In-depth One-day Course and Workshop

10am-4:30pm, Saturday 19 October 2013 

Venue: NSW Writers’ Centre: Rozelle Hospital, Grounds/Balmain Rd, Lilyfield

For further information and timetable, please write to Dr Ehsan Azari Stanizai,

e.azari@uws.edu.au or call on 0402440637

Sufism (comes from Arabic noun, suf, literary meaning course wool and the Sufi is the one wearing woolen garments) is the name of a great Oriental intellectual tradition. Sufism has been divided into two practical and theoretical parts: To those who practice it, Sufism means a quick spiritual foray into a space where the presence of the divine could be experienced. To those who are concerned with its theory, it is a body of knowledge that expands its influence in Western academia and culture. As Robert Graves wrote, a ‘cross pollination’ of Sufism in Western poetry and literature.  

As an elixir of wisdom, intuition and an intellectual Yoga, Sufism has been known, cherished and even practiced in the West since time immemorial. Western poetry and writing in each epoch as Robert Graves wrote, illustrate ‘cross-pollination' of pollination of Sufism and its intellectual tradition. It is hard to find a single great Western poet or thinker who has not been inspired by Sufism. Dr Johnson loved Sufi Oneness and pantheism; Voltaire in Candid saw Sufi philosophy as an antidote to social injustice and religious extremism of his time. Goethe loved Sufi poetry; Richard Burton and Robert Graves were keen on practicing Sufism.

 Sufism was also cherished by Australia's greatest poet Professor Alec Derwent Hope. Hegel draws on Sufi thought in his works. Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was the first who brought the news about the Sufi music and dance known as “Whirling Dervishes” to Europe.

Nobel laureate, Doris Lessing is the doyen of contemporary Sufis in the West. She identifies Western admiration of Sufism since the 1960s as ‘a Sufi craze,’ and ‘Sufi bandwagon’. For Lessing, Sufism was a kind of universal feeling, emotion, a quick fix and an access with no intermediary. “Sufism is something one experiences on one's own,” she would say. Sufism is a treasury for sharpening your poetic and writing intuition and inspiration, one who tastes it knows it.

Rumi is a household name in the West. His poetry is now in the best-selling list in the United States.

He is famous as Shakespeare in the West. Sufism has been used as healing effects on psychosomatic disorders; that is why Rumi is called by many as ‘healer of our time’.

This one-day course will introduce you to Sufism, its philosophy, spirituality, literary and cultural heritage and to Rumi, his poetry and his Whirling Dervishes.

Course Outcome: By the end of the one-day course, the participants should be able to:

• have a widespread understanding of what Sufism is? Identify key concepts in Sufi philosophy, Sufi literature, poetry and art. Learn about the theoretical and practical aspects of Sufism.
• define, explain and discuss key theoretical and literary texts in Sufism and its philosophy. Learn how to analyse a mystic discourse in a literary and poetic text.
• apply Sufi knowledge and intellectual tradition for enhancing their capacity for intuition and creativity.
• explain and discuss cross-fertilisation between Sufism and different branches in Western intellectual tradition.
• identify and understand leading Western thinkers, poets and writers inspired and influenced by Sufism.
• understand mystical experience in Eastern and Western traditions.

Timetable

9:00-9:15am: Registration

9:15-10:30am: Introduction: Sufism, Sufi philosophy

10:30-10:45am: Coffee break

10:45am-12:00: Influence of Sufism in the West: Idries Shah, Richard Burton and Doris Lessing, etc.

12:00-1:00pm Sufi Tales: Rumi (Mathnawi) & Attar (The Parliaments of Birds)

1:00-2.00pm: Lunch break

2:00pm-3:15pm: Sufi arts and music: Whirling Dervishes

3:15pm-3:30pm: Coffee break

3:30pm-4:30pm: Mystical Experience (ecstasy) from phenomenology to psychoanalysis:

Rumi and his Love/mystical poems

About the presenter and tutor

Dr Ehsan Azari, is an internationally acknowledge academic, researcher and writer. He has an MA (1^st Class) in English literature and linguistics and a PhD in English literature from Macquarie University. He has taught different subjects in different universities. He is an Adjunct fellow with Writing & Society Research Centre (UWS) and an academic with The School of Humanities and Communications Arts (UWS). He is the author of Lacan and the Destiny of Literature: Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery: (2009 Continuum). He frequently writes for the Australian and international media on a wide-range of topics.

