Axel Scheffler: 'The book wasn't called 'No Room on the Broom!', Illustrator of the Year, British Book Awards - 2018

14 May 2018, London, United Kingdom

Hello, that's amazing. I'm foreign, so I don't have much to lose in this country. So I'm going to bore you with a three hour speech on Brexit!

I am very grateful to receive this inaugural Nibbie for illustration. I’d like to thank my three main publishers: Macmillan, Scholastic and Nosy Crow; Kate Wilson, who has published me for thirty years; Julia Donaldson, with whom I have forged an extraordinary – and extraordinarily successful – partnership; and I’d like to thank readers – the parents and the children who have grown up with the books I have illustrated; and The Bookseller and the judges who chose me, an foreign EU citizen in Brexit times – that’s a nice gesture.

But I also accept it with a heavy heart and maybe even a slightly bitter feeling – it feels like a consolation prize. Or even a farewell gift. I know that this is not the place for long speeches, but as you are all gathered here, I can’t pretend it’s business as usual. I’ll take only a few minutes, and then the party can go on.

It’s just ten months until “Freedom Day”, the bells will be ringing over the country – next March – and I – and my fellow EU citizens, many working in the UK book industry – are still living in uncertainty. We have, so far, no guarantee that we can still live and work here in the future. In a worst-case scenario, I might not be allowed to stay here by the time my next book with Julia Donaldson is launched.

Michael Morpurgo wrote movingly, “My uncles fought for peace, not for Brexit”. He wrote that Britain doesn’t really like the rest of Europe. And he’s right. That hurts and it makes me sad and angry every day.

The UK has been my home for 36 years. There would have been no Gruffalo without the EU facilitating my study here. And, even if I had, somehow, studied in the UK, I would have had to leave after my studies ended in 1985. So there would never have been the successful Anglo-German joint venture Donaldson-Scheffler.

I know that my contribution is acknowledged here tonight, and, once again, I am grateful.

But I would like to mention another person who came from Germany under completely different circumstances who is here tonight: my friend, Judith Kerr. Here, in this room, you have a refugee from the Nazis and a peace-time EU immigrant giving something hopefully to the families and the economy of the UK. But after the Brexit vote it feels, despite our contribution, as if this country is saying, “It was all a mistake! We don’t really want refugees and migrants in this country.”

A Brexiteer would, of course, say, “Of course we want them when they make money for us.” But how can you gauge the future contribution of a young girl, as Judith was when she came here, or a 25 year-old student, as I was.

It makes me sad, and I worry when I think of a post-Brexit future for the UK families, especially the children, who are growing up with our books. What went wrong? What did they miss, the parents and grandparents who were reading Room on the Broom with its message of the importance of solidarity, partnership, friendship and kindness? The book wasn’t called No Room on the Broom.

So beware, Brexit Britain – if you have no friends in a hostile environment – the dragons may come and get you.

Here is a blog post Axel Scheffler wrote for Nosy Crow, 'Without the EU, there would be no Gruffalo'

Erica Wagner: 'I had no idea what an editor did, but I wrote to Penguin and asked', Dromkeen Medal - 2017

30 November 2017, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Erica Wagner is the children's publisher at Allen & Unwin Australia.

Thank you, Alison, and the Dromkeen Selection Panel and the State Library for hosting this event. And thank you so much to my colleagues, Anna McFarlane and Eva Mills, who nominated me, to the fantastic team at Allen & Unwin – whose cleverness and sense of fun I appreciate so much every day – and to every author, illustrator and colleague I’ve ever worked with – this is your medal too!

This Robert Ingpen created medal symbolises so much for me. I’m conscious of the calibre of the previous recipients, and their formidable legacies, and feel honoured to be part of the Dromkeen story.

I’ve thought a lot about what I wanted to say today – so much thinking, and over thinking, that this 5-minute response was in danger of turning into 5 hours. While it was tempting to tell you about every book I’ve ever worked on, replay the sweet moments of triumph and vindication, and confess to every publishing error and indiscretion I’ve been involved with, I ended up returning to a simple question. Why is it that I’ve spent so much of my life involved with children’s books … almost 40 years in fact, if you start counting when I was 15, crushing boxes at the back of a bookshop in Brighton … ? What has held me here? The answer is short: books bring together my two great loves, literature and art. Books are the perfect package, still as relevant today as ever. And they have been the steady heartbeat to the dramas of my interior life since childhood. I cannot imagine living life without them.

I was a timid child, so books gave me language for my emotions. They enabled me to be a prince, a pharaoh, a wild white stallion! I grew up in a German-speaking household and so German fairytales, and the anarchic words and pictures of Struwwelpeter, Max und Moritz – very cautionary tales about very naughty children – remain indelibly imprinted in my psyche. I read everything – the entire oeuvre of Enid Blyton and endless animal stories, Mad magazines and Donald Duck comics. My siblings and parents all read to me – my sister reading the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when I was 7 … Even my attempts at stealing were book related … it was a copy of Black Beauty that I pushed up my jumper one dark day when I was 10 … intrigued at how easy that was to do …

I have been so lucky to have found – as Agnes Nieuwenhuizen said so eloquently – the right book at the right time. 

