CarmelBird.com is the official webpage of Carmel Bird, an Australian author.
Title
Carmel Bird homepage - www.carmelbird.com
Description
BIRD, Carmel (1940- ), born Launceston, Tasmania, was educated at the University of Tasmania and lived for a period in Europe and the USA before settling in Melbourne. Bird's fiction blends real and surreal, mundane and macabre with inventive irony, reflecting her perception of Tasmania itself as an 'ironic' island, whose picturesque surface masks deep secrets and is haunted by the ghosts of Aborigines and convicts. She has published two novels, Cherry Ripe (1985) and The Bluebird Cafe (1990), and four collections of short stories, Births, Deaths and Marriages (1983), The Woodpecker Toy Fact (1987), Woodpecker Point (1988) and The Common Rat (1993). She has also written a guide for writers, Dear Writer (1988), and edited a collection of short stories, Relations (1991).
A witty writer with a wide but always highly original tonal range, Bird raises what is often potentially dour or even sinister or horrific to something approaching comedy. Disease, deaths and violence are staples in her fictional world, which has similarities with Barbara Hanrahan's Gothic sensuality and feminist irony, although Bird's deadpan humour is a distinctive, determining element. The stories of Woodpecker Point, for instance, focus on the common emotion of sibling jealousy which has the uncommon consequence of a dual death, on marital infidelity and the sterility of close relationships, on failed lives, madness murder and extreme domestic violence; the stories of The Common Rat are linked with common themes of death, madness and crime. Bird's approach to these themes, however, is both detached and involved, a search for a pattern which may have simply the satisfaction of art or approach a more essential truth, which may represent meaning or just the arbitrary effect of language. As the semi-autobiographical narrator of 'The Woodpecker Toy Fact' comments after describing her childhood inference of a special meaning in 'Toy Fact', a result of her ignorance that a toy factory's shop sign was truncated, and her subsequent search for imaginatively significant facts, 'trapping them, bright birds in flight, planets in amber', the quest offers either the possibility of metaphysical discovery or aesthetic production: 'I am still uncertain as to whether I will ultimately discover The Toy Fact, and so complete the pattern, or whether, by placing the final fact I will produce The Toy Fact.'
She is fascinated by the power of memory and the capacity of mundane scenes, incidents and sensations to trigger it into life as well as by the truth-telling power of fiction and its ability to mine and represent the past more effectively than the single-minded pursuit of documentary fact. As she has commented in an article titled 'Fact or Fiction', 'Life is a crude inventor; fiction will only be convincing if it is more artful than life'; she has also described herself as 'interested in the play between fact and fiction, interested in the moment when the metamorphosis takes place, when the grub of fact becomes the butterfly of fiction'. Finely observed details -- snails crawling over love letters, a grandmother's patchwork quilt, the solemn brown eyes of a cow -- are often the hinges of her short fiction, the points at which external sketch and first-person reminiscence blend in epiphanies of insight. Some of her stories, such as 'The Woodpecker Toy Fact' are as much demonstrations of the art of fiction-making as they are themselves fictions, although artful play and seriousness exist side by side as do gloom and joy.
Contact
- carmelbird
-
- Balwyn Victoria
- Australia 3103
-
