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Blue Hour: Australian Edition

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Blue Hour will be published 29 June 2022 by Hachette Australia and available in all formats.

1936: At nineteen, Kitty was ready to leave behind the stifling control of her parents and all those constantly telling her how to live her life. Work at the Wintonvale Repatriation Hospital was her escape and a chance to be someone else.

Then she met soldier George Turner – and she heard her mother’s voice in her ear, warning of danger, of being that girl. Kitty told herself if she ever had her own daughter she’d never control her. She’d make sure her voice never left a mark behind.

1973: Growing up, Eleanor’s home was strained by sorrow and the echoes of war that silenced her parents. And always her mother, Kitty’s, bitterness, twisting and poisoning everything she touched. She thought she knew what made her parents this way … but Eleanor would never know all her mother’s secrets.

The demands of marriage, motherhood and looking after her daughter while her husband, Leon, is in Vietnam lay claim to Eleanor’s days. Nature, embracing curiosity and not being like her mother are Eleanor’s solace. But they are not enough when Leon’s darkness overwhelms. Both he and her mother leave their mark, and use her child for their own ends. Afraid, unsure and alone, Eleanor will be driven to erase her mother’s voice in her head. But the question remains: can she bear the burden of her own secrets?

Vivid, deeply affecting and confronting, Blue Hour explores the beauty and violence in the world.
Powerfully magnifying the fractures between a mother and a daughter, it reveals the brutal cost when we allow grief and trauma to reach down generations.

Blue Hour: UK edition

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It’s been five years since SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE was released. In that time I worked on a second novel which felt all consuming to write. A year or so into the project I became terrified, essentially convinced I would never finish writing a first draft let alone deliver a completed manuscript fit for publication: I realised I had no idea how to write this novel and I was afraid of what was appearing on the page. The self doubt and hyper criticism became too much at times. And then there was the intensity of sharing head space with my characters and their lives. I wanted none of it, I wanted all of it. And yet. I kept going. Because what else would I do with my life if I stopped writing it?

But now we’re here.

The good people at Tinder Press (UK) have recently released their cover and blurb for BLUE HOUR which is released later this year. You can find out more here: https://www.tinderpress.co.uk/titles/sarah-schmidt/blue-hour/9781472250629/

She thinks of blue mountain, her favourite place. ‘We’re going somewhere where we can be safe. We never have to come back here.’ She eyes the rearview mirror, keeps a look out for headlights, keeps a look out for him.

As dawn breaks over sleeping houses, Eleanor straps her infant daughter Amy, into the back of her car. Together they will escape the private hell of Eleanor’s marriage to make the drive to blue mountain, a place of enchantment and refuge that lit up Eleanor’s childhood. Can she be sure that her husband is not on their trail?

As the car eats up the long miles of highway, so Eleanor’s mind dives back into the depths of her childhood, and into her fraught relationship with her mother, Kitty. Kitty a woman who wanted so much, in marriage and in love. Kitty who always tried too hard to bend Eleanor, her brother and her father, to her image of the perfect family.

In her masterful return to fiction, Sarah Schmidt, acclaimed author of SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE reworks the classic road novel to tense, devastating, and ultimately redemptive effect.

A week of tricking a new project into existence

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Monday: writing objects

I made myself look around the lounge room, settle on the first object I saw, then write whatever came into my head for 2 minutes. I did several, all as terrible as I expected. It was satisfying. New project whispered but didn’t come forward. Here are two objects.

Door handle

A circle holds a button holds a turn/ clicks an opening into place/ widens the world

All the hands that have held this exit/ wound: ghosts.

White dining chair

Small lighthouses bring you to table/ bring to food, bring to gather/ it hard underneath skin/ It holding the accumulation of sitting years/ it supporting your back so you can look your family in the eye

Tuesday: writing food

I tried to remember a meal from when I was under 8 years old. I wanted to pinpoint the most mundane meal I could remember and gave myself 10 minutes to find it. The new project said it was willing to speak with me but that’s as far as it went. Wrote about toast with condensed milk but also remembered the fig tree in the front yard in Nowra circa 198something :

A swing made of rope and wood, the seat dad made that would pop out of place if you weren’t careful. Always fruit bats in leaves, in tree top. Always fruit bats screeching into figs, dropping into the ground. Always half eaten fruit rotting in the sun, small seeds in red flesh. Insects. I always thought the seeds were insects. We never ate the figs. Probably didn’t know how. Probably thought they belonged to the bats. Probably didn’t see a good thing when it was at our feet…

Wednesday: random words, reading about Virgin hermits

Woke up with a very strong sense of characters that want their own project. Told them to settle down, that I was still waking up. But I wrote their list of words and statements to quiet the noise:

Shame/love/inability to control everything / I have died and risen my whole life/ my jaw aches/ flea/ music music music/ superstition

Thursday: Worked on an issue I’m having with Blue Hour. Can’t reveal what I wrote. New project cracked the shits. Very jealous. Good.

