Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Our colleagues that Read This
Speaker 1: routinely hosts the brightest and best writers from Australia and
Speaker 1: around the world. Today, we're going to hear from Geraldine Brooks.
Speaker 1: Geraldine is an Australian American writer who began her career
Speaker 1: as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Her
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four book Nine Parts of Desire was in
Speaker 1: fact one of the reasons that I wanted to become
Speaker 1: a journalist. I loved her ability to access the inner
Speaker 1: worlds of these women in countries that I hope to
Speaker 1: one day be able to visit. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: her novel March was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Speaker 1: Since then, she's published several more books of fiction, including
Speaker 1: her latest Horse. Michael Williams is the host of Read This,
Speaker 1: and he's with me now. Hi Michael, Hi Ruby, Great
Speaker 1: to see you again. I am such a fan of
Speaker 1: Geraldine Brooks writing. Have you been also following her career
Speaker 1: for a while?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Look, massive fan as well. And in fact, the
Speaker 2: Geraldine Brooks episode that people are about to hear today
Speaker 2: was the one that we kicked off the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four season with and it was kind of a very
Speaker 2: deliberate choice. We had a chance to sit down and
Speaker 2: chat to Geraldine. Her most recent novel, Horse is terrific.
Speaker 2: But she's also one of those people who's so thoughtful,
Speaker 2: not just about what she writes, but about what she
Speaker 2: reads and the ways in which influence plays a huge
Speaker 2: role in her work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember her thoughtfulness and the way that she reflected
Speaker 1: on her role as a journalist as she was doing
Speaker 1: the journalism that informed her work that I found really
Speaker 1: inspiring when I read it as a teenager. In this episode,
Speaker 1: you asked Geraldine about her life sentence, So a piece
Speaker 1: of writing advice that has stayed with her? Why were
Speaker 1: you interested in hearing about that from Geraldine.
Speaker 2: The life sentence format, which we use occasionally for read
Speaker 2: these episodes, stems from a column that we do each
Speaker 2: month in The Monthly where we ask contributors to reflect
Speaker 2: on a piece of advice. Maybe it's an old lyric
Speaker 2: from a song or a quote from a work of
Speaker 2: literature there or that has really stayed with them that
Speaker 2: kind of permeates their day to day routine and their
Speaker 2: creative routine as well. Something that underpins the way they
Speaker 2: see the world and the way they write about it.
Speaker 2: So the opportunity to ask a writer like Geraldine Brooks
Speaker 2: who's made that transition from award winning journalist to novelists
Speaker 2: and has thought about storytelling through all these different prisms
Speaker 2: felt like a really great opportunity.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to hear what she says. Coming up
Speaker 1: in just a moment, How Geraldine Brooks became a novelist?
Speaker 2: Okay phone off, microphone on headphones twenty twenty four, We
Speaker 2: are Back? Where were we? Geraldine Brooks is that rarest
Speaker 2: of things. A literary bestseller, her two thousand and five
Speaker 2: novel March, a retelling of Little Woman, won a Pulitzer Prise.
Speaker 2: She's written historical novels about plagues and Puritans, about the
Speaker 2: writing of the Bible, and in her most recent novel, Horse,
Speaker 2: about the greatest race horse in American history. Her readers
Speaker 2: hang onto her vivid retellings of history and literature, but
Speaker 2: they also hang on her every sentence because on the
Speaker 2: line she's gorgeous. This combination of the poetic and the
Speaker 2: forensic see for me, I love reading Geraldine Brooks's novels
Speaker 2: because she's one of those writers whose turn of phrase
Speaker 2: is mesmerizing. I'll stop reading and share passages with whoevers
Speaker 2: in the room. I'll take photos of paragraphs and send
Speaker 2: them to friends, like some kind of instagrammer eating a
Speaker 2: particularly photogenic meal. Geraldine Brooks writes sentences, so when I
Speaker 2: asked her to offer a life sentence for Read This,
Speaker 2: a turn of phrase that had stayed with her or
Speaker 2: resonated in her life or in her work since she
Speaker 2: first came across it, it made perfect sense that she
Speaker 2: might choose a scene for its elegant beauty from Schwartz Media.
