August 2018 – LOUISE PIEPER

Heroine chic

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I’ve been polishing my gauntlets and buffing my boots in preparation for the Heroines Festival and Heroines Anthology launch.

The fearless protagonists at Neo Perennial Press have teamed up with the South Coast Writers Centre, the Wollongong Book Festival and Culture Bank Wollongong to focus on speculative and historical storytelling and showcase women writing about women – strong and brave and smart and unstoppable.

How could I not want to be part of that?

The first festival is on Saturday 8 September, 12 to 5pm at Thirroul Neighbourhood Centre – all the details about the program and guests like Kate Forsyth, Catherine McKinnon, Claire Corbett and Pamela Hart are here.

Leading up to that, though, is the launch of Heroines: an anthology of short fiction and poetry. The anthology has been edited by Sarah Nicholson and Caitlin White and I am thrilled that it includes my short story Bits and Bolts and Blood.

The launch will take place at Philanthropy Tribe Book Café in Wollongong on Wednesday 5 September, 6 – 8pm. You can find out more about the launch, and about the seven writers who will be reading from their work in the anthology on the night, here and follow the link to book tickets for the free event.

Yes! I’ll be reading from my short story at the launch.

So, what’s the story?

The anthology called for reimagined myths, fairy tales and legends. Bits and Bolts and Blood takes a few of my favourite things – the Grimm’s Little Redcap tale, Tarot cards and fairy changelings – and mixes them together to make something new.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the anthology and discovering what stories all the contributors have chosen to tell.

If you’re in or around the ‘Gong on the 5th of September, come to the launch! It should be fun and fabulous. Even if you’re not, I’ll put details of how you can get your hands on a copy of the anthology, ~~as soon as possible~~ right now (only $19.99).

What’s your poison?

Monkshood We were talking about poisons at a book launch* last week and one of my learned colleagues mentioned that the traditional witches’ brew garden plants just aren’t as deadly as you might think. Is that the fault of an exaggeration of the plants’ toxicities or, as another writerly polymath suggested, improved health levels making people more likely to survive poisoning? I don’t know the answer, but it did get me thinking about (da da daaa!) PLANTS THAT KILL!

Being Australian I’m used to the notion that, at any given time, approximately 36% of my immediate environment is actively trying to kill me, but that’s mostly creepies and crawlies and slithery things** rather than large carnivores and plants. Not that some of the plants aren’t up to the task – anyone who has tangled with a Gympie Gympie*** is familiar with its charming brand of ‘god let me die now so the pain will end’.

The Dendrocnide moroides is also known as the stinger or suicide plant and arguably has the most painful sting of anything in the world. The recommended treatment is to wash the area with diluted hydrochloric acid (1:10) because, I guess, acid is preferable to this monster. It’s related to the giant stinging tree but has a more potent neurotoxin. Apparently, the pain can last for years…

Some of our continent’s nastiest inhabitants, though, are ornamental imports brought by early colonists. Like many children around the world, I recall being warned away from Oleanders and Angels Trumpets. The latter, Brugsmansia, has pretty flowers, the perfume of which can cause respiratory irritation and nausea in some people. They are closely related to Datura – Devils Trumpets – but the Brugsmansia’s flowers are pendulous rather than erect. Both types of ‘trumpet’ belong to the nightshade family.

The alkaloids in Brugs (as fans of the plants call them) will mess you up. Some people, looking for a natural high, have contemplated their choices (lick a cane toad**** or drink some trumpet tea) and opted for the tea. I’m definitely not recommending the former, but nasty things happen when you ingest trumpets belonging to devils or angels. Bad, bad trips – the hallucinogenic effects have been described as terrifying rather than pleasurable and in one case the ‘acute psychotic condition’ led to self-amputation of the tea drinker’s penis and tongue.

So that’s a no.

Having grown up in the subtropics, it wasn’t until I went to the UK that I saw a lot of the deadly plants that my reading of fairytales, the classics, fantasy fiction and historical non-fiction like Nicholas Culpeper’s Herbal had led me to believe would just about leap out and attack me. You know, the sort of classic witches’ weeds of deadly nightshade, hemlock and henbane, mandrake and monkshood, wormwood and foxglove.

I found it a little confronting to discover that the gardens of Edinburgh were a veritable pharmacopeia of death – atropine, aconite, digoxin, taxine and cicutoxin, just to name a few. Those lovely monkshood in the banner pic? Photographed in Edinburgh, as was this snowy graveyard yew.

Yew in Edinburgh graveyard

But none of these plants, nasty as they are, can compete with (da,da,daaa!) the TREE of DEATH!

