Dear Readers,
Another chewy personal essay from me this week. It’s about why and how I’m hand-writing my new novel and some breakthroughs I’ve had in response to two books about artistic process. More broadly though it’s part of this deprofessionalistion process and trying to get clean and get a bit honest or strip things down a little or whatever the fuck we’re all doing here together right now.
Here are some other snippets of thoughts and conversations I’ve been having this week:
On Saturday night I threw a big cocktail party at my apartment, and my friend Megha and I were discussing how these days (a Sydney thing? a 30s thing?) there are so many ‘events’ and so few ‘parties’, and how, really, we all prefer a party.
This episode of City Arts & Lectures with Miranda July about All Fours is phenomenal. The way she talks about the shame of menopause and peri-menopause gave me that oooomph-woooah feeling.
I genuinely love how much conversation the New York Times has generated with their ‘100 Best Books of the 21st Century’ list. The original list was compiled by ‘503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers—with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review’ and then a second list of 100 was released here, which were reader-nominated. And it got me thinking, if you were an author, which would you rather?
I’m so fucking here for the twists and turns in this MoNA Ladies Lounge story. Some douchebag complains to the court that he can’t get into a women’s exhibition, the court orders it closed, they move the Picasso paintings to the women’s bathroom, turns out the Picassos are forgeries by Kirsha Kaechele, who is appealing the decision because while the man ‘was treated differently in terms of not being able to pass through a doorway, he experienced the piece as intended’. LOL.
The link to join the livestream next week is now in the ‘LIVESTREAMS’ chat. That’s Wednesday 31 July at 6.30pm Sydney time.
In the comments section last week replying to someone I stumbled onto the idea of making a podcast called Spoiler Alert (or similar) where we actually get to talk about the endings of books. Because I know from doing the interviewing and being interviewed that readers are dying to discuss endings, but you can’t do spoilers at public events! Basically it’s what makes a book club good. Does anyone know if this already exists? I hope so. If not, let’s do it on News & Reviews livestreams each month. We’ll start with mine next week and go from there.
I record the livestreams and make the video available for one week afterwards. Got a question for me? Submit it here. This is a good one someone sent through last week: ‘Were there any alternative endings you considered, and if so, why did you settle on the final one? And also have any reader interpretations of the book surprised you or given you new insights into your own work?’ Thank you! Looking forward to rambling about this for sure.
Friendly reminder: if you genuinely can’t afford a subscription, just ‘reply’ to this email letting me know and I’ll add you to the comp list for 6 months, no questions asked. If you super duper can afford a subscription, why not gift one forwards?
Best wishes and happy reading,
Bri
What Are Your Self-Limiting Beliefs?
Last month when I was laying on an orange chaise lounge, modelling for the portrait Natasha Walsh was painting, I listened to her describe her process of material experimentation and was awash with envy.
Young artists sometimes contacted her asking for tips for how they too could paint on copper and get such astonishing results and she had to explain, patiently and kindly, that it was not something she had been taught. This ‘alchemy’, as she described it, was the result of ten years of making her own paints, experimenting with the reactions in the substances. What I heard as she spoke was a dance between the controllable and the unpredictable. We know copper does this, but what would happen if the paint did that?
‘I wish I could experiment with materiality,’ I said to her.
We kept talking about our respective artistic processes then a natural silence followed for a few minutes, and then I fell through the plaster ceiling of my own consciousness.
‘Oh my god,’ I said, ‘I am experimenting with materiality. I am literally hand-writing this book!’
We both burst out laughing, me still laying on the chaise lounge, having already made so many jokes about it being a cliched therapy set-up. I’d been telling Natasha for hours about how and why this new book was coming along so well. I knew it was because I was putting literal pen-to-paper instead of typing. And yet, in my mind, a writer had no physical ‘material’ to work with in the same way a visual artist does. We laughed and laughed.
It is so absurd sometimes, how we can self-reflect and self-examine and critique and analyse… and not see what is right in front of us. In the month that has passed since that revelation I’ve come to understand two particular previous attitudes towards my ‘process’ (we’ll get to more on how that word is loaded further down here) were self-limiting beliefs.
And those self-limiting beliefs were tied up in this super-productive-turbo-professional image I’m spending some weeks of News & Reviews trying to shake off.
I knew I had to make this the subject matter for the next newsletter when, last week, I started reading The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing by Adam Moss and groaned with recognition at this footnote:
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