Helen Healy Writer & Reader

30/08/2024

The Michelangelo of Print

Have you ever wondered who invented italics, or semi colons, or expanded the reason why we read?

I love knowing this trivia now, but especially love knowing that there was a person responsible, and a point in time when reading became about pleasure.

Thank you Aldo Manutius for your beautiful book printing in 15th century Venice, and Amitav Ghosh for your wonderful books.

This extract is from Gun Island, it’s read alone, but also a sequel to The Hungry Tide.

Recommend both highly and have copies if you live nearby and want to borrow.

16/08/2024

Described as a literary masterpiece and I couldn't agree more.

Not only an insight into the Palestine/Israel situation but an extraordinary and beautifully written 'riot act against oppression, misogyny and shame' by Susan Abulhawa

26/01/2024

Preparing draft #8 (and second last!) for my Beta Readers* as I prepare to go down the let’s-get-published road. 🙏🏼 🤞 ✍️

*according to Wikipedia, a beta reader is a test reader of an unreleased work of writing, typically literature, who gives feedback from the point of view of an average reader.

This feedback can be used by the writer to fix remaining issues with plot, pacing and consistency.

The beta reader also serves as a sounding board to se if the work has the intended intellectual and emotional impact on the target market.

19/05/2023

One of the highlights of my life was sitting at the desk of Borges in Buenos Aires.

Full story in my blog - link in comments.

"In October 1982, 83-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who at that point had been blind for nearly 30 years, gathered sixty of his closest friends and admirers at a special dinner in New York. Susan Sontag was there. Speaking to a reporter covering the event, she captured the enormity of Borges’s spirit and significance with her signature eloquent precision, saying: 'There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.'

"Borges died four years later.

"On the 10th anniversary of his death, Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled 'Letter to Borges,' penned on June 13, 1996, and included in the altogether fantastic 2001 collection 'Where the Stress Falls: Essays.'

"Sontag begins the letter, the proposition of which she deems not 'too odd' since Borges’s literature has always been 'placed under the sign of eternity,' with a sublime paean to his genius and humility:

"'You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.

"'You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like 'the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.' That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.'

"Sontag also referenced a famous quote of Borges, from "Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems":

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

Thanks, again, to Maria Popova and The Marginalian.

02/05/2023

Elizabeth Strout just may be my new favourite author.

Such a unique writing style as she exploring the complexity of human behavior and takes my breathe away when she nails a characteristic in just a few exceptionally well chosen words.

Her latest reveals the strangeness of the lockdown years with characters making return visits from previous books.

Here's a full list of every book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Stroud. Find everything from her debut title to her latest release right here in one place!

31/12/2022

On running and writing…

“I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity.”

Once I was sitting at a desk writing all day I started putting on the pounds. If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape.

27/12/2022

Brilliant and audacious work of fiction.
Or non fiction.
Or a novel.

Fabulously intertwining deep dive research, flipping between centuries, countries, view points, with jump off the page characters, including ghosts, all bookended by global pandemics.

An insightful book for writers on viewpoint, narrator, how to present years of research and thinking, dealing with your agent, deadlines, advances and importantly how to finish a book and knowing when to stop.

Sad it had to end.

Well done Sophie Cunningham, Ultimo Press and the ghosts of Leonard and Virginia.

26/04/2022

Now this is the kind of cafe I need right now…

Writers facing deadlines go to Tokyo's "Manuscript Writing Cafe" with an understanding - they can't leave until their work is done.

29/01/2022

‘Don’t. I thought. And then I did.’

What comes after this line is mind blowing, utterly orginal and breath taking.

It’s been a long time since I didn’t want a book to end and I’m about to slowly read and relish the last 20 pages.

Goes straight to the top ten of all time.

18/01/2022

Thanks Nick.

Just what I needed to hear about my writing…

“Apply yourself fully to the task, let go of the outcome, and your true voice will appear. You’ll see. It can be no other way.”

Dear John, Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental...

28/12/2021

Vale Keri Hume.

I went to see her at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe, Sydney in the early 90s because I was gobsmacked by her book the Bone People and loved her gutsy authenticity and lack of pretension.

The Bone People was, and remains, unlike any other book, both fierce & tender with a language of its own.

A great writer fittingly acknowledged with the Booker Prize.

The accomplished poet and author has died at the age of 74 after facing chronic medical issues.

07/10/2021

Hot off the press

The 2021 in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate pe*******on of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”