blogilicious

The Genteel Art Of Birding

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 23:54:44 +0100

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker

When I think about bird-watching I think first about Jane Hathaway, the gangly, tweed suited secretary to Mr Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies. I picture spinsterish women with bottle thick glasses and bumbling English vicars whose dialogue includes phrases like ‘Jolly good what!’ I picture hats with furry earflaps.

When I think about bird-watching, or birding as it is more often called these days, I think of eccentric old fellows who wax lyrical about species with names such as “Pink Crested Tit” (real) and ‘Spangled Doo-dally” (imagined) without a hint of innuendo.

To the outsider, the birding world is an idiosyncratic one. It is peopled with sociophobic obsessives who care more about the mating rituals of the Himalayan Blue Crane (real) than the welfare of their fellow human beings. After all, these are people who spend hours sitting in camouflaged “hides”, enduring all types of inclement weather, on the off chance that they might spy a bird slightly less common than a pigeon (real).

To a birder the list of all the various species they’ve seen—what is called a “life list”—is often viewed as more precious than their own children. It is not uncommon for these lists, scribbled on shabby weathered notebooks, to be kept in safety deposit boxes along with the family jewels. I’ve heard of life lists that were the subject of custody battles.

These strange behaviours of birders, as exotic as the nesting habits of the Irritated Dappled Dodo (imaginary), don’t help the perception that bird-watching is an activity for weirdos. Take for instance the birding group in New York who, in the winter when the majority of bird species head south, arm themselves with notebooks and bird guides and head for the Metropolitan Museum. The object of the activity is to search that eminent institution’s various exhibits and artworks for mere representations of our feathered friends. The desperate act of addicts hanging out for a fix. Stranger still, think of the odd ornithological habit of keeping a separate life list of all the birds one has seen in wallpaper! I ask you, is not that the behaviour of the marginally sane?

Birding is a complex culture. Listen to any two birders in conversation and you’ll soon feel as I do when listening to the discourse of my teenage nephews and nieces, as if exposed to a whole new language. Two birders in full swing emit chatter not unlike the song of a Yellow Breasted Robin (real) or a Variegated Thrush (not a nasty yeast infection and also real).

Some common birding terms: twitching, twitcher, dipping, sitting. Twitching, a term originating in the United States, refers to a particular form of birding in which one actively seeks out rare and scarce birds that have been blown off course – thus appearing far out of their natural range. Distance is no object for fanatical Twitchers. Many travel hundreds of miles, at a moment’s notice, to see some hapless bird that has unwittingly touched down in an alien continent. Twitchers often give up regular employment in order to be able to devote more time to scrambling about the country chasing up reports of disoriented birds. Twitchers were recently the subject of a motion picture starring Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin (The Big Year 2011). Twitchers have hit the big time.

“Real birders” are sceptical of Twitching. It is claimed that Twitchers are ‘only in it for the twitch’, only in it for the adrenaline hit. Twitchers are accused of not caring about preservation. This is one of a dozen schisms in the bird-watching world. There is also the widening divide between professional and amateur ornithologists, those whose interest is solely scientific and those whose interest is more aesthetic. Twitchers are generally younger, more likely to engage in cyber-birding (sighting birds on the internet) and are considered a sect unto themselves, a strange religion rebelling against the orthodoxy of ornithology.

Dipping, which the humorous birder will tell you has nothing to do with baba ghanoush, is the failure to twitch (make a sighting). This often happens like this: a Twitcher receives a page or text message about a rare bird sighting. The twitcher leaps lethargically into his/her Morris Minor and hurtles off into the countryside. The report turns out to be spurious. The Twitcher should have known something was amiss when the report came in. How many African Vultures (real) end up in suburban Toowoomba anyway?

