Behind the scenes
They say it takes a village to raise a child. The same can be said for writing a book, and certainly true for The House in Bausasran. Let me introduce you to some of the amazing people who have come along on the book's journey.
Kerry Kilner & Angela Gardner - Editing -
In 2009, while living in Yogyakarta, I emailed Kerry a few pages of memoir I’d typed up one morning. Through family connections Kerry and I had met in our late teens. Over the years since, life’s challenges, a joy in each other’s achievements, reading, her flair for fashion and my dressmaking skills have connected us as kindred spirits.
She was working as a University of Queensland academic at the time, coordinating a major project called AustLit – in other words the mammoth task of collating and editing a bibliography of Australian literature from 1790 until now.
After teaching that day I checked my email to find an enthusiastic response. “Keep writing! ‘I think you’ve got something here,’ she wrote. ‘Women love to read about other women who’ve reinvented themselves!”
We both fell in to that category. And, we were both romantics and years before were budding feminists who’d spent a beach holiday one summer in our youth reading aloud, to each other, passages by Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin and Marguerite Duras.
When I look back at the few pages I sent Kerry I am embarrassed to reread them, but she saw potential in the story, and in me. Sometimes it just takes one person to believe in you.
Over the next few years I wrote when I could between a busy teaching schedule and studying Indonesian. The book stayed in a semi-holding pattern until the pandemic took hold in 2020. Finding myself alone in Brisbane, I had a year to focus. I read and reread Writing down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. I wrote down the bones of The House in Bausasran and then I sat and wrote, or gazed out over the back garden willing the book to write itself.
Half way through writing the manuscript I once again emailed Kerry and her life partner Angela Gardner, a prize-winning poet, author and visual artist. They were in Ireland at the time. Travel restrictions had forced an extension to the few months holiday they had planned, though neither complained from their new location - a stone cottage on a windswept hill overlooking postcard picture views of an Atlantic bay.
‘We both love the book so far and really want you to finish,’ they said, preceding a page of bullet point advice! How relieved and grateful I felt to have such support and professional guidance, especially as I was also busy keeping not only Covid 19 from the door but the wolves as well.
With this boost from Kerry and Angela I returned to the laptop but still spent far too much time polishing sentences and not progressing much.
“We’re coming back for Christmas! Get it finished and we’ll edit for you!” urged Kerry, on a lockdown video call. “By the way we’ve bought the stone cottage here. I’m retiring from UQ (Queensland University). We’re selling up in Australia!”
By the time Kerry and Angela arrived three months later the manuscript had gained momentum. After spending a tough two weeks in hotel quarantine they were hosted by friends and family in Brisbane including me. What a joy to have these two remarkable women stay in my home for a few weeks. They gave me a deadline and a print from artist friend Fiona Dempster that read Create first, critique second. Genius! Just what I needed! Those key words unlocked the stored up parts of the story and stopped me from constantly correcting. Within a few weeks I’d completed the first draft.
Kerry spent a few summer heat wave days of 2021 with the manuscript and a red pen in hand and her feet dangling in the backyard swimming pool. During the afternoons while she and Angela packed belongings and prepared to move countries I would rewrite the edited parts. At night we’d gather around the dining room table after dinner. Angela would read the manuscript aloud. I’d heard Angela recite her own poetry at a number of venues in the past including the Queensland Art Gallery. To have her reading lines from The House in Bausasran, and occasionally suggest a better synonym from her vast repertoire of words felt like I had won the literary help lottery!
There were more revisions since that summer to get the manuscript to a final polish. Kerry and Angela have overseen them all. The House in Bausasran and I are better for having been cradled in their skilled hands.
Anne Kilner - Formatting -
‘Ask Anne to help with formatting the book,’ suggested Kerry, on a call from Ireland, after the final editing of The House in Bausasran was done. Her words were delivered with the eager tone of a younger sibling’s confidence in a capable older one. ‘I could give it a go but Anne’s much better than I am. She can spot an accidental space or missing indent from across a room!’
Sifting through a shoebox of old photos at Anne’s house the previous week I’d come across a few of us together. In one of them we’re in our early twenties, both fresh-faced and wearing flimsy dresses. Our coconut-oiled skin appears to have spent too much time under the blazing summer sun. We’re laughing at something off camera. There are two small boys in the foreground. Our boys.
