Hello!
And welcome everybody.
My name is Danielle Ainsley
and on behalf of Woollahra, Randwick and Waverly Libraries
it's a pleasure to have you all joining us this evening.
It's also a pleasure to welcome both
Charlotte Wood and Michela Kalowski as well.
Now, before we get started, I do want to acknowledge
the traditional owners of the land on which I currently stand
the Gadigal and Birrabirragal people
of the Eora nation
and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
It's also a pleasure to welcome both
Michaela Kalowski and Charlotte tonight.
So Michaela is an interviewer, moderator and presenter.
She's interviewed writers and thinkers
from the worlds of arts, science and politics.
And recent highlights include Margaret Atwood,
Trent Dalton, Stan Grant, and Richard Fidler.
She has conducted radio interviews for ABC
and in June last year curated The Big Weekend of Books,
ABC Radio National's first ever on air
Writers' Festival.
Now Michaela regularly facilitates
panels and conducts interviews at writers' festivals
universities and community organizations as well.
Now, Charlotte is an award winning author
of 6 novels and 2 non-fiction books
and I'm sure there's more there that I haven't even...
haven't even counted.
She has won the Stella Prize, the Prime Minister's Literary Award,
the Indie Book of the Year
and most recently
the Literary Fiction Book of the Year
in the Australian Book Industry Awards.
Her most recent book is this one,
which I have right next to me, there we go.
"The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life".
And we have the pleasure of hearing more about that tonight.
Now, hand it over to Michaela.
Thank you Danielle.
It's very very lovely to be here with everyone this evening.
I do always wish we could be together in person
but it's lovely wherever you are around the country.
It's great to be with you and wonderful
to be in conversation with Charlotte Wood.
I wanted to start by saying that this book
is a really beautiful kind of hybrid of things.
It's a book that explores really what it
means to be a writer or to create
and woven through the book are also life lessons,
insights that Charlotte came to while studying craft
or talking to other writers and thinking about creativity.
And tonight I wanted to ask her about
all of these 3 things.
Some of the discussion will be about those life lessons,
she learnt from writing, others will be
questions about her writing life
and the creative lives of others.
And I'll also speak with her about
how ideas that relate to creativity can
help the rest of us navigate our lives.
Charlotte, welcome.
Thank you so much Michaela.
And thank you everyone for coming on this
Friday night, which seems to me a big
sacrifice for you, but it's a great joy for me.
And I'll just say that I'm joining you from
Bullanaming, the area of Sydney that's
known as Marrickville now.
And I pay my respects to their elders of course.
Wonderful.
I wanted to start, like I said to you before
I promise it's not a lazy question,
but it's always better from the.. from the mouth of the author herself,
if you could talk..
If you could tell us just a little bit for
people who haven't read "The Luminous Solution"
because it's only just been, you know, brought in to the world.
What.. what you explore in the book?
And who it is for?
Thank you. It is a book about sort of
the nature and texture of creativity I suppose.
Of course, from my own perspective, primarily.
But also from what I've observed of other
people's creative impulse over the..
I keep saying 20 years, but I think it's actually 30 years
I've been writing books.
And I've always really been fascinated by the creative process
and the creative impulse and why people have it and how it works.
And with this book I wanted to sort of bring together
all the scattered thoughts that I'd had
over many many years.
Sometimes I'd written about it,
other times I'd just had jottings in my notebook.
I wanted to bring these thoughts together
to see if they formed any sort of
coherent idea
but also to see what a discussion of
creativity in general might have to offer
a wider readership than just writers or artists.
Because I do feel very, maybe romantically
strongly about the
the pleasures and the satisfactions and the deep human joy of...
that comes from making something
that wasn't there before you made it.
And that might be making a cake,
it might be making a garden,
it might be knitting, it might be singing in a choir.
I just think there's something really fundamental in us
that... that... that gets something very profound
out of that creative expression.
And the process even more than the outcome.
So I wanted to look at that in lots of different ways
from.. from my years of writing and then
looking at increasingly
sort of interested in the cross pollination
that comes from the other art forms,
other.. other fields of expertise altogether.
I wanted to ask it, when you're at the..
very at the beginning of the book
you do start with the first lockdown last year.
The first chapter begins and you talk about
how your garden is in disrepair and maybe
the garden reflects your inner state.
But you talk about your inner state,
you talk about your inner life as a writer which I wanted to ask you about.
But you talk about the inner life generally.
You're sort of pondering that.
And I.. The question you.. you propose is
what might feed a prosperous inner life.
And I wondered if you could describe
the elements of rich inner life in your experience?
I mean... it sort of when I started writing about the inner life
and then I thought: What is it anyway?
What does mean to have an inner life?
Or a rich inner life? Or sort of interesting inner life?
And I thought over time that maybe
the inner life could be described as
a sense of your mind as a place to go to
and a place where you can develop
your own original thoughts and feelings
about things without having everything
fed to you from the outside world.
And.. and I said it in that piece Fertile Ground that..
which is the first chapter of the book
that there are things that threaten
a sort of rich inner life and things that nourish it.
And that for writers and artists
the inner life is really inseparable from our work.
Sort of where we live, you know in our
professional, while we're making our work.
So, you know I was looking at what...
and what's written as you say at the
sort of, I think it was about 3 weeks into the first lockdown
where I was just in a state of panic.
I don't know about everybody else,
but you know I see myself as a fairly calm
and rational person,
but I was not calm or rational then.
And I was in that sense of just...
Just sort of not being able to focus properly,
not being able to even really makes sense
of what was happening.
Because none of us knew it was such a
world shattering event that we were facing.
You know, turned out that for me,
my life was completely fine, but back then
I didn't know that was going to be the case.
So I realized that I, I'd sort of
in response that I'd been rushing around
just sort of filling myself up with things
that I thought were sort of meaningful.
