Everyday Kindness by Stephanie Dowrick - Reviewed by Walter Mason

Walter Mason is the author of Destination Saigon. You can find him online here. 

Stephanie Dowrick is by now one of the legendary figures in the world of Australian books. A pioneering feminist publisher in 1980s London, Dowrick transformed herself, first into a novelist and then into a wildly successful writer on psychology, personal growth and, in latter days, spirituality. She has grown and developed with her readership, at times leading and at times listening to the lives of ordinary people. In her latest book, Everyday Kindness, she takes up the simplest concept and creates one of the most inspiring and original books I have read in a very long time.

Born out of her collected columns for the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine, Stephanie soon detected a theme in her brief writings – the everyday concerns about kindness and respect, and the great difference the cultivation of these can make in our lives. And so she edited, extended and enlarged upon these years of observation, creating this exquisite book devoted to such an unexpected topic. The short, sharp chapters, so perfect for picking up and reading whenever you have a spare moment, are at turns surprising, meditative and inspiring.

And I just kept turning and turning through the pages, filled with ideas about how I could make improvements in my life, and how I could afford to extend more kindness in almost every daily encounter. Dowrick encourages us to shift away from the obsessive worry and constant self-concern that causes so much pain in our lives. By re-focusing on the needs of others, and on the finding of solutions rather than the cultivation of complaints, we grow as people and with that growth comes a concomitant increase in self-esteem. Oddly, the self-love we so desperately search for comes to us more easily when we are actively expressing our love of others.

Encouragement, gratitude and appreciation – those wonderfully old-fashioned virtues that many of us have forgotten – are built up in the book, not just as tools of personal growth and social cohesion, but as ends in themselves. There is a tremendous psychic value, Dowrick suggests, in being joyful about others’ successes and triumphs. In doing so we are answering one of the most fundamental human needs – the desire to be appreciated and valued.

Everyday Kindness is essential reading, I think, for anyone who is worried about the state of the world and interested in ways that we can make it better. Its focus is on the personal, on the direct relationships that we are most capable of influencing and improving. Dowrick’s voice is refreshing in its simplicity and in its careful regard for compassion and the necessity of building up our personal power through supporting and respecting others.
 

 Everyday Kindness is available here. 

Shearer's Bookshop is holding an event with Stephanie on Wednesday 8th February 2012 at 7.30pm. Tickets are $10, you can book on (02) 9572 7766

Guest Blog: Falling Through the Genre Cracks and Finding Wonderland by Kim Westwood

This post was first published on When Genres Attack

I know a writer who turns her books face out on the shop shelves wherever and whenever she can, and this week I admit I’ve done my personal equivalent of that: sneaking a copy of my freshly published second novel out of Science Fiction and into the Crime Fiction section of various local bookshops. If I had my druthers, I’d stash another copy under Australian Authors and one in Literary Fiction too, though usually, there aren’t that many copies to spread around—and it would make me too obvious in my nefarious activity.

So why bother? Because The Courier’s New Bicycle is a hybrid creature—a genre amalgam; but who would know from the bookshop shelf arrangement by genre, as if being in one category denies the possibility of the others?

My book rep tells me my real problem is that my surname begins with ‘W’. Chastened, I scuff my boot against her bag hung on the café chair. If only I’d had the perspicacity of Jim Grant, who, with a clear and canny eye to his future as an author, carefully gathered together the correct letters and syllables to make his nom de plume, and turned himself into Lee Child.

About labelling, I remember the first short story competition I sent a story to. Its requirements were that the writing be ‘speculative’. I thought, well, my stuff’s that. At the time, I didn’t realise how the term was part of a highly structured system of categorisation: one that a writer and their writing could become permanently ententacled in, despite the term itself being a superfluity, all fiction surely speculative. Anyway, this first story won that competition, then one called an Aurealis, and my trajectory as a writer of speculative fiction was set.

My first novel, The Daughters of Moab, was published in 2008 by HarperVoyager, and so it came out with a science fiction label. I preferred to call it poetic apocalyptic, a descriptor I’d come up with in an effort to flag to readers something of the style and substance of its interior, which was a conglomerate of SF, mythology and the supernatural, all with a literary bent, its bedrock being the land—a post-apocalyptic Terra Australis—and its preoccupations being with humanity’s capacity for destruction and equal instinct to survive.

