From Geraldine Brooks on Tim Winton

A few excerpts from the Writers on Writers series. Geraldine Brooks writes on Tim Winton.

"When you write historical fiction, as I do, faith can't be sidestepped, so powerful is the force of belief in lives of former centuries.... I'm drawn to the struggle. The thousands of years of human consciousness in frantic search for meaning. All those ancient people ravenous to know how best to live, how to bear the unbearable fact of death.... the gospel messages - turn the other cheek, renounce wealth, care for the least of them -- the most rigorous ethical guidebook yet created. Winton remains steeped in those ethics...he said - 'For me, if it's not about love, if it's not about mercy, if it's not about kindness, if it's not about liberation then I'm just not that interested.' "

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From Tim Winton's short essay, 'A Walk at Low Tide':

"...what lies beneath the surface of every sleepy step I take before breakfast: the resonance of a trillion lives, finished or only just begun, subjects that ache to be fed, seek the light and tilt toward increase in a creation that has been burning and lapping and gnawing and withering and rotting and flowering since there was nothing in the cosmos but shivering potential. To tread here and never pay tribute, to glance and just see objects, is to be spiritually impoverished... Looking deeply, humbly, reverently will sometimes open the viewer to what lingers beneath the hue and form and texture -- the faint tracks of story that suggest relationships, alliances, consequences, damage ... And ghosting forever begind its mere appearance is its holy purpose, its billion meetings with the life urge in which it has swum or tumbled or blossomed, however long or however briefly."

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About his work:

"He has described himself as working like a tradie, referring to the disciplined way he shows up at his wdesk just like any bloke shows up at his worksite and toils for as long as necessary to put food on the table. But he also works like a tradoe in the sense that he has mastered a craft -- all its details, its skills, all its gear and tackle and trim. And that includes sentences of glorious syntactical perfection.... Tim states his mission (on natural beauty): ' As an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty.' "

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"We read to find life, in all its possibilities."

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Closing notes, she writes:

"...that Winton asks me to question: is a bit more tenderness, a bit more attention, a bit less aversion what's required of us if the really shattered people have any hope of gathering up their broken bits? It is a question that could not be more relevant as we spin away from each other, accelerating under the force of dark matter that we can barely perceive, but what is dragging us nevertheless into ever deeper and more distant silos. Around those high walls, our own opinions echo with a deafening clang, drowing out not only the voices of others, but any voice that even suggests we need to listen.

Winton, steeped in the idea of grace, cries out for our resistance. Chich a hand back, he suggests. Let's try for less aggro, more agape.

This is the work great writers to. They reveal us to ourselves. They show us who we are, and who we might become. They stand us up where the light is bright -- harsh, even -- and hold the mirror so close that we can't look away. There's immense consolation in it. When we read, we know that someone else has failed in all the ways we have failed. Someone else has felt exactly as we do. Someone else knows what this is like. We are not alone."