Author Archives: Benjamin Solah

About Benjamin Solah

My name's Benjamin Solah. I'm a horror writer and Marxist revolutionary from Melbourne, Australia.

Gaza and the Realpoetik

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With Gaza on my mind, the bombing, the deaths of children and the mainstream media’s silence, I’ve come close to writing again. Horrors such as this always bring forth new words, but I can hardly say I’m thankful for it. I’ve got some disturbing images floating around inside my head. But I think these are important things to write about, it’s why I write in the first place, without some overblown expectation that my words will change masses or do as much as real action can, but I think writing is at its best when it engages with the real world.

On that note, Jessica Wilkinson and Ali Alizadeh’s manifesto, The Realpoetik Manifesto, speaks to me and how I approach writing, especially poetry. The manifesto is “an unavoidable and necessary code for the art of non-fiction poetry.” Manifestos haven’t really been in for a while so I love to see its return. There’s this old manifesto by these bearded guys called Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that’s worth reading too.

In the manifesto, which has been posted around various literary and poetic websites it states: “The Realpoetik recognises the unquantifiable potential of poetic writing to convey a deeper experience of reality and ‘real life’ accounts than may be possible through conventional non-fiction prose.” And so on it goes. Well worth reading.

I would like to publicly state my intention to join The Realpoetik. Perhaps it will guide me to write something about Gaza after all. Writing about something from home in Melbourne feels hard though, because it seems not as powerful or real as if someone had written a poem by Gaza. I found that when writing about the Egyptian revolution last year, when I wrote this poem, Egypt. It comments on the process of writing from where I was.

On not writing

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It’s a bit of an oxymoron to write a blog post about not writing, but other than my little spurt at NaNo, I basically haven’t been writing that much over the last month or two, or perhaps longer, if you don’t include uni assignments. No poetry, hardly any blog posts, certainly not that much fiction. And I’ve kind of withdrawn from the poetry scene for the moment, and feel a bit rusty when I have performed at various gigs.

I’ve been doing a lot of trivial things that probably aren’t worth talking about like playing video games. I’m also looking for a job which is hardly inspirational, but rather pretty soul destroying. I suppose I’m taking a bit of a break. Perhaps it’s a good thing. Certainly, it’s not healthy to just force myself to write if I’m not feeling it, but the latest bombing of Gaza has angered me, perhaps enough that some poems will come out, but again, I’m not forcing it.

This is a blog post just to give people a heads up.

On NaNoWriMo, withdrawing, and returning to old projects

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I’ve had a bit pretty good relationship with National Novel Writing Month and been pretty committed to it over the years. I’ve at least started every year since 2004, even though I’ve only completed it twice. I think I will always make an attempt or throw my hat in the ring in some form every year, because it’s always been the camaraderie, excitement and motivation that draws me too it rather than the format, the duration or the word count. I like writing consistently with lots of people over the month.

San Diego Comic-Con 2011 - Impact Wrestling ringNaNoWriMo is always a bit contentious amongst writers and there are many debates often had about how useful it is, but I feel like it may work for some and not for others and there’s no single path for writers and their methods, so in some sense the debates are often redundant.

But NaNo was a bit different for me this year. Perhaps it’s studying Creative Writing at uni, being on break, or a number of other factors, but writing was not the problem for the first time. It wasn’t time or my ability to get down a lot of words, but the story kind of fell flat, so despite being well ahead of my word count, I pulled the plug on day 4, the same day I decided to withdraw from the City2Sea due to a knee injury and focus on other things.

Both training for a long-distance running race and attempting NaNoWriMo require intensive input so perhaps it was not the best thing to do after completing my first year of uni, so now my attention is turning to the other things on my list and another writing project that keeps grabbing my attention.

It was Jodi Cleghorn, my editor for a number of short stories included in the eMergent anthologies, that led me in that direction over a late breakfast. NaNoWriMo is not a waste of time for me because it’s been the 2010 NaNoWriMo novel that keeps coming back to me.

I keep trying new formats for it, new mediums etc. but despite still being unsure if it’s a serial, a series of short stories, a novella, a novel or a script, or whatever it ends up being, the characters, and the story keeps holding my attention.

So I’m going to try some new things, some less structured writing, and just dabble with scenes, with plotting, and play with the characters for the next few months and see how that goes, especially in November and see if I can still make use of the month.

Grand plans for uni holidays

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Semester is over! I’ve basically finished my first year of my Creative Writing degree as of yesterday. Well, I have this one 10 minute prac test tomorrow and there’s the off chance I won’t pass this one subject, so technically I’m ten minutes away from possibly finishing my first year, but then after that, I am free.

