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Today, in an act of biographer pride, I brought together all my biographies from around the house onto one shelf, displacing a random selection that had been occupying this hall shelf unhappily for a couple of years. I had more important things to do, but I don’t regret it at all. I’m going to look at this diverse collection of biographies many times each day as I pass and it’s going to inspire me. My arrangement of books – the double-stacked shelf of fiction in another prominent place – will no longer reinforce the hierarchy the literary community tries to impose.
Shifting from a novelist to a biographer has been like changing religions or at least from Protestant to Catholic. But the conversion has been to a persecuted minority sect. (No doubt I’m drawn to them, becoming as I did an Anabaptist in the early years of this century.) When fiction writers ask me what I’ve been writing and I update them on my progress on my biography, they’ll say (with all good intentions), ‘But have you done anything creative?’ I used to have this desperate need to insist I AM STILL CREATIVE. But I don’t care so much any more. It has not been good for my confidence to present excerpts from my biography to a creative-writing group; so few people seem to have much understanding of the genre of biography. They want it to have the qualities of fiction – thickly described scenes, interiority – while remaining oblivious to the virtues of biography. Life narratives woven out of the remains of the past, alert to the revelations, the mysteries, and gaps of the past with a sense of wonder lost in fiction’s pretense of full knowledge.
The practitioners within this minority group are too isolated. I’m glad to belong to Biographers’ International Organization and hear news from my tribe each month, but all of its action occurs overseas, mainly the US. I ponder, in my next acts of biographer pride, an Australian email list and a local gathering.
Footnote: as to the arrangement of the books, I chose, defiantly, to sort by biographer’s name rather than subject’s name. But I put all the hardbacks first. And then the books about biography. And then the paperbacks. And then the memoirs, as the half-siblings within the family of life writing.
I love books as display almost as much as I love reading. (Do you have a problem with young sticky fingers?). I’m sorry “creative” writers give you a hard time. Firstly, I really value literary biographies, and secondly as a blogger writing 2,000 words a week how I would love the freedom to just write, instead of having to read/research first.
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Yes, our toddler loves to pull books off the shelf. I can’t actually complain about fiction writers – it’s just that I’ve had to learn we speak a different language. Maybe you could post about life on the road some times – less research required! I remember your great post about the truckies’ library.
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I’m surprised the creatives are so discouraging: it seems to me as a mere reader, that all forms of writing deserve respect, even if they’re not my favourite form.
PS I love rearranging my books too…
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Thanks Lisa. I should say I haven’t felt intentionally disrespected. Science fiction and children’s writers probably struggle with similar issues.
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I love your contrarian streak! I was having a moment of crisis last summer when visiting Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon–an otherwise happy place, where I went looking for the biography section and discovered that, in a book store spanning multiple floors of an entire city block, they did not have a biography section, but rather shelved biographies “by subject” amidst the rest of the books in the store. Pros and cons to this, which I won’t attempt to enumerate in this comment. Suffice it to say, as another who hopes to write biography that will be regarded as literature: I like your shelving system better.
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Powell’s has suppressed our tribe! I have been half thinking writing about this from a Dewey Decimal point of view – it now prefers biographies classified with their subject and a ‘092’ suffix, rather than in their own 920s. Makes sense in a theological library – and I have been following it in this context – but less so in a bookshop!
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Yes, Nathan, Dewey classification allows for either option – 920 for biography, or under the area the subject of the biography worked in like economics or education with the 092suffix. Back in my day, librarians could choose depending on their understanding of their clientele’s needs. Most public libraries, as I recollect, would go the 920 Biography section route, while some specialist libraries might go the area the subject was renowned for route. Normally, I would expect a big bookshop to go the Biography route, but each to his/her/their own!! )BTW What an exciting book Powells is).
But, has it changed in libraries now and they all go the 092 route? I loved this classification/cataloguing aspect of librarianship!!
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Anything we do…. sewing, writing, painting …. we have to do for ourselves. Others may or may not get it.
The collecting arranging displaying discarding… it is bliss to compare and contrast, choose our own arrangements and to rearrange endlessly.
I’ve been collecting for decades. I am having a grand sort out in my museum room. My favourite collections…. wool felt used by my grandmother in the 40s and 50s, a bucket of embroidery cotton and silk, mother of pearl and Bakelite buttons, hundreds of men’s silk ties, braids and ribbons, every style of tea cosy and apron, doyleys, linen and embroidered napkins, tapestries of animals, patchwork scraps. Just to have it all together in the one place, to throw away the ugly, embrace the beautiful. I am making naieve felt cats using some of the silk ties and embellishing with embroidery, quirky braids and old buttons. Who cares what others think of them. I adore them and only give them to people I love.
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Your museum room sounds splendid, Sue! How wonderful that you have wool surviving from that long ago, with the family connection. You’re so right that in the end we need to follow our passions for ourselves, not for others.
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Looks like space on that shelf for perhaps a Katherine Susannah Prichard biography or … three.
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I think so! Thanks Karenlee.
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Great post. Maybe you’re hanging with the wrong creatives? My writing group was deliberately formed and populated only by non-fiction writers. Even though I was the only biographer, the others ‘got it’ in a way that, as you describe, fiction writers may not. I agree that biographers, as a community of interest, form only a small subset of writers. Isolated perhaps, but I’m not convinced that we’re persecuted! If you start up that mailing list, count me in! And maybe talk to Writers WA to see if they can help link you with other biographers?
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Thanks for the encouragement Michelle! It’s great to have a fellow biographer blogger in you. I was joking about ‘persecuted’ – I can’t really complain that much, but as your experience shows, it helps to have feedback from people who understand.
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