Sitting is what it sounds like, sitting, specifically in a concealed location or hide in the hopes of sighting a rare bird, or for that matter any bird. Sitting generally involves thermoses of tea drunk in damp meadows and more whispered talk than actual bird-watching. It is in the context of these long stakeouts, or “big sits” (which have nothing to do with constipation), that another aspect of birding culture reveals itself, that of the urban (birding) myth and birding in-jokes.

Birding jokes are generally of a poor standard. Two vultures are in the desert eating a dead clown. The first vulture asks the second vulture ‘Does this taste funny to you?’ Or how about these ones:

How do you catch a unique bird? Unique up on it!
How do you catch a tame bird? Tame way - unique up on it!

Then of course the old standard: How does a chicken mail a letter? In a HEN-velope! Some jokes are situational. If, god (imaginary) forbid, someone happens to pass wind at a particularly silent moment during a long sit then the flatulent birder routinely says ‘Oh goodness, there goes a Flatulent Owl!’ To which one of his companions replies, ‘Or a Brown Warbler!’ Birders find this scenario hilarious no matter how many times it is enacted.

Birding myths are in much the same vein. Some of these myths have been circulating for decades. Like many urban myths they tend to change over time, usually becoming more and more outlandish with each retelling. I first heard the following myth on my virgin birding trip, which I undertook not as a true participant but as a bemused observer. This myth is widely referred to as ‘Old Boiler’ and is known by all serious birdwatchers.

It goes something like this: In the 1920’s the U.S. Department of the Interior began tagging migratory birds for the Washington Biological Survey. The leg bands bore the abbreviated name of the survey: Wash. Biol. Surv. One day the agency received a letter from an Alabama share-cropper which read: ‘Dear Sirs, while hunting I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and want to tell you it was real awful!’ Apparently a batch of the leg rings was wrongly stamped with the words: Wash. Boil. Surv.

My favourite myth is set in England. A retired Anglican vicar sets out on a birding trip, carrying binoculars, camera and tripod, field scope, lawn chair and picnic basket. He ends up in a bramble of thorny bushes while searching for a nearby pond and its ornithological rarities, horn-billed waterbirds (real). He sets up in what seems to be a good spot and prepares for a pleasant day of watching. After only a few minutes two policemen come by. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ they ask. He answers, ‘I’d hoped to jump on some rare birds, such as the horn billed waterbirds that frequent this pond.’ The constables roar with laughter: ‘If you stay here you will be the one who gets jumped! You’ve ended up in a meeting place for rare birds indeed, lonely but horny homosexuals!’ Of course, the lonely but horny homosexual is quite real, I can attest to that fact myself having sighted a few at close range. Alarmed by the news that he has stumbled onto the mating grounds of the horny homosexual, the vicar’s face pales. He seeks a police escort back to his car.

Oddly enough, it was this last tale that convinced me that I was ready to come out of the closet as a birder. I had always thought that I might be the only queer birder on earth but, if legends be true, I’m more likely to encounter a Dapper Homosexual (real) on a birding trip than an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (also real and rather randily named).

So, when next you overhear two genteel old ladies discussing Little Whimbrel (real), American Widgeons (real), Fandangled Warblers (imaginary), field scopes, big sits and life-lists, don’t report them as suspected Al-Qaeda operatives. Be assured that they’re just birders, one of my own kind. Though, one does wonder which is more frightening.

The Dapper Homosexual

Book/Journal Reviews

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:23:36 +0100

Hello my friendly (blog) rollers, Just a bit of an update. My book America Divine: Travels in the Hidden South is featured in Books from our Backyard, the Queensland Writers Centre's overview of books written by queensland authors in 2011. On another front, I've recently been getting into writing book reviews. Book reviews are not easy things to write and so I'm not great at it yet. Recently, two of my reviews appeared on Angela Meyer's Literaryminded blog. Angela is THE rising star of Australian literary criticism and a really good writer to boot. Check out my reviews of Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and the first edition of the new journal Southpaw and then read some of Angela's reviews. You won't regret it. Cheers, ciao, thanks a lot, Dallas.

