Reading 2010: Abigail George (South Africa)

Today's feature, Abigail George, is a young South African poet, memoirist, and short story writer. I have read her moving poetry, sometimes in manuscript form. Some of her short fiction has appeared on StoryTime, the weekly African E-Zine. One of her short stories has been selected for African Roar 2011: an Eclectic Anthology of African Authors, which I am co-editing with Ivor W. Hartmann.



Here is Abigail George 2010 reading list, followed by an interview I did with her.

Manual of the Warrior of Light – Paulo Coelho
The Pilgrimage – Paulo Coelho
Like the Flowing River – Paulo Coelho
The Zahir – Paulo Coelho
Once in a House on Fire – Andrea Ashworth
Bird by bird – Anne Lamott
Body bereft (poetry book) – Antjie Krog
Ribbon of rhythm (poetry book)
Franny and Zooey – J. D. Salinger
The bell jar – Sylvia Plath
Ariel – Sylvia Plath (poetry book)
I’ll go to bed at noon – Gerard Woodward
Almost heaven – Marianne Wiggins
Martin Sloane – Michael Redhill
How I live now – Meg Rosoff
The miracles of Santo Fico – D. L. Smith
The footsteps of Anne Frank – Ernst Schnabel
Silver Bay – Jojo Moyes
Slow Man – J. M. Coetzee
The Life and Times of Michael K. – J. M. Coetzee
Ask your guides – Sonia Choquette
The secret – Rhonda Byrne
Letters to a young poet – Rainer Maria Rilke
A moveable feast – Ernest Hemingway
Still me – Christopher Reeve
New moon – Stephanie Meyer
The secret teachings of Mary Magdalene
Angel healing – Claire Nahmad
The secret of secrets – U. S. Andersen
Daily Guidance from Your Angels: 365 Angelic Messages to Soothe, Heal, and Open Your Heart – Doreen Virtue
The Templar Revelation – Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
Second Honeymoon – Joanna Trollope

Interview with Abigail George

1. Please tell a little about yourself

I am a poet, writer, diarist, memoirist and grant writer. I was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1979. I studied film and television production for a short while, which was followed by a brief stint as a trainee at a production house. I have lived in Johannesburg, Swaziland and Port Elizabeth but I am currently living in Port Elizabeth. I have poetry published in print and online.

I have had short fiction published online. In 2005 and 2008 I was awarded grants from the National Arts Council in Johannesburg, South Africa. I am not purely devoted to poetry but to pursuing writing fulltime. Storytelling for me has always been a phenomenal way of communicating and making a connection with other people. Africa, Where Art Thou? is my first book. The Origins of Smoke and Mirrors is the title of my first collection of short stories. I have been published online in Finland, Canada, the United States, England, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Istanbul, Turkey.

At my age my own mother was a mother already. I am not a mother and I think that this has a huge influence on my writing. I draw a lot of my inspiration from my childhood, the grown up relationship I have with my mother now (I have grown to respect and honour her more and more as I realise what she had to sacrifice for us, her children and her husband) and the in-between of the intense explosion of daily family life.

Elizabeth Wurtzel said, “That's the thing about depression: a human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.” Depression is something I have struggled with since adolescence. This sorrow, this raging sadness guides me to the page. I am reminded of the writer Marya Hornbacher who,in her memoir of an eating disorder, said, "You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."

That is something of what depression feels like to me and that is mostly when I turn to writing and when it comes it is violent, brutal, gut-wrenching, bewildering, engaging, mysterious and there are pieces, moments, times that are even wonderful when I see what has touched the page layer by layer in stillness and calm. Yes, I am melancholic but I also have a lot to be grateful for in my life, especially my family.

2. I notice that your reading list has both fiction and poetry. When reading, which are you drawn to easily, poetry or fiction? Why do you think that is?

I am drawn mostly to poetry because when I was a child I started writing poetry first that is why I see myself as a poet first and a writer second. I started writing when I was very young. I was always curious for more words, nose in a book. Already my future was mapped out for me and I already had an inkling of this even at a young age. I wrote about fairies, butterflies, flowers and they were published in the children’s section of the weekend newspaper. A short story of mine got published too for the whole school yard, community and my family to see. But having my name in print always left me wanting more. I didn’t have the audacity to give it a name yet. This recognition always gave me butterflies in the pit of my stomach. Yet I yearned for more.

