TEXT prose

Amy T Matthews

Thinking About Camels

I assume there was an actual camel once. The one that became proverbial because its death was just so damn poetic. I assume it was an Arabic camel (the proverb being Arabic), standing in the blinding heat, being all sullen the way camels are, their black eyes spiteful as they chew whatever they chew. I have no idea what camels eat. They spit, I know that. When they get mad, they spit. This camel probably spat, as its idiot master kept loading it up.

There it was, in the shimmering, headachy heat, probably besieged by stinging flies, glaring sullenly as load after load was piled onto his back. It might have made a noise; that discordant unpleasant noise camels make, and yes it probably spat. But it was just a camel. It didn’t have a say in what was loaded on its back. Its knees probably locked, to withstand the weight, then trembled. It might have sunk a little into the sand. And the idiot kept loading it up and, at the very last, threw a straw on top. The straw was clearly added by the storytellers. What possible use is a straw and why would you pack one?

In some versions of the story it’s a feather. One version has a monkey instead of a camel, and a melon instead of a straw. It’s kind of beside the point. The straw is poetic. If there was an actual, historical camel (and I bet there was at some point), there was probably a bundle that got thrown on at the last, and not an actual straw. The idiot master was probably a merchant; the bundles and packages were probably goods; he probably stood to make a lot of money off that camel’s back. Anyway, he threw the last straw (bundle) on and, snap, there went the camel’s back.

It didn’t die. It wouldn’t have. A broken spine isn’t lethal. It would have gone down, clumsily, without grace. The camel would have been in agony, distressed, screaming. And the merchant would have killed it, to put it out of its misery. And then he would have bitched and moaned about having to buy another damned camel.

To: XXXXX
From: RLP Literary Agents
Subject:  Contract and Timelines

Hello XXXXX,

Firstly, congratulations on the shortlisting. Excellent news. When is the winner announced? Please keep me in the loop and I’ll make sure the news is posted on our social media and website.

I’m expecting a draft contract to arrive in the next few weeks for The Happy Ending. I will forward it on with my notes attached and we can discuss then. I have a few suggestions at this stage – are you free for a chat? Would like to know your thoughts on international rights and whether we want to enter into a multi-book contract, offer rights of first refusal, or keep our options open. Caroline is enthusiastic about the book and wants me to pass on how excited they are. How soon can you write a sequel?

The literary book is with four publishers at present, with responses due back to me by mid-month. I know this one is dear to your heart. Fingers crossed for it.

You mentioned you need a publication ASAP for work. The romance will be out late next year (if we accept the offer after seeing the contract). Will that be counted as part of your publications? Or does it absolutely have to be a ‘literary’ book? You said you’re feeling ‘up against the wall’. I hope the short story you had out last year counts? The novel was released when… 2011? And your academic book a year or two later? Considering that the market is settling finally, after the flux of the past few years, we should be able to place your books soon. If the romance can be published in the next 12-18 months, we can then try and find a home for the other two romances.

Can you forward me a synopsis for the next literary novel? From memory you just wrote an outline for a grant or fellowship application? I think that project sounds marketable – more marketable perhaps than the last couple of literary books. What kind of timeline are you working on?

Reviewing our last discussion, you are currently working on a sequel to The Happy Ending and this next literary project? Are there any other irons in the fire that I should know about? How fast can you work?

Best,
R

 

How fast can I work?

To: XXXXX
Subject: Performance Review

Dear XXXXX,

Your performance review has been scheduled for next Monday. Please fill out the attached forms and return them by Friday, so your supervisor has time to read them before your meeting.

Regards,
HR

They say there aren’t any camels left in the wild. They were domesticated thousands and thousands of years ago, because they can travel long distances without much nourishment, through terrains where no road can be laid. Self-sufficient animals, they have large soft feet that spread to let them walk on shifting sands. Useful, camels were put to use. They’re the workhorses of the desert; preferred, because you don’t have to feed them much. They’re patient and they endure. So you don’t have to worry about them startling and bucking and galloping off. They’re plodders. But at least they’re more exotic than cows.

            I try to imagine telling the truth on my performance review. Is it research to spend an hour thinking about camels?

