S3E2: Annabel Smith

In this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with writer Annabel Smith about throwing her diary across the room, hearting Michael J. Fox, and singing SexyBack at karaoke. 

Annabel has taken part in three Bad Diaries Salons, including our third ever salon back in 2017, in Perth. Annabel is also the creative force behind the live spoken word series To Whom It May Concern: Complaint Letters Live, and Tracy and Annabel talk about some of the similarities and differences with Bad Diaries Salon, and the pros and cons of reading live vs writing it all down.

Just a heads-up – we talk about verbal sexual harassment in this episode. Take care.

Annabel Smith is a writer based in Perth, Western Australia. Her debut novel, A New Map of the Universe, was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She’s also the author of experimental speculative novel The Ark, and US bestseller Whisky Charlie Foxtrot. She was one of five inaugural recipients of an Australia Council Creative Australia Fellowship for Emerging Artists, for her interactive digital novel/app The Ark.

Annabel has published essays, short stories and articles in many of Australia’s prestigious literary journals, and is in demand as a teacher, reviewer, speaker and interviewer. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University.

Find Annabel on her Substack, Thinks I'm Thinkin'.

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast Season 3 is recorded and produced in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. Seasons 1 & 2 were also recorded in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

Transcript

Tracy: Kia ora, hello, I'm Tracy Farr. A big welcome back to Bad Diaries Podcast. My guest for this episode is Annabel Smith. It's always a delight to hang out with Annabel, but I was especially keen to get her onto Bad Diaries Podcast because Annabel has been a reader at three Bad Diaries Salons over the years, including our third ever salon back in 2017, in Perth. That was the first salon outside Melbourne, and in fact the first salon I took part in as well. I read at that salon and shared the MC duties with Jenny Ackland.

As well as reading at Bad Diaries Salons, Annabel is the creative force behind her own live spoken word series, To Whom It May Concern: Complaint Letters Live. So, I was keen to chat with her about some of the similarities and differences between Complaint Letters Live and Bad Diaries Salon. We get into some of the pros and cons of reading live at a literary event, versus writing it all down in a novel or an essay for publication. And as always, I ask Annabel about keeping diaries and journals both as a personal record and for her writing work.

Just a heads up before we get into this episode that we do talk about verbal sexual harassment, so please take care.

Annabel Smith is a writer based in Perth, Western Australia. Her debut novel, A New Map of the Universe, was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards. She's the author of the US bestseller Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, and she was one of five inaugural recipients of an Australia Council Creative Australia Fellowship for Emerging Artists for her interactive digital speculative fiction novel and app, The Ark. She's published essays, short stories and articles in many of Australia's prestigious literary journals. She's in demand as a teacher, reviewer, speaker, interviewer and karaoke participant. Such a treat to welcome to the podcast Annabel Smith.

Tracy: Kia ora, hi, Annabel, welcome to Bad Diaries Podcast. 

Annabel: Thanks, Tracy. Thanks for having me. 

Tracy: Oh, it's a pleasure to have you here. Well, you and I are talking over Zoom, but a week ago, we were actually in the same room. Yeah, we had lunch together, and you invited me to read at your Complaint Letters Live event in Perth when I was there, which was fantastic.

Annabel: Thank you. It was great to have you as part of the lineup. Return the favor.

Tracy: Oh, it was a pleasure to be on stage again with you. And we'll talk a little bit more later about Complaint Letters Live, the salons that you run. And we'll talk a little bit too about Bad Diaries Salons, because you have read at three of our Bad Diaries Salons in Australia. That makes you our Australian author with the most salon readings other than Jenny Ackland or myself. So, you know, kudos. You should probably get a gold medal or something.

Annabel: I’d like a little certificate. At the very least.

Tracy: Consider it in the mail. 

Annabel: Okay, thank you.

Tracy: We'll circle back to those readings in a minute. But I'd like to start our chat today by digging into the thing that we, I guess we focus on in Bad Diaries Podcast, which is the human urge to record in diaries and other not-meant-to-be-shared writing. So I'd like to ask you about your own diary practice. Do you keep a diary? And if you do, do you always keep it, or is it just when you travel? Or almost never? Tell us a little bit about that.

Annabel: Yes. So for most of my life I did keep a diary, starting when I was about 13, I got a five-year diary and I would just write a few choice lines a day. And a lot of the time one of the lines would be something along the lines of ‘I heart Michael J. Fox’. And I would write that like every day for maybe a year until I got a new crush.

