From left to right: Lisa Walker, Jane Camens, Helen Burns and Jessie Cole

For the past ten years Jane Camens has lived in the Northern Rivers but her work has taken her all over Asia organizing the annual conferences for the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators conference.  This year, she writes, it’s taking place in the Philippines in October.

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to work from my home in the Northern Rivers and yet bring together writers—established and emerging— with literary translators, publishers, agents, and teachers of creative writing in different cities around Asia.

Last year, working with Singapore’s National Book Council, we held the event in that city’s grand old Parliament House, now called The Arts House. And I was delighted that, for the first time, writers from the Northern Rivers – Jessie Cole, Lisa Walker, Helen Burns and Victor Marsh— were able to be part of the event. They joined me with about 150 others from Asia and beyond, for four culturally fascinating – and fun – days.

Jessie Cole (author of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water), wrote afterwards that it: ‘gave me my first international platform in which to share my work’ and that it was also ‘really lovely to be exposed to different works from around Asia.’

Lisa Walker, whose books to date include Archie’s Pilgrimage to the New Big Thing; Sex Lies and Bonsai, and Liar Bird, wrote: ‘Mixing with such an eclectic and talented group of writers from around the region is highly addictive.’ She chaired several panels, including one which asked what writers can do when their novel gets stuck. On the panel were Tim Tomlinson (co-founder of the New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing), Nury Vittachi, author and humorist from Hong Kong, and Filipino/Australian author Merlinda Bobis. Walker shared the hot tips: ‘Tim says read around the topic, Nury says set yourself a deadline and Merlinda says dance!’

Dance, sing, eat, drink and laugh is what the writers do, particularly at the social events and book launches, getting to know each other and the work of writers from around our greater geographical region. This year in the Philippines won’t be different, if I know my Filipino friends, our hosts, who are renowned for their ability to enjoy themselves.

Nury Vittachi, an author and humourist from Hong Kong at the APWT conference.

These events aren’t ‘conferences’ in the academic sense, although they started that way when APWT began as an initiative at Griffith University. Apart from panels on which writers talk to themes relevant to their writing, there are readings, chances for writers to launch new books (some of them self published), and master classes in writing and editing workshops with mentors from some of the best creative writing schools in the world.

Many of the same people, and a lot of newcomers, register each year. Not only have friendships developed but also the writers offer each other new platforms to promote their work. It’s not unusual, for instance, for invitations to come in afterwards for attendees to appear in festivals in India, Tahiti, Indonesia and even the World Literature Festival in the UK.

Some of the authors I know are coming this year include Sri Lankan born author Romesh Gunesekera (curtsey of the British Council); Robin Hemley who runs NonFiction Now (an initiative of the Creative Non Fiction at the University of Iowa); Xu Xi who started the low residency MFA in Creative Writing at City University Hong Kong (in which some writers from the Northern Rivers have enrolled); Dai Fan who runs an English language creative writing unit in China; Nick Jose who is one of Australia’s foremost spokespeople on engagement with Asia, and Filipino-Australian author and performer Merlinda Bobis. It’s possible that you haven’t heard of these authors, but that is the point. APWT brings the literatures of Asia and the Pacific to wider readerships. The Australian book market is comparatively very small; not big enough to support many fulltime writers. (The slogan of the APWT, and our new online magazine LEAP Plus—developed with the help of the Verandah Magazine team—is ‘Taking Writers Further’.)

I do this because it’s a passion of mine. I lived in parts of Greater China (Hong Kong, Shanghai and Macau) for around 15 years and felt isolated from a writing and English-language publishing culture until, with Nury Vittachi, I started Asia’s first annual literary festival that showcased writing (in English) from and about Asia. The Asian literary scene has changed hugely since 2001 when that first festival was run. Now, literary agents and publishers are keen to hear the voices of Asian writers with new ways of showing us the world we live in.

Most people who come to APWT conferences organize their own funding, either through universities, arts bodies, or they self fund. I can apply for limited funding from the Arts Council, the Copyright Agency Ltd, and sometimes the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which together last year paid for about 11 Australians to go to Singapore. I ask for funding for a range of authors, always including one or more indigenous Australian authors, Asian-Australian writers, and writers whose work speaks of engagement with Asia.

APWT’s conference this year is titled ‘Against the Grain: Dissidence, Dissonance, and Difference in Asia-Pacific Writing and Translation’, and will take place in Manilla between October 22-25. It will be hosted by several of the universities, and will be led by the University of the Philippines and the Book Council.

