It Is The Words During Which Spout Out

In an earlier post, I mentioned having been told that Surface Tension had apparently received a "cracker of a review", but that I hadn't yet seen it. I've now seen it, and a couple of others too, and am so thrilled with the response this book seems to be eliciting so far.

So this is a wholly self-serving post to gleefully report on those reviews and bombard you with my favourite pull-quotes from same.

#1 From Bookseller+Publisher:

Surface Tension is a wonderfully layered story—reading it is like being gradually immersed in a pool of water as each layer of the narrative slowly washes over you. The writing is so gentle that the mystery at the heart of this book is as much a surprise to the reader as it is to Cassie, our protagonist, when piece by piece it floats to the surface before her ... There isn’t a dull moment in this book.

-Bec Kavanagh

#2 From Kids Book Review:

This is most definitely on my list of favourite kids' books so far this year.

Original, gripping, poetic, authentic - these are the words that spring to mind during and after reading Surface Tension, a book that kept me reading far longer than I should have at each sitting.
...
McKinlay - novelist, picture book author and poet - has created a stunning novel ... I almost can't wait for my toddler to grow up so I can share this one with her.

- Megan Blandford

For the complete review, visit Kids Book Review


#3 From the West Australian:

This well-plotted and engaging novel covers terrain not usually found in junior fiction, and will appeal to readers wanting something different, deep and satisfying. As well as writing for children, Meg McKinlay is a fine poet, and this is evident in the lyrical and accessible images that make Surface Tension such a pleasure to read.

For the complete review, visit writingWA.


#4 From The Book Griffin:

Meg McKinlay made me nostalgic for the days when I loved reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden ... [the author] has done a wonderful job of inventing a fresh, original, suspenseful and intriguing story in Surface Tension, that will have you hooked to the very last page.
For the complete review, visit The Book Griffin.

And finally, my absolute favourite, which I think I can feel free to quote in its entirety, given that the 'reviewer' seems to make their living from a total disregard for copyright. This is taken from one of those sites which trawls the web for content and aggregates it into one place in an attempt to draw traffic and thereby earn $$$$ for doing absolutely nothing at all. In this case, the 'writer' seems to have lifted the Kids Book Review piece and jumbled it up a little to cunningly avoid detection (and coherence, it would seem). The results are very amusing, though. Behold:

It is most certainly one my list off the books off the children off favourite up to now this year. Original, taken, poetic, authenticates - it is the words during which spout out to occupy itself and after the surface tension off reading, has book which maintained reading to me much to skirt than I should cuts with each meeting. Cassy feels one the peripheries off all. Its family, her life, even its city. Supported in has very new city, the day that the old village was dammed up, Cassie always felt drawn with the lake. There has whole city to the bottom there; the houses off the people, to their lives and died and the memories all extend below. When Cassie gives up the local swimming pool to achieve its daily ritual off swimming to the lake, it does not curry out what it and her friend Liam is butt to discover. It seems that with differently, nap people cuts secrecies hidden below the surface. McKinlay - novelist, author off book off images and poèt - created year astounding! Novell which east duty-read for girls (although it is not “girly� has book, the history, the characters and the model off writing will attract girls). It off the words inspires the thought, the question and the emotions which will remain with the long readers then who final page. I almost boat await my infant to grow thus I edge divide this one with it.

Thanks, "Mickey". That one is going straight to the pool room.

And the next time someone asks me what I do for a living, I shall reply, enigmatically, "It is the words during which spout out to occupy itself".

Everybody wins.

Fragments From a Coastline

Last year, I spent three months in Japan. I've lived there before but I'd never travelled the northeast coastline. I leapt at the chance to catch train after train all the way up from Tokyo through Sendai, Matsushima, Hachinohe, Hakodate, deep into Hokkaido, and along the way, a clutch of fishing towns whose names are now all over the news.

Just last week, I picked up the verse novel I started writing in Japan, thinking it was high time I got back to it. This morning, trawling through the stream-of-consciousness jottings I made on my travels, I came across these fragments:

piles of coloured balls – fishing floats. The beach is grey and stony, no sand as such. dotted with colourful balls that look like baubles, decorations, children’s toys, as if some party has left its detritus – colours are bleached, faded, the jaded aftermath of a party somewhere far out at sea, washed up on this lonely shore.

There's no surf here, no waves, – the ocean lies flat and docile – here and there ‘be careful of tsunami’ signs seem almost cartoonish, their over-excited exclamation marks jarring in this featureless grey. what a shock it would be if something were to rise out of this.

There seems no clear division btwn land and ocean – sand the colour of dirt as if the ground simply continues – no waves and no change in level. It doesn’t feel like a different state, just a continuation. Water, land, water land, a line that might blur at any moment, a line that isn't a line, always this lapping, the gentle knocking. The signs speak of a different insistence but could it really turn, this present calm?

