Equinox, equanimity, equilibrium

Dear friends dear readers of this newsletter

equilibrium

Even for me it’s been a long time since the last newsletter. The Australian summer was one of such disaster, destruction, devastation, that like many others I found it hard to maintain a sense of worth and meaning in communicating about my work. As ever, just doing the work .
And now … there’s one topic dominating all others. I think we’re all having similar conversations about it, and all we know is that no-one knows how this will go. Wishing health and strength to us all, and a social transformation emerging.
As it’s the Equinox as I prepare this, let it be a time of equilibrium. (Take any signs and blessings on offer I reckon.) (Shorter days? More moonlight.)

If you’re new to this newsletter, please know it’s very infrequent, and you can unsubscribe anytime. There are links below to previous editions of the Local Time Publishing Newsletter. Feel free to forward. If this was forwarded to you subscribe here

The photos I’ve chosen this time, to keep to the layout template set up from Newsletter One, are from 2019, which apparently was not a great year for many people and not for the world but was one of my better years, not least for the opportunity of a house-sit for dear friends near Brunswick Heads, where I was happy to find myself awake early each morning, to start the day with sunrise on the beach, a tonic like no other.
And there I grappled with the immense amount of material for the Sasha Soldatow biography and started putting it into a shape, a structure. More on that below. But first …

big event: publication

Of course my big event for 2019 was the publication of my novel Turn Left At Venus, with the publisher I most wanted, Transit Lounge, launched with aplomb by poet Pam Brown (“this is an eccentric novel”) at a jolly party in Sydney where friends from different eras turned up.

meta Turn Left At Venus

There is a new page on my website for TL@V. Reviews and so on will be linked there, usually first appearing in the News Blog on my site.
Critical reception has been excellent; nothing like being reviewed by another novelist for the first review in the Canberra Times; it says “a rich and rewarding reading experience … a book of many pleasures” ; read it in full here

The review in the SMH said, in full:

Ada’s first name is pronounced ‘‘ardour’’ and her professional name as a writer is A.L. Ligeti, which at once erases gender and indicates a nod to a fellow-artist, the composer Ligeti. Ada is in the last stretch of her life, surrounded by people who know her work and are preparing to give her an appropriate send-off, and her memories swim through her elderly consciousness taking various narrative forms. Inez Baranay’s metaphysical concerns are given substance by the intense physicality of her settings and characters. Always an imaginative and intellectually uncompromising writer, using a broad canvas in her work that stretches across the world and beyond the bounds of the human, Baranay combines realism and speculative fiction in this tale of women’s friendships, the life of art, artificial intelligence, and the limits of ageing. Link here.

Interviews include one with writer Paul Laverty on The Quiet Carriage, which I enjoyed as he got the SK character in the novel. For her Narratives Library series of podcasts I was interviewed by Karena Wynne-Moulan. Pieces I was asked to write include this one for The Age on 4 books that changed me and this one for Book Lovers Book Review on why I wrote TL@V.

libraries libraries libraries libraries libraries

Even if you’re buying your own copy, please do make sure your local library, any library you access, orders Turn Left at Venus. Thank you. Borrow the novel; this keeps it circulating, keeps it visible.
What is more wonderful than a library.
Most branches of my local library, City of Sydney, have just closed because of the pandemic. Still, reserving or requesting this title is possible. And the libraries will re-open, somehow.

buying Turn Left at Venus

Support your local independent bookshop. Self-isolating? Bookshops do mail orders.
Or order directly from the publisher, Transit Lounge, here
Outside of Australia: Book Depository does not charge shipping, unlike Amazon.

You can get The Edge of Bali the same way, from the publisher or Book Depository.

work in progress

As noted in the previous newsletter, I’m working on “a life and times” of Sasha Soldatow. If you knew Sasha and I haven’t spoken to you, please be in touch.
The most recent Sydney Mardi Gras season included an exhibition called “Yesterday’s Heroes” for which I was asked to write a short biography of Sasha Soldatow to go alongside his unforgettable poster for Rock-n-Roll Sally (posing nude on red sheets a la famous Marilyn Monroe photo) .

