Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:18
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kay Cooper and I guess today is novelist, short story writer and comedy writer and performer, Tracy Crisp. Tracy is an established rather than an emerging writer, but one of the aims of our programme is to include reflections from more experienced writers, as well as publishers and others involved in producing and distributing new Australian writing.
So we're delighted that Tracy can join us to talk about her diverse roles in writing and performing, being a funeral celebrant and exploring new creative projects. Welcome to the programme, Tracy. You grew up in Country South Australia and your home region features in your creative work. Would you begin by telling us about where you grew up and why Country South Australia remains so special to you?
Speaker 3 01:14
Yeah, so I grew up in probably two main places in regional South Australia. First of all, the Clare Valley when I was young where I did all my primary schooling. And then when I was in grade five or six, we moved to Port Peary. And then I've also spent a lot of time in the Riverland which is where my husband's family are from. I met him when I was 18 and at university. So I know the Riverland quite well as well. What's special about them I guess is, or the landscape of course, the sense of community that you get from living in a regional place, the connections that you make.
And I think just generally that sense of where you grew up, you can't help having an attachment to it in many ways. Yeah, that would be probably the main things I think.
Speaker 2 02:03
You mentioned meeting your husband at university and from the country you did come to the city to go to university. Your website mentions a diverse range of study interests followed by years of travelling and living overseas. While you were living in New Zealand, your story, Antonio's Gift, was published in the New Zealand Puffin Storybook. Would you tell us about this experience of having your work published for the first time?
Speaker 3 02:29
Yeah, so that was amazing actually. I at the time was studying and I was working part -time as a librarian and one of my part -time library jobs was as a children's librarian and I had always had this sense of myself as a children's writer. I loved novels and reading when I was young and not just the experience of the story itself but the whole experience of having a novel in your hands and losing yourself in the illustrations. And one Easter there was a series of workshops at the Auckland University and one of the workshops was about writing for children and it was run by Tessa Duda who is one of New Zealand's permanent storytellers and I went along to this workshop and as part of the workshop we had to write a story.
We had to go home on the Saturday night and write a story and bring it back. So I went home and wrote a story and the sense of reading it was amazing so it's about my mum I guess it came out as being about my mum and I could just really feel that everybody was wrapped up in the story. It was the first time I really felt this sense of connection and Tessa at the time was having a story put into this anthology and she asked me if it would be okay to send it off to the publisher which of course I said yes.
And then the publisher wanted to put it into this anthology so I thought that's how easy writing and publishing was that you just write something someone listens to it and sends it off of course that's not exactly how it happens but it really was an amazing experience of being supported by somebody with much more experience than myself and of course of having something published was amazing and it was in this story book alongside Margaret Mahi who had been one of my favourite writers when I was a child so it was all around amazing actually that's what it was like
Speaker 2 04:19
Would you read that story to us now?
Speaker 3 04:21
I would love to read that story for you. So it's called Antonia's Gift and it is a little bit sad, so I've just worn you in advance of that, but it's probably still my favorite story that I've written.
Antonia's Gift on Tuesdays. I hurry home from school so dad can drive me to my music lesson. Dad calls my teacher Ms. Allegretto, but I call her Antonia. When I get to my lesson, Antonia and I drink spirulina. Then, for a warm-up, will I flat on her backs, close our eyes, take a deep, deep breath. And when our breath comes out, it is the sweetest, brightest sound in the world. For the rest of the time, I play my flute and Antonia listens. While she listens, she asks me to do different things with my music. Antonia asks, can you play like a monkey? And my notes chase each other around the room. Antonia asks, can you play like a soldier?
And my notes march neatly side by side. Antonia asks, can you play like a tree? And my notes rub against each other, whispering secrets I don't always understand. One Tuesday, when I got home from school, dad said I couldn't go to Antonia's. He said he needed to tell me something. Dad asked me to cuddle up tight with him on my favorite lounge room chair. He sat as still and as quietly as my best, semi -brief rest and took a deep, deep breath. I can't remember exactly what he said, but he told me that early in the morning, Antonia had been in an accident and died. Dad was crying, but at first I didn't know how to cry. I didn't understand, so I didn't know what to do.