Like, you know yoga and books and films and...
I didn't quite get to sourdough bread making
but I did a lot of cooking.
Banana bread maybe?
I'm now into, massively into making biscuits,
which is a terrible thing really because then I had to eat them all.
But, it was that sense of, well I might be
doing all these things that we see as meaningful,
but I still just cramming them in.
I may as well be just eating junk food
in the way that I'm sort of taking these things into myself.
So I just sat up here where I thought
I just need to stop. Just still.
Go quiet. Settle down.
Figure out what I actually need,
what I want and how to just go back to a sense of, sort of
some kind of
the peacefulness that actually was
available to me if I chose to have it.
So then I was looking at, well what threatens
my creativity which to me is inseparable from me in an inner life
an what nourishes it.
And I guess the nourishment is always
and I have to keep re-learning this,
which is extremely annoying but it just seems to be the way it is.
Very comforting for us as readers,
I'm like "She's been writing for 30 years
and she keeps having to re-learn this lesson, I'm fine".
Yeah, I have no idea, what I'm doing 90% of the time,
but... it, the nourishing stuff is firstly
making your decision to choose to feed that inner life.
And then secondly saying, well what is nourishment and what is not.
So what is not nourishment is endless
indiscriminate time on the internet, on my phone.
And I fall into that trap, you know as easily as anybody,
which is sort of probably a bit shaming to admit
for a writer who is supposed to be very
I mean, I think there was a sense last year that
we writers should be able to just
slot back into our normal working routine
because this is where we live, you know,
I work at home all the time.
I didn't have children to home school.
I didn't actually have any...
There was nothing rational about the
disruption that happened to me.
Whereas other people, their lives were really turned upside down.
And yet, still I, I found it so difficult to focus.
So I went back to the very basic things,
which is orderly physical world.
You know, house that's sort of under
some sort of control mess-wise.
Food in the fridge.
Exercise.
Going to bed early. Getting up early.
Eating decently etc.
And really, those physical things are really important
to nourish and.. what I would call a rich
inner... inner world, inner life.
And the.. the things that threaten it are
just sort of feeding rubbish into my mind, I guess.
And that means, all you know that sort of
just doom scrolling, too much current affairs and news,
too much television,
even sort of reading in that cramming sort of way,
thinking "Oh, I've got a.. my "to be read pile" is... you know,
gotta be as cool and interesting as other people's on Instagram.
So, just really settling right down and thinking
"What do I want in my mind?"
"And what do I want out of my mind?"
And in a way, I think it's almost as simple as that.
Deciding that you have choices about
what goes into your inner life and what you keep out.
It's a beautiful description, a really powerful description.
When it.. throughout the book and it's
an idea you introduced that early on,
is this tussle we feel between the inner life
and the modern life but also consumerist life, a capitalist life
that wants us to keep on eating yoga classes like we are just at a buffet
and we just can't stop.
Who want us just to churn through, through content.
Yes, because then we have to go and buy
yoga mats and yoga clothes... and...
Yoga hairbands, yoga masks..
Yoga hairbands. And then think, "Oh, actually yoga is not quite enough.
I should do some pilates and yoga."
And, you know. And I think I said in that essay
that I think panic is.. is what capitalism
loves best.
It's just that, if we panic, then we just
clutch at anything, you know, that we think will help.
And, you know, I have to keep saying,
I am, I am terrible with all of this, it's not...
So having written this book, you might
think that I, you know, have a very
anti-consumerist life.
But I fall into all that crap as easily
as a next person, when I'm not being
thoughtful about it really. It's as simple as that.
I wanted to stay with some of these kind of
almost kind of bigger ideas of... of insights you're thinking about
that.. that struck me as kind of life lessons.
One that really intrigued me, is in the book.
The idea of the... creative person has a vision
that they see in their mind.
Then they sit down to write it or they sit to paint it
and it.. it evaporates.
It's a beautiful description to use from Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse".
And the painter who has that experience.
And I wondered about how you find ways
to translate your vision to the page.
And you write about that in a lot of detail in the book.
But I wondered how... how might the rest of us
get more familiar with that relationship
between an idea and how we bring it to life.
Yeah. I love the idea that people might
start opening up a little to.. to the uncertainty
that is central to the creative process.
Because I think a lot of the time people start doing...
you know... they want to.. they want to write their memoir
or they want to learn to play music
or you know.. write a screen play
or.. even knit or something.
And when it gets hard, which is all the time
and especially at the beginning,
I think a lot of people think "Oh, what I'm producing here is... is terrible,
therefore, I don't belong in this space.
You know. "I... Therefore, I can't do this".
And what is absolutely, you know, at the heart
of any creative endeavor is... is that failure
that is. It's, you know... I know there are writer friends
watching this and they will be, you know, sadly nodding their heads.
That, that uncertainty, doubt, not knowing,
failing most of the time.
Living in a... in a... in a very uncomfortable uncertainty
is actually, that's where artists live.
That's, that's what creativity is.
And you kind of have to go into uncertain space
in order to find something new and something
that hasn't been done before in quite the same way.
And of course there are skills that you can learn.
So if you learn to knit...
I... I once was a very very bad knitter
and gave it away to stop offending the world
with my terrible creations.
But, you know, that's only... Because I didn't... I didn't want it enough.
I think that's the other thing when
if you want to do something well, you have to want it enough
to really commit to it, to learn how to do it.
And so I feel like the idea of the apprenticeship
it's a really good way to think about a creative life.
I feel like... So I've written 8 books, 9 books now,
I feel like I'm just starting to get a handle on
how to do some things.
But I feel like I'm in this apprenticeship forever.
I never feel that I know what I'm doing.
I never feel that...
