Tuesday evening is usually pretty dull: nothing much happens in my house. However, last Tuesday was kind of special. The acclaimed writer and mentor Kathryn Heyman, author of Fury, was giving a free masterclass titled Voices & Vision. So I walked through the door marked Zoom, and had a lovely evening listening to Kathryn weave her magic. If you ever get a chance to work with Kathryn, or go along to one of her workshops, grab it!

One of the nifty exercises we did was writing about the story of our main character’s name. It was an exercise grounded in exploration of character voice and their habits of speech. We first decided what our character’s main linguistic preoccupations were, then we wrote within these parameters. As the text I’m working on at the moment is a memoir, I wrote about my own name. Here’s what I wrote:

I was born into light.

That sounds frightfully pretentious, doesn’t it?

Perhaps I should begin again…

I was born at a large regional hospital north of Sydney. On the day I visited it, as a teenager on holiday from Tasmania, it was being torn down. I stood there and watched the wrecker’s ball swing in. Large sheets of concrete folded like grey paper. Dust became a world above the ground. The clouds fell out of the sky. My ears were gripped by the low sonic boom of explosives.

I was born in this place, with its long spearmint green corridors, and its cheap white painted walls, and its pinboards dusted with demands. I lay on the bed – a useless, red, squally thing – and they shone a light on me. Shone a torch and flicked it across my face, to check my vision. And my goggle smeared newborn eyes grabbed hold of the light and clung to it like a drowning sailor to a spar. Seized the particles of the brightest thing in the universe. Let it speckle my pastey blue irises with infinite pinpricks of exquisite pain.

And they called me Helen – for the old Greek word for light.

Very pleased to be starting a Lighthouse Arts residency tomorrow, courtesy of Hunter Writers Centre! Located at Nobby’s-Whibayganba Headland on Newcastle Harbour, the residency is a deep immersion in sea, sky and wind… lots of wind!

Today I was painting an old farmhouse property in the Hunter Valley, and listening to podcasts while I worked. My current favourite is ‘Creative Pep Talk’ and the episode usually concludes with some kind of practical exercise for artists. Today’s was about reverse-engineering your creative practice so, for example, writing lyrics when you usually start with the musical score, or drawing images when you usually start with words. Thought I’d try it in advance of tomorrow’s residency, by writing about what I would like to paint during the residency. I’m intending to create a series of paintings of the harbour – inspired by the sincerity of Alfred Wallis’ shipping images (no gap between object and intent) and the wonderful, floating spatial quality of Marc Chagall. Here it is:

I want to create dream-like images that show the movement of wind, water and sky, the slow churn of the earth, the flicker of shadows and the flight of gulls. I want ships and boats to stand in for humans, to be just as varied, emotive and interesting. I want to see fish many fathoms down, and satellites high above the sky. I want the giant spin of things to be as pretty and engaging as a child’s toy. I want to see the stars at noon.

I often spend Thursday nights at Peter Lankas’ life drawing sessions in Newcastle. Last Thursday was an incredibly hot evening, I’d spent the morning doing some concreting, so by the time 9pm arrived I felt like nap time was long overdue. The class finishes at 9.30pm, and we had one more pose before everyone packed up and went home.

I had one last piece of paper left in my favourite sketchbook. It was actually a black piece of paper, right at the end of the book, kind of like a title page in a book. The previous day I’d primed it with some leftover reddish-brown paint. Tired, not caring, wanting to finish off the book, and not waste precious time with a model, I scribbled away with a black pen then packed up and went home. Strangely enough, it ended up being my favourite drawing of the night – there’s a frenetic looseness and lack of fussiness that you only seem to get when the conscious mind has checked out. White highlights were added later in the studio at home. I don’t usually name life drawings but this one’s called ‘beautiful girl’.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, may I suggest that instead of a last-minute bunch of slightly wilted roses from Woolies, you instead bring your beloved some high-grade literary spice? The Nights is now available as an audio book, narrated by the brilliant actor Kelly Burke.
The Nights is published by iconic indie publisher Spineless Wonders with a foreword by one of my favourite writers, Carmel Bird.
Here’s what poet Paris Rosemont has to say about the book:
‘Lush, opulent and dripping with sensuality, this novella will take you on a journey through 1001 nights that you’d wish would never end’
And here’s where you can find the book 🙂
x
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/nights-the
https://bingebooks.com/book/the-nights
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-nights-helen-hopcroft/1144251662
https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798868656491
https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Helen_Hopcroft_The_Nights?id=AQAAAEASvkr-SM
https://www.storytel.com/se/sv/books/4722589
https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/nights-being-an-erotic-memoir-and-private-journal-of-the-virgin-scheherazade-a-gripping-tale-of-love-death-creativity-transformation-and-metamorphosis/732530