Without apparent difficulty, Lisa Gorton wrote a book of poetry simultaneously with a children's novel, writes Simon Caterson.
YOU HAVE YOUR HEAD IN THE CLOUDS, we might say to someone inclined to daydream. Lisa Gorton has her feet on the ground with a new baby and a three-year-old to look after. Along the way, the Melbourne author's fascination with the literary possibilities of the weather has helped inspire a children's novel and a poetry collection.
Belonging as they do to different publishing categories, the two books are the product of inspired multi-tasking. Cloudland is the story of a young girl who ascends to the ether and Press Release gathers poems, including a sequence set in the very real Mallee country.
Gorton concedes the creative cross-pollination may not be completely self-evident.
"On the face of it, nothing connects poetry with a fantasy novel for children," she says. "I was working on Press Release and Cloudland at the same time. There's even a phrase from Press Release in Cloudland. More largely, I think writing a novel made me test out some thoughts about narrative in the poems."
Gorton has been publishing poetry for more than a decade here and overseas.
"My poetry uses a lot of images. I'm really interested in what you might call the tension, or contradiction, of images in a poem and its narrative line, its sense of time. It seems to me images work in poetry the way some memories work in your life - the memories that seem to exist outside chronology, as a kind of floating gallery in the mind - though they take their meaning from all that was happening in your life at the time."
Gorton's interest in verse took her to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar specialising in English renaissance poetry in general and one poet in particular.
"I wrote my doctoral thesis on John Donne. I like the way his compressed and very complicated images bring a kind of electric charge to the poems. Reading, you all at once understand them and that sudden understanding feels like illumination.
"I also like the way he plays with speaking voice and dramatic situations to create an effect of intimacy and truth without any of the drabness - like a version of self-pity - you find in some confessional poetry."
After teaching at university in South Africa and a stint as a consultant in Sydney at McKinsey & Company, Gorton returned to Melbourne and rediscovered her family's roots in remote rural Victoria.
"The longest sequence in Press Release, the Mallee Sequence, started with memories of my grandmother, who came from Maine and found herself running an orange farm on the edge of the Mallee during World War II, through a terrible drought. She was uncomplaining and also, I think, very deeply disappointed.
"I suppose that landscape, and the story of Mallee settlement, became a way for me to imagine all those parts of life that are to no purpose - that constitute the most part of experience and are, at the same time, only mementoes of loss."
Gorton's poetic sensibility informed her novel's creative process.
"In the beginning, I didn't think of Cloudland as a fantasy at all, because I was thinking about imagery and clouds. It struck me an imagined world in the clouds would give an effect of truth to images of emotional states, while a story set in the clouds could gives those images another dimension, action."
Cloudland is not mere whimsy. The emotional states it absorbs are grounded in the brutal reality of many children's lives.
"The 'back story' of Cloudland is the story of Lucy's parents' divorce and her mother's remarriage. I wanted to use the clouds to imagine those feelings of isolation and disconnection, which seem to me to be a condition of that age - say, 10 to 14 - when you are waiting for time to happen to you, as it were."
Cloudland combines elements of Gorton's childhood and her adult self.
"I had two prompts for writing Cloudland. When I was about seven, I flew with my sister to Canberra, just the two of us. I remember looking out the window at all that dappled cloud and thinking, 'There ought to be a world up here'.
"Then, when I was studying in Oxford, I used to have a weekly radio show where I interviewed authors. Philip Pullman came on the show. He had a really interesting take on writing for children: he argued writing for children needed to have a child protagonist, that was the main difference."
Like Pullman's fiction, Cloudland has serious philosophical underpinnings. "I based the society in Cloudland on Plato's description of an ideal society in The Republic - such a coldly imagined society. I wanted to bring that sense of clouds into the story, too: there's something troubling about their imperturbable beauty.
"The American poet, Philip Levine, has a great poem about clouds, which ends: 'The clouds have seen it all, in the dark/ they pass over the graves of the forgotten/ and they don't cry or whisper./ They should be punished every morning, they should be bitten and boiled like spoons'."
Gorton sees no reason why all genres of writing should not be infused with the poetic imagination.
"I liked what Richard Ford once said about writing fiction: he liked the challenge of making something unbelievable believable. It seems to me realism misses something about how we really experience time, as a weird sequence of sensations, memories, and sudden perceptions. I thought a story set in the clouds could give a more dream-like version of realism. I think poetry does that too."
Cloudland is published by Pan Macmillan at $14.95. Press Release is published by Giramondo at $22.