I went to my bedroom. I lay down on my bed and I tried to figure it out. On Wednesday, I didn't go to school. On Wednesday night, I looked at my flute and thought of monkeys, soldiers, trees and cats and wondered who could help me make their sounds now. No one, I was sure. On Thursday, I went to school. Most of my friends and teachers were kind, but some of them didn't talk to me all day. I guess they didn't know what to say. On Thursday night, I packed up all my music and put it with the newspapers to be recycled.
When I closed the bin lid, I thought I heard a monkey laugh, but I knew it wasn't true. On Friday, Dad took me to see Antonia's mum, Veronica. Veronica looked just like Antonia, only smaller and sadder. Veronica's house was filled with flowers. There were flowers next to the phone, flowers on the piano, flowers on the coffee table and flowers in the bathroom. She said the orange roses we gave her were beautiful, but I wished I could have given her something better.
07:07
She invited us to stay for afternoon tea. I asked if she knew how to make spirulina, and Veronica laughed and hugged me, and I felt a bit like smiling. Veronica and I talked about Antonia and the things we loved and missed about it. Veronica told me about camping trips she and Antonia had been on when Antonia was a little girl. I told Veronica about the cats and soldiers Antonia could entice from my flute. Then I told her I would never play my flute again. I could never make it come alive without Antonia, so I would leave the flute in its case forever. Veronica didn't answer. Before we left, Veronica gave me Antonia's silver ring shaped like a frog. I looked again at the orange roses Dad and I had given Veronica, and in my mind I thought I heard a tree rustling, but I knew it wasn't true.
The next Tuesday, I tried to ride home from school as slowly as possible. I couldn't imagine not going to Antonia's, although I knew I wouldn't be. I rode through the park and I heard the monkeys laughing in the trees. And I knew this time it was true. One tiny piece of the world suddenly made sense. I raced home, grabbed my flute and asked Dad to drive me to Veronica's. He looked a bit worried, but he didn't ask questions and we left straight away.
When we got there, I unpacked my flute and I started to play to Veronica. At first I played like a storm and my notes exploded in anger as they crashed against each other. Then I played like a mountain and my notes were wide and grand and wise. And then I played like the moonlight and my notes danced lightly from ceiling to floor to wall. I played and played and played and my music was anything I asked it to be. A sunflower, the ocean or an eagle.
As I played, I still missed Antonia. I still didn't understand why she had died and I would always wish she hadn't. But I knew something else now. Antonia had given me trees and monkeys. That was her gift to me. I had given Veronica the moonlight, mountains and a storm. And that was my gift to Antonia.
Speaker 2 09:32
That is an incredibly beautiful story and although some of it's sad it's really optimistic, it's really positive and it's speaking with young people about how to be okay about grief isn't it?
Speaker 3 09:46
Yeah that's what I hope it is. Yeah and I think the reason I wanted to read that or share that particular piece is that there's this kind of thing that people say about writers that we're all examining the same story over and over again and that is certainly about my mum who died very suddenly and was a music teacher but everything I've tried to do since then has been about the truth of grief and about living with the truth of grief but the truth of grief there's a lot of beauty in it too because there's a lot of beauty in the experience of our relationships and our connections so thank you for thank you for noticing that about it.
Speaker 2 10:26
And we'll talk later on in our conversation about your more recent work as a funeral celebrant. But for now, I want to ask you more about your writing because you've published short stories and essays in most of Australia's major literary journals. You have two published novels, Black Dust Dancing and Surrogate, published in 2009 and 2017 respectively, and you're currently working on a third novel, the working title of which is The Fish Have Vicious Teeth, which you changed from Blackout after Covid struck.
Now Black Dust Dancing is a subtly and beautifully written novel and the narrative is highly engaging. It's one of those special books that I read in one sitting because I just didn't want to put it down. Would you give us an overview of the story and what inspired it?