You know, I never write something down the first draft
and go "Ah, perfect!"
Never, never, never.
Sometimes, I think "Oh, I like that image
or there is something there that... that
calls at me and interests me, it doesn't make any sense,
but now after all these years I recognize that as a good impulse.
I know to follow that.
And there's a chapter in the book,
which the subtitle is "Nine Creative Ways to Think"
and... and it's one of those 9 methods of thinking
is something called "heat seeking".
And that "heat seeking" I feel like is at the real heart of...
certainly of my writing impulse.
And partly becoming a more experienced
writer is just learning to... to obey that
impulse to follow that heat.
Even when it doesn't make any sense
sometimes for years.
There might be some element of a book that you think
"I know this doesn't fit, but I still...
I just have this gut feeling that I want it in there".
And now I know to trust that because
that's at a certain point it will become clear what... why it's there.
And at a certain point the book will show me how to write it.
But you have to really trust that.
And it takes a while to learn that sort of trust I think.
It's wonderful.
Another thread that runs through the book
is about the difference between art and artists.
And I kept trying to think what the...
what the creativity is for somebody who isn't creative.
You know, for me I'm not a writer, I'm not a sculptor, I'm not a painter.
And I wondered if it was like the difference between
saying, you know "Am I my work"?
But I wondered if you could talk a bit about that.
You write about the artist's process that belongs to you.
You know, you're responsible for the process,
but you say that the art is separate to you.
And I won't spoil it for people because
of those fabulous quotes you've found
from painters and writers throughout the book
about how... how distanced they feel from the thing they create.
Can you talk a bit about that? I thought that was really fascinating.
Well sometimes it's... it's a good thing.
Sometimes just quite a scary thing.
But I think for me I came to a point of...
of realizing that I had to be able to
separate from my art.
I mean, it's a weird thing because it's so central to you.
You know, it is... it is part of you in a huge way.
But in order to... to make it what it needs to be
you also have to get some separation
where you can be quite disenchanted with it. And quite...
you know, be ready to throw it all away.
So you can't be too deeply connected
even though we have to be too deeply connected at the same time.
And there's always, I mean a lot of the
book is sort of discussing these tensions,
these paradoxes where two things are true at once.
One is that, of course every book I've
written is absolutely me and of course
every book I've written is completely separate from me.
But there are certain points where you need to
remove yourself from the book.
And one person I loved talking about this
separation with was Jude Rae the painter.
She's a magnificent Sydney painter,
some people might know, and she talked about how
it's really good while she... she... she really
likes to have someone come into her studio
and see her painting while she is making it.
Now, this could be any person.
It could be the postman.
It could be a neighbor.
It doesn't have to be a person who knows anything about art.
Doesn't have to be a person who has an opinion on it.
But something about their looking at it
that she called, she said it... it causes
a useful alienation
for... for her the painter.
So that she suddenly sees it through
a stranger's eyes.
And... and I said to her in this interview
"So it actually hasn't anything
to do with the person looking at it".
And she sort of laughed and said
"No, not really".
Like almost "I don't really care what they think".
But their being there, somehow causes her
to detach in a very useful way
so she can see it afresh.
And I think that happens for writers in lots of ways.
Sometimes not till the editorial process,
right at the end.
For me there's usually a point sort of
three quarters of the way through completion
where I'll hand over my work to, sort of
a trusted reader or to... to... to give me
a different perspective on it.
So, it's sort of a weird and hazy thing to try and describe.
But I think that separation,
I remember reading some years ago
and I never found out who it was who said this,
but they said
"You have to be disenchanted...
You have to be calm disenchanted with your
work in order to enchant somebody else."
So the maker needs some sort of...
Distance.
Remove. Yeah.
Throughout the book as well in this first
section you talk about some destructive
mythologies around artists.
Around the artists' natural state.
And one of them is this idea that, you know,
for art to be good, maybe an artist needs to suffer.
And you do write really frankly about,
you know, the grumpy solution,
the grumpy phase, the grumpy struggle
that you go through where you're like
"This is not working. And I just want to run away from it. Or I want to bury it"
or it's... whatever it is.
And wondered if you could, I suppose
dispel that ... or unpack it for us that myth
about the... the state an artist has be in
or the state you have to be in, in order to create, you know.
For something of... to be of worth does it
have to cause me suffering to create it?
I think when I was younger, I maybe
was a bit enchanted with that idea.
And I'm still, I'm still sort of really in two minds about it.
Just before I go into that I want to
acknowledge that the grumpy struggle
and the luminous solution both words come
from an American writer called Janet Burroway
who described her, her own writing for instance.
I will see if I can find it to quote properly.
She said it's always the struggle to get myself. Here she says
"Once I'm working the process is much
the same in every genre. The effort to
get myself to the computer, a period of grumpy struggle,
despair, the luminous solution that
appears in bed or bath, joyful work,
repeat, repeat, repeat".
And I just love that because it's like
"Yes! This describes exactly what it feels like for me".
But the... the idea... I think
the face of tortured artist myth is... is really...
can be very destructive.
And because it involves, in the way that
I've always thought of this,
sort of, the isolated artist,
keeping themselves separate from the world.
And only from, you know, I think it's the
Hemingway said, you know
"Writing is easy. You just stand at the typewriter and bleed".
Now lots of authors actually will recognize that
very Hemingway, and the Patrick White
quote about, you know
"The writing is dragged out by tongs,
a bloody mess in the small hours".
So good.
And it's a big part of myth that... that
totally recognizes that.
And yet I also want to really resist that
because I don't believe that you have to
be in constant suffering
to... to produce anything of worth.
I just don't believe it.
And I also think it's really damaging to
a lot of people who could have a really
fulfilling and joyful creative life.
