editor Laurie Steed shares his thoughts (initially posted on the Gum Wall, Dec 4, 2009, reproduced with permission).

The Story
Jen has broken up with her husband Phil. They have two children together, and Jen’s doing her best not to take it out on the two kids.

She left the relationship because he was beating her, and now busies herself with the day-to-day process of raising her kids. She packs the lunches, considers the housework, and makes a mental list of things to pick up from Phil’s. She has an additional task today; going to see her friend Sal, along with Sal’s newborn baby.

Jen has to work first, watching elderly residents knit, thread by thread at Clarabell Hall, with “nursing home stares”. She heads off at one, leaving them to their world of inactivity, time frozen.

She has reasons to be hesitant about seeing Sal, but wants to be there for her friend, and so pushes her grief down, at least for the time being.

Jen drives to the hospital, stopping first to pick up food and gifts for Sal and the baby. And then, with dahlias in hand, she visits the maternity ward.

Why it Sticks
With good stories, you barely notice the seams as you read. Even better stories have any number of subtly linked scenes, narrative echoes of the overall theme. Fitzpatrick’s story is filled with narrative echoes and thematic symbols, many of which I missed the first time around I was so engrossed by the character’s journey. On subsequent readings, you can literally see motif upon motif, all contributing to articulate the story’s common themes of grief, isolation and guilt.

Memories of a friend also succeeds because it is willing to take risks with its characters, where grey is most definitely the colour. These are not mere caricatures, but real people, with their own flaws, mean-streaks, and petty insecurities…and that only makes their story all the more compelling.