As a writer I am like Virginia Woolf when she said, ‘As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world.’ In both my poetry and prose I strive to tell the truth; to be as honest as I possibly can. I believe I have been blessed with this generous, wholesome, holy gift – to write , and I have to uplift it at all times and uplift my readers with it as well. Hopefully, the weight and memory of the images in my stories and poetry will last long after like a chain of voices in a choir.

3. Of the books you read in 2010, which ones did you like best?

Franny and Zooey, The Bell Jar, Manual of the Warrior of Light, To kill a Mockingbird (I forgot to include this one in my list) and Ariel.

4. Which five titles would you recommend to other readers?

Bird by Bird, Long Walk to Freedom, I Write What I Like, The Pilgrimage and A Moveable Feast. Both questions 3 and 4 were hard questions. I had a lot of deliberation to do. Books are like Christmas presents. You can’t wait to open up the next one and put the one you have down with a lot of trepidation.

5. You also read books about writing (such as Bird by Bird). Do you find writing manuals or craft books useful in your own writing? In which what way?

Of course, I find reading what other writers think about the craft and their own memoirs about it interesting. It is not only a joy and a pleasure. It encourages me. When I see people who have struggled as I have with the growing pains of writing a short story or a novel it makes me even more determined to get the job well done, to get the sum of all its parts to shine as never before. When other writers give, then other writers learn. It puts a firm pressure on us to exceed our even greater expectations that what we expected on what we wrote. There is no giving in. There is no quitting when you read these kinds of books. It says something of a writer when he/she will not stand for that.

6. What infuence Bessie Head has had on you? I know you have a story, or a couple of them, on this writer.

Bessie Head’s life mirrors my own when it comes down to certain things; such as her deep depression and mental illness and the fact that she was institutionalised for it. Although she did have her flashes of brilliance when she put pen to paper and wrote, I hope I can only learn from where she failed. She only failed to live life to the full but never when she wrote. Also ‘Maru’ is one of my favourite books and she is one of my favourite writers. I think she was a feminist before anyone knew what that word meant in South Africa or Botswana and perhaps she was not aware of it. She had her moments when she was a very strong, self-assured, confident woman, wife, mother and then there were those moments when she was a total basketcase.


7. What are your reading and writing plans for 2011?

I have an article entitled ‘Getting there – the Gut Symmetry of Sriting’, which will be published in the Istanbul Literary Review early next year as well as some of my poetry. I am very excited about this since this has been a dream of mine to be published extensively in Africa, and in the Fall/Winter of 2011 a personal essay of mine on depression will be published in a book entitled “Being Bipolar: Stories from Those Living with the Disorder and Those Who Love Them”.

I also have a short story forthcoming in African Roar #2, 2011.

I want exposure and not necessarily as an African writer (although that is important to me because my work was appreciated and published by African online magazines but I do not want to box myself in or classify myself as this kind of writer or that – I want to leave up to the most important person in this writing process; the person who buys the book and reads it); as a writer would do just fine by me. Seeing my name in print makes me feel powerfully steadfast and omnipresent in a way I can only imagine in my dreams.

8. What is the state of reading in South Africa?

Children do not read anymore. Adults even less so. Everyone goes to the movies; watches films. If we could just get people to read but how is that going to be possible in this age of technology. Children and adults find books boring. Some do read but just newspapers and those are just elderly folk. Kids should be encouraged to go libraries on a regular basis but this should come from their parents, from their teachers, from schools and from the grass roots level and then up. The elite, posh schools have no problems with this.

They have libraries stocked from the floor to the ceiling with books. No problem there but when it comes to rural areas nothing is being done and the government is slipping up. There should be more libraries, more access to computers, more access to books and more literacy programmes, more creative writing workshops for children, for the youth of South Africa.

It is the responsibility of all spheres (not only writers), teachers, parents, schools and community leaders especially to influence marginalised writers. The writing potential from South Africa and coming out of Africa does not match the writing voice that comes out of South Africa or Africa as a whole. There is a lot of work to be done still to motivate these untapped, narrow resources in all aspects of writing.

Young writers need a platform, need to be exposed to prizes, need to be encouraged by masters of the craft. They need to show off their work. Not ‘sometime in the future’ but now; presently.

I wish I could say more about this subject but it is heartbreaking. You can’t write if you can’t read and then that leads to other problems. You’ll have trouble concentrating in class; you won’t be able to understand cognitively what the teacher is trying to explain to you in the front of the class. It is a sad; a living great, great loss, an unfolding, day to day tornado, striking, leaving one stunned, gasping for breath, once again the legacy of apartheid and the digital divide. I am afraid that there is no great promise for words in the future if the caretakers of this generation do not do something immediately about it.