Speaker 2: I'm Michael Williams, and welcome back to Read This, the
Speaker 2: show about the books we love and the sentences that
Speaker 2: make them. French novelist Andre McKean won that country's two
Speaker 2: most prestigious literary prizes with his nineteen ninety five book
Speaker 2: Dreams of My Russian Summers. It's a novel about memory
Speaker 2: and loss, one that grapples with the weight and expectations
Speaker 2: of history and the ways in which it shapes and
Speaker 2: distorts the personal. I'm not surprised that for Geraldine Brooks,
Speaker 2: pre eminent author of historical fiction, it's a book that
Speaker 2: resonated at several levels. Here she is with the sentence
Speaker 2: from that novel that has stayed with her.
Speaker 3: By now she knew that this life, despite all its pain,
Speaker 3: could be lived. That one must travel through it, slowly,
Speaker 3: passing from the sunset to the penetrating odor of the stalks,
Speaker 3: from the infinite calm of the plane, to the singing
Speaker 3: of a bird lost in the sky. Yes, going from
Speaker 3: the sky to that deep reflection of it that she
Speaker 3: felt within her own breast as an alert and living presence.
Speaker 2: Geraldine Brooks, thank you so much. What a treat to
Speaker 2: be read to, and what a gorgeous choice. Maybe if
Speaker 2: you could kick us off by telling us a bit
Speaker 2: about why that passage stands out for you.
Speaker 3: I was reading dreams of my Russian summers for the
Speaker 3: first time in a pretty difficult year for me. It
Speaker 3: was two thousand and four and I was being treated
Speaker 3: for breast cancer and you never know how that's gonna go.
Speaker 3: And I'm very happy that it's almost what twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: and it's just a bad memory and a couple of
Speaker 3: fading scars. But at the time, you're right in the
Speaker 3: thick of contemplating your mortality. For me, for the first
Speaker 3: time quite seriously, because I'd always been in denial about that.
Speaker 3: Even when I was in crazy situations covering wars and whatnot,
Speaker 3: I always felt invulnerable. But there was something about getting
Speaker 3: to that point in the book. And he's writing about
Speaker 3: his grandmother who was trapped in Siberia by the outbreak
Speaker 3: of World War One, and her husband has gone off
Speaker 3: to fight, and as far as she knows, he's dead,
Speaker 3: and of course conditions have been terrible. But this idea
Speaker 3: that the sad and the happy, the beautiful and the terrible,
Speaker 3: they're all going to work side by side in your life.
Speaker 3: You're never really going to be in one steady state,
Speaker 3: and you have to accept that and still be open
Speaker 3: to the beauty as well as accepting the grief and
Speaker 3: the pain.
Speaker 2: Oh I love that acceptance and openness and steadiness. It's
Speaker 2: kind of seeking stillness despite being buffeted at all sides.
Speaker 2: Does that resonate with you were still person?
Speaker 3: No? Not really. Every time I go to yoga class
Speaker 3: and we get to the end and you're lying in savasna,
Speaker 3: all I can do is think about all the things
Speaker 3: I should be doing if I wasn't lying in Sevastna.
Speaker 3: For me, the only time I've ever experienced the full
Speaker 3: bee here now is on the back of a horse,
Speaker 3: because if you're not there now, you'll be on the
Speaker 3: ground very soon after.
Speaker 2: Fair enough. But you only came to horse riding at fifty.
Speaker 2: Do I have that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I was in my fifties, because that's relatively late to
Speaker 2: find the thing that gives you permission to be still.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Because for me reading it's a bit like that
Speaker 3: Andre McKean experience. You're associating it it always with things
Speaker 3: in your own life. And I should also say that
Speaker 3: the reason I love that sentence is as a writer,
Speaker 3: it's just a magnificent sentence. The punctuation is incredibly complicated.
Speaker 3: You're breathing on the semi colons and the commas. It's
Speaker 3: a long, single sentence, and I'm just blown away by
Speaker 3: it technically, So I'm never one hundred percent there in
Speaker 3: the book because I'm thinking, wow, this is really beautifully written,
Speaker 3: or I'm thinking, yes, he's got that right, because it
Speaker 3: associates with something in my own life that.
Speaker 2: Makes perfect sense. But that seems inherently sad to me
Speaker 2: that as a writer you might not be able to
Speaker 2: just read for joy. I mean, are you always aware
Speaker 2: of the mechanics reading as a writer?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Look, no, sometimes not. And when that happens, the minute
Speaker 3: I finished the book, I go back and start it again,
Speaker 3: to read it for the cross. Yeah no, I do
Speaker 3: that myself, get carried off by story and emotion and
Speaker 3: the reality that the writer has created.
Speaker 2: Have you changed as a reader throughout your life?
Speaker 3: I think we all do, don't we. I mean, the
Speaker 3: more tread you get worn off your tires just by living,
Speaker 3: the more you can see. I mean, all those classic
Speaker 3: books that they marched us through in high school, they
Speaker 3: were great, It was a great experience, but when you
Speaker 3: come back to them, having actually lived, you read them
Speaker 3: as a completely different book.
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more. It's one of the great delights,
Speaker 2: I think, is to go back to a book that
Speaker 2: you either read too young, or that your reading of
Speaker 2: it was kind of consumed by some wider cultural context
Speaker 2: rather than the book itself, and then you come back
Speaker 2: to it and you discover the magic on the page,
Speaker 2: or the ways in which it confounds your expectations. I
Speaker 2: adore that feeling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I I used to read a lot
Speaker 3: to my kiddos before they could read for themselves, and
Speaker 3: it's you know, there was really a day that really
Speaker 3: amused me. We'd been reading the Philip Pullman his Dark
Speaker 3: Materials trilogy, and talk about a book that I was
Speaker 3: getting on entirely other levels to what my eight year
Speaker 3: old son was getting in terms of the Milton references
Speaker 3: and the string theory and all that. When we get
Speaker 3: to the end, and it's this absolutely heartbreaking bit whether
Speaker 3: two young protagonists realize that they have to go back
Speaker 3: to their own universes and they talk about how they're
Speaker 3: going to sit on this bench at Oxford at the
Speaker 3: same time every year in their separate universes. And I'm
Speaker 3: in absolute floods of tears, and my son is like, Mom,
Speaker 3: could you stop crying and just get on with the
Speaker 3: story because he hadn't experienced deep romantic love like that.
Speaker 2: You know, no, of course, But tell me, were you
Speaker 2: read too when you were a kid? Did your parents
Speaker 2: read to you?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yes, that was one of the great things of
Speaker 3: my childhood. We didn't have a lot of material stuff
Speaker 3: when I was growing up, but books were huge, and
Speaker 3: we would go to the library every weekend and we'd
Speaker 3: all come back with our stack. You know, my parents
Speaker 3: were voracious readers, and my dad read to me every
Speaker 3: night from six thirty to seven, and wherever we were
Speaker 3: at at seven o'clock, that was where we left it.
Speaker 3: And it was all a big plot, of course, because finally,
Speaker 3: when my reading skills were sufficient and the book was
Speaker 3: so good, I just you know, that was when I
Speaker 3: finally took off as a reader. But yeah, no, being
Speaker 3: read to was a huge part of my childhood.
Speaker 2: You might not, but I'm just curious, do you remember
Speaker 2: any moments when you were aware of your father enjoying
Speaker 2: a book? Is reading to at a level you worked at.
Speaker 3: But you know, the great thing about my dad was
Speaker 3: when I was coming up, he was working as a
Speaker 3: proofreader for the Women's Weekly, and often the books that
Speaker 3: he would choose for me were ones that had been
Speaker 3: serialized in the Weekly. And I remember one of them
Speaker 3: was Paul Gallico Scruppy, which is about the apes on
Speaker 3: Gibraltar during World War Two. And it is a book
Speaker 3: that works on two levels, because you know, the wartime
Speaker 3: part of the plot didn't intrigue me as much as
Speaker 3: the character of Scruppy, who is this absolutely impossible ape
Speaker 3: that they have to convince to mate with a female otherwise,
Speaker 3: you know, the legend is that if the Apes disappeared
Speaker 3: from Gibraltar, the British Empire will collapse. Anyway, my dad
Speaker 3: was incredibly in love with the English language. He was
Speaker 3: very astute grammarian, and he had like certain things that
Speaker 3: drove him crazy. Misuses of were like decimate. He could
Speaker 3: not bear it. He could not bear the expression centered
Speaker 3: around anyway. So he would stop in the middle of
Speaker 3: the book and explain grammatical niceties. And also he was
Speaker 3: very patient about if there was a word I didn't understand,
Speaker 3: I would get a definition that was worthy of the oed.
Speaker 2: Did you have a similar dynamic with your mum? Like
Speaker 2: did she read to you?
Speaker 3: She was a huge reader. She didn't read to me,
Speaker 3: But she was the one who taught me to be
Speaker 3: a writer, I think because she was more into the
Speaker 3: imagination and she would make up these incredibly involving games
Speaker 3: that had a strong narrative line through them, had characters
Speaker 3: in dialogue and all that, and we would play those
Speaker 3: games together and I think that that you know, I
Speaker 3: wasn't thinking about being a writer, but it was the
Speaker 3: best training possible. And you know, I loved hanging out
Speaker 3: with her because it was so instructive and I learned more.