Blast from the Eighties Past

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:10:31 +0100

Here are some pics (not great quality) of me in the Eighties. A picture says a thousand words as they say and these speak quite articulately about the gender-bending generation. In the one above, I am second from the left, I've been caught mid wink/sneer/stoopid eighties pose. I think I'm fifteen years old in this. Cheers, ciao, enjoy.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 01:08:20 +0100

So, after getting asked again about my name I thought I might write a post about it. It might come as a surprise gentle reader but people often ask me if 'Dallas Angguish' is my real name. It's a bit tiring answering that question over and over again but I suppose my name is unusual enough to warrant the curiosity. The answer I normally give is a variation of this:

The full name on my birth certificate is Dallas John Angguish Baker. In the early eighties, when I was a deeply anxious and sad Toowoomba teen in regular therapy with a homophobic psychiatrist, I chose to be known as Dallas Angguish because I thought it reflected how I felt on the inside. Please do not berate me for this cliche, I was after all a teen (the period in life when cliches are the norm) and it was the early Eighties (the time in history when cliches were currency and kind of kitchly cool).

Just FYI dear reader (or is that roller? As in blog roller?), Angguish is actually a transliteration of "anguis" which is Latin for snake and/or dragon (as in anguis in herba/snake in the grass). The serpent and dragon symbolised two things for the traumatised teen that I was: sexual energy and mysticism. The snake has long been associated with both.

This is all very 80s and tres dramatic of course, but as a queer kid in homophobic Queensland a name that celebrated my sexuality, my interest in mysticism and my trauma seemed a good idea.

To complicate matters, the surname on my birth certificate is my grandmother's maiden name (Baker). My grandfather's surname was McPhee. My paternal grandparents were unmarried and so my dad got his mother's surname.

To top it all off, my father - who spent many years in a 'boys' home' because of his mother's mental illness (she was a paranoid schizophrenic) - named me after a boy that he shared a room with in the orphange; the original Dallas John Baker.

So, I never felt that any of my names were really mine. The result was that I cobbled together a name that said something about who I thought I was at the time. I then proceeded to get published under that name and so I'm stuck with it, whether you like it or not.

I hope this explains the angguish of my situation.

Ciao, cheers, thanks a lot.

Is it possible to become a writer, or is writing ability an inborn talent?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:07:58 +0100

I was on a panel at the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival recently and made one of those rather glib and throw-away statements that are becoming a rather predictable part of my repertoire when in public. It’s not that I want to be glib; it’s just that being in public spaces provokes acute anxiety and nervous exhilaration in equal measure so that I’m not really myself. It’s a bit like being a Catholic priest at a Gay Pride parade.

So, what I said was that I didn’t believe in ‘bad’ writing, just skilled writers and developing writers. Needless to say, that ruffled a few feathers, particularly among those whose job it is to tell the rest of us which books are bad and which are good. In other words, the reviewers and the academics who are often one and the same creature. So, I just wanted to make clear that I am not anti-critic or anti-reviewer. I am a huge believer in the value of cultural criticism and reviews.

Without reviews, we would be forced to spend endless hours of our lives reading the banal blurbs on the backs of books which are, unlike reviews, not written by objective and informed booklovers but by cynical marketing types who wish to plunder our pocketbooks. We would also find ourselves having to wade through mountains of published material to find those rare books that, like a voice from beyond, speak directly to us, tug at our heartstrings and inspire and comfort us. Reviewers make finding the kind of books we like to read much easier.

Reviewers also help to place a book in its social, cultural and literary context. That role is really crucial. Reviewers champion books and make evident the cultural significance of writing. Without reviewers and literary academics, penny-pinching governments would find it all too easy to write off literature as unimportant and thus cut support for it from increasingly constricted budgets.

I am myself an academic and so, predictably, I have no qualms about the role of academia in discussing and critiquing books and writing (mainly because I’d be doing myself out of a job if I did).