It now seems perfectly natural that my teenage bookshop job continued on and off for 10 years while I studied briefly, travelled, lived in a tent and worked on a tomato farm in north Queensland. I wanted to get a life! Be a writer, be an artist… I’m sure my reading of Tolstoy and romance novels was in part responsible for me marrying a poet at 20 and having two children in quick succession. And it was in the bookshop, where I’d returned again to work when my children were small, that I had an epiphany – that I wanted to be an editor – that is, I wanted to work with books but not with the public. I had no idea what an editor did, but I wrote to Penguin and asked, what do you have to do to be an editor? The reply I received – to get any job in the publishing industry and work your way up, and that secretarial skills would be useful – is why I felt able to apply for a trainee editor position in the newly formed children’s department at Penguin books.

I didn’t get that job – my friend Janie Godwin did! – but a few months later, in July 1988, Julie Watts rang, asking if I was still interested … and did I want to come in for a chat … For some reason, she saw something in the young woman I was then – 25, 2 little kids, wearing a rainbow-coloured jumper and feather earrings (my smartest outfit), pretending I was just a little rusty with my non-existent typing skills. Thank you, Julie, I owe you so much, for teaching me everything about editing and giving me that magnificent lucky break.

I still remember my first day at Penguin, so scared that I would be asked to type 100 letters in triplicate, but instead Julie gave me a Victor Kelleher manuscript to read, and Janie kindly showed me (a few times, until it sunk in) how it was that one put paper into a typewriter …

Those were heady years. I was somewhat star-struck by the famous authors and illustrators striding through the corridors of the offices in Ringwood. The creative process remained a mystery, but I did learn quickly that everyone making a book needs something to help them get their work done … and it’s the editor’s job to find out what that is. I discovered that some authors effectively need to be left alone, some need to brainstorm and bounce ideas off you, some need gentle nurturing and some, stern intervention! Later I was to learn that illustrators could construct epic stories inspired by one hero image.

There were launches, conferences and festivals, and the famous Dromkeen dinners - so many ways to feel part of the wider Australian children’s book community – which remains so strong and supportive even today. I was incredibly lucky to work on seminal books with brilliant authors and illustrators – many in this room today – learning on the job, learning to trust the creative process.

At the end of the 90s, a turbulent time in my personal life, I left Penguin to start Silverfish, a new children’s list for Duffy & Snellgrove, at the same time heading overseas to my first Bologna book fair and some months in the US on the Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship. So much happened in that year – things I couldn’t have learnt any other way – but it did end up being a stretch too far, and I finally landed, somewhat bruised, in a new life, with a new blended extended family, at the Rathdowne Street office of Allen & Unwin. My first day was Valentine’s day in the year 2000 – and for the first few months I shared Rosalind Price’s handmade table. Thank you, Rosalind, for picking me up when I was down, and for being such a constant creative support and inspiration.

Allen & Unwin moving to the House of Alien Onion in East Melbourne was the start of yet another chapter, and over the years – as the competition ratcheted up, the book industry was rocked by the GFC, the market became more volatile, and as we realised that things just didn’t work the way they used to, new technology and systems were introduced, our team expanded and changed, we learnt to adapt – some of us kicking and screaming more than others … If this sounds somewhat chaotic, it was …

We had to go back to basics and ask again: What are books and stories for? Of course, they are for children. But where do they fit into the world of screens and endless chatter? Is there still a place for the quieter heartbeat of stories that encourage reflection, a deeper connection? At the most prosaic level, how do we help to keep our company afloat as it wrestles with the relentless financial pressures of rising costs, punishing trade conditions, an increasingly litigious culture. And definitely a more censorious one.

These are crucial moral issues, when so many people depend on you – not just in-house staff and creators, but the entire ecosystem of freelancers ­– editors, designers, photographers – printers, booksellers and our core champions, teachers and librarians, who are under enormous pressures of their own. And it does have an impact on publishing decisions, as we try to balance commercial imperatives with the very different work of nurturing creative people to fulfil their potential …

I honour the creators and champions who have gone before us. And I’m proud of the writers and artists who continue to take chances with stories, with daring imagery, with subject matter. I cheer on the next wave of editors and publishers who remain passionate about Australian voices, who are bringing a fresh perspective on our complex society, who are determined that books should not only reflect our society but inspire readers to be engaged citizens, beyond the algorithms of Facebook, to be thinking and feeling – kind! – humans who can face up to the truth of our past as we head into the future. I believe in our youth, and I believe there is nothing you can’t say to a child - you just have to find the right way of saying it. So they in turn are equipped to find the right book at the right time.

Finally, I want to thank my family, my children and grandchildren, my darling Craig Smith, who have shared this adventure with me, give meaning to everything I do and without whom I would not be here today.

Ursula K Le Guin: 'We need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art', National Book Awards

19 November 2014, New York City, New York, USA

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction — writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want — and should demand — our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It’s name is freedom.

