A Quick Word

This is a piece I have written for the ENO Mini Opera Competition. It is a response to Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sweeper of Dreams’, which you can read here. The writing phase of the competition closes tomorrow, but you can read more about the musical and video parts of the comp over at the Mini Operas website. My Mini Opera is called ‘Things Unswept’.

I hope you like it.

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I’ve been attending all the K-5 assemblies while I’ve been in my residency at St. Helens, to give me a chance to look at what the kids are doing, and to celebrate their achievements with them. In these assemblies the teachers give out a couple of certificates to students who cannot be awarded academically. I suppose you might call them ‘citizenship awards’, usually for un-instructed kindnesses of one kind or another.

I decided at the most recent assembly that I would hand out a couple of awards myself, to celebrate the efforts of two boys who had really stepped out of their shells during the program, and – regardless of quality – had worked really hard to produce something in the short time that I had with them.

But I didn’t want to just hand them an arbitrary piece of paper.  It had to be unique: ‘Artist in Residence’ style.  So I wrote both boys a poem each, drawing cartoons around the edges, and signing both of them with a dedication.  The poems suited the boy’s interests.  One had written a story about a dragon war, so he got a poem which imagined him as King of the dragons, struggling to train a dragon who will not fly straight. The other boy was well known in the school for calling everything ‘epic’.  When I had him in a group one day I told him that I had been working with the Grade 2s, and he said: “Oh man! Grade 2 was epic!” I cannot know for sure that his Grade 2 was not vastly different from mine, but I am pretty confident it wasn’t THAT different. The Lord of the Rings is epic. Grade 2 is not epic. Knowing his fondness for the word, however, I wrote him an ‘Epic Poem’, which I am told contains no less than eighteen uses of the word ‘epic’, beginning:

“There was an epic boy,

Who kicked an epic ball,

And didn’t see the epic robots,

In the epic hall…”

These were really treasured by the boys, and were fawned over and coveted by their classmates. One of them said goodbye to me at the end of the day clutching his to his chest, and it was a real highlight of the residency to see this self-identified maths boy take so much pleasure in something from outside his discipline. My only regret is that I can’t do it for every student, though they’d certainly like me to try. At the end of the day several students attempted to force me into story-producing slavery like Kathy Bates in Misery, even going so far as to try to give me ideas for the poems that they wanted. One boy got on his knees.

I don’t have any doubts, but if I ever did have any doubts about whether my role at St. Helens is meaningful, important, or successful, I need only picture that young boy, holding his cap out like Oliver Twist’s bowl, and blocking my path out of the school, eyes wide, yelling:

“I’m begging you, Lyndon!  I’m BEGGING YOU! Please! I just want a story!”

A.I.R is an initiative of arts@work. You can find out more about the program here.

This post was written for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Tasmanian branch, of which I am currently acting as judge. The organisers of their official blog have kindly allowed me to reproduce the post. You can find the original here.

A few weeks ago I received a package from America. I was rightly ecstatic, because it came from an independent bookstore in North Carolina, and it contained - amongst other things - two books: Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler (a man who occasionally masquerades as the unparalleled Lemony Snicket) and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.  Both had been signed in a recent author visit.

Let’s leave Why We Broke Up for today, which, for the record, remains a worthy and wonderful addition to Handler’s canon, and is gorgeously illustrated by Maira Kalman, who he collaborated with previously on 13 Words. Let’s get back to the other book. Because I have a confession to make. Not only was this not my first copy of The Fault in Our Stars, it wasn’t even my first signed copy. If you count the audiobook, which I purchased as an author-read limited edition box set (they only made a thousand copies of that one), I now had three copies of Green’s latest.

So why TFiOS? (Yep, the acronym is out. Let’s get heavy.)

Well, I think John Green is the best writer of Young Adult fiction alive today. When I first read Looking For Alaska I was - once the tears dried - nearly driven mad by its eloquence. John can achieve that - so often impossible - feat; he can write teen literature with intelligent characters that don’t sound like adults pretending to be children. Too often Y.A. writers leave their characters lifeless and vapid in an attempt to make them sound ‘street’, and they become an idiotic stream of text-speak and pop-culture gags. It’s a cut above but no small crime too, to go the other way, and leave your teens speaking in bizarre adult voices, like children dressing up in their parents clothes and playing their own farcical version of adulthood.