Tracy: I applaud your consistency. I love that and for the record, I too was given one of those five-year diaries with the little lock – yeah – lock and key, about the same time. But I was much less consistent in my writing. Even then I had a fear of the blank page that sort of stopped me putting things down. So. Okay. So I heart Michael J. Fox … 

Annabel: Yes, yes. And then I sort of progressed to, a kind of small page a day diary and then a very large page, like an A4 size page a day. And I was verbose. I could fill those pages. I quite often used to write my diary on the train, on the way to work, or wherever I was. I took it with me, and then I went into free-form notebooks because I couldn't be contained by a page a day. And I just, for years and years of my life just recorded everything that I was thinking and feeling and doing. And then I reached a point … so I went through a period where my mental health was not very good. And writing in my diary was another form of rumination, which was not healthy for me.

Tracy: Right.

Annabel: And I remember at one point, reading through some things I'd written and throwing my diary across the room, and the spine snapped and the cover fell off, and then I tore the book in half.

Tracy: Yeah.

Annabel: And then I thought, oh, maybe I'll take a break from writing a diary.

Tracy: Yeah.

Annabel: And now I keep a notebook, but it's much more occasional. I might do a bit of journaling if I'm really struggling with something. I use Brené Brown's ‘rumble questions’ to work through something. And I might do a kind of what's been going on for me in the last few months wrap up, like highlights, things I've been struggling with. So it's more like that; occasionally if I'm reading a book that makes me think a lot, I might make notes, but yeah, it's much less self absorption than I used to have, I guess.

Tracy: Yeah. And, and so prior to that book-throwing, spine-breaking moment, it sounds as though it had been a very consistent, and building …

Annabel: Very.

Tracy: … building. So every day sort of more or less without fail.

Annabel: And sometimes I was doing morning pages from Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way, but they were the thing in the end that broke it for me because I think if you are not in a good mental place and you find yourself writing the same things over and over, it's not healthy. So, yeah, the morning pages worked for me for a time, and then really didn't work for me.

Tracy: Yeah, Yeah. Do you still have all of those books?

Annabel: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have all my diaries. And in fact, a couple of years ago, during Covid, during one of those kind of random things that happened during Covid, my son's babysitter came to live with us.

Tracy: Wow. Okay.

Annabel: Yeah. She was between houses, and she came to stay for a few nights. And then lockdown happened. And I said to my son, you know, is it okay if our babysitter stays, you know, for a couple of weeks, it might be hard for her to find somewhere new to live. And then that just continued. And we really enjoyed having her. And she actually lived with us for more than a year, and she and I became very close. And she was a young woman, and she at one point started reading aloud to me from the diaries I had kept at the age that she was now. And, you know, because I had them all and she would just pull them out and open them at random and start reading something.

Tracy: Okay. So this young woman who's living with you during that strange period of lockdown when everything was strange anyway, is performing your life, to you …

Annabel: Yeah.

Tracy: And how did that feel?

Annabel: And she would read them in these voices of, like, sometimes like disdain or like hilarity … because, you know, of course, the things that you write in diaries often just sound quite melodramatic. It was so entertaining. I would just be cracking up. I would sometimes be just cringing. And also just so aware that I was writing this stuff down, so in some part of my brain, I was understanding it, but I wasn't acting on it. So she was reading from a section of my diary about how unhappy I was in the relationship I was in at the time. It was hilarious because when I went through those diaries at a later time, just over and over again I was saying the same things about how the relationship could never work, but I wasn't following through by ending the relationship.

Annabel: And so it was kind of striking to hear also her reading things from my diary from, I don't know, 28 years ago or something. And I was saying the same things about relationships that I think I had found myself still saying now. And I was like gosh, have I learnt anything? It was a very funny process. But yeah, I still have all the diaries and I don't reread them myself, so it was interesting to have someone else pull them out and read from them, because I don't do that. I find it just too cringey.

Tracy: Too cringey, too painful to go back and reread them. But the impulse is there to keep them, so to keep them as an archive.

Annabel: Oh yeah. I feel like maybe I will reach a certain age where I will be able to look back on them with maybe more tenderness and less cringe, so I'm sure I will revisit them at some point.

Tracy: Yeah, yeah, I'm still absolutely struck. Struck. Stricken. I have been struck by your bravery in letting the young woman who was living with you read those diaries to you. That strikes me as both brave and foolish and, and all sorts of things.

Annabel: I think, to be honest, that's something that could only have come out of the Covid time. We spent all of this time just doing everything together. We went to the supermarket together and we did a workout together at home, and we just spent so much time together that even though there was a really big age gap between us, she was like, she could have been my daughter. We became very, very close in that period in a way that just wouldn't have happened at any other time.

Tracy: Yeah, yeah, I get, I get that, I get that.

Annabel: So it didn't seem that weird to just let her randomly peruse my diary.

