Navigating the Unvoid

by

Gillian Polack

Writing is shouting into a void. A writer might pour her heart out, but she doesn’t know if anyone will listen, much less try to understand. Perhaps one of the saddest parts of writing a novel is that every time we write, we pour our hearts out into that void. If we're very good and very, very lucky then someone will be strolling past that void and will see our heart and will pick it up and will treasure it.

Reviews are one of the tools readers use to navigate the void. As readers, we’re faced with impossible choices. Thousands of books each year. Tens of thousands, if you’re in the heart of the book industry. The market signals are mixed (as market signals are) and the explanation that this book is ‘horror’ or that another is ‘chick lit’ and that another is a ‘fast-paced thriller’ only help people who look for a certain kind of tale.

Me, I’m a reader who looks for a heart—I’ll read most genres, as long as there’s something in it I can treasure. And I’m not alone in this. The void, you see, isn’t really a void. It’s full of books, of readers, of reviewers, of journals, of publicity bods, of editors, of people. And it’s changing.

With the increasing role that the Internet plays in our daily lives, the ways we traverse this crowded void . . . this unvoid, this space that shifts so much and so often that we can’t even define—the ways we traverse it change. They don’t change once (which is bad enough: like other humans, I find change worrying) but so quickly and so unpredictably that stuff is hard to pin down.

I’ve learned about new books from Twitter and from Facebook and from blogs and from places such as BiblioBuffet. This is just today, during the last hour, and just sitting at my computer, reading my daily messages. I haven’t even read my back blog posts yet (from friends as well as from the industry) for I have a missing password and a bad eye and am putting off the non-urgent. Yet still I’ve heard about all kinds of books I haven’t yet read and even more I’ve already seen. Some I note as “Must read” and some “Ought to read” and some “Why are they telling me this again”—four blips about a single book in a single hour means I’m already bored by that one and probably won’t buy it. If the book is by a favourite author then everything else fades. Alan Garner finishing a trilogy, a half a lifetime on: that’s the sort of news that gets my heart racing. Still, there’s too much noise. When there’s too much noise and it’s all clamouring, it ends up all sounding the same. It’s easier to turn the television on than to find a good book.

Behind all this noise, there are people. It’s always about people. The tweets can be cute or they can be annoying, but when a person emerges from a throng and says “I’m talking to you, just you” or “I know you” or “I’m like you” or “I’m giving you my heart. Be gentle,” then I will listen, always. I care about the person, so I begin to care about the books they love. I will try them, even if someone else has told me six times “This is badly structured and the characterisation stinks.”

March is Women’s History Month in Australia as well as in the US. This is not irrelevant.

I was thinking, in February, about these paths through the unvoid, about signposts, and it was when I was considering how I should celebrate Women’s History Month this year that I thought that the best signposts are people and their hearts. I asked a bunch of writers (mainly writers, but not only writers) if they would put their hearts on a platter for me and for my readers. And they did. Each of them talked about the work they love and showed me not only what I urgently need to read because of their love for a book, but also the writers themselves. People are signposts to their own writing, after all.

Elizabeth Chadwick talked about Elyne Mitchell’s work with such love and tenderness, while Mary Victoria unclenched her hand to cautiously reveal the great literature treasure within it: the writing of Ursula le Guin. Kari Sperring, writing about Ethel Turner, made me race to my shelves and look for Seven Little Australians for she reminded me of my own childhood and made me yearn for it. Delia Sherman and Russell Farr both showed the work of Lucy Sussex and Jack Dann talked about Anne McCaffrey, not as a writer of space opera, but as a personal friend whose books remind him of her every time he opens one. Trent Jamieson talked about an unknown writer (Krissy Kneen) and Marty Young about an unknown artist (Kim Sassen). Some writers (Thersa Matsuura, Kaaron Warren, Lucy Sussex, Joanne Anderton) talked about artists and some about musicians (Nicole Murphy). Other writers made little lists, because choosing between such deep loves was too hard—Anita Heiss did this, on the very first day of the month, as did Kay Kenyon a couple of weeks later. And there was more. Thirty-one moments of love from thirty-one writers and editors and publishers.

My idea was that there are not enough signposts to women writers in that wilderness. In asking for signposts, I myself learned to see behind each of these writers to what made them write, what they love and why.

There is no void. The unvoid now has paths. I can voyage from one book to another for months, just based on this one month’s messages. And that’s the trick. Ignore the bristling and conflicting recommendations. Find a few places you trust. Use them to lead from one book to the next and then to the next. If the books look as if they're running out, then that path is a dead end or has been temporarily blocked, but there are always more paths, just as there are always more books. It’s just a matter of finding them.

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.