Fiction that crosses genre lines runs the risk of not being judged on its own terms, but according to the label it comes with, preconceptions firmly attached. The Daughters of Moab, viewed through the lens of science fiction, was critiqued accordingly—and more often than not it vexed expectations, the prose deemed too obfuscatory for the genre. And while I maintained that a broader readership might get something out of a dose of the poetic mixed with the apocalyptic, apparently the story’s SF label made it too lowbrow for literary inspection.

I remember how my first-time novelist’s ego plunged like a bungy jumper into a bucket when (I shan’t say a close family member) saw the book cover’s shout line, Assassin. Protector. Blood Sister… and said, ‘If you write something like that, you have to expect a lot of people won’t want to read it’. Sadly, my close family member wasn’t wrong—labelling and shelf allocation all but killing a broader interest; and alas, the novel fell through the genre cracks.

By now you’re thinking I’m dark on labels. In fact I like labels, and sorting things. Some (family members) would say it’s my anally retentive Virgo nature coming to the fore, but I think labelling was invented to help everybody, not just me, organise a confusing world.

One of my favourite activities as a kid was to put all the animals from my big bag of plastic creatures into groups. Sometimes it was according to kind—farm animal, wild animal, mythological animal, etc; other times it was by biggest to littlest or best to worst; and other times it was according to the new alliances and friendships each had made with the others while I was off eating my breakfast. Eventually abandoning my bag of animals, I went on to list making and room tidying, my clothes drawers organised by colour and my files alphabetically. This, I said to myself, was so I could find things. Little did I know that this entirely sensible rationale would return later in life to bite me in the bum.

Back to the genre amalgam that is The Courier’s New Bicycle. I’m happy to report Australian Bookseller+Publisher has described it as ‘a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale’. This quote-worthy phrase opens up the field of interest: the ‘noir’ a nod to crime fiction, the ‘cyberpunk’ to SF, and the ‘credible’ to current societal aptness. Hopefully, it will spur a variety of readers into wanting to know more about a bike courier and accidental sleuth who has a mystery to solve in the alleyways of a dystopian Melbourne just around the socio-political corner from now, despite the book’s despatch solely to the SF shelves steering it too towards the genre cracks. Which brings me to Venn diagrams.

Unlike fractions (those sharp-edged and unyielding divisions that caused me no end of pain), the circles that I learnt about in primary school geometry class, their intersections alluringly shaded, hinted at a world with grey areas, ambiguities. These days I wonder if my fascination for Venn diagrams was because I knew from quite young that I was attracted to girls as well as boys, desire floating in an as yet unnamed place, and those grey areas speaking to me of the possibilities that might live inside me and at the interstices of things. This might explain, in part, the gravitational pull cross-genre writing has always had on me, and maybe now’s the time to mention that Salisbury Forth, the primary protagonist in The Courier’s New Bicycle, is happily gender androgynous.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in the binary labelling system currently used to decide sex and divide gender, and began to see both as continuums with any number of identity positions along them; but a non-intersecting binary now seems as blunt and flawed an instrument of categorising as the labelling system used, say, to keep literary and genre content apart.

An either/or world is a brittle, lifeless creature. The pleasure that sorting animals gave me as a kid was also the pleasure of re-sorting; that is, the freedom to change perspective and make endless rearrangements in the order of things. In my fiction I go to the grey areas and in-between places because they hold the most promise. And for those willing to read a novel that slips between the genre cracks, there’s always the possibility of finding wonderland.

Written by Kim Westwood 

The Courier's New Bicycle and The Daughters of Moab are currently available. You can visit Kim Westwood at her website.

Guest Blog: M.J. Hearle on Writing, Perceptions and Genre

I was at a backyard barbecue recently – the sort of occasion one gets dragged along to by a partner where you don’t know anyone and spend half the afternoon introducing yourself – and got stuck talking to a stockbroker named Randall. His name might not have actually been Randall but if it wasn’t it should have been. Randall seems like the sort of name a stockbroker would have: strong, confident, and a little obnoxious.

It became clear quickly that we had little in common. Randall liked talking about money. I don’t have any money, so I couldn’t contribute much to the discussion. When he realised I wasn’t a prospective client, any semblance of polite interest began to fade from Randall’s eyes. It only flared up again when I told him what I did for a living.

