Book Exchange

We exchange books, my writing mate and I. She gives me her collection of short stories Back Burning (review at the end of today's blog), and I give her The Card. She is staying with me for the Geneva Writers Conference, putting up with non-breakfasts and rides stuffed in too small places to the other side of the city where the conference is being held. We have little time to talk falling into our beds when we get home, exhausted from the constant hum and flow of the conference, but we snatch bits and pieces in both places when we can.

In our alleged retirements, she flies from Vienna to Sydney and where her writing commitments take her while I keep one foot in Geneva and the other in Argelès. Freed from the daily grind of jobs we can put our words together when we want and explore our crafts more deeply. It is a gift to our souls in the same way our friendship has been a gift to our craft.

Only after she leaves do I have time to pick up her book. Many of the stories are familiar. I was there at their birth. We sat at her organization’s cafeteria, a view of the mountains and lake out the window, plates with the remains of our lunches pushed to one side, going over a phrase, discussing why the characters did what they did. (She did the same for my writing).

I pick up her book as I lay in bed Monday morning, delaying the day’s beginning with a half hour’s read, the ultimate luxury of my life not rushing to iron clothes, put on a suit and be out of the house to do a series of work tasks I don’t want to do.

I select the story Matroshki. I remember the garlic being peeled and put into oil, a wife’s uncertainty, but I had forgotten the beauty of her words, the “muslin of clouds” and “red feathery brush strokes made patterns...” among others. I have been dropped into a lush world, so vivid I can smell the characters, the clematis, the garlic.

I scan the other stories and decide I will read one a day. I want to savour them in the way I would a box of Auer chocolates, where you pick one up and nibble it to make the flavour last.

Review

Winner, IP Picks 2007, Best Fiction
Sylvia Petter’s collection flings the reader across the globe in its bold exploration of love, death, passion, relationship, and family. Echoing her own life experience, Sylvia Petter’s award-winning stories explore universal themes through lenses of distance and separation. Back Burning spans continents, zooming in on snapshots of relationships from childhood and young love, through adulthood and career, political pursuits and history, to awakening in old age. Powerful stories of loss and rejuvenation emerge from this patchwork in unexpected ways. ‘I want to tell them about timing, how a new fire can burn once an old one has died. I also want to tell them about back burning and fires that are lit to quell bigger flames.’