Friday: read articles from 1900. Took notes, got bored

‘The woman who married her grandson their… a grandfather who had a daughter married a widower with grownup sons…’

‘Kate took a fancy to someone and would invite him to manage her affairs… then in a short amount of time she’d begin to fight with him and imagine him guilty of a whole bunch of offences’ [1924]

Saturday: rode bike to Melbourne general cemetery and spoke to the dead. I questioned what is a good life, what is a good death. Found Diane’s love and grief for her young parents and wondered when and why they had been taken. Fictional ideas started to form, took mental note. Went home and wrote. Project coming along. Too many projects coming along. Possible I now have too many things in my head. Absolutely itching to work on Blue Hour again so I can let it leave my body.

Clearing out the dead notes

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Found: forgotten phone notes for Blue Hour (once Blue Mountain)

Found: photographs I took on small walks (things I told myself would be useful for the novel)

Found: old ideas became new ideas became whole chapters became rejected edits became rewritten paragraphs

Found: the smallest thoughts that completed a manuscript

Found: my head, my dreams, things I don’t remember thinking

Found: memories of notes I’m positive have been erased and aired and erased again but keep coming back every time I open archived digital folders.

Found: this is a way you can write a novel when you think you have nothing inside you

Princes Park: 4 pm, Friday

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Journal page:

Waiting for another round of edits for Blue Hour. Can’t sit still. Ride bike to the park because at least then I’ll be too tired to think about the work ahead, the anxiety that’ll inevitably arrive with it. I haven’t written in a few weeks because my brain is so tired and my hands won’t cooperate with a pen. I don’t even know how to describe things anymore. I should never have taken a small break from writing. Idiot. But I’ve taken my notebook with me. Like always. Time to slow back into words. Ugh. It’s too warm to write now. Sarah, concentrate on what’s around you and write it down otherwise you’ll never do it.

Here: smell of over ripe green grass, of rain that dried up days and days before. Thirsty dirt holding tight to green and white blades, to the tornado of tiny black insects lunging a meter into the air as a dog sprints toward me: that dry-swear fur, of dogs in the back of hot cars, windows down. This the scent of a Friday afternoon in January in Princes Park.

Here: a five year old too big for the light blue tricycle he’s riding. His sibling on a scooter. These mad dash legs. The children sound like crickets.

An older couple walking by me. He: ‘I’m not improving as fast as I want.’ She: ‘yeah’. She draws herself out until she lands on the thing she ought to say. But he’s out of breath, hands begging to hips to slow down, and she says nothing else because… because.

Here: ‘mum! Mummy!’ Somewhere over my shoulder two claps in the air and a dog appears. Shaggy, limping-old, faded ginger fur and flopped ears. Is this mummy? Mummy stirs the insects and they shoot to the sky.

A small passage of daily thoughts (Corona edition) 1

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31 March 2020

Yesterday A and I went for our daily walk for fresh air. There were a few cars, those hard-work cars carrying men in twos. Some with the window down, banging on the side of the car door. There was no music on the radio. Sound for the sake of sound.

Everyone eyes each other, necks craning as far as they’ll go; social exorcisms. It feels different from usual leering: this is small talk with strangers, talking without words. I find I want to call out ‘how are you spending your nights? What are you thinking each morning before you leave your house?’

Sometimes I pass people on the street and I just want to scream, want them to scream back, for us both to be primal, to just make noise and empty our lungs. Instead I just say, ‘hello.’ Or ‘please look after yourself.’ Everyone telling everyone to look after themselves. Is this better than screaming? Probably.

