Three weeks on tour is enough to make a ground man sick and tired but luckily this man is not fully grown and although it was hectic and full on with full trams and buses and even boats there is nothing like arriving home and finding a smooth, sharkless ocean with swells to make an almost old man smile and dip.
And here I am.
The program this month includes:
BIG SKY WRITERS' FESTIVAL, GERALDTON
Featuring: Robert Drewe, Anita Heiss, Shelly Gare, Dean Alston, Barbara Temperton, Joy Lefroy, Lara Morgan, Jim Fisher, Simon Hayes and even this blogger.
It will be fun.
Then, soon enough, SPRUNG, the word released, in ALBANY.
Some of the same as above and also:
David Malouf
Charles Firth
Maggie Beer
Scot Gardner
I could go on.
I may.
But not now.
I must away to the Albany Fresh Markets, then coffee, then lunch, then a lie down.
Oh, the life of a casual writer.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Friday, 7 August 2009
Doust heads east
Jon Doust is heading east to shove and push and generally talk up his new book, Boy on a Wire. It’s a heavy book, yet light, and easy to read.
It’s time to push. Sales are good, but could be better. Lots of folk on the eastern seaboard have not heard about it yet.
Oh yes, the reviews have been great, but how many people read them? Lots, that’s why sales increase with good reviews.
But reviews have to be accompanied by appearances, handshaking, door knocking, and annoying behaviour in order to attract attention.
That’s where Doust steps in.
Here’s his itinerary.
TUESDAY 11 August
Life Matters ABC Radio National
With Richard Aedy
9.30am
TUESDAY 11
Shore Bookclub
7.30pm
WEDNESDAY 12th
Wenona Girls School
WEDNESDAY 12 August
Bowen Library Talk
669 Anzac Parade, Maroubra
7pm to 8pm
THURSDAY 13 August
East meets West
Canberra Writers Centre
6pm
MONDAY 17 August
774 ABC in Melbourne
With Richard Stubbs
2.30pm.
Penguin Novel Selection Evening
5pm
TUESDAY 18 August
Melbourne Athenaeum Library
188 Collins Street,
Melbourne
1pm to 2pm
Thursday, 9 July 2009
oh yes, now you can listen to it
It is read by Paul English who has also read Mao's Last Dancer.
Paul's work in theatre includes twenty-five productions for the Melbourne Theatre Company, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure to Janis Balodis' The Ghosts Trilogy; premieres of new Australian work for Playbox by Michael Gurr, Peta Murray, Rodney Hall and Nick Enright; Tom Stoppard's Arcadia with the Sydney Theatre Company; and the plays of Daniel Keene with the Keene/Taylor Project, of which he is a founding member.
Thanks, Paul.
Nice read.
More info?
Go to Fremantle Press.
Monday, 6 July 2009
THE AGE - Non-fiction, Fiona Capp, 4/7/2009
THE boarding-school experience - bullying prefects, sadistic teachers and cruel rituals - has produced some classic films and books. While there is much that is familiar about Jon Doust's recollections of ills at a West Australian grammar school in this semi-fictionalised memoir, Boy on a Wire does not simply rehash old themes. From the opening sentence, it is clear that we are in the presence of a writer with a distinctive voice and uncanny ability to capture the bewilderment and burgeoning anger of a boy struggling to remain true to himself while navigating the hypocritical system he finds himself trapped in. Accentuating the narrator's sense of failure is the fact that his older brother excels at everything he does. What saves the narrator from going under and what makes Boy on a Wire much more than a bleak coming-of-age story is Doust's sharp wit. "Justice not only prevails at Grammar School, it is rampant:' If you know an angry teenager, give this to him.
As if this review would make you buy a copy!
(But on the slim that it does, go to Fremantle Press.)
As if this review would make you buy a copy!
(But on the slim that it does, go to Fremantle Press.)
Sunday, 14 June 2009
Monday, 25 May 2009
BOOK SIGHTINGS
"Boy on a Wire" is still being reviewed and consistently well.
People are seeing the book all over the place and walking in on friends who are offering it to them as "a good book to read".
What does all this mean to me?
It has meant me coming to terms with the realisation I have written a better book than I thought I had written.
All right, of course, I did my very best: I slogged, I slaved, I shed tears, I sat up late and got up early.
