This site records a residency at the Albury Regional Art Gallery, as part of the Artists@Work Program held in January/February 2010.  Box People was a novel, a performance, a series of images, a game.  

**Readers beware!  Blogger publishes posts with the most recent entry at the top, so if this is your first visit please use the archive list to guide you through the chapters...that's if you want to read them in the order they appeared***




Saturday, February 6, 2010

NOVEL ATTEMPT ON LIFE

 

1. Attempt on Life

After a week in the gallery, drafting and illustrating, there was a moment when all the text seemed to slide off the pages of the manuscript in front of me.   Box People , the novel I've been living with for 15 years, was erasing itself.  Time to give up, split up, bail out.  Kill the thing. 

2.Manuscript

I had the familiar urge to scrumple the papers into 250 balls, but I refined this into making paper aeroplanes. With the help of invisible tape, the planes became flowers.  I folded until my wrist burned, the skin peeled off my left thumb and I got bored.

3.More Manuscript

I put the rest of the manuscript on a chair.  Where my bum should be.    

4.Disposal Chair

I got a better chair.  This may have been a mistake. Now I have two chairs and I have to sit on one.  Which means getting back to writing.

5.Hooks

Not enough in my narrative so far, so I added a few.

6. Fishing line

Tension, suspense, threads.  And they shine so pleasingly under gallery spotlights.

7.Guests (not pictured)

People visit.  They smile at the flowers.  I show them what's left of my first novel and they laugh sadly.  At first I tell them that they're looking at the death of a novel, but they get upset. Friends and complete strangers lobby for the death penalty to be revoked.  I am touched by their concern for a piece of writing that they have never met, and that may in fact be rotten to the core. They suggest a life sentence on a USB in a far away place, rehabilitation in the form of poetry or short stories, or community service as a youth arts project.  The jury is still out.

 




1 comment:

  1. citizens arrest. you're a criminal. but i get the joke now. in any case yu have stolen something.

    ReplyDelete

 

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