Ursula Dubosarsky

Ursula Dubosarsky is ACHUKA's first Australian Special Guest. Magpies has called her, "One of the few truly original and talented voices speaking to children today."

1. Zizzy Zing, which has just been published in the UK (June 1998), is--like much of your work--difficult to categorise, but it carries your distinctive voice, and was, I believe, your first novel (although not your first published book). It is hard for the reader to see where the story might have come from. This is part of its fascination. There is something Kafkaesque about the telling. And I notice from your Authorfile answers that you admire Isaac Bashevis Singer, and from your biography that you went to live in Israel soon after working on this book. On the other hand, the girl in the book is looked after by nuns in a convent. Any comments?

What an alarming series of references! A friend of mine once said that she found Zizzy Zing notable for it's tone of near-hysteria, and she was worried about how I must have been feeling when I wrote it...The book was written in the evenings while I was working in my first job for the australian public service in Canberra - perhaps this accounts for it! It was my first book - actually written before I ever went to Israel or even thought about it - and before I read any Isaac Singer. The nuns are because my mother is Catholic and was educated by nuns and I suppose I always had a nostalgic fascination for a kind of education I might have had - I was brought up in the Church of England, which in Australia at any rate, is the religion-you-have-when-you-don't-have-a-religion. I ended out in Israel really by accident - through an interest in Latin and Greek. I noticed that people who did Latin and Greek also often ended out doing Hebrew, so when I was in Canberra I took up a Hebrew class at night - at a pretty basic level! mainly so-and-so begat so-and-so, and then the children of Israel camped here and then they packed up their tents and camped there and so on! anyway, one thing led to another, and feeling like a change and meeting someone in the class who'd just come back from a kibbutz, I threw in my not terribly fascinating job and jumped on a plane.

 

2. Although not naturalistic, the narrative is entirely convincing. As the storyteller, to what extent did you know in advance what was going to happen to the girl when she gets off the train?

No- although I'd read in lots of books about planning your plot and so on, I never found that approach worked for me, and I only really find out what's going to happen in my books as I'm writing - really for me the best analogy for writing is dreaming - it's all happening in your head, so of course at some level you're controlling it, or deciding what's happening, but on the whole it's not a conscious thing, and it just feels like it's unravelling before you. The only idea I had when I started Zizzy Zing was that I wanted to write a murder story where the child was the detective - in the end it's more of a ghost story, I suppose.

3. Was the ending of the novel, and in particular the moving discription of The Family picture, part of the original book which you worked on in the early eighties, or something which developed nearer to publication in 1991.

Alas, you are very perceptive to point this out! when I rewrote the book closer to publication, I was asked to somehow tidy the plot up, or make ends meet somehow. I'd just come across the wonderful paintings of the american impressionist Mary Cassat and there is a painting of hers of a family and like all her paintings so replete with tender family affection which  I suppose can't help but be tragic in that it's so terribly vulnerable and faulty - anyway, it was that painting I was thinking of.

4. Your first published book, Maisie and the Pinny Pig, was a picture book, and your second, High Hopes, had been taken from the slush pile. Since then you have worked mainly with one editor, Jane Godwin, at Penguin. To what extent has this relationship been important to you in your development as a writer.

I feel so  fortunate to have fallen into Jane's open arms as it were - the rapport we have has developed gradually over the years in what feels like a very natural way, which I think must be so much more fruitful than just having a "rapport" thrust upon you by constant changes of editor or publisher. I suppose when you're first sending off manuscripts you just do it willy-nilly, but certainly my experience at Penguin has been  continually supportive and encouraging and I feel so lucky to have been able to work with Jane all these years and to have had the benefit of her imagination and intelligence and her eternal kindness. I suppose (well I know) I am oversensitive and touchy and very easily put off and demoralised, and her criticisms are always beautifully tactful.

5. Your OzLit entry describes your books as "comedies, often with a black or 'serious' streak, for fairly advanced readers". Which comes most naturally, the comedy or the blackness?

Oh definitely the comedy! I think just having a bit of a depressive nature, the sadder bits just creep in but I always think of myself as a comic writer essentially - I suppose they say advanced readers in that it's not necessarily what people think of as typical children's comedy in that it's character based rather than "action" comedy. But when I'm describing my books at public talks and so on I always find myself describing them as funny books, not sad or serious.

6. Your books are eminently appreciable by adults as well as children. When you started writing, did you make a conscious decision ot become a 'children's author'?

No - I think I really am one of these writers that write for a type of person rather than an age group -I mean they are most definitely in my mind children's book in the sense of the genre they belong to - I suppose it's just that I think the kind of person that might enjoy one of my books at the age of ten will still enjoy it when they're fifty. I also tend to believe on the whole that writers just write what they can! the ideas that come into my head are ideas for children's books, so that's what I write - I've never really consciously set out to do it - even when writing for very young children, the ideas come to me, rather than me setting out to find them. I have written a book recently for  much younger children called "Honey and Bear" and it really did just drop out of the dark sky in the middle of the night into my head, quite unexpectedly.  

7. The White Guinea Pig, which came out in Australia in 1994, in the UK in 1997, begins with a short 'Anonymous prayer': "Dear Father, hear and bless/Thy beasts and singing birds/And guard with tenderness/Small things that have no words." This sounds sweet and sentimental, but there is nothing sentimental about the blackly comic ending, in which Alberta the guinea-pig is sacrificed so that characters' self-knowledge can develop. Do you ever receive any protests from readers at the guinea-pig's death, and if so how do you respond?

I never had anyone express the slightest sympathy for that poor little guinea pig, funnily enough! I think though that you're a bit hard on me, to suggest the pig was sacrificed for the characters - I mean, her death was alas inevitable - as a mother in the playground muttered to me sagely when I announced we'd got  pet rabbits - "There will be some deaths" -  very wise words, I've always thought! Death is a bit of a bi-product of pet-owning, rather like gardening, alhtough not what you think of when you bring the poor little things home Even the best cared for pet is bound to have a shorter life-span that it's owner. I feel a terrible tenderness for Alberta or any  guinea pig (we still have some out the back), the small things without words, while at the same time a kind of impatient wonder at that poor unreflective little brain. Of course, pets are vast receptacles of emotion - my eleven year old daughter accepted the death (through a mite) of one of our guinea pigs comparatively calmly, but when her sea-monkey (a minute prawn called Fernando) "passed away" she was in floods of tears, quite devestated (she'd raised him from an egg, as she explained when she'd recovered)

8. Both The White Guinea-Pig and Bruno and the Crumhorn are told in the third person. Are you more comfortable with this than with first-person voice narration?

Again, it's not a conscious thing, but I have certainly noticed that my first person novels - Zizzy Zing and Black Sails, White Sails (which came out in Australia last year) have a definitely more melancholy tone - I think the first person brings out the sadder side of me somehow! I suppose a first person can be terribly intense - the perspective being so confined - in a third person narrative perhaps its easier to take a more philosophical view of life's various catastrophes...

9. What sort of a childhood did you have? I ask this, because the quality of your unique style is difficult to convey to anyone who has not read one of your books, and comes in part from the surprising and childlike lateral-thinking displayed by the main characters, and not just by the children. I think, for instance, of the great-aunt Ilma's dreams of Wimbledon in Bruno and the Crumhorn. Were you (are you!) a scatty daydreamer. I mean, scatty in your mental peregrinations, not necessarily in your nature. In other words, and this is an awkwardly-worded question I know, do your friends and relatives recognize you in your books?

In the end, a piece of fiction is an expression of  the writer's personality, and I  certainly recognise my personality in the way my books are told - I'm not sure what relatives and friends think, although I suppose they must as they've never said the opposite. I was pretty scatty as a child - a bit of a Bruno, I think - always losing things and forgetting things - and certainly a daydreamer like him -  to compensate either for boredom or social unease or sadness - I think this might be Freud's theory of creative expression (???)- as a compensation, I mean, for one's inadequacies. I've always found daydreaming a blessing - now I can't do it, really, I guess it goes into my books. All I can do now is worry. I'm often accused of being a bit eccentric - it's hard to judge yourself, I suppose. I'm aware that I sometimes go in for things that other people think are a bit on the nutty side (I like going on television game shows, for example!)

10. Did you write about a crumhorn because of persnal interest or involvement in Early Music?

t's not exactly a personal interest, but it came about through a series of personal encounters with  an Early Music society - now that's a breeding grounds for true eccentrics, not dilettante eccentrics like myself! early music type people seem so marvellously zealous - quite overpoweringly so, actually. I went to several fascinating meetings on the invitiation of a friend who's a keen recorder player, and I witnessed a few recitals very like that in Bruno and the Crumhorn. I suppose I was attracted to the crumhorn because of the funny name and the incredible honking sound - I at Bruno's age learnt (and lost!) the clarinet, a much more conservative choice.

11. At the risk of embarrassing you, I will select, more or less at random, a sentence from one of your books. "It had stopped raining, but it was wildly windy, and gusts of black birds with wet wings were banging about on the grey roofs." This comes from Chapter 10 of Bruno and the Crumhorn. I think it is demonstrative of your straightforward, but highly effective, and often poetic style. Are you a quick writer, or do you have to rework sentences such as this one to get them right?

