The Dog

by Kerstin Ekman

The Dog is a novella which recounts a year in the life of a lone dog surviving in the wild. Hopelessly lost (although in fact not very far from home) a puppy takes cover below a snow covered spruce. Thus begins a new life away from his warm and friendly home.

Ekman takes us with the dog through the seasons, to near starvation, injury, escape and rough territorial journeys. Almost, it seems, to despair. But this is a dog’s story – though not without analogy to the human condition. This dog does not despair. He is confused, bewildered, alarmed, afraid, expectant. Scents excite him. He has vivid sense memories of places where food was found. He learns the smells, sights and sounds of his environment and how to stay safe.

The author gradually reveals the teeming natural environment as the dog experiences it and takes us through the changing seasons as he matures. Daily life is portrayed physically as a search, but there is also the sense of some more human spiritual journey:

…he was the only one searching for a way to make sense of a jumble of sounds and restless shadows. But he didn’t find it. He could find no trace of the pack he’d once belonged to. pp54-55

Eventually rediscovered by his human master, the dog is slowly and lovingly coaxed back to “the pack he once belonged to.” But his nature is changed forever by the experience of surviving the wilderness. Ekman succeeds in keeping this nature at the centre of his story. The dog chooses his place within the human family, who in turn recognise his otherness as enrichment rather than as scar.

Originally published in Sweden in 1986, we are fortunate that The Dog is now available in English. 

Short Stories

Good quality short stories make for excellent supplementary texts and there are some fine collections around. Here are a few to dip into.

The Penguin Book of the Road (edited by Delia Falconer, 2008): This Australian collection includes both classic and contemporary stories, and excerpts from larger works. In Across the Plains, Over the Mountains and Down to the Sea by Frank Moorhouse, a man recounts to his therapist the memory of a special time spent with a former lover. Landscape is a vital part of this story which evokes a sense of melancholy. Much anthologised, you will also find this story in The Picador Book of the Beach (ed. Drewe, 1995) and The Penguin Book of the Beach (ed. Drewe, 2006). All three collections are easy to find in libraries and offer a wide choice of good stories (the second and third including writers from many countries, including Australia). Across the Plains… featured on ABC RN’s Sunday Story on 2nd August 2009 and will be available as audio for four weeks from then.

The Rip by Robert Drewe (2008): This collection by a master of the form includes The Lap Pool, about a self made man now languishing alone in his luxury Queensland home whilst awaiting trial on tax charges. His wife and children have returned to Sydney. He’s a nice guy so how did he end up in this mess? (Read The Lap Pool online) In The Cartoonist a teenager is working hard to settle in to a new town and school, courtesy of his mother choosing to leave her marriage and run off to the north coast with him in tow. He’s an accommodating kid, but we all have our limits. All the stories in this collection are engaging narratives with ample ideas to relate to belonging and good technique to analyse.

The Boat by Nam Le (2008): This young Vietnamese Australian has had a stunning debut with this book. Each fairly long story is a whole universe unto itself. The title story directly relates to the author’s family experience of escaping Vietnam in the seventies. Others are set in a world of drug lords and violence in Colombia, the countryside beyond Hiroshima just before the atomic bomb hits, and a couple are in modern day New York. Halflead Bay is set in a Victorian seaside town as a teenage boy deals with his mother slowly dying, falling in love for the first time and confronting violence. This is a very assured collection of stories, each very much worth getting your teeth into.

The Turning by Tim Winton (2004): This beautiful collection of  linked stories is a real Winton primer. He has been writing about a Western Australian coastal town called Angelus (or something like it) for many years – from Lockie Leonard days to this year’s Miles Franklin Award winning Breath. Small Mercies is one of my favourites of this collection. It tells of a man who returns to his home town with his young son after the death of his wife. The reader pieces together what is told and what only hinted at about Peter’s past in this town which he thought he had left for good.

Cut to the chase

In media res – in the middle of a sequence of events, as in a literary narrative

Peter FitzSimons – journalist, broadcaster, author, speaker, former Wallaby – delivered a keynote address recently where he spoke on the importance of story and in particular how he found the right way to tell the stories that matter to him. 

