Episode 104: Reader conversation about Sister Heart

This week, Fable and the Verbivore are thrilled to share our August book club episode!

This is our second episode where we invited a reader to join in our conversation. This month we asked the Verbivore’s sister Anne Stender to pick a book that meant something to her for us all to read and discuss together. Anne chose Australian author Sally Morgan’s novel in verse Sister Heart.

Sister Heart is a fictional story based on real events, written in the close perspective of a young Indigenous girl as she’s taken by the Australian government from her family who live in the outback and is sent to live at a state school far away in Southern Australia. In the days that follow her name, language, and hair is stripped from her. But, in the course of the story, a series of themes unfold within the heart-breaking reality – understanding that your spirit and identity can’t be taken from you and finding a way to hold on to your voice and to hope.

In this episode, we talk about the how the author uses straightforward, simple and yet powerful language. The verse form is boiled down and concise, but the narrative covers a lot of emotional ground and includes breath-taking visual imagery. It absolutely feels as if each word in the story pulls it’s weight.

We also discuss how the author takes care to write about trauma in an authentic and truthful way - showing how some healing must occur and trust established before new friendships can be made and someone can feel safe enough to be vulnerable and share parts of themselves. She also focuses on the power and importance of remembering and passing down the stories that are ours. And lastly, how healing getting back to the Earth, nature, and country can be.

We hope you enjoyed this episode, we sure enjoyed having this conversation! We feel this book was an important, poignant, and hopeful read - as well as an interesting study of what a novel in Verse can do. We’d highly recommend that you check it out.

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The quote that Anne mentioned came from a Freemantle Gazette article featuring Sally Morgan called “Writing it from the heart.” The link is https://www.perthnow.com.au/community-news/fremantle-gazette/writing-it-from-the-heart-c-920079. Here is that quote:

  • “It wasn't a story I planned to write, I dreamed the first page of the book and when I woke I knew I had to write it because the story had been given to me." - Sally Morgan

The Verbivore talks about reading the first page of the Sister Heart on Google Books. This link to that first page is https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sister_Heart/2mRmCQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA11&printsec=frontcover . Here is the opening section as it appears there:

  • Here I am

    curled in the corner

    of a cold stone room

    with no one to hug

    but me

The Verbivore and Anne discuss some of the history associated with this book. If you’re interested in learning more, here are a few places to start:

The Verbivore references the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, saying that it’s form opened up for her what poetry could be. The link to this poem is https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow. Here is the text:

  • so much depends

    upon

    -

    a red wheel

    barrow
    -

    glazed with rain

    water
    -

    beside the white

    chickens

Anne talks about the healing nature of country from an Australian Indigenous perspective. Here is some information of that:

Books Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Conversations with a read, book clubBethany Stedman