Surly to rise

The scraping metallic whistle signaled the approach of a train that was already apologising for any inconvenience that it’s tardiness had caused. It’s been a long time since I have caught a peak hour train, I must have put on some weight in the last six months, as this one seemed a lot tighter than I recalled. Hemmed in on all sides by commuters, I did my best to ignore the restrictive journey, but I couldn’t ignore the chirpy female voice emanating from the speakers in the carriage “Myki can now be used on all Metropolitan trains!” Yes, well, my key opens the front door of my house but it didn’t cost me $850 million.

I was supposed to meet my fellow bloggers for a caffeine baptism to start the festival off with a jitter, but no one was at the café. I bumped into a man that resembled an extremely Irish Yul Brynner. He introduced himself as Chris Flynn and asked if I’d like to see his Torpedo. I recalled the time I had dialled a number I found on a public toilet wall, despite it’s claim, there was definitely no good time had, not by me at any rate. I politely declined his offer. Chris shrugged and told me he was off for his Morning Fix. My bowels gave off a Pavlovian gurgle and I followed him into a large café called Feddish.

The café was warm to the point of stifling and the air seemed thick with pungent chemical fumes. I sat down next to a well-stubbled man and asked if there was a gas leak in the room. He gestured towards a group of pallid people seated around a table. The air above them rippled with last night’s alcohol. Two were propping their heads up with their hands while the third was grimly clutching the table like the steering wheel of an out of control big rig. I watched as the waitress placed three croissants in front of them. The table-driving lady reached into her purse, producing a large pack of Berocca that she emptied into the pastry. She caught my eye while crunching down on her Beroccroissant and apologetically mumbled “Text Publishing party last night”.

Through the wobbling booze air I listened to four authors whom all seemed worlds apart. Despite hailing from different countries, with vastly different upbringings, they all serendipitously read passages from their work that focused on recapturing and reinventing childhood memories. Their words gripped the crowd, bringing forth laughter, smiles, even tears. Although that could have been the fumes coming from table 9.

Parley with Krissy Kneen

Krissy Kneen

Krissy Kneen has been writing about lovers, friends, sex and intimacy on her blog Furious Vaginas for over a year. And now her book, Affection, is garnering acclaim from all quarters. I asked Krissy to tell me what was what.

Krissy, your book Affection: a memoir of love, sex and intimacy has an intertwining structure of many different timelines and vignettes spanning 30 years. Tell us about how this particular structure came about.
I wrote most of my material on my blog to start with.  Because of this structure my stories were short and focused on particular scenes. When I sat down to write the first draft I took all that and put it into chronological order, but I knew there was something in my life now that I wanted to explore. In fact I got stuck in the writing till I could work out what my central question was. In one of the first scenes, a friend suggests I am a sex addict. This scene came about in real life as a conversation about what my book’s central question would be. She said “Why don’t you just explore what it is like to be a sex addict?” This conversation helped me to really write the book. Turns out that was a red herring. The book ended up having a different central question which might be something like “How do the sexual experiences we have impact on our lives and teach us who we are?” It was the hunt for a central question that made me structure the book by jumping between modern times and the past. There is also a little foray into meeting my husband which was a suggestion from my editor, Mandy Brett, and a damn fine one at that.

You also maintain a blog, Furious Vaginas. How has blogging affected your writing?
I started the blog to help me maintain a regular writing practice, and I posted every day religiously until the last couple of weeks.  The publication of the book distracted me. I have lost a few days to other priorities. I would never have finished the book so quickly without all the blog material. My issue now is how to make the blog work for my next book. Because the next book may not be completely about sex, I may lose some of the readers of my blog as more and more posts become about character exploration and a new storyline. We will see.

Affection is a very emotional book for a reader. Can you describe the experience of writing a memoir about your sexual and emotional life?
I am glad that readers emotionally commit to the book. When I wrote the first complete draft, I locked myself away in a house in the rainforest alone for a week. I wrote 15-20 thousand words a day. It was madness.  I woke up at 5 and sat at the desk and barely moved till midnight. This was complete insanity. But as a result I became completely emotionally caught up in the book.  There were a couple of scenes I knew I had to write and I had been avoiding them because I don’t like to dwell on them in real life. When it came to write them I found myself getting up, pacing, making odd noises. It was a quite physical experience and when I had written them I didn’t want to revisit them to rewrite. Maybe because of this those scenes are kind of raw for a reader too. Either way, I am glad people respond so strongly.

There have been a couple of MWF parties already this year; you mentioned you had a surefire ice-breaker.
I think this year’s MWF recurring theme is autofellatio. I seem to come back to conversations about this amazing act all the time. Ronnie Scott (The Lifted Brow) started it by sending me a link to an apparently famous autofellator’s webpage and we talked about this at the Text Party. Now it seems to come up in conversation all the time. I even had a very long and incredibly intense conversation with the lovely China Mieville that circled around this and related themes. Festival director Rosemary Cameron got into the action (not physically) at the festival bar.  Everyone it seems is fascinated by this quite amazing act.

What are you reading at the moment?
I am reading the amazing This is How by M J Hyland which I started on the plane and my god it is great. I have also started Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned because everyone tells me it is startlingly good and I want to read it so I can be in awe of him when I meet him. Got to have a good literary crush at the festival – so far I am completely besotted with Ethan Canin because of his amazing book America America and now M J Hyland, and maybe Wells Tower will become yet another distraction.  So far so good but we will have to wait and see.

Estelle Tang, 3000 BOOKS
Festival Blogger

Literature for the yoof, or for everyone?

I love an awards ceremony. The Text Publishing Young Adult Prize, now in its second year, was announced by Text publisher Michael Heyward at Taking Over the Grown-ups Table. Inaugural prizewinner Richard Newsome’s The Billionnaire’s Curse took ten years from go to whoa, and has now found an audience in half a dozen countries. Congratulations to 2009 prize recipient Leanne Hall, who came up trumps in a field of over 300 applicants!

I love YA books even more than I love awards ceremonies. The Taking Over the Grown-ups Table audience easily had the youngest average age of any session I’ve seen so far at MWF, and the audience members were well armed with questions and intimate knowledge of the guests’ books. It was fantastic to see lots of fellow book fiends lined up to see Isobelle Carmody, Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld.