A shoutout to four bookshop managers

For all that I’ve been shameless in my promotions over the past months, there has been one task that I dreaded. I hate spruiking my book to bookshop managers. I imagine them silently resenting having to sound warmly welcoming when they’re under so much pressure these days from changes to the book industry.

But four bookshop managers have been extremely kind.

Lynda Carmody at the NLA bookshop in Canberra took copies and walked me though the unfamiliar paperwork. She gave me gentle and invaluable advice about how to price my book in ways that would be fair to both me and booksellers. Jessica Rowe at BookFace in Gungahlin seemed delighted to be supporting a local author; it was as if I was doing her a favour! James Redden at Harry Hartog couldn’t have been more warmly supportive, offering his space as a possible launch venue when I was getting nervous about fitting everyone into our own home. And Mark Rubbo at Readings in Carlton took copies despite me not being a Melbourne author or a regular Readings customer.

If anyone out there is looking for a copy of the book and lives in either Melbourne or Canberra, do visit one of these bookshops. I owe them.

Launch Day

Feeling edgy. Just over six hours till the Launch. Jo is cooking up a storm, we’ve got the wine and will make a punch, the family arrives from Melbourne within the hour. I’ve got a bit to do on my speech.

Lots of lovely messages this morning, from around the country and from overseas.

Fingers crossed.

A new venue for the Book Launch - Tuesday 26 March

Thank you to the 120 people who have responded with a YES to the invitation to the Book Launch.

That’s too many for our house, so I’ve been looking for an alternative.

I’ve written to the UC Inspire Centre, the Canberra Grammar Gallery, the Ainslie and Gorman Arts spaces, University House and have chatted to a bookshop owner. I’ll follow these up early next week.

Do let me know (in the COMMENTS below or by emailing me at steve.shann@canberra.edu.au) if you know of a venue that you think would work,

For those coming to the launch, I’ll email each of you once the new venue has been organised.

"So Steve, how's the book doing?"

It’s a question I keep getting asked. Until yesterday, I wasn’t sure how to respond.

I’ve sold a couple of hundred copies, some via Amazon and some I’ve sold directly, and the book launch is still a month away, so I guess that’s pretty good. I suppose if sales are the measure of how the book is doing, I won’t know until after the main publicity burst around the launch on 26 March.

If visits to my Squarespace website where the novel is featured are any guide, interest is growing.

There are now three bookshops - Readings in Carlton, the National Library Bookshop and Book Face in Gungahlin - who have agreed to stock it, and a number of other Canberra and Melbourne bookshops are looking at it as I type. So that’s good.

We have 122 people who have sent RSVPs to say they’re coming to the Book Launch. That’s exciting.

But I was reminded again yesterday, when I friend told me she was about to read the book for the second time, that none of the above are the metrics that matter. It’s what people have been saying about the experience of reading the book.

An American teacher wrote to me via Twitter last week, and it’s comments like these which make me feel that the book is doing just what I hoped it would do.

The Harriet page on my website has most of these comments, and the short film here has snippets from many of them.

Three insights gained from wise others

In my last blog, I asked for advice about writing a study guide for The Worlds of Harriet Henderson. Twelve members of ‘my community of knowledgeable peers’ replied, and their advice has given me three clarifying insights.

 1.     I don’t like the idea of readers studying my novel. I want people to read it, and I want to do everything possible to encourage as many readers as I can. Perhaps the study guide idea was, for me, a way of enticing teacher educators to get their pre-service teachers reading my book; naturally I want pre-service teachers to read my book. But I don’t want them to study it. Mary talked in the comments about the experience of entering into the world of the novel, and how a premature exposure to a study guide might interfere with that.

2.     If there’s guiding to be done, I want the novel to do the guiding, not me. When I’m teaching students in schools or at university, or when I’m leading teacher groups, what works best almost every time is when I introduce some material and then ask two questions: What did you notice? What did you wonder? The ensuing discussion is then determined by the material and the readers’ experience of it, not by my own preconceptions or agenda. I think an approach based on these two questions would lead to the kinds of discussions and explorations listed by Misty and Brenton in their comments on my last post.

3.     I’d rather spend my time doing other things rather than writing a study guide. I want to start writing the next novel. I’ve also got some ideas about creating some kind of online space for an emerging and potential community of knowledgeable peers. And I’d love the opportunity to discuss the novel face-to-face with groups (students, teachers, readers). I’d find all of that kind of thing much more appealing than writing a study or reading guide.

 Thank you all who commented. Whether you were encouraging or discouraging of the idea, your thoughts helped bring me some clarity. I do feel blessed by these collaborations.