Speaker 3: So I became a bit of a school avoid and
Speaker 3: she was pretty okay with that. So I would just
Speaker 3: miss a lot of school and hang out with her
Speaker 3: and we would make up stories.
Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. And it's like they're the essential
Speaker 2: building blocks for any writer. Your dad offering the technical
Speaker 2: side of things and the rigor of language, and then
Speaker 2: your mum's imagination and story and love of play. What
Speaker 2: an amazing combination.
Speaker 3: And you know, throw in the third thing, which is
Speaker 3: the Irish heritage, the uncles and the great uncles and
Speaker 3: their aunts. And my grandmother loved poetry, and so when
Speaker 3: they would get together, you know, and they'd had a
Speaker 3: few Sherris or whatever, they all had their party piece,
Speaker 3: these long narrative poems that they would recite, and it
Speaker 3: was transfixing for a kid. Wait for them to get
Speaker 3: a bit tipsy and launch into Alaska or the charge
Speaker 3: of the Light Brigade or whatever it was.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. For the past several decades, Geraldine
Speaker 2: Brooks has split her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard,
Speaker 2: where she lived for many years with her late husband,
Speaker 2: writer and historian Tony Horowitz. The two met while they
Speaker 2: were foreign correspondents, Tony for the New Yorker and Geraldine
Speaker 2: for the Wall Street Journal. Eventually both made the move
Speaker 2: from journalism to books, history for Tony and ultimately the
Speaker 2: novel for Geraldine. I was curious about how that transition
Speaker 2: was for her.
Speaker 3: It wasn't so smooth that it was a little bit
Speaker 3: more gradual. So the first turtle to get over is
Speaker 3: the transition from writing reasonably short to sustaining a narrative.
Speaker 3: And that lesson I learned with my first book, which
Speaker 3: was a nonfiction and one hundred percent of journalist's book,
Speaker 3: which was nine parts of Desire. And I was trying
Speaker 3: to distill what I had learned over six years living
Speaker 3: in the Middle East and basically learning to report the
Speaker 3: region through the advantage that I have had, which was
Speaker 3: the ability to speak to the women and get their experiences.
Speaker 3: And you know, it had been a mind expanding, mind
Speaker 3: blowing six years for me. And when I sat down
Speaker 3: to write that book, I had no idea how to
Speaker 3: sustain a narrative. More than three thousand words was the
Speaker 3: longest thing I'd ever written at that point, and that
Speaker 3: was considered a long story for a newspaper, so I
Speaker 3: had to learn how to do that, and so that
Speaker 3: was It took me six months, and I've wasted time
Speaker 3: before I could even begin to see the way. So
Speaker 3: that was one step, and then the next step was
Speaker 3: my second nonfiction book was quirky and a lot more personal,
Speaker 3: and it was about the It was call Foreign Correspondence,
Speaker 3: and it's about the penthals that I had when I
Speaker 3: was growing up in Sydney in the sixties and early
Speaker 3: seventies and writing to these kids all over the world.
Speaker 3: And when I was thirty nine or forty, I found
Speaker 3: that my dad had kept their letters to me, and
Speaker 3: so I went and found them. And that book is
Speaker 3: kind of a strange hybrid between a travel adventure, a memoir,
Speaker 3: and a reflection on what kind of a dude my
Speaker 3: dad was. So all of those three things were the
Speaker 3: strands that I had to learn how to weave together,
Speaker 3: and I think that doing that loosened me up and
Speaker 3: made it possible when I made the leap into fiction,
Speaker 3: because I had learned a couple of lessons earlier on.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to writing fiction for you, clearly
Speaker 2: one of the bigger engines. The kind of recurring prompts
Speaker 2: is history. Where did you love of history come from?
Speaker 2: When did that fascination kick in and the novel and
Speaker 2: history inextricably linked in your mind?
Speaker 3: No, it's just because I'm a lazy bugger, and you
Speaker 3: find these wonderful stories from the past. You've got the superstructure,
Speaker 3: and you know, I really don't think I know how
Speaker 3: to make it up from scratch. I love to find
Speaker 3: these stories that if you did make them up, they
Speaker 3: wouldn't be great books because they'd be too implausible. That
Speaker 3: a Muslim risked his life to say the Jewish book,
Speaker 3: that a Native American born into his own language and
Speaker 3: culture in sixteen forty ends up graduating from Harvard with
Speaker 3: the sons of the colonial puritan Italy. If you made
Speaker 3: him up, everybody would say, oh, that's bs, But it happened.