‘An author, huh? Published too? What sort of stuff do you write?’ Randall asked, puffing cigar smoke in my face (he wasn’t smoking a cigar, but it feels like he should have been).
Clearing my throat, I answered without a shred of embarrassment, ‘I write supernatural fiction.’
Randall’s eyebrows twitched, and his top lip curled into a smirk. ‘Oh...really?’ he said, in the kind of patronising tone only the truly ignorant can muster. ‘Why? Why would you choose to write that junk? You’re a grown man. It’s all a bit silly isn’t it?’

I smiled and shrugged, biting back my reply that it was probably a bit silly to wear a three-piece Armani suit to a casual backyard barbecue, thanked him for his opinion and moved on. I think he was grateful to see me go. Men like Randall, creatures of facts and figures, have a hard time relating to people like me. I make them uncomfortable. Storytellers don’t fit easily into their carefully ordered, rigid view of the universe (which probably looks something like the Matrix – everybody and everything reduced to a flashing green number.)

Now, if Randall had nodded politely and told me that he personally didn’t enjoy reading about things that go bump in the night, I wouldn’t have minded (though I would have been surprised as such a response required a level of tact presumably beyond his reach). Books are like ice-cream, and not everybody likes strawberry mixed with their chocolate. I don’t like reading westerns – not because I have anything against cowboys on the high plains, it’s just not a flavour I particularly appreciate. What bothered me about Randall’s reaction was the way he dismissed an entire genre without a second thought, as though it was an irrefutable fact that supernatural fiction was terrible and those who wrote it, fools.

When we’re young we happily gobble up the fairy tales our parents read us, delighting at the monsters and the magical turns such stories feature. As we grow older, some of us begin to look down on these stories, locking them away with our old toys, leaving them to gather dust. We forget the power they have and our imaginations start to atrophy. Soon the only narratives we can tolerate are those that take place in a recognisable reality, and anything that challenges or pushes at the constrictive boundaries of this reality is regarded with suspicion, or worse, contempt.

I used to feel sorry for people like Randall and their shrunken, malnourished imaginations until I realised something startling – these people felt sorry for me. They looked at my ability to suspend disbelief, to indulge the impossible, as some kind of developmental shortcoming. A few steps removed from mental retardation or insanity.

Why choose to write about such things? – they ask me, and my response is always the same...
Why assume there is a choice?

What moves us, moves us. It’s a simple as that. A psychologist might be able to pick apart my predilection for the paranormal. Might be able to point to incidents in my childhood that helped shape my creative direction, but what it boils down to is, I dig this stuff. Not only that, but I genuinely believe supernatural fiction has literary merit. Of course there’s plenty of pap out there, but there’s enough genuinely good work that I’m always surprised the genre is given such short shrift.

You only have to look at the writings of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Block, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and that poor whipping boy of the critical community Stephen King, for evidence of great stories of the supernatural that hold up to literary scrutiny. All of these authors can weave tales that astonish and terrify, but most do so in the service of a greater message. They use genre conventions and metaphor to reveal basic human truths much more artfully than straightforward, realistic fiction. In other words, the spectral happenings are just the garnish on the meal, not the meal itself.

When I started writing my first novel, Winter’s Shadow, I knew I wanted to write about love and death. I wanted to write about that difficult transitional period between adolescence and adulthood. I also knew I wanted to write about monsters. So I crafted the tale of young woman named Winter Adams, who discovers there’s a whole other world beyond the one she can see with her eyes. A world full of magic and terrible things that wish her harm. One of those terrible things just might be the man she’s fallen in love with.

I wasn’t attempting anything profound, but I didn’t approach the story carelessly. While it’s true the surface mystery contains many supernatural twists and turns, it was the deeper mysteries of the book, those grounded squarely in the real world, that interested me: love and death. Winter learns a lot about both over the course of the novel, and her journey is all the more satisfying for it. If I’d left out the supernatural aspect I might have garnered fewer sneering responses from the Randall’s of the world, but I wouldn’t have had as much fun writing. And, I suspect, the readers who’ve picked up the book wouldn’t have had as much fun reading.

M. J.
 www.mjhearle.com

 Winter's Shadow by M.J. Hearle is available now.

Guest Blog: Some Thoughts on Genre and Literary Fiction by Kirsten Tranter

Kirsten Tranter is a novelist whose debut, The Legacy, was long listed for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award. She will be appearing at Shearer's on Friday 13/05/11 as a panel member for our special event, When Genres Attack!

 This week I had the very happy experience of admiring the brand new Spanish edition of my first novel, The Legacy. In Spanish, it's El Legado  - sounds so sinister and impressive. And the publishers have added a subtitle, just under the title: "una novela de misterio." My Spanish is virtually non-existent, but I think that what they are doing is telling readers what kind of book it is, which is to say what genre: "a mystery."