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Professional Development Seminar for Writers

Time and date: 9am-5pm, Sunday 19 February 2012

Writers: here’s your opportunity to eyeball an agent and pitch to a publisher!

From left to right: Belinda Alexandra, Carl Harrison-Ford, Selwa Anthony, Andy Palmer, Linsay Knight

NSW Writers’ Centre, Callan Park Rozelle (Enter Callan Park from Balmain road opposite Cecily Street and follow the signs to the NSW Writers’ Centre)

There is plenty of free parking at the Centre.

Cost: $150 for waged, or $135 for seniors and students, plus $10 for pitching session.

Payment includes morning and afternoon tea and lunch. Please let Irina know if you are a vegetarian.

NB You must attend the full day to be eligible for the pitching session.

Payment: Send cheque/money order made out to Australian Writers Network and post to Irina Dunn, PO Box 136 Balmain NSW 2041 or deposit fee in Westpac BSB 032020 account 254469. Don’t forget to add $10 if you wish to make a pitch.

NB There are limited places for this one-day seminar and applicants will be enrolled in the order in which payment is received.

Inquiries: Irina Dunn, email idunn1703@gmail.com or mobile 0403 48 63 63.

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PROGRAM

9am-10am: Opening address — Andy Palmer on “The Modern Author”

ANDY PALMER is Allen & Unwin's publicity director. He has worked in Australian book publishing for over 25 years at Pan Macmillan, HarperCollins Publishers, Simon & Schuster Australia and Hachette Australia. For eight years he ran Publicity Matters, a Sydney-based PR agency specialising in books and writers. In that time he was the Sydney Writers' Festival publicist for two years and the federal government's Books Alive (now called Get Reading) campaign publicist for seven years.

Morning tea 10am-10.30am

10.30am-11.45am The surgeons of your manuscript

Chair: Irina Dunn

With thousands of unsolicited manuscripts hitting the desks of Australian publishers a year, the onus is on writers to ensure that their work is as polished as it can be before submitting it to a publisher. Your friends and family will love your work, but only a professional editor can give you a dispassionate assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, suggest improvements in its structure, get rid of those embarrassing grammatical errors and other writing glitches and make your words shine on the page. Jean and Carl speak with many years’ experience as freelance editors; Jean is also a creative writing tutor and both she and Jan will talk about how writers can develop techniques to edit themselves. Alison Green speaks from the point of view of an in-house editor preparing the work of her authors for publication.

12pm-1.15pm: Agent Selwa Anthony and her clients Belinda Alexandra and Grant Hyde (see below for bios)

Chair: Irina Dunn

With publishing an increasingly difficult field to break into, hear what Selwa Anthony, one of Australia’s top writers’ agents, has to say about the current climate in Australia, what books are being taken up by the major publishers, what the prospects are for overseas interest, and what are the distinguishing features of successful Australian books and authors. Selwa Anthony’s clients Belinda Alexandra and Grant Hyde talk about how they broke into publishing, what efforts they put into getting their first and subsequent books published and their plans for future work. There will be ample time for all your questions at the end of this session.

Lunch 1.15pm-2pm

2pm-3.15pm: What kind of books are publishers looking for today?

Chair: Irina Dunn

Hear what Jacob Coates, Alison Green, Linsay Knight and Melanie Ostell have to say about the kinds of manuscripts they are looking for, which titles are doing well in today’s market, whether they look at unsolicited manuscripts, their relationships with agents, and how they want manuscripts presented to them. There will be ample time for all your questions at the end of this session.

Afternoon tea 3.15pm-3.45pm

3.45pm-5pm: The Pitching Session

This is a unique opportunity to pitch your manuscript to a publisher. Your pitch will be strictly limited to three minutes. The panel members will assess the pitches and award a prize to the pitch they think has the best chance of being published. The prize is a copy of the current Australian Writer's Marketplace, an essential reference and resource for writers.

NB The pitch will be judged NOT on your presentation but on the genre and subject of the manuscript you are pitching.

To participate in this session, please email ONE PAGE with the following information to idunn1703@gmail.com, and don’t forget to add $10 to your fee if want to make a pitch.