The method FitzSimons descibed reminded me of a comment by educationalist Leonard Sax, who says: draw boys into reading by starting ‘in media res’  – in the middle of the story or with the action.

Peter’s books range from sports biographies (Nick Farr-Jones; Les Darcy) to the stories of major battles in Australian history (Tobruk; Kokoda) and most recently Charles Kingsford-Smith and Those Magnificent Men. (Find out more about the books here.) To get right at the meat in a story he often uses little know vignettes which are uncovered in research – the soldiers’ reaction immediately after Hitler’s death for instance – to make a big story personal. He has equal success in using this method as a speaker.

Peter credits American writer Gary Smith with teaching him how to pull a reader right into the story. Smith writes for Sports Illustrated and has been one of it’s top performers for some years.

Smith doesn’t start an article by describing the cafe where he is meeting his subject. He begins a piece on golfer, David Duval, by describing a painful scene from Duval’s childhood, pulling no punches and showing why it might be that Duval has a lot of grit. (No Man Is An Island by Gary Smith)

A more recent piece, an article on surfer Kelly Slater from earlier this year, Ready For The Next Wave, Smith introduces this way: “Kelly Slater is winning world titles again—a record nine and counting—and planning to bring his sport to the masses. But before he could do that, the uneasy rider had to solve the nagging mystery of why he surfed.”

Sports Illustrated is a great example of a magazine with a large, searchable archive of articles, many of which will fall into the theme of belonging. Search for some more of Gary Smith’s stories, or seek out similar quality articles on topics of interest.

Photo: Peter FitzSimons at Mosman Library Originally uploaded by Mosman Library

More from Shaun Tan

Panel Borders: The Art of Shaun Tan is a podcast interview with Tan which allows him wide scope to relate the history and experience of his writing and illustrating life. In particular we get some great insight into Tan’s two major recent works, The Arrival and Tales From Outer Suburbia.

Hearing Shaun Tan speak about his art (and in this case also about other graphic artists) is an illuminating experience. Starting out as an aspiring writer in his teens (and treasuring the experience of his first rejection letter, which made him feel like a real writer) Tan kept getting rejected until he happened to add an illustration with one story he submitted to a scifi mag. They still didn’t want the story but published the picture as their cover.

Panel Borders is a longer, podcast version of a UK radio show about comics presented by Alex Fitch. The Art of Shaun Tan was broadcast on 11th June, 2009 in an edited version as an episode of Strip! on Resonance 104.4 FM in the UK. You can download the podcast from the Panel Borders website, or subscribe via iTunes.

[The Skull Boy illustration on this page is by Gareth Courage and is the cover of a mock graphic novel which he designed to be used in a low budget film. See the rest here.]

SKULL BOY Originally uploaded by Gareth Courage

Nobody Owns the Moon

by Tohby Riddle

Here is a gift, not from this blog, but from Tohby Riddle, that whimsical Australian cartoonist, illustrator and author. Tohby has presented some illustrated notes on Nobody Owns the Moon.

….

I recently talked to a student about using this as a related text with Herrick’s The Simple Gift. I’d only read Riddle’s book once before and found it quite captivating when teasing out some of the similarities and differences with the Herrick. The Simple Gift also includes the pleasures of sharing a meal, gifts, and the importance of the spiritual over the material. Join Clive Prendergast, a fox, and Humphrey, a rather desultory donkey as they savour some of the uncommon pleasures of the city.

Shaun Tan on illustration as narrative

The Colin Simpson Memorial Lecture, an annual event of the Australian Society of Authors, was delivered by illustrator and author Shaun Tan on 28 March, 2009 at Redfern Town Hall, Sydney.

Tan, whose recent works include The Arrival and Tales From Outer Suburbia, speaks with great insight about illustration as a narrative device. He comments on a range of interesting picture books and graphic novels written by others, and also discusses some of his own work.

You can listen to the lecture online, or read a transcript (PDF). The audio is also available from TheBookShow on ABC Radio National.

