Evelyn Juers Speaks Westside
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Evelyn Juers was educated in Germany, Australia and England, with a PhD from the University of Essex (UK) on the Brontës and literary biography. As an essayist and reviewer she has contributed to a wide range of local and international publications. She is co-publisher of HEAT magazine and Giramondo books. In 2009 her collective biography House of Exile was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier's Prize, and it won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for non-fiction. |
Photo: Conrad Del Villar.
At the 2009 Westside: Fill Your Bucket launch BYDS and our guests had the pleasure of listening to special guest Evelyn Juers officially launch the publication. Here is what she had to say... .
There's something about Westside that makes me think of music. Especially, it brings to mind Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's West Side Story. Set in the migrant ghettoes of 1950s New York, this most famous of all musicals is about much more than gang warfare and teenage love. In its day, West Side Story was a shockingly modern reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. When it opened, one critic called it "savage" and "electrifying", a show that "rides with a catastrophic roar over the spider-web fire-escapes...and the plain dirt battlegrounds of a big city feud". To paraphrase another worker-in-song, and a kind of Romeo from a later era, even if "those were the reasons and that was New York", even if cultural phenomena like West Side Story belong to a special time and special place, the metropolis still has much in common with another special place, Western Sydney in the new millenium. And I don't just mean migrants, gangs and young love. Like the Broadway musical, this magazine - Westside - offers an exciting choreography, a dramatic orchestration of diverse voices. It captures the spirit of new energy and passion and heartfelt honesty.
And each in their own way, the contributors have redrawn the line between comedy and tragedy. As I was reading Westside, often an image or a word appeared at once funny and sad, innocent and wise, light and heavy, mental and physical, private and public. The writing you've published thrives on the complexity of your sources and the immediacy of your articulation. It's a heady mix.
Take the fence-walker in Peter Polites' very moving and beautifully structured story Passing of the Eye. The magazine leads with this image of a boy on his way to school, "fence-walking" on a low brick wall. The sun rises behind him and the winter moon sets over the neighbour's olive tree. And we know where we are because there was a time when only migrants in Australia grew olive trees that reminded them of their other home.
The boy creates his own balancing act between cultures, between generations, and between genders. We're all fence-walkers, Zarathustrian tightrope walkers, and this publication is full of the trembling, halting, dangerous and hilarious thrill of it, of what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called "the crossing, not the goal". It's drawn very lyrically by Tim Carroll in his poem The Bridge, and with great physical rawness and metaphysical poise in Fiona Wright's work, and with a kind of navigational walk-on-the-wild-side genius in Luke Carman's Collected Stories (and Luke claims Nietzsche was his English teacher!).
The balancing act: we always hope that the rope we're walking on is nice and tight. We hope we don't trip and fall. And if we do fall?
Then for Rebecca Landon it's a place she knows well, she calls it Here, "Here at the end of the world". Andrew Ma describes what it's like to fall asleep in a clothing bin. Samantha Hogg writes about fear and anticipation in her story Madness and Bliss. For Riem Derbas it's a martini and a knife that topples the protagonist into "the performance of her life". In Nathan Elhosni's poem Jump it's a moment of freedom that all too quickly fills with tragedy.
What I admire about this collection is its optimism. I don't mean silly, or happy-go-lucky, or engine revving or flag waving optimism, but small things - tiny things, glimpses - that signify assurance. Also the optimism of a sense of community. The sense that the writers and their subjects are not alone.That everyone is always talking to someone. Arguing. Questioning. Inviting.
The anthology is called Fill Your Bucket, and while in his editorial Michael Mohammed Ahmad has given some explanations for this title, for me it recalls another piece of music popular in the 1950s, called There's a Hole in the Bucket. I think of this song because of the bucket, but also because of the song's dialogical, digressive, and argumentative structure...just like much of the work in the anthology. Actually, there's a whole (not a hole) in the Westside bucket. I'm even thinking it has a much better outlook than our latest edition of HEAT magazine, which is called Without a Paddle. The difference perhaps, between youth and age.
With a full bucket anything's possible. And in the book there are wonderful surprises: finding Walt Whitman under a broken cabinet at the Whitlam Centre, or in George Toseki's poem: watching Henry Lawson as he stops to look at "drowned vehicles tugged from George's River", and not least the inclusion of the talented work of the finalists of the Youth Week Writing Competition. I love the Romeo and Juliet of Bill Reda's Alleyway Honour photographs, Andy Ko's grieving man who can still "deliver a smile", Felicity Castagna's fingertips and whispers, Tamar Chnorhokian's character Tim Tam making room for herself in a country town, Arda Barut's clean water, Gloria Ahmad's tomorrow, Lachlan Brown's language cracked open by the wind.
The most optimistic work in the entire collection, I'm sure you all agree, is Mohammed's honeymoon sequence. It's a brave and skilful (and lucky) writer who can communicate moments of sheer happiness. His wife Mariam's smile captivates him and the reader with a kind of radiance which these days is rarely found in literature. I almost expect them both - at the Trevi Fountain, at the Colosseum, amongst the pigeons of St Mark's Square - to burst into song and dance through the streets Rome.
In Mohammed's narrative, and in the anthology as a whole, I hear variations of Fiona Wright's "fleshy hum of afternoon sun", and it's something very much like the complicated dark and light music of Westside Story, but in a new and unpredictable setting, somewhere between Wright's Cronulla, Panania, and Lithgow, and beyond, to all the other significant western points of the compass.
It's a great honour to launch this new series of Westside: Fill Your Bucket.
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