Thank you.

Sean Condon: 'How not to get an agent', The Lunchtime Soapbox, Wheeler Centre - 2012

5 July 2012, Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, Australia

Hello, my name is Sean Condon.

As you may or may not know I was – or maybe am, I’m not too sure anymore – I am or was a writer. I wrote books and stories and articles and funny pieces because I was, I thought, quite good at it and I enjoyed it. I loved the hours and, as everyone knows, you make a lot of money from it and get to hang out with celebrities and catch private jets everywhere. Plus people respect the hell out of you. As a career path, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I had an agent, frequently described as the doyenne of UK literary agents. Her name was Pat Kavanagh. Her friend and client Clive James described her as “beautiful, clever and loved to laugh, but she could also have a blunt way with a fool. She could make publishers shake in their handmade shoes.”

Her roster of clients included Ruth Rendell, Margaret Drabble, Robert Harris, Joanna Trollope, William Trevor, the British poet laureate Andrew Motion, her husband Julian Barnes… And me.

She came to be my agent in a pretty straightforward fashion. This was back in October 2001. I was living in Amsterdam and I’d published three books. I wrote to her, telling her what was what – that it was October 2001. That I was living in Amsterdam, and that I’d published three books and was looking for representation. I expected not to hear from her, ever but she asked to see the ms of my novel and a coupe of weeks later called – actually telephoned me – to say that she liked it and would be happy to be my agent. It was pretty amazing. I met her several times, had lunch once or twice, called her at home once (and spoke to Julian Barnes), she sold my novel to a great publisher and everything was pretty nice and I was happy because, why not? I kept on writing and she kept on representing me and then in October 2008 she died suddenly of a brain tumor.

It was sad and awful and I have nothing glib to say about it. Her support and encouragement meant an enormous amount to me; like most writers – the good ones, anyway – I’m not particularly confident and having someone like Pat in my corner was invaluable.

When I started to consider replacing her, my first thought – and I have to be honest, my first choice – was the Wylie Agency, helmed by my former agent’s arch-nemesis, Andrew Wylie. Pat and Andrew became famous enemies after Wylie famously poached Pat’s client Martin Amis away from her with a half-million pound advance for his 1995 novel The Information. I thought it would be a nice irony to go from her to him, and a 500,000-pound advance would be fine with me, too. The Wylie client list is, to put it mildly, impressive. They represent Dave Eggers, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Elmore Leonard, Raffi Khatchadourian and practically every other New Yorker writer, King Abdullah II, our own Elliot Perlman and someone actually called Adonis (although these last two may in fact be the same person), as well as the Estate of Everybody Who Ever Published Anything. But the problem with the Wylie Agency is, you don’t pick them, they pick you. Or to put it the way they do on their very austere and intimidating website: “The Wylie Agency does not currently accept unsolicited submissions. Not now, not ever. So fuck you.” I added that last bit but you get a pretty strong sense that that’s what they mean. Nevertheless, I wrote to an agent there, Sarah Chalfont, and explained my circumstances. She didn’t get back to me so I knew I’d have to settle for an agency that reps fewer Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners (as well, for some reason, Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, author of 1987’s ‘Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society’).

So I began sending out letters of enquiry (to those agencies who allow such boldness.) But it’s not a simple matter of drafting something snappy and interesting and then doing a mass mail out. Each agency has its own special, individual, frankly pernickety requirements of such letters because they’re all so desperate for an excuse not to read your ms that if you don’t rigorously follow their guidelines – such as, all sentences must begin with the letter Q – they’ll eagerly, almost ecstatically disregard you/your enquiry/your work.

So my letter of enquiry, a template which I tweaked and altered where necessary was this:

Dear Sir/Madam,

My name is Sean Condon; I am writing to see if you might be interested in taking a look at a manuscript I have written.

I should also mention, without wishing to seem arrogant or presumptuous, that I am a published author (Penguin, 4th Estate, McSweeneys, Lonely Planet Journeys and many others have published my work) and that the reason that I am seeking representation is because my former agent, Pat Kavanagh of PFD and United Agents, passed away.

MICHAEL SWEENEY'S METHOD is a [blah blah blah] YA book that was published by Penguin in Australia in late 2007. Briefly, it is about what happens to the young narrator, Michael Sweeney, in his final year of high school when a semi-mysterious American student shows up. It's about doing the right thing, getting into trouble and falling in love. Also, a school production of The Breakfast Club plays a critical role.

I would be grateful if you would consider taking a look at it.

If you like, you can learn a little more about me and my work at sean-condon-writer.squarespace.com

Thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Sean Condon


Over the next few months I sent this letter off to ICM, WMA (where I already had two film agents repping me for film work at the L.A office), Waxman, Levine/Greenberg, Writers House, Foundry Media, Trident Media, Dystel, Cheney Literary, Fine Print Literary, Sanford Greenburger and Associates, Betsy Lerner at Dunow, Carlson, Lerner, Neeti Madan at Sterling Lord, Sarah Burnes at Gernert Agency, Diana Fox fox literary, Jill Grinberg at Jill Grinberg Literary, Jill Corcoran at the Herman Agency, Herman Agency at the Jill Corcoran Group, Julia Churchill at Greenhouse Literary, Agent X at the XYZ Agency and many, many more, including a woman named Susan Hawk at The Bent Agency of Brooklyn, New York.

Almost without exception, the responses I received were along the lines of “you’re a very talented writer” (which is true) but it’s a very difficult marketplace right now (which is also true, but of far less flattering interest to me) and you deserve an enthusiastic agent who can passionately champion your work blah blah blah we wish you every success in finding the perfect agent and publisher for your work.

Except for the one from Susan Hawk at The Bent Agency of Brooklyn, New York.

Hers read:

Dear Sean,

Thank you so much for writing me about your project. I read and consider each query carefully and while yours is not exactly what I am looking for, I would certainly encourage you keep trying. I know your work is important to you and I am grateful that you wrote to me.

All best,

Susan
The Bent Agency
204 Park Place, #2
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Despite the claim of ‘considering each query carefully’ the response sounded suspiciously… generic and oddly hollow. And there was no mention of what a talented writer I was. So I sent another ‘test’ email.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2010

Hello Susan,

I have an idea for a kids' book. It's about a rock named Rock who sits around doing rock-like things such as not moving and coping with the elements. What do you think?

regards,

Sean

After carefully considering my query, she replied:

Dear Sean,

Thank you so much for writing me about your project. I read and consider each query carefully and while yours is not exactly what I am looking for, I would certainly encourage you keep trying. I know your work is important to you and I am grateful that you wrote to me.
All best,

So I wrote:

Dear Susan,
Did you really consider my semi-geological query carefully? Be honest – I can take it.
Yours,
Sean

Silence. I waited patiently for a month or two before sending her a nudge:

Hey Hawkey,

It’s Connie the Rock man here. I haven’t heard from you for a while, I guess because you’re carefully reading and considering my last email with the perspicacity, perspicuity and perspiration that’s put you at the very top of your game (Brooklyn Division). Nevertheless I thought I’d send you this brief update on all things Rock.

I’ve decided on a title for the kids’ book about a rock named Rock who does rock-based things (like not moving, not speaking, not emoting in any way despite suffering many hardships such as being stepped and/or rained on):

Rock: [FULL COLON] My Story; [SEMI COLON] A Tale of Courage and Redemption with a Neat Third-Act Twist; [SEMI COLON] For Children of All Ages. [FULL STOP] A Novel.

What do you think? Please send me the list of publishers you plan on enveloping in a fierce bidding war for this sure-to-be-hot property as soon as you have carefully read and considered this email.

Rockspectfully yours,

Sean

Well, this last one really got her attention and she fired off a response:

Dear Sean,

Thank you so much for writing me about your project. I read and consider each query carefully and while yours is not exactly what I am looking for, I would certainly encourage you keep trying. I know your work is important to you and I am grateful that you wrote to me.
All best,

The months rolled by… Every few weeks I’d receive a delayed and often somewhat patronising reply, such as this one from Julia Churchill at Greenhouse Literary: “While your story has some nice points, I’m afraid it doesn’t stand out quite enough for me.”

Another problem with the ms soon emerged.

“While there really is so much to love here, and while this was a success in Australia, the setting doesn’t quite translate to the American YA market I unfortunately have to pass on this.” So said Kerry Sparks at Levine Greenberg. While Steven Malk at Writers House wrote, “We thought this was a great concept, and that the voice and the setting felt authentic and realistic. However, we worried that the Australian setting and the slow pacing at the beginning would make this a tough sell in the American market, so I'm sorry to say that we must pass on this project. I wish I could be writing with better news, as we do think you are a strong writer.”

It got pretty depressing, hearing over and over again what a tough market it is and how the slow action took place in the wrong country. And in a particularly low moment of rage and despair I wrote this:

Dear Blah

My name is blah and my book is called blah and it is about blah blah.

Among the reasons you may not want to represent it are: it is not set in the USA and certain readers may find this troubling; there are no vampires in it; nobody is really, really hungry.

Please choose one of these and press reply.

Thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely… Blah

Obviously, I never sent this to anyone because I am not crazy.

But I didn’t give up – I didn’t give up because all the advice websites about everything tell you never to give up – and boy are they wrong. I know that now, but I did not know it two years ago.

My not giving up meant going out with yet another round of queries, and one exchange in particular is instructive. Once again it was my usual letter, adjusted according to whatever unique and specific requirements this literary agency demanded, but in this case I was pitching Michael Sweeney’s Method and another novel, called The Third Act…

It’s Thursday, February 4, 2010 11:42 a.m

Dear Sir/Madam,

My name is Sean Condon; I am writing to see if you might be interested in taking a look at two manuscripts I have written.

MICHAEL SWEENEY'S METHOD is blah blah blah

THE THIRD ACT is the story of two friends who, in the early 1970s, drive from New Orleans to Los Angeles with the idea of turning whatever happens to them into the screenplay for a movie. Along the way they meet a mysterious blonde and are pursued by two Mexican killers. And the whole thing is narrated by the ghost of a long-dead Choctaw Indian.

I would be grateful if you would consider taking a look at either or both of
them.

Thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Sean Condon

A few days later I received this:

Thank you for submitting your query to InkWell Management. Unfortunately, your project is not one that I think would be right for our agency at this time.

Publishing is a subjective business, and other agents may well feel differently. I wish you all the best in your search for representation and publication.

Sincerely,

Charlie Olsen

**

And very promptly, I sent back this:

Dear Mr Olsen,

Please take the time to read my polite, correctly-spelled letter of enquiry a little more carefully and make the few slight alterations to the form reply with which you have so heedlessly responded.

Yours sincerely,

Sean Condon

**
Five minutes later:

Sean,

Your book is not for me.

Best,

Charlie

**

Me:

Good lord, Charlie - there are TWO projects mentioned in the enquiry. That would require a plural form of rejection, i.e 'books', 'projects' and 'are'. If you can't even properly absorb a few paragraphs I'd seriously question your ability to apprehend an entire manuscript; of course, I'm only a writer, while you're an agent so you'd probably know better.

SPC

**

Him:

Sean,

What are you hoping to accomplish here? I'm not interested in either project and my name is not 'Dear Sir/Madam' so the personal letter of enquiry wasn't very personal and neither was my response. Best of luck getting it published but I won't be working with you on this.
My best,
Charlie

**

Condon:

Dear Charlie,

What I’m hoping to achieve by this wearying back and forth is that next time you see fit to summarily dismiss an enquiry you will do so with just a little touch of humanity. Being a writer is quite dispiriting enough without being further ground down by a succession of impersonal form letters, and while I’m not suggesting that you tailor a thoughtful, empathetic reply to every feckless sap that arrives in your in-box, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you actually address the content of his or her enquiry. (For example, if a person is pitching more than one project, throw in a couple of ‘s’s when you tell them you’re not interested.) As far as your somewhat petulant outburst of “my name is not 'Dear Sir/Madam' so the personal letter of enquiry wasn't very personal and neither was my response” – the submission guidelines on the Inkwell site allow only for initial correspondence to be sent to info@etc, therefore ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, however personally upsetting this may be to the sir or madam in question, is the only option.

Finally, to your wishing me luck in getting ‘it’ published; you’re very kind, but once again your powers of reading and comprehension desert you. It’s already been published – and not by me, by Penguin – and what I am looking for is a US publisher. And as soon as I stop receiving robotic form letters I’m pretty sure I’ll find one because, as you would be in a position to appreciate if you bothered to read it, it’s a good book.

Here are some more things you might find irritating about me:
http://seancondonauthor.tumblr.com/about

Yours sincerely,

Sean

Olsen:

Sean,

You're vicious. Send me "Michael Sweeney's Method." But if it's something I don't like, don't expect me to write you a two-page paper on why that is so you can sell it with someone else. Deal?

Best,
Charlie

Three months pass until…

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 2:17 AM

Dear Sean,
I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I've read about half of Michael Sweeney’s Method and I don't think it's something I can sell. You have a finely-tuned wit but the story just didn't grab me as much as the idea — I wish I could come back with a positive answer! Thanks for sharing two of your books with me, and best of luck searching for a new agent. If you have anything else you'd like a read on, feel free to send.

My best,
Charlie Olsen

Eventually he passed on both books and that was the end of that. We parted on good terms.

**

By now it had been the best part of a year since I’d begun my search to replace Pat and it was time to review the situation. And during my three-minute review it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from a certain Agent X at the XYZ Agency.

Back in February 2010 she’d responded to my query promptly, nicely and thusly:

Dear Sean (if I may),

Thank you for querying me.

I would be happy to consider MICHAEL SWEENEY'S METHOD. Please email the full ms to me and cc Assistant P in my office at blahblahblah.com

I look forward to reading.

All best,

Agent X

Eleven months and a handful of extremely inoffensive emails to Agent X (cc-ing Assistant P) later, I broke… It wasn’t that I thought there was the slightest chance that this person would want to represent me or that there was the slightest chance that the book might find a U.S publisher; those hopes were long gone, but it just burned me up that after an initially pleasant beginning this person – this human being – could just so coldly ignore me. (I should also point out that she or he was far from the only one; lots of them are more than happy to pretend that you don’t exist, even a tiny bit. But there’s not much you can do about that without seeming harrassing and crazy.) Anyway, I guess that a year of failure and repudiation had finally gotten to me. So I wrote the following email to Agent X, which I realise probably does make me seem a little bit crazy.