Shaun Tan discovered the wonders of picture books as an adult after being asked to illustrate a couple of titles aimed at young adults. He discovered that “picture books seemed especially good at presenting a reader with complex questions in a concise way, largely through the imaginative play that can exist between words and pictures, outside of any simple or direct visual-verbal relationship.” The best may prompt the reader “to think about familiar concepts in an unexpected way, offering up a new and interesting perspective.” (p 3)

Tan says that many illustrators, including himself, are interested in ideas of silence and voicelessness. Illustrated books can invite “a great deal of speculation over repeated readings.” (p 6)

Describing his own approach to story and illustration as “an act of limited suggestion, heavily dependent on a reader willing to creatively find their own meaning”, Tan believes some images, when successfully created, “are able to tap into a kind of subconscious emotional intelligence.” (p.8)

“Photo albums are actually perfect examples of how illustrated narrative works most effectively. Their power is not so much in documenting particulars, but triggering memory and imagination, urging us to fill the empty space around frozen snapshots, to build on fragments and constantly revisit our own storyline, a kind of visual literacy we all understand intuitively.” (p 10)

Follow up the rest of this interesting speech to gain invaluable knowledge which may help you when analysing an illustrated narrative.

Quotes from: 2009 Colin Simpson Memorial Lecture by Shaun Tan, March 2009 

The North Star illustration in this post is copyright Peter Reynolds/Fable Vision

 

The Chimaera:A literary miscellany

The Chimaera is an e-zine which features poetry, fiction and essays. It is published twice a year and older editions are archived to view. A number of shorter poems from the current issue appear in rotation on the home page as “Poem of the Day”.

The May 2008 edition had as its theme Belonging. A nice place to start if you are looking for a suitable poem.

“Welcome to our third issue. This issue’s Feature Theme is Belonging: our theme section includes a rich assortment of poetry and prose focusing on various aspects of belonging, including its negative form, alienation.” The Chimera, Issue 3 – May 2008 

How I almost died, twice

by Gary Hughes, The Weekend Australian Magazine, March 7-8, 2009

Journalist Gary Hughes and his wife, Janice, barely survived the recent bushfires which destroyed their home in St Andrews, Victoria. This feature article is written as a diary of the days after the fire. The journalistic instinct to record and to share was a reflex for Gary, but he reflects on this as a double edged sword as the adrenalin wanes.

We find that, as we repeatedly retell our survival story, the details are getting briefer and briefer. We are shutting ourselves off from reviving memories. We are starting to put up walls. There is also a deepening disconnect with the real world. As we visit the local supermarket we know so well we find we are strangers in a strange land, a land where normal people lead normal lives and have normal homes. We do not belong to that world any longer.

American Born Chinese

Graphic Novel by Gene Luen Yang

Three parallel stories are presented here. The mythic Monkey King is the lead in one; Jin Wang (pictured on the cover) is the second protagonist, trying to deal with life as the only Chinese-American kid in his class; then there is Danny, the all American teen whose life is made a misery when his over-the-top cousin, Chin-Kee comes to visit.

Yang masterfully blends these stories to a conclusion which surprises. He uses words and pictures to play with stereotypes, some of which shock at the same time as making us laugh.

Test run this book in this preview.

Tom White

Feature film, 2004, directed by Alkinos Tsilimodos

We drop into Tom’s life just as the final wave that will tip him out of suburbia and into vagrancy begins to break. His crisis has been cooking for weeks – perhaps years – before he first appears on screen. The fracturing of his world is visually represented in a shot early on in the film in which we see Tom from inside a birdhouse. The transparent walls of the birdhouse are angled to create a triple image of Tom as he checks the feed and water, and begins to talk to himself, vocalising an internal dialogue of uncertainty.  Ben Goldsmith, ‘Interogating Identity:Tom White’, senses of cinema, December, 2004

Tom encounters an ensemble of characters on the streets, finding friendship and loneliness in equal measure. Memories of what he has lost remain painful, but he seems unable to find himself.

The musical score is by Paul Kelly. The theme song, Meet Me In The Middle Of The Air, is a reworking of Psalm 23 – The Lord is My Shepherd:

I will lay you down
In pastures green and fair
Every soul shall be restored
I will meet them in the middle of the air
Come and meet me in the middle of the air

This video captures a beautiful a capella version by Tripod and Eddie Perfect from the ABC program Sideshow.