Childbirth and creativity go hand in hand
A throwaway, heartless remark put Glenys Osborne on the
road to inspiration.
OSCAR WILDE WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY about it. Glenys Osborne
has not only won second place and $2000 in the Age
short-story competition for The Feeder but another of her
stories, Mermaid Footwear, was one of two commended by the
judges.
Osborne has been writing since she was a child, although she
says that it takes her a long time to produce anything that “can be
shown in public”. She has spent 10 years on a novel that “is
experimental in form but not in content” and has embarked on
another.
She turned to the shorter form when her son was born. Osborne
did most of her writing in the small hours after she had woken up
to feed him and then found her mind still racing. “I really wanted
to keep a part of my old life alive, the pre-mother me,” she says.
“Lots of women have said that they had a huge burst of creativity
after their children were born.”
The Feeder is narrated from the point of view of Ruth, an
anorexic girl whose friend Lily has just died. She meets a boy and
begins a relationship with him, But the issue is whether he is
trying deliberately to fatten her up for his own sexual purposes or
is this perception part of Ruth’s distorted view of reality?
The story was prompted by a documentary Osborne saw about
so-called “feeders” (men who are attracted to larger women) that
set her thinking about body image. And she was also motivated by a
“heartless” remark in a psychology lecture that referred to
anorexics as “vain” and made her wonder what it would be like to be
one. She was also fascinated by an article by Hilary Mantel that
looked at 19th-century martyrs who starved themselves to death.
One of the judges, Cate Kennedy, a two-time winner of the
Age competition whose collection of stories, Dark
Roots, was published last year, said the story used
first-person narration to great effect. “We’re privy to the
self-sabotage and deluded self-image that she herself has no
insight into, and this creates a narrative full of torment and
self-fulfilling prophecy about ‘the food thing’, as she calls it,
as she fights for control in her own way.”
And another judge, Steven Carroll, who has twice been
shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, said it had a
“strong, distinctive voice. The story has its surprises but never
telegraphs them.”
The judges, who included myself, worked from a shortlist
prepared by the Melbourne Centre of International Pen. The
1700-plus entries were sent for judging anonymously. The next
Age short story competition will open in September.