Tracy: Yeah, because everything was weird, right? Yeah. Yeah, everything was turned on its head. Yeah. Now I'm imagining her sort of dressing as you and kind of really inhabiting your life. But let's not go there. Well, look, let's shift from there, talking about revisiting diaries, let's have a little look at the Bad Diaries Salons that you've read at, for us. And just kind of think back to that time and a little bit about what it was like. So I looked up my notes before I hopped on the Zoom with you. And you read at three of our salons. The first one that you read at, the theme was REGRETS, and that was in Perth in September 2017. That was our third salon ever. The first in Perth, the first outside Melbourne. The first two had been in Melbourne. So that was REGRETS and I and I was there too. And Jenny was there too. So: Jenny, you were there, I was there. Laurie Steed.

Annabel: Yes. Brooke Davis.

Tracy: Brooke Davis, and I think that was it.

Annabel: Yeah.

Tracy: Yeah. And then you read at a salon in Melbourne the following year, in 2018, and the theme for that was CLUELESS. And that has a fantastic poster, that's all Clueless-pink with a coat hanger on it.

Annabel: Yeah.

Tracy: And then the third salon that you read at was in Perth again, and that was one that I organised one time when I was visiting Perth. That was in late 2019.

Annabel: That one was at The Bird, wasn't it?

Tracy: Yeah, it was The Bird. And the theme was BURN for that. And do you know what? I looked up my notes from the day after that because, Jenny Ackland couldn't be there. She was in Melbourne. And so what Jenny and I would tend to do is just catch each other up in quite general terms about how the salon had gone. And so I said to her, “Annabel was first, reading from travel in her 20s, a fabulously strident conversation with self/diary about men and sexual harassment, the sort of street hassles that (especially young blonde) women get in southern Europe, and finding the voice to respond to that.” And then I've put, “Funny and fierce”. So does that bring it back to you?

Annabel: Oh yeah, that diary. Because I bought this beautiful notebook from a paper store in Portugal. Because I finished the travel diary I had, really quickly, and then I bought this beautiful new book, and I wrote on the front of it, Caro Diario, which is like Dear Diary in Italian, because I had seen a film called Caro Diario, and I thought it would be very, you know, literary to write that on the front of it. And then partway through the trip, I had added a kind of subtitle to the diary, My European Tour of Sexual Harassment.

Tracy: Oh.

Annabel: I remember that trip so distinctly. And I remember actually now reading from that diary about the times when … I think it was probably about the time when I shouted at a man in a park in Athens because I had reached my absolute limit with that stuff.

Tracy: Yeah. And what year was that?

Annabel: Well it would have been like ’95 or ’96 or something. I was about 21 or 22. I was very young, and until that point I had, when I travelled, had this very strong idea that I was an ambassador for my country when I travelled, and that I should represent Australia well by being polite and decent. And I don't really know where I got these notions, but maybe just from seeing bogans everywhere and thinking, oh God, I don't want people to think that's all Australia is. So when people would hit on me, I would be very polite to them. You know, initially, like men, men of 45 hitting on a 22-year-old, “Would you like to have dinner with me?” “Oh, no. Thank you for asking.” Yeah. “No. Thank you. No, I'm busy.”; “No, no, really. thanks. It's very nice of you,” that kind of stuff. Whereas by the end of the trip, I was literally screaming, “Fuck off! What is wrong with you? What the fuck?!” You know, like I was at my absolute limit. I just had never experienced anything like it. Couldn't walk down … I remember in one town in Greece, Sparta, staying at a youth hostel there. And one night, the first night, I went out of the youth hostel to go and find something to eat and literally hit the street and a guy said, “hey, chat, chat, chat, do you want to have dinner?” “No thanks,” blah blah blah went on through it. Walk, I don't know, 50 metres. It happens again. It happened three times in ten minutes. And then I just went back to my youth hostel without getting anything to eat, because it was too hard.

Tracy: And exhausting, probably. Yeah.

Annabel: What I should have just done, when they said hello, I should just ignore them and kept walking. But I didn't feel able to do that at that point. I was like, oh, that's too rude.

Tracy: Yeah, and so young as well. I mean, you're kind of finding that way of navigating in the world. Couple of things: I travelled around, you know, backpacked around Europe, a few years before you and a few years older than you (because you're a fair bit younger than me). I was sort of 28 or so when I did it. I was travelling on my own, but a couple of times I travelled with two young women from Melbourne who I met along the way and travelled with them, and one of them was like me – sort of little and dark-haired – and the other was willowy and very, very blonde. And she just got so much unwanted, unsolicited attention. And it was shocking because I had mostly – not entirely, you know, I didn't entirely escape it – but I had mostly travelled, you know, on my own, without too much in the way of that attention. And so it was really shocking and eye-opening for me to see just how it got turned on. It was amazing.

