I was honoured and delighted to learn that my memoir The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement is now the subject of a long article in academic journal TEXT. Senior Lecturer Bernadette Brennan, of the University of Sydney’s English Department, has just published ‘Frameworks of grief: Narrative as an act of healing in contemporary memoir’, a close reading of my book and Maggie MacKellar’s When it Rains. How convenient that such articles are available online, so radically unlike my years of dust-inhaling in research library stacks in the early 1990s.

Last year I discovered that Bernadette teaches my memoir to her Masters students as part of course about contemporary Australian women’s memoir. Other works studied in the course include When it Rains and the award-winning Reading by Moonlight by Brenda Walker.

In response to Andrew Reimer’s review of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, ‘Frameworks of grief’ investigates the question of whether private sorrow should remain private, whether there is really no way language can be employed to articulate the experience of grief, and – reflecting a question raised by Julian Barnes’s review of Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story – whether ‘autobiographical accounts of grief are unfalsifiable, and therefore unreviewable by any normal criteria’. To do justice to all these questions, the article runs to 12,000 words – or about one-fifth as long as my entire book.

It’s a funny thing to read someone else writing academically about your own work. I was relieved that Bernadette found little trace of sentimentality in my book, and that she saw a connection my love of jazz music to the way I structured the book. She writes:

The dialectic of inside/outside recurs in various guises throughout the text. The damage to the inside of the house is more pronounced than that to the outside. So too, Lloyd suffers deep, psychic pain while presenting a competent public exterior. Less obvious perhaps is the way the narrative, in its dance between intimacy and distance, demonstrates the gulf which exists between the private experience, and the public expression, of loss. Lloyd’s description of her beloved jazz hints at her narrative strategy:

My head and my heart have always found equal refuge in its combination of improvisation and harmonic structure. The music expresses freedom and constraint simultaneously; the freedom to improvise is in fact only created through the structures of melody and harmony that provide choices for the improvisation. (p13)

In narrative terms Lloyd’s ‘melody and harmony’ are structure and metaphor. By controlling them she is able to articulate something for which she has no training and for which there seems to be no guidance.

Something for which I had no training and for which there was no guidance. That sentence could describe grieving a spouse, or writing a book. Despite the tsunami of writing guides and how-to manuals and online courses and ebook downloads pinging my inbox with daily intensity, I do believe that you learn to write only by writing (and reading). But you don’t learn to grieve. You just grieve, and you breathe, and at some point you find that you have survived.

All those years ago, when I was an unhappy PhD candidate, not once in my wildest imaginings did I suspect that I would one day write a book that would be taught at Masters level or be the subject of thoughtful academic analysis. But I never thought I’d be a widow, either.

In this video, Fiona Higgins, author of The Mothers’ Group, discusses how she wrote her first novel with journalist Ellen Fanning. The conversation took place at Fiona’s book launch at Berkelouw Books in Paddington, Sydney.

The novel is getting great word of mouth, assisted by some terrific reviews. As Fiona’s agent, I’m thrilled to report that the novel has now been sold to four European countries including France and Germany.

If you’re writing and have questions about the process, or about any aspect of getting published and working with a literary agent, please post your comment below. I want to hear from you.

Have you read it yet?

For those readers who don’t use Twitter or who didn’t catch these links the first time I tweeted them, I’ve decided to post a select time-sucking round-up of my most-retweeted links from the past month. Topics will always be some combination of literary agents, editing, memoir and finding grants for writers.

On literary agents
Questions to ask a literary agent before signing a contract, from Writers Relief

How Can You Manage So Many Clients? from the Steve Laube Agency

On memoir and creative nonfiction
A seriously insightful interview on the process of writing memoir with author Ashley Dartnell, by Pam Johnson of the interview-rich Words Unlimited blog

Phillip Lopate on the necessity of a memoirist’s double perspective - a creative nonfiction class in one essay, and possibly the best thing I’ve read on memoir aside from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story.

Love creative nonfiction and stuck for something to read? Consult Reality Hunger author David Shields’ alphabetised list of must-reads from Creative Nonfiction magazine.

Have you heard about the Creative Industries Career Fund, which provides up to $5,000 for career-enhancing activities for Australian creators?

This excellent initiative is part of Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Each year, Copyright Agency (CAL, the L is for Limited) allocates an impressive $150,000

to support individual Australian creators and those involved in the creative industries who wish to develop their skills and take their careers to the next level.

Applicants can apply for grants of up to $5,000 to undertake training, travel or other activities that will enhance their careers.

