She-Creatures

Michaela McGuire (pen and paper out of shot)

In literature, women writers continue to battle the ‘commensensical’ notion that their work concentrates on the intimate and the domestic while men’s literary domain is the universal. Indeed, women have historically been confined to the private sphere and done much of their writing as personal communications: diaries and letters.

Both the confessional and the intimate qualities of correspondence will be highlighted at Women Of Letters, a new monthly event co-curated by writers Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire, at which an all-female lineup will read out letters they’ve written to a particular theme.

The letter as literary form has plenty of precedents: epistolary novels, Dear John letters and literary voices that address a particular reader or listener. But McGuire tells The Enthusiast that the public, performative aspect of Women Of Letters “will naturally give the form a fresh spin.”

She adds: “I think it will be fascinating to see how much of this traditional privacy each of our women chooses to divulge in a public forum.”

Because of its personal address, letter-writing undeniably packs a great emotional punch. Andrea Goldsmith wrote a terrific essay for Meanjin in 2008 that expressed this far more eloquently than I can here, but I can testify that just this week, I looked on with wistful envy as my housemate – who hails from Perth – received all manner of interesting-looking, hand-addressed envelopes for his birthday, while I received crappy superannuation reports and postcards from the vet addressed to my cat.

When I was a kid, my best friend and I maintained a daily correspondence – even though we saw each other at school every day – and I vividly remember rushing to the mailbox in order to make the 6pm delivery deadline. I suspect I’m not the only one to feel nostalgic about physical mail.

“Definitely,” McGuire says. “Over the last couple of years in particular, with the advent of the Kindle and the iPad, et cetera, there’s more concern about physical texts becoming obsolete. Marieke and I are both perhaps a bit too obsessed with books – we tend to carry around enormous handbags stuffed full of them at all times – and many of the women who are involved [in Women Of Letters] have similar tendencies. Clare Bowditch, for instance, who is one of our April guests, has been writing ‘Open Letters’ to her fans for years.”

At a young age, McGuire’s letters hinted at the kind of yarn-teller she would grow up to become. In grade five, she was encouraged to exchange letters with a American pen pal to learn about a different culture.

“It was eight weeks before my teacher discovered – after receiving a complaint from my pen pal’s teacher in the States – that I’d been using my powers for evil and had convinced my unsuspecting correspondent that I travelled to school in a kangaroo’s pouch. And that we had no electricity in Australia, and ate witchetty grubs for breakfast, and used didgeridoos instead of telephones. All that sort of nonsense.”

Following the publication last year of her first book Apply Within: Stories Of Career Sabotage, McGuire has racked up plenty of experience speaking on panels at writers’ festivals and “in conversation” events. She’ll act as moderator at the first three events (after which Hardy will take over), and is hoping for a lively salon atmosphere.

“I think Women of Letters has great potential to become known as an afternoon in which incredibly smart and funny ladies, who perhaps would not otherwise be inclined to do so, share their intelligence and humour with an eager audience,” McGuire says. “I’m quietly confident that it will be a great deal of fun.”

The event also encourages participants to put pen to paper themselves. During a musical break spun by a roster of guest DJs, “we’ll be encouraging audience members to write letters of their own to whomever they feel compelled to get in touch with, and we’ll have stamps and envelopes on hand and will post them off at the end,” says McGuire. “Much like children’s letters to Santa.”

There’ll also be a dialogue with the audience, for which McGuire will be “harassing people to write little anonymous notes that include either a question or a point of conversation that they would like the panellists to address.” She’s hoping for a mixed bag: some serious “Q&A-type questions as well as “TELL MYF SHE’S HOT”-type notes.”

Speaking of whom, “Television’s Myf Warhurst” is one of five panellists at this Sunday’s opening event, along with comedian Judith Lucy, musician Angie Hart, and the Statler and Waldorf of Australian publishing, writer Lorelei Vashti and publisher Caro Cooper.

“We’re attempting to ensure that there is a really varied mix of women each month – in terms of their personalities, professions and voice projection,” McGuire explains. “The general criteria for the women is that they should be funny, clever and just a bit awesome.”

Each month, participants pen a letter ‘to’ a particular theme. This month, it’s “Nights you’d rather forget”. When The Enthusiast asks McGuire for an example from her own past, she demurs at first – “I’m quite sure that as moderator I get to dodge that particular bullet” – but thankfully caves and offers “the time I was chased by a garbage truck down Brunswick Street”.

“The gentlemen inside yelled, ‘Don’t worry love! We’ll give you a lift!’ and I politely declined their offer because, well, rape. But they were quite insistent and kept telling me to just ‘Hop right in’,” she recalls.

“I laughed, told them that although it would probably be a fitting end to my night to get driven home in a garbage truck I was just going to get a cab, and then started walking down the street towards the taxis. But they began reversing the truck and impeding my access to the cabs, and so I started walking faster and faster and they began reversing more and more quickly until eventually I was sprinting down Brunswick Street away from a garbage truck. Those are the moments that stay with you.”

The event co-curators met when McGuire was a guest on Hardy’s triple j breakfast show. Both women subsequently moved to Melbourne, “and so now I drop round and amuse her with my atrocious ping-pong skills. We’ve bonded further over a shared love of literature, wine and bearded musicians.”

When asked if she’d help “concoct a sort of literary event that would involve interesting, smart and witty ladies,” McGuire leapt at the chance. “We threw a couple of ideas around, but Marieke was the one to ultimately come up with the letter writing angle. Her ideas tend to be quite marvellous.”

Events such as Women Of Letters are important precisely because the marginalisation of women has not ended with genteel lady correspondents relegated to their parlours, but continues to pervade the publishing industry. Our leading literary award is named after Miles Franklin, a woman author who went by a man’s name in order to get her work published. Of the 52 prizes so far awarded, only 12 have been to women… and four of those went to Thea Astley alone.

In a recent interview, terracotta-skinned chick-lit douchebag Nicholas Sparks was at pains to deny that his novels are womanly ‘romances’, instead comparing himself to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare and even Ernest Hemingway. “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do,” he says.

And as young adult fiction author Lili Wilkinson recently fulminated, there are more women authors, more women publishers, and more women readers than men. Yet books by women are rarely studied in high school, and only two of the last 20 Booker Prize winners have even had a female protagonist.

Stuff like this continues to remind us of the importance of genuinely championing women’s voices. So The Enthusiast was more than a little disappointed to find that Women Of Letters was not, in fact, dreamed up to showcase the talents of women, but to raise money for animals – specifically, for Edgar’s Mission, a shelter for neglected and abused livestock. A pun-heavy article in The Age about the event has Marieke Hardy posing with two hogs and speaking about her veganism.

Wouldn’t a charity that helps women be a better fit? “No, not at all,” McGuire insists. “Women of Letters actually came about because we wanted to raise money for Edgar’s Mission. That was the impetus for putting on the event, and we thought it might be easier and a lot more fun to host a panel of brilliant women rather than a collective of farmyard animals. Hopefully our audience will agree.”

The inaugural Women of Letters will be held at Bella Union, Trades Hall, Melbourne, on Sunday 28 March at 2:30pm. Entry is $10.

No related story.