And when I say joyful I don't mean that
it's, you know, Pollyanna sitting there
you know, laughing and skipping around
the room as I write, not at all.
But there is a deep sort of quiet, almost
serious joy if that makes any sense.
That comes from investigating something
really deeply and quietly
and going as deeply into it as you can.
But the... I think the whole tortured
isolated artist thing is a very patriarchal idea
because it depends on... that it comes from
male artists who have always had women
doing all their boring crap in their lives.
You know, doing the dishes, doing the laundry,
bringing up their children, cooking the food
to allow them to have this incredibly precious isolation.
And, you know, women's art making has
always been much more porous.
Because women have always, I mean I don't have children myself,
but many of my writer friends do,
and there is a wonderful photograph of Ruth Park
writing at a tiny little table with
toddlers crawling between her legs
while she's typing her work.
So women, had always... if not having children
then you know, just...
Caring.
...doing stuff around the... yeah, caring
in lots of ways for families and friends
and partners and whatever.
So I want to kind of celebrate in a way
that there are... there are communal aspects
to art making that don't mean I work on
my art with somebody else.
But I often work alongside somebody else.
And that is really precious to me and really inspiring
and sort of energizing and challenging as well.
It's not just someone there holding my hand.
You know, I think the tortured artist,
yeah, I had this sort of vision of a great
man artist like this big blank outline
when I think of this stuff.
And that sort of person would say
"Well, you have to be able to work on your own,
You have to be in isolation".
And that is also true, but you don't
have to be in misery the whole time.
Now I'm gonna do another little flip
and say I do think art costs.
It costs you.
And I feel like if it doesn't cost you something
it may be you're not going deep enough,
you're not pushing yourself enough.
So, yeah, I know I am saying like 55
completely contradictory things here,
but we can say multitudes.
That and we do and I love it. And that's the book as well.
I mean, you're picking up on some of the
things you just said you describe in the book
that... that state called "porousness".
That women are more porous to the world.
That women artists are more porous to the world
because of their gender.
And that we don't often think about why that is.
But you also described earlier in this conversation
that when the pandemic first happened
last year, you know, you... there was
no rational reason for you to feel disrupted,
but your world was disrupted.
You are porous to the world, you can't be
separate from the world. You can't be sitting in a garrett
on your own in isolation.
And I think also, you know you also talk
about the cost, the part has to the creative person.
But there's also a cost it has on a people
around that creative person.
And there's a lot of that, you sound like
you've already dispelled it.
All those myths around artists who are allowed to behave badly
because they are geniuses.
I feel like finally we're beginning to
really move away from that.
We're seeing the real impact on... on people and on communities of
as you say if life is the process
of how damaging that can be when
the art is beautiful and the artist is abhorrent.
And we don't have to love the person to love the art.
So I'm also saying a whole lot of flip flopped things.
The nature of...
I agree with that. Absolutely.
Yeah.
I wanted to cover a bit about... to talk
with you a bit about reading.
There's a beautiful chapter in the book called
"Reading Isn't Shopping".
And I... and then I want to get to some writerly stuff.
But I wanted to know why you wanted to...
to write that chapter in particular.
And I... and just to let people know that
the conversation in that... in that piece
is about what's going on when a word... work of art
makes us feel bad or disrupts us
and what we can learn from that.
Can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah. I started writing about that particular
topic because... partly because of
out of writing "The Natural Way of Things",
which was a novel couple... a few years ago of my...
that was very dark and very kind of harrowing really to write
and I know for some people to read.
And it... it taught me a lot about writing
and about why I was doing what I was doing and so on.
And I also had quite a lot of...
I did a lot of talking in public about it
and I had a lot of interactions with people about it.
Some of which were very uncomfortable.
So that... that the initial spark for that
particular chapter came when I was
being a sort of volunteer gallery attendant
in this little art gallery over a weekend
with a whole bunch of pictures that I didn't like.
I thought they were kind of... kind of ugly.
And some of them seemed a bit violent.
And they were... you know, they were not the sort
of pictures that I would have on my wall at home.
And... but because I sat there for two... three whole days
I had to kind of really start thinking about
"Well, what's going on with these?
Why do I feel like I feel about these pictures?"
And that led me to thinking about books
that are difficult or unpleasant
and why it's important that we still read them.
You know, that we don't necessary...
and also with you know film and
theater and everything else within art in general.
That I think it's really important that we
don't stop looking at something or reading something
or listening to something just because we
don't like it.
And that's where the phrase "Reading Isn't Shopping" came from.
Because I felt that... I don't know how
recent it is, whether it's just always been there
but there is a sort of sense sometimes that
well if a book doesn't please me it... it's of no use to me.
And...
If I can't see myself in a book, if I can't
relate to the people in the book
That's right.
there's a lot about... a lot of emphasis
on art needing to mirror my exact
experience in the world which
is a peculiar new thing I think.
Yes it is idea of relatability which is something I sort of
have a bit of a discussion about.
And I... I remembered my own high school years
I had brilliant English teachers
uncle Gilligivitriou and uncle Paul Cullen.
And they... and I remember Gilligivitriou in particular, you know,
I... at the... whatever 16 year old saying
"I liked, I liked that book! I can relate to that".
And... and my English teacher saying
"That's of absolutely no relevance whatsoever
that you can relate to it. I don't care
if you can relate to it.
What is the book doing? What effect is it having?
What is the author trying to say?
You know... What is the language doing?
What is the rhythm doing? What is the setting?"
You know... and it was... so I was so
trained out of it very very early, really
while I was still a child.
And I'm so glad that I was because then
it allows you to actually see what's
in a book rather than just going
Oh, the only measure is "I liked it", "I didn't like it".
You know, sort of thumbs up, thumbs down.
And then, I started to think in that... in that chapter
about how we... we're...
capitalism just wants to give us what we want, right.
