#betweenstates

The body loosens its edges. Gravity hesitates. What remains is not a figure, but a trace — a brief disturbance in the rhythm of the world.

Movement forgets its origin, light forgets its task. Between falling and rising, something unnamed insists on being felt.

The first event of the Mildura Writers Festival was my writing workshop this morning, held in the Theatre Club at Mildura Brewery. 

We had a full house for discussion (and a whole lot of gabbing from me) under the title Between States: Writing at the edges  — a workshop about borders, states and edges, and how they shape our writing.

Here in Mildura — at the border of three states, edged by river and desert — that seemed a suitable overarching concept.

We looked at three main ideas:

1. STATE OF ORIGIN How, where and why do we identify ‘home’? Does our identification with home affect our writing, or its reception?

2. BORDER PATROL Consider the border between fact and fiction — does it exist, where does it lie, and how might we cross it, break it down, or straddle it?

3. THE CONFLUENCE Half an hour’s drive from Mildura is the confluence, where the Darling River meets the mighty Murray. We talked about confluence in the sense of merging and meeting, the flowing together of people or cultures or ideas, in relation to writing.

Though I try to avoid writing cooking scenes these days (back when I started trying to write fiction, it was a device I used, and overused), one morning this week I wrote a scene for my novel-in-progress in which one of the characters bakes a cake (it’s a plot point, trust me). There’s some business with eggs: half shells rest and rock on the table, broken fragments finding their balance.

That evening, my housemate for the rest of the month arrived. Junichiro Iwase is an artist who lives in Canada. He’s here to create a piece for the Mildura Palimpsest Biennale in October. I’d briefly looked up Junichiro’s bio on the Biennale website, seen the image of one of his artworks there, but hadn’t (consciously) noticed something fundamental about it, the material it’s made from: the cleaned half shells from broken eggs.

Junichiro, while he’s here, will be creating a new work for Mildura Palimpsest, using egg shells. He’s interested in surfaces, in outsides and insides visible at once. As it turns out, that’s one of the ideas that runs through the novel I’m working on: insides and outsides, and the spaces between.

Confluence is a word used to talk about the coming together of ideas, or of people; where things or people or ideas flow together, or merge. Call it coincidence, call it confluence, call it serendipity — or just eggs in the air — but I love the fact of this small eggy overlap between my writing and Jun’s artwork.

I’m interested in exploring confluence, actual and conceptual, while I’m here in Mildura. This weekend, I plan to cross the river (the border) into New South Wales (this is no big dramatic journey; the bridge across the river is near the end of the street where I’m staying). I’m going to head to Wentworth (half an hour away) to see an actual confluence: where the Darling River meets the mighty Murray.

Links: Junichiro Iwase at Mildura Palimpsest

Walking by the river, I met a woman. I was wondering about the seagulls — why are they here, so far from the sea? — and she was taking photos of the pelicans, to send to her daughter overseas: Mister Proud, Mister Ponder and Mister Percival say hello.

She told me that the pelicans aren’t always here. She thinks maybe they’ve come — the seagulls too? — because the river is low (there’s work being done on the weir).

The river's low.

Pelicans, seagulls, the low river, the bridge across the border.

I find myself drawn (in my writing and otherwise) to borders, doorways, edges, and the spaces in between. 

What struck me about Mildura, when I first started thinking about a proposal to submit for the Mildura Writers Residency, was the sense of it being a border town, between states, at the edge of the desert. Inspired by the geographic, ecological and politico-cultural location of Mildura, I proposed a theme for my 2015 residency: Between states: Writing (and reading) at the edges. I wrote in my proposal:

Mildura is at the border of three states — Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia — with the Murray River a very real, very physical delimiter, a reminder of the state of being liminal. I’m Australian, but moved to New Zealand in my thirties and have lived there for nearly twenty years now, so I live and write between the geo-cultural states of ‘New Zealander’ and ‘Australian’, identifying with elements of both.

During the residency, in these blog posts for the festival, I’ll focus on and develop that theme — writing (and reading) between states — as well as documenting my experience of the residency itself.

You can expect digressions and distractions (and the odd photo) on laneways, doorways, lines and edges.

Laneway #1: the space between

At the risk of sounding like Johnny Cash: Hello, I’m Tracy Farr.

I flew into Mildura on 1st July, to take up the inaugural Mildura Writers Festival Residency. During the month that I’m here, I’ll be posting regularly to this blog, documenting my experience of the residency itself, the Mildura Writers Festival in the middle of the month, and the creative project I’m working on while I’m here. I’ll also document my responses to being — for the first time — in Mildura.

But for this first post, there’s just this observation (on observing): on my first day in Mildura, and every day since, my attention’s been drawn to the sky. 

Lines on the darkening sky; and a bird caught in flight, at the edge of the frame.