A Study Guide for 'The Worlds of Harriet Henderson'?

A former colleague has encouraged me to have a go at creating a study guide for my novel, The Worlds of Harriet Henderson, for use with pre-service teachers in universities or with English teachers as part of PD courses. Some of the reviews from teachers and teacher-educators have hinted at something similar.

I’m not sure. It’s the kind of project I’d enjoy working on, but would it be useful?

I thought I’d flag the possibility here, have a go at the beginning of a study guide, and see what others think.

So here’s a draft beginning:

Is this worth pursuing?

I’d love some thoughts from those ‘in the field’: teacher educators, pre-service teachers, English-teachers-thinking-back-on-their-pre-service-experience.

If encouraged, I’ll spend hours happily working on this, but I don’t want to do it if it wouldn’t be useful.

My Napoleonic Campaign

The planning, even if I do say so myself, has been meticulous.

 Jo and I have gone through multiple drafts of The Worlds of Harriet Henderson and edited out every error we can find (and still one gets through - it’s ‘toe the line’, not ‘tow the line’!). I’ve created a new edition so that I can have my own ISBN instead of the one assigned by Amazon. I’ve set a date for the launch, planned the event, issued invitations and have had about 100 acceptances. I’ve assembled a Launch Team to help with publicity in the fortnight leading up to the launch. I’ve spruced up and aligned all my various sites - webpage, Amazon author page, Goodreads author page, social media pages - so that all roads lead, sooner or later, to information and reviews about the novel. I’ve sent out pdf copies to over 100 readers and have now nearly 30 reviews, some on Amazon, some on Goodreads and all on my website. I’ve got reviewers from Netgalley, and have created a Book2Look biblet so that anyone can read the first chapters before deciding whether or not to buy the book. Sol and I have made a video of the making of the cover, and I’ve made a short film with quotes from various readers. I’ve let Australian library services know about the book, and have copies ready to send to potential reviewers. I’ve sold or got orders for around 100 copies, which I’m bundling up and delivering or posting, and next week I begin approaches to bookshops and local libraries, armed with a flyer that Sol and I have created. I’ve been collecting photos of readers with their copies of the book (all genuine!) and publishing these on social media. And that’s only the half of it. 

I may be overdoing it. For my birthday my wife Jo wrote me a poem, part of which read

But Harriet’s there/Competing for air/We’re hoping she’ll soon leave the nest!

Overdoing it or not, I’m ready. I’ve planned. I’ve left no stone unturned. Not known as a details person, I’ve attended to every one of them. 

Success is assured.

Like it was for Napoleon, that brilliant and meticulous planner.

One of my all-time favourite novels is War and Peace. I read it when I was at university (when I should have been reading my political science texts), and then again a couple of years ago. There’s so much I love about it. But it’s the portrayal of Napoleon, and of what actually happens in battle despite the best laid plans, that I keep thinking about these days.

The outcome of battles, says Tolstoy, has nothing to do with the big plans of the generals and everything to do with the ‘chance promptings of the throng’. Here’s his account of part of the Battle of Borodino:

Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and in its small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell where what he had seen was…

There for several hours amid incessant cannon and musketry fire, now Russians were seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now infantry, and now cavalry: they appeared, fired, fell, collided, not knowing what to do with one another, screamed, and ran back again.

From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress of the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place of conflict but reported what they had heard from others; and also because while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to Napoleon circumstances changed and the news he brought was already becoming false. ..

The marshals and generals, who were nearer to the field of battle but, like Napoleon, did not take part in the actual fighting and only occasionally went within musket range, made their own arrangements without asking Napoleon and issued orders where and in what direction to fire and where cavalry should gallop and infantry should run. But even their orders, like Napoleon’s, were seldom carried out, and then but partially. For the most part things happened contrary to their orders. Soldiers ordered to advance ran back on meeting grapeshot; soldiers ordered to remain where they were, suddenly, seeing Russians unexpectedly before them, sometimes rushed back and sometimes forward, and the cavalry dashed without orders in pursuit of the flying Russians … All their rushing and galloping at one another did little harm, the harm of disablement and death was caused by the balls and bullets that flew over the fields on which these men were floundering about. As soon as they left the place where the balls and bullets were flying about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them and brought them under discipline and under the influence of that discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of fear of death they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the chance promptings of the throng.

My planning may well have been meticulous. The outcome, though, will probably be determined by the chance promptings of the throng.

Postscript: The image of Napoleon and his generals above is a detail from a much larger painting depicting the Battle of Eylau in 1807. Here’s the full painting. The outcome of the battle was inconclusive. 

