Louise Omer | FKA Lou Heinrich

I write about books, faith and women | 2017 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship | Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers shortlistee

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I've moved! Come find me at louiseomer.com

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I'm so lucky to have creative lady friends. Thanks to the excellent Bri Hammond for my latest headshot! You can find more of Bri's work here

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The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

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Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me Has Quietly Blown Me Apart

"Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly one at the heart of the status quo, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not jsut the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so." - Cassandra Among the Creeps This razor-sharp essay collection has me on my knees bowing before Solnit in reverence of her prose and wit. Read. It.

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Hel-LO! Subtext Collective is an artist-run literary collective for emerging writers in Adelaide, South Australia. My gal Aimee Knight and I have been working HARD on our first event, What Editors Want: Demystifying the Writer/Editor Experience. Hosted by Archer Mag ed Amy Middleton, this will be an excellent opportunity to get into the mind of a lit mag editor. Essential for freelancers and journos. Learn more HERE!

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New issue is out now. You can read more about it, you can find it in a shop near you, or you can subscribe and we’ll mail it to you. 

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“The omnipresence of men raping female children as a literary subject, from Tess of the d’Urbervilles to Less Than Zero, along with real-life accounts like that of Jaycee Dugard (kidnapped at 11 in 1991 and used as a sex slave for 18 years by a Bay Area man), can have the cumulative effect of reminding women that we spend a lot of our lives quietly, strategically trying not to get raped, which takes a huge toll on our lives and affects our sense of self. Sometimes art reminds us of life.”

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Phwoar.

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Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.

Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Svetlana Alexievich, talking to Masha Gessen for The New Yorker. While I don't necessarily agree with the simplistic dual system of gender, I have been thinking a lot lately about women writers and the inclusion of emotional expeience into storytelling.

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You guys. I have been listening to the best new podcast! Strangers tell stories "to make us strangers no more" - basically host Lea Thau gives space for people to tell stories about the things that connect us all as human beings: loneliness, hope, courage, disappointment, fury, love. The first, longest part is the person telling their story, and the last ten min or so is Lea deconstructing the story's themes and giving examples from her own life, with her deep voice and slow-paced cadence. She gets to the heart of the matter, seeks out the story's emotional truths in such personal ways. It's the validation and exploration of the emotional experience that gets me. Every time. You can start with the latest episode (and my favourite in my short listening period, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. It features one of my favourite novelists, the gap between dream and reality, and dealing with failure. Excuse me while I explore the entire back catalogue.

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It's November. I AM GETTING EXCITED ABOUT ADELAIDE WRITERS' WEEK! Running 27 Feb - 3 Mar, it's literary love under tall trees in long grass. It's storytelling and talking about storytelling. It's a book tent of a thousand novels. Yes. Yesyesyesyes. There's a gazillion authors being shipped to Adelaide, but here are the ones I'm sah essited for! Patrick deWitt

His second novel, The Sisters Brothers, was crude, absurd, and somehow IRONIC WHILE BEING HEARTWARMING. How can that happen? It's like deWitt changed the physics of the proton and neutron and decided that things that are seemingly opposite to each other can unite. He'll be promoting his latest novel, Undermajordomo Minor. And well. I just have imagined that this man will be a weird and strange festival guest. Charlotte Wood Pretty much everyone I know and admire (ie female writers around the country) have been writing on Facebook posts how Wood's latest, The Natural Way of Thing, shook them to their core and they are still thinking about it while walking with their kids to the playground, on the bus, cooking dinner. While this sounds intimidating and also scary (in the book, women are punished for perceived sexual sins), it also shows that the author is fuck-off awesome for delving into the darkness to discover greater truths about humanity (kind of like Roxane Gay in Untamed State). Also, she has like a treehouse writing shed. If that doesn't make Charlotte Wood the coolest writer in Australia rn, I'm not sure what will. Masha Gessen HelooOOO! The woman who is a LGBT rights activist in RUSSIA? Who deconstructed the men who were behind the Boston Bombings? Whose journalism cuts to the core? Two words. Yes. Please. So. I will see you there.

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"O’Neill has painstakingly depicted a world that validated Emma’s body as “bait” and then normalised the violence against her. It’s a rich tapestry of sexism." You can read my full review of Louise O'Neill's YA novel Asking For It at Right Now.

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Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life--the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses--lead to an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling...

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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feminist curriculums should not merely be isolated to special weeks like “Women in World War II” or “Female Scientists” in otherwise phallocentric subjects the rest of the year round. Instead, we need rethink how maths, sciences, and humanities reproduce gender gaps both at the level of how we frame knowledge in disciplines and how such knowledge gets communicated.

Senthorun Raj's Right Now column on female historians and sexist curriculums.

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I don’t find it difficult to understand why other people have children. I’m just not entirely sure why I would have one. And now that people in the western world are better able to decide whether or not they have children, more in charge of the process than any other known time in history, the decision to have a baby is one that can be cautiously considered.

Read Estelle Tang's essay on the question of children for Interrobang.

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"Clayton had married Crystal Watt in 2003. IN the wedding photos, the new wife was a skank with a horsey face, dark around the eyes, fake-tanned the colour of baby poo, breasts that hung in mid-air, and eyelishes like a child's drawing." Although I object to the word skank, this description made me cackle. My favourite part of J M Green's Good Money. Finally, someone gave fake tan the dressing down it deserves.

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Whiplash-inspired thoughts on living the creative life I watched this the other night and by the end, my palms and armpits were decidedly moist. So stressful! Since it was released last year, you've probably heard about the depiction of a music teacher and a drummer; the mentor relationship is a disturbed mix of manipulation, power and abuse. I kind of hated watching it. So competitive. So egocentric. So male. Blah blah. But I felt a level of inspiration at the all-encompassing commitment that protagonist Andrew showed to being the best. Of course, it was absurd - he cut a relationship short because he wanted to concentrate on his music, he couldn't hold a conversation with his family that wasn't about his work - but his story showed the unwavering dedication of a creative practitioner. In The Conversation, Jazz Researcher Nicolas Pillai wrote:

A common trope of the musician biopic is the suggestion that talent is inherent. But in Whiplash, achievement is the result of agonising work, an incremental and painstaking mastery of discipline.

Anyone who has sacrificed a clear cut career pathway in order to follow creative pursuits will know that you must be pretty fucking good to carve a skerrick of a career. And while a knack for whatever you're doing (drawing, writing, singing) may have come easy when you first picked up a pencil or sang in front of a microphone all those years ago, to become excellent you have to get the hell down to work. You have to get up early and go to bed late. You have to carve out your time, portion it, so that you don't waste any opportunity to build your craft. No one sees those long hard hours in front of a laptop or with a notebook, practicing. Everyone who sees any success you have will think you walked into it. But those private times when you make mistakes and start again and sweat and cry and rage are what will make you great.

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A recurring motif in Whiplash was Andrew's bloody hands. He drummed and drummed until his blisters had blisters and they all popped and his hands were open wounds, smearing dark red on his drumsticks. I don't believe this is an essential part of the creative life. Sacrificing wellbeing to serve the muse is foolish and unsustainable. Sure, there's a certain romance to the tortured artist who is so obsessed with his vision he refuses to eat properly, his ashtray is overflowing, and he hasn't changed his bedsheets in months. Well good luck having a mentally healthy life with that mindset; as I recently found out, people with creative careers are not special wizards, we're normal and we need to take care of ourselves and (in my case) have lots of sleep and eat meals at normal times otherwise your work will suffer AND that's the last thing we want, right? TL;DR - Whiplash made me think about the unseen, unwavering dedication to the craft, and reminded me that ensuring mental wellbeing is part of making work great.

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Hot Links

Boy, do I have some smashing reads for you!

Kat Muscat's columns for Farrago Magazine have been illustrated by The Wheeler Centre

Leslie Jamieson on The Possibilities of the Personal

A fabulous exploration of feminism and porn by Ellena Savage.