RALPH WESSMAN
- An interview with Mary
Blackwood
-
- Besides writing books and
short stories for children, Mary Blackwood’s adult poetry has been published in
various newspapers and journals. She lives in Hobart, where the following interview was
taped during two sessions in April and May, 1990.
-
- The interview began with
Mary discussing her life-long love of literature.
-
Yes, I have to confess to
liking Enid Blyton when I was a child because she was so accessible and the stories were
so lively, so light; they weren’t difficult to read. I enjoyed all the schoolgirl
stuff – horse stories, Fourth Form at Mallory Towers, everything really. And
oddly enough I always liked at an early age, Victorian writing. I liked things like Eric,
or Little by Little, and some early American writing, like The Last of the
Mohicans. It might have been to do with being in my grandmother’s house often,
and those books being a part of that rather Victorian atmosphere. I always liked Hilaire
Belloc’s poetry, the Cautionary Tales for Little Children, most of which I
know; I do like his rollicking rhythm and the dry understatement that an adult appreciates
at one level and a child at another. Now I’m an adult I know that, but when I was a
child I probably didn’t care about it one way or the other; I still liked his poetry.
I think the books I liked best
as a child really reflect some of the themes that seem to have worked their way into what
I write now, and that’s … cosiness, warmth, people being safe … which is a
part of Derek the Dinosaur: you know, animals coming out of the cold. And the other
theme of course, is triumph, and succeeding in the end. That’s a kind of ‘ugly
duckling’ thing, isn’t it? And Jeremy’s a book of triumph.
The writing I now like would
include, among Australian poets, Les Murray and Bruce Dawe, Andrew Sant, Peter
Goldsworthy, Margaret Scott, Stephen Edgar…. Their poetry is part of what I am
probably reading every day, in Poetry Australia and elsewhere, and I try to keep
up with what they’re doing. Adult prose writers? It’s very odd, I’m still
attached to Victorian novels. I read Middlemarch every six months or so, Vanity
Fair once a year. I have them in the background all the time. At the moment I’m
reading a bit of Martin Amis. I like Jessica Anderson, Amy Witting and I read women
novelists such as Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and Margaret Attwood. You probably need to
emphasize that I’m a very ordinary person, my tastes in writing are not particularly
elevated.
My grandmother was an important
influence on me. Before the age of television, the whole attitude towards reading was
different. Reading was easier to maintain: you automatically went to the library every
couple of days to change two or three books. My parents and grandparents read all the
time, so I was constantly exposed.
My grandmother wrote poetry.
When her husband – to whom she was extremely attached – died, she began to write
a lot more and published four books of her work: The Rim of the World, Time and the
Cherry Tree, The Quiet Bay and From a High Place. Some of the poetry in those
books is marvellous, and ahead of its time. She was eighty-eight when she died, and still
writing.
- Gray Day
-
- Agnes M. Morris
- (from The
Quiet Bay)
-
- There is no reason to despair
- when great waves break,
- and sorrow pours like tears
- to dim the sun
- and scatter petals where the
roses bloomed.
-
- It is enough to think of seasons
gone
- and know that more will come,
- if not to you, to some dear
other one.
-
- How gray the sky, and mountains
gray with rain,
- and gray the sea,
- in this return to Winter
- when the air of Spring
- was so translucent only
yesterday.
-
- The sudden changes leave one
rudderless
- upon the changing sea.
- The Peace Rose
-
- Agnes M. Morris
- (from Time
and the Cherry Tree)
-
- I like the repartee that roses
make
- to the cold threat of winter
rain,
- raising their most glorious
blooms
- like staunch, defiant flags,
- as the invincible enemy comes.
-
- Or is it a cry of grief
- for the great beauty lost?
- A last farewell?
- O breaking heart – peace.
- Peace to you all.
-
- But no.
- It is a valiant call;
- the last brave stand of beauty
- as the leaves fall.
Writing things down in this
condensed way was a part of what I grew up with. It wasn’t until 1977 that I began to
write myself. With the particular encouragement of Margaret Scott, I sent three poems to
the Sydney Morning Herald, and a couple were accepted.
Are you a prolific writer?
No, just the reverse. I guess
since I began writing poetry I’ve written … twenty poems? Once I’ve written
something I’m happy with, I’ll try to have it published in a newspaper or
journal. I don’t think I’m very much externally motivated as to what I write, I
usually feel I know if it’s worth writing. Then it’s always worth trying to have
it published. In that way I guess I’ve had about a dozen poems published in a range
of places.
Having children forced a change
to my writing. It interrupted my poetry – but being involved with children made me
think about writing something for them. My children’s writing began accidentally with
a story written for my five year old niece at Christmas. It was one of those years when
you cook jams and jellies for your grandparents and aunties – home-made gifts –
and Derek happened. My niece thought it was good. When I had my own kids they
liked it too, so I entered the story in a competition. It came second, and I began
seriously putting it out to publishers. It was knocked back by three or four, then lay
about gathering dust until the day Clive Tilsley at Fuller’s Bookshop put me on to
Omnibus – and within a week they’d sent me back an offer.
Is there financial reward in
writing children’s books?
Well, you don’t get very
much in terms of return per book: the illustrator and author share 10% of the retail
price. But the thing is, they do such big print runs. The hardback run for Derek
was 8,000, and his paperback run was 15,000 – and there’ll be 20,000 in America.
But I understand too that you
need to have about ten books in print to actually make a living from children’s
writing. I don’t rely on it for a living, I don’t have time or capacity to
attend to that aspect of my life in a sustained way.
Do you have artistic control
over the illustrating of your books?
