Five facts: Uzodinma Iweala

Uzodinma Iweala is the author of the novel Beasts of No Nation, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His latest book is Our Kind of People, a nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis in Africa. Iweala is an American-born Nigerian.

Five facts:

My favourite writers’ festival experience was the FLIP Festival in Paraty, Brazil because a.) it’s Brazil b.) my little brother came with me and ended up getting profiled as the author’s ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ brother who ‘walks down the street followed by ladies’ in a national newspaper and c.) it’s Brazil.

The best thing about being a writer is not working in a hospital/ listening to all my friends talk about how horrible their real jobs are and realising that I would do what I do for free (don’t get any ideas now…)

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I go for a walk, run or bike ride. I often find that vigorous physical activity can help eliminate some of the anxiety that blocks those creative inclinations.

My parents had a great influence on me, because they have been very encouraging of my work but also extremely honest with me about how difficult this world can be. It has really helped form a sense of commitment to my work and a strategic way of thinking about how best to create the right environments to do good work.

My greatest ambition is to sleep, oh please sweet sleep!

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Uzodinma Iweala will be appearing on the panel The Other Africa on Friday 24 August at 2:30pm, with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sefi Atta, Majok Tulba and Arnold Zable. He’ll be interviewed by Peter Mares on Saturday 25 August at 11:30am in a session called Humanising the Virus. And he’ll be reading from his work in The Morning Read session (free) on Sunday 26 August at 10am.

Switching to Fiction: Christopher Kremmer, Anna Funder, Leslie Cannold and Malcolm Knox

When Christopher Kremmer fled from an op shop where he’d found a bound collection of old Sydney Morning Herald newspapers from the period when his father had been a jockey in the Melbourne Cup, he realised that his ‘whole life was about running away from the past’. This time, he decided to turn back around and face it, and was drawn into the stories of the horseracing world. His novel The Chase tells the story of a scientist, Jean Campbell, trying to root out drug use in the horse racing industry. Even for the experienced non-fiction writer and journalist, research was nigh impossible: ‘the world of horseracing is a world of secrets … it’s all about masking what goes on to increase the odds’. To make his task even more complicated, the real-life scientist Kremmer was basing Campbell on had never left any records.

Then there’s the balancing act between a non-fiction writer’s research instinct and the novelist’s creative impulse: ‘You overresearch it, but you get to a point where you need to let go of those real people. Once you start doing that you start to be able to pour yourself into these character.’

Chair Geordie Williamson asked whether there was any pressure on Anna Funder to follow up her acclaimed account of the former East Germany, Stasiland, with something in a similar vein? ‘My husband said I had second-album syndrome, which I don’t think is true,’ said Funder of her new novel, All That I Am.

In non-fiction, Funder believes, it’s important to honour the people you’re writing about, so in Stasiland, for which she spoke with people whose courage had been ‘almost unbelievable’, she wanted to pay tribute to that. With All That I Am, though, the people on which Funder based her characters are no longer alive, and what happened isn’t known, so ‘I looked at shards of history and put together a plot which I think is the most likely thing that happened’. While this lack of material might seem less advantageous, there is an upside: ‘The biggest moral limit of non-fiction is not being able to represent the consciousness of your characters from the inside. That was a huge liberation.’

Leslie Cannold ‘didn’t make a conscious choice to write a novel’. The impetus for writing The Book of Rachael was a BBC documentary attempting to unearth historical truths about the life of Jesus. Cannold  ‘started wondering what my family were up to’ at this time – but it became clear that the historical record was not concerned with women. Fronting up to the library, Cannold demanded everything that existed on Jesus’s sisters, but she was told there was basically no existing material on the subject. Cannold decided it would be her responsibility to tell such a story.

Where fiction and non-fiction do mix, suggested Malcolm Knox, was ghostwriting. Someone like the famously laconic Bart Cummings is hard to write a 300-page book about, so the tools of fiction can assist in creating a narrative. Yet there is a point at which you have to stop and go no further – you can’t make anything up. In regard to Knox’s novel The Life, there was at least one good reason not to write a biography of surfer Michael Peterson – one had already been written. But he ‘was always about 50 per cent fiction anyway’, said Knox.

