Shutting Up

This has been a long while coming - I had some plans for overhauling this space, but having a few weeks off gave me the space to be truly honest about blogging, and therefore I'm closing up Life in Brief. I'll delete this little ol' blog in a bit, and move on to pastures new. My focus now is on my academics and my personal life, and as such I'm keeping my twitter account (although I've changed my username), so do feel free to find me over there, and I'll still be instagramming from time-to-time.

I guess all that remains to be said is a massive thank-you to everyone I've met through blogging here - you're all amazing, interesting, funny (and sometimes slightly crazy) women I'm glad to know. Please keep in touch!

Byron Bay Bluesfest: A Playlist

I've been meaning to write this post for about a week now, but I struggled to find the words to say. Bluesfest was simply phenomenal. I have never been so in awe of someone standing only a few metres from me, as I was with Robert Plant, Paul Simon and countless others. My favourite moments were those where we popped into a tent to avoid the rain and came across someone truly amazing, like Ben Caplan, whose voice has haunted me for the past week now, or Genevieve Chadwick, who you should all track down at any opportunity and go listen to!

Mentions have to go to the Tedeschi Trucks Band, who blew the roof off the Mojo tent only minutes after the fantastic Santana finished his set, and Trombone Shorty who got us dancing like maniacs at 4pm in the afternoon. And of course, Frank Turner was awesome. As he always is.

So rather than attempt to put in words an experience which is better described by others, I thought I'd share a few of the tracks that I was bowled over by instead, along with a couple of the photos I snapped on my phone .

Women Writers Reading Group: My Father's Moon, Elizabeth Jolley

Hila of Le Projet d'Amour set a book challenge on her blog recently, and I'm very keen to take it up. The Women Writers Reading Group has two simple rules:

1. Making a conscious decision to read books by women, and;
2. Reviewing books by women on my blog/website.

In her post explaining the motivation behind the reading group, Hila asked her readers to think of the breakdown of their bookshelves in terms of male and female writers. I find that my bookshelf sits close to 50-50, yet statistics from VIDA show that women are still highly under-represented in the literary arts, and therefore this reading group is one step in the direction of supporting women writers.

In a recent attempt to bring more Australian fiction to my bookshelves, I began Elizabeth Jolley's somewhat autobiographical trilogy, reading My Father's Moon (admittedly not set in Australia, but focused on the period of her life growing up in England). I didn't know Elizabeth Jolley prior to this, but simply found this book at the local library. The story follows Vera through boarding school and into training as a nurse during the second world war, finally teaching in a small school with her illegitimate child and the narrative jumps back and forth between these three stages of her life. Jolley's writing is stark and bleak, offering little sympathy to Vera. She is instead painted in an honest and brutally critical light, showing up character flaws of jealousy and selfishness. However, I found this appealing as it's quite rare for a girl or woman to be described this way. Male characters are allowed to display prejudice, dishonesty and often even disregard for others, yet somehow this is excused, or at least allowed for. Women are instead required to be soft and gentle, or at least to show compassion at times.

Vera's redemption comes, in part, through her loneliness, and in this I found it hard to dislike her, despite the sharp edges to her personality. The title refers to her father's comment to her, as a child heading to boarding school, that the fact that they look up at the same moon will keep them joined even though they're apart. This becomes a repeated theme, brought back time and time again, particularly at her most lonely.

'The moon belongs to my father. He has always said it was his. If I was over there he would know without my telling him. It is only such a small thing I have to tell. Perhaps it is the small things which are the hardest to tell. They are the things which make all the difference.'

The structure of the book is difficult, I'll admit, but wholly worthwhile, and I wonder if perhaps I felt more engaged with the book due to the jumping between periods. Another reviewer described the disjointed nature of the book as seeming "appropriate for the story of a person like Vera", and I feel that is a better description than I can offer!

I have a tendency to become immersed in a good book such that a small part of me disappears from this world for a little while, lost in the book. This book grabbed me to an extent beyond that, and I am really looking forward to reading the next books in the trilogy.

Finally, if you're an avid reader, I'd really encourage you to take up Hila's women writer's challenge. It's incredibly easy to follow along, and I think I'm likely to discover some fantastic writers I might otherwise have overlooked as a result.