My statement was not about the role of criticism but about other things. I went on to say that as an academic in an institution in which writing is taught it is important to see the practice of writing in a certain way. Well, that’s what I meant to say but I probably said something much less lucid.

Traditionally, writing has been seen as an inborn ability, an aspect of artistic genius, which can be honed and refined but cannot be developed out of nothing. In other words, it is a talent not a skill. Skill is defined as the ability to do something well, usually gained through training and experience. Skill is not inborn but learned. If we see ‘good’ writing as the product of talent, an inborn ability, then a person cannot ‘become’ a writer. They either are a writer or they are not. If that’s true then what’s the point of university writing programs and all those workshops at festivals and writers' centres?

For me, saying that writing ability cannot be learnt is a bit like saying that one cannot become a doctor, one either is or isn’t one. That’s clearly ludicrous. Of course, it takes a lot of hard work to become a really good doctor. It also takes a lot of really hard work to become a writer.

The idea that writing ability is an aspect of genius, a mysterious internal quality, has been disproven by leading edge research into creativity and the arts by folk such as Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis. This research shows that creativity and artistic ability are skills, that they are learned and developed through experience. This means that a person can become a writer. It even means that a person can, with hard work, persistence and tenacity, become not just a writer but a great writer.

This makes the relevance of Creative Writing courses in universities very clear. These programs can support people in their journeys to become more skilled writers in a way that those people might not be able to achieve on their own. The research by folk like Professor Sawyer also shows that we are more creative in groups than alone. This is why creative writing workshops, both in universities and outside of them, are so beneficial to developing writers.

I know that there will be many, some of them my academic colleagues in writing programs, who will still insist that there is something, some ‘x’ factor, which makes some people more likely to be great writers than others. Some people have an ear for the music of language they’ll say, while others are incredible observers of the human condition. Well, that’s true, but I would counter that an ear for language and an ability to observe deeply and comprehend the human condition are also learned. Clearly, these things are not learned in a classroom and often the learning is not wholly conscious, but the research shows that these things are learned like anything else, learned from our parents, our family and our socio-cultural environment.

So, as far as I’m concerned, writing ability is a skill not a talent. This means that there are no ‘bad’ writers nor ‘good’ writers, merely skilled writers and developing ones. Furthermore, I believe that it is possible to become a writer, even a great one.

Cheers, ciao, thanks a lot :)

Bellingen

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:44:25 +0100

A Couple of photos of the Bellinger valley. The church is in an area called Glennifer and is described in Peter Carey's novel "Oscar And Lucinda".

Writing in Pixels

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:07:22 +0100

Ask any writer how they do what they do and you'll get a diverse range of answers. Most writers however will agree that their writing practice is fed by these three things:

Reading

Introspection (which sometimes requires solitude); and

Social interactions (which often requires alcohol).

Some writers, especially those for whom writing is as much an act of reflection as an act of communication, say that music and visual art both play a part in inspiring, sustaining and reinvigorating their writing practice. This is certainly the case for me.

I once wrote a verse novel about birds (The Song and Flight of Birds) while listening to the same record over and over again (Marc Almond's Virgin Tales). I've never attempted to publish that verse novel suspecting, quite rightly I think, that a verse novel about birds migt not fare very well in a book market dominated by paranormal romance and crime fiction. The writing of that verse novel seemed bound up with my engagement with Marc Almond's music in a way that I couldn't deny. Somehow, all those verses about birds had been given flight by Almond's lyrics and music. I won't go into the poetry collection I wrote in the winter of 1988 which was inspired by "industrial death disco" band Skinny Puppy. Those poems are a wicked abomination and I pray they will never see the light of day.

At other times, a piece of writing has emerged after an encounter with a work of art. Photography in particular has acted as a trigger for my work. So, in an attempt to draw more deeply on the visual to inspire and refresh my writing practice I purchased a lovely Sony DSLR camera with two lenses. The whole package seemed as magical to me as Harry Potter's first wand must have seemed to him; it opened up a whole world of possibility and learning. A year later and I still know next to nothing about photography, but it has become a parallel practice to my writing. The photography enriches my writing and, to my surprise, my writing greatly informs and 'directs' my taking of pictures.

