They might also tell you too that they could have done with some honest insights into what this parenting gig really involves from fellow parents speaking from the heart.

Which is where one of the Sydney Writers’ centre’s much loved presenters, Allison Tait, comes in. She is the driving force between a new e-book that releases today, “Things They Didn’t Tell You About Parenting”, which comes with a forward from the wonderfully wise and funny Wendy Harmer.

You can purchase the book here.

The book has gathered together contributions from 32 bloggers, including Nicole Avery, Kerri Sackville, Clint Greagan, Chantelle Ellem, and Eden Riley, and of course Allison herself, who write about what it means for them to be a parent. They do it with candour and humour, and together, give anyone looking for some honest insights into parenthood, the sort of practically helpful material you will never find in the stock standard parenting books.

And best of all, all the proceeds go to a more than worthy cause, Foundation18, which looks after orphaned or underprivileged children in Bali and helps them to grow, in harmony with their environment, into confident adults ready to take on the world. All the proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit this charity.

Some of the girls looked after by Foundation18 (image by Cate Bolt)

We briefly spoke with Alison Tait about the book and its beneficiaries, her top three things that parents aren’t told, and any ideas she may have for future projects.

Where did you get the idea?
“I ‘met’ Cate on Twitter about two years ago and then through a professional contact. She has always used social media to market and fundraise for her charity Foundation 18, and she works so hard! The thing with Cate is that you can’t ignore her or her passion. She makes it very difficult to just ‘go about your day’ without thinking of bigger causes. So, towards the end of last year, I got to thinking about how I might be able to help her, in a way that was more sustainable than simply sponsoring an orphan. I thought about an ebook – and then wondered how I’d go about creating one. So I called Tracy and Mal at Ebooks Need Editors – whom I’d also met via Twitter – and said ‘what do you reckon about this?’. They jumped at the idea, as did all the bloggers that I approached to take part. We all loved the idea that social media had brought us all these parents together to help a mother help those children.”

How did you get Wendy Harmer involved?
“I asked her. Sometimes it’s as simple as that! I knew she’d be perfect, so I sent her an email, outlining what we were doing, who Cate was, what Foundation 18 was, and she said ‘sure’. I was thrilled!”

Allison Tait

What are the top 3 things we weren’t told about parenting but should have been?
1.Before you have children, you have very clear ideas about what you’ll be giving up when you do have them (sleep, sex, travel, sanity) – but no idea about what you’ll be getting. The scales are balanced. Trust us.
2. Parenting is the only job in the world in which the aim of the game is to make yourself redundant.
3. At some point you will find yourself facing the ‘big’ questions. Life, death, stiffies. You will be flustered, but you must never show fear. Children can sense it. Channel the most grown-up person you know, take a deep breath, and … hope for the best. We’re all in the same boat.

Which project are the proceeds destined for? 
For a charity called Foundation18. All details are at Foundation18.org. Cate has established a group home at Ringdikit in North Bali, where 12 girls (who either do not have a living parent or whose parents have relinquished their children) are cared for in a safe, family environment. Foundation 18 aims to raise confident, self-sufficient children. The Foundation also operates an Education Outreach program, whereupon children from the village are sponsored to go to school. Foundation 18 hopes to help as many children as possible from the village attend school to senior high school level.

Is this a one-off or if successful, do you have ideas for further books?
I’ve got lots of ideas. Always lots of ideas! We’ll see.

It’s a great book to get for any parents you knows. Once again, you can purchase the book here.

And to a great extent that is true. Chris Flynn, a writer and book reviewer who chaired this session on the art and ethics of book reviewing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival 2012, and his co-panelists, Kerryn Goldsworthy and Gideon Haigh, agreed with this description of their vocation. Though with that agreement came some important qualifications.

For while there is a romantic notion attached to those that read and then critique books as loyal toilers in the fields of literature, the reality, as with so many professions, is much more complex. Chris Flynn alluded to the many issues surrounding any discussion of book reviewing by saying in his opening remarks that “it can be an incendiary topic”.

That may sound surprising but the field of book reviewing comes with a unique set of moral and ethical considerations that present unique challenges for anyone involved in the industry.

For instance, and this was raised almost immediately for discussion by Chris with his fellow panel members, there is the thorny issue of friends reviewing friends. It’s almost impossible to escape this as an issue given the limited size of the Australian literary scene.

While Chris made it clear he baulks at reviewing a friend’s book because of the obvious implications of favouritism, it sometimes happens inadvertently due to the time lag between a book review being written and its eventual publication. It happened to him recently with Paddy O’Reilly’s new book The Fine Colour of Rust (published under the name P. A. O’Reilly), which was handed to him for reviewing six months before his review saw the light of day.

In the intervening time period, through sheer luck and happenstance, he ended up at a number of events where Paddy was also in attendance and they became friends. So by the time his review of her book appeared in the press, he and Paddy knew each other quite well, and he felt conflicted, worrying that the review would be seen as too beholding to their friendship. This was even though it had been written long before their friendship formed.