Annabel: Sure. Yeah. Being blonde was a huge disadvantage in those places. And at one point, I think, I met these two American girls who were also both blonde. And we were talking about our experiences, and then we were out in the town that night, and three blokes came up to us, and because we were together and we'd already talked about it and laughed about it, and made fun of these silly men, it was really different. It was really liberating. So right in front of them, we were like, “no, Yorgos, I don't want to go out with you. Why would I? You’re 20 years older than me!” So the three of us were like having a crack at them because we had that safety in numbers.

Tracy: Yeah, and having had that discussion as well. So you kind of worked it out and talked it through.

Annabel: … kind of going, oh, this is happening to me. Yes. It's happening to us, isn't it? Horrible. We hate it. These men are so gross and old, you know, and we wouldn't go on a date with them in a million years.

Tracy: Yeah.

Annabel: Yeah. Like, where are they getting off with these thoughts, you know?

Tracy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that occurs to me is it sounds as though, for the most part, you were travelling on your own on this trip, and so travelling on your own as a young woman on the other side of the world. You're already – I'm imagining – you're already on alert and having to just be very aware of what you're doing, where you are, and how you're navigating your way through the world. So to have that layered on top, that constant having to be vigilant about that and having to respond to it or not respond to it or choose how to respond to it. Just awful.

Annabel: Yeah. I mean, I remember sometimes I'd be in a situation where I had this little personal alarm that made, like a noise. And I would have that in one hand in my pocket and in the other hand I would have my penknife.

Tracy: Right.

Annabel: Like, “I don't feel safe here, and I'm going to do the things that I need to make myself feel safe.” You know, even at that age, I was aware, you know, women move through the world so differently.

Tracy: So differently.

Annabel: And I think, you know, when you travel alone, the diary is such an important companion, you know, because you don't have anyone to talk about what you've seen with. So writing the diary was a way of kind of processing the things I was seeing and doing and feeling and understanding, including the way I was treated by men; and, you know, it was also a record. I have reread some of my travel diaries and it's great to remember, you know, the places I went and the things I saw. So I think for me, keeping a journal when you travel is pretty wonderful.

Tracy: Agreed. Especially when you're, as you say, when you're travelling on your own and it becomes your companion, it becomes that way of talking through and sort of processing what's happened in the day.

Annabel: And of course, now with smartphones, what I probably would do is if I was travelling, I would be still in contact with friends back home when I'm travelling and sending probably text messages. That would form a kind of record, but it's not the same.

Tracy: Exactly. So the way that we record things has changed, and the way we record not just text, but images. Because I don't know about you, but back in 1989, when I did my big backpacking trip, you know, I had a – oh, actually, it's over there – I had a Pentax Spotmatic, you know, 35mm camera and however many rolls of film that I took on that nine-month trip or whatever. And so I was very careful about what I recorded and what I took photos of because I couldn't just go snap, snap, snap and take photos of everything.

Annabel: Yeah that's really true.

Tracy: Yeah.

Annabel: I actually didn't, take very many photos because I think I worked out very early, I can just buy a photograph, a postcard at this place? Stick it in my diary. It will be a better photograph than the one I take anyway, because it's been taken by a professional and put on a postcard. So I just bought postcards everywhere I went and stuck them in my diary.

Tracy: Yeah. Are those postcards still stuck in your travel diaries?

Annabel: Yeah, I glued them in. I must have travelled with a little glue stick. Which is hilarious. And maybe a little pair of scissors or something, I don't know.

Tracy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can set up Stationery Village everywhere you went, kind of in the youth hostel or wherever.

Annabel: Yeah.

Tracy: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So, thinking back to the salons, because you read at one of our first salons and you were part of that cohort – we all kind of met each other on Twitter, didn't we? Back in the day? And there was a bunch of us, mostly either Australian writers or writers with an Australian kind of connection. So, me being sort of here in New Zealand, but with, you know, with an Australian connection … and we used to hang out there when Twitter was good.

Annabel: Oh my God they were the halcyon days of Twitter. It was such a wonderful community.

Tracy: It was, it really was.

Annabel: I connected with so many people in that period, and I really miss them now, because I don't stay in touch with them any other way.

Tracy: Same, same same. And so the salon that you were part of in Perth in that first year … so the very first one was in Melbourne in July, and the one we did in Perth was in September of the same year. So it was really early days. We were working out the format, so you wouldn't have seen a Bad Diaries Salon before then, because there wasn't one in Perth to see. Can you recall: did you have any qualms about reading? Were you really keen? Did you sort of say yes and then think, oh fuck …

Annabel: Oh no, not at all. I'm one of those shameless people that just love any opportunity to share my inner thoughts. Just really want to … oh, wonderful … okay, great. No, I didn't have any qualms at all. I think I did have some cringe experience reading, like trying to find the reading because then I had to – I was forced to – read some of my old diaries, and that was sort of semi-confronting, but it was a gorgeous event because it was in that little courtyard. It felt so intimate.

