Women's History Month: Amanda Pillar

Like many women who’ve contributed to Women’s History Month, I’m a scholar and a writer. I’ve been at the University of Melbourne for 9 years, and I like to say it isn’t because I’m a slow learner. I normally don’t say why I’ve been there so long, but it is relevant here.

I’ve spent most of the past decade at uni working towards a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science, where I majored in archaeology, English and physics. While there, I also did an Honours Degree in archaeology and I’m currently in the final year of my Masters in Archaeology. After this, I’ll do my PhD.

So why all the study? Well, I want to be the female version of Indiana Jones, minus the grave robbing. And it’s not an uncommon thing; while most of my archaeology friends at university are male, women are really beginning to move up through the field. Also, conversely, most of the friends I made during my physics degree were women; and the head of the department I deal with most is also female.

Both of my supervisors are women, one of whom may or may not have been told back in the day that she should give up her career to look after her husband’s interests (he is also an archaeologist). Suffice to say, she didn’t. And while I don’t strongly adhere to feminist archaeological principles, I do believe it is necessary that a female perspective is treated with due importance. Although, I would more strongly advocate that we need to study a culture not just from a male’s or female’s stance, but from a person’s stance.

All this study has been also useful in my editing career. KV Taylor and I are currently working with Kaaron Warren, Cat Sparks and Deborah Biancotti on a collection called Ishtar, which surprisingly, is about the Mesopotamian goddess, Ishtar.

And really, for Women’s History Month, what better deity is there to discuss?

Ishtar (or Inanna) was the love goddess who spanned the Mediterranean in various guises and forms. She was linked to, or associated with, the Canaanite Asherah, Phoenician Astarte and with them, Egyptian Hathor, Greek Aphrodite, Roman Venus and many others.

She was the ultimate; sex, war and love.

In mythology, even the creator god was careful about irritating her. Ishtar faced the Underworld -- like some other male gods -- and came back alive. She was easily equal to her male compatriots and often times, their superior.

So while women are climbing through the archaeology ranks, female authors are also providing new aspects on traditional histories or myths using strong women (be they real or mythical), as their inspiration.




Amanda Pillar is a writer and an award-winning editor. Currently, she is the Editor-in-Chief for Morrigan Books, an independent dark fiction press. Amanda is the mother of two Burmese cats and lives in Victoria, Australia. In her free time, she plans on becoming the next Indiana Jones.

Matt Forbeck - Vegas Knights

Matt Forbeck's first novel with Angry Robot, Amortals, was extremely tight. Not a word wasted. Not an idea that didn't slot in to the whole. I wasn't sure if I should look forward to Vegas Knights or be worried. When a novel works so very neatly, I want to see something different in the next one, because otherwise a writer is predictable as someone who writes closely-crafted plots where everything counts and they become predictable: I can see where each piece will fit in. I was hoping, in short, for something different.

Vegas Knights opens with a couple of students planning (one reluctantly) to win money in a casino with a little magic help. One is immoral and wealthy and the other ethical and poor. It's a good beginning. The publicity describes it as "Ocean's Eleven meets Harry Potter" and that's a good description. ("good" is my word of the day - I intend to overuse it, but only in a good way)

This is the closest Angry Robot is likely to get to producing a Young Adult novel. It's the older end of YA, but it's readable by a wide range of age groups. A bit boys' own, perhaps, with the main characters suffering the stupidity that descends on some when they reach their late teens and with casinos and thugs in the mix. Two kids who get themselves into far too much hot water.

The tone changes some way in. I should start getting used to this. There's been a whole slew of novels recently that have started off as one kind of novel and ended up as another. The changed tone part of the novel still got the same characters and a good pacing, and the underlying structure is still consistent. Some of the characters are a bit sketchily drawn, however and colour rather than depth is the order of the day. Still, it's tightly written. Not as tight as Amortals, but everything fits in place and makes sense.

It's not a book that's easy to put down. Also, it's a very fast read. Perfect for a northern hemisphere summer, in fact. I should have saved it for then…


PS This is my last Angry Robot book for a bit. I've run out!

(no subject)

I'm almost caught up with my reviewing. This is almost unheard of in teaching period in March. Last year I was so sick that 2 hours teaching on Wednesday morning ruined me for the rest of the week. This year I'm teaching 6 hours, plus doing other work (as it eventuates), plus reviewing, plus doing my doctorate. It's amazing the difference a little health makes.

I'm not well yet, although I apparently look significantly better (and I'm obviously doing more). I'm still spending much time resting and wondering when all these improvements mean that I start to actually feel better. I never have enough time or energy to do everything I need to do and weeks like this, where I actually seem to make progress, are a delight.

