Commentaries by Peter Veenhuizen
Peter is a 63 year old husband, father and grandfather. He has spent the best part of his working life as a busy and focused Psychologist, but since moving from Melbourne to Maldon in 2017 he hopes to spend a large part of his free time writing…and walking, and gardening, and travelling, and becoming involved in the Maldon community.
Peter is a 63 year old husband, father and grandfather. He has spent the best part of his working life as a busy and focused Psychologist, but since moving from Melbourne to Maldon in 2017 he hopes to spend a large part of his free time writing…and walking, and gardening, and travelling, and becoming involved in the Maldon community.
A Conversation with Sofie Laguna
'Writing is a form of prayer’ (Franz Kafka)
Kafka's words resonate deeply. They provide a wonderful counterpoint to the intense and anxious petitioning of my childhood. Kafka, and the idea that writing is an expression of genuine depth of feeling, swirled in my mind as I attended my first ever Bruno Goes Everywhere literary event at the Bluestone Church Arts Space in Footscray.
It was a night of firsts. First time back in a church for too many years to think about. First time reconnecting with familiar associations: arched windows, bluestone walls and the acoustics of sound bouncing between a timber floor and vaulted ceiling.
First time meeting Bruno. I'd heard about this literary troubadour and his contribution to the writerly world. The image gained through other's anecdotes was wholly confirmed. But, I'll be honest. My first thought was ‘Ah, the Road Runner' - high energy, engaged and alert - internal radar switched to the max. A true extrovert.
Bruno is a networker. A community builder. An energy giver. No wonder he is able to go everywhere.
The night however was not about Bruno. It was an occasion for lovers of literature to meet Sofie Laguna, 2015 Miles Franklin Award winner for her work, The Eye of the Sheep. Another first. I had never met or even been in the presence of a Miles Franklin winner let alone an accomplished, award winning author of children’s books, and a famous actor. I was expecting some kind of aura: a glow of inner illumination accompanied by the grace and poise of a literary maestro. What we got, fostered by the facilitation of a beautifully prepared and ever respectful Bruno, was an insight into a writer's life: straddling the everyday ‘groundhog’ world of being a mother with young children and the writer's ‘space’.
What is this mysterious space? For Sofie, they are pockets of time when she enters the world of her narrative and possibilities it offers. One gets the impression a pocket of time could occur anywhere: a momentary period of solitude while driving, a burst of quiet, a planned hour or two outside the normal household routine. Sofie recruits them all for the brainstorming, the imagining, and the percolating of her writerly brew.
As a writer in his infancy, I was relieved to hear this. Sofie’s abhorrence of the long contemplative hours that others seem to engage in, strikes a chord with me. 'These fill my heart with dread,' she says.
In the writing of 'The Eye of the Sheep', Sofie borrows from her world, snatching experiences, scenes, images - criss-crossing between the two. Bruno inquires about the enormous physical and psychic energy demanded. "In the end, how do you know if it’s the writing is any good?" he asks.
“You don’t; that’s the torture," says Sofie, suggesting a writer lives with uncertainty, allowing a process to unfold. “So, there is torture, there is doubt, there is anxiety."
Not a great trifecta?” says Bruno in a beautifully understated response.
For Sofie, the discipline of not asking if its any good is compensated for by the personal litmus test of her writing – ‘Is my character alive? Is the story alive? As I allow myself to enter the story, to inhabit it, does this feel alive? If not … you know what to do. But, if I even find one point of aliveness, go there and work with that.'
OK … I'll put it out there. I am still not exactly sure what she meant. But, I love it. Sofie is describing a kind of wrestling with what it means to be alive. As she says: 'Writing is the lens. It is life flowing through me passionately.’
'Writing is a form of prayer’ (Franz Kafka)
Kafka's words resonate deeply. They provide a wonderful counterpoint to the intense and anxious petitioning of my childhood. Kafka, and the idea that writing is an expression of genuine depth of feeling, swirled in my mind as I attended my first ever Bruno Goes Everywhere literary event at the Bluestone Church Arts Space in Footscray.
It was a night of firsts. First time back in a church for too many years to think about. First time reconnecting with familiar associations: arched windows, bluestone walls and the acoustics of sound bouncing between a timber floor and vaulted ceiling.
First time meeting Bruno. I'd heard about this literary troubadour and his contribution to the writerly world. The image gained through other's anecdotes was wholly confirmed. But, I'll be honest. My first thought was ‘Ah, the Road Runner' - high energy, engaged and alert - internal radar switched to the max. A true extrovert.
Bruno is a networker. A community builder. An energy giver. No wonder he is able to go everywhere.
The night however was not about Bruno. It was an occasion for lovers of literature to meet Sofie Laguna, 2015 Miles Franklin Award winner for her work, The Eye of the Sheep. Another first. I had never met or even been in the presence of a Miles Franklin winner let alone an accomplished, award winning author of children’s books, and a famous actor. I was expecting some kind of aura: a glow of inner illumination accompanied by the grace and poise of a literary maestro. What we got, fostered by the facilitation of a beautifully prepared and ever respectful Bruno, was an insight into a writer's life: straddling the everyday ‘groundhog’ world of being a mother with young children and the writer's ‘space’.
What is this mysterious space? For Sofie, they are pockets of time when she enters the world of her narrative and possibilities it offers. One gets the impression a pocket of time could occur anywhere: a momentary period of solitude while driving, a burst of quiet, a planned hour or two outside the normal household routine. Sofie recruits them all for the brainstorming, the imagining, and the percolating of her writerly brew.
As a writer in his infancy, I was relieved to hear this. Sofie’s abhorrence of the long contemplative hours that others seem to engage in, strikes a chord with me. 'These fill my heart with dread,' she says.
In the writing of 'The Eye of the Sheep', Sofie borrows from her world, snatching experiences, scenes, images - criss-crossing between the two. Bruno inquires about the enormous physical and psychic energy demanded. "In the end, how do you know if it’s the writing is any good?" he asks.
“You don’t; that’s the torture," says Sofie, suggesting a writer lives with uncertainty, allowing a process to unfold. “So, there is torture, there is doubt, there is anxiety."
Not a great trifecta?” says Bruno in a beautifully understated response.
For Sofie, the discipline of not asking if its any good is compensated for by the personal litmus test of her writing – ‘Is my character alive? Is the story alive? As I allow myself to enter the story, to inhabit it, does this feel alive? If not … you know what to do. But, if I even find one point of aliveness, go there and work with that.'
OK … I'll put it out there. I am still not exactly sure what she meant. But, I love it. Sofie is describing a kind of wrestling with what it means to be alive. As she says: 'Writing is the lens. It is life flowing through me passionately.’
A Conversation with Helen Garner
“Writing is what I do that makes life bearable really. It’s the only way I know, of making sense of everything.” (Helen Garner)
Nobody moved. There was hardly a murmur as this priceless self-revelation passed us by at the mid point of the most recent Bruno Goes Everywhere. Thank goodness I was taping the session, because I missed the next few minutes, completely absorbed by this powerful almost off-handed declaration.
Everywhere I Look is Helen’s latest collection of personal anecdotes, tidbits, reflections, and analyses of some of the darker aspects of human existence. And the more she talked, sometimes quietly, often thoughtfully, but always in the manner of someone quite self-possessed, the more I sensed the cost of this looking.
“I howl a lot,” she said unashamedly. Matter-of-factly. As though it’s the most natural thing in the world to do. Even I, a somewhat stoic Dutchman, know what she means. It fits with my experience reading Everywhere. Not howling, but certainly finding myself caught unawares fighting back tears at some intense observation, or the savoring of a brief interlude; or perhaps, the scrutiny of an everyday moment. Helen hovers, all the while absorbing the meaning and impact of an experience. Sometimes dark, sometimes hilarious, but all in the service of allowing herself to become more fully conscious. Really Looking.
If writing is an act of survival, it is also a moment of grace.
And Helen does mean writing - by hand. The pen, chosen well, is a delight. The ink, its viscosity and its flow, provide a kind of visceral joy. But it’s more than that. It’s the love of the sentence: its structure and verbs – “let the verbs do the work!” The sentence must carry the nuance of an experience, no matter how brutal the writer must be with themselves. Blessed is the writer who, upon wrestling with their sentence, finds it resonating with the object of their looking.
But there is more. Because indeed as the looking is transformed into a structure, a strange coming together begins to occur in which the inner process and everyday experience somehow serendipitously coalesce.
“You get to a certain point in writing a book and everything seems to slot into the area that you are wrestling with. And everything you overhear on the tram seems to be something that you could use. And it’s quite a mysterious process. That’s the exciting bit. Where not everything that you are doing is heavy spadework. You just stand there sometimes and it lands in front of you and you feel awake to it.” Wrestling gives way to grace.
We shared so much more on this lovely afternoon. And as we did, my eye was drawn, time and again, to the cover of the book. There she stands. Solitary Helen, centre stage. Looking intently at the reader. Inoffensive, yet challenging. Solitary yet inviting. As though she is waiting patiently for a lift and has spotted you. “Are you the one?” she seems to be saying. “Have you come to meet me?” But then you realize she’s not waiting for a lift. She’s waiting to take you on a journey. A journey of recognition.
In the humanity of her writing, and of her presence on this afternoon, she has strangely touched our lives. She has made our wrestling a little more bearable and issued a call to persevere in our looking.
A Night With John Clarke
Rupertswood Mansion 19/7/16
To look into John Clarke’s face is to see a man in whom there is no guile! That is, at the moment of anticipation - the opening shot of our weekly Clarke and Dawe. Who will he be tonight? Tony Abbot? Kevin Rudd? Or maybe Avery Largenumber, Economist. Or Iggi Norant, Environmental Consultant! That face. Just for a moment. Cool and in control. The very image of sincerity.
Until he opens his mouth.
And in that instant, as anticipation gives way to reality, I can feel what’s coming! Whatever the content, it’s delivered in a marvelous combination of ducking and weaving, innuendo and obfuscation. Laugh? Many-a-time I’ve cried.
But not tonight.
Here, as 200 or more gather for the Twilight School, at beautiful Rupertswood in Sunbury, we are about to meet the man in his natural state. Yes, John Clarke the writer, actor, essayist, screenwriter and poet. But also John Clarke the son, the father, the friend and the colleague. Relaxed and unpretentious. As though we each were sitting around a small table sharing a pint at the local.
It appears he’s had a lucky life. Lucky at least in the sense of a knowing early the direction he was to take. A University education in Arts/Law was simply the backdrop against which he found what could properly be called a vocation rather than a career. It was here, on stage, that he first thought ‘aah, this is where the plug goes into the wall for me.’ This is what turns me on. Thinking and remembering lines, then writing lines for himself and others, and then more writing.
The trajectory of this writing has one recurring theme. It is what seems to be a type of antiphonal response to the world. “I’ve been lucky in all sorts of ways in my life”, he says, “but because I’ve always written material that comes out of my own response to the world, I have got more interested in my writing as I’ve got older, because its about more. It’s about what I am thinking, and what I am thinking now has a greater provenance...”
This makes sense. He knows, and I suspect we know, that this response starts, as it were, on the street. Or if you like, the cafes, the milk bars and servos, where he meets ‘us’. Regular folks. And it is here that he is, at times, gifted with a point of view or an insight into the way that the world is turning that is new and refreshing.
But as I sit and listen, I feel I am hearing more than this. If I am right, that his work has the cadence of the antiphonal, it seems also to inhabit the core of his collaborative work. Listen to him talk of his various working partnerships. Most obvious of course is the longest of his professional collaborators Brian Dawe. Here, as with a dizygotic twin, he is most in his ‘rhythm’. The trust is implicit and they work in a harmony born of practice and a deep inner knowing. An antiphonal duet.
Nowhere is this resonance more in view however than when John talks of his parents. His difference from them, acceptance of and thankfulness for them comes through all that he says and writes. Despite his parents separating relatively early in his life, he developed a relationship with each, separating himself from them as a unit. Now that they have passed, he reconnects through stories and memories that ‘nestle around’ the eulogies originally written and delivered by him - a posthumous resonance.
Through it all one can’t help but be deeply impressed with John’s buoyancy. Whether it is the fracture in his family background, the hills and valleys of his vocation, or the loss of ones so dear to him, he seems so easily to emit a stability of spirit. I am grateful to have been left with his wonderfully defiant parting words:
“I am heartened by almost everything. I refuse to be disheartened by any of the things that I think are irritating. I don’t think that we should give them the satisfaction of disheartening us.”
Rupertswood Mansion 19/7/16
To look into John Clarke’s face is to see a man in whom there is no guile! That is, at the moment of anticipation - the opening shot of our weekly Clarke and Dawe. Who will he be tonight? Tony Abbot? Kevin Rudd? Or maybe Avery Largenumber, Economist. Or Iggi Norant, Environmental Consultant! That face. Just for a moment. Cool and in control. The very image of sincerity.
Until he opens his mouth.
And in that instant, as anticipation gives way to reality, I can feel what’s coming! Whatever the content, it’s delivered in a marvelous combination of ducking and weaving, innuendo and obfuscation. Laugh? Many-a-time I’ve cried.
But not tonight.
Here, as 200 or more gather for the Twilight School, at beautiful Rupertswood in Sunbury, we are about to meet the man in his natural state. Yes, John Clarke the writer, actor, essayist, screenwriter and poet. But also John Clarke the son, the father, the friend and the colleague. Relaxed and unpretentious. As though we each were sitting around a small table sharing a pint at the local.
It appears he’s had a lucky life. Lucky at least in the sense of a knowing early the direction he was to take. A University education in Arts/Law was simply the backdrop against which he found what could properly be called a vocation rather than a career. It was here, on stage, that he first thought ‘aah, this is where the plug goes into the wall for me.’ This is what turns me on. Thinking and remembering lines, then writing lines for himself and others, and then more writing.
The trajectory of this writing has one recurring theme. It is what seems to be a type of antiphonal response to the world. “I’ve been lucky in all sorts of ways in my life”, he says, “but because I’ve always written material that comes out of my own response to the world, I have got more interested in my writing as I’ve got older, because its about more. It’s about what I am thinking, and what I am thinking now has a greater provenance...”
This makes sense. He knows, and I suspect we know, that this response starts, as it were, on the street. Or if you like, the cafes, the milk bars and servos, where he meets ‘us’. Regular folks. And it is here that he is, at times, gifted with a point of view or an insight into the way that the world is turning that is new and refreshing.
But as I sit and listen, I feel I am hearing more than this. If I am right, that his work has the cadence of the antiphonal, it seems also to inhabit the core of his collaborative work. Listen to him talk of his various working partnerships. Most obvious of course is the longest of his professional collaborators Brian Dawe. Here, as with a dizygotic twin, he is most in his ‘rhythm’. The trust is implicit and they work in a harmony born of practice and a deep inner knowing. An antiphonal duet.
Nowhere is this resonance more in view however than when John talks of his parents. His difference from them, acceptance of and thankfulness for them comes through all that he says and writes. Despite his parents separating relatively early in his life, he developed a relationship with each, separating himself from them as a unit. Now that they have passed, he reconnects through stories and memories that ‘nestle around’ the eulogies originally written and delivered by him - a posthumous resonance.
Through it all one can’t help but be deeply impressed with John’s buoyancy. Whether it is the fracture in his family background, the hills and valleys of his vocation, or the loss of ones so dear to him, he seems so easily to emit a stability of spirit. I am grateful to have been left with his wonderfully defiant parting words:
“I am heartened by almost everything. I refuse to be disheartened by any of the things that I think are irritating. I don’t think that we should give them the satisfaction of disheartening us.”