All the guests thought of fiction as serving a different purpose to non-fiction in telling a story. Cannold thought that if she wanted to write about something about which there was very little known, she would elect to use fiction. Kremmer thought that, for his next book, he would probably be returning to the more familiar ground of non-fiction, but not because fiction was unsatisfying: ‘I found it one of the great experiences of my writing career’.

Five questions for Anna Krien, author of Into the Woods

Anna Krien’s book, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests has just been released.  Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Going Down Swinging, The Age, Colors, The Best Australian Essays, Frankie, The Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Voiceworks and Dazed & Confused. I spoke to Anna about writing the battle over Tasmania’s forest in Into the Woods.

Anna, the focus of your book Into the Woods is the battle over Tasmania’s forests. What first drew you to this divisive issue?

Actually it was this footage that first drew me to Tasmania’s forest issues. A warning – it makes for some ugly viewing.

The video (filmed by a forest activist hiding in a tree) shows Tasmanian logging contractors smashing a gutted car that is blocking a forest access road in the Florentine valley with sledgehammers. Two young activists are inside the car. The loggers are yelling and grabbing them through the broken glass, trying to pull them out of the car.

An activist friend of mine working on the island sent me the footage and I booked a ticket within an hour of watching the video. I intended on staying only five days – I was still there a month later.

In such a longstanding and multidimensional dispute, there are sure to be multiple viewpoints. What did you want to find out about the forestry war, and what did you unearth?

Yes – there are multiple viewpoints. At times it seems like everyone has an opinion on the island’s forests. And if we’re going to refer to it as a forestry ‘war’, then like all wars, a significant proportion of the fight is propaganda and spin. So in short – I ‘unearthed’ a lot of bullshit. I found that I had to create a few ‘touchstones’ to return to when people overwhelmed me with information and obscure terminology. One of these touchstones was simply ‘woodchips’. I had to remind myself that this was the main product that had divided families and towns; the entire island was torn to its core over a low value, high volume product. The way people spoke, the drama as they described impending economic doomsdays and starving families – it was easy to forget that the problem was woodchips, albeit cargo ships laden with the stuff.

You spent some time at the Camp Florentine blockade, which is 90 minutes west of Hobart. How long did you spend there, and what did you learn?

I learned that it doesn’t matter what kind of camp you’re at – be it school camp or a long-running forest blockade – the worst job is always the same. Digging the shit pit. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I go camping, I always return to the porcelain dream – the bathroom – with a renewed sense of awe at the genius of plumbing. This was doubly so when I learned my second blockade lesson – that eating food rescued from the dumpster is bound to give an amateur like myself gastro. Now that was a fun few days.

But enough with the poo, what else did I learn out there?

I learned that the Sassafras tree is a kind of bush milk bar – the leaves are sweet to chew and considered a ‘pick me up’ by the Tasmanian Aborigines. I learned that Australia has its own special type of Robin – the Pink Robin bird. A male with a hot pink chest visited the camp daily to flirt with some plain brown female robins.

I also learned that trees will fall down if you cut everything around them – that they lean on one another and that a forest is like a house, buffeting its inhabitants from the wind. One of the last times I visited the blockade, it had just been busted by police, many of the activists had been arrested and about 40 hectares had been cleared. The trees that had been left on the edges of the coupes were just falling over. They weren’t able to stay standing on their own.

In an article you wrote for The Big Issue in April, you wondered if Tasmania’s forests would be missed by those who had never seen them. How did seeing these famed forests affect you?

It’s funny – but I’m not really a ‘forest’ person. People wax lyrical about Tasmania’s Tolkienesque trees and Middle Earth forests while I am far more likely to be moved by rugged plains, beaches, hot bushy scrub and vast red deserts.

But having said that, I couldn’t help being affected by Tasmania’s forests.

