Francesca will be a guest at the following upcoming festivals:

Emerging Writers Festival, Melbourne: May 24 – June 3 2012

Town Hall Writers Conference — in the Melbourne Room

Life Stories, Sunday May 27 @ 3pm

Memoir and creative nonfiction are hot writing topics. Francesca Rendle-Short and Luke Ryan discuss how they write and re-tell their life stories in interesting ways.

To log in and download the full EWF program click here

Reality Bites Literary Festival: The truth about nonfiction, Sunshine Coast, Queensland: 26-29 July 2012

Francesca will be on the following panels:

Free speech and The Censor's Library

The Wages of Censorship: Since discovering a secret ‘censor’s library’ in the National Archive – 793 boxes of banned books – Nichole Moore has written a provocative book about what she found. Rendle-Short’s mother was a fanatical campaigner for the banning of books. The personal meets the political in this discussion of good old fashioned censorship and the religious fervour behind it. Chair: Chrys Stevenson.

The Fiction of the Self: You can’t avoid the ME in MEmoir: but how truthful can a writer really be? Sally Breen, Alice Pung and Francesca Rendle-Short discuss with Annette Hughes whether one can – or should – ever tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

And she will be giving a workshop too:

Writing the Mother: How do you begin to ‘write the mother’? What sort of courage will you need? How does the imagination fit in? In this practical workshop participants will experiment and play, find their own material with nonfiction and fiction writing exercises, and build confidence to keep going. There will be lots of writing, and some sharing of work.

To see the program click here

'Rendle-Short uses the incremental possibilities of metonymy to enhance the metaphor, thus creating a rich and layered extended metaphor. Tongues are for speaking, kissing, eating, licking, drinking, singing, spitting and praying. Tongues slither, laze, loll, fall off. Tongues tell stories, spit out truths; they lie and sin. Tongues connect human beings with their own bodies, other human beings, souls, pets, animals they eat, plants and objects. When it comes to tongues, human beings dread the knife, which makes them aware that other body parts of their bodies can be cut off. As speaking beings, they lash at others with their tongues, speak in tongues and talk about tongues of flames.

'In many ways, tongues are cut in bite-size bits in this book. However, in the end all the bits do fit. Here is no Babel. Here is a fantastical tongue-atorium.'

Read more

Read Francesca's review of this new and quite startling memoir The House of Fiction by Susan Swingler under the heading The secrets of Leonard and Elizabeth Jolley published in Australian Book Review, May 2012.

Here is a blog by Spinifex Press intern Veronica Sullivan on the debate over Premier Campbell Newman's decision to axe the Queensland Premiers Literary Awards: Writers refuse to bite their tongues.

Queensland Literary Awards to go ahead. Read more here.

The blog Me, You, and Books writes:

'A fascinating, innovative memoir/novel about an Australian woman/girl whose mother burns books and convinces her that reading and writing can change reality.

'Remarkably, for such a complexly structured story, Bite your Tongue, is a very accessible book, partly because Rendle-Short is such an impressive writer. Her prose is sharp and clear and extremely detailed.' Read more

Francesca's paper presented at the Byron Bay 'Ethical Imaginations' conference is now up online.

'Close up, the writing dissolves. Close up, this discontinous narrative of fragments and half-stories becomes distorted — don’t matter to matter hits — inviting the audience/reader to interject, intercede, as she/he hovers like I did over the text in horizontal and vertical readings, and non-readings — glabrous = smooth / with love love.' Read more.

The novel Bite Your Tongue by Francesca Rendle-Short was published by Spinifex Press in September 2011. It is a work of the imagination that draws on found documents in the archive and on the author's memory of that time.

From the backcover blurb:

'Mrs Angel Rendle-Short said that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel.' (Courier Mail, 1975)

In Francesca Rendle-Short’s family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother’s moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn.

Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?

Bite Your Tongue is the story of the deep bond that exists between a daughter and her mother, no matter how difficult that mother might be. It is also a story of acceptance.'

'What a potent mix—a daughter torn in her loyalties to her overbearing parent, and a mother hell-bent on getting to heaven by banning ungodly school texts. Rendle-Short traverses the remembered minefield with candour, grief and something like wonder.' -- Cate Kennedy, author of The World Beneath

'A mother—daughter tale unlike any other: this is a feisty, idiosyncratic and original book, full of weird energies and wonderful affections.' -- Gail Jones, author of Five Bells