A and I walked down quiet streets hand-in-hans and the sun was high above and our palms were sweat. All the houses shuttered. Every now and then we’d come across a house with children’s toys facing the street, even a sign with the words ‘HELLO!’ One sign said ‘We love you. Stay safe.’ The natural condition of humanity is to be social and to connect. I feel this more than ever. When I do see someone on the street, especially another woman and her child, all I want to do is hold her. Look at us raising children, I want to say. Look at how they smile right now. Because in the back of our minds we know that we don’t know what happens next. And that is a massive secret to keep from your child.

Your Rejections Are Necessary

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In a wooden drawer in my bedroom is a small pile of notebooks full of half-formed ideas or near-complete short stories that got the better of me. I’m positive that each time I sat down with these ideas I promised them something beyond completion, promised redrafting until I could take them no further, and then there would have been a promise to submit to a journal or a competition or maybe collect them like small sticks and present them to my agent as a surprise starter for a bonfire. What a side project they could be.

But it’s rare I see any of these to completion. I used to think my wandering mind was to blame, all that boredom that eventually came from sticking to a smaller world. I used to think it was laziness. Or maybe it was guilt for most often than not, when I write these short pieces, I am at the beginning, the middle, the endlessness, of a manuscript that should have the priority. And so the story is stopped, a character dies, and the notebook goes back into the dark and before I close the drawer I tell the story, ‘I hope you’re still here when I eventually come back to you.’

Over the years it’s occurred to me me that all these half-formed things are practice runs, perhaps even small bricks that may one day form the side wall of a paper and ink house. It’s occurred to me that these incompletes, these small rejections of ideas, are necessary for something bigger to be born.

The last short story I remember writing was about John, a teenaged farm boy sold by his parents to a travelling competitive eating side-show so that they could use the money from the sale of their son to save the family farm. John travels around vast country lands on a tractor. There are hopes he would return to them but he dies during a competition and the story ends. I can’t express enough how married to this story I was: I loved writing it. I almost finished an entire draft of it in a few days. And yet. I had begun work on the structural edit of See What I Have Done and so I put it away, the guilt strong, and that was the end of John.

Tonight as I sat down to work on my current manuscript, the farm boy crept through my mind. Was it possible he was still here? I went to my drawer. And sure enough:

I opened to a random page. There a date: 23 March 2016. Something caught my eye:

John saw colour: blue the sky, black that crow; the yellow silk eye. Green tree leaves. Landscapes: altered gaits of men, some with mushroom-grey skin, others with bowl-cut hairstyles, mama-kind women in their deep-cut overalls exposing cheesecloth covered chests. The tractor passed all of them. John imagined their smell, underarms warm since five am, worked-earth underneath fingernails, trails of sweat. These were the people he hoped would come and watch him, give him a dollar for eating bear meat.

Three years have passed since I wrote this first draft. I’d forgotten the specifics of the paragraphs but it was instantly familiar: this is my current manuscript. The voice, style, rhythm, the near-cold and standoffish observations. In this short story is me learning another side of my writing. Perhaps this was me returning to that side after writing in the first person for so long.

I hadn’t known it then but this burst of energy and love for this story in early 2016 was part of the foundation of a bigger idea: novel two. Because beyond the voice, there are several themes that I’m clearly drawn to in this short story that are now repeating in the current manuscript. I realised tonight that the strange assurance I felt about how I might use narrative voice when I began the second novel was only able to feel like gut-instinct because I’d already had a practice run.

But then: where did the voice come from in 2016? What had I rejected months, years earlier while in the beginning, the middle, the endlessness of See What I Have Done that made it possible for me to approach it? Our creativity is the product of what is both realised and what is rejected. Our creativity is the product of accepting ideas come and go. Sometimes they stay, more often than not they go to someone else. And sometimes they return to you wearing a mask.

Tonight, sitting with the farm boy to my left and my manuscript on my right, I can see the inherent flaws in the early version of the short story’s structure, can see what this story should do, the new choices I’d make based on the last three years of growth I’ve made writing something new. I feel excited and I’m thinking I’d like to redraft it, submit it to a journal next year, maybe even send it to my agent as a possible future side project.

Knowing me I’ll attempt a rewrite and put it back in the wooden drawer. Maybe it’s because of guilt, maybe it’s boredom. I suspect some things are never meant to be completed, that they simply exist in order for something better, something stronger, to manifest.