Tracy: It did, didn't it?

Annabel: And also, I think because I was doing it with you and Jenny and we'd become quite good pals by that time that I felt very … it was just like, oh, this is a fun thing I'm doing with my friends. It didn't feel that much like, oh gosh, I'm standing up in front of an audience and performing.

Tracy: Yeah. And that leads me on to connect up with To Whom It May Concern: Complaint Letters Live, which is the salon format that you've come up with and that you coordinate and manage and host and produce and mother-hen, because it strikes me that there are some aspects it shares with Bad Diaries Salon. But there are … but it's very much its own thing. And there are differences. But one of the things it shares, one of the things it shares, is that, you know, often as writers, when we get up on stage in front of people, we are talking about our work. It's often a large piece of work, and so we're having to talk about it both in breadth and in detail. So, you know, we're kind of zooming in and out of this work that we've devoted probably years of our life to. But both for Bad Diaries Salon and for Complaint Letters Live, there's this kind of a freeing aspect to it because you're coming up with something … you know, in the case of Bad Diaries Salon, you're actually looking to uncover something that's already been written that, you know, that's already there. So it's a process of uncovery and recovery and discovery and sort of sending out into the world. Talk to us about Complaint Letters Live and the format, and how it gives writers and other artists and comedians an opportunity to come up with something and to just expose it in front of the audience.

Annabel: Yeah. So Complaint Letters is similar in the sense that there's usually five readers or performers, performing their work. So it's little segments from each performer. So it's similar to Bad Diaries in that sense. But in this case, yeah, they're usually writing a kind of, a bit of a rant or quite often in a way, telling a story, but in the form of a complaint letter. So it's more frivolous than a lot of the writing that most people generally do if they're writers. It can be more frivolous; sometimes it's very deep. But I think for the people who are writers among us, we tend to write things that are a bit more silly and fun because it's a break from that very serious writing that we do. Yeah. So, you know, we've had AJ Betts, for example, she wrote a complaint letter about the Fremantle Doctor, which for people who are not from Perth, that is what we call the sea breeze. So on those really stinking hot summer days in the heat waves we get in Perth, when the sea breeze comes in, people say, oh, the doctor's in. And she was, she's not enamoured with the Fremantle Doctor. And she wrote a complaint about how it messes up her hair and how it's not even from Fremantle, it's from Mandurah, and it's more like an aromatherapist than a doctor. And just a lot of silly … so I think we have fun writing something that's just a lot more playful and silly than the kind of “let me labour over this conversation” about, you know, for example, AJ's book about two teens on an oncology ward. You know, so, yeah, that kind of stuff.

Annabel: But I think also there's a vulnerability that you can still tap into which you tap into as a writer always your own vulnerabilities. That's how you make good work, you know? So people are still doing that? There's been some extremely vulnerable letters, and they're the ones that the audience really connects with. One guy wrote a letter to his mum, which was just incredibly brave. And of course, you know, he had to check with me that this is not being recorded in any way, and no one's keeping a transcript, because, you know, I would never, ever want my mum to somehow come across this. But when he started his letter … and a lot of the letters will start, you know, “To Whom It May Concern” or they'll start, you know, “to the Fremantle Council, Committee of Dog Parks”. So his was “Dear Mum” and there was this sort of … yeah, that sound that you made … everyone was going, oooh. You know, people were very moved by that level of vulnerability, and also it was so relatable because so many of us have mums who are … our mums are not aware in the way that we are as mums. They didn't have the self-help books, they didn't have the therapy, so they often just sort of say these blundering things and you're just kind of like, what the hell?

Tracy: Yes, yes. I'm nodding. And so that's another kind of point of contact or point of similarity between Complaint Letters Live and Bad Diaries Salons is that care to create a safe space where people can, if they want to, go deep and be vulnerable, and whether that's presenting something that's funny or cringe or whether that's really digging deep. And like Bad Diaries Salon, Complaint Letters Live is not recorded. So there is that you-have-to-be-there to share that. One of the things that I like about that kind of way of managing these salons, these events, is that it gives the reader, in the moment, the choice to actually read the room. There might be a word, there might be a phrase, there might be  something that they're going to just choose not to share in the moment just because they've read the room; or they might choose to share something. You know, because they've read the room and because they're receptive.

Annabel: Yeah, because they're feeling safe.

Tracy: Yeah. It creates space for the reader to, to really be in control, that might let them kind of surrendercontrol.

Annabel: You know, that's really true. We've had – and I think this is the same with Bad Diaries Salon – we've had such wonderfully supportive audiences. There is just this feeling of safety in the room. And, at one point when my friend was reading that letter to his mum and it was about something, that his parents had put a Country Road catalogue in front of him and said, “this is how we want you to dress”. Like he was dressing kind of like, not a goth, but a bit like a mod. Like an indie kid, you know? Like jeans, Doc Martens. And they wanted him to wear, you know, Aran knits and a beret or something. And someone in the audience shouted out, “Oh, you're beautiful”. And it was just so lovely, that feeling of, he was being so vulnerable that someone wanted to kind of give him that hug of, well, you're perfect, exactly how you are. And the same thing, I shared something that was very vulnerable, which was actually a letter that someone had written to me, or extracts from a letter about everything I had done wrong in the friendship. For 25 years, they had kept a sort of mental record and put it in a 17-page letter to me, and I read parts of that aloud as a, you know, it was a complaint letter aboutme, sent to me, by someone I thought was a dear friend.

Tracy: Oh, wow.

Annabel: Sharing that letter in that space was incredibly cathartic. Someone at one point shouted out, “Boo!”, just like, oh, no. And afterwards, people came up to me and said things. I felt so held by them. It was very healing, in a strange way. Yeah, it was, it was special. And of course, there's a lot of vulnerability with reading from diaries, especially early diaries, because, you know, we say such idiotic things when we're young. And when we're older, too.

Tracy: I also feel though that you can sort of hide behind that, “Oh, I wrote this 40 years ago” kind of thing, you know? So there can be more of a vulnerability in more recent stuff, you know.

Annabel: I’m sure that's true. I remember, though, from the salon that we were talking about at The Bird, Holden Sheppard's diary entries which were so adorable because it was before he understood that he was gay. And he was talking about the wife that he was going to marry and oh my gosh, it was just … there was something just so adorable in that, and in him seeing the irony of sharing that with us. He was very cute.

Tracy: Yeah. With his now-husband in the audience. So is there anything you wouldn't read at a salon or at a Complaint Letters Live? Is there anywhere you wouldn't go? Where's the line?

Annabel: Yeah, there are places I wouldn't go. So my parents come to almost all of them. And so I wouldn't say anything, really, about my family, that was related to, you know, difficult stuff in our family. I wouldn't talk about those issues there. I'm not sure if I would do that anyway, even if my parents were not there. But knowing that my parents will come means I don't even contemplate sharing that. And one of my brothers often comes too. And so, yeah, there's a sense that, that stuff is kind of off limits, whereas I will share stuff like that in, for example, I wrote a kind of personal essay about my divorce, my eating disorder, and my depression, that was published in Westerly. It's called ‘Defective’, and it's definitely the most vulnerable thing I've ever written. And, you know, it was published in a, you know, journal that anybody could read. But I was confident that no one in my family would read it and my ex-husband wouldn't read it. So it felt different in a way, even though it was public, it was that certain people who were mentioned in it weren't going to come across it. Whereas in the actual live events, there's so many people I know in the audience, that I don't tend to get into really super personal stuff that involves people who I still have relationships with now. I did read a letter about my son, and about how I felt about him growing up. But that is the most vulnerable I've been, and I barely got through it, actually, I sort of started to break down in the last couple of lines and only just made it to the end. So, generally, I tend more on the side of, like, funny, less personal things for my letters. But I love having the mix from what people share.

Tracy: Yeah. And same for Bad Diaries Salon. You know, we love the cringe and the funny, but what really hits are the more vulnerable moments; and the mix.

Annabel: Yeah. That's right. And I think you need both parts.

Tracy: Light and dark, baby. Light and dark. You know, it's the mix. Let's circle back, as they say, let's go back to – you touched on it briefly – but the place of diaries and notes and archiving in your work, in your writing work. So as you're researching for writing, do you keep kind of process or project notes for your writing?

Annabel: No. And I always hear about people doing that. And I think, oh, I'd like to do that, but then I don't do it. I remember either reading or hearing Kate Mildenhall talk about that, and I've seen people talk about how each day they maybe at the end of a writing session, they'll, you know, just jot down a few notes about what they wrote and what they're struggling with. And I was like, oh, I'd like to do that, but I just don't do it. I do have … for every book I write I have – I've got one here – write a little notebook, and I try to put everything relating to that book, including all my research, into one notebook. Sometimes it ends up bursting out into two, but it will have, you know, summaries and sometimes plotting diagrams and scenes I need to write and questions, things I'm struggling with and yeah, research. So sometimes if I'm on a retreat, I keep a record of words I've written per day or so. I kind of like having that to look back on, like, oh, my God, I deleted 20,000 words that week.