Speaker 3 11:17
Well, you don't have to read very carefully, I think, to know that it's based on the life of somebody living. It's called Port Joseph, but certainly it grew out of my time, my childhood in Port Pirie. And what inspired it was, it certainly examines the lead issue there. But what I really wanted to talk about and get to the issue of was the reason that people like me love living there and love being from there. And during the time of, well, I want to say of the lead issue, it's ongoing. So I don't want to downplay it as it's still environmentally really important. But at the time I'm examining, I guess, there was a lot of negative media about the place.
And I just always remember my dad saying, what people coming from Adelaide don't understand is that it's like walking into someone's house and saying, your kitchen is filthy, how can you live like this? And our town had an environmental issue, but we still love being from there and we love our community and the sense of community. And I was really trying to grapple with that because I could never understand why people just wanted to sort of disown in a town when lots of places do have environmental issues. And I think it's really important to address them. The lead issue is crucial to, you know, it's dangerous. As all sorts of environmental issues, but that the way of tackling them isn't sort of to just disparage a place, but is to look at what people are loving about living there as well.
Speaker 2 12:54
And that sense of community, you really build up very effectively in the novel through all the different dialogues you show, the relationships that people have and the harmony in their relationships that comes through very strongly.
Speaker 3 13:08
Yeah, I hope it does because the truth is those kinds of issues can also be very divisive because they are the same with climate change. I find it incredible that we're having any arguments about climate change. Why are we not just addressing it? So there's also that, but there also is a sense of obviously shared place and commonality.
Speaker 2 13:29
And as we know the best solutions to any kind of issue or problem come from communities being able to give advice to experts on what's going to work for them in that context.
Speaker 3 13:42
Yeah, that's really true. I don't think I examined that enough, but that's, yes, true.
Speaker 2 13:51
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is novelist, short story writer and comedy writer and performer Tracy Crisp. Tracy, Surrogate is the title of your second published novel. The Sydney Morning Herald review observed that your clipped, understated prose, eye for detail and slightly earthy sense of humour make surrogate an involving read. What drew you to write that particular story?
Speaker 3 14:23
Well, it's interesting. I think again, actually, what that story is, is about setting. At the time I wrote it, I was, like a lot of people have done, was spending a lot of time down at the old Royal Adelaide Hospital site. My dad was in and out of hospital for three years, I think. And anybody who has been in that hospital knows that it's, even before it got knocked down, you would only have to look around and know, at the very least, it needed a lick of paint.
But it was a fascinating building in that the way the escalators and the lifts, you know, like you would press button three and end up on level four and because it was all that kind of mish -mash and brought together.
Speaker 3 15:07
And then it was right next to the Botanic Gardens, which I do think is a real loss in their move, that they don't have that beautiful setting next door. But you would go, I would take my kids out for a quick run around the park while we were visiting dad and you would be in the Botanic Gardens and it would be filled with nurses on their lunch breaks or people pushing people around in wheelchairs. And there was something very moving about that whole experience. And I knew that the building, I didn't know I was gonna get knocked down, but I knew there was lots of talk about what was going to happen to it and what we were going to do about our hospital.
And I really wanted to write about that place. There was just something really that spoke to me about the place. And also at the time, my husband and I were having our own fertility issues and I was never really sure how sure I would go along that fertility journey. So I was sort of exploring that as well. So that's the different things. And then those characters kind of came to life themselves, I guess, yeah.
Speaker 2 16:14
Tracy, what can you share with us about the third novel that you're working on, which as we mentioned is titled, The Fish Have Vicious Teeth. It's a pretty ripping title.
Speaker 3 16:26
Well, what I can share about that is that always try and finish your work because the problem with this is it. So it started as blackout and it was, and it still is, set in the Adelaide Airport on the night of the statewide blackout, which at the time my husband was living overseas still. We had just recently moved back to Adelaide after many, many years in Abu Dhabi and it took him about 18 months to find work again and transition back. So I'd brought my children back so that they could start high school and those kinds of things.