A New Series: Dreams of #1… Mannerism

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Mannerism (Noun):

1 a: exaggerated or affected adherence to a particular style or manner

B: often capitalised: an art style in late 16th century Europe characterised by spatial incongruity and excessive elongation go the human figures

Merriam-Webster

At the beginning of the year I was in London and trying to enjoy a short break from writing. By this stage I was completely over my novel-in-progress and couldn’t move myself away from the feeling that what I am writing is not only irrelevant and derivative but is already a complete creative and personal failure. Upon reflection I think it’s safe to say these overly wrought and self-loathing thoughts were partially a manifestation of creative exhaustion and so the decision to take some time away from characters and words and emotions was probably a correct thing to do for a little while: nothing helpful can be gained from telling yourself something you’re in the middle of creating is a steaming pile of dog shit.

And so to London. A few weeks into my ‘I’m not physically writing or even thinking about writing for at least a month because I can function fine without that shit and anyway I’m super tired’ was going well until it wasn’t. The first thing I noticed was the quality of my dreams. They were vague, unmemorable. For someone who mostly experiences very vivid (often colourful dreams), this was unsettling. Throughout the day black and white pieces of the dream would come to me but they were so small I wasn’t able to glue them together and make a narrative. It has always been my superstition that if I can’t remember my dreams I’m in trouble creatively. The next sign that things weren’t going well were my feelings of being too big for my mind and body, that I was growing so far out of the boundaries of my bones and grey matter that I was feeling claustrophobic. At this stage of my life I know all too well that this happens when I need to release thoughts and feelings, to create something.

Obviously the logical solution was to start writing anything down to feel better. But I had made a commitment to not-writing and my occasional tendency to be stubborn had well and truly kicked in.

The best solution I had for myself was to go see some art and soak up other people’s creativity and keep it all in the memory bank until it was time to write again. The first place I went to was the Victoria and Albert Museum.

After walking around for a few hours trying very hard not to think about writing and how every bloody thing I saw was inspiring me, I found myself in a room filled with extremely old and expensive fancy tableware and hideously ostentatious home decor. I was relieved. Nothing here would tempt my need to write.

Then out the corner of my eye I saw this:

I found it both grotesque and fascinating. I went a little closer to examine it in more detail. That’s when I noticed a little plaque nearby that told me this was a piece from the Mannerism movement. I love art but I’m no art historian. Up until that point I hadn’t known that Mannerism was even a ‘thing’. I now know that the paintings I used to refer to as the weird but intriguing, OTT Renaissance stuff is actually from the Mannerism era of 1520-1580.

But there was something else. Encountering Mannerism in that very moment gave me a feeling of déjà vu. I felt motion sick. I needed to leave the museum immediately. On my way out I noticed a small sculpture of Prometheus, took a photo of it, and thought about the past.

And so the past:

When I was twelve I dreamt I owned a race horse called Mannerism who I adored but was considered an outside chance to win anything. In the dream I was constantly knee high in mud and at some stage I was ordered not to go near my horse for fear I would contaminate her. I felt utter shame. It was then that I realised I didn’t own Mannerism but was in fact the stablehand. My life wasn’t what it seemed. Eventually the day came that Mannerism was to start in her first race and so I went to the grounds to be with her, to show her I was there. But my legs were once again mud stained and I was forbidden to go near her. So I watched the race on a small screen in a crowded room which had green carpet and cigar coloured walls, the noise of punters screamed my ears and I could smell the filth of my pants but didn’t know how to take them off. The race began and Mannerism was in the lead, kept her lead and she won. Men in the room danced on their toes and as I started to feel joy I woke from my dream, opened my eyes to the pitch dark of my bedroom and said, ‘Mannerism. Don’t forget Mannerism.’

This is one of my most vivid dreams I’ve carried with me from my childhood and I often revisit it in order to understand where it might’ve come from and what, if anything, it means. But I’ve never arrived at anything satisfying. Over the years the word and meaning of mannerism has popped up in various forms for different reasons, especially when I’m writing, and every time it does I think of my dream horse. It was only after the encounter at the V&A that I considered for the first time the significance and symbolism of the opposing feelings of the dream: joy and shame.

Later that night I was scrolling through photos I’d taken that day and came across Prometheus. Looking at him, I heard a possibility of a story inside my ear, and despite myself I couldn’t help but write the following:

Over the hill break animals; bones as maize. All you shepherds come closer, sob your losses. ‘I cut the last lamb,’ one said, hung head. Hunger does terrible things.

There it was: a hint of shame. As soon as I started writing, the story became quiet and in that moment I didn’t have the energy to chase it. But the act of writing that short piece instantly calmed me, reduced me in size a fraction until I felt comfortable in my body. I knew this meant my break from writing would have to come to an end because this comfort would be temporary if I didn’t.

London and the writing break were over weeks ago and I’ve been back at the novel slowly willing it to tell me more of what it needs. But I can’t stop thinking about Mannerism and the reasons we dream, the significance of what we dream.

What can past dreams tell us about our future projects? What exactly are we returning to when we remember dreams?

Around one to two years ago I got the strong sense that I’d like to write a future novel which explores the themes of shame and guilt. I wrote the idea down so it wouldn’t stray too far from me while I continue writing novel two however I’ve had to revisit it in light of the remembered Mannerism dream and it’s symbolism of joy and shame. What does the dream know that I don’t yet?

I’ve started learning more about the Mannerism era and the idea of spatial incongruity and excess. Paintings from this period often show the moment before the action takes place and are a reaction to the late Renaissance by breaking the rules or exaggerating concepts. It’s why so many of them are just so bloody weird: they use rich colours and careful details but when you look closer you notice that things are off and slightly distorted. Things aren’t harmonious or conforming and are inconsistent with themselves. Space is strange, bodies are exaggerated, settings are sometimes unclear. All of this is a deliberate style to attain the ideals of’properness’ or perfection.

And then there are dreams. We now know that dreams may help the brain deal with trauma as it rakes over our memories and processes events. We also know that there are two types of dreams: REM dreams and Non REM dreams. One type allows us to practice emotion and the other strengthens our memories.

And so I come back to this: what can past dreams tell us about future projects?

What is clear now is that the encounter with Mannerism and Prometheus brought back a memory of a dream and inspired a short burst of writing that eased my feelings so I could fall back in love with my current novel-in-progress and finish a draft. But it is also clear that the past and future are colliding and that my present self needs to listen and explore this collision to make sense of it, to create something new.

For more about REM dreams and Non REM dreams watch this:

https://play.vidyard.com/Kr4T8eSibPltl_YfDv8kQQ.jpg?play_button=1

Stigmatised Buildings

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Above: I walk by this house all the time. I’d love to go inside

Buildings call to you. The shape of windows, the colour of a door, the height of the roof, the patterns in timber, a romantic garden: bricked-bodies reaching out for your love. Then there are those buildings which make you grit teeth, tease the blood from your heart, this guttural sixth sense of knowing that unspeakable things have occurred behind that façade. These buildings are monuments to some of our darkest fears. Most towns have them: the witch house, the murder house, the creepy building, the haunted house, the place everyone crosses the road to avoid. Gaston Bachelard sees houses as ‘a body of images that give[s] mankind proof or illusions of stability.’

Perhaps it’s these images of unstable illusions that have always attracted me to buildings and houses, not because I am an architectural enthusiast (I know almost nothing substantial about architecture) but rather the stories that are hidden inside, the memories that exist under the floorboards. I am attracted to the feelings of a space.

Outside the realm of writer dreamscapes, houses and buildings which are associated with murders, suicides, meth labs, cruelty and hauntings are called ‘stigmatised homes’. Properties ‘with history’ will often see a 25% reduction in value and take longer to sell. For some investors, this might be music to their ears: historically expensive homes going for cheap. As recent as 2016, the Amityville horror house, Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood home, and the Kreischer mansion were all up for resale. Needless to say these are not my idea of smart, first-homeowner investments.

Buildings call to you, want to whisper their secrets in your ear. Here are four stigmatised homes, buildings and places which have stories to tell:

The Queen Mary, docked permanently at Long Beach Harbor, California

Said to be one of the most haunted ships in the world, over the course of it’s life the Queen Mary has been a luxury cruiseliner, a warship named The Grey Ghost during WW2 which carried 800,000 sailors and prisoners of war, before being restored once more as a passenger vessel.

Behind its opulent interior is a history of death, beginning in 1936 when the first captain, Edgar Britten, died from a stroke in his cabin. As the years progressed, senior second officer, William Stark, was poisoned to death after he drank from a gin bottle filled with laundry detergent (there are claims it was actually acid); a woman and a child drowned in separate incidents in the ships’ swimming pools; during WW2 three Australian soldiers threw one of the ship’s cooks into the oven, burning him alive; and in unrelated incidents two men were crushed to death by door 13 in the ship’s underbelly.