She pulls out an earlier photo of us at a witches and warlocks party. We look so young. ‘Remember this?’ she grins. ‘You sprayed your hair silver.’
‘What year is this one of you in Machu Picchu? I ask, pulling out a photo of her in denim jeans and hiking boots. Anne’s intrepid solo travels have taken her and her tripod from far northern countries right down to freezing cold Antarctica where she took a dip in icy waters! She is fiercely and admirably independent.
We’re reminded of how long we’ve known each other. How many birthday candles we’ve lit and blown out. How many years would they add up to? We’re both in our mid-sixties now. Since returning from Java I often stay over. We like to watch Vera on Friday nights and drink tall glasses of iced ginger wine.
She retired from senior management in community services with a healthy skepticism for politicians and people in power, which makes for witty commentary whenever we watch the evening news. She hates injustice. In another life she would have chosen carpentry or horticulture.
Anne’s formatting skills were recently honed while writing, and preparing for print, a family history inspired by her grandmother’s stories. After a fling with various formatting apps her self-sufficient style had settled on Microsoft word. It served the purpose very well
‘Let’s format your book while header and footer designs, drop caps, fancy fonts and margin widths are still fresh in my mind!”
‘Perfect timing! I’ll look through some novels for style ideas! The Tim Winton one on the coffee table looks good or the Marsha Mehran one beside it.'
After a few tuition sessions with Anne at the dining room table, a week of solid work (there's always more than meets the eye) and remembering that left is right and right is left, The House in Bausasran was transformed into Garamond font and ready for the next step – illustrations.
And of course another photo was added to our collection. The two of us with smiles of achievement and thumbs up relief!
Circle Brophy - Artist -
Circle Brophy seems to hail from a planet where goodness and kindness prevail. His sometimes extra-terrestrial and often whimsical art is as otherworldly as the artist himself but his motto in life is earthed and simple, “One tries to do ones best to be a good egg.”
I had the entertaining pleasure of meeting Circle Brophy in Yogyakarta in 2007 when, with a flamboyant flourish and a polished British accent he welcomed me to the language school where I would later teach English.
As proof that the power of politeness cannot be underestimated we have been the best of friends ever since – in work, our creative pursuits and in life.
When I returned to Australia in 2017 he would often check via text that I was doing okay. He would send photos and updates about life in Yogyakarta knowing how much I would miss my life there.
When I began writing The House in Bausasran in earnest during the pandemic not a day went by that he didn’t send a message or some uplifting wisdom.
Frequently I would send paragraphs for him to read. Being widely read (William Burroughs, China Miéville, Jacques Vallée, Leonara Carrington,) and a philosopher by nature, he would make insightful suggestions and push me to do better. Certain parts of The House in Bausasran were born out of our conversations.
Circle Brophy brings colour into the world with his creativity and his personality but like many artists he is an introverted extrovert who loves to escape into the spacecraft in his mind and materialise his visions on screens or paper.
When I asked him to illustrate a gunungan symbol for the book I already knew how intricately detailed it would be because he once studied the fine art of batik.
In 2018 along with founder and fellow Englishman Simon Bolshaw, he established Oxford English language school in Yogyakarta, and so must balance the spiritual demands of his art with a heavy teaching schedule.
Still, I smile for the Indonesian students who have crossed his path or will cross his path in the future and perhaps graduate with a most proper British accent.
I celebrate the day I met Circle Brophy and we both celebrate the day he met his wife Susan Agustina, the elegant and reserved Javanese woman and linguist who brings a balance to the eccentric genius of his world.
Susan Agustina - Linguist & Translator -
Susan Agustina is the owner of a virtual library on language and linguistics that includes the etymology of words in three languages. Her first language of Javanese is the one she uses to speak with family and Javanese friends.
The umbrella language of Indonesian is the one she uses for teaching and for speaking with Indonesians who come from other ethnicities in the archipelago; and with foreigners like me who have learned to speak the language. Susan’s third language is a very British English by virtue of necessity for her work as a translator, and her need for clear communication with her otherworldly artist husband, Circle Brophy.
Susan is currently editing and proofreading the Indonesian version of The House in Bausasran (poetically shaped in 2022 by Pascalis Sopi, a philosophy teacher and translator from Flores).