Perhaps I will reflect on that in another post, but I definitely think the decision to go to uni finally has been great for my writing and helping to take it seriously. I also feel so much calmer and healthier in the head not working full-time in that office job of mine.

But holidays means much more time, which will mean I’m going to find some kind of casual job for a bit before uni goes back next year. I have like four months holidays which is kind of a lot of time. We’re actually only at uni for half of the year, which doesn’t seem like much given we’re getting into truckloads of debt for it.

But anyway, holidays means more time and lots of things to do, including…

  • Reading! Lots of reading. Reading political books, like Eugene Debs’ biography, Bending the Cross, which I’ve been meaning to finish, and novels like Suffient Grace by Amy Espeseth which I’ve had my eyes on, and lots of poetry too. I think I will start compiling and culling a manageable list of things to read over the holidays.
  • Writing! Of course, but writing that I want to do, and getting together with classmates and other writers outside of class to critique stuff and push each other to send stuff out.
  • Art! I’ve got a canvas sitting around that needs stuff added to it, as well as a few other ideas.
  • Learn how to use fewer exclamation marks!
  • NaNoWriMo i.e. National Novel Writing Month i.e. writing 50,000 words in a month i.e. writing a lot in a select period of time
  • Write more poems, which is like point two but specifically poetry and lots of them
  • Put on a poetry gig involving RMIT creative writing students because that would be fun and I have time for more poetry gigs and I want to show other Melbourne poets how talented we all are
  • Running – Yeah, am still obsessed with that. Running the City2Sea on November 11, 14km, so will be training for that. And finding other races to do
  • More cycling because I got a new bike and it’s less impact on my joints from all the running, and am liking getting around like that.

So yes, I have grand plans, much of which might fall apart fairly quickly, but hopefully not. If you know of jobs around, let me know, that would help heaps. What’s everyone else got planned?

Blogging elsewhere

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I haven’t blogged a lot during this semester of uni. I’ve got one more week, and it’s crunch time for assignments but all the work has me feeling dreamy-eyed for the holidays and all the things I’m going to do including hopefully more blogging.

But in the meantime, I thought I’d highlight two posts I’ve written for another blog. Embedded Literati is a group blog exploring the Melbourne literary scene as part of an assignment for my creative writing degree.

I was lucky enough to review Angela Meyer of LiteraryMinded fame about her blog and her involvement in the literary scene.

And I also discussed literary schools, movements and groups in response to Beth Blanchard’s post for Litcisms.

South Sydney ’til I die: on Souths, footy, and why I love it

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I’ve been a Bunnies fan since I was born basically. Dad told me we had red and green in my blood and I believed him literally because I didn’t quite understand metaphor at that age.

This might seem like a bit of a tangent, but it’s been exciting to see the Bunnies get so close to an NRL Grand Final. I’ve never seen it my lifetime. And it will be a pretty huge moment when they finally make it.

The last time they played in the Grand Final, they won in 1971. My Dad was pretty young at that age too, so we’ve been holding onto hope for a long time whilst they were near the bottom of the ladder during the 90s.

The team has been pretty important to me over the years. I believe the loyalty I’ve had to the red and green is linked to my loyalty to unionism and class that my father passed down to me. And it’s quite moving being in the stadium side by side with thousands of other fans, not unlike protests and demonstrations I’ve been on.

Actually, my first demonstration was in defence of Souths when they were being threatened with expulsion from the league. There was real working class anger at Murdoch, News Ltd and Foxtel for attacking our club to revamp the league in the pursuit of TV ratings and more profit. To come from that, from being kicked out of the league for a few years in the mid-2000s to being one game away from the Grand Final seems a lot bigger to me than any other team making the Grand Final or even winning it.

A lot of people take their sport and their teams pretty seriously, and for some, that seems trivial or unimportant, but I think those loyalties and the passion people hold is a lot deeper than how it appears on the surface. I can imagine that the kind of values, like taking a side and being loyal to a club, could easily transfer to other realms of people’s lives like class solidarity and standing up for our rights.

Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and angry working-class voices

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I am prone to obsessions. I don’t just get into something, I consume everything to do with it. My current one, in case you haven’t picked up on it, is running. Not only am I running a lot and feeling strange when I go a few days without, but it keeps coming up in my writing and am reading things inspired by it. Writing is hard at the moment, a lot harder than running is it seems, and as a result, I keep falling back on writing about running, letting it creep into everything because it’s what’s in my head and keeps the words moving.