I have included some of my other shots in an earlier post (Photography 1) by way of illustration. I also regularly post them to my Facebook page. A few readers of my book (America Divine: Travels in the Hidden South) have already said that they've enjoyed looking at the images while reading my book. But I don't take the pictures to illustrate or document my writing. I take them to enrich the process rather than to adorn the finished product. Having said that, it might be fun to have some of these images at hand while reading my travel tales. They might help to set the scene.

Ciao etc etc.

Photography 1

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:07:32 +0100

Why I Love Southern Literature

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:07:41 +0100

My new book is a collection of travel tales set in the Deep South of the USA. People are always asking me why I love the South and Southern literature so much. As a queer man, it might seem that there is much about the South for me to dislike. Well, let me explain, drawing on some of the Preface of Amer ica Divine.

The landscape of my travel tales is the American South, a place that I have visited a number of times over a decade or so. Although I am certainly writing about my experience of the South during those visits, I am doing a bit more than that. I am writing about a landscape that exists beyond the physical boundaries of the Southern states. I am writing about a South of the mind, a metaphorical South.

My first encounters with the American Deep South were as a child through old black and white films replayed on television. I was a reclusive boy, constantly skipping school, and I spent many of my mornings watching these old movies.

The first one was Jezebel, starring Bette Davis and set in New Orleans. That was enough to get me hooked. Then I saw Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte, Gone With The Wind, The Yearling, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Streetcar Named Desire and a number of others. Of course, these films are partly about the real South, the historical and factual South, but they are more about the metaphorical South, the South of the mind and of the imagination. I got to know this South very intimately as I avoided the drudgery of my all-boys Catholic school.

I’m not sure why the local television station in Toowoomba, my hometown in regional Australia, played so many films set in the Deep South. It seems a very strange thing for them to do. After all, what had the American South to do with Toowoomba, a small town nesting on a mountain in the Darling Downs?

Toowoomba was then, as I was growing up in the 70s, a town known for being something of a peculiarity in the state of Queensland, because of its distinctly eccentric atmosphere, but was also almost fervently Australian. In this respect at least, Toowoomba had something in common with Southern American towns which were also both eccentric and deeply patriotic.

As a boy, there was another stand out quality to those films that reminded me strongly of my hometown. This was those films’ fascination for the supernatural. Toowoomba was a place equally captivated by these things; ghost stories, gruesome crimes, tall tales and outlandish characters.

Perhaps those films were also played because the programmers felt what I came to feel sometime later, that there were many themes and issues explored in those films, and that affected Southern society, that resonated with the history and life of that strange town on the mountain.

Queensland in the 60s, 70s and 80s was a police state noted for corruption, wonky elections and the repression of non-whites, women and homosexuals. Many of the marginalized residents of Queensland must have seen the issues they were dealing with in their everyday lives reflected in those old films. I for one certainly did.

As a young boy it became apparent to me that other boys like me were not appreciated in Queensland. I was a bit of a sissy and found my fellow boys much more fascinating than was considered normal or appropriate. In fact, at the time I was watching those films, homosexuality was a criminal act. If you indulged your fascination for members of your own sex and were discovered or exposed, you could look forward to a custodial sentence in some of the nation’s most backward prisons. This did not change until the mid 1990s.

A little later, when I was a teen and should have been enjoying myself by exploring the delights of the flesh, the AIDS pandemic hit. Suddenly homosexuals were not only evil and unnatural, they were diseased, infectious, vampiric and condemned by God to a slow, agonizing death. One AIDS activist said rather controversially that, and cover your eyes if you're easily offended, fags had become the ‘niggers’ of the world.