Tracy: So that's in a notebook, and that's handwritten. And so that sounds to me as you're describing it, some of those things are the things that, you know, you can record them digitally, but they're somehow easier to record by hand, aren't they. Because you can, you know, like diagrams and those kinds of things that somehow [there’s] that connection between brain and hand and paper …

Annabel: Definitely true for the diagrams, but also for me, I feel that with research, if I copy and paste something from the internet, it does not hit my brain in the same way as taking notes. So if I am researching, I do all my notetaking by hand because there's this weird process where what I feel is: okay, do I need to write that down? No no no no no, oh yes. That! I want to write that down. There's a sort of feeling of which are the words that kind of glow for me. And then those are the ones I put in my notebook. Whereas with copy and pasting, I don't get that same sense of this is critical. There's some energy in that part of it that I'm responding to.

Tracy: Yeah.

Annabel: And also, I'm so much less likely to reread digital notes than I am to flip through this, you know, hard copy notebook and go, oh, that's right. I was thinking about that thing and I kind of forgot about it. Sometimes I'll go back over them and highlight things and go, I need to reconsider that, or have little sticky notes in them. Things I'm working on. Structure. Things I want to come back to. I just found this here: a list of strip club names, for my latest novel. Yeah, it's not that detailed. I mean, this book's been going since 2014, and it's a small notebook. It's getting kind of full. Sometimes I occasionally stick extra pages in the back … it's not enough to start a new notebook, but I don't want to not have it.

Tracy: I love that. I love that. I was nodding a lot while you were talking, because that idea of, when you're researching, having those words, those phrases, those lines that glow, and for me, I have to write them down to remember; I can't learn things, I don't seem to be able to learn things just by reading. I have to, it has to be that action of writing down. Tell me though, you've got your notebook, and that's a usually a single notebook for a project. And so that's a nice holdable, manageable, flick-through-able kind of a resource. So do you ever transcribe everything from there into a Word document, or into Scrivener? I can't remember if you use Scrivener or not.

Annabel: I do use Scrivener. No, very rarely. Occasionally, if I make a timeline in the notebook, then I might put it into a spreadsheet because I go, oh, this is what age they are in this year. And I have each character and how old they are. That's probably the only thing that makes it into a digital form, because it's just so much easier to refer to; but almost everything else just stays in the notebook.

Tracy: Nice. I transcribe everything to Scrivener. And so I will, when I've transcribed from my notebook, I'll stamp the page, so I know if the page has been stamped, it's been transcribed. And I'll write in the metadata in Scrivener. You know, it's from Big Green Notebook 3, page 21. You know, written on the 12th of July. Transcribed on the 14th of July.

Annabel: And that's the kind of record of the writing process for you?
Tracy: It's part of it as well, but it also means it's sort of searchable for me as well. So I do go back to the physical notebooks as well. It's what I started doing at a certain point. And so I've kept doing it. So, so yes, it's part of the process. It's part of the process. Write into the notebook. Transcribe to Scrivener.

Annabel: But the writing into the notebook, is that actual words for the book? Or is that just research notes, that kind of stuff?

Tracy: Both. Both.

Annabel: I suppose I never do, I never write by hand, what will become a scene. I used to do that, but never, ever now.

Tracy: I still do.

Annabel: I do love the metadata feature of Scrivener. I absolutely love that. Brilliant. It's such a great program.

Tracy: Okay, I love that idea of the book for each project. Now thinking about diaries in your published work. And so there are sort of two different ways I like to think about this. The first is what I call the Helen Garner approach. So, have you drawn from your own diaries in your published work, would you say?

Annabel: Actually, yeah, probably. In A New Map of the Universe the character travels across, drives across Australia, and I think at that time I was keeping a diary and I had driven across Australia. I remember looking at the paper map that we'd used. It's unbelievable to think of it now that we had this big paper map. And we'd, like, we must have photocopied it, and we'd stuck it together into one big document. And I remember looking at that because I was trying to describe the coastline and stuff. So now, of course, we would do all that online. But yeah, I think I did keep a diary at that time, and I almost certainly did refer to it to get some details. But generally speaking, no, I wouldn't because I just don't keep enough of a diary now. I don't end up using it to inform my writing, because I just don't kind of record that sort of stuff.

Tracy: And then the other sort of approach that I'm always interested in is what I think of as the AS Byatt Possession approach, which is: have you used diaries or letters or those kinds of things as devices in your work? For example, a character writes a diary which another character finds and reads. And I'm trying to think back to The Ark. Some elements of that are diary or journal aren't they?

Annabel: Yeah. Of course, because in The Ark all the communiques are digital. But one of the characters has a blog, which is kind of like a diary.

Tracy: Absolutely.

