I’m happy to say that Writers in the Attic is back for 2018! To ease the pressure on myself a little, I’ve decided it will be more of an occasional series, but I promise it will be just as interesting and varied!

My dear writing friend, Michelle Johnston, is kicking off this year. You might remember Michelle from when she was a guest here back in 2016. She wrote, then, about being an emergency physician and writing, and it’s been one of the most popular posts ever. 

Michelle returns today as a published author: her novel, Dustfall, was released by UWA Press last week. I’m intimately acquainted with Dustfall, as Michelle and I have been in a writing group for some years now. We’ve read and re-read each other’s works in progress, and I’m always awed by Michelle’s majestic prose. Dustfall is an incredible novel about what happens when doctors make mistakes, the tragedy of Wittenoom and the power of storytelling. 

 

‘What such editorial pruning did however, was release the truth within Dustfall, one that even I didn’t know when starting out to write the manuscript.’

Dr Michelle Johnston is a consultant Emergency Physician who works at an inner-city hospital. Mostly her days consist of trauma and mess. She believes there is a beating heart of humanity, art and beauty within the sometimes brutal reality of the Emergency Department, and has dedicated her career to finding that sweet spot between creativity and critical care medicine. Books are her other oxygen, and writing her sustenance.

You can follow Michelle at her website and on Twitter.

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An Unexpected War

I keep Virginia Woolf in my scrubs pocket. Almost every sentence of hers speaks to me with words of deliverance, and when I’m at work in the merciless Emergency Department, the salvation she provides is much needed. In addition, her insights on the writing life are piercing. She told her biographer, ‘Nothing has really happened until it’s been described.’ As a rather slow-learner, this has only come to me latterly – it is only through writing that I understand anything at all.

So, here I am with a book about to come out. Dustfall. A novel that took six years to complete. It was the culmination of exploring a million different ideas and thoughts and experiences which had been stored in this chaotic head over decades, many in the dusty restricted section of my brain, and it was only in the writing them down, getting them firmly pixelated on a computer screen, that these notions made any sense. Something magical happens when thoughts are transcribed into words – some alchemical process that gives these ethereal things unexpected shape and colour and wonder.

 

‘Something magical happens when thoughts are transcribed into words.’

 

This is what happened with the writing of Dustfall. But, as all writers know, all good writing is rewriting. Redrafting is where the real wizardry takes place. It’s a type of evolution, with your own set of biological rules and Darwinian regulations. Only the fittest sentences survive. But, like the dodo, it means there will be some horrible losses along the way. So this little piece, for the gorgeous Louise Allan is my eulogy to those forfeited passages, the extinctions, the failed snippets.

In many of the former drafts of Dustfall, there were stories and sidelines and characters that I mourn. There was the fictional town of Parmouth, a cinematic, technicolour teeming Wild West town which was an inverted version of Wittenoom. There was a night when nickel nuggets rained from the sky like hail, to be collected by the school children and taken home where they were heated up and moulded, emitting a green other-worldly flame, releasing the toxic nickel carbonyl which would poison the town, smiting hordes of children. And, lest I forget, there was the Rural Ladies Association. Our own CWA, not terribly cleverly disguised, full of well-upholstered and competitive women who went into battle over their jam competitions and stabbed each other in the back whilst pouring tea for the Mayor in his clanking gold chains. I lament them all, but they had to go. They didn’t serve the heart of Dustfall. Will they ever be resurrected, Jurassic Park style? I don’t know. I expect, like the dinosaurs, they’ve had their time.  As the divine Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm said, ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.’ I should learn from him, and let sleeping velociraptors lie.

 

‘This unleashed a rage inside me, a storm of anger about the neglect and the cover-ups that were part of the fabric of this time, and the attempts at compensation that followed.’

What such editorial pruning did however, was release the truth within Dustfall, one that even I didn’t know when starting out to write the manuscript. The heinous episode in Western Australia’s history. The twenty-three years of asbestos mining in Wittenoom. This unleashed a rage inside me, a storm of anger about the neglect and the cover-ups that were part of the fabric of this time, and the attempts at compensation that followed. Once the focus narrowed in on these aspects, an unexpected war emerged from the mess of the early drafts. Now, in its completed form, this book is something I can say I am proud to let loose. At the time of writing this I do not have the first clue how Dustfall will be received by the wider public. Perhaps it does not matter. If it only opens a few eyes, and gives a handful of people joy, then I will have achieved my aim.

My final thought is about how one can inhabit the god role in this process of book evolution. In a word? Feedback. My gratitude will never be sufficiently expressed to the beautiful hearted Louise Allan and Jacquie Garton-Smith, both of whom knew when to direct me to the rubbish bin. My writers’ group, my supports, my friends. There were many other people of patience and wisdom who helped me dissect and prune – Kathryn Heyman, Terri-Ann White, Clive Newman, all of whom without the book would not exist. So, I thank you, good blog reader, for permitting me a few elegiac words, for those words now buried.

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PERTH WRITERS WEEK

Michelle and I will be speaking with Meri Fatin as part of Perth Writers Week. Our session is called Doctors’ Writing Club and it’s on Saturday 24th February at 12:30pm.

Tickets are free. Click here for more information.

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NEWSLETTER

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