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DAVID RISH |
Tasmanian children's writer and dramatistJottingsChocolate , Moment or two from my life, Born to it, Why I write (Possibly), Rejections, Steps , High school begins ChocolateOne day, some years back, David went into the Sister's Beach shop to pick up his mail. He decided not to buy a pie. He decided not to buy chips. He decided not to by that interesting-looking magazine (he had work to do!) The chocolate rack caught his eye. No-no, he wouldn't succumb! But the bars looked so nice. He'd buy one, just this once. (He loves chocolate, specially fruit-&-nut!) He ripped off the wrapping as he held out the money. There was a package waiting for him. With chocolate-covered fingers, he opened it. Inside was a copy of his first book. David let out with a scream of pleasure; Tony, the shopkeeper, dropped a box of Kennebecs on his foot. David showed him the book. He was forgiven the bruised foot. David bought another bar of chocolate to celebrate; peppermint cream. He went home, ecstatic. It was as if he was walking on air. He was an author. The peppermint cream tasted even more delicious than normal. Because he was an author. He finished off the last square of chocolate as he reached his front door. He was an author, an author returning triumphantly home. The author stepped inside. His tooth was throbbing. He shouldn't have eaten all of that second bar. He should have kept some for Carmel, his librarian partner, or Olive his two-year-old. (The first word Olive read, on a milk tanker in Burnie, was "Cadbury"!!! Her brother Jacob was still four years into the future. His first word was 'woof'!). Still, he was an author, even if an author with toothache. He was an author; ow! His dentist celebrated. Moment or two from my lifeAt school I was an OUTSTANDING student. My teachers were constantly saying "Get out of this classroom and go and stand in the corridor!" We used to sit in rows, two desks side by side, three rows of five deep. I think it was so the teacher could do a quick head count. "2, 4, 6, 7! .... Quick, break out the school dogs; Rish has escaped again!" Any way, one day I was bored and began surreptitiously prodding my best friend Roger with my ruler. My teacher saw. "Rish!" he exploded (because that was my name.) "Rish" (he liked to repeat himself.) "Rish" (it was really annoying because I'd heard him the first time) And, .... "Rish, if you don't stop poking Spiegel with ruler, you can jolly well miss out on football and stay inside reading instead." Now I happened to love reading! So, ..... POKE! (Actually, I really love sport too! I reckon that if you read a really heavy book, you get physical activity by lifting it up and down while you enjoy your story so you win on both counts!) I do love reading! One night, I couldn't sleep. I'd won a green apple eating contest with my brother but because of my victory I felt as though I had a mump-swollen elephant in my gut. Knowing I wouldn't get back to dreamworld, I took my favourite William book, my torch and my aching body to the toilet. Some thirty minutes later I nearly caused my mother to die when she opened the door and I was sitting there. She screamed. I screamed. The book ended up in the bog, something William Brown would really have appreciated if only he'd been real. One good thing about the fright was that it did manage to clear the blockage!!!! I do love reading! I read anything, anywhere. (Did you know that on the bottom of the cereal box it says "wrong way up, twit!") My favourite place to read was in bed. One afternoon I was under my blanket tent, immersed in The Coral Island, when my brother Adam came in. "David, I finished playing with your shot-put," he called. "I'll just drop it on your bed." (I was only glad that it wasn't the javelin!) After the shot-put incident I had to find somewhere safer to read. I decided on the high cupboard of our built-in wardrobe. Now, our house was under an earth bank. It was possible for my brother to quietly drop a ladder from there to the roof, sneak across the tin by stepping on the roof nails and then when he was directly above me, leap in the air and come crashing down. He did. For me, blissfully reading, it was like being inside a large bell with Goliath's big brother striking it with a sledge hammer. Fortunately, there were no lasting after effects. I still love books. Sorry, did you just say something? Speak up a bit, please. Pardon? Born to itThere is a story told about me by my family that in the unknowable ether before beginning my time on Earth I was offered a birth gift of either great wit & intelligence or beauty, personal magnetism & physical dexterity and I said, "No!" (So, having spurned my great opportunity, I became, having no other choice, a writer!!!) Being irritating:In our house we love making up silly and very annoying rhymes and songs. The Rish family beanbag rant is one such. If you attempt this on your family (and I think on due consideration that you probably should) you should do it with a whiny, nasally voice. Constant repetition works exceptionally well on the irritation front. Using varying volume can also cause severe stress in listeners and you should make sure that you drop the beanbag rant in at the flimsiest of opportunities. e.g. "I'm tired I want to sit down." (tired-sit down-beanbag-beanbag rant!) "Would you like baked beans for tea?" (beans-beanbag-beanbag rant!) "Would you help bring in the shopping bags from the car?" (bags-beanbags-beanbag rant!) "You're late, where have you been?" (Been-bean-beanbag-beanbag rant!) etcetera. Find the rant below. Good luck with your efforts but please don't blame me afterwards for any unfortunate consequences such as having your pocket money docked or people shutting you in some dark locked room until you shut up. THE BEANBAG RANT: "I've got three beanbags. One of them is dark brown, one of them is light brown and one of them is tan. Sometimes I lie in a beanbag with another on my stomach and my feet resting on the third. Sometimes I count my beanbags. One, two, three. Sometimes I count the beans in my beanbags. One, two, three, four, five, six .... seven, eight, nine ..." [etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum or until threatened with immediate extinction by your parents.] Why I write (Possibly)A long ago sports day at school. We assembled out in front of the flag pole in our houses, Direction, Nelson and Wellington, and then marched up onto the oval where we formed lines in front of the portable public address system. Before the events started, we had to sing "God Save the Queen". I, to amuse my friends, began to burp the tune, really getting into it. I didn't notice that