When it come to sentences, on the whole they just come out like that - where I have to do lots of rewriting and so on is working through the action - making the plots work. I was told early on (with Zizzy Zing, actually) that I had the opposite problem to most children's writers, in that my fortes were language and character, and my weakness was plot, whereas with most children's writers, and I think this is probably true, the plot is the main thing, and it's the characters and language that tend to languish

12. How long does a novel such as Bruno and the Crumhorn take you to write?

I suppose it took about a year, perhaps. That's with plenty of breaks - I never do anything in the school holidays, for example. I'm quite driven in my writing, though I don't exactly churn the words out. My books aren't long - about 30,000, and I know for some writers that in a year is a pathetice effort! but as you mentioned poetry, I know that although it is prose, in a way I think I have a mental attitude to each book that perhaps is more suited to a poet - I mean I'm not expansive, I want it to be concise, for every word to have to be there. That' why they're short - mainly when I'm rewriting I'm cutting and cutting and cutting.

13. Do you work at any particular time of day? How long at a stretch? Do you find that the age of your own children has ever affected your choice of subject-matter?

I try to write in the morning, for one to two hours. When I was blessed with a sleepy baby, this worked quite well - bit like sitting down for an exam - I told myself the only time I could write was when he was asleep, and  you time starst NOW! My current baby (well he's two now) isn't like this, so I've adjusted a bit - the time is not so concentrated as he potters about the place next to me (with the occasional helpful comment or stare) as I'm writing. As for subject matter - my oldest child is now eleven - I wonder if I would have been brave enough to write for eleven year olds if I'd waited till now!!! the novels really didn't have anything to do with my children, but the more recent things I've been writing for younger children were most definitely written with my own in mind - in  that I imagine telling the stories to them as they come into my head.

14. As The First Book of Samuel is also published in the UK this month (June 1998) but was unavailable at the time of the interview, would you care to tell ACHUKA visitors a little bit about it?

This book came about from reading my daughter a story from a children's Bible- we're not a religious family - either Jewish or Christian - but I'm fond of Bible stories - anyway, I was reading her the story of Samuel in the temple hearing the voice of God calling him in the night - I'd always liked the story as a child (probably because it's one of the few stories from the Bible where a child is the main character!) anyway, reading it again lead me back to the original story from the beginning of the first book of Samuel and I was just so struck and warmed up somehow by the human dilemma of the whole situation - the man with the two wives, one of whom has lots of kids and the other who doesn't have any and is always crying and stops eating and so on - anway, it just came to me as a great" skeleton" for a novel - my novel of course, is set in late twentieth century Sydney! but the characters are named for and based on the characters in the Bible story. In the end the book I suppose could be classified as a Holocaust story, as the families involved are Jewish (like in the Bible!) and this theme came out quite naturally, I suppose inevitably, I didn't start off with that idea in mind. It's been I think my most successful book in Australia.

15. You have had at least two spells of living on a kibbutz. Did these experiences leave their mark on you as an author?

Well, following on from the last question, the  kibbutz and my marriage  led me into a lot of contact with Jewish people, more so than otherwise everday life might have led me into, and naturally then more exposure to a consideration of the issues with which this particular identity grapples. A significant part of the First Book of Samuel is in fact based on a personal story told to me by my Hebrew teacher on that kibbutz ccalled Yehuda Artzi, and I dedicated the book to his memory. But The First Book Of Samuel is perhaps about family life and generational trauma - which of course are not exclusively Jewish problems. I think if I hadn't been to the kibbutz I wouldn't have written that particular story, but then, I would have written another! As for kibbutz life itself, I adored it the first time, and ran screaming the second time. It was a fascinating and wonderful experience as a human being, I don't know about as a writer...

16. One of your homes was acquired by the government on the grounds of aircraft noise. This must have been quite a problem to you, both as a parent of young children, and as an author. How did you manage to keep writing at this time?

Oh look, that was just another of life's wierd little episodes! The planes were so low, it was quite an amazing sight. Perhaps the whole thing will surface one day in some literary form, who knows?

17. When your books are published in the UK, does any additional editorial work get put in on them?

No, they just get published as they are in Australia -, just a different price on the back!

18. How has your work been received in America?

A number of the books have been published there and I've had some pleasant and encouraging reviews but the sales are very small. It makes me happy though to know someone could buy one if they wanted to !

19. What are you currently working on, and when is it scheduled for publication.

I've just finished working on this book for younger children that I mentioned in an earlier answer "Honey and Bear", which is illustrated by Ron Brooks. It's five little stories in one volume, about a friendship between a bear and a bird - and it has just been a joyful experience altogether. The illustrations are so beautiful and gentle and grave and funny and they seem to bring out something so warm in the stories, which are sort of little philosophical fables, perhaps, little pieces of emotion that form the  everyday life of children. I suppose that's the charming thing about writing for this younger age group - little children are as we all know very concerned with what you might call the Great Questions of Life - by the time they're eleven or twelve, the other age group I write for, the social dilemmas are more preoccupying, both for writer and reader, I guess. Anyway, it's coming out in Australia in November this year, and I think in the UK and the USA next year.