Saturday, November 10, 2010 6:34 PM
Subject: Re: Michael Sweeney's Method

Ms (or Mr) X,
I have to confess that I’m somewhat mystified about what may have occurred during our brief correspondence that’s inspired you to treat me and my follow-up enquiries with such contempt. Was the sample of my work that I sent you so utterly wretched that you simply cannot bring yourself even to tell me get lost? Whatever the reason, your resolute ignorance of the polite, patient emails I’ve sent you over the past few months is as dispiriting as it is despicable. I’m sure you don’t give a good goddam what some stranger from the bottom of the world thinks of your basic social morality but if you feel even a slight sense of shame you may find a small measure of consolation in the fact that you’re far from alone in your behaviour, that rude silence in the face of genuine hope is the incredibly lazy, incredibly dismaying default ‘response’ of many others in your profession.

Seven years later I still await her – or his – reply.

**

Recently, in preparation for today, I checked back in with the Bent Agency of Brooklyn NY. This time I wasn’t pitching my story about the rock who does rock-like things; this time I was going with a tried and tested classic – I was pitching Maurice Sendak’s multi-million selling classic, Where the Wild Things Are. Only under a different name. Before sending my pitch through, though, I read some of the advice for aspiring authors they’d posted on their website, just to ensure that mine and Maurice’s idea was on the money.

BENT ADVICE:

Consider your story in your opening, where is your protagonist? Are they doing something mundane like flossing?
NO!
Are they dreaming, or rambling through a monologue, giving the reader too much information before we even know what they’re about?
NO WAY!
Are you writing the moment that will change their life and set them on the first stages of this unstoppable journey they’re about to take?
HELL FUCKING YES I AM!
Or are you starting at point A when there’s not really a point B? WHAT?

March 1 2012

Dear Ms Hawk,

My name is Sean Condon. I am a writer. I’m querying you with an idea.

My picture book is called ‘Erase Main Duck’.* It’s about a kid who has a tantrum and won’t eat his dinner and then he gets in a boat (possibly imaginary) and visits a land where he becomes king of these creatures he finds there and then gets tired and goes back home on the boat (possibly imaginary) and, despite expectations (the kid’s; the reader’s), his dinner is still hot.

It’s for young readers; the word count is 336. I’ll send you all of them – in the right order – if you show even a slight bit of genuine interest in this idea.

Sincerely,

Sean Condon

You can probably guess the nature and tone – perhaps even the exact words – of Susan Hawk’s reply.

* Anagram for 'Maurice Sendak'.

Purchase Michael Sweeney's Method here for kindle and other devices.

Albert Camus: 'For myself, I cannot live without my art', Nobel banquet speech - 1957

10 December 1957, City Hall, Stockholm, Sweden

In receiving the distinction with which your free Academy has so generously honoured me, my gratitude has been profound, particularly when I consider the extent to which this recompense has surpassed my personal merits. Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I. But I have not been able to learn of your decision without comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the country of his birth is going through unending misery?

I felt that shock and inner turmoil. In order to regain peace I have had, in short, to come to terms with a too generous fortune. And since I cannot live up to it by merely resting on my achievement, I have found nothing to support me but what has supported me through all my life, even in the most contrary circumstances: the idea that I have of my art and of the role of the writer. Let me only tell you, in a spirit of gratitude and friendship, as simply as I can, what this idea is.

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.

By the same token, the writer's role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.

None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.

For more than twenty years of an insane history, hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation in the convulsions of time, I have been supported by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to write today was an honour because this activity was a commitment - and a commitment not only to write. Specifically, in view of my powers and my state of being, it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared. These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons - these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction. Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists. And I even think that we should understand - without ceasing to fight it - the error of those who in an excess of despair have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death. In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

At the same time, after having outlined the nobility of the writer's craft, I should have put him in his proper place. He has no other claims but those which he shares with his comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to drawing from his double existence the creations that he obstinately tries to erect in the destructive movement of history. Who after all this can expect from him complete solutions and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road. What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up as a preacher of virtue? For myself, I must state once more that I am not of this kind. I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and my faults, it has doubtless helped me toward a better understanding of my craft. It is helping me still to support unquestioningly all those silent men who sustain the life made for them in the world only through memory of the return of brief and free happiness.

Thus reduced to what I really am, to my limits and debts as well as to my difficult creed, I feel freer, in concluding, to comment upon the extent and the generosity of the honour you have just bestowed upon me, freer also to tell you that I would receive it as an homage rendered to all those who, sharing in the same fight, have not received any privilege, but have on the contrary known misery and persecution. It remains for me to thank you from the bottom of my heart and to make before you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude, the same and ancient promise of faithfulness which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.

Kristen Hilton: 'This novel that is delicate in its detail and strong in its message', When the Lyrebird Calls launch - 2016

27 October 2016, Readings Kids, Carlton, Melbourne, Australia

Kristen Hilton, far right, is a Commissioner at the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission

Acknowledge traditional owners of the land

Because this is a time slip novel I am going to go back about 20 years when Kim and I crossed paths in the ‘Tower of Babylon’ also known as the John Medley building at Melbourne University studying German. A few years later we ended up at the same law firm – not the spiritual heartland for either of us as it turned out and some years later found ourselves sitting side by side at the Professional Writing Course at RMIT. It was during that course, maybe a decade ago that I first heard the voices of Gert and Madeline and it is cause for celebration that those words and ideas now find themselves in this beautiful book, in this lovely new shop (Readings Kids) and I hope, in the future, on school syllabuses.

