Pip Smith

I thought long and hard before setting up my Gay/Lit LGBTQIA books category, because I like it when authors simply include LGBTQIA characters as part of the furniture, so to speak. If you’re writing about the modern world, then chances are that your characters ought to include some who are LGBTQIA because LGBTQIA people are everywhere. In rainbow families with or without kids; in schools, religious communities and the workplace; and lately, openly in our parliament. Which is all good, and as it should be, and so I shouldn’t really need a separate category. But it would be naïve to think that discrimination has gone away, or to imagine that some don’t suffer a crisis of identity, so there is also a place for books which explore issues of gender identity rather than treat diversity as a given. These books serve purposes both for those of us who seek to understand and those who relate to characters facing that kind of existential crisis.
Half Wild shows us the cruel consequences of a time when discrimination was so routine it was not even recognised as such. Sydney-based author Pip Smith has recreated what was a 20th century salacious scandal to bring to life the humanity of its central character. Eugenie Falleni was a real person who struggled with transgender identity, and Half Wild fictionalises the story of multiple lives: a childhood defined as a daughter; of an adolescent running away to live and work as a man; of two marriages where the wives did not know about the disguised sexuality of the person they had married; and ultimately of a stepfather —revealed before the courts to be a woman—charged with the murder of the first wife.
The novel is bookended with the memories of an elderly woman in hospital. Jean Ford was hit by a car in Oxford Street and is drifting in and out of coma. Her thoughts are incoherent, and then in a new chapter titled ‘Who She’d Like to Be, Wellington New Zealand, 1885-1896’, the story proper begins with the first person narrative of Tally Ho, baptised Eugenia and known to her bemused Italian parents as Nina. When she sees her mother having morning sickness once again, she declares that she doesn’t want to have babies…

Her face went still like the refrigerated pigs I once saw in the bond store at Queen’s Wharf.
Well, what are you going to do? Mamma said. Be a nun?
No, I said. I’m going to be a sailor, or a driver down the West Coast called Tally Ho, or a butcher boy like Harry Crawford.
She ruffled my hair. She said I was a funny little joker. Then she said I’d better get my tally ho to school or she’d butcher me herself. (p.12)

School, as you can imagine, is torture, and not just because Nina struggles to learn to read. There is a Father Kelly who knows the difference between an insolent child and a child who was not meant for the schoolroom but as soon as Nina escapes from his efforts to help she bolts away, feeling good to have that stale school air squeezed out of [her] lungs so nothing but life could flood back in.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/12/02/half-wild-by-pip-smith/… (altro)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/penguin-plays-rough-the-book/

Since 2008, first in a room in a flat above a convenience store in King Street, Newtown, and then in the front section of a warehouse in St Peters, Pip Smith and her housemates have hosted Penguin Plays Rough – a series of monthly short story readings. I've been twice, and each time has been a joyfully mixed bag with an appreciative mostly inner-west, mostly young crowd.

A number of pieces were written especially for the book, so it's not so much a 'Best Of' as a print equivalent of the anarchic creativity of those evenings, a showcase for the PPR talent. The text doesn't lie quietly on the page as in a well behaved book. Each story is set in a different font, ranging from 8 to 24 point. One seems to have been hand lettered on note paper and scanned in. One (which I found unreadable) is laid out as a Wikipedia entry. Each has its own illustrator, and the range of graphic styles is impressive (email addresses and web sites are listed at the back). It's a shining example of self-publishing.

And it's a good read. Fidel Castro walks in its pages, along with Johnny Cash, Lot from the Book of Genesis, Emanuel Swedenborg (in his own words), Tariq Ali, Cosmo Kramer and the characters from The Wonder Years. Some startling pieces seem to run close to memoir. There are well-made stories, a film pitch, a playlet, some cut-ups.

It's probably a generational thing that there's quite a bit of explicit sexuality that seems to my aged sensibility to owe quite a bit to sustained exposure to porn. Zoe Coombs Marr's 'Genesis' is a kind of Biblical fanfic whose subtitle gives fair warning: 'The story of Lot, comprising the invention of buggery; the downfall and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; Lot's family's flight to the mountains when his wife is turned into a pillar of salt; and his date-rape by his daughters in a cave'. The photographs illustrating the story are tactfully low res. If you have a low tolerance for misogynistic porn, do not read Luke Carman's 'All That Pap', a memoirish piece that includes shocked adolescent exposure to some of it. It's possibly relevant that when the Sydney Morning Herald interviewed Pip Smith (here), they found it necessary to substitute prim little dashes for some of her evidently unladylike language.

The stand-out pieces, to name just three in random order, are Pip Smith's neat 'Five Husbands' (yes, she hosts a salon, edits a collection and also writes!), Amanda Maxwell's pseudo horror story, 'Playing Imaginary Cards with Jeremy' and Michael Sala's tale of love lost, financial intrigue and tourism, 'The Catacombs'.… (altro)