​In January 2021, three micro-grants of $1000 each were granted for a new, original short work, for writers over 18, residing in New England and creating for adult readers/audiences in any genre. Works could be multi-arts and the theme was "Summer in New England", which could be interpreted in a variety of ways.

The following is Fiona McDonald's insightful, honest analysis of the creative process, how doubt lead to experimentation and magical interpretation of Summer in New England, with story and pictures to delight.

Experiments in Art & Prose

The Project and its Outcomes
At first, when I was putting together the proposal for Summer in New England, I was considering doing an alphabet book, not specifically for children but for any age group, adults included.

I haven’t abandoned this idea but felt it was beyond the scope of this particular project in terms of time. Instead, I envisioned a poster organised alphabetically with the letters being like those in an illuminated manuscript. For instance, A would have Angophora, Armidale and some other words and pictures relating to the New England area and the first A would have something entwined around it. This was a way of structuring the work.

​I do have a poster started in this way, but I abandoned it for something more lyrical when I began making research and inspirational journeys into the landscape and words and phrases began to take shape.
​I have taken lots of photos to use as references for the final works and from these and the actual physical visits into New England I discovered two different prose works emerging.

One was a general feeling, built of memories of my experiences of my beloved New England, an atmosphere I have always wanted to instil so I could revisit it at a glance.

The other is a very personal piece tied to the Pine Forest, a local recreational area on the edges of Armidale.

This place, so un-Australian in many ways, was a huge part of my childhood and what I was reading at the time shaped the way I saw and experienced it.

​It wasn’t until I had been to university and began studying the works of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet, and formed a theory about those works and their links to the act of writing poetry (and one that is strongly linked to the idea of the wood being raw material from which to make poetry) that I realised that my Pine Forest was the same wood as Dante’s, even at its most dark and difficult.

Even though I began working on the general New England piece first, the Pine Forest piece quickly overtook it in production. I had thought of making it black and white, possibly pencil, under the influence of the illustrator Alan Lee. But as I worked on it colour seeped in and then, just as the weeds are doing to the forest at this very minute, the colour burst across the paper, possibly to the detriment of the work’s aesthetics.

I wish I had videoed this process because I think the process was more important than the finished product.
Doubt leads to experimentation
I have completed one of the pieces but the other is stuck part-way because I was hit by doubt as to whether it was working. One problem with both pieces is that the writing is difficult to read, certainly on a small screen reproduction. And, quite honestly, I don’t feel either piece works aesthetically. I would describe the process as having taught me a lot in an experiment I have been yearning to do, but I have not pulled it off, yet, to my satisfaction.

​One of the major problems is my handwriting. I want the handwritten text to be an integral part of the visual image. I think it would work better if it was a more regular calligraphy. I personally dislike artists who use scrappy or juvenile handwriting on their paintings. I have to admit I detest the work of Colin McCahon, I do not find the handwriting a powerful visual image for the message he is putting across. I find it irritating.

​I am worried that my own script appears amateurish and uneven in an unpleasant way. Also, the text and image are still not integrating in a way where one is totally dependent on the other. Either will work without the other.

​The Summer in New England microgrant enabled me to undertake these experiments. I have shared some of the process on social media. 

Surprisingly, the Pine Forest piece was very popular, and there was even an expression of interest in having it made available as a print.
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I feel that I need to reduce the words a lot. I also feel that I need to find a way of inserting the words into the image, so they become part of it, whereas I don’t think I have achieved this in these experiments and the words could just as easily have been supplied on the page opposite as in a regular illustration.

​I am keen to keep working on the experiment and will continue to post updates on social media.

Summer in New England

​Summer in New England is embellished with memories. It is holidays, long and hot with afternoon storms and a landscape rampant with greenery. No shoes but bare toes free of their leather burden - no socks to trap the heat. Shorts and summer dresses, and freckles in abundance.
Time standing still in the great length of summer, spread out like a picnic blanket covered in sweet delights. Swimming in the Gara River, the Blue Hole, Booralong Creek and Copeton Dam. The water is always warm three inches on top then cold below where eels and craybobs dwell out of sight and mind.
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Playing late into the evening on the swings, the air full of the smell of dinners cooking. Going home only when voices call us in to eat. 
Cicadas, singing an endless chorus of Jingle Bells, pave the way to a Christmas in which carols of winter snow are sung under a summer sun while rich fruit cake cools with scents of sugar and spice.
Sunday afternoon drives, dreaming of a promised doll and adventures as the landscape flickers past, trees dappling the sun and camouflaging the road with leopard spots and tiger stripes.

​Bendemeer, Bingara, Bundarra. Stopping to play by a creek or a playground in a small town, creaky wooden roundabouts providing exotic fun.

​Guyra, Glen Innes, Inverell, and Tenterfield on the edge of the world, the landscape rolls away and slots fondly in the mind.
​An occasional snake luxuriates in the warm grass, the sighting of which inspires both excitement and fear. A small head lifts and peers short-sightedly for the intruder whose presence has been felt in dull shudders through the earth. One more step and the lithe body straightens and dashes off like an arrow, disappearing among great granite boulders.
As New Year draws us onwards spiders of all shapes and sizes set ambushes between every tree and shrub. Hats and faces festooned with sticky thread. Beetles trundle over leaf and earth baked by a relentless sun in a year with no rain. Ants scurry, tackling any invader small enough to carry off to feed an army of hungry workers and the infants of the Queen.
Wallabies and kangaroos chew long strands of grass, the westering sun gilding long lashes and the tips of twitching ears. They watch us warily from a distance and suddenly spring off in their cohort as the order is given - humans can’t be trusted, time to go.

School returns and the holidays withdraw into the mists of memory, longed for in their blending with the memories of summers before the one before. Little signs tell that the balmy days are over. Trees begin to shed one leaf at a time. Curtains are drawn at night, it feels right to pull a jacket on and the thought of hunkering down to winter nights with hot soup in front of cosy fires is awakening those other memories of fond enclosure with the family and stories are told of the summer that was.

Summer's Forest

​In Armidale there is a forest. It is a magical place which becomes all the forests in all the stories that have ever been. It is the Hundred Acre Wood where Pooh and Piglet, Eeyore and Owl live out of sight while children play house with fallen needles on summer picnics.

It is Lantern Waste to Cair Paravel without the snow, lush with warm weather and rain, a northern landscape flourishing in the south. Blackberries grow voraciously, producing plump purple sweetness at summer’s end. 

In time the forest changes. It is the home of Hobbits, the lair of goblins; elves and heroes are in attendance. Brothers obligingly play sword fights and shoot arrows from homemade bows. Long reeds and weeds are thrown as spears and battles last the whole hot day.

​Tilbuster Creek offers cool unguents for tired feet: green weed. Suddenly the glamour of story is lifted, and children are just splashing in the creek, hungry enough to eat all the vegetables on the plate.
​Middle Earth lingers in the forest’s memory as Arwen haunts Lothlorien. Vestiges of myth meet children returning from grown-up adventures in the wider world. Each visit renders the magic fainter until it is the merest water colour wash and the murk of overgrown thistles and burnt cars blots it into shabby grey.

Time turns ceaselessly and the forest is forgotten until one day, in the middle of our life’s way, it is possible to become lost in a dark wood. The Pine Forest returns, triumphant with all its memories and brings all the forests that ever were and binds them all with the ancient Greek word: hyle. 

In the Silvan glades lies a centuries old tradition played out amongst plantation pine on an Australian hillside. The forest becomes the raw material for making poetry.

It is a good thing to be able to see the forest within the trees.
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