All that is a given, but it does still not mean I have written a good book. It means I did my best. I tried my hardest. But not that I have the extra bit, the clever bit, the smart bit.
There are still others out there who are on their fourth, their fifth, their twenty fifth, most better than my first. I don't have enough time to match them.
All I have time left to do is the best I can in the time left.
Wish me luck.
People are seeing the book all over the place and walking in on friends who are offering it to them as "a good book to read".
What does all this mean to me?
It has meant me coming to terms with the realisation I have written a better book than I thought I had written.
All right, of course, I did my very best: I slogged, I slaved, I shed tears, I sat up late and got up early.
All that is a given, but it does still not mean I have written a good book. It means I did my best. I tried my hardest. But not that I have the extra bit, the clever bit, the smart bit.
There are still others out there who are on their fourth, their fifth, their twenty fifth, most better than my first. I don't have enough time to match them.
All I have time left to do is the best I can in the time left.
Wish me luck.
Monday, 11 May 2009
The Canberra Times Review: Carrying a school boy's scars into manhood
BOY ON A WIRE. By Jon Doust. Fremantle Press. 236pp. $24.95.
Reviewer: PETER PIERCE
Australian fiction boasts no Billy Bunter and its school stories have usually involved day, rather than boarding, establishments. Think, early on, of Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians.
In common with at least every literature written in English, the deforming power of institutions has been a common theme in Australian writing, whether this involves the victimised children who attended Fairbridge or the domains of the Christian Brothers.
In Jon Doust's fictionalised autobiography, Boy' on a Wire, his recalcitrant hero, Jack Muir, is sent to board at the Grammar School in Perth. following his brother, the apparently impeccable Thomas, and their father.
There Jack suffers - along with most others -his share of physical abuse: bullying by older students, caning by masters, who are often summoned after hours in their shabby dressing gowns. Yet - and this is a curious and distinctive feature of Doust's novel - none of this seems much to touch Jack Muir. It is as if this account of his school days shows them to have been a period of stasis, a long interlude between childhood in rural Western Australia, and the world of work.
(The novel's postscript, "Where are they now?", shows that the main character's fate is to have become a "successful, angry journalist").
In one strand of the novel, a darker tale of school experience is related. This involves a boy who seems doomed to be picked on wherever he goes - William Broadbent (Sad) Sack. He has been moved from the care of the monks of New Norcia to the Grammar School. Eventually he confides in Jack, "They did things to boys." And he never recovers. He does not last long enough to become one of those to whom Doust dedicates his book: "To all those boys who carried their scars into manhood". Instead, moved once again, Sack kills himself in Scotland.
In Boy on a Wire, Doust refuses numerous gambits of the Bildungsronian (as the Germans ponderously style the education novel). This is not a tale of innocence lost. Although Jack conducts a querulous conversation with God for some years, he is not possessed of many illusions to shed. Most tormenting is the effortless superiority of his older brother, whose path through school to the law is never in doubt.
Nor is this a tale of sexual initiation, despite more scenes in the book taking place in the showers than the classroom. Absent from the Grammar School as well, as far as Jack is concerned, (and notwithstanding the headmaster's Speech Day boasts) is any teacher to inspire him.
Such denials of conventional expectations for the school story keep Boy on a Wire off centre. The essential dramas of Jack's life are not concerned with school, but within his family. His neurasthenic mother, who has a belated third son, has hidden from Jack all details about her father until he dies. Jack's own father is on the one hand a pillar of the community - (briefly) serving in World War II, ex-Grammarian, Rotarian, proprietor of a successful farm machinery business. Yet he clearly seeks a stronger, more emotional bond with his middle son than he can articulate, or bring into being. In the portrayal of his relationship, Doust's method is oblique and we are intrigued by what the story of father and son might have yielded but for the cultural forces by which it is stunted.
Perhaps it is because of this that at school Jack becomes a boy "who can't stop fighting back". He is rebellious, but not extravagantly so. He fights a lot - in frustration, sometimes in a desire to make up from wrongs done to others. He is very good at sport, but this is intimated by Doust and then carefully underplayed.
While Jack makes good friends, circumstances ensure that this is never for very long. School does not socialise him.
He is gregarious but solitary: just the sort of unusual student whom school reports routinely fail to describe or understand.