Pitching page for [YOUR NAME]
Phone number:
Email address:
Title: (of your manuscript)
Length: (number of words in your manuscript)
Genre: (eg memoir, young adult fiction, speculative fiction, chick lit, historical novel)
The title of a comparable book which your book would sit next to on a shelf in a bookshop:
Synopsis: maximum 300 words.

The publishers on the panel will be provided with copies of the pitch page you submit.

You may either read from the page you submit or you may simply speak for three minutes.

SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF SEMINAR GUESTS

From left to right: Alison Green, Jacob Coates, Jan Cornall, Jean Bedford, Grant Hyde, Melanie Ostell

BELINDA ALEXANDRA has been published to wide acclaim in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, USA and throughout Europe. The daughter of a Russian mother and an Australian father, she has been an intrepid traveller since her youth. Her love of other cultures is matched by her passion for her home country, Australia, where she is a volunteer carer for the NSW Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Services (WIRES). She wrote the novels White Gardenia, Tuscan Rose, Silver Wattle and Wild Lavender. Her latest novel, Golden Earrings, is set in Spain and has once again given her readers a story they love.

SELWA ANTHONY was born in the Australian country town of Cowra, NSW. Her passion for books was ignited by her father when he gave Selwa her first library card when she was just eight. Having migrated from Lebanon in the 1920s, her father loved writers like Lawson, Paterson and Marcus Clarke, and they helped him love Australia. He also passed this love for Australian literature onto Selwa. She has said, "as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz had a yellow road paved with bricks, mine seemed to be paved with books".

Selwa’s career began in the book section of a large department store in the 1960s. A decade later she was the retail and marketing manager in Sydney for a major book company, where she was the first manager to feature Australian books at the front of the store. During this time she also had her own radio book chat program, syndicated throughout Australia, and reviewed books on the Midday Movie Show with Bill Collins.

In 1984, the Selwa Anthony Author Management Agency was born. Selwa credits bestselling Australian author Colleen McCollough with her becoming an authors’ agent, after Colleen said of her: "Selwa has the best eye for a manuscript of anyone I have known and should become a literary agent".

Since signing up her first popular fiction author – the late Evan Green – Selwa pioneered the first breed of popular Australian fiction writers. Almost thirty years later, successful authors on her list are plentiful with the likes of Belinda Alexandra, Tara Moss, Kate Morton, Kim Wilkins (aka Kimberley Freeman), Diane Armstrong, and many more.

Selwa’s agency champions the cause of Australian authors, who are often underappreciated in their own country. She focuses on discovering and promoting home-grown authors who have wonderful Australian stories to tell.

Selwa has also written four books of her own – The Lebanese Cookbook, co-authored with her two sisters, two "little positive thinking books", Succeed With Me and Wake Up, Shake Up, Stand Up, with Jimmy Thomson, and The Spirit of Australia, with Sue Williams.

Selwa is married and has two daughters, a stepson and stepdaughter, and two grandchildren. She lives in Sydney.

JEAN BEDFORD teaches Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the author of the short-story collections Country Girl Again and Colouring In (with Rosemary Creswell), the novels Sister Kate, A Lease of Summer, Love Child, If With a Beating Heart, Now You See Me, and three detective novels. She has been a journalist (Literary and Arts Editor of The National Times), a publisher’s editor (both in-house for Angus & Robertson and Transworld, and freelance for most major Australian publishers), a teacher of ESL and of creative writing, as well as commissioning editor of several short story and essay collections. She has been a judge for numerous regional, state and national literary grants and prizes, including for the Literature Board of the Australia Council, both for literary grants and for publishing subsidies, as well as for various Fellowship of Australian Writers and National Book Award prizes. She has several times judged the NSW Premier’s Award for fiction and the Australian/Vogel Award as well as the Nita B Kibble Award.

JACOB COATES is the founder of Jaffa Books, a new e-publishing company based in Brisbane. A keen reader of speculative fiction, Jacob has always loved the works of some of the masters of these genres. J.R.R. Tolkien and Douglas Adams are two of the greatest inspirations to him. Since emigrating from England at fifteen, Jacob started writing his own work before graduating from QUT’s creative writing degree in 2010. Jaffa Books was conceived shortly afterwards, and successfully launched late last year. Jaffa Books is an e-publishing company based in Brisbane. Jacob is always looking for exciting new talents, and accepts a wide range of fiction across any genre and almost all lengths. Offering an attractive royalty deal for writers, Jaffa Books is well suited to first-time or upcoming authors.