So it wants to please us because then
we buy more stuff.
So we've started transferring this kind of
shopping mentality into art.
And I think it's really dangerous.
So that... the idea that a book should
represent me rather than show me something...
And you know all... all writers and I'm
certainly one with them,
that we have people complaining about
the behavior of our fictional characters
because it's not nice or it's...
it's sort of immoral in some way.
Or... and there was, I think I detailed
in that one woman who wrote on the social media thing
that she hated my book "The Weekend"
because it... the women in it were nothing
like her and her friends.
And... I was... I'm always just kind of
a bit gobsmacked by that.
You know, I have friends in the world,
but don't go to books to find friends.
And I think sometimes it's really important to...
to just force yourself to keep going with
the book you don't like.
Even if you still don't like it at the end.
Jerry Saltz is a... is a art critic for
New York Magazine
and he has a great little booklet
called "How to Be an Artist".
And I really love this book.
And he says, finding out what you don't
like is as important as finding what you do like
because what you don't like will show you things
about yourself and about what you want to make as an artist.
And he... he suggests that if you're
looking at something that you hate,
think "Well if I was the kind of person
who likes this what would I like about it.
And I really like that approach to say,
it just sort of... it just deepens the whole thing.
And I was reading a book the other day
a translation of a Japanese book
and I don't know if the translation is really bad
or be it artist... like... this is really
not doing it for me.
Wasn't working for me.
But I remembered Jerry. Well if it was
working for me what would I see.
So it was kind of, you know...
It's... it's interesting, it just makes...
it's not about sort of morality
although I think there is an ethical dimension to it.
But it's about just enriching things,
making them more complex and interesting.
One... and one of the other things you talk about in that same chapter
is this idea of "empathy porn".
That there's an overemphasis here
and while it comes from a good place
of the idea that fiction isn't up here,
I hear people saying empathy machines.
So there is no... no better way to get
people to think that... that someone
different to them is a human than to read about that person.
But you describe, I... I think it might be Sarah Sentilles
I can't remember who... who.. which other
author talked about it.
The idea of... of embracing radical "otherness",
like embracing radical difference.
I thought that was a really wonderful way
to push through that idea of empathy is obviously very important.
And there's something else that you
really capture brilliantly on the page
which is that something different happens
to my imagination when I read your characters in "The Weekend"
to when I see them on my screen.
If I'm watching a Netflix show and I see
people who are abhorrent and... and
have affairs with each other and sleep
with someone else's husband,
I'm more likely to kind of roll with it.
But when I'm translating it into my own imagination
there is something else that happens
and you... you capture that process.
You capture that process in your... as a writer
and therefore you make us think about that
process as readers, which is really a great gift in this book
all the way through it actually.
Thank you.
I think that thing about empathy is really
it is really interesting because I...
I say in that chapter, Look
I'm, you know, being quite snooty about relatability,
but you know, quite a lot of us talk about
empathy as... as the real... the thing
that makes books so... you... novels so important.
And... and then I was like, well how far is the difference
between relatability and empathy.
You know, it's still about how able am I
to inhabit this other life.
And of course we... we want that.
Reading is an act of putting yourself into
the... the person of the... people in the book.
But Sarah Sentilles wrote that great thing
in her book "Draw Your Weapons".
And she does talk... I think she calls it radical otherness
and she says empathy depends on...
I'm paraphrasing here, I hope I'm getting it right enough,
Empathy depends on perceived likeness.
You know, I'll treat this person justly
because on some level they are like me.
And then she says, well what if they're not like you?
What if you cannot find that point of connection?
What then?
And she says we need to learn to
protect and respect, I think that which we
don't understand and we will never understand.
You know, that we should... we should
give people human rights even if they're abhorrent to us
because they're humans not because I
see myself in you.
Not because they're like me.
So that's the kind of, yeah.
There's... we're talking about why we read, sorry,
but there's also why you write and there's
the beautiful connection obviously
between those two things.
And I wondered if you could read
a little bit from your book.
There's a fantastic section, sorry, to give people background
it's a moment in the book where Charlotte
is talking about how, sorry,
she has lost her way with the book.
And she's not sure why she's writing
and she doesn't want to keep writing.
And you make a list for yourself of why
you might keep going.
And I wonder if you could just read that for us?
Thank you Michaela, sorry you've got
scratchy throat, I know that feeling.
Yes, this... it was while I was writing
"The Natural Way of Things".
"So on one very bad writing day a few
years back, I thought again about giving up.
I wrote to a couple of my writer friends
and this is the email that I wrote to them.
"Not going so well this week after all.
Somehow swamped again with the futility of this work.
Trying to find the point of writing a dark bleak book
about girls imprisoned and trapped and reviled.
Yesterday, I couldn't see how I was not
just adding yet more ugliness to the world.
But I had just bucked myself up a little bit
by writing a list of reasons to keep going.
Here is what I came up with:
1. To make something beautiful.
Beauty does not have to mean prettiness,
but can emerge from the scope of ones imagination,
the precision of ones words, the steadiness
and honesty of ones gaze.
2. To make something truthful. Beauty is Truth. Truth Beauty.
3. To make use of what you have and who you are.
Even a limited talent brings an obligation
to explore it, develop it, exercise it,
be grateful for it.
Next. To make at all. To create is to defy emptiness.
It is generous. It affirms.
To make is to add to the world not subtract from it.
It enlarges, does not diminish.
At last, because as Iris Murdoch said
paying attention is a moral act. To write
truthfully is to honor the luck
and the intricate detail of being alone.
I returned to that list for comfort often
through the writing of my novel.
But it had stayed with me in the years since
because I think it speaks to the reasons we need art at all.
It often feels that we've entered a new dark age.
