Author Archives: Nathan Hobby

Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard: a review

06 Thursday Oct 2016

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Post #2 in my Australian Short Story Festival series

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s first collection of short stories, Kiss on the Lips, was published in 1932, the same year as her collection of poetry, The Earth Lover and Other Verses. It came at the height of her career, soon after her three great novels – Working Bullocks (1926), Coonardoo (1929) and Haxby’s Circus (1930) – as well as her underrated “children’s” novel Wild Oats of Han (1928). It was the last book she was to publish before the devastation of the death of her husband, Hugo, in 1933.

It’s a diverse collection, spanning two decades across genres, landscapes, readerships, and quality. The book offers no guidance to readers, not even an acknowledgement of previous publications, and I can imagine some of them feeling bewildered. Continue reading →

Angela Carter: Far from the fairytale | Books | The Guardian

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in biographies of writers, artists & musicians, links

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The otherworldly figure conjured after her death in 1992 doesn’t do Angela Carter justice. Her biographer Edmund Gordon attempts a more accurate portrayal of a complex, sensual and highly intellectual woman

Source: Angela Carter: Far from the fairytale | Books | The Guardian

This is a great article in the Guardian from Angela Carter’s biographer, Edmund Gordon. He does a splendid job of creating a capsule biography of her in the article, giving a sense of her whole life in a few thousand words, while making it interesting to read and illuminated with revealing moments. This must be so hard to do after coming to know her life so well in its details and agonising over any summary, given any summary will tend to distort by simplification or omission.

He describes the mythology she has been reduced to and sketches something of how he reinterprets Carter. It takes insight and courage to successfully and fairly reinterpret a life. And there’s a pressure on biographers to do so – because if you’re not offering a new interpretation, why are you writing? (In this case, though, it is the first biography of her.) Another point of interest for me: how will he be received as a man writing about a woman?

Re-reading my first short story 20 years later; or, confessions of a coal-powered writer

01 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Short Stories (2016), writing

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Post #1 in my Australian Short Story Festival series

I have a confession to make: the beginning of my literary career was powered by coal company. The arts festival presented by Griffin Coal is a big event in the life of Collie, the coal-mining town in the south-west of WA where I grew up. Winning second-prize in the open category of the 1996 Griffin Festival Literary Awards at the age of fifteen – beaten by my drama teacher – made me think I could be a writer. Continue reading →

Australian Short Story Festival

01 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by in news, Series: Short Stories (2016)

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Later this month, I’m appearing on two panels at the inaugural Australian Short Story Festival, which runs from 21-23 October in Perth. Sue at Whispering Gums wrote about the festival last month. I’m appearing on “Voices from the West” at 11am on 22 October, with Bindy Pritchard and Donna Mazza, chaired by Charlotte Guest. Then at 3:30pm I’m on “The Importance of Structure” with Michelle Cahill and Vahri McKenzie, chaired by Susan Midalia. To celebrate the festival, and prepare for the panels, I’ll be blogging about short stories for the next three weeks – both here as I reflect on stories I have read and written and on my biography blog to contemplate the stories of Katharine Susannah Prichard.

Visible and invisible biographers: a quick response to David Marr

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in biographical quests, biography as a literary form, biography in fiction, Uncategorized

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Sue at Whispering Gums has given a great overview of David Marr’s Seymour lecture, “Here I stand”. He focused on the biographer’s craft, and he said so many things of great relevance to me, but I’ll just engage this comment:

Marr spent four years (I think) on the project, meeting with [Patrick] White, visiting places he’d been, meeting people he knew, and so on, but he is not in the book. Editors today, he said, would “tell me to get in there”, to write of his adventures in research. He described this style as “quest biographies”, and he doesn’t (generally) like them. They “inflict their homework on readers”

I love biographical quests; they’re how I came to biography. For my Master’s thesis , I wrote a biographical quest novel (“The Remains”) and a dissertation on aspects of the genre, including the influence of its non-fiction counterparts. From AJA Symons Quest for Corvo to Laura Sewell Matter’s “Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist” and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – and not forgetting Martin Edmonds Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, which I’ve just started – I’ve encountered some superb non-fiction biographical quests.  Continue reading →

Troppo by Madelaine Dickie

10 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by in book review, fiction, Western Australia

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Troppo Madelaine Dickie (Fremantle Press, 2016)

I had the pleasure of meeting Madeline Dickie at the TAG Hungerford Award ceremony in March last year. It turns out she’s a good friend of a school friend of mine. She was announced as the winner that night and I’ve been looking forward to her novel coming out since.