JAN CORNALL is a Sydney-based writer, performer and teacher who supports writers through the long process of realising their creative work. The author of 15 plays and musicals, a feature film, three CDs of songs and a novel, Jan teaches creative writing at writers’ centres, community colleges and universities in Australia and the Asia Pacific. Jan also leads writing retreats in inspirational locations: Bali, Fiji, Laos, Cambodia and the Australian desert. She is dedicated to nurturing the unique attributes of each writer, and each year a number of her students go on to publish with major publishing houses. See www.writersjourney.com.au.

IRINA DUNN is the Director of the Australian Writers' Network, which has 7,500 subscribers throughout Australia and abroad. She wrote The Writer’s Guide: a companion to writing for pleasure or publication, (Allen & Unwin), which was described by the Australian Book Review as ‘a godsend for writers’ and as ‘one of the clearest and most commonsensical compendiums around’. Irina has been a regular programmer, speaker, presenter and moderator at writers’ festivals at Ubud in Bali, Byron Bay, Norfolk Island, Darwin and Sydney Writers’ Festivals. For the last four years she has chaired the Woollahra Council Local Writers’ Festival. In 2010, she was invited to be a judge of the inaugural Randwick Council Literary Awards.

ALISON GREEN is CEO and co-founder of Pantera Press, which was founded in 2008. Pantera Press is small, independent and Australian, and brings together an unusual mix of passions for the arts, business and philanthropy. With her background in psychology and business strategy, Alison’s creative vision is to foster debate by discovering and nurturing talented new authors and publishing books readers rave about. With its “Good books doing good things”™ mantra, Pantera Press supports programs such as The Smith Family’s Let’s Read initiative that encourage the joy of reading. Since May 2010 Pantera Press books have received critical acclaim, with a best-seller, several books going in to reprint and Sulari Gentill's novel A Few Right Thinking Men being shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book for this region.

CARL HARRISON-FORD commenced his life in publishing as a “poison taster”, assessing unsolicited manuscripts for a large publisher. In the subsequent four decades he has been a self-employed editor. During that time he has worked on fiction — both literary and popular, including much crime fiction — and a wide variety of non-fiction, from the academic, general history and biography to books on sport, and memoir, a wide range but excluding Lifestyle and New Age. Some years ago he was the Editor in Residence at the University of Canberra, and earlier still was instrumental in the establishment of the National Book Council Manuscript Assessment Service.

GRANT RAYMOND HYDE was born and raised in Maroubra in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. A bookmakers son, he attended Waverley Catholic Boy’s College until his matriculation in 1986. He worked as a clerk for his father until he was graded with the NRL’s Eastern Suburbs Roosters (Sydney Roosters) in 1989. His football life ended in 1992 with the death of his father and a serious career beckoned. Over the following years he worked as a hotel manager, gym instructor, building project manager and real estate agent, all with varying degrees of success. It was his interest in human history and his love of the Polynesian people that brought him to complete his first novel Lords of the Pacific in 2008, and it was published the following year. The stand alone sequel Islands of Gold was released in January 2011. Grant is currently working on his third novel, Daniel’s Empire, an Australian saga set in early Sydney Town.

LINSAY KNIGHT is widely respected as a leading expert in, and contributor to, children’s literature in Australia. As the Head of Children’s Books at Random House Australia, she has nurtured the talent of numerous authors and illustrators to create some of Australia’s most successful children’s books. Linsay is also the author of several successful non-fiction children’s books, and the editor of a number of children’s dictionaries and story collections, including 30 Australian Stories for Children, 30 Australian Ghost Stories for Children and four age story collections: Stories for 6, 7, 8 and 9 Year Olds.

MELANIE OSTELL has more than 20 years' experience in Australian book publishing as a bookseller, educator, editor and publisher. For many years she was senior editor at Text Publishing and in June 2011 she took up the position of Publisher of the Pier 9 imprint at Murdoch Books. Pier 9 is the narrative imprint of Murdoch Books, which has been publishing award-winning titles since its founding in 1991. Pier 9 publishes around 22 titles each year with an emphasis on narrative non-fiction that includes memoir, biography, history and popular science titles. We also publish literary and genre fiction and select young adult fiction.

For information about the program, contact Irina Dunn idunn1703@gmail.com,

or call 0403 48 63 63.

The delicious food for attendees was provided by the talented chef, Lucky Pappas.

Thank you Lucky!

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RUSSIAN WRITING TODAY

SOIRÉES LITTÉRAIRES 4 OCTOBER 2011

Tatyana Tolstaya                    Irina Dunn

Who are the great Russian writers of today?

Whose books will become the Russian classics of tomorrow?

We know what novels Russians read in the 19th century — the great classics of Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Under Communism they read Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak and Gorky, often as Samizdat (underground) hand-written copies circulated among trusted friends.

But what are Russians reading in the free market economy?

Does literature play the same significant role today as it did under both Tsarist and Soviet rule?

How do current Russian novels reflect the society which produces them?

Why are Russians devouring writers such as Victor Pelevin (pictured above), Tatiana Tolstaya, Boris Akunin and others in such huge quantities?

IRINA DUNN takes a look at some contemporary Russian writers, explaining why they are so popular, how they reflect the current zeitgeist of the country and which might become the classics of tomorrow.

IRINA DUNN BIOGRAPHY

Irina Dunn is the Director of the Australian Writers Network. Previously she was Director of the NSW Writers' Centre, Manager of the Australian Writers’ Guild Authorship Collecting Society and Managing Editor at Booktopia. She wrote The Writer’s Guide: a companion to writing for pleasure or publication, (Allen & Unwin), which was shortlisted for the Australian Publishers’ Association National Education Awards.

The book she co-authored and co-edited with two scientists, A Natural Legacy: Ecology in Australia, won the Royal Australian Zoological Society Prize for best text on the subject AND she received an international prize for her documentary about the Australian women's peace movement, "Fighting for Peace".

She represented NSW as an Independent Senator from 1988 to 1990.

Irina was born in Shanghai, China, and is of Russian, Irish, Portuguese and Chinese background. She is a cultural tour guide and takes Australian travelers to Russia, the Baltic States, Mongolia and China.

DETAILS

Place: Eastern Suburbs Leagues Club, Level 3 restaurant,
93-97 Spring Street – Bondi Junction

Date and time: Tuesday 4 October 2011, 6.30pm-10.00pm

EARLY BOOKING ESSENTIAL AS PLACES ARE LIMITED.

Cost: Light supper plus talk $35.00 per person (non-refundable)
Regrettably, no complimentary tickets can be issued as prices have been minimized to keep the costs affordable for Soirées guests.

Payment: Deposit to Westpac BSB: 032 051 Acc: 162 874

Make sure you include your name in your payment then send email to: irina_spinadel@yahoo.com.au for your receipt/ticket,
or send cheque payable to “Soirées Littéraires”, PO Box 572 Paddington NSW 2021.

Website:  soireeslitteraires.org.au

Inquiries: Irina Spinadel, Soirées Director, 02 9363 1147, or Irina Dunn, 0403 48 63 63

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AN EVENING WITH PETER MILLER-ROBINSON

Peter Miller-Robinson is a songwriter, singer and guitarist whose original music embraces elements of folk, blues and jazz. He also plays mandolin and eight-string ukulele. He is known for rich vocals, dexterous playing and astute, often wry lyrics. Peter has been awarded twice by the Australian Songwriters' Association.Peter is an enthusiastic live performer who plays regularly at festivals, universities, folk clubs and on national and public radio. He has shared the stage with many well-known local and international artists. In 2007 he supported Bo Diddly, Eric Burdon, Rodriguez and Chris Smither at the Basement in Sydney during their Australian tours.In 2009, Peter was invited to tour Ireland by Kingdom Management. A highlight of this trip was playing at the hallowed De Barras Folk Club run by the famous Moore family, Christy, Barry (aka Luka Bloom) and Gavin. The tour was a great success and Peter will be returning to Ireland in June this year. This Pain Quotidian show will be one of his last in Sydney before Peter flies out. Peter is currently completing his second CD, "Amongst Others", before the trip. Peter acknowledges the inspiration of the generation of songwriters he grew up listening to, including Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. There are also the darker influences of Lou Read and John Cale from 60s New York. As well as Peter's own compositions, you can expect to hear fine interpretations of songs like "Dance Me to the End of Love", "Hallelujah", "I Shall Be Released", "Subterranean Homesick Blues", "Crazy Love" and even "Perfect Day".