And my obsession took me further. From a uni classmate recommending an essay in Believer, The Race That is Not About Winning, and in that finding the mention of a novella, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ by Alan Sillitoe, I was led on an unexpected trail of new writing that both sated my new craze for running and found resonance in the radical socialist part of me.

The novella, part of a collection of the same title, is about a working-class man put into prison for theft, and as a way of potentially getting his sentence shortened and a bit of freedom, accepts the offer from the governor to train for this distance race between the other prisons. He’s going to be the pride of the prison and win the cup for the suits at the top and gets special privileges to leave the prison early in the mornings and run. But despite the chance of getting out early, the narrator refuses to suck up to the governor and give him the honour so stops just before the end to let someone else win.

Sillitoe, in the narrator’s voice, manages to capture a bunch of feelings of why I like running and at the same time encapsulate the real class divide within English society at the time. It is rife with comments about hating the rich, the police etc. That voice, the angry working-class voice is something I’m interested in writing and kind of reminds me that I’m able to use these obsessions, distractions even, to write in those voices and talk about themes that I’ve always talked about.

Book Review: What I talk about when I talk about running – Haruki Murakami

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In line with my recent running craze, another writer and runner recommended Haruki Murakami’s What I talk about when I talk about running, a memoir of sorts about Murakami’s long standing dedication to long distance running and writing, and how it all kind of links together.

It is a short and engaging book, helped greatly by Murakami’s matter-of-fact minimalist style, or at least that of the translation. And I don’t think you need to be into running to get anything out of it, but as I continue to come across writers who see running as their physical activity of choice, I think those of us who are both, recognise an affinity with the two activities.

Much of the book focusses on his preparation for the New York Marathon, how he prepares, what challenges he faces, particularly the onset of old age and inevitably slower times. Murakami’s incredibly philosophical about the whole thing and provides some honest insights into mortality and why he continues to run. It’s due to needing to keep healthy when you spend so much time as a writer at your desk, which makes sense, except weight isn’t really a concern for me (I can’t gain weight for some weird reason) so running is about keeping fit in case the bits inside me, the bits I can’t see, might be breaking down without any outward signs of my lack of health. It’s also time to think, which hasn’t exactly worked out that well for me personally yet and writing is much harder at the moment than running. You can keep running regardless of mental barriers. The process remains exactly the same. One foot in front of the other. I seem to have more control over it than I would writing sometimes, how exactly to start or attack an idea or image. Often these things puzzle me or it’s not as clear as looking ahead down a path and knowing how far left I have to go.

Through What I talk about when I talk about running, you get a real sense that Murakami is an incredibly focussed and disciplined person and that his routine means he probably doesn’t find writing as hard or sporadic as I might. It’s worth reading for writers who feel they lack motivation and discipline, as reading memoirs from writers often does.

On writers as runners and attempting a 10km race

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It might be just me, but over the last month or so I’ve noticed a bunch of writers that are also runners. It started with Steph Convery’s blog post and then as I outed myself as someone getting into running again, a bunch of other writers came out.

I’ve also come across Haruki Murakami’s memoir on marathon running and novel writing, What I talk about when I talk about running. It’s not just a coincidence. Perhaps there’s a common personality trait in some writers that leads them to complete long distances, like long stories. Both are simple. Running is a simple sport, you don’t need any real equipment and writing is a simple art form, again, no need for fancy equipment.

I’ve been running again for over a month now. It was the only sport I was any good at in High School, but haven’t really done it since. At first it was hard running again, but now it’s getting easier and I’m becoming addicted to it. So with a group of friends, I’ve entered the 10km run of the Melbourne Marathon. I always wanted to do a long-distance race, like The City to Surf when I lived in Sydney. One day I’ll get there with that one.

I’ve begun training and am aiming to run under 55 minutes. I’m also using it to raise money for the campaign for refugee rights. You can donate via my GoFundMe page. All donations will go to the Refugee Action Collective (Victoria). This way I can make my training go to a good cause and the donations coming through will spur me on.

New pieces published at Overland

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I’m very lucky and honoured to have two pieces published recently with the progressive literary journal, Overland – one blog post and a spoken word piece.

Yesterday, the special edition, Audio Overland went online, edited by Maxine Clarke and includes my spoken word poem, ‘Climbing’ which is part of a suite of poems I’ve been working on concerning refugees and mandatory detention.

And two weeks ago, my blog post on the battle of the various ebook formats, ‘Monopolish’ appeared as a guest blog post in the ‘Loudspeaker’ section, drawing on a bunch of ideas about digital publishing and ebook technology has been discussed on this blog.

Both pieces are available free online but I would encourage you to support Overland by subscribing.