My amazement this week is that I'm not as far behind as I could have been, despite taking time off for family matters. This is partly due to some help from friends. Kaaron sorted out an incipent food problem through taking me shopping (carrying much food is stil not something I can do, and with everything last week and the week before, I kept put off shopping because it was just too difficult) and Jenny sorted out some of my biggest problems with the UK/France trip.

I still have giant lists of windmills to tilt at, but fewer than I expected. Fewer is good.

Women's History Month: Tamara Mazzei

This is my second attempt at writing a WHM guest-post for Gillian’s blog because the first post I wrote was so inadequate, I had to ask her to delete it and let me do another one. After sending that first, pitiful, guest post to Gillian, I asked myself why I had done such an idiotic thing. It was barely two paragraphs long, it contained no sense of my love of history, particularly women’s history, nor did it mention any of my own participation in creating the website for Australia’s first few Women’s History Months.

The answer that I came up with as to why I was reluctant to do a decent post for Gillian is that for some reason I am reticent about anything of my own that resembles an accomplishment. In other words, if I had started out to write about someone else (which I should have done), it would have all right, but I somehow got the idea to write about ME, and then I ran into a brick wall. Hah! And what century did you say this was?

So. I have decided to go out on a limb and write about a few of my own experiences because I am a woman and in some sense, I have a history too. And if I have a “passion” (as Gillian refers to it), it is not easily defined beyond making the best of my circumstances whatever they happen to be. And this, I suppose, is one thing that connects me to so many of the women who have come before me. Women in earlier generations did not have as much autonomy as we do today, and yet, many of them were still able to find ways to "bloom where they were planted" – a piece of advice I picked up from my grandmother and which I try to follow whenever I can.

My backstory is that I was born in Arkansas in the American South, and I lived there until I was eleven years old, upon which my father was transferred to the Chicago area. Except for visits to Arkansas and summers with my grandparents in Florida, I lived in the Chicago suburbs until I married in my early twenties. During all that time, I was relatively oblivious both to history in general and to my own family history. I remained oblivious to my family history as my husband and I moved from state to state for his career, but somewhere around the age of thirty, I developed an interest in medieval history. And really, phrasing it like that, “developed an interest” doesn’t come close to my experience. What happened was that I fell truly, madly, deeply in love with medieval history. It was all-consuming.

In the meantime, I was writing. Instruction manuals, online help for software, checklists, marketing brochures, etc. I was continually playing with fiction as well, but there was usually a high demand for business writing, so that’s where I kept my primary focus. I had, in the back of my mind, the idea of starting my own publishing company someday. A company that would allow me to use the skills I had developed over the years to publish the sort of fiction I enjoyed reading. And then my husband was transferred to Louisiana.

I was not prepared for Louisiana. I had lived in Chicago, in Seattle, in Houston – all major cities. Moving to a small town in the Deep South was not in the plan. I kept my job and an apartment in Houston and commuted on weekends for almost a year before finally conceding to reality and making the move. At first it felt quite alien, but then, something in me began to change. I began to remember all the wonderful things about my childhood in Arkansas, which is also in the South. I began to make connections with my family both literally by making more visits, but also figuratively by becoming more aware of how past generations had influenced me to become the person that I was.

And then I started my company: Trivium Publishing. At the time all of this was in the works, Gillian and I were collaborating on a medieval history project that alas, was so huge I was forced to back away from it (though she did not). But in the process of doing that work, she allowed me to read some fiction she had written, and out of that came the first book we published: Illuminations.

That, dear readers, was very exciting indeed, because Gillian came to the US and we did a book tour. And it was not your average garden-variety book tour either. Oh, there were some bookstore appearances (Bookpeople in Austin, TX and Shakespeare in Little Rock), but the fun was in driving to them in a red Mustang convertible. Yes; truly, that’s what we did. We started out in Lake Charles, Louisiana, then we went to Austin, TX, and then on to Little Rock, Arkansas where we spent a few days. My grandmother made fried chicken for Gillian because she really needed to experience that slice of Americana, and then we went to Louisville, and Nashville, and then to Cincinnati. Finally, we ended up, half-dead, in New Orleans and had to call my husband to come rescue us, but what a trip!

The Lake Charles American Press did a profile on us and we were the entire front page of the business section. My husband faxed it to us while we were on the road so we could see.

All of that happened in 2003, and since then I have moved three more times: first to a small town in southern Texas, then to an island on the coast of Washington state, and finally (I hope) to San Antonio, Texas. I've also experienced some serious health problems and lost someone who was very dear to me. With all that upheaval in my life, it's been very difficