#01 The Dispatch
Rejection, Pip Finkemeyer, Beloved, and Why Andor Is My Favourite Show This Year
Hello all you saucy minxes,
Happy pride month!!! I’m in a bit of a writing funk so you all get a newsletter/blog update instead. This writing funk isn’t actually bad– in fact, it’s kind of great. I’m jumping between about six different manuscripts like a game of whack-a-mole and Gemini season has me basting in creative juices. The great thing about likening myself to a big hunk of meat is that a good roast also needs resting time which is kind of where I’m at. Before the cut I need to sit, be left alone.
Enjoy the updates below!
Rejection Has Never Felt So Good (Publication Suggestions Welcome)
I’ve actually been holding back a lot of my work, hence this great churning productive beast slowing down, sweat lathered on the flank. I’m not holding it back out of fear or self-doubt, but actually out of love and hope. I want to start getting my short stories published by magazines or comps. This week I received a really encouraging rejection from Apex Magazine which was probably the highlight of my year (the above picture is A JOKE), but it only commits me more to guarding my babies, eagle-eyed, before letting them fly.
In fact, I’d love suggestions for magazines/journals/potential publishing sources. My short stories are all between 1000-3000 words and a mix of fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction. The internet is also big and overwhelming hence my Gondor call. I really want to find a home for these creative pieces and don’t want to jump the gun too early by posting them on my Substack because posting them here usually disqualifies me from submitting to said publications. If you know of any publishing sources please chuck your suggestions as a comment below, it would be greatly appreciated!
In the interim, I’m going to be sticking more with essays, lifestyle satire, reviews etc. I am a clown and I am going to milk that.
Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel Book Launch
Last Tuesday night I went to Better Read than Dead Newtown to see Pip Finkemeyer in conversation with Diana Reid (author of Love & Virtue and Seeing Other People) to talk about Pip’s new book Sad Girl Novel which is out now!
Pip’s book follows a young Australian woman on the Ringbahn in Berlin as she endlessly circles the question: Am I a creative genius or completely delusional? She is attempting to write a book while her best friend is preparing to raise a baby on her own. How do we go about birth (creatively and physically) and how do we support or delude each other in the process?
Diana’s questions were extremely thoughtful and Pip’s answers were equally so. For a novel about delusions of grandeur, it was a pretty inspiring and hopeful conversation that I felt were actually helpful and applicable to my own life. We spoke about moving past the cringe of the first draft, how important it is to have writing groups and the power of reading other people’s shitty first drafts. I personally find the cringe of my work hard to move through but then it also depends on the story and the narrative voice. Sometimes the voice is strong, it’s there, the character is speaking already and I’m simply transcribing. Other times I’m an archaeologist, I’m unearthing, I’m sifting through the excess in a process of refinement where the voice only appears in the edit.
Something that Pip touched on that this Guardian article also spoke about (which you can read here) is that it’s not enough just to satirise something, you must offer up something in return; something with heart, something vulnerable. I personally love writing satire and it brings me endless joy, however, I have also found that satirising others without satirising the self is too close to self-aggrandization. Critiques are incredibly important, it’s how we can reshape the world, but the best thing I ever learnt to do was offer myself up as a caricature, or at least use it as fuel. There is no greater therapy than laughing at yourself. We are all lame! and embarrassing! lean into it!
Melbourne Trip
I’m off to Melbourne this weekend so I’ll be off all socials and newsletters/essays whilst I’m there. Naturally, I’ll be galivanting around overpriced restaurants but also my partner and I are headed off to La Mama to see Little Brother, Big Sister, a play drawn directly from the writer’s lived experience of schizophrenia.
I’ll also be heading to the State Library of Victoria for the ‘World of the Book’ exhibition which is described as a display of ‘the rare, the sacred and the iconic.’ If that’s the case I wonder why they don’t have a book about ME in there.
Expect (hopefully) aesthetically pleasing IG photos when I return.
Watching: Andor
My mother and I have spent the last week watching Andor which has been such an exciting, seminal experience. I feel like so often our framework of ‘good’ (especially within franchises and cinematic universes) is such a skewed conversation because our referent point is so low and banal and money-grabbing and BORING. For once, Andor is an intelligent script performed by brilliant actors on wonderful sets, special effects (not CGI) are done with integrity, and at its heart is a message that seems to be at odds with Disney’s sanitised-imperial-galactic-military-final-frontier-pro-capitalism schtick.
Andor is an angry yet tender look at how a revolution starts without falling into the pitfalls of glorification or romanticisation. It looks at how love and anger are two sides of the same coin of justice, how in the heat of battle or in the quiet of the storm fear can paralyse us, how systems of oppression interlock and sustain each other (good old shitty kyriarchy) – and it is genuinely brilliant.
I really enjoy Star Wars. Do I love it with the same fervent passion I have for Lord of the Rings? No. It always falls short; it’s gone on too long, it always feels like the ideas are so great but the execution just isn’t there. The original trilogy is fantastic and nothing else has come close (except, as my sibling pointed out, the final season of Clone Wars). But Andor has that ineffable spark, that fighting spirit. I wonder if Disney execs were really paying attention when they decided to fund such sympathetic revolutionary material.
The planet of Ferrix reminds me of my father’s days at the steel mill; I know exactly how the scrap yards would smell, the grinding screech of steel on steel. It was so exciting to follow characters in high-vis gear who fought with their labour instead of lightsabers. It reminds me of being seven years old and Dad passionately ranting about Thatcher and Howard, how they choked the unions and divided the blue-collar class. It makes me want to write about it more.
Reading: Beloved
I will end this short little newsletter with just a few words about Beloved which I am nearly finished reading.
Safe to say it’s easily one of the best books I’ve read in my life. It’s been fairly slow going, I don’t think it’s something you can easily race through and so my schedule has been ‘read for a few hours, put down, think, percolate for several days, repeat’. As far as gothic novels go it’s incredibly horrifying in a way that departs from the genre. Where many others are in the spectral, partially-dissolved shadow of the past, Beloved is in the blinding light of the present, devastating, urgent now; it exposes the continuation and evolution of white-supremacy, the pushback against anti-racism (and critical race theory), the weaponisation of institutional education and how it upholds violence and dehumanisation (the most horrifying characters in the book being schoolteacher and his pupils). The haunting isn’t over— it’s still happening.
Beyond the plotting and how Morrison breathes new life into genre conventions, it is brilliantly written. Her style and narrative voice is so distinct, the prose tight yet loose; it’s obtuse, discursive, slippery, acerbic; it slinks away from you, won’t look you in the eye until suddenly it turns, head on, looks you full in the face and hits you like a thunderclap. The example of Beloved that keeps springing to mind is the repetition of the phrase, ‘Baby Suggs, holy,’ and Beloved’s truncated stream of consciousness.
There are a few writers and books which spring to mind insofar as their idiosyncratic voice and transcendental, intangible prose feels like a gift. I think immediately of N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (and Broken Earth trilogy as a whole) and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
I wish I had read Morrison earlier but I feel like it is also the right time. I am more present with my books, I am a better close-reader, I am more appreciative of the craft and the technique, not just the story. I am not sure when I will get to The Bluest Eye but hope to later this year.
Alright folks, that’s all from me! I’m not sure how regular these wee updates will be but I do enjoy taking a bit of pressure off myself so mayhaps I shall treat you all a little more often. It also plays into my gorgeous delusion that people actually give a shit about what I’m up to. Planet Yazmin, population: 1, is going strong.
See ya 🤪