Although it still shocks and upsets me, the ‘n word’ is not as shocking as it once was. These days it is frequently used in Rap & Hip Hop music and even, by some African-Americans, as a term of affection for each other. But in the 80s it still had the power to shock, offend and outrage. What that AIDS activist intended to say by using it, was that because of the HIV virus homosexual men had become the most despised group in every nation across the globe. He wasn’t referring to African-American people themselves, but to the notion of a universally vilified and oppressed category. For me, problematic and insensitive though that comment was, it also made a connection between the mutual struggle of African-American, lesbian and gay people for equal rights. Southern cinema and literature often reflects those struggles and does so in ways that Australian cinema and literature are yet to do.

It was around the time of the onset of the AIDS pandemic, the early Eighties, that I fell in love with Southern literature, principally Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and the plays of Tennessee Williams. Much of this writing explored gender and sexual dynamics in a direct way and made more explicit for me the ways that the oppression experienced by African-Americans, women and queers in the South of the U.S.A. was not dissimilar to that experienced by those in Queensland.

I am not surprised at all, when I look back at it, that I identified with the marginalized characters of those Southern films. To the young me it must have seemed that queers were oppressed, because of their sexual difference, in a way not dissimilar to the ways that African-Americans were enslaved because of their racial difference and rebellious Southern women were oppressed because of their gender difference.

Of course, Southern racial and gender dynamics are much more complex than I could have grasped at the time. Nevertheless, those films and the books of Capote, McCullers and Welty gave me a way to recognize, think about and reflect on all of these injustices. They also acted as a kind of exposure therapy, a safe visit to unsafe territory that helped me to frame and to deal with my own hostile environment. I am extremely grateful that I was exposed to them when I was.

Having said all of that, America Divine does not directly address why a sissy boy from Toowoomba grew up obsessed with the Deep South. Instead, it reflects my fascination for the South’s culture and history and presents the idiosyncratic experiences of a Queenslander trying to get to know it better.

The tall tales I tell in my new book document my journey to discover more of the real South as much as they document my continuing love of the cinema and literature of America’s Southern states.

Because I am often writing about a South of the mind, a metaphorical South, my stories have that taste of the South that I encountered in films and books. This is often the taste of the actual South, but sometimes differs from reality in subtle ways that are difficult to express in words.

While travelling in the South, I find it impossible to relate to the place and people without those films and books feeding into my perception. Every street corner is haunted by those films, every building filled with celluloid ghosts. The landscapes and the people are ‘written over’ by the literature and by the myths.

I’m not sure if I should be concerned about that. Perhaps I should, but the metaphorical South so completely overlaps the landscape and features of the actual south that, for an outsider anyway, it is practically impossible to see one without the other.

Southerners themselves often talk about their home with reference to those very same films and books and so visitors are encouraged to experience the actual South while reflecting on the metaphorical South. It’s almost as if Southerners don’t really want us to see the real thing. Perhaps they prefer to hide behind a cinematic and literary veneer.

That veneer is very nostalgic and tends to gloss over that which is dark about the South – the racial inequality, the conservative (often closed) mindset, the environmental degradation, the lack of focus on heritage and cultural preservation, the political hypocrisy. But, every place has its good and bad. Every place has beauty and ugliness. Every region has its saints and its villains. The South is no different.

I intend to go back to the South again. They say that anyone who has been to the South once cannot help but return. That is certainly true for me. Perhaps that's true for you too but, if you’ve never been, I hope that you can make the trip soon. In the meantime, you could make a trip to the metaphorical South in the form of America Divine. Whatever the case, I hope y’all enjoy your stay.

Welcome to Blogilicious

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:07:52 +0100

So, I wanted a space where I could deposit my thoughts, feelings and rants about books, writing and writers. Blogilicious is it. From time to time I will review new books, and sometimes I'll review old books, but mostly I'll be musing over the writing that has most influenced me and discussing the ins and outs of the thankless and torturous art that is writing. I'll also share quotes from writers and other notables that inspire me. I might also do a bit of whining about the sorry state of publishing, literature (what is that anyway?), society, culture, politics, the arts and my cats' litter tray. I might even share the odd piccy-wicky (photograph) taken as I careen through my day. I'm pretty lazy, so I'm not likely to post anything more often than once a month.