ACADEMIC STAFF
PERFORMANCE REVIEW
FORM A
SECTION 1

13. RESEARCH AND/OR CREATIVE ACTIVITY

13.1   Activities since last review (refer to Note #13.1 in Guide to Form A)

• I submitted final drafts of two novels (one literary, one romance) to my agent
• I had a short story published
• I submitted four abstracts for conferences
• I did two public readings of work in progress
• I submitted a novel to an award
• I applied for a fellowship
• I was awarded two internal grants
• I’ve been thinking about camels
• I bought a lot of new books and lined them up on my bookshelf; I haven’t got time to actually read them
• I went to conferences and wondered how all these people manage it; I wonder if they’ll tell me the secret
• I got a serious haircut in the hope that it would make people take me seriously
• I’ve been crying a lot and thinking about divorce and death and depression and growing old and what romantic love really means in the face of real life
• I’ve been juggling single-parenthood and working full time and I never get time to write anymore and I wonder what the point of it all is

13.2   Proposed activities for current year (refer to Note #13.2 in Guide to Form A)

• First draft of new literary book
• Working on a draft of new romance
• Short story about being a writer in the academy
• Three papers to be presented at conferences
• Organising national conference for 2016
• Paper co-authored with PhD student to be submitted
• Write anything at all

13.3   Future plans (refer to Note #13.3 in Guide to Form A)

            Cocaine? Then I wouldn’t need to sleep and could write at night?
            I can’t afford cocaine.
            Crystal meth?

            Quit my job? We’d be homeless and hungry, but at least I would have time. These days time is the new gold. Invaluable. Perhaps glittering on the ground in some distant land, where I could go and buy a plot and gather it up.

            Become someone else – one of those people who seem to be able to turn off their person-hood and be a worker bee.

            Get interested in bees. They’re more highly thought of than camels.

In the northern hemisphere the death of the honeybee has reached biblical proportions. In far north Oregon in the United States a woman named Joy clocked off one night and emerged into the Wal-Mart car park to find the corpses of 50,000 bees. I don’t know how she counted them all. Did they hire someone to count the bees? Whoever it was has a burgeoning career, as bees are dropping from the sky at unprecedented rates. The age of the bee is drawing to a close.

            Colony Collapse Disorder is when all the worker bees disappear simultaneously. Bees have disappeared before from time to time; their sudden absences turns up in the history books under the names disappearing disease, spring dwindle, May disease, autumn collapse, and fall dwindle disease. But this time it’s different. Never before have bees disappeared, dwindled, collapsed in their millions, across an entire hemisphere. Never before have they been asked to make honey from fungicides. And as they die, the fields fall fallow. This is what happens when the workers fall from the sky.

            There are 1500 species of native bees in Australia and not one has fallen dead to the ground in a Wal-Mart car park. Not least because we don’t have Wal-Mart. But even the Target car parks are dead-bee free. We use insecticides and fungicides. But we never did get much honey from native bees.  In fact they’re not really much like bees at all – they’re more like a kind of wasp.  That’s our disappearing disease; our wasps disappeared into the genus of bee, victims of the usual European history of trying to fit new things into existing boxes. Like the camel – most of the time the creature we think of as a camel is actually a dromedary.

            No one writes poetry about dromedaries. Even though they run feral through the mid-north, galloping free: wild. Wild camels haven’t existed for thousands of years; and yet there they are, striding through the red dust of the great Australian emptiness. Imported to serve, they broke free. What’s more poetic than that?

            I will write about camels.
            Nothing else seems to work.

Dr Amy T Matthews is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University and a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. She has published short stories in collections including Best Australian Stories, and been long-listed for the Australian/Vogel literary award. Her novel End of the Night Girl won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award, was published by Wakefield Press in 2011, and was subsequently shortlisted for the 2012 Dobbie Literary Award and the 2012 Colin Roderick Award. Her book length exegesis Navigating the Kingdom of Night is published by Adelaide University Press. Amy also writes historical romantic-adventure novels under the name Tess LeSue, is a past winner of the Anna Campbell Award and has been shortlisted for the Romance Writers of Australia’s EmeraldPRO, Emerald and STALI Awards. Tess’s novel Bound for Eden is in stores now.