It's not wrong to call my book a mystery, but I'm not sure whether it's a good idea for the publishers to brand it like that. Without giving it all away, The Legacy plays with conventions of the mystery novel but doesn't entirely embrace them; at key points, it swerves away and refuses some of the narrative expectations that come with the genre, and deliberately takes another direction.

I've noticed in some reviews of the book that readers care a lot about these narrative expectations, which amount to an implicit promise or compact between the writer and the reader, and not all readers are happy when the rules are broken, even when they're broken with a purpose. I hope there aren't too many disappointed readers in Spain and the rest of the Spanish speaking world who pick up my book expecting one thing and getting something else. Maybe they’ll be pleased and surprised rather than disappointed; maybe Spanish readers are very open minded.

I describe my book as a "literary mystery" because while it engages with the conventions of the mystery novel, it does so in a critical way. This to me is what makes it literary: literary fiction, I think, is interested not only in telling a story, but in encouraging readers to reflect in some way on how the story is told. These issues are at the heart of The Legacy, which is interested in the shaping power stories have in our lives and our understanding of ourselves. In The Legacy I transform the plot of a Henry James novel, The Portrait of a Lady, and adapt it to a contemporary setting, before turning it into a mystery about a disappearance on September 11.

It can be hard for any book that engages with genre conventions to be taken seriously as literature. Why is this the case? Why is it that when Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin in 2010 for Truth, the judges felt compelled to insist that the book transcended its genre, as if to justify the incredible idea that a genre novel could have literary merit? And why does a former Booker Judge, John Sutherland, believe that submitting a crime novel to the prize would be “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”?

Anyone who reads sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, or crime can tell you that there are plenty of writers working in and on the margins of those genres who are deeply concerned with the craft of writing, with questions of aesthetics and interpretation and other hallmarks of "the literary." But a deep prejudice against convention dominates some people's sense of what literature can be: the idea that any convention is a form of constraint, and thus an obstacle to originality and art.

Edward Doxc rehashed some of these ideas in a recent piece in The Guardian, an argument about why literary fiction is distinct from and better than genre fiction: "even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material."

Any author writing before the period of the Romantic poets would find this a very bizarre idea indeed: it's a relatively recent, modern idea to believe that all formal constraints are an impediment to art. True, we're not all in the habit of writing sonnets any more, and a hierarchy of genres has existed for a long time. But I don't see any reason why creativity and art can't inhere in the way conventions are utilised - the way they can be extended, played with, broken and put back together, or simply mastered with authority and a powerful command of language.

Like many people who want to oppose literary fiction to genre fiction, Edward Doxc is very troubled by the phenomenal success of Stieg Larsson, whose books he regards as typical instances of bad genre writing. I can only imagine that he doesn't read very widely in any genre apart from literary fiction. If he did, he would recognise the deep investment Larsson has in deliberately questioning and manipulating conventions and typical features of the crime/thriller genre. Sometimes, reading Larsson, I'm not sure whether he's deliberately screwing with my expectations, or whether his plotting is just clumsy (or both?) – his writing is intelligent enough for me to suspend that question, and tend towards the idea that he was genuinely trying to reinvent the genres he works with, on both a formal and political level.

Doxc is surprised that so many people read Larsson because Larsson is so bad (and he does have one valid point: the opening of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is boring. I personally thought it was satire) but I find myself surprised that so many people read Larsson because his books are so unconventional. The fact that so many readers stick with the strange narrative journey of the Millennium trilogy is testament to the strength of Larsson's central character, Lisbeth Salander: by half-way through the first book, we care enough about what happens to her that we'll follow her anywhere. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts out as a thriller about corruption in the world of corporate finance. It then becomes a murder mystery in the style of a classic "locked room" story; later, it morphs into hunt for a serial killer obsessed with Leviticus. Within each book and from one book to the next the precise generic contours twist and reshape themselves around this indomitable, brilliant, sociopathic woman. What is this if not formal innovation, a sustained reflection on and reinvention of the way stories are told - what is this if not literature?

Written by Kirsten Tranter

 The Legacy is available from Shearer's Bookshop. When Genres Attack! featuring Kirsten Tranter, P.M. Newton and James Bradley will take place at 7.30pm on Friday 13th May 2011 at Shearer's Bookshop. More information about this event can be found here.