Sasha Soldatow (1947-2006) disrupted the early gay liberation movement with his polemical pamphlet What Is this Gay Community Shit, one of several artisanal publications he produced of drawings, poetry, and political/personal protestations. He never swerved from anarchist values and a penchant for provocation, while participating in action for inner-city housing and tenants’ rights, prisoners’ rights and prison reform, defying censorship, and shocking the shockable. Sasha wrote many short pieces, two books of uncompromisingly modernist prose, Private Do Not Open and Mayakovsky in Bondi; a scholarly introduction to a selection of Harry Hooton’s poetry; and an “autobiography” co-authored with protege Christos Tsiolkas, one of many writers he mentored. He went to live in Moscow in 1991 but his dreams of returning to his Russian roots collapsed along with the Soviet Union. Devoted to friendship, gossip, art, and attending all the parties, Sasha is remembered for his stylish hospitality and invigorating conversation, and for several electrifying performances of his cabaret-style suite of poems, The Adventures of Rock-n-Roll Sally. The poster and other of his art works remain on many walls.

3 x 3: summary of my life’s work at this point

I realised when asked how many novels I have published that Turn Left at Venus is the ninth. I have thought of it as part of a kind of trilogy: 3 novels linked by, for one thing, an element of the non-realist: Always Hungry (vampires), Ghosts Like Us (ghosts) and now Turn Left at Venus (feminist utopias).
I realised the other novels (not by design) also fall into groups of 3: 3 novels set (all or mostly) in Sydney: Between Careers, Pagan, and Sheila Power; 3 novels set in parts of Asia: The Edge of Bali, Neem Dreams, and With The Tiger.
There are also 3 short prose collections: The Saddest Pleasure; sun square moon: writings on yoga and writing; and 7 Stories 2 Novellas.
I’ve also published two memoirs, Rascal Rain: a year in Papua New Guinea, and Local Time: a memoir of cities, friendships and the writing life. Call them life writing and they’ll be joined by a 3rd, the present project, the life and times of Sasha Soldatow. Divine apophenia.

revisit secular and sacred India

Now as per newsletter template I revisit two former titles.

Currently following news from India (how are we able to add more sorrow to our sorrows) and the atrocities fuelled by hindutva extremism made me think how my mid-1990s novel set in India, Neem Dreams, based on an intellectual property rights controversy and dramatising the clashes, comparisons and compromises between tradition and modernity, relates the start of an outbreak of politically engineered mass violence of a similar kind. Neem Dreams, published by Rupa&Co. in Delhi in 2003, had a fantastic reception in India.

buy both books from Lulu.com

Then I turned to the cliche I’d been praised for ignoring in Neem Dreams, the “spiritual India” of the West, and wrote With The Tiger, a 60-years-later Australian version of WS Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, telling of a young man’s search for the meaning of chance and death, the effects on the people in his life, and his eventually finding a kind of answer in India. Also first published in India, by HarperCollins India in 2008. (Mine not Maugham’s.)

Local Time Publishing

I called this the Local Time Publishing Newsletter. Local Time Publishing is my own publishing project— created to keep the back list in print; there are 7 back list titles . Also I added new titles: a memoir, Local Time, a new novel, Ghosts Like Us, and a short prose collection, 7 Stories 2 Novellas.

I also have books with other publishers, notably Transit Lounge — Turn Left at Venus, The Edge of Bali — and Writers Workshop Kolkata—the beautiful edition of sun square moon: writings on writing and yoga.

buying Local Time titles

The Local Time Publishing titles are created at the Lulu.com platform. Buy directly from Lulu. Lulu often offers discounts (Also available on Amazon etc.)
All LTP titles can be seen here. e-book versions are also available.
Contact me if you want to buy from me directly. Deals.

previous Local Time Publishing Newsletters

November 2018 I’m on local time wherever I am
July 2017 From retreat to return to relocation
December 2016 Always it’s a search for pleasure, always it’s a return to work
July 2016 Seasons, world events, life goes on, literature survives
April 2016 solstices and equinoxes and blue moons

I usually put a photo of myself at the end but there's me (with Pam Brown; photo by Sandy Edwards) up the top, so instead of a new recent one I found this one from 1965 in Penang (I was 15 or 16).

I would love to hear from you. It's the best thing about creating this newsletter, hearing back from you.

Stay safe, stay well, stay at home til it's ok not to