Green gets it. His characters in this novel are brutally intelligent without being ridiculous. On top of that, he’s hit a killer plot as well. TFiOS is your average boy-meets-girl love story, with a crucial twist: both its main characters, the narrator Hazel Grace Lancaster and her love interest Augustus Waters, meet in a cancer survivor support group. They live on borrowed time. It takes everything you know and love about Y.A. and turns the intensity up to eleven.

There is also no denying that John’s a great guy. Dismayed by the amount signed copies of his books went to desperate buyers for on the internet, he signed every single copy of the initial print run of TFiOS to even the odds - a mere 150,000 scribbles. His philanthropic work with his brother Hank as the YouTube duo VlogBrothers and the founders of ‘The Foundation to Decrease WorldSuck’ also leave plenty to be admired. I may come back to those on here another day.

In this book though; this remarkable, funny, heartbreaking, existentially fraught, wonderful, emotional and intelligent book, there is everything that could be hoped for from Green, or indeed any other author. I have a habit (I would suggest knack, but truthfully a habit) of announcing that a book is the next big thing, and waiting and watching as the movie rights get sold, the hype builds, the film gets made, and the book explodes into something more than words on a page in the hearts and minds of its captivated audience.

I’m calling it, folks. The Fault in Our Stars is the next big thing. Read it, borrow it, or steal it, but make sure you get a copy.

I might even get another one myself.

“There are no secrets in St. Helens,” I was told, and I didn’t quite believe it.

Shopping for my first meal and finding teachers and students lining the aisles, however, I soon realised that the tightness of this school and its community were unparalleled by anything I had seen before. I don’t mean to be critical or dismissive of the school’s smallness, but instead want to give a sense of the closeness of a place like St. Helens. It is both a challenge and a prize. It is not easy to enter a community like this without some pretty intense reservations about being seen as an outsider. But there are some major advantages when you finally feel welcome. Shrinking a community like this, bringing it close to you, it intensifies. If I’m sick of being alone down here in my unit, I just go for a walk. I’d put good money on the odds of seeing someone I know.

And the experience of being Artist In Residence so far has been incredible. I love working with the kids, and the kids appear to love working with me - some teachers expressing minor frustration that their ‘opt-in for working with Lyndon’ sessions are seeing almost the entire class ready to jump up and leave them childless for the afternoon. It’s exhausting, but equally invigorating. There are very few male teachers that the kids have contact with in the age group I’m currently focussing on - Kinder to Grade 5 - and so for some of the boys my entry into the school has been a rocket boost for their creativity. Sometimes, it seems, it really can be as simple as a perspective shift. Every good story I hear about one of these young guys telling their parents that my visits have them excited to come to school again, I realise how important this is. Right now it feels like university is getting in the way of me being here at the school, which is a dangerous state to be in. But its nice to hear the siren call of teaching, and to love the work I’m doing.

As I was riding my bike back from Binalong Bay today I saw yet another business sign with a surname I recognised. I immediately thought of the boy I had taught in class only the day before, and how his parents must run this business, concocting pictures of the entire family in my head. That’s what its like in St. Helens. The puzzle pieces don’t stay apart, and interlock whether you ask them to or not. One story becomes a second story, which becomes a third story, and all of them intertwine, with recurring characters and a living postcard of setting, with streets named for the heroes of myth, and characters of a Dickensian vividness on every second corner.

If I was a visitor, I would call it a coincidence.

As a writer, I call it a gift.

A.I.R is an initiative of arts@work. You can find out more about the program here.

When Andrew Slack finished the Harry Potter books he felt, like most of us, a little disappointed. Not because the story was bad, but because it was kind of awesome. And now suddenly it was over, and all that magic was gone from his life. Why couldn’t the real world be more like Harry’s, with forces of evil and darkness to be overcome? Why couldn’t we be in Dumbledore’s Army too, fighting for our schools and friends and values?

Following this line of thought, he realised pretty quickly that actually there was no reason. After all, weren’t depression, illiteracy, climate change and child slavery some of our own, equally evil dark forces? Why couldn’t we form an army against them? The Harry Potter Alliance was born.

For me the H.P.A has an advantage over other charities because its members share something more than a cause. They also share a passion. As the planes that the Alliance sent to Haiti were loaded with food and supplies, each had a name: Harry, Hermione, Ron. It was more than just a victory for charity and goodwill, it was a victory for one of literature’s greatest heroes. As you guys might remember from my Walk To Mordor Fitness Challenge, I’m really interested this year in the point where books stop being books and become something bigger. As such, I’m fascinated by the H.P.A.  

So I offered to take charge of their movement in Tasmania.

If you want to do some good in the world, the H.P.A is a great place to start. What has really impressed me about joining their ranks is the way that they use their organisation as a piggy-back to give you the launch from book fan to activist. I was appalled when I heard about SOPA being put forward in the U.S. but I didn’t know what to do, or even if I could do anything at all. The H.P.A showed me how I could add my name to the list of those in opposition. At the moment they are about to start a Hunger Games campaign called ‘Imagine Better’ which will encourage fans of Suzanne Collins’ books to support charities like Oxfam who are working towards fighting issues such as water scarcity and the disempowerment of women. The theory that fans of books care deeply about the message in those books is spreading. And it’s making a real difference.

So what can you do?  Well, it wouldn’t hurt to watch Andrew Slack’s presentation at TEDx about why he started the Alliance. Importantly though, your first step would be to join my Dumbledore’s Army Tasmania (DATAS) Facebook page (you do not have to be Tasmanian to join!). I’m keeping that updated with everything I hear, so it’s the best place to keep in the loop. DATAS is still in its infancy, and from here its goals are largely what you guys want. If you want to meet up in person, we’ll do it. If you want to hold events, fundraisers and charity drives, we’ll do that. If it’s more online activism that interests then we can do that too. I only ask that you get excited about it.  And tell your friends!

Welcome to the Harry Potter Alliance.  Let’s go fight the evils that no-one else will name.

I can still remember my first experience of Charles Dickens.  I was at the Palladium Theatre in London, aged 5, about to see my first ever live theatre show.  It was a massive revival for the musical Oliver! which had been out of circulation since 1983, and was being brought back in grand style and to much acclaim, with a young Sam Mendes as director, and a killer performance by Jonathan Pryce as Fagin.

I was terrified.  The show started with its classic opening of “Food, Glorious Food”, but before that there was the thumping and grinding of the workhouse, explosive flashes of thunder and lightning bringing in the musical with a bang.  My Dad had placed his jumper between us on the chair’s armrest, and I quickly pulled it over my head, refusing to watch.

Within a minute though, I had peeked just a little over the corner of the neck hole, and I stayed like that for the rest of the nearly two-hour perfomance; just my eyes peering over the top of the jumper, ready to pull it back up, but not ready to look away. 

We listened to a tape of that performance all around England, and in the many years that followed.  The story of Oliver Twist, in its intense sense of adventure, social justice and characterisation, remains a favourite to this day.  

I was hooked on Charles Dickens.

* * *

Fast forward to this morning, and the bi-centenary of Dickens’ birth.

Over the summer I asked mum to keep an eye out for cheap Charles Dickens books at the op-shop.  We actually got most of the way there.  She would go with friends and trawl the shelves, and I have about ten of his works so far, all in different shapes and sizes, belonging to various sets and decades of publishing.

Then about a week ago we got a call from one of Mum’s friends, who had been trawling through an old shed of her late-husband’s things.

“I’ve got something for Lyndon,” she said.

The picture above is mine, taken of what she has given me.  A complete, 26-volume set from the early 1900’s, of Charles Dickens’ complete works.  It is simply a beautiful collection, and I am so privileged to have been given it.

Charles Dickens it seems, by providence or luck, has never quite been able to leave me alone.  From age five to now, like his Ghost of Christmas Past he haunts me, a comforter and guide in the best of times and the worst of times.  Running my fingers along the bevelled edges of this complete set I wonder how different things will be in the world that he has left behind fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, and even many centenaries into the future.

Yet while there is poverty, injustice, and the weak and defenceless fighting to be noticed, it seems unlikely that this impeccable man of letters will ever be far away.  While there are still Scrooges, Mr. Bumbles, and Gradgrinds, we will continue to need his stories to comfort and right us.

We still need Charles Dickens.  I think perhaps we always will.  And for that, God bless him.  Happy birthday Charlie D.