At times, the train runs right along the coast, the water only a few feet from the window and nothing else in btwn, you could dive from the windows if you wanted to. I want to. But also want this, this journey, this onward and onward carrying away of self into elsewhere. From here, you can see the seawall – a series of jagged cement blocks, like unstraightened teeth, piled upon each other – black, wild, bleak. Some are patterned, others in random piles, bits of broken stones like they will throw whatever they can at the barely perceptible border to keep the unconcerned sea in its place. As they break down their edges wear so they become rounded, look like dissolving, pockmarked starfish.

With every shift of light, every promise of ocean, every head tilts subtly sideways. People will always turn to look at water.

There are no words for what has happened. Checking in with one of my host families, I felt perversely that this was the most important thing for me to be able to say in Japanese. That there are no words. That they are not up to the task.

I'm wary of feeling connected. It's not my tragedy. I am not suffering. I recognise, and despise, that impulse to insert oneself sideways into it, to lay claim to a personal stake. I don't mean to do that. I'm not sure what I'm doing, exactly. It may be as simple as All I have are these words. Here.

And I don't know what to say about the media, about the endless bombardment of images, the piling of video upon photograph upon 'miracle' upon 'tragedy'. There's a part of me that wants to say, stop! and to what purpose? and enoughenoughenough, that says it's not about information or education or bearing witness, at least in any productive sense. There's a part of me that can't help quoting Sylvia Plath, yet again:

'Aftermath'

Compelled by calamity's magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

Dash of Random

I did promise the occasional dash of random and I'm not sure I've really been delivering. To rectify that, here are two completely unrelated things:

Random Item #1

Surface Tension came out this week. This is excellent and I'm thrilled to see it on shelves. I'm told it received "a cracker of a review" in Bookseller + Publisher, though I'm yet to see it myself. As you do when you have a shiny new book, I've taken to picking up a copy, opening it, reading a few lines, sighing, and putting it back down.

Shall we call it Shiny New Book Syndrome? It is an identifiable disorder - I'm sure of it.

But in the course of my illness, I've realised something about my first line, which reads thus:

The day that I was born, they drowned my town.

Firstly that I love it.

And secondly that it owes a debt to Sylvia Plath. Because when I read it, something strange happens. I read it like this:

The day that I was born, they drowned my town.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry/Took its place among the elements

The following lines aren't mine, of course. They're the second and third lines of Plath's well-known poem "Morning Song". But for some reason, they got attached to my line and I couldn't seem to separate them.

I finally worked out why. To begin with, there's a similarity in subject matter - a birth - and along with that, a similar rhythm, the cadence of the lines. Here's the first line of "Morning Song":

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

It has the same number of beats as mine and to some degree a similar sound quality. The way the last three words fall upon the ear. It's a thin relationship, but it is one, at least in my head. And realising this answered another question for me. During editing, I considered taking 'that' out of my first line. It's one of those words you can often lose without much impact on the surrounding text.

But in this case, I wanted to keep it. I kept taking it out and putting it back in. I wasn't sure why. I just felt the line sounded better with it. And every time I repeated it to myself, Plath's lines followed it, much to my exasperation, and it took me this long to work out why. The slightest of connections - the subject, the rhythm - and our work was connected in a way that affected what I wrote and how I wrote it.

I love this stuff. I love that a poem I read years ago can seep into my own work. I know it's imperceptible to anyone but me. I know there's no real relationship between our work. But it just brings home to me how all of our writing is the outcome of a complex web of highly personal, idiosyncratic associations and image repertoires and relational frameworks. And that everything I write emerges from everything I've been and done and seen, in tiny, secret ways I can't possibly be awake to.

I always say this to kids during workshops. No one sees the world the way you do. No one will write the story you'll write, the way you'll write it. This is just, for me, a really cool reminder of how that can work on the most micro of levels.

For the curious, here are the actual first lines of Surface Tension:

The day that I was born, they drowned my town.

The mayor flipped the lever and everybody cheered. There were streamers and balloons and a really lame brass band. The people of Old Lower Grange ate sausages and potato salad while they watched their lives sink beneath a wall of water.

And writing that, I've realised how much the second line owes to Plath's second line. I'm sure the similar structures are no coincidence. Ahh, I find this stuff so interesting.


Random Item #2

I'm working on a duck book, a follow-up to Duck for a Day, a chapter book which featured a duck with attitude. I'm not always making the progress I'd like to, for all the usual reasons. Now, thanks to Leonie at Walker Books, if I feel like slacking off, I just look up at my corkboard, shiver a little, and get back to work:

Here endeth the random, at least for now. I must shiver a little and get back to my duck book.

* Image copyright Gary Larson.