Literary Birthday – 30 August – Carmel Bird

Happy Birthday, Carmel Bird, born on 30 August 1940.

Carmel Bird Quotes

1. The narrative of your own life is the most complicated story you know. It is also the most precious, and because it grows, develops and changes as the days go by, it is the most dynamic, original and absorbing story you will ever know. (Carmel Bird)
2. I’m always writing – even if only in my head. I take notes on paper – often backs of envelopes and other scraps, I confess. But yes, I am always writing. It’s what defines me. If I need defining, what I am is a writer. That’s what I do.
3. I complain savagely about having to abandon the laptop and organise travel and pack and actually lock the door behind me and head off, leaving my writing routine behind. But once the actual journey is in motion, I revel in it, and find joy also in the way that inspiration floods in. I don’t take my laptop with me, so I can’t do any serious work, but I take a little paper notebook in which I jot stuff. This will mainly be details that will later go into my journal, and there will also be bits of inspiration for future stories.
4. I call my journal a ‘Book of Three Good Things’. The idea is that I recall three good things from each day and write them down. They can be slight, such as discovering or remembering a word, or they can be larger and more complex – seeing a grandchild for the first time.
5. Introvert, extrovert. I don’t know. Yes, it takes time to observe, reflect, write and write again. I often think, not in terms of psychology, but in more ordinary terms, and I think I am and always have been observant – and kind of creepy.
6. Everybody’s early life is to some extent disrupted by sad, ugly, frightening events, and some people become, as result, writers of fiction, and some don’t. The fiction writer takes those moments and works with them in order to do, I think, broadly two things – one is to make sense for the writer, and the other is to entertain, inform, illuminate, but above all connect with, readers.
7. To describe my imagination – it is a combination of very dark and also very light, airy. The result of this can be fiction that shivers along, sometimes dropping into the dark, sometimes whisking up into a realm close to hilarity. I think.
8. A lot of my fiction has a slightly hybrid flavor – some of the feel of an essay, I think – but no, the form doesn’t change. I did write a little short story about the butterfly women long before I wrote the essay – but that is really just a matter of taking one inspiration and responding to it in two different genres. My boundaries are wavy. I just set about writing really, and the form presents itself with the material as I write.
9. I don’t have a social life really. I do have family responsibilities. But somehow most days I can write all morning and all night – finishing up about eleven, usually. But, of course, it can go on later.

Source for quotes 2-9: Sydney Review Of Books

Carmel Bird is an Australian writer of novels, short stories, and essays. She has also written books on the art of writing, including Writing the Story of Your Life, and has edited anthologies of essays and stories. In 1991, she won the New South Wales Premier’s Award for The Bluebird Café.  In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Her most recent books are Crimson Velvet Heart, a novel and Love Letter to Lola, a collection of short stories, several of which are set in Tasmania. Her first book Dimitra was published in 1976, and her memoir Telltale was published in 2022.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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