Speaker 3: And so I'm always looking for a story where you know,
Speaker 3: this fascinating thing happened, but you can't know everything about it.
Speaker 3: And that's where the fictional part comes in. I wasn't
Speaker 3: really that interested in history, but then I fell in
Speaker 3: love with a historian, a guy who was absolutely animated
Speaker 3: by history. And I think it's a bit of symbiosis,
Speaker 3: you know, occurred living with a real historian.
Speaker 2: Is it the case that if your childhood and your
Speaker 2: upbringing was the kind of perfect gift to the person
Speaker 2: who wants to go on to become a writer, your
Speaker 2: marriage to Tony somehow became a continuation of that gift.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it's certainly. You know, it was an amazing
Speaker 3: thirty five years being married to Tony. Oh, it's that's
Speaker 3: for sial.
Speaker 2: Was he a different kind of writer to you? How
Speaker 2: did that help with your own development as a writer.
Speaker 3: We started off being quite similar. You know. I met
Speaker 3: him in journalism school, and we were passionate news reporters
Speaker 3: for more than a decade and a half. That was
Speaker 3: all we thought about doing. And then, you know, for me,
Speaker 3: it was having a child at the age of forty
Speaker 3: and realizing I didn't want to be running off to
Speaker 3: dangerous situations on open ended assignments, and that I needed
Speaker 3: to try and find something else that would be gainfully employing.
Speaker 3: And for Tony, it was just realizing that book writing
Speaker 3: made him happier than having to answer to a squad
Speaker 3: of editors at The New Yorker. He was desperately unhappy
Speaker 3: there because they would handpeck every sentence, and they also
Speaker 3: wanted him to tell them what the story would be
Speaker 3: before he'd reported it. And he had by that time
Speaker 3: written two or three books, and he realized that he
Speaker 3: was a much happier man when he was working under
Speaker 3: his own direction.
Speaker 2: That makes a lot of sense. But it is funny
Speaker 2: to me that you describe your use of history as
Speaker 2: evidence of laziness in some way, kind of delving into
Speaker 2: artifacts and incidents, that's this whole additional layer of work
Speaker 2: and responsibility, not to mention pressure. Surely that's the opposite
Speaker 2: of lazy grappling with the past.
Speaker 3: Oh well, look, I don't know, but at least you've
Speaker 3: got an idea of what the plot is.
Speaker 2: And where it's going to go exactly. But isn't there
Speaker 2: a burden of responsibility when you're doing that? I mean,
Speaker 2: I imagine if you're going all the way back to
Speaker 2: the Bronze Age Israel or whatever, you don't feel like
Speaker 2: very similitudes essential. But at the same time, the way
Speaker 2: people use history, the meaning they derive from it, is
Speaker 2: so loaded and so charged. Is that something in your head?
Speaker 3: Look, there's a huge burden and responsibility being a journalist.
Speaker 3: I used to have like a tick in my eye
Speaker 3: from thinking about have I been have I you know,
Speaker 3: have I reported it well enough? Have I been fair
Speaker 3: to that? You know, international conspiracy of bad guy representative
Speaker 3: who's going to get completely shellacked on the front page
Speaker 3: of the Wall Street journel tomorrow. And I didn't sleep
Speaker 3: the night before those big stories were going to come out,
Speaker 3: So there's a huge responsibility there. And yes, I like
Speaker 3: to follow the line of fact as far as it leads.
Speaker 3: I don't willing nearly change things. And if I do
Speaker 3: change some small thing, I always come clean about it
Speaker 3: in the afterward of the book, because I do feel
Speaker 3: a responsibility to that.
Speaker 2: But even though the historical kind of provocations are central
Speaker 2: to your novels, you'll often make the point of framing
Speaker 2: them with a contemporary thread, or making a point of
Speaker 2: the relationship between retroactive storytelling and hindsight and how we
Speaker 2: kind of extract meaning from them in the present day.