By Antoine-Jean Gros - Unknown, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=391852

The office that reads together ...

In my blog post ‘What’s it all about?’, I told the story of my son Oliver encouraging his workmates at Jack.org in Toronto to ‘support a lovely old man ‘ by buying The Worlds of Harriet Henderson.

This morning I received these photos.

Books & Bodies: Flows & Becomings

A week ago I wrote a blog post in order to help me answer the question ‘What is my novel about?’ I had a plot response (it’s about the worlds that Harriet Henderson experiences and creates) and a theme response (it’s about useful and less useful ways of going about the business of teaching). Today I want to come at it from a different direction. I guess it’s a theoretical response, though (given that I’m a storyteller rather than a theoretician) I’ll do this through telling four stories. These are four stories about different bodies.

Story 1: My body in 2015

I retired in June 2015 and pretty much from the day I retired I started to write the first draft of Harriet. I spent a week or so in Melbourne, walking around Coburg or sitting in cafes writing, and then returned home to Canberra, where each morning I’d spend a couple of hours at my desk playing with ideas.

I was aware, as I wrote during the middle of 2015, that my body (not just the physical thing called the body, but the complicated amalgam of physical attributes, accumulated thoughts & feelings, and mixture of conscious and unconscious impulses and aspirations) was both tired and animated. Forty-five years of professional teaching had had its bruising phases, but had also been immensely stimulating. Writing a novel felt like an opportunity to collect together some thoughts, perhaps even to see some of my experiences from a slightly different vantage point.  

One morning I found myself trying to summarise what I’d come to believe about teaching. I wrote:

GILES DELEUZE

There are ways of conceiving a classroom that lead to life being squeezed out (or at least suppressed so that it needs to express itself in deviant forms). Conversely there  are ways of conceiving a classroom that allow for flow and becomings. I hadn’t thought, until writing that sentence, of using those two words - flow and becomings - for my story, though they’ve been increasingly interesting to me over the past couple of years as I’ve been reading Deleuze (1977, 1987) and Massey (2005). I think this is why I’m so drawn to the word ‘lifeworlds’. Who coined it, I wonder? The phenomenologists, I’m guessing. Anyway, if we can conceive of a classroom as a lifeworld where flows and becomings happen, rather than as a space where something is done to students, then the experience of that space is transformed - for students and teacher.  Lifeworlds - messy, exceeding, tangled, interconnected, full of the unconscious, unpredictable, rich, tappable - has to be a kind of organising (ironic?) idea for my story.

I had just articulated a thought that was now, through the writing, a bit closer to the surface of my consciousness. In writing it, the thought assumed a slightly more concrete form in my body. It was more consciously present. It had a bit more weight, perhaps, or energy. It had the potential to contribute more forcefully to a becoming.

MOLLY’S MEMORY

Story 2: My body in my book

When I was about nine and my parents were out (father at work, mother out doing the work of a diplomat’s wife), I rearranged the furniture in our main room, put on some favourite music, and danced. It was an ecstatic experience, or at least it was until I was suddenly aware of my mother standing at the door looking appalled at the mess I had made.

This event is described in the Prologue of my novel, as an early memory of Molly, the teacher. It is one of a thousand ways in which my body is in my book.

My body is present in each of the four main characters - Harriet, Max, Molly and Zeph. I’ve put into Harriet my yearning to write well and the thrill I get from learning from a mentor. Max has those parts of me that are about a love of solitude and a haven. I’ve put into Molly my passion for teaching, and my impatience with certain routines. And into Zeph I’ve put my bouts of debilitating introversion and my sense that truth and beauty exist beyond words. Each of the four is a part of me. My body is in my book.

Story 3: The bodies in the book

The characters (Elliot, Gillian, Rhonda, Tran as well as the main four) may be, as I’ve suggested, parts of me, but they’re also bodies in their own right. By this I mean that they exist as virtual realities which have somehow in the writing become actual. Perhaps only those who have written fiction can understand this, though I suspect that it’s something most creative artists feel, no matter what the medium. The creation assumes an actual life. Authors mourn the death of their creations, whether that’s a death in a story or the death that comes from finishing a novel. While Molly might have begun (as she remembers the dancing incident from her childhood) as an aspect of me, she soon becomes a separate being, a body that receives impressions from other bodies in the book and a body who affects the lives of the other characters. She’s infuriated and persecuted by Elliot; she inspires Harriet. Her life is affected by others, she changes the lives of others. Her body is entangled with, and changed by, its interplay with the bodies of Max, Harriet and Zeph. The story arc of the novel is shaped less by the way my body is in the book and more by the way the bodies in the book find and affect each other.