However the events of 2 October 1942 provides The Queen Mary with it’s most significant record of death. The HMS Curacao was escorting The Grey Ghost through the ocean, zigzagging through tides in an effort to confuse any U-boats that may have been hiding in the water. This routine passage for both ships became a nightmare when The Queen Mary unexpectedly caught up to the Curacoa. Colliding with the much smaller ship, The Grey Ghost split the Curacoa in half, killing many of those on board instantly. Horrifically dozens upon dozens of men were then dragged underneath the water into The Queen Mary’s propeller, their screams loud and wild, siren calls. Somehow a few hundred men, now scattered in the freezing water, managed to hold onto their lives however due to war protocol, the Queen Mary couldn’t stop to pick them up. An SOS was sent to ‘nearby’ British ships to rescue those stranded but by the time those ships arrived two hours later, only 99 men were found alive.

Hinterkaifeck Ranch/ The Gruber family farm, Germany

Before the six inhabitants of the Gruber family farm were slaughtered, rural-strong father, Andreas Gruber, reported strange and mysterious occurrences to neighbours and friends: there had been odd footprints in the snow leading from the forrest to the house but none leading back. He told them how their last maid had left six months before because she believed the house was haunted, kept hearing unsettling knocks throughout the house, kept hearing someone walk around in the darkness. Mystery after mystery .

The day Maria Baumgartner, the new Gruber family maid moved in, a final mystery came for them all, mattock in hand.

Exact events surrounding the day of the unsolved 1922 murders remain unknown however the best anyone has ever been able to determine is the following: one by one, Andreas Gruber (63), Cazilia Gruber (72), their widowed daughter, Viktoria Gabriel (36) and her daughter, Cazilia (7) found their way to the barn and were murdered by someone wielding a mattock. Shortly thereafter the perpetrator walked into the house, into a bedroom where 2 year old Josef was still a ball of sleep in his cot and killed him before heading to the bedroom of Maria Baumgartner (44) and killing her too. Over the course of a few days, the killer made themselves at home, eating food from the kitchen, feeding the farm animals and making a fire to keep warm. When days then nights on the farm became too silent, the murderer left as quietly as they had arrived, leaving behind the family’s remains for neighbours to discover four days after the crime.

Although the house was demolished in 1923 and a shrine erected in its place, the farmlands still grow green, still waits for the murderer to be found.

Pripyat Amusement Park, Pripyat, Ukraine

The children of Pripyat daydreamed about the new amusement park for months leading up to its scheduled grand opening of 1 May 1986: how fast would the carousel go? How hard could they drive the dodgem cars into each other? What would be seen from the Summer-yellow coloured Ferris Wheel? How many sweets could they eat before feeling sick?

As children counted down the days, the town of 50,000 residents (and founded in 1970) went about their lives: workers made their way down the road to the Chernobyl NPP like they always did, mothers dropped off their children at daycare before going to work, teenagers made weekend plans. Everyone watched the construction of the amusement park move from skeletal mechanics to full grown life. And they waited.

History tells us what happens next. After the devastating Chernobyl disaster on 26 April 1986, Pripyat, like so many other towns nearby, was evacuated a few days later. There are conflicting reports as to whether the amusement park ever opened with some claiming it did for a few hours on the 27 April and others stating it never opened at all.

Pripyat has been a ghost town for over 30 years. Residents ever returned. The amusement park remains: instead of children’s feet hammering laughter into asphalt, neon green moss spreads like a cancer, fights with the decimated shades of green, brown and bleached grass growing through concrete faultlines. The Ferris wheel, sour-yellow rust, is an angry God, looms over strewn Dodgem cars and the carousel. The buildings in Pripyat are old bodies dropping paint, dropping walls, dropping skin, fingernails, hair. It’s a town largely without colour, without sound, without life. Some days not even wind comes to play at the amusement park.

Pripyat is now a destination for ‘extreme tourists’ armed with Geiger counters and a curiosity for what might have been.

The John Sowden House, Los Feliz, United States

Before this Los Feliz house was built in 1926, painter and photographer John Sowden asked his friend, Lloyd Wright, to design a home for him, something architecturally significant where he could entertain his Hollywood friends. The result was a Mayan revival house with a cave-like entrance and tomb-thin staircases. Although ridiculed by many for it’s appearance this would be a home to make memories in.