Speaker 2: I mean, in Horse, it's fundamentally important to the power
Speaker 2: of that book that the stuff you have to say
Speaker 2: about race and about slavery is seen through a lens
Speaker 2: of present day racism in the US as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I realized that if I was going to
Speaker 3: be discussing racism in the nineteenth century, and I was
Speaker 3: going to have a contemporary story, which I always wanted
Speaker 3: to because I was fascinated with the science around the
Speaker 3: horses skeleton at the Smithsonian, I couldn't leave racism in
Speaker 3: the past as if it was something over and done with.
Speaker 3: That would have been irresponsible. And I have to say
Speaker 3: when I realized that that was where I was going,
Speaker 3: my heart sank a little bit, because you'd have to
Speaker 3: be living under a rock not to be aware of
Speaker 3: the discourse around appropriation and about who has the right
Speaker 3: to tell what story. And I wasn't thrilled about walking
Speaker 3: into that particular threshing machine, but I didn't see any
Speaker 3: way to responsibly tell the story without doing that.
Speaker 2: When it comes to anxiety about stuff that you feel
Speaker 2: entitled to write about, you're yet to write a novel
Speaker 2: that is solely inspired by or set in a context
Speaker 2: of Australian history or Australian culture, and I'm curious about
Speaker 2: whether you have the anxiety of the expat who lives
Speaker 2: in two countries when it comes to writing about Australia,
Speaker 2: or whether you're just waiting to find the right story.
Speaker 3: I know I started writing a novel based on the
Speaker 3: life of Jane Franklin, but something happened there in that
Speaker 3: I could not access the story that she was telling herself.
Speaker 3: And if you can't do that with a character, you
Speaker 3: really can't write them. But honestly, Australian history is so painful.
Speaker 3: The dispossession and the abuse of Indigenous Australians has to
Speaker 3: be addressed in it. The despoilation of the landscape when
Speaker 3: you know, we cut down the big scrub and I
Speaker 3: don't know, you know, it's just I think when it's
Speaker 3: your own, the idea of immersing myself in these painful histories,
Speaker 3: I'm a bit of a coward about it.
Speaker 2: Honestly, No, I completely get that. You know, it's such
Speaker 2: a different thing when you feel implicated personally in the
Speaker 2: history that you're writing about. So, if I can bring
Speaker 2: it back to the McKeen quote that we kick things
Speaker 2: off with, I want to know when you're writing, how
Speaker 2: do you know when a sentence is done. Are you
Speaker 2: in a state of kind of constant revision, constant returning
Speaker 2: to the line, or does it flow out of you.
Speaker 2: You know it's done, and you move right.
Speaker 3: On all of the above. I am constantly revising, and
Speaker 3: I would be still revising horse if they had let me.
Speaker 3: You know that that terrible day comes when they have
Speaker 3: to take it from your cold, dead hands, you know.
Speaker 3: And then you go out and you might be asked
Speaker 3: to read a passage and you can see like six
Speaker 3: ways you could make it better. It's excruciating, and then
Speaker 3: you know, so I love what A friend of mine
Speaker 3: who's a sculptor, her name is Sarah z and she
Speaker 3: makes these incredible, elaborate constructions, and they were profiling her
Speaker 3: for The New Yorker and they asked her about her process,
Speaker 3: and she said something that is so wonderful. She said,
Speaker 3: my process is mess, mess, mess art. And I love
Speaker 3: that because you can go to your desk and make
Speaker 3: a mess every day. You don't get to make art
Speaker 3: every day. You're lucky, you know. If you get one
Speaker 3: of those incredible days when the plane just takes off
Speaker 3: and sores wonderful and the sentences flow out and they're great.
Speaker 3: But you have to be really suspicious of those days,
Speaker 3: I think, because most of the time the plane's just
Speaker 3: clumping along on the runway and it's not getting the list.
Speaker 2: There's no question that Geraldine Brooks's latest novel, Horse has
Speaker 2: Left and its sores. It's available at all good bookstores now.
Speaker 2: And if you're a fan of Brooks and in particular
Speaker 2: her love of an elegant sentence, you should read her
Speaker 2: contribution to the Writers on Writers series about Tim Winton.
Speaker 2: It's a terrific essay and illuminates hips about both writers.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Geraldine Brooks on Read This.
Speaker 1: For the next couple of months, we're going to bring
Speaker 1: you some of the best interviews from the show. Every Sunday.
Speaker 1: Listen out for conversations with Eric Beacher, Mary Beard, Bruce
Speaker 1: Pasco and more. And if you don't want to wait
Speaker 1: until next Sunday, today I've in to read this. You
Speaker 1: can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There's
Speaker 1: a whole year's worth of fascinating conversations ready for you.