Details of the event will be available on the APWT website soon after my return. (apwriters)A teaser about the event is up on LEAP+: leap-plus.com/manila

If you’re interested in what happened at our conference last year in Singapore, there’s a wrap up of the conference on our website here:  apwriterswrap.up.

Jane Camens is Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators. She is currently co-editing an issue of Griffith Review entitled ‘New Asia’, published in August this year.

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In literature, and in film, there are some classic plots almost guaranteed to grab the audience’s attention. The Stranger Comes to Town is one, Coming of Age is another and what in England we might call Something Nasty in the Woodshed (a reference to the wonderful novel Cold Comfort Farm) is another.

Like a practiced chess master, local Burringbar author Cole, who grew up in relative isolation on a country property, has used all these themes to create a novel that is as deep, chilling and sensuous as the title itself. Her first book, Darkness on the Edge of Town, (which also used the stranger in town device) was good, this one is not just better, it’s extraordinary.

It’s ten years ago this year since I moved to the Byron and during that time we’ve experienced nature at its best and worst. You don’t need to live in the country to appreciate Cole’s novel, but it’s certainly familiar territory – which she writes about with tender clarity – if you do happen to have suffered from the arbitary forces of nature. At the start of Cole’s novel, we’re introduced to the main character, a young woman, Mema, who, like Cole, has spent all her life living on the family property – she’s trying to get a cow who has started to calve away from the edge of the rapidly swelling creek, when a car is washed off the close-by bridge. Mema rescues the young man, Hamish, with a long branch, bringing herself close to disaster at the same time. When Hamish is finally safe, his 21^st century life and all its accoutrements in the bottom of the creek, he takes one look at Mema, and says: “Fuck, you’re just a girl”.

Just a girl. Mema thinks how horrified her mother would be, and in the space of a remarkably short time we get the idea – Mema is a capable 22-year-old, who also happens to have a club foot; her potter mother has alienated all the surbanites in town with her ‘feminist’ ways, and because she’s had children to different men, all of whom have left her. Mema’s older sister already has a toddler, and a baby on her hip; Mema’s best friend, Anja, is as light and as unstable and dangerous as mercury, with a father who is a drunk, and possibly abusing her. Into all of this strolls Hamish, the city-slicker, an environmental consultant who is in the area to asses a proposal to turn sugar cane waste into power. And then there’s Billy, a somewhat brooding presence, who’s had the ‘hots’ for Mema for years.

It’s a volatile mix, but no less volatile than Cole’s actual life, and if a writer is as good as their material, then sadly for Cole, she has been given first-class material in the suicide of her older sister when she was a teenager, which drove her psychiatrist father to madness, and also eventually to suicide. With two young children by the time she was 23, Cole was suffering depression when she first went to see a counsellor who encouraged her to write everything down as therapy, and in an ironic twist of fate, the life that had caused her such deep grief, has become a deep well of complex emotional material.

It’s almost inevitable that Mema, who has never taken much notice of men, should fall for Hamish, but Cole doesn’t take the easy route of giving Mema and Hamish a relationship, instead all of Mema’s longings are stirred into a melting-pot of desire and confusion which, in the end, allows her to notice Billy, and his devotion to her.

There is warm, rather than cold comfort in this novel, in the end, which is perhaps testament to Cole’s growth as a writer. Where her first book was chilling to the bone, Deep Water allows for, in amongst the tragedies, the sweeter things of life – that a local farmer who has been leaving flowers for Mema’s mother at her driveway, should finally be given permission to approach the prickly matriarch, that Hamish should warn Mema that the company he works for does not necessarily have the area’s best environmental interests at heart; that Billy and Mema, despite misunderstandings, begin to see themselves as a couple.

One of the most compelling aspects to this novel is the way Cole writes about landscape. In this book – and parts of it remind me of Peter Carey’s ability to make the landscape a character in itself, in both Bliss and Oscar and Lucinda – the landscape is a living, breathing entity. Mema’s connection to it is visceral, and in a sense it is the force of nature – the flood, her awakening to love in the woods around her house, a potentially lethal fire, her call to environmental action, that create a backbone, or trunk, for the novel. If Mema’s mother is the brooding matriarch of this big, scattered, somewhat chaotic family, then this country of the Northern Rivers is the matriarch of the entire novel, a Kali-esque presence that can switch from giver to destroyer of life in a few minutes, but whom, in her turn must be mothered and nurtured. It’s that unseen compelling Gaia presence that certainly keeps me here, where life is often extreme in surprising ways.

For me a pre-requisite for a novel is that it should transport you to another time and place, and allow you to connect to its characters. I walked around for days imagining myself in the world of Deeper Water and I can’t think of higher praise than that.

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