An age in which science is rejected
in favor of superstition and greed,
in which our planet is desperate need of rescuing,
in which bigotry and religion are inseparable.
In the midst of this gloom, to create
is an act of enlargement, of affirmation.
It lights a candle in the darkness
offering solace, illumination, maybe
even the possibility of transformation
not just for the maker but for the reader
or viewer, which is to say all of us.
Art urges us to imagine and inhabit lives
other than our own.
To be more thoughtful.
To feel more deeply.
To challenge what we think we already know.
Art declares that we contain multitudes,
that more than one thing can be true at once.
And it gives us a breathing space
in which we can listen more than talk,
where we can attentively question our own beliefs.
It gives us a place in this chaotic world
in which to find the sort of meaning
that only arises out of stillness, deep within our quiet selves.
So beautiful, it's one of my favorite
sections of the book. Thank you Charlotte.
Thank you.
I wanted to ask you a few other questions
about sort of writing and writerly process.
Early on you talk about, you referred to it
earlier in our conversation about this idea
of the writing mind.
And you say that the writing mind is
something beneath beyond or behind
normal conscious thought.
And this conversation tonight is about
how we can use creativity to think differently
about our work, the way we are in the community,
they way we make decisions about things.
Can you talk a bit more about that idea,
the idea of this... well I'm fascinated
with this idea of you being conscious of
these two minds.
That the idea of your writing mind as being
beneath or beyond.
Yeah. It's kind of a strange way to move in lots of ways.
I mean it's sort of, it's wonderful and it's...
it can be weird.
Like I know some writers who feel like
they are never actually truly present
with other people.
Because it's always a part of them that is
in their book or whatever.
I don't particularly feel like that.
I feel like when I'm writing, I'm doing that
and when I'm going about my life...
But when I'm with people, I generally feel
fairly, you know, present. It's just that moment.
But of course there are times you know
another writer a friend of mine said
"Well, you know the good thing about
being a writer is that a boring dinner party is never wasted".
And, you know, there's always a place you can go when
when you're not... you know, when you don't
want to be connected to what is in front of you.
But it's... it's kind of important to...
to learn to access that other place
as sort of thoroughly and deeply as you can.
And I lose sight of it all the time.
And you know the pandemic has... has really
pushed me out of my... of my quiet
imaginative mind.
And that's when I need to do things like you know
drawing the boundaries of time space
and keep out and don't do, you know,
a lot of socializing and that sort of stuff.
There is a list of Susan Sontag's sort of
diary notes to herself in the book
where she gives herself these sort of
lectures in her journals about
"So I will go to bed at this time.
And I will get up at this time.
And I'll only have lunch once a week and
say no to this and blah blah".
But I found it very amusing because she
also has little qualifiers next to all these
things saying, you know
"I will only have lunch once a week" and
then in brackets "can break this rule once a fortnight".
And then "I will only do this".
"Can break this rule two times a week".
So it's this kind of... and it shows you
sort of attempt always to move between... between worlds
to stay in the kind of quiet, private,
sort of wilderness of your creative mind.
And yet for me, I had to go into the world
to bring stuff back to that creative mind
and to my novel.
You know, my novel in my head needs
the outside world to feed it.
So it is a real tension that movement
between the two.
Another thing that goes throughout the whole book,
and I want to ask you some questions about "The Natural Way of Things",
is you also write about the role that other artists
have in inspiring you and visual artists come up a lot.
And I was surprised by that, I was.
I wondered if you could explain what it is
they offer to you as a writer.
Yes, it's sort of fairly recent thing for me
to be, I mean I've always loved looking
at visual art, but
lately, really in recent years, I've started
seeing particular artists as real
sort of guides for me, for myself.
Whether they know it or not.
Sometimes it's just about their bravery
and their willingness to
just walk their own path.
And while I was writing "The Natural Way of Things"
I became quite, a bit obsessed with
the artist Louise Bourgeois.
The sculpture and the installation artist.
She... for people who the name isn't familiar,
you might, you will have seen those
enormous spiders,
like, as big as a house, kind of,
metal spiders outside of the Guggenheim
on the building somewhere.
Or she makes cages made with creepy things
hanging inside them.
And she inspired me because I've felt,
I was so... I went through a period of being
very afraid, while I was writing
"The Natural Way of Things" and feeling so kind of...
that I was such a weirdo and it was so creepy
and what was it saying about me that I was
having this stuff in my head that I was
putting on the page.
And I also kept thinking "Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?
And what does it mean?"
And it was so tedious to keep going,
stopping and questioning myself all the time.
And that's when I came across the work of
Louis Bourgeois, which was really creepy,
always really menacing, slightly violent and also beautiful.
And... so I decided at a certain point
that whenever I get, you know sort of...
when I feel wimpy about it,
I'm just gonna, I'm gonna be Louise Bourgeois.
I'm going to... and I think I said
I'm just gonna hang some uteruses
in a cage and forget about it.
Which is some of her artwork.
And it gave me strength, it gave me a sense of...
because I... in my mind, you know, I have no idea
what Louise Bourgeois' actual practice was,
but I felt that looking at her work
she wouldn't dick around going
"Oooh, why am I doing this? Oooh, that's a bit mean.
I don't want people to think I'm, you know.
She is just making these really full on creepy...
She made some giant marble penises and
sort of carried them around.
Always very threatening and weird.
And I just thought "You rock Louise.
So I'm just gonna pretend that I'm you
for the purpose of writing this book.
So that's one... one of the ways.
And then other ways, I have a chapter in there called
I think it's called "The Outside Voice In Praise of the Unruly Artist".
And I particularly was looking at women artists
who I felt were really...
Louise Bourgeois is that kind of artist too,
but a bunch of like contemporary
Australian artists who just seem to me fearless
and unashamed of their instinct. Their art instinct.