Victoria, the southernmost mainland state of Australia, is my home state and it’s not hard to imagine Tasmania breaking off from the Victorian coastline all those thousands of years ago. It’s as if the spectacular southern wilderness I grew up with (such as the Sherbrooke forest in the Dandenongs Ranges, the Otways and Wilsons Promontory) flourished on the small isolated island.

At one point during my journey, I was driving along the highway after an interview with a local who had pleaded with me not to use her name and I realised just how hard it is for a local to speak out in such a small community, let alone write the story I was aiming to tell about Tasmania’s timber industry. Things like getting a job, a government grant, feeling safe and welcome, all of these things would be at risk. I had to pull over and have a little cry on the side of the road at that point – because I realised that I too, was risking my relationship with the island and even though I wasn’t dependent on the place, I had definitely fallen in love with it.

You’ve written about diverse social issues, including ‘white collar’ drug users, women’s prisons and Australia’s ‘dry’ communities. What is your approach to journalism and to story?

Bizarrely, I found the most difficult place for me to get a story was when I worked at The Age. For me, there was something about being cooped up in a newsroom that stifled my journalistic sense of smell. For example, the women’s prisons story you mention came about when I was waitressing and a group of interstate prison officers came into the restaurant for dinner. Being the highly unprofessional waitress that I am, I got involved in their conversation as the night wore on and ended up swapping contact details with them.

My approach to journalism is unfortunately the antithesis of making money. I write a story because I want to understand the issue and the motives of the key people involved. I rarely line up an editor or a publication until I’ve completed it because I’m wary of outsiders trying to shape a story before it has taken its own form. So I tend to work backwards – I follow a story, live it, talk to everyone, read everything I can get my hands on, write it and then ask for the green light from an editor. I’m a publication’s finance department’s dream and my accountant’s nightmare.

Anna will discuss Tasmania and its stories with Amanda Lohrey and Nicholas Shakespeare in Small Places, Big Ideas at 1pm on Sunday, September 5.

Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself

This week, I received an email asking me what books had changed my life. Social pressures aside (should I say Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities when I mean Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt?), some books effect such seismic shifts in knowledge that they easily stand up as life-changing. Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself is such a book. While reading it, I had to reluctantly let go of what I’d though were established facts about how the brain works. Two examples, if you will.

Established Fact #1: Each brain function is processed in a particular, predetermined location.

Having the dilettante’s grasp of psychological principles, I was pretty sure that it was possible to map the brain according to which parts did what. For example, the left part of our brain is verbal and the right part is where our visual and spatial abilities always reside. Right?

Well, no. Doidge visits a twenty-nine year old woman, Michelle, who was born with only the right hemisphere of her brain intact. But she is, as Doidge puts it, ‘a demonstration that … half a brain does not make for half a mind.’ Michelle can read, carry out conversations and pray – because her right hemisphere has compensated for the missing part.

Established Fact #2: Brain cells die at astounding rates and cannot be replenished.

We’ve all had older and wiser people warn that we’d better use it or lose it, and there’s probably no older nor wiser than Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who in 1913 declared that adult brain nerve paths die and are never regenerated.

But several studies that show that animals form new brain cells – ‘neurogenesis’ – through exercise and mental activity. Californian researcher Frederick Gage suggests that this is because ‘in a natural setting, long-term fast walking would take [an] animal into a new, different environment that would require new learning’.

These are heady discoveries, and there are more to be had in The Brain That Changes Itself. The book is a delight, due to Doidge’s ability to combine painstaking research with a keen narrative sensibility. The personalities found in this book – whether that of someone who is a prime example of the brain’s fascinating plasticity, or a scientist who has radically changed the way we understand the brain – are as vivid as the science is interesting.

Life-changing, brain-changing … what more could you want?

Norman Doidge will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He is one of the eight writers who will discuss what it means to be human in our Keynote Address #1: Eight Ways to Be Human. In The Brain That Changes Itself: Judge for Yourself, see footage of people with ‘incurable’ conditions, who underwent neuroplastic change. He will also appear in conversation with Perminder Sachdev, author of The Yipping Tiger, to discuss The Amazing Brain.