Boy on a Wire chooses not to be polished, or preachy. Some of the writing seems hurried and untidy. Yet the mixture of wit and resilience that Jack shows invigorates the story, down to those last two pages that dryly sketch the adult fates of those whom we have met.
Anson Cameron (Lies I Told About a Girl) and Peter Goldsworthy (in Everything I Knew) have also made rich, but very different assays of the non-Catholic school experience. In the long literary historical view - when time is given to take it - this will seem another small, but significant shift in the social reckonings that Australian fiction makes.
Peter Pierce is an honorary research
fellow and professor at the National
Centre for Australian Studies at Monash
University.
Reviewer: PETER PIERCE
Australian fiction boasts no Billy Bunter and its school stories have usually involved day, rather than boarding, establishments. Think, early on, of Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians.
In common with at least every literature written in English, the deforming power of institutions has been a common theme in Australian writing, whether this involves the victimised children who attended Fairbridge or the domains of the Christian Brothers.
In Jon Doust's fictionalised autobiography, Boy' on a Wire, his recalcitrant hero, Jack Muir, is sent to board at the Grammar School in Perth. following his brother, the apparently impeccable Thomas, and their father.
There Jack suffers - along with most others -his share of physical abuse: bullying by older students, caning by masters, who are often summoned after hours in their shabby dressing gowns. Yet - and this is a curious and distinctive feature of Doust's novel - none of this seems much to touch Jack Muir. It is as if this account of his school days shows them to have been a period of stasis, a long interlude between childhood in rural Western Australia, and the world of work.
(The novel's postscript, "Where are they now?", shows that the main character's fate is to have become a "successful, angry journalist").
In one strand of the novel, a darker tale of school experience is related. This involves a boy who seems doomed to be picked on wherever he goes - William Broadbent (Sad) Sack. He has been moved from the care of the monks of New Norcia to the Grammar School. Eventually he confides in Jack, "They did things to boys." And he never recovers. He does not last long enough to become one of those to whom Doust dedicates his book: "To all those boys who carried their scars into manhood". Instead, moved once again, Sack kills himself in Scotland.
In Boy on a Wire, Doust refuses numerous gambits of the Bildungsronian (as the Germans ponderously style the education novel). This is not a tale of innocence lost. Although Jack conducts a querulous conversation with God for some years, he is not possessed of many illusions to shed. Most tormenting is the effortless superiority of his older brother, whose path through school to the law is never in doubt.
Nor is this a tale of sexual initiation, despite more scenes in the book taking place in the showers than the classroom. Absent from the Grammar School as well, as far as Jack is concerned, (and notwithstanding the headmaster's Speech Day boasts) is any teacher to inspire him.
Such denials of conventional expectations for the school story keep Boy on a Wire off centre. The essential dramas of Jack's life are not concerned with school, but within his family. His neurasthenic mother, who has a belated third son, has hidden from Jack all details about her father until he dies. Jack's own father is on the one hand a pillar of the community - (briefly) serving in World War II, ex-Grammarian, Rotarian, proprietor of a successful farm machinery business. Yet he clearly seeks a stronger, more emotional bond with his middle son than he can articulate, or bring into being. In the portrayal of his relationship, Doust's method is oblique and we are intrigued by what the story of father and son might have yielded but for the cultural forces by which it is stunted.
Perhaps it is because of this that at school Jack becomes a boy "who can't stop fighting back". He is rebellious, but not extravagantly so. He fights a lot - in frustration, sometimes in a desire to make up from wrongs done to others. He is very good at sport, but this is intimated by Doust and then carefully underplayed.
While Jack makes good friends, circumstances ensure that this is never for very long. School does not socialise him.
He is gregarious but solitary: just the sort of unusual student whom school reports routinely fail to describe or understand.
Boy on a Wire chooses not to be polished, or preachy. Some of the writing seems hurried and untidy. Yet the mixture of wit and resilience that Jack shows invigorates the story, down to those last two pages that dryly sketch the adult fates of those whom we have met.
Anson Cameron (Lies I Told About a Girl) and Peter Goldsworthy (in Everything I Knew) have also made rich, but very different assays of the non-Catholic school experience. In the long literary historical view - when time is given to take it - this will seem another small, but significant shift in the social reckonings that Australian fiction makes.
Peter Pierce is an honorary research
fellow and professor at the National
Centre for Australian Studies at Monash
University.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)