Because the story is not just a one of imagination, rich character development and intrigue - it tells, in part the story of the development and maturation of our country. As the golden, serious and disappointingly sleazy Master Williamson drafts the laws of the federation, his sister leads the suffragist movement from a clandestine printing press set in Drummond Street not far from here. I wondered as I read of the volatile relationship between these siblings how our country might be different today if Master Williamson has listened more closely to his sister – if the women were at the drafting table instead of holding séances.

The book also points to the other critical civil rights movement which took place around the time, as Percy returns to Corranderk, a thriving Aboriginal enterprise and place of activism. When I go to talk to students about the history of social justice movements and human rights many of them refer to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parkes – this is right and true, but what goes shamefully undervalued is the strong Aboriginal rights activists who have positively shaped our national narrative – people like Peter Coppin, Margaret Tucker, William Cooper – there is enough defiance and spirit in Percy to imagine that he might have belonged to this kin.

In addition to When the Lyrebirds Calls I read another lovely piece of literature this week. It was by a little known writer, Tom Schroeder. He sent me a letter – compelling and brief. In it he wrote:

“Dear Commissioner, it is unfair that women don’t have the same rights as men. If they have the exact same job, they should have the exact same rights. For example, did you know that women don’t get the same payments as men in some jobs. Here is a fact: women were not allowed to vote until 1908. Isn’t that crazy?

Men and women should be treated the same and fairly.’

Yours sincerely

Tom – Grade 2, Wembley Primary School.'

This letter resonated with me for lots of reasons. It is a letter of which Aunt Hen would have been proud, unlikely for her to imagine maybe that it was written by a young boy, and like many of Madeline’s sharp observations, it reminds us that while much has changed - the unbinding of corsets, celebration of the physical prowess of women, greater understanding of gender equity - our progress is not linear and not complete. At one point Nanny scolds Madeline telling her that ‘forthrightness is terribly unappealing in the female sex.’ Today, even in our national discourse, strong women with ideas and assertion are described as ‘shrill.’ Nanny’s hard line did not die with her. If you a woman in this country you are four times more likely to be subject to violence, you are more likely to be poor, you are likely to be discriminated against and the picture is even bleaker if you are a woman of color.

I also used the letter to goad my own grade 2 boy into doing his homework. I read it to him and he said “He is lying Mum.”

I said, “What do you mean? I have been talking to you about the gender pay gap all year.”

 “No,” he said. “There is no way that kid is only in Grade 2.”

But back to this author – when my 5 year old daughter finishes reading Ginger Green I will give her this book. This novel that is delicate in its detail and strong in its message. This novel within which you find characters across centuries of spirit, humour and passion – this book that is about ideas, loyalties and friendship – the collision of cultures and times. A work of lovely literature but also a girls’ handbook for activism.

Kim will tell you this book took 10 years to write and much has changed in her life in ten years and then again, maybe as Madeline reflects, not so much after all, because here we are a stone’s throw from Melbourne Uni, the RMIT writing class just around the corner, hanging out in Readings talking books.

It is a pleasure to commend your book Kim.

You can purchase 'When the L:yrebird Calls' here.

Click here for Sofie Laguna's launch speech.

Bob Ellis: 'All teaching is the business of saving souls', Glenaeon Art Show - 2010

5 November 2010, Glenaeon Steiner School, Middle Cove, Sydney, Australia

I am told to assure you that I eventually get around to the subject.

When I first went to East Lismore Primary School in 1947 there were still bomb shelters in backyards and a fear that a new big war with the Russians would soon break out. There were morning assemblies with oaths of loyalty to the King, rote-learning, rote-spelling, a national anthem, God Save the King, routine schoolyard bullying and a few sharp thwacks of the cane each month – on the hand, not the bottom – which we saw as a ritual of manhood in those days.

As was being in the cadets, playing war games away from home at age eleven, which I, from a pacifist religion, could not do. War was everywhere in our thoughts, and the atomic bomb, whose worst effects we were trained to evade by getting under the desk.

I felt, as a Seventh Day Adventist, an outsider. I could not play cricket on Saturday, nor go to the Saturday matinees at the cinema with my friends. I could not theoretically go to the movies either – there the Devil with heathen images tempted you to sin – though I did sneak out once a week with my mother’s connivance on my bicycle to see at the Star Court, Vogue and Vanity Theatre Alec Guinness movies, and The Ten Commandments and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky. We were God’s peculiar people, Pastor Breadon said and, boy, I felt that way pretty often, sneaking out of the cinema and wondering who had seen me go on.

I was saved, if that is the word I want, and civilised and made whole as a human being by the technological accident of radio which filled my mind with images and stories I cast myself in as they came by night into my crystal set, and a microgroove record of the Marlon Brando-James Mason Julius Caesar, which I can recite by heart, As Caesar loved me, I weep for him, As he was fortunate I rejoice at him, as he was valiant I honour him, and a teacher, Bill Maiden, whom I still see once a month at the Woy Woy fish restaurant to discuss the world’s news, and our long, long memories.