Story 4: The bodies of the readers of the book

It’s clear, from the feedback I’ve already got, that the novel has got into the bodies of many of its early readers. Their molecules have been agitated, in one way or another, as described in these extracts from the feedback I’ve been getting.

SOME OF THE FIRST READERS OF ‘HARRIET’

I can’t imagine anything more life-affirming … Honestly, once I started reading, I could not put the book down … I read this when I was needing some inspiration - it gave me that … I wanted to swoop on and know more, but at the same time I wanted to slow down and savour the story … I finished the book at 2am - read in two straight settings with a meal and meeting in-between!! I haven’t done that for years… I just loved it. Found it fascinating, thought provoking reread sections to mull over. .. I felt the ache when [Max] stands at his granddaughter’s room, remembering how he used to make her bed for her, the bitter-sweetness of her outgrowing that ritual. …  I got shivers reading that very first paragraph of part C … I stayed up after my three-month-old son’s 2am feed to finish this novel, not a choice a sleep-deprived mother would make for a lesser book! It spoke to me as both a reader and (English) teacher. … [The book] sparked my imagination and will continue to enlighten my teaching practice…. This is a marvellous book which I found hard to put down, even when I was reading it late at night and had determined I must go to sleep immediately… Molly the English teacher is a luminous figure for me. … I really really enjoyed Part 4 and the resolution of all the threads. I think I want to be Molly!!! …

So what?

 One way of saying all this is: my body in 2015, constituted as it was by a complex amalgam of current and historical events and interactions with other bodies, found its way into the body of my book, it created a number of fictional bodies whose bodies took on a direction and character of their own and this became the body which is a novel, and this novel-body then got into the bodies of some readers and created particular affects in them.

But why might this unusual way of talking about writing and reading be of any particular significance?

Well, I think it nudges me closer to a theoretical response to the question I asked in my first blog post: ’What is my novel about?’ My novel is about the ways in which bodies interact and affect, the ways in which they create (and block) flows and becomings. It is also itself an example of the same thing. The book tells the story of flows and becomings, and the book itself creates (or has the potential to create) flows and becomings.

BILL GREEN

It was a paper called Thinking Bodies: Practice Theory, Deleuze, and Professional Education that helped me to see this. In the paper, Bill Green makes the following points:

1. A body is never singular. The body is inevitably pluralised, it needs to be thought of as a multiplicity.

2. Bodies are continually in the process of trying to become-other. That’s what learning is. This is done through interaction with other bodies, through affect.

3. Theory is as much (or even more) about what it can do in the world, what useful flows it creates, as it is about how accurately it represents or explains what exists. It’s trying to do something useful rather than describe something accurately. Philosophy brings forth events.

4. The bodies that create affect are not just human bodies. We need to pay attention to the socio-materiality of the extra-human world.

5. Bodies proceed without, or perhaps exceed, volition on the practitioner’s part.

6. We need to pay attention to the materiality of language; it is in and of the body, always issuing from the body or being impeded by the body, affecting other bodies.

A mythopoetic methodology

This is the human body [Bill says in this article] as both material and cultural, but also the interplay of bodies in situ. As such, it is readily available for research, whether that be phenomenological or ethnographic. 

I want to suggest that fiction, or the mythopoetic, has the potential to add something that neither the phenomenological or the ethnographic can so easily address, whether our aim as researchers is to describe more fully a phenomenon (such as learning, or the classroom), or if (as Deleuze and Bill suggest) the aim is to affect flows and becomings. The mythopoetic can legitimately draw on the imagination and intuition in ways that phenomenology or ethnography cannot (consciously) do. The mythopoetic can gesture towards the existence of the unconscious in ways less easily done in other forms of scholarly research.

In an email to me, Bill Green suggested this himself. He quoted Garth Boomer as follows:

'... a micro-analysis of the moment-by-moment dance between, say, teacher and student will show fascinating fluctuations in the balance of power, a shifting drama of point and counterpoint, changing patterns of initiation and response. If ethnographers could develop a kind of x-ray lens to probe the psyche, I am sure they would uncover quite amazing flows and ebbs of affect and primal resistance in teachers and taught from moment to moment.’

‘How would one capture something of this?’ Bill asked in his email. ‘In a realist account? More poetically? Or perhaps something a la Deleuze/Guattari... It's an intriguing challenge.’ 

Perhaps ‘capture’ is not quite right. Perhaps all we can do is try to create useful affects.