Sacred Site by Kim Fleet
Hello, and thanks to everyone who’s stuck with me this far. This blog has been a jumble of cats and cooking and philosophy and time, with a few fieldwork stories thrown in. Some of my favourite fieldwork stories have an airing in Sacred Site: the experiences that are so cringeworthy or funny or peculiar simply had to be included, but I’ve still got a swag full left over. Like the time I stopped to help a carful of Aboriginal people who had run out of petrol on a remote track in Central Australia, and in return for 40 litres of petrol they plonked two dead lizards on my bonnet. And when you think of the cost of fuel these days! And then there’s the time when I turned up bright eyed and bushy tailed (I swear that naivety is the best quality to have if you’re an anthropologist) hoping to take an old man out on a field trip. I had notions of us driving out onto his traditional country; which he didn’t get to visit that often as he was very old and didn’t have access to a car; stopping by a steel windmill or at a waterhole and putting the billy on to boil while he reminisced about his time as a stock man, told me about his ancestors, maybe told a dreaming story, or instructed me how to make fire from kangaroo droppings. Uh-urrr! (Family Fortunes you got it wrong buzzer noise). When I pulled up, he bounded out, and excitedly told me “Young man in the community’s just murdered his father and tried to hang himself!”
“Oh, how shocking, what a good thing we’re going out today.”
“I’m not going nowhere. I’m not missing this! This is the most exciting thing that’s happened for ages.”
Right.
And then there were the old ladies with their salacious stories that made me blush; the fights; the kids learning from their grandparents; the huge skies and scent of acacia blossom. I wanted to write about these experiences, and a writers’ workshop encouraged me to think about using the thriller format to do so. Why? Because then people would know what to expect; genre fiction is comforting in that it says what it does on the tin (deliberate reversal, before the emails start!). The more I thought about this, the more I thought that actually the ‘put it in a box and put a label on it’ approach to publishing was little to do with the reader, and more to do with pandering to the booksellers and packagers, the majority of whom, it seems, can’t cope with things that fail to be characterized. They don’t like cross over fiction, fiction that spans two or more genres, fiction were you can’t tell from one glance at the blurb whether it needs a pink jacket or a black one.
That’s where Picnic is different. Their raison d’etre is to find books that readers will enjoy reading, and issues about genre and placing and labeling are secondary. And it doesn’t matter if the author is a big name, or has published squillions of books before; or if they’re an unknown with no previous publishing experience; what counts is the manuscript. We’ve all heard stories about authors who tried publisher after publisher and just got rejected time after time, only for the manuscript to turn out to be an enduring classic. Or the writers who penned several, maybe dozens, of full length novels before one, finally got accepted, and gave them the breakthrough they needed. I know that writing takes an apprenticeship, and that you could/should write several full length manuscripts before you get your voice, and before you build up the writing muscle power to sustain you through successive projects. But come on! I wonder how many wonderful writers simply give up, demoralised. Like I said earlier this week, writers write because they have to, but submitting a manuscript is like handing over a child, and if each time you do it, the recipient rejects your child, then eventually self preservation will win the day.
I don’t believe that readers can’t cope with ‘different’ books. The success of recent books like the Time Traveller’s Wife and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time indicate that there is a healthy public appetite for books that defy ready characterisation, and maybe publishers are doing us all a disservice by trying to protect us from them.
Thanks to Picnic, for being prepared to take a chance on unknown authors and authors who like to bend, break or smash the rules.
That’s it from me for now. Next week you’ll be in the hands of Roger Cottrell, author of retro-thriller ENEMY WITHIN.
Bye! Kim