Years passed. John sold the house in 1930 and after many owners it was eventually bought by Dr George Hodel and his family in 1945. At first the Hodel children embraced the labyrinthine house, fell in love with the magic of a building that was a world onto itself. But not all was golden. George frequently beat his sons in the basement, was accused of raping his daughter.

The Hodel’s eventually sold the house and when George died in 1999 his son, Steve, then a retired LA homicide detective, found two photos of a dark haired woman amongst his father’s belongings. She looked familiar. Memories of overheard conversations from Steve’s childhood in that house came back.

15 January 1947: over eleven miles away from Los Feliz, Betty Bersinger and her three year old daughter were out for their morning walk throughout Leimert Park. Fresh air, car movement, birdsong. Joy. It was then the three year old noticed the mannequin in the grass beyond the sidewalk. What an odd place to leave one. Betty went to the mannequin to investigate. Closer, closer she went, her body probably registering what lay in the grass before she had the chance to verbalise horror: the body of Elizabeth Short, cut in half, drained of all blood. Somebody had slashed Elizabeth’s mouth from the corners to her ears, had sliced whole pieces of flesh from her thighs and breasts. In that moment: horror of what men thought they could do to you and your body, your life. Betty would carry this with her for the rest of her days. Betty screamed, called the police. In the moments after the murder, reporters rushed to uncover as much ‘sordid’ information about the victim by any means necessary. They even gave Elizabeth a new name, ‘The Black Dahlia’, these attempts at reducing her to an image, someone not real. At one stage, the LA Examiner located Elizabeth’s mother, Phoebe, told her that Elizabeth had won a beauty contest and would she mind sharing stories about her daughter’s personal life? Phoebe agreed, opened up. It was only after they nabbed their information that the Examiner told Phoebe that her daughter had been murdered.

The murder remains unsolved to this day. Except for one thing: Steve Hodel’s memories. After finding the photos he asked older family members to fill in memory-gaps for him, answer the questions he’s always had about his sadistic father. After long conversations, Steve believed Elizabeth had been to his childhood house in Los Feliz. He believes that his father tortured, murdered and dissected her body in the basement.

Sometime after 2011, Steve Lopez, a reporter for the LA Times went through a stack of old DA files on George Hodel. At the time Hodel was being investigated for his daughter’s rape, the house was bugged and everything was recorded. Steve Lopez found those tapes, found those transcripts in the file. He listened, he read and discovered: George had in fact been a suspect in Elizabeth’s murder. There was also another tape in the file, one where George can be heard on the phone to a friend saying, ‘‘Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia… they couldn’t prove it now.’

Somewhere in that house is a memory with an answer.

Above: Ralph Eugene Meatyard. One of my favourite photographers. For obvious reasons

 

Draft Season

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The transformative relief of drafting is what I look forward to the most when writing: taking small ideas, making raw words, rewriting them over and over until the project finds its true self. The beginning of things is daunting. Everything else that comes after that is hard work and the part of writing I enjoy the most. Because this is the moment you find out what you and the novel are really made of.

I’m in the middle of typing up several notebooks and am amazed at how my (still unfinished) first draft has both managed to retain original structure and intent and yet has completely obliterated itself. I had no idea the project wanted to be the shape it is becoming.

Recently I ran a writing workshop and afterward I was asked if I find my first drafts embarrassing. Yes, sometimes I do. But mostly I’m just glad it exists.

First drafts are not publishable. Most likely the next couple aren’t either. I’ve mostly kept what I have of the first draft to myself but I have shown a few snippets recently and most of that has been typed up straight from my notebooks without editing or even a second thought. And so I figured I’ll show some of that now. I realise that I often post parts of it on here but I figured it was time for some more.

Not because I think it’s great–far from it–but simply because it’s important to be reminded that all books start somewhere and they never arrive fully formed (at least for this writer). I also think it’s important to air your flaws so that when you do arrive at that place of accepting that you’ve done as much as you can for your project, that it’s the best version it can be, you can see the distance you’ve travelled, the progress you’ve made as a writer, a human.

And so some first draft material (some of which I’ve recently

shared elsewhere) :

It’s an odd thing to look at these minuscule sections of the draft and know full well how much of this project I am currently hiding from everyone, even my publisher and agent. These extracts reveal so little. And yet. Because what this novel truly is, what I’m positive it now wants to be, is perhaps something I’ve been hiding from myself until just a few months ago. And so now it’s time to get to that, to draft out the first version and then beat it into submission.