Looking through this list of recent recipients, CAL seems to support writers who have a specific manuscript to work on (they have funded several residency stints at Varuna), or who have been invited to attend a writers’ conference. If you haven’t got an invitation somewhere exotic to read your work or appear on a literary festival panel, CAL has funded more modest projects closer to home, such as participating in a workshop at the NSW Writers’ Centre or attending a NSW Society of Editors conference.

Overall I think the Creative Industries Career Fund has a lot of unmet potential from the writing and editing community. It seems that visual artists are enjoying most of this particular pie. But it’s a large pie so why not apply for a slice of it?

The application guidelines are brief, stating only that

Applications are open to the individual creator or those involved in the publishing and visual arts industries who wish to broaden their knowledge base, skills or expertise and take their careers to the next level.

A refreshingly broad brief. You’re creative; use your imagination. The application deadline is 5.00 pm Friday 20 April 2012.

Good luck!

PS. If you can’t make the April deadline, there’s another round of funding in late July.

Fiona Higgins, author of The Mothers' Group

It’s often said that writing a book is like giving birth. While I have done one but not the other, I can confidently say that one major difference between the two experiences is that the gestation period of the latter is more or less reliably nine months.

I thought it might interest unpublished writers to get a sense of how long it took my friend and client Fiona Higgins to move from first drafts to published book with her novel The Mothers’ Group.

Two years ago: Fiona sends me a draft of the novel she has been writing. I am astounded. All I’d been hearing was how she hadn’t been getting any sleep due to her new baby. What I didn’t know was that Fiona was using the sleepless hours making notes and inventing characters and plotlines for a story about six very different women who are all the mothers of newborn children. Some of us might have settled for a hot cocoa and a bit of telly. Fiona is not one of those people. It took her about one year to get to this point.

Reading the draft, I see immediately that it has loads of potential but needs more work. I respond to the draft with a range of suggestions ranging from minor to substantial.  She knows the drill: we went through exactly the same process for her first book, a memoir.

18 months ago: Fiona sends me a revised draft. She is a dream client in that she is open to discussing ways of strengthening a manuscript. Note: I do not mean that she automatically agrees with everything I suggest! She takes suggestions (not only from me, but a small group of trusted readers), sifts them to find common themes, thinks them over, and addresses them in her own way with any changes that she makes.

This is a stronger manuscript, but I still feel it needs more work.

At this point, Fiona is probably starting to question whether or not I know what I’m talking about.

I have to be careful now not to push her too hard. The fact is that the eventual publisher will want to shape the book further, and I can see that there is still room for strengthening more detailed aspects of the novel. But that level of detail is a job for the publisher, not the agent.

15 months ago: The third draft incorporating further revisions arrives via email. This version I feel is ready to send out.

May 2011: Before I can do that, two things happen. First, Fiona sends a further revised manuscript based on reaching out to various experts representing characters or action featured in the book (a lawyer, a doctor, an ambulance driver) who advise technical changes for accuracy.

Second, Fiona gives birth. Yes, she has been pregnant throughout the revision stage, and goes into labour conveniently after finishing the revisions.

June 2011: I send it out to a shortlist based on publishers (or editors in US parlance) whom I think will like it. Acquiring books is largely a matter of personal taste, so it’s inevitable to get a couple of quick rejections en route to establishing a group of extremely interested potential publishers. This is a dream for author and agent alike.

July 2011: Allen & Unwin is the successful bidder. They schedule the book for April 2012.

October 2011: Fiona responds to a highly detailed editorial report from an Allen & Unwin editor. This report focuses on the details. It is rich with questions, suggestions and constructive feedback, a testament to the enduring value of a great close editor.

November 2011: The final manuscript goes into production mode – copyediting, typesetting, proofreading. The cover is developed from a dozen initial rough ideas into one that everyone, including the author, loves. (NB that result is not always the case. Authors should be aware that the publisher has final say over covers – much like a President’s veto power over Congress.)

December 2011 – January 2012: The cover blurb is one of the last things to be finalised before the book goes to the printer in mid-January. Allen & Unwin’s sales reps work hard to sell-in as many copies as possible to booksellers, who must order copies for their “stores” (quotation marks indicate not all stores are made of bricks and mortar) around three months out from publication.

January-February 2012: Books arrive in the warehouse to be distributed. Marketing and publicity efforts are well underway with long lead-time publications (eg women’s magazines) and advance reading copies to booksellers.

March 26, 2012: The Mothers’ Group arrives in stores. Happy publication day, Fiona.

Fiona’s Facebook page has a list of book-related events, as does her own website.