He taught me three times, for two weeks in 1951, for all of 1952, and in Modern History classes at Lismore High in 1957 and ’58. He made us sing, and write stories. He got the class of ’52 to write a novel, A Journey to the South Seas, in ten chapters, and read it out week after week to our peers. Mine concerned surviving dinosaurs on certain Pacific Islands, which Spielberg clearly stole from me forty years later, and the esteem which this gained for an otherwise tiny, bullied, frightened nerd, set me on the course which has made me a writer lifelong.

Bill believed in reading, and soon I was through David Copperfield, Kidnapped, White Fang, The Dam Busters, Boldness Be My Friend and The Sword and the Stone and, as it were, on my way down the road that goes ever on and on, the life of the mind that, through dreaming to order, nourishes our sympathy and takes us through lives not our own to the forks in the road of those lives and their beautiful and terrible destinations.

There were such teachers as Bill in those years, often men who had been in the war and in flapping tents in monsoon rains had read Thucydides in the original Greek and Orwell in orange Penguin paperbacks, but the culture did not favour them. The heroes of my day prevailed at rugby, and the swimming races, and the hundred yards sprints. It was the sissies like me who joined the drama groups, and the debating societies, and drew in charcoals and wrote satirical poems, and were more or less reviled for it.

 I did not know that at that time the first Steiner Schools were beginning in this country and the kind of education I could barely imagine, powered by hundreds of teachers like Bill Maiden, was creeping into the leafier suburbs and stirring to magical thinking children my age.

But every now and then I glimpsed it. I had an eight millimetre projector, and some Chaplin films. I had a record of Orson Welles and Bing Crosby reading The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, and a record of The Snow Goose, the fable of Dunkirk, starring Herbert Marshall as the hunchbacked hero in his little boat. My mother drove me to Mullumbimby one night to see Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and the Young Elizabethans came to town with Twelfth Night.

It was a near-run thing. A scholarship, narrowly discarded, bounced back to me, and I arrived a week late at Sydney University where Robert Hughes, Les Murray, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Bruce Beresford, John Bell, John Gaden, Richard Wherrett, Richard Butler, Richard Bradshaw, Richard Neville, Michael Kirby, Mary Gaudron, Graham Bond and Geoffrey Robertson, were all in attendance, and soon, in the drama societies and the newspapers and magazines, and the pub talk and the philosophic wrangle I entered the world I had nearly missed.

It always happens in clusters, I learned then, as Glenaeon proves every year.

To say a life of the mind is a good thing to embrace and a useful nourishment of your one life on earth is still not as universally accepted, now, I think, as it was for a while in the nineteen sixties and early seventies. Our current Prime Minister has never read an adult novel. The last American President did not read a book after university. Margaret Thatcher on achieving office had not been to a play at the National Theatre. All over our university system, cut courses in history studies, and music studies, and fine arts and art history, and Latin, and Greek and archaeology, and even Persian though it was Persian scholars who cracked the Ultra Code in World War 2 and won it, thinned the blood of our learning and drove good teachers, great teachers, into early drunken retirement in Queensland and unpleasant climaxes to once promising lives.

These are not small matters because, as all here well know, a young person whose life is deprived of art, and participative art, or music or word music, or dance or the explored past, may end badly, in drug-pushing, or stalking, or real estates, or worse. Adolf Hitler did not achieve the art scholarship he yearned for and would, I think, have been saved by, and found in World War I and its lessons a different course for his life, and sixty million others.

All teaching is the business of saving souls. But the business of Steiner is greater than that. It is the summoning to a soul of its better angels who uplift to a high plane of possibility that creative magic, that unstoppable glittering energy, that may change the world.

An extraordinary film now showing, The Social Network, the best film about American greed and American competitiveness and American hubris and American vengefulness since Wall Street, shows a life ill-chosen by a brilliant young man with Michelangelo possibilities who opted instead for the remorseless pursuit of billions through an adult toy of no great worth called Facebook, a sort of postcard brimming with trouble, when he might, had he been here, had he studied here, have been a painter, or puppeteer, a song writer, a set designer, a beloved friend of good friends instead.

I have two angelic children formed and shaped by the Steiner system and its celebration, its drawing out, its enhancement and congratulation of human possibilities. And I know how close each came to destruction before they arrived within its rooms and corridors of love. I know how much I owe, and I stand on the dock observing the voyage out of a future generation in a time more testing in its choices and its temptations than any before it, and I toast it, and I wish it bon voyage.

This exhibition is a measure of the great artistic diaspora of the children of Glenaeon whose homeward yearning far-off angel hearts remember from far Babylons of exile and longing how good it was, for a time, and what a time it was, it really was, in these hallowed rooms with these magic weapons of brush and charcoal, canvas, easel and sketch-pad, re-imagining the word.

William Faulkner: "Man will not merely endure" Nobel acceptance -1950

10 December 1950, Stockholm, Sweden

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969