Dear Madman

THE WORLD OF DEAR MADMAN

/ Edwina Shaw / 2 Comments
Laidley Corn Day

Laidley Corn Day

This is the world I’ve been living in for the past few years as I’ve been researching and writing my latest project, Dear Madman, a novel based on a tragedy that has haunted my family for generations. Laidley is a town in the Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane where the story is predominantly set, one hundred years ago.

I love this photo because it captures just how “edge of nowhere” it was back then. I am especially intrigued by the girl on the pony in the middle on the far right. Pinafore and all. Who is she and where is she going? She could even be one of my great aunts.

For a long while I had this picture pinned up beside my desk to remind me where my characters were living. For them, this was the nearest big town.

I loved living in this quieter time and place where I could hear the thud of horses hooves and my own footfall, not the constant stream of traffic flowing past my home now in busy Brisbane.

I’ve finished the latest draft and have sent it off with fingers crossed and candles lit. But now I’m left, relieved in one way to be free of the madness and violence at the heart of this story, but sad too that I have lost this slower, simpler world.

WRITING THE BODY/EMBODYING THE WRITING

/ Edwina Shaw / 2 Comments
Writer dancer

Dancing the writing?

As a practitioner of both writing and yoga, I have long been fascinated by the challenge of putting the visceral experience on the page. For how do you accurately portray the experiences of the body in words alone?

Using specific sensory details is important, without filters such as “I could feel”, “I could hear”, “I noticed” etc. Not, I could feel the sun on my face, but The sun hit my face. Not – I started to cry, but My tears tasted of the sea.

However, when it came to expressing the deepest of human emotions, pure joy, the silent anguish of loss, words have many times failed me.

Over the past few years, I’ve been working with the performance dance students at the Queensland University of Technology. You couldn’t wish for better yoga students – incredible athletes, and determined, sensitive artists. I have nothing but praise for them and the art form of dance. Surely the most demanding of all the arts.

For it is there, through dance and music, that the rawest of emotions can find expression, through the body, through sound. In ways that are impossible with words alone.

Lately I have become intrigued by the idea of embodying the writing, rather than the other way around. I’d love to take the core emotional events from my current project, “Dear Madman”, and create some sort of narrative dance cycle. But where to start?

I’ve been talking with Jennifer Roche, one of the lecturers and choreographers at QUT and she’s willing to let me in on some of the secrets of choreography – the art of story-telling through movement. Can’t wait!

So, how do you write the body? Have you found a way to express those voiceless cries in prose, or poetry?
Any secrets you’re willing to share?