And it's very galvanizing and very inspiring
you know, to think, to look at those people
and think "I'm... I'm gonna do that.
I'm gonna take charge of my work in that same way
and not care what other people think of it".
You know, of course you do care but
in the moment of making it, it's so important
to forget about what other people are gonna think of it
because it will just stop you doing anything.
And I think that's something that does stop lots of people
from even trying something creative.
But they think "Oh, this is...
this is no good...
so I can't. It can't be allowed.
And you know, another one of Jerry Saltz's
bits of advice is "Of course it's no good.
Just go do it." You know, "Go make your
bad art your big baby", that's what he says.
I love it.
And it's so great to just go "Yeah, of course it's crap.
So what? Just go". It's very freeing.
... in both situations it's like a
feedback loop, isn't it? You think
"Oh, no I won't, it won't be good enough so I just won't do it.
But also what I love at the moment,
I made notes, I put little post-it notes in the book,
when you describe those women, at one point
you said maybe they're like feral women,
is that the unruly artists many of whom are women
who you admire and you list all the attributes.
and one of them is that they talk about
themselves and their work in a really straightforward way.
They're not apologizing, they're not
contextualizing, they're not thinking about
how it's going to be received.
They are not interested in a long game.
And as you say, not interested in pleasing other people,
and I'm not, I don't mean it in an unkind way.
And those hallmarks feed because of their
ability to be those people.
To actually really as you say like exist in themselves.
It informs the work. So there's
negative feedback loops and positive feedback loops.
And I found that very inspiring and I'm not a writer,
I'm not a sculptor, I'm not a painter
but I was like "Yeah, that sounds like a really great way to live."
Yeah, I love that they just seem so...
and some of these women I've met or I know
and I was struck by the complete self acceptance.
And some of this work is really weird.
You know, some of the stuff that some of
these artists make.
But they would speak about it as
an entirely natural and kind of obvious thing.
But of course, you know Carla Dickens
an amazing artist,
of course you would cast some underpants in aluminium
and then hang emu feathers and fish hooks of them
and rusty traps.
But what else would you do?
So it's the idea of just going my impulse
is entirely natural and it is...
And why would you even question it.
And you need me first.
And I think when you can get to that point
of absolutely trusting your own instinct..
And you know to me, the weirder the better in a way.
Because you can always dial back something
like that, but if you're playing it safe all the time,
you just end up with this sort of generic
you know, people pleasy work that doesn't please anybody.
It doesn't stick around.
And when I think, when I'd had conversations
with people after "The Natural Way of Things"
what stuck with people about that,
and I know sometimes we get it wrong as readers.
We talk about story and we talk about plot
and we fixate on them.
But so many people talked about that kind of
when it's, it's like a dream or a nightmare
that space, that luminal space that your created on every page.
And then we're talking about, you know,
without saying it, readers were talking
about sentences. They were talking about language.
They were talking about tone.
They were talking about all the things
that you probably agonized about.
But that's what they were responding to,
to that subconscious space in which
women or people who are a minority
in some way or shape or another thing,
this... this could happen to me.
This has happened to me.
This will happen to me if I speak up,
if I'm dis-empowered more that I already know that I am.
And so you tap into a whole lot of
conscious and subconscious things with writing
that as you say that you just went
"I'm gonna be feral about it. I'm just
gonna write this. It's gonna be weird and
I'm gonna commit to it. And it has that.
Has that impact.
And it took me, it was, you know...
That's why I'm proud of that book because
it taught me how to do that.
You know, I couldn't... it... because it wasn't working
any other way.
It wouldn't work any other way.
So out of just sheer exhaustion in the end
I was like "OK, I'm just gonna go with what this thing is".
And then it just, phhhh, came sort of pouring out.
And it was weird and creepy and surreal and dreamlike and...
and... and in the end I loved that.
That's what I liked about it myself.
That's what I found, what I hoped lifted it out of just a bleak
sort of misery tale.
That... that sort of surreal, dreamlike, symbolic, archetypal
that stuff that made people, a lot of people told me
they felt they read it with their body,
rather than their mind.
And... and it felt like I wrote it with my body.
And it had a power because of that,
that I've never felt before as a writer
and I didn't want to lose that.
So I went sort of looking "What is that?
What happened in that book that I can
sort of take with me now into the future?"
So it's like, it's a gift for you and a gift for us.
I'm conscious of the time.
We have got a couple of questions here
and I want to put them to you.
One person has said "You've stopped me
in my tracks with your thought of staying
with the book that I don't actually enjoy.
What is it in reading that gives us such
strong reactions: like, dislike, relate, resent"?
Well, I don't know. I think sometimes it's recognition.
And in the chapter that I talk about
the paintings that I didn't like,
I was forced to kind of go "Well what is it, why don't I like them"?
And partly it was, they were unfamiliar
and I didn't... I felt kind of...
I felt slightly ashamed that I could not see
what it was that other people saw in these pictures.
Because I knew in artists that I very much admire
very well know and just had chosen those
pictures by different people.
And so I felt sort of like "Oh there must be something wrong with me
that I don't see what all these people
think is so great about these pictures".
So it was a feeling of an almost, a kind of
a fine fine strand of anger that I...
I didn't want to be made to feel like an idiot.
So therefore I would just reject the pictures
instead of thinking "Well, doesn't really matter
that I don't understand, but I shouldn't just reject it
because I don't understand it".
I also think... I mean I do think...
I also don't finish every book I start.
If I'm really really bored I don't.
That's a sign that I'm... you know...
you know, there are a lot of bad books out there.
I don't think we should read bad books.
But I guess, I wanted to make a distinction between
a book that isn't very good rather than
one that makes you feel bad.
Because if it actually does make you feel bad
then it's doing something.