The manchineel (Hippomane mancinella) or manzanilla de la muerte, which means little apple of death, grows in and around the Caribbean. On some islands they put warning signs on the trees to let people know that the fruit, sap and leaves are highly toxic. (Check it out!) Just standing beneath one, when it rains, will cause skin blisters. I think Flaubert overstated the danger of the tree in Madame Bovary where he referred to its ‘poisonous shade’, but not by much.

Truth, as ever, is stranger than fiction. But it makes me think about how ludicrously nasty a fictional plant would have to be, just to compete with some of our world’s fabulous flora. And all of this really makes me want to get back to a short story I started writing about four months ago about malevolent apple trees. Not that I’ve gone all ‘hello, my pretty’ with poisoned fruit. Just those yellow and red stripes…that’s Nature’s warning, right? Like tigers and wasps.

Plus, I think doing some writing would be safer than a spot of gardening, all things considered.

*the book, City of Lies by Sam Hawke, features a family of poison tasters.

**and the sun, of course – mankind’s ancient enemy….

***much worse if you do this in Gympie, thereby cubing the level of your distress as well as running the additional risk of mercury poisoning.

****the Bufo marinus has hallucinogenic sweat. And is gross. You could not pay me enough to lick one.

A bonfire of my vanity

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Tonight, I’m off to a bonfire of my vanity, rather than a more generic bonfire of the vanities which would call for the righteous roasting of anything which might encourage sin.

Let me explain and, since it’s Wednesday and there’s always time for a little wordsmithery, before I set fire to the pyre I’m going to investigate some history and wordalicious etymology.

Back in the 1490s, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was ruining his former patrons, the de Medicis, by preaching that luxury and ostentatious excess were sinful. (And, yeah, those Medicis knew a thing or two about ostentation.)

The good people of Florence, egged on by Savonarola, in the spirit of abstinence called for by the upcoming Lent, spent Shrove Tuesday 1497 chucking anything that might tempt them to sin – mirrors, cosmetics, musical scores and instruments, playing cards, paintings, books – onto a fire.

This wasn’t the first falò delle vanità, bonfire of the vanities, but it is the most well-remembered, at least in part because it was said that the great Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli consigned some of his own paintings to the pyre. Che cavolo!

Things didn’t end well for Savonarola – only fifteen months later, after being excommunicated and tortured, he was hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, along with two other friars. Their ashes were dumped in the Arno to prevent his followers from making relics of his bones.

And, yeah, that’s the Arno in Pisa – stop being picky. Its the same river and it brings us to the etymology of bonfire which is that it is a bone fire. That is a fire in which you’re burning bones.

Why, you might ask. Or even, what sort of monster are you?

Firstly, they don’t have to be human bones. Don’t go all wicker man on me, alright?

Secondly, burning bones is a great way to turn them into a nice, friable fertiliser. So, you bring the beasties in from their summer pastures after harvest, knowing there’s not enough feed for them all for the winter, and after the butchering and everything is done you’ve got a pile of carcasses which need burning to make fertiliser for the fields for the next year’s crop.

And, oh, is that the time? Somehow it’s the end of October and time for Samhain, so you build up bonfires – bonefires – and make a party of it. You drive the rest of the cattle between two of the bonfires and you pass through them too, as a cleansing ritual. The wall between the worlds is thin, so you make sure you appease the spirits of the fae and of the dead.

So the bonfires (with or without their bones) were being lit at that time of the year (preferably by a fire made by friction = force-fire, needs-fire or neatsfire, neat being an Old English word for cattle) long before the Catholic Church moved its celebration of All Hallows from the 13^th of May to the 1^st of November, and long before English justice saw Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators drawn, hung, mutilated and quartered for their conspiracy to blow up King James and the parliament on 5 November 1605. A ‘guy’ has been burnt in effigy on that date – Bonfire Night – ever since.

Because what’s a bonfire without at least a few (notional) bones?

And what’s it all got to do with my vanity?

Well, I’m off to have one of my manuscripts critiqued, tonight, by the CSFG novel critiquing group. If producing a book is like producing a child, which it really isn’t, this is like asking some other parents to tell you how ugly your kid is. No, honestly, tell me. I can take it.

Actually, it’s more like taking all the things you’re proud of in your work and watching while others throw them onto a bonfire.

Well, it will be cold tonight, here. About 4 decrees Celcius. Books, as Mr Bradbury told us, burn at 232 Celsius. And bones, as it happens, will become friable due to the breakdown of collagen at around that temperature too.

Still, even if all I’m left with is the charred remains, they’ll make a good fertiliser for the next version of my manuscript.