Creative Writing - Books and CDs

Dodging the Bull

‘This is rugged, strong writing with tonnes of charcter. It’s for people who think life hurts, rewards, bends, breaks and redeems.’ – Martin Flanagan, senior writer, The Age

from the cover blurb - Paul Mitchell throws a spanner into daily lives and watches his characters pick up the pieces. From the Bali bombings to the difficulties of unorthodox sexuality in a closed-minded community, Mitchell’s stories are socially aware and compassionate, but also confronting and progressive.

Shifting with ease between vernacular and lyricism, Dodging the Bull chronicles the lives of honest Australians confronted by the rift between ignorance and compassion that threatens to divide today’s multi-layered society.

Dodging the Bull functions as a cultural balm – raising awareness of peoples’ differences, and expressing that we can and should strive to resolve them, rather than dwelling on the problems that arise because of them.

from the Reader’s Report - As the narrators explore an inner world often neglected or denied in both our culture, and our literature, these characters transcend the stereotype of the out-stationed Aussie battler, by reflecting something in each of us. Combined, they perform an amazing collection of stories that yearns to bridge the divide between perceived social and cultural barriers.

Dodging the Bull has received some recent reviews :

The Age had this to say – view PDF.

The Sydney Morning Herald said this:

In this collection of stories, Paul Mitchell is working in the territory inhabited by artists as diverse as Tim Winton, Raymond Carver and Bruce Springsteen, a bunch of very heavy hitters and not people you'd want to be compared with. As with them, Mitchell is interested in the powerless, the inarticulate and the struggling - people who don't really understand how their lives could have turned out this way and don't quite know how to talk about it.

It is fiendishly difficult to write in an eloquent and moving way using narrators whose problems include an inability to express themselves and it's a problem that Mitchell hasn't quite solved yet. The more successful stories here are those told by relatively articulate narrators, such as That Bali Smile. Having his narrators grunt, swear and drop their Gs is mostly a bit self-defeating.

But there's one story, the last and best, in which he makes this technique work; TJF, the tale of a young policeman at the end of his tether, is an indication of what Mitchell might be able to achieve in his future work.

The Independent Weekly reviewer said this:

Paul Mitchell has produced a confronting collection of short stories showing us the plight of Australia's broken, beaten and damned. His tales tackle the hard topics, veering from small town to big city, from the ordinary to the extraordinarily horrifying. Death and grief are everywhere. There is the infidelity prevented by the Sari Club bombing. The mechanic who realises his frustration with an Asian couple's poor English has sent them to their deaths. The lonely suicide of a small-town service station attendant. The children fleeing into the dark from the standover men who will probably kill their parents. The battered family of a traumatised war veteran and the dying man whose mother tries to comfort him the only way she knows.

Some of the stories in Dodging the Bull, such as the story of the man who sees a little girl lost in the park and decides to take her home, make for extremely uncomfortable reading. But this is obviously what Mitchell intended. He has an unflinching eye and a sparse writing style that refuses to spare the reader's sensibilities. He has already published two collections of poetry, but keep an eye out for more of his fiction. With the grassroots tang of Oz lit hero Tim Winton, he will be one to watch in the future. Wakefield Press $22.95 -- Georgia Gowing

All lovely words. You can buy a copy at Wakefield Press’s website or ask for it in your local bookshop.

Awake Despite the Hour

My new poetry collection, Awake Despite the Hour (Five Islands Press, 2007), is now in the shops. If it isn’t in your local one, ask them to order it in. Here’s what the back cover blurb says:

“Borrowing from everyday speech while remaining erudite, Paul Mitchell’s poetry challenges those who would use language to exclude or dominate. He is awake to our possibilities for connection and refuses easy targets or solutions.

This is poetry as spiritual longing, where mystery is celebrated and our common humanity esteemed. In an age when words are cheap, Mitchell asks us to remain vigilant and to count the cost of evading uncomfortable truths.”

Novelist, poet and speechwriter, Joel Deane, said this about the book at the launch:

“. . . Disturbed and disturbing . . . but always striving to be authentic – striving to make poetry out of the inconsistent lives we are living and the duplicitous language we are speaking; and succeeding in making the authentic sounds that only Paul Mitchell can make. Paul has, as William Carlos Williams once put it, built poems that are small and large machines made of words; and when those machines start operating, start banging words together, they propel us towards something that is beyond words . . .”

My Book: minorphysics

My poetry book, minorphysics, was released by Interactive Publications in late 2003. It won the publisher's national best unpublished poetry manuscript award for that year. You can buy it by clicking here (look down the left column to locate minorphysics on my publisher's order form).

Plenty of people have had good things to say about minorphysics:

"Like [Bruce] Dawe, Mitchell finds beauty in the most seemingly mundane subjects." - Claire Stewart, in Cordite Poetry Review

"This is the most accessible collection of poetry to be published in Australia in many years." - David Reiter, publisher IP (read more)

"By turns wry and moving, minorphysics is the work of an original." - Kevin Hart

"His poetry wears both halo and beanie. This is a must read." - alicia sometimes

"Raw, honest, confronting and challenging." - Paul Grover, editor Studio

"If poems were nails I would want Paul Mitchell to build my house." - Kevin Brophy

"Some of his writing reminds me of Dorothy Porter . . . They both have a charged Australian voice . . ." - Maurice McNamara in Deadline

My CD: JUMBUKTU

Jumbuktu is the name Bill Buttler (multi-instrumental guru) and I use when we team up to create spoken word/music fusions. "As if Nothing is Happening. And it is" is our first CD and contains many tracks that have appeared on Going Down Swinging CDs for the past five years. Check out some tracks here:

1. "Get the Word"
2. "Party Talk" 

Our CD received a great review in POAM, the Melbourne Poets' Union newsletter:

"At last, a poetry CD that you can listen to as you would a music CD . . . Mitchell uses his formidable reading skills - he knows when and how to hang a pause out there, so that the listener is thirsting for what comes next . . . Buttler's contribution to this album is immense . . . [He] employs music styles at times so familiar to us . . . they act as another image in the poem . . .The everyday world of these poems poses insurmountable problems, asks unanswerable questions. This is a CD for the times." - Garth Madsen