Annabel: Yeah. He talks about what is happening in the world outside, during the post-peak-oil chaos. And he talks about his life in the bunker. And so that very much functions like a diary, but it's one that other people could comment on.

Tracy: Yes, yes.

Annabel: And then his mother, Ava, she writes long emails to her sister, which also very much function like a diary. She's inside the bunker. Her sister’s on the world outside. They are writing to each other, each sharing what their daily lives are like. And there's a lot of interiority, like you get in a diary. So even though they're digital formats, they do share a lot in common with, like, a handwritten diary.

Tracy: Love it. Love it. I'm just looking at the time, so I think we might think about winding things up.

Annabel: Oh, yeah. So, like, I could chat all day about these topics, actually. But, yeah.

Tracy: I know that's the thing. I am going to finish up in the way that we almost always finish up these Bad Diaries Podcast chats, with our Bad Diaries Podcast questionnaire, which we call Six of the Best.

Annabel: Oh, great. Oh, I love it.

Tracy: Number one, tell us your best food or your best film.

Annabel: So hard, I think, I couldn't say it's my best film, but it's definitely really, really up there for me, is Blade Runner. I think it's a film that really defined or helped me to form my love of science fiction. And I've watched it probably more than any other film except for The Sound of Music when I was a kid. So, yeah, I think Blade Runner would be up there for sure.

Tracy: Excellent. Now I'm – without doing the math in my head – did you see it when it first came out? No.

Annabel: No, no.

Tracy: No, you were too young.

Annabel: I was too young. I would have first seen it probably in my early 20s. And then I just kept watching it again and again. And then I adored the Denis Villeneuve sequel. I thought it was wonderful. Which is rare.

Tracy: Sidebar: next time you and I do karaoke together – which we've only done once before – maybe we'll have to do, like, a Sound of Music feature.

Annabel: Oh my gosh. I am so here for that. Oh my god. Absolutely. I mean, I wonder if they would even have those songs at karaoke, but …

Tracy: Well, we'll just bring them ourselves. We'll just sing.

Annabel: Yeah. We didn't even get to talk about the karaoke night after the Bad Diaries Salon in Perth. You, me and Jenny went out for karaoke, didn't we?

Tracy: We did, we did.

Annabel: That was absolutely hilarious.

Tracy: And we were all exhausted.

Annabel: And we were sort of slumped on the couches with the microphones in our hands. I remember trying to sing that Justin Timberlake song, ‘I'm bringing sexy back’. Do you remember that?

Tracy: I do.

Annabel: Oh my god, yeah. I love The Sound of Music. What a joy.

Tracy: Same, same. Okay. Number two. Number two of three. Your best rule or your best room?

Annabel: My best rule. That is easy. Leave it better than you found it.

Tracy: Nice.

Annabel: Yeah, I use it, actually, to stay on top of my house getting crazy. So every time I walk into a room, I have to leave it better than I found it. So that might be just pick up like one sock off the floor or a cup or whatever. It makes it so manageable, to have that rule, is like, I just have to do one thing that leaves it better than I found it. But it's also just a great rule for life. Like if you have an interaction with someone, leave them better than you found them. Like I find it just it applies to everything, I love it.

Tracy: This is my new best rule. Thank you Annabel.

Annabel: It’s from the Cub Scouts, I believe: leave the campground better than you found it.

Tracy: Right. Okay. Last question. Your best shoe or your best snog?

Annabel: Oh, I love these categories. Oh my gosh. Oh. I think I'm going to have to go with my best shoe. So, at one point in my life, I had a burnt orange patent leather Prada Mary Jane. Oh, and it was the most eye catching, stunning, gorgeous shoe. I would walk down the street and people would stop me to comment on my shoes. And you could put them with any outfit and you immediately felt like a million dollars. They were just the greatest shoe of all time.

Tracy: Well. What happened? What happened to the shoes?

Annabel: Well, because patent leather, as soon as it gets little chips in it, it just starts to look really bad. So, yeah, they had a lifespan. They were wonderful. And then they were not. Not anymore.

Tracy: Well, they were wonderful. And then they were not anymore.

Annabel: That describes a lot of things …

Tracy: Yeah, I know.

Annabel: Like sometimes, you know, marriage …

Tracy: … and that's a whole nother podcast episode! Well, Annabel Smith, you have been, as always, an absolute bloody delight to talk to. Thanks for being on the pod.

Annabel: Thank you. I really enjoyed it, Tracy. Thank you very much.

Tracy: You've been listening to Bad Diaries Podcast. We'd love you to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any of our episodes. And you can rate and review us wherever you find your podcasts. Head to our website for show notes, live salon news, or to get in touch. You can find us on Instagram or Facebook at Bad Diaries Salon.