First things first, here's a bit about me (snitched from the "About Me" page) that will either make you interested or make you ill:

I am a writer. It's a bold statement but one that I feel confident to make. I write in the shorter forms mainly - short stories, essays, short travelogues, poetry and academic papers - but I have also just finished a memoir and a novel (to come out soon). I have studied writing at university, something that has taught me much about the practice, appreciation and teaching of writing. I have a Masters in Writing and am just finishing a PhD in writing at Griffith University. According to Wikipedia, which we all know is terribly reliable, I have been "described as Truman Capote's literary heir and as reminiscent of Carson McCullers, the much lauded Southern Gothic writer." Of course, I would like to see myself as highly unique, as unlike any other writer, but my debt to Capote and McCullers is both substantial and obvious. They are the writers that I truly love and who have deeply influenced me. But I have been influenced by other writers as well, notably David Malouf and Allen Ginsberg. I have also truly loved the fiction of Anne Rice, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. A mixed bag, but all of them exceptional wordsmiths.

I was born and raised in Toowoomba, Queensland. Usually when I tell people this they say something like "Oh, how awful for you!" or "I'm so sorry" or "My God! How did you survive?" In case you don't know, Toowoomba has a reputation for beautiful parks and gardens; and for extreme racism, sexism and homophobia. It stands apart as one of the few Australian towns with a Ku Klux Klan presence. Indeed, there has even been a recent KKK linked homicide. Thus, I am an exile from my hometown. Although Toowoomba is not exactly Disneyland for people like me, it still occupies a significant place in my heart and mind. I have both affection and dislike for the place and it often features in my writing, particularly in my book Dare.

Growing up in Toowoomba - known for its hauntings and its over-abundance of psychics, tarot card readers and spiritual healers - it was probably inevitable that my first career was as a playground shaman, telling fortunes over spilt milk, holding séances in the attic, getting spirits to levitate Coca-cola bottles. This career ended abruptly when a growing superstitious fear surpassed my childhood curiosity. In other words, I turned yellow. I then turned to the visual arts and produced a multitude of works in crayon that have since been lost. An ongoing investigation continues as to my mother's likely involvement in their destruction. At the age of eighteen, under the influence of a dark herb, I turned my hand to poetry and that, as they say, was that. I have now been writing - poetry, short stories, screenplays and the like - for some time. It remains difficult and, for the most part, socially unacceptable.

My mystical bent did not just go away however, I have always had a fascination for Eastern religions (mainly Buddhism), and that has stuck. My fascination for all things Eastern culminated in my taking vows in the Buddhist monastic tradition. I remained in this guise for five years until I realized that it was making me more repressed and rule-bound rather than less. Buddhism is still core to my life but I now practice it as a lived philosophy, a heart practice, rather than a 'religion'.

I often say that I swim in a shallow gene pool, a bit like the creature from the black lagoon, because I live with a few inherited illnesses. The opposite is, in fact, true. My gene pool is pretty wide and deep. My mother's ancestry is English, Welsh, German and Chinese. My father's family are of English and Scottish descent. Of all of these, I feel a stronger connection to the Scottish side of things. I am strongly drawn to the ancestral stomping grounds of my father's Scottish progenitors and feel a "spiritual" connection to Celtic culture.

Although I live in Australia, I consider the USA one of my other "spiritual" homes. I'm not sure why, I just do. I have a particular love of the South - perhaps because Toowoomba is not unlike a younger, antipodean version of Savannah Georgia - but also because I first experienced the South through the writing of authors I love: Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty et al. I have visited the South a number of times and have written about these visits in my book America Divine.

Well. that's enough to be getting along with. Catch you later. Ciao etcetera.