New Year and the Politics of Writing

Welcome back to my website and a happy New Year! I’d like to follow on from”what goes on inside the mind of a fiction writer’ from my last post and include some problems and challenges facing me. I’d like also to mention marketing and other annoying aspects of trying to sell my book and e-book.

Marketing especially creating an e-mail list is one of the unpleasant aspects of being a writer that annoys me. Why? Because people have been using the internet, social media and especially YouTube to sell stuff. And their videos a full of advertising. Does anyone out there reading this subscribe to YouTube premium? They claim it is add-free. Is it? It makes me wonder if this is just a ploy to get you onboard. Another example is paid movies on TV platforms. Do we really want to watch and pay for that movie?

I’m resisting appeals to set up an e-mail list. Why? Because I get so many and I don’t have the time to look at all of them. I don’t want to put that burden on anyone. I believe it’s getting out of control and ia is making it worse? Do you agree with me?

Relevance, fan fiction and feel-good fiction

I’m not famous. I have a website, so what? Why is it important to seek relevance? When I retired from full-time teaching, I wasn’t seeking fame or celebrity status, I just wanted to write a story about my life in the eighties and my experiences on the World Bike Ride. I wanted to connect with other people with the words I’d written and hence, the need to publish the book, The Formula of Memory. Relevance means many things but one thing is “connecting with other people“. We need other people in our lives not just our immediate family. And I think writing a book is one way to achieve this. I don’t seek to make much money from the sales (although this would be nice). I’d be happier if a reader sent me some positive comments about what I had written.

That brings me to feel-good fiction. I wasn’t even aware that this was a genre until three months ago, when I was talking to an author outside a bookshop in Newcastle. When I asked her what genre she writes, she said, “feel-good fiction.” Well, who am I to judge on the “relevance” of this art form? People read all kinds of stuff. There must be a market for this genre, but it’s not my thing. That’s my nature, I research universal themes including truth, justice and honesty in relationships and historical events, and feature these (including the Stolen Generation and the Holocaust) in my writing. Sometimes it’s poetry. That’s okay cause I can complete one poem quickly. I like doing that. I’m currently working on a collection of poems and short stories to be published later this year. I’ll keep you notified.

Readers’ Competition

The first reader to reply via email gets a free copy on my book (must live in Australia),

All you have to do is to give the style of the following poem, ie what type of poem is it?

(email your answer to: wooborachris@yahoo.com.au)

Amnesia on Australia Day

Did you say colonised? Try forty thousand years of occupation and custodianship, never relinquished. A voice defiant, not defeated. The distance grows between us and you and distorts like a syncline of sneaky secrets.

To some of you we become an annoying oddity a stealthed inconvenience that wears away at the fabric of reality. Whose reality? Greenies and rednecks and loggers-of-the-truth batter each other with humbug like the ocean batters and wears us down, after 40 million years there’s your beach, Captain Phillip. Did you thank Cookie?  Oh, but wait, too late. Didn’t he meet some unpleasant Hawaiians? Poor chap.

Again, there’s your beach Phil, there’s your new continent to terra nulliorise and Nullabore us with. That wasn’t in books or a history lesson, if it was in there the pages have been ripped out.

The rivers bled red cedar and clotted white flour floated down the Hastings to the Port. Convicts, slaves, incarcerated souls and our relatives lost sight of reality to the growing whine of truth told backwards.

*

They bought the site for a school. Sale of the century. Words were lost, never recorded when the victims lost their land. Their land.

Words are powerful. Words can be hurtful, but unspoken words are the most hurtful of all.

A bulldozed ceremonial site becomes unencumbered dirt.

A silent  PM stuck in liberal mythology sits stony-faced before the sails light up in rosy patterns of nationhood. “Sorry?” It’s all history now…Just white letters on a moving black background.

I fold the poster and Pauline Hanson slips back into my pocket.

by Christopher Williams.

(Note for readers: On the site of Wauchope High School there was a ceremonial site which was bulldozed to sell the land to the Department of Education)

Politics and writers

Recently, the board of the Adelaide Writers Week banned or “dis-invited” Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from attending. Over 180 writers withdrew from attending in protest and the festival has been cancelled. This raises the question of censorship and the importance of writing as a means of expressing sensitive and controversial issues, especially now that the federal parliament wants to introduce a bill banning hate speech. Many oppose limiting freedom of speech, and I’d hate for someone to ban what I write about. Kim Goodwin, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, recently wrote in The Conversation: “the board(Adelaide Festival) weighs up artistic purpose against perceived organisational risk.” There were no artists or writers on the board. This gets to the core of artistic independence and freedom of speech. Yes, the Bondi massacre was terrible. But compared with over 70,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza by the Israeli military, 59% of them women and children, how can you compare the degree of atrocity? Just on numbers alone, Gaza was a much bigger crime. These people were killed, most of them were innocent civilians, the same as the Bondi victims. Where are the voices for the slain Palestinians, if not Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah?

This is an example of writers making a stand and speaking out against atrocity. Censorship for political purposes must be resisted. We as writers need to be able to speak out freely, without fear of censorship.

Well, that’s about all for this month. I hope you are all writing furiously and please enter my competition for a free book. The winner will be announced in my next post.