a sudden silence had fallen over the multitude. Then my best friend tapped me on my shoulder. I looked up. Everyone was staring at me. I suffered one of life's 'uh-oh!' moments. "Rish!" thundered my headmaster, red in the face (as red as the red of my Direction house tee-shirt) "Rish, go and stand in the corner. I'll speak to you later." But we were on the oval, there were no corners. I was confused and frightened and I think that, maybe, my becoming a writer has been that Zen-like search for an oval's corners. (Please, like a hard-boiled egg, take this tale with a grain of salt.) RejectionsA frustrating thing for many writers, me included, is getting rejections. Sometimes you understand why a project hasn’t worked but sometimes you feel, after a rejection letter has plopped heavily into your letterbox, that your failure isn’t a ‘failure’ and that it works as a story if only it could find the right place. After my books Targett and Mongrel were published I had an idea for a third book that I saw as the concluding part of a loose sort of trilogy. I knew as I began to write it, that I would be very lucky to find a publisher willing to take it. Publishing trends had changed and, whatever its artistic merits, this sort of book just wouldn’t be likely to achieve the ‘figures’ to make it financially worthwhile. Regardless, I really felt I had to go ahead and write it. The characters would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t given them some sort of fictional life. So, I did. And I even chanced my arm with a couple of publishers with the expected result – the beastly rejection letter lying heavily in the bottom of my letterbox like the final breakfast of a condemned man. However, I’m not too disappointed. I like the story I created. I think I made a great pair of heroines, strong girls with real lives. Here are two sample chapters from a ‘failure’, Steps, the story of two seemingly mismatched girls who become sisters-under-the-skin despite their differences. High school beginsI started at Taroona High School on February 7 th, 1967. Black Tuesday, when bush fires raged across our state, destroying houses, bush and livestock and taking over seventy lives. Newspapers in England reported that the entire population of Tasmania had been evacuated on a nuclear submarine and it was already mozzarella-bubbling hot as I walked, my feet uncomfortable in black leather after the weeks of summer bare-foot freedom, to the bus stop at the bottom of Lipscombe Avenue. Hot already, matters were worsened my new uniform of a white shirt and tie, heavy blue blazer and my very first pair of long school pants, gray and scratchy and now banned under the Geneva Convention as cruel and inappropriate torture. "Ah, young Rishy," said Steve Balcombe, my elder brother’s friend, "I see you’re starting high school. Those long pants 'll hide the bruises." I laughed, but uncertainly. Back then, first year high school was known as E-class because that was the noise some timid kids uttered when they got there on the first day, "Eeee!" (Steve, sadly, died of cancer a few years ago.) The bus arrived and I reluctantly climbed aboard. I had to stand for the journey because, even though there were free seats, first years - according to my brother - couldn’t sit if they wanted to survive until day two. We wound down the Channel Highway, me and the other newbies desperately hanging onto the overhead straps. The older kids down the back took bets on who’d fall off first. They made things interesting by poking us with hockey sticks and other handy implements. Because of the heat, the winding road and first day nerves, several kids unpacked their hot breakfasts and soon a malodorous artificial lake formed on the floor. Every time the driver applied his brakes, a tsunami of sick swooshed up the central aisle of the bus, hitting the windscreen before splattering the kids sitting in the front seats. I’d been wondering why the bus had windscreen wipers on the inside. We pulled up next to the tennis courts. The wire made my first impression of the school 'prison'! The bus doors opened and several hundred (pre-metric) gallons of warm sick sluiced into the gutter and slurped slowly down the slope towards A-block where, rumour suggested, it was recycled as the thick vegetable soup that cost a shilling (with a bread roll) from the school canteen in the basement at lunch time. We alighted heavily and trudged off to find our new homes. The bus drove back to the depot to be hosed out. The heat continued to steadily build over the day. Thermometers popped with monotonous regularity and you could see people slowly disappearing as their water evaporated, vapour trails above their heads like halos. One or two spontaneous combustions occurred and a few students dressed unadvisedly in nylon got stuck to the over-heating plastic chairs and had to be abandoned when eventually, after lunch (I passed on the soup!) the entire school was evacuated down to the beach because flames were threatening to cross the Channel Highway. Some B-class (Year tens) boys were sent up onto the roof of the primary school, ready to protect the building in the event of the flames jumping the road. No way in today’s world would year tens be allowed to do such a thing, unfortunately perhaps. Down on the beach my friends and I formed a line and faced the on-coming inferno, sucking hard in an unsuccessful attempt to draw the fire towards the buildings. The sky was an amazing red (as were we in the heat) the smoke pall heavy and unpleasant. It was scary because we didn’t know how things would end but also exciting because we thought that maybe the summer holidays would get extended if the school burned down. Quite a few students did lose their homes, pets and other animals, though I don’t remember anyone in my class (E2) losing family members. It was eventually decided that it was safe for us to go home and we re-boarded the re-sanitised bus to return to our worried families. So ended day one at Taroona. PLEASE NOTE: This was originally assembled as a possible inclusion in a Fiftieth Anniversary compilation for my old high school and some slight liberties with the exact truth may have occurred during the preparation of the item.I suspect if you're a good writer, you know it. But, if you're not a good one, you can never really be sure that you're not a bad one, like a tone deaf person screeching and bellowing embarrassingly away in a choir. The only way to become a writer, is to write. And write. And write. Make mistakes. You learn from them. Jot ideas down as soon as they occur. Your ideas (thoughts) are the fuel for your writing. Do it - but also spend a lot of time day dreaming too. © David Rish , 2004 |