I’ve always been happy
with the illustrators I’ve had. They’re professionals in their own right –
and I’m not a professional graphic designer – so I don’t think that I have
the right to get my nose in and tell them how to do it. I do think it’s correct for
me to report back on whether their work reflects the feeling that I have about the book.
And I’ve been lucky that Kerry Argent’s work with Derek was very much
in line with how I felt, she’s added some lovely touches to Derek.
Jane Burrell has done the same
with Jeremy. I’ve seen Jane all the way through as she’s been doing
roughs, and that’s been very exciting. I’ve never had any problem with what
she’s doing. The illustrations are finished. Jeremy will be a lovely book; it might
be out in September this year but certainly next year.
If I did have a problem, I
don’t know quite what I’d do, because I do think illustrators are entitled to
their own professional range, without somebody telling them what to do … just as I
don’t think editors should tell writers too much what to do. When you’re told
that you start to feel a bit violated, and you lose your own sense of the work.
As a writer, do you feel a
sense of isolation here in Hobart?
No, I don’t feel isolated
at all; partly because of the energy and activity of the Writer’s Union, and partly
because of the size of the place which means that anybody you’re interested in who
comes to Hobart, you can inevitably meet.
I met Les Murray about ten
years ago – maybe a little longer than that – when he read at the museum and
there were five people at his reading; we all went and had drinks after. I wrote to Les
Murray a couple of times after that, and he back to me, about poetry; and I sent him
something, to which he made a couple of changes and which was subsequently published.
You would never normally be
able to do that. And it is because of the smallness of Hobart, and its isolation –
which people usually see as a negative – that you get that kind of exposure to
people. So no, I don’t feel isolated. There’s so much around to go to if you
choose, I haven’t even made use of what’s available.
I went to the Adelaide Festival
some weeks ago. I felt it was good to be there, because of the atmosphere and size of the
thing, the number of writers all gathered together. But from the point of view of exposure
to people you’d never see in Tasmania, it didn’t add that much.
You mentioned that
you’ve a copy of every issue of Island magazine to have been published….
Yes, and of some issues I have
doubles, those were my grandmother’s.
I think Island
magazine has succeeded because no matter how little it was to start with – when it
began as the Tasmanian Review it was a slim little thing – they never did
compromise on quality. It’s always been very good. There were articles that you
weren’t always interested in, but you knew that what you were looking at was always
of high quality.
Andrew Sant was an inspiration
in that regard. He was something of an inspiration to me too, I first met him when he ran
an Adult Ed class I was enrolled in. He was always very critical of our work – not
nastily, but appropriately – at a time when it was easy just to be soft. And I think
it was his refusal to compromise, his readiness to help people constructively and tell
them the truth, that carried through to Island magazine.
When you submit work for
publication, are you ever asked to make changes?
I’ve been lucky, I
haven’t had to change much. But it’s really hard to change anything anyway. If
an editor says ‘change it’ and you say ‘no, I won’t’, you’re
probably saying that because you wrote the thing as an organic whole you’re really
quite incapable of changing it. So you pretend it’s a matter of principle but really
it’s a matter of inability. That’s what I think!
What have you written
recently?
Omnibus has accepted my first
(and only, so far) children’s short story, and Island magazine a couple of
poems for a forthcoming issue.
I’m trying to set aside
more time for my poetry, the essence of which, for me, is to keep to what I hope are
short, pithy pieces. I don’t know if that’s laziness or whatever, it’s just
my natural inclination. I certainly find extended poems very difficult, and I always have.
At school one of my teachers used to say ‘A telegram is never as good as a letter,
you know!’
What I’m interested in is
a single and probably quite pure but quite narrow, emotion of some sort of another, and
the attempt to describe that in a very condensed way.
My recent poetry has touched on
the areas of grief, pain, loss … which everybody looks at all the time, I mean,
it’s so important. And because it hits ordinary people inevitably, you have to keep
finding fresh ways of talking about it. That’s in addition to recognizing the
importance of the old repetitive ways, the ‘In Memoriam’ notices that are very
stereotyped – that use the same old words and rhymes – but serve a function.
One of my recent poems is
called ‘Wake’. What I chose to write about was the spurt of relief that I think
there almost always is – perhaps except in the case of the death of a child –
that goes with anybody’s death, especially when someone has been very ill for a long
time. It’s embedded in the grief that people undoubtedly feel, and I think
that’s a very strange thing for people to cope with. Do you see what I mean?
It’s a very narrow emotion, it doesn’t last long.
I’m interested in that
kind of small observation, that’s why my poems are short. But I’d like to feel
they’re not observations that have been made before, and for that reason they have to
be obscure. I’m much better at observing an emotion in that way than I am at
descriptive poetry. I really enjoy Bruce Dawe’s descriptive poetry about events, or
the way Anne Elder writes a poem about a bird, I think that’s wonderful – but I
can’t do it at all.
It’s very satisfying to be
writing poetry again, and for it to be accepted. it’s been … 1986 … since
I’d last had any published. I hope to keep this particular pot boiling. What’s
in the pot I don’t know, there seems to be a number of different things in there.
I’d like to keep going and not to lose touch with it, until such time as I can devote
more time to my writing. I hope I’ll find that having kept it going I’ll be able
to tap straight back into it again, perhaps when the family’s older: when kids are
the age mine are now, you don’t have much time to muse.
- Wake
-
- Mary Blackwood
-
- He would not have wanted
- us to weep
- he would have wanted
- us to think
- of happy times
- and smile for him
-
- we say
-
- and so excuse
- relief –
- magnesium in the
- crucible of grief,
- its flaring brief
- but brilliant –
-
- now he’s gone.