You know Christos Tsiolkas's books, you know,
I have always read Christos and almost
always felt really uncomfortable and really
like "I don't want to be with these people.
I don't want to be in dead Europe, in this
you know, really dark and scary place.
I don't want to be with these, you know, arseholes
in this land".
And yet, there's something very compelling about it
and also it showed me about the world
in ways that I didn't, you know...
Just because it wasn't nice, didn't mean
that I shouldn't go there.
It also seems like an unrealistic request of
of fiction, which is, you know,
written by real people in the world
that it should all be pleasant
Like, life isn't pleasant and all kinds of things aren't pleasant.
And it's boring! I mean pleasantness is, you know...
Yeah.
That's what the Truman Show was about, right?
Like you need, you need
the grit in the oyster.
You need the discomfort, it's part of living
And, yeah... but as I say if it's just dull then...
You're allowed to put it aside, yeah.
There's another question here
"How important is the responder to creativity?
Can you create without a responder"?
I'm assuming that would mean like a reader or a viewer or something.
I'm thinking mainly of the artists you mentioned
who need someone to see the work
as it's being done.
Well, Jude and I, that artist and I talked about
this thing of "Would you keep making work if no one saw it"?
And she said "I feel like the reason you
have shows as an artist is because you need to...
you need someone to see it".
And I feel as a writer that if I wrote books
and I knew that they were never gonna be published
in some form, even if I, you know,
publishing yourself is publishing,
but if I thought no one is ever going to read this,
personally I don't know that I would keep going.
I don't think other people should stop
writing if no one is gonna read their work.
Because there's so much that comes...
you know the main reason I do it is to
find out what I think, you know, about the world.
To find out what are my preoccupations and
Edna O'Brien said "People become artists
because they have an intensity of feeling
that normal life cannot accommodate".
And I absolutely feel that that's true for me.
And yet, if noone was ever going to read it
I feel like I wouldn't know if it worked if no one read it.
So for me, it's certainly the other half
of the creation is the reader.
And I imagine that painters...
although I know a couple of painters who
paint and never exhibit, you know, by choice.
So I guess it just depends on the person, the creator.
But I personally, I need someone to see it.
Very much so. I understand.
We're pretty much at the end of our time,
but I wanted to ask you one last question,
which relates exactly to what you were just talking about
which is that as we've talked about tonight
you know there are chapters and ideas in the book
that speak directly to artists and writers.
But how do you think readers who are,
what do you think readers who are not writers
can learn from the book? What do you hope they'll take away from it?
What I would love, is for...
my fantasy reader for this book is
someone like a policymaker in some really important area
or... or an industry leader or something,
where... to start to understand that
cross pollinating from other things very unlike yours
can really enrich your own area of expertise.
So, and I had this little pang a few weeks ago
thinking about "Imagine if at the beginning of the pandemic
we got the best visual artists, actors,
sports people, industry leaders,
scientist, researchers, health people,
writers.
The best of every field together and said
"What are we gonna do about this?"
"How can we work together to solve, attack this problem?"
I feel like we would have had so many amazing new
projects and policies and connections.
And you know a big hallmark of creativity,
of creative thinking is the joining of unlike things.
And I think most of the time in our
contemporary society we... we don't...
we actually actively resist creativity when we see it.
We don't like it.
And one of the ways we do that is by saying
"Creativity is for artists".
So we put it over there and they can hang it on their walls
and it's just the thing on the side that's
kind of pretty but doesn't mean anything about the way we actually live.
And I want to bring that right into the way we actually live.
Because it's... it's crucial.
Like radical creativity is the only thing
that is going to save us now. I really feel that.
And that cross pollinating...
cross pollinating ideas...
a real embrace... embrace and tolerance of failure
because we... we just utterly reject...
the... the possibility of failure, which means
we so often don't develop really good things
because, you know, we decide they're not gonna work
before they've even had a chance to grow.
You know, I have a long manifesto of things
that I think should happen more.
And not rejecting things because
they don't work at first.
And that can go for a cake, you know,
it can go for a... learning scales on a piano.
It could go for developing a really cool business idea.
I just would love for us to open up more
to the unknowing and they mystery and the uncertainty
that is the place where creativity comes from.
You've done that really beautifully in the book.
It shakes us up. It reminds us why we love art.
Why we need art.
And how it can kind of re-shape the way we see the world
and therefore re-shape us.
Help us imagine things differently.
Charlotte, thank you very much.
Congratulations on the book and I'm handing back over
to Danielle Ainsley.
Thank you Michaela for your very beautiful questions.
And can I say your beautiful voice.
Oh my God, I could listen to you just all day.
Thank you.
I second that.
Thank you very much despite my little dry coughing random.
It just added to the allure.
Well thank you so much to both of you.
I really appreciate you both taking the time out
to... yeah let us in on this great conversation.
I had a really lovely time and I'm sure others did as well.
Now, in a moment you'll see a survey
pop up on your screen.
It's very short only four questions.
We'd love feedback if you could spare
the moment to do that for us.
Now you can purchase copies of the "Luminous Solution"
at our local bookshops
and at the moment a few are running
a "Click and Collect" service.
So Oscar and Friends in Double Bay is running
a click and collect service if you're wanting to do that.
Otherwise, the Woollahra Bookshop on Spicer St,
Harry Harthog's and Gertrude and Alice in Bondi,
and Read On Books at Westfield Eastgardens as well.
Otherwise you can purchase copies of the "Luminous Solution"
on Booktopia if you're not local and we've got links
in the chat as well.
And we've also got copies of all of Charlotte's
books in our collections and they are available right now
as an e-resource if you wanted
or as a physical book via click and collect as well.
Thanks so much everyone.
We hope you have a lovely rest of your evening.
Thank you very much.
Take care everyone.