On Wednesdays and Saturdays we meet over Zoom. Susan shares the screen and begins to read through the part she has worked on. Listening to her warm voice as she retells the story in Indonesian draws me back to my former life. We laugh a lot and sometimes shed a tear. She is constantly fascinated by my reflections of living in her country. Her patience, humility and her gentle sense of humour epitomize all that I admire about being Javanese.
She reads at a steady pace and pauses intermittently to check about a word that might need to be replaced with a better synonym or a sentence that might need some words deleted or switched around. Not an errant comma or repeated word escapes her sharp eye for detail.
Susan’s eye for detail extends to a clever and fun sense of fashion. She loves to team her favourite pair of Doc Martins with feminine dresses; occasionally captured in playful photographs. Cameras adore her.
In 2016, when she married Circle Brophy in the stillness of St Petrus & Paulus Catholic Church in Yogyakarta, she looked like a delicate butterfly dressed in white. Circle wore a sophisticated black suit and coloured his hair a jolly shade of green. What a wonderful couple they made, and what a joy it was to celebrate their special day. How fortunate I am to have them in my life, colouring my world too.
Antonius Waget - Writing Coach & Translator
Sitting down to pen a few words about Fr. Antonius Waget this morning seems like more than a coincidence, because today (February 17, 2023) marks a new milestone in his life. He is to be appointed Principal of Junior High, Matoloko Catholic seminary in Flores, Nusa Tenggara. I like to think that higher forces are being garnered to wish him well with this challenging task, in his words, ‘tantangan besar.’
On video calls between Matoloko Seminary and my home in Mapleton, Queensland, I remind him how far he has come since we first met in 2009 when he was a student at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta. He was studying to become an English teacher at the time. In the evenings he’d take extra classes at the language school where I taught.
At the age of thirty-nine his life as a missionary priest had already taken him to Kenya and Botswana where he tended those suffering from HIV and AIDS and where he first began to use English in daily life.
In the last year of his study at Sanata Dharma (2012) he approached me for help with editing his thesis. I’d just taken a year off work, planning to write. I hesitated at the thought of helping but could not refuse, after all, writing a thesis in your mother tongue is hard enough let alone in a second language. So the next twelve months were taken over by the editing of ‘Grice’s Maxims of Polite Conversation!” We both learned a lot but I’ll leave you to Google that topic sendiri.
Sendiri: alone, independently, by yourself
Looking back this interruption to my plan feels like divine intervention. I was unaware of all the events yet to happen before The House in Bausasran was ready to be written. As the saying goes 'seeds planted in a rice field take time to yield'.
During the year of Anton’s research and writing, and my editing, I learned that no matter how hard the challenge, or how much sweat it takes, this man is tenacious. He never considers giving up. Anton’s life has been one of intense discipline and fortitude including through the occasional crisis of faith, so there was no one better to insist I could meet the challenge of writing a thesis length story!
‘You just need someone to support you along the way as you did for me,’ he assured. ‘Now it’s my turn to help."
Over the next two years he would set word counts for me, review parts I had written or was planning to write, make suggestions and discuss cross-cultural differences, extracting much more from the story I thought I knew well. “The readers will want to know this or that,’ he would say, pushing me to improve.
During these two years he was in Epworth, Chicago furthering his English studies in order to become a more professional teacher to the students in Matoloko Seminary.
One Saturday, when I was a few chapters in and feeling stuck, he happened to call from Epworth. He had just written a sermon in English and hoped I could check the grammar. ‘Yes of course! Email it now,’ I said, looking for any excuse to procrastinate on creating my own sentences. Anton, however, would urge me to push ahead, regularly checking on my progress. That day he set me a task.
‘Teresa, please write the last chapter today. Then you will know where the road leads. Send it to me when you’ve finished.'
What a brilliant piece of advice! By that evening I had sent him the final chapter. We soon translated it into Indonesian, the evocative language of the country where it is set.
Having established a destination meant I just needed to follow the path that led there. My writing resumed with more purpose.
Neither of us could ever have foreseen the roles we would play in each other’s lives. We have been each other’s editors, translators and exchangers of teachers’ tips but above all firm friends on the path of life for more than a decade.
Recently we collaborated on a short story called The Boy from Flores. (to be published soon)
I wish you could all meet Romo Anton in person as I have. His smile is uplifting and bright. But you can catch a glimpse of him teaching his lively students on: YouTube @RP. Anton Waget, SVD – Welcome to my classroom -
Romo: Father
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