Peter will be accompanied by long-time musical friend, Tim Watts, on double bass.

What the critics have said about Peter...

"Fine writing" Philip Adams:

"A compelling story teller" Drum Media:

"Haunting tales" Sydney Morning Herald

Time: 6.30pm-10pm, Monday 16 May
Venue: "Le Pain Quotidian", 54 Norton Street, Leichhardt NSW 2040
Cost: Supper + Performance $30.00
RSVP essential, limited spaces
Phone: (02) 9646 1101
Email: irinadid@ozemail.com.au

Payment:

1. Send cheques to Australian Writers Network, PO Box 136 Balmain NSW 2041

2. Deposit your payment into the following account:

Australian Writers Network Westpac BS 032 020 Account 254469 (make sure you provide your last name when paying.)

3. Pay via Paypal below using your credit card

Inquiries Irina Dunn (02) 9646 1101

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In this newsletter we will be offering items of interest to both published and aspiring writers, as well as to discerning readers.

If you have a short review of a newly published book or a writing quote you wish to share with Network News subscribers, please send it to irinadid@ozemail.com.au.

We will advertise gratis items of general literary interest sent in by subscribers, but if you wish to advertise your book or event through our e-newsletter, please contact us regarding the very modest fee we charge for this service. Irina Dunn

Soirées Littéraires (February)

GUY DE MAUPASSANT: HIS LIFE AND WORKS

Guy de Maupassant is one of the greatest short story writers of all time and is considered to be a father of the modern short story. He also wrote six superb novels. He hated war, he hated religion and he adored women, but De Maupassant found little happiness in his short life - the epitaph he wrote for himself was "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing".

This talk by well-known literary expert Susannah Fullerton illustrates the genius of this troubled writer and tells the story of his short and turbulent life.

Time: 6.30pm-10pm, Tuesday 1 February

Venue: "La Brasserie", 118-126 Crown Street Darlinghurst, Sydney (Nr William Street)

Cost: Supper + Talk $30.00

RSVP essential, limited spaces

Regrettably, no complimentary tickets can be issued as prices have been minimised to keep the costs affordable for Soirées guests.

Payment: Make cheques to Soirées Littéraires, PO Box 572 Paddington NSW 2021 or deposit $30 in Westpac BSB 032 051 Account 162 874.

MICHAEL WILDING AND INEZ BARANAY AT LEICHHARDT LIBRARY

Irina Dunn talks to Michael Wilding and Inez Baranay (above) at Leichhardt Library about their new novels from Press On

The Prisoner of Mount Warning by Michael Wilding

Wilding’s latest novel is a take on the secret world, mainstream and underground journalism, writers’ centres, the counter culture and much else. The book is a heady ride from Sydney to Byron Bay and the Gold Coast.

Peter Corris writes: “If this was as much fun to write as it is to read, Michael Wilding must have enjoyed writing The Prisoner of Mount Warning.

With The Tiger by Inez Baranay

With the Tiger is set both in Australia and in India, and makes entertaining, often dryly satiric, observations on the last years of Joh’s Queensland, the gay art scene, and the high-flier social circles of Sydney during the boom and bust of the 1980s. – Paul Sharrad

A racy read, this is a worthy addition to your literary vocabulary. – Sahara Times

www.inezbaranay.com

Leichhardt Library
Italian Forum, 23 Norton Street, Leichhardt, Sydney
6pm, Thursday 3 February, 2011

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4. Review of Michael Wilding’s The Prisoner of Mt Warning

by Irina Dunn (Quadrant Jan-Feb 2011)

One reason I like Michael Wilding’s work so much, and this may be the same reason it is sometimes misunderstood, is that the acute social observation of his writing is sometimes taken as unmediated description. And so the creative imagination of the author is dismissed as if he were a mere cipher for recording the world around him.

Not so. Wilding is a sly writer, who lures you in with a knowing laugh only to turn the joke around and leave you gasping. There were many such moments in Academia Nuts and Superfluous Men, his novels about aging academics as they reach the end of their careers and face anonymous retirement.

Wilding’s latest novel The Prisoner of Mt Warning returns to the heady pot-smoking paranoid seventies by focusing on a group of one-time hippies whose past exploits are catching up with them to embarrass them. If you were young in the seventies, you might know what this means.