He asked both Gideon and Kerry whether “a literary editor [can] know whose friends with who?”

Kerry said you can but it takes a lot of work. When she first began reviewing books in the mid-1980s for The Australian Book Review she quickly realised that “I’d have to keep track of who knew whom and how well.” In those pre-internet days, she maintained an Excel spread sheet that detailed who was friends with who and who was sleeping with who and so on.

“The list was lumpy with white out especially because of lovers and ex-lovers. I had to be careful I didn’t help friends to help their friends, or [allow] enemies to review their enemies and push them off a cliff.”

But she admitted these days the task was complicated by the fact that most book editors were stretched by diminishing time and resources in the mainstream media. They often had to accept review pitches from freelancers where they were unaware of the relationship between the reviewer and the writer to be reviewed, and didn’t have time to check how extensive it might be.

Gideon Haigh, while agreeing that you should avoid reviewing a book by someone you know well, friend or foe, felt that if it did happen, it wouldn’t impair the review to a fatal extent.

“If you’re a sensible reader,” he said, “ you can tell a favourable review that doesn’t have the text in mind.”

In other words, it would be obvious to all that a reviewer wasn’t praising the book on its merits. But regardless of the discernment of a reader, everyone agreed that it was best to avoid reviewing anyone you knew if it could possibly be avoided.

This raised the associated issue of the ethics of reviewing a fellow debut author if you are currently one yourself, or indeed reviewing any books in the year your book is published. It is something Chris Flynn is acutely aware of with the recent release of his generally well-received book, A Tiger in Eden. He says he “feels compromised” and “will shy away from it [reviewing books]” this year, even though it denies him a revenue stream he has come to rely on.

But it can be a challenge to observe not reviewing the book of someone you know, or in the year you have your own book out, or when you are one of the few subject matter experts able to review a particular type of book. It is only natural that a book editor will call on you if you are, like Gideon Hague, one of only a few people with specialist knowledge of business or sport. He believes in these circumstances that some crossover is inevitable.

“It’s an awkward position to review your peers but you can’t escape it.”

Declining to review a book because you feel there may be a conflict of interest is laudable but an unintended side effect noted Kerryn, is that a book can then be reviewed by someone with no knowledge of the subject matter resulting in an inferior review.

“It is unbelievably irritating to be reviewed by someone with no knowledge of the subject.”

Reviewing someone in the same field as you can also be problematical when there is a disagreement about the approach to the discussion of that particular subject. Kerryn cited three reviews by legendary Melbourne-based reviewer, Peter Craven where he was especially tough on the authors because “in each case Peter had very strong views on the subject matter, and wasn’t going to let them [the authors] get away with it.”

But it’s not just ethical dilemmas that complicate the lot of a book reviewer in today’s fast-paced media climate. The rise of new media, and the attendant decline in the revenue and hence resources available to existing mainstream media, are placing a whole host of pressures on reviewers.

For one thing, the space available to them in many publications has either declined markedly or disappeared altogether. This is leading to the rise of short 80-100 word reviews where the danger is, noted Kerryn, that you can slide into Amazon-esque “It rocked! No, it sucked” types of reviews.

While they all agreed it is appealing trying to say something constructive within such tight word counts, it does compromise how insightful a review can be.

Discussion then turned to the rise and rise of online reviews, especially in the blogosphere, particularly the fact that the aforementioned word count restrictions are no longer an issue. While Gideon said he felt that “sometimes blogging is a personal form of writing, not designed to inform or edify”, Chris and Kerryn both saw merit in this new forum for reviewers. Chris felt it gave reviewers scope to be truly honest, while Kerryn said bloggers can address issues that “mainstream reviewers don’t have time to touch on.”

The emergence of new technologies also triggered discussion of the new accessibility of reviewers to those they review. While it was once difficult for a writer to track down a book reviewer prior to email and Twitter, these days it is relatively easy to track down the details of a reviewer.

“We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift,” admitted Kerryn. “People can track you down in seconds now. It is a bit scary.”

While in ideal circumstances this can lead to a fruitful exchange of ideas and views, in the hands of some people it can lead to ugly and less than edifying confrontations. Some writers it seems don’t handle criticism well.

They all questioned the wisdom of adversely reacting to what is perceived as an overly negative review, saying that it doesn’t do the writer any good to attack the person reviewing them. Kerryn noted that “if you’ve got a glass jaw, it’s not a good idea to tell people as someone else might want to smack you on the other side.”

Gideon agreed saying that he felt “it’s poor form to respond [to a review] and there is no advantage to be gained from it.”

But people do respond negatively more often than many people realise, and everyone on the panel agreed that it was largely due to the fact that though we have a robust review culture in Australia, it seems we don’t handle the criticism that might flow from this very well. As Chris noted:

“In the arts we don’t like to be criticised.”

He pointed out that this is unlike sport where people simply move on after being criticised for poor form, or a less than successful game. He asked both Kerryn and Gideon why people in the arts are so thin-skinned.

“There’s something about writing,” said Kerryn, “that people regard as a particularly undifferentiated extension of their personality.”

