Skip to main content

What I am Most Looking Forward to- Gail Jones ‘The Art of Writing’


Though there will be a variety of authors attending this year’s Writers Festival in Mildura who will all bring something new and fascinating to our arts education, for me personally I have felt drawn in with mysterious fascination by the Australian writer Gail Jones, whose collections of work have peaked my curiosity into what kind of insight she will provide in her talk ‘The Art of Writing’, alongside Helen Garner with Michael Meehan.

At first when I begun to research the festival program and the people who would be holding the sessions, Jones seemed to be someone who stood out to me the most for honestly no particular reason. It was after looking into her articles of work and coming across her novel A Guide to Berlin (2015) that I began to grow interested in her as an author.  
Mildura Writers Festival guest author: Gail Jones

At first I thought the novel was simply just what it says in its title; that it was a tour guide for Berlin; but in actual fact it is a novel that revolves around international travellers from all around the world, who meet in Berlin and share their individual stories, with an unexpected act of violence changing everyone’s lives. As I absolutely adore reading mystery novels as well as adventurous ones, the premise of her novel intrigued me and drove me to continue my research yet I was stumped almost immediately, as all I could really find was her Penguin Books biography.

Though I have only just purchased a copy of A Guide to Berlin, I look forward to hearing Jones speak at the festival, and hopefully getting the chance to ask her how she managed to create the premise of such a thrilling novel, raising questions as to what kind of research and thought process that would go into creating this type of story. It is endearing for me personally as I feel as though I have someone whom I can look up to and know that success is possible for Australian female writers.

I wish to finish A Guide to Berlin by the end of the festival and post a review of the novel online, hopefully being able to add some comments that will come out of Gail Jones session as well. 
Edited by Sue Gillett
Originally uploaded to the official WIA blog 10 July 2017 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Voice Inside the Writer

[This piece is written about my experience of hearing the writers read out their works on the final day of the festival, which provided a whole new dimension to hearing and seeing the characters and settings in their novels.] S omething I found to be quite extraordinary was the emotions in the voices for the writers, who all created something so powerful when they read the words out aloud from the pages of their novel, bringing the characters out into the world and giving them life. Unlike the thoughts in my short poem ‘I am a child to my emotions' where I spoke about how we all recognize characters in a certain way, it is from the authors readings that this idea is challenged. The audience was able to witness the true uniqueness of these characters, and listen as they came alive though the voice of the author who created them.  Though there where many readings on the final Sunday sessions, it was Helen Garner and Jason Porter's reading session that struck me the most,
Post a Comment
Read more

A Guide to Berlin (2015) novel review

"The power of connections"- A review of Gail Jones' A Guide to Berlin (2015) Photo taken by Erica Little S et within the wintery European city of Berlin, A guide to Berlin (2015) is a powerful narrative driven by the emotional connections between a group of foreigners and their personal stories. As a veteran Australian writer, Gail Jones brilliantly captures the individualism of each person’s life and culture in her novel, as they are simply outsiders who stick together in foreign country. Despite their commonality however, a single ripple effect through the group divides them and eventually forces them to collide. This novel centres around the main character Cass, an Australian who journeys to Berlin and joins a group of travellers from all around the world for a ‘speak memory’, in which they disclose the intimate stories of their lives and how they came to be the person they are today. As the reader follows Cass throughout her journey in getting
Post a Comment
Read more