A writer turned investigative reporter, Wilding’s protagonist Plant is the most innocent of all the players, despite the implications of his name, in what is gradually revealed to be a widespread spook network.

Huxter, the arts editor of a major newspaper, employs Plant to track down a man called Dorritt, who has written a disturbing article about being kidnapped, tortured and subjected to sex slavery while in the employ of the secret service many years before.

Dorritt had been enlisted by his professor to conduct a survey of alternative magazines and newspapers after funding for Dorritt’s PhD program was terminated. Dorritt had a nervous breakdown during the course of his research and was put away for years, emerging only after a “Writing as Therapy” course at a writers' centre prompted him to record his earlier traumatic experiences. It is this that has got Huxter so worried.

Trouble for Plant is, Huxter doesn’t want to say too much about the case because, as Plant correctly opines, he’s personally involved.

“Find out what he’s [Dorritt] planning to write.”
“What sort of things?”
“How would I know what sort of things?” said Huxter.
Very clearly, Plant thought, but he kept quiet. Huxter was worried about something and wasn’t going to say what it was. Something that Dorritt might write. But if Dorritt in the end didn’t write it, then Huxter didn’t want to have said what it was. That was clear. It was also clear that it was something serious. Something worrying. Something incriminating. Otherwise there would be no reason for Huxter not to tell Plant.

In his search for information about Dorritt, Plant visits Bobby, the American proprietor of Bobby’s Books who, with “blonded hair, gold necklace, earrings, bangles, beige business suit”, was clearly inspired by Pat Woolley of Fastbooks.

Bobbie tells Plant of her reaction when Dorritt visited her years before to interview her for his research project on the alternative press:

“I thought he was a poet,” said Bobbie. “One of those English ones. All dandruff and unwashed socks.”
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said.”
“Talk,” said Bobbie, counting out another twenty-five copies of How to Grow Your Own Dope and Harvest It.
“Well, interview you,” said Dorritt.
“Go ahead,” said Bobbie.
He took out his notebook.
“What is the aim of your publishing program?”
“To sell books,” said Bobbie.
He laughed. A madman’s laugh…
“Apart from that?”
“Apart from that we’re going to be out of business.”
He snuffled some more.
“But your editorial objectives?”
“Not to publish poetry,” she said. Hoping that would get rid of him. But it didn’t. He just wrote it down.

Plant’s mission to find the elusive Dorritt takes him to inner city pubs, the Greek restaurant above Hyde Park, the writers’ centre in Rozelle where Dorritt is a volunteer. Plant is a keen observer of his environment, as an investigative reporter should be, and brings Sydney to life with piquant details of his travels around it:

They drove across to Ashfield, parked the car and walked past the church hall and the food being doled out to the down and outs, past the Polish house, last relic of the post-war Slavic migration, down into the new Chinatown, in the Shanghai Night. In the early afternoon. Hand made noodles. Shallot cake. Vegetable dumplings. Chili pepper tofu.

Plant follows his quarry to the hills behind Byron Bay, the scene of the crimes Dorritt alleges took place — kidnapping, torture, sexual slavery and interrogation. He visits the commune and finds that Rose, one of the original inhabitants, still lives there. There’s the bowl of fruit on the wooden table. The bowl of dope. Familiar? The heady smoke of pot rises from the pages when Plant sits around the hippy table, questioning Rose and Huxter’s colleagues Angela Dark, a journalist, and Ghostly Sperrit, political speechwriter and bagman, about their involvement in Dorritt’s kidnapping and torture, since they were at the commune at the time the alleged events took place.

Plant becomes increasingly paranoid when his friend Fullalove suggests that Plant may have been employed to find Dorritt so that “the contract man knows where to go”. Enmeshed in a spy ring in which everyone lies or is evasive, maybe even his friend Fullalove, his paranoia provides the links for transforming a complex set of hints and suppositions into the ultimate paranoic interpretation of the case and make it seem plausible, at least until the end of the story.

This is a story which will confront you with its logic and suck you in with its reasoning.

Plant’s sensitivity to the nuances of communication lead to many hilarious moments in this very funny novel, while Wilding’s wonderful ear for menacing dialogue and a witty punch line make The Prisoner of Mt Warning a must for anyone who would enjoy a spy thriller loaded with black humour while taking a nostalgic trip back to the radical 70s.

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