Tasmanian author Heather Rose writes because she can’t stop writing.
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Her words spin out across the page, sharing the stories she has to tell.
Rose’s most recent book, The Museum of Modern Love, was this week longlisted for the prestigious women's literary award the Stella Prize.
The book was 11 years in the making; a “labour of love”. It was a story that had to be told.
“This novel kept coming back to me and back to me and I just kept working on it when I could,” Rose said.
The Museum of Modern Love is set in New York around a real performance by Yugoslavian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic.
While the book features several real people alongside Marina, they and the story are fictionalised.
This was the greatest challenge of writing the book Rose said, particularly fictionalising Marina.
“It was quite challenging to write Marina Abramovic as a character because she gave me complete license to include her in the book and she didn't ask to approve anything. She just said, ‘Yes’,” Rose said.
“That’s a gorgeous invitation but also not easy when you have the most powerful Serbian artist in the world at the heart of your novel... it was a little bit daunting.”
Rose isn’t sure she ever overcame the daunting nature of the project, “I think I just got brave”.
“I had a wonderful editor Ali Lavau … and she asked me to expand on a couple of areas where she felt I was holding back and I realised she was right. After 10 years I was still trying not to upset Marina,” Rose said.
“So I got brave. I wrote the things I’d been holding back on a little bit … I got braver about saying what might be going on for Marina as she sat in the middle of the Museum of Modern Art for 75 days. They were the insights that were hardest to write.”
Authoring a novel is something that requires a lot of courage, Rose said.
“Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and I think that novels are much the same. Except they're 1 percent imagination, and 99 per cent courage a whole lot of the time,” she said.
“There are lots of forms of courage but perseverance is definitely one ... because you have to feel like it's worth doing. You have to feel like it’s worth spending hours and hours of your life where you could be gainfully employed having tea with friends or gardening or doing anything else but sitting at your desk and typing and rambling about with these characters.”
One gets the impression Rose would rarely be lonely, with a cast of colourful characters and intriguing stories roaming in the fields of her mind.
“I don't need a television. I don't own a television. I got very lucky with a brain that makes up stories all the time,” Rose said.
“It’s the fabric of my being - storytelling, and I feel like there’s a lot of magic about writing.
“I often refer to it as psychic orienteering. It’s got an amazing capacity to lead me through life giving me the right things at the right time ... and my job is to be on the lookout, to keep listening.
“To continue to expand on Edison's interpretation, writing is probably more for me, I suspect, 25 per cent imagination, 25 per cent perseverance, 25 per cent courage and 25 per cent magic.”
Clearly the magic woven through Rose’s storytelling captivates readers, as this most recent nomination attests.
The judge’s report for the Stella Prize noted The Museum of Modern Love's demonstration of the power of art as a catalyst.
This is something Rose believes should play a strong role in the 21st century.
“I would like to think that the pen remains mightier than the sword, as does the music note, and the paint brush, and the clay, and the play, and I think that we have never needed creativity more than we need it now,” Rose said.
I think that we have never needed creativity more than we need it now.
- Heather Rose
“In an era where we have a NAPLAN that doesn’t do anything to acknowledge creativity in its deepest, broadest sense, where we've got a world of rising fanaticism; imagination and creativity, and the courage to see those as vital in our community, is essential if we want to maintain healthy communities and therefore a healthy world.”
In a world that seems increasingly transient, populated by tweets and memes that disappear in moments, Rose loves the enduring nature of the written word.
“We can read work from people thousands of years ago. We can still read Socrates, we can still read Plato, we can read Dickens, we have an ability in language to understand lifetimes that we could never imagine any other way,” she said.
“I think the enduring quality of writing is very special to me.”
Also, Rose loves that each writer’s work is akin to a fingerprint – each entirely unique from another.
“The uniqueness of the author's voice in their work - nobody writes the same way,” Rose said.
“Just like everyone paints differently, has different brush strokes, it’s the same with language.
“We all have sentences and grammar and punctuation and vocabulary, but finding out the way that those tools express our stories, that’s so fascinating to me and it’s probably what keeps me writing year after year after year.
“That grappling with the English language to learn to say what I want to say as simply and as clearly and with as much integrity as I can for my characters is a lifetime's challenge. A lifetime isn't long enough.”