Troppo’s first person narrator is Penny, an Australian in her early twenties who’s returned to Indonesia escaping the boredom of her career-focused older boyfriend, Josh, and the sterility of life in Perth. She lives for surfing, adventure, and the excitement of new people. “Risk,” Penny writes, “always make things sharper, throws into contrast the highs and lows, gives clarity. As a surfer, I know this, I’ve lived this. Living in Perth, like a sleepwalker, I’ve missed this.” Penny is drawn to a new man and is torn between her attraction to him and her loyalty to Josh. At the same time, she’s about to begin a new job at a resort run by Shane, an expat with a reputation as a psycho whose business is the focal point of growing tension between the “bules” and the locals. Continue reading →

Two years in: an update on my Katharine Susannah Prichard biography

29 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events

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January 2016 – Mechanic’s Institute, Yarram, where KSP played the lead in Sweet Lavender, a nickname which stuck for years.

The two-year anniversary of the official start of my PhD passed by on 21 August. I had 20,000 words of the biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard written a year ago; I now have 40,000, which is a neat piece of symmetry. I’m imagining it’s going to be 80,000 words, but only if I can start reining myself in – I feared there wouldn’t be enough to say, but there’s always too much. I recently deleted a paragraph about the feud – which spilled into the local paper – between Katharine’s favourite teacher at Armadale State School and the bad-tempered headmaster. It represented several hours of research (some of it precious time in an interstate archive), but it really had to go. Other details are harder to let go of.  Continue reading →

Shibboleth: a new short story collection

19 Friday Aug 2016

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I had the honour of launching Shibboleth and Other Stories, edited by my friend Laurie Steed, in Perth last night. Here’s my launch speech.

Shibboleth Launch

Thursday 18 August 2016, Centre for Stories, Northbridge

Laurie Steed, the editor of Shibboleth and other stories, is one of the great ambassadors for the short story in Australia today. Another great ambassador is Ryan O’Neill, who tweets about short stories as if short story writers are a persecuted minority. Which is sometimes true. Here are some of his tweets:

  • “Not all awesome people write short stories, but all short story writers are awesome.”
  • “Endings are tough to pull off in short stories. Too neat and they seem artificial, too open and they are unsatisfying.”
  • “Before becoming a writer I analyzed the market to see what made the most money. Sadly, I’m awful at maths, so I became a short story writer.”

It’s a real achievement for Margaret River Press to bring out this fifth anthology from its competition. It shows commitment and patience, and has resulted in growing significance. This sort of stability in the literary scene is precious. There are many things writers need, but near the top of the list is opportunities to publish good work and reach an audience, hopefully beyond other writers. Congratulations to Caroline and John Wood and the rest of the team. Continue reading →

Boundary-rider?: the early Katharine Susannah Prichard on the edge of fiction and autobiography

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in academic, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings, memoirs

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I gave two papers on Katharine Susannah Prichard in July. The first was on 9 July at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Canberra and was called “History of a troubled autobiography: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Child of the Hurricane”. I’m hoping to develop it further into a chapter of the critical section of my thesis and also as a standalone publication. It was a little scary presenting my paper to an audience of Australian literature academics, but they were generous in their responses and I think it went well. I have been encouraged toward some further reading in mid-century Marxist responses to auto/biography and Freudian thought.

My second paper was at the Limina postgraduate humanities conference at UWA on 29 July. The conference theme was “beyond boundaries,” and so I wrote a paper on the boundaries between fiction and autobiography in Katharine’s 1906 serial, “A City Girl in Central Australia.” I’d been looking at this serial for chapter six of my biography (“Outback: Tarella Station, 1905”), and it fitted neatly with some of the thinking I’d been doing for the paper on Child of the Hurricane. It’s pitched toward a general audience and I’m not reworking it for scholarly publication, so I present it here on my blog. Continue reading →