She also felt that many in the arts feel embattled by budgetary cutbacks, and a lack of public profile and wide mainstream acceptance, and so react far more defensively than people in say sports, which enjoys widespread appeal.

They all agreed in closing that, regardless of all these challenges, there would always be a place for reviewers in our society because they act as guides for readers on what constitutes a good book.

That makes sense since there is no sign of readers going away anytime soon.

Nonetheless, we’re here to discuss what it takes for women to write men. Matthew Condon chaired the session with authors Kirsten Tranter and Deborah Robertson who have both just released novels featuring male protagonists.  Deborah’s book is Sweet Old World and Kirsten’s is A Common Loss.

Matthew Condon starts the session with this quote from Dorothy L Sayers:

A man once asked me … how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. … I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Deborah Robertson agreed, saying there was far too much emphasis on gender when writing. “What men and women share is so much greater than what divides them,” she commented. In her own book she aimed to capture qualities considered un-masculine. Her main character is struggling with his desire to have a child. At 43 it’s something that’s becoming increasingly unlikely but his need is overwhelming. It’s a situation we often only associate with women.

Kirsten, whose book explores male friendships, said she was more interested in exploring the differences between individuals rather than men and women. When she wrote her book she realised many things were left unspoken, “which is typical of male friends I have who don’t speak to each other as much as women.”

So, if women are writing as men, will they transpose their female experiences on their male characters?

Kirsten says she didn’t do that at all. In fact, she didn’t find it much different to writing her first novel, whose main character was a woman. She did admit, though, that being a compulsive eavesdropper helped to make her male characters more authentic.

Deborah says she started her novel with a female character, but a couple of hundred pages in, she found she was bored with it. “I knew about female yearning [for children] and I wondered about the men in this story.” Like many writers, she’s drawn to the stories on topics she knows little about, hence her novel on the male yearning for children. But she also said she didn’t think about writing a man, she was “concentrating on writing a person”.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Kirsten and Deborah’s projects have been the reader reactions. Both found their male readers had no problems with the protagonists, they found them completely convincing. It was actually female readers who questioned the authenticity of the characters. One of Deborah’s readers remarked, “As if any man would put off seducing a woman just because a child’s in a coma.” Even the men in the audience were surprised to hear that!

Of course, writing about men doesn’t really make the process of writing a novel any different. Deborah is a writer who is constantly thinking about her characters. “I have about nine characters I’m moving in and out of all the time,” she says.

Kirsten also didn’t feel her approach was different at all for her second book, but admitted she was a little sick of hanging out with blokes by the time she finished it!

Deborah and Kirsten did admit that writing men has changed them in small ways. Deborah said, “I wanted to address my own prejudices and mistrust of men. I’ve come closer to the men in my own life. Writing this novel has changed me.”

Kirsten says her novel “made me think about men and their interactions. Fiction is a great exercise in compassion.”

That it is – no matter what gender your characters are.

His first novel, which he released after his return to Australia in 1996, was The Suspect, a psychological thriller which was chosen by the world’s largest consortium of book clubs as only the fifth “International Book of the Month”. Following that success, he released a series of best selling titles including Lost, The Night Ferry and Shatter, all of which were listed for various awards. His latest book, Say You’re Sorry, is due for release this year.

She has also found great success as an author. Her first book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (1995) won the British Book of the Year Award in 1997. It has since been made into a dramatic television series, and a documentary. Her latest book, A Perfect Heaven, released in 2011, examined how Copernicus‘s scientific endeavours revolutionised man’s understanding of the cosmos.

His interest in ceramics informed his first book, Bernard Leach (1998) who was an important ceramic artist and member of the famed St Ives collective. But the book which has won him most acclaim is The Hare With Amber Eyes, which traces the history of his mother’s side of the family through a collection of Japanese Netsuke carvings he inherited on the death of his uncle, Ignace. The book earned him a number of awards including the Ondaatje Prize and the J Q Wingate Prize.

She has also edited a number of volumes of stories, poems and essays for Meanjin and The Best Australian Essays. Her latest novel is The Mountain.

Passionately committed to advancing the cause of human rights, she is a governor of the British Institute of Human Rights, and has written extensively on the issue for The Times and Independent newspapers in the UK. It also informed her 2004 book, Human Cargo, which focused on refugees in the modern world.

His work has attracted a number of high profile awards including the prestigious Nordic Council’s Literary Prize for his fifth novel Skugga- Baldur which he won in 2005. A major figure in the Icelandic cultural scene, he has worked with countrywoman, Bjork on a number of occasions including on her latest project Biophilia and has also been involved in the staging of many art exhibitions. He is currently working on writing the final volume of the trilogy he began in 1994 with the novel Augu.

Currently employed by the University of Auckland as a creative writing tutor and lecturer, she has also authored a number of well-received novels. Her first book, Leave Before You Go was published in 1998 with her following novel, New Girl (2001) being shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her latest release, Novel About My Wife (2008) continued her success winning the 2009 Montana Book Awards.