And so the airport was a big thing in our lives. And on the night of that statewide blackout, I found out all the planes were getting grounded because there was an actual blackout at the airport. And I was just thinking, oh, how terrible that would be for so many people on so many different levels.
And the whole blackout, of course, was really fascinating that it could happen to a whole big population of us. So that this is a really good premise for a story and there's not many things that unite a whole population in their experience. But of course, I didn't finish it in time. And then we had a pandemic, which is far more uniting than a blackout. But I still, it is still set there. The fish have vicious teeth comes from the first sort of story in it, which is about a kind of a childhood prank between a brother and a sister and a fish that one of them catches that has sharp, pointy teeth.
What it is now is about South Australia's first female premier, who comes into being on that night. So it's kind of a very, all of my work is very South Australian and is about being from here. But I'm also really fascinated by this idea that South Australia is politically the first place after New Zealand in the world to give women the vote. And yet we have not had a female premier. And I find that fascinating. I'm not sure that we have a female premier, probably not coming up in the next little while either, depending what happens.
Speaker 2 18:36
That is a fascinating premise and you're absolutely right to point that out. We haven't had very many women political leaders anywhere in Australia over the years. Fortunately now we have far more women in politics, but considering where we started way back when, yes, there's still a lot of ground to cover. Tracy, what are some of the rewards and what are some of the challenges of being a writer?
Speaker 3 19:02
Well, the rewards, the one big reward is in the connection that you make with readers or audience. There is nothing more rewarding than when someone says after a show or sent you an email after they've read a book just to say, this really spoke to me in some kind of way. And my performance work in particular, I find that really rewarding. The challenge for me is the focus. I'm one of these people who, you know, sees the next shiny thing and gets the dopamine hit from the idea rather than from the work. So the challenge for me is focusing on doing the work and getting the work done. I think another challenge is especially when you're starting out is taking yourself seriously and respecting the work and the time that the work takes because you don't necessarily wanna start out calling yourself a writer, right?
Like Helen Garner's a writer or Richard Flanagan's a writer and you don't wanna be disrespectful to that and you would never consider yourself to be in that kind of space. So there's that idea of taking yourself and your work seriously is really, that's an ongoing challenge, I think. And then I think applying yourself to the work can be hard. Like writing a novel takes a really long time. And so that idea of extending the playoff, like of being able to really see the long term vision can be quite hard, especially because you're not often working in a team.
So you're finding your own momentum, giving it your own energy. And also, unless you're a really highly well -established and highly regarded writer, you don't really have a definite outcome. You don't know if it's going to be published. So you're kind of trying to give yourself the momentum and the energy of something that takes all of this effort and all of this work on the back of a fairly nebulous result. So reminding yourself that the journey of writing is as important as the destination is crucial and not necessarily simple. So that's why I have a little folder of emails and sometimes people say something nice to me, I make a little note of it so that I can flick back through it sometimes and remind myself that that's, there's the reward.
Speaker 2 21:30
That is a great strategy to use. And following on from that question, I've got a couple of questions now about the day-to-day practicalities of writing a novel. The first question is when and where do you sit down to write? And the second part is about how you keep yourself on track with the storyline and the characterisations.
Speaker 3 21:55
So at the moment I am a bit focused on a couple of shows so I do just go to my desk every morning and sit down and blot out whether it's going to be good or bad words, it doesn't really matter. I'll blot out 500 words or a thousand words or something like that and just apply myself to it. But that is not always the case otherwise I would have written a lot more novels. So that's really in the end that is how you get something done. You just keep working on it. But I also sometimes try and sneak up on a project a bit. So I gather things around so that because it's not all just about sitting and writing you need the ideas and the input for it. So I spend a lot of time going back through stuff I've already written to see if there's something in there.
I do lots of jotting down and just lots of scraps of paper and that kind of thing that comes to nothing sometimes but sometimes there's a little germ of an idea in there. I've just for the first time ever we've just put up this false wall in our house in this little nook that was a little bit awkward. So I do have a space that has never been used for anything except my desk which is the first time I've ever had that. I do think that is crucial that there's a space that's designated for the energy of that work. I know that sounds very woo but I think there's something about just going to the place where the writing happens and say and that's what you're supposed to be doing there at that time.
In terms of keeping myself on track well I haven't done a very good job at all of that with this last novel because this current novel because it's been changing quite a bit and I look back and I say oh my goodness there's so many changes along the way but that one I have actually because it's not tied precisely to events but certainly the chronology and the narrative I want it to reflect certain things that have happened politically in the state and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 24:00
That has a really clear timeline and a spreadsheet and because I have been trying to interweave a lot of different characters. I've put the characters from the left hand side, it's got 1940 down to 2000 and whatever we are now and then each of the characters alongside that so that I can make sure people's lives match up so it is fairly, there is a map there for it and that's really helped me too because I've been picking it up and putting it down. That's really helped me keep track of it because I keep looking at that and going oh that. Because quite often what is amazing is you'll pick up a piece of prose and not even remember having written that really. Where did that come from? I don't know. So yeah I do keep notes a lot.
Speaker 2 24:49
This is a question I've been asking guests on the program who've had their work published in book form. Your two novels have been published by Wakefield Press. How do you go about approaching potential publishers and how did you decide on Wakefield Press?
Speaker 3 25:05
For me Wakefield is a really natural match because they are South Australian and my writing is quite deliberately local and South Australian. But the reason I first got published by them was because I entered the unpublished manuscript competition which is part of the festival awards which is open now and closes on the 15th of December. So that is actually a really good way of deadlines are super important helping you to get work finished and like I was talking about before this is kind of nebulous ending so you can keep going and going and going.
So that provides every two years a deadline which I highly encourage anyone in South Australia with a manuscript to get together a good enough manuscript to put in that. So that's how I started. So I didn't win but they did kind of notice it in there. So it would have been nice to have won but I didn't win. So that's sort of how I got started and then I've just stayed with Wakefield really.
Speaker 2 26:07
How do you go about editing your own work before you send it to the publisher?
Speaker 3 26:12
Yeah, so I always pay, I have an editor who I've worked with a little bit. I've just been working with a woman called Virginia Lloyd. I have sent manuscripts to her before, for her to have a look at in a big kind of structural way. I have sent them to friends before, but I probably wouldn't do that again because it's a really big thing to ask friends to do. Number one, it takes them a lot of time, but number two, then they have to think through how they're going to respond to the work.
So I probably wouldn't ask friends again, except to say, would you like to read it before it gets published? Like as a kind of a friendship thing rather than as a feedback thing. But yes, I do. I have a couple of editors who I pay along the way. Yeah, who that's the service that they offer. Yeah. And then of course, there's the in-house editing that works once you've sent it into the publisher and then now then there's that going on again.
Speaker 2 27:13
So it's a process of negotiation, the feedback you get from editors, from the publisher and from any friends you might have given a draft to.
Speaker 3 27:21
Yeah, but it goes through some different stages. So initially I'll send something off and it will be usually too messy to make any detailed comments. But there's a really useful process of just a couple of big key questions and I do that for work as well. I sometimes have people send me scripts, manuscripts and also do it for a couple of friends. Because quite often somebody can just say, well, how is this going to resolve or this isn't working for me this relation? Why are they in a relationship together? There's I can't really, they don't seem like siblings to me or those kinds of high level questions, first of all. And then later on it starts getting a little bit more granular and then until at the end it's copy editing and making sure you're agreeing on spellings and verb usage and those kinds of things.
Speaker 2 28:17
Thank you so much, Tracy. It's great to speak with you about your work. So let's continue with part two of our conversation in next week's program. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was novelist, short story writer and comedy writer and performer, Tracy Crisp.
Speaker 2 28:34
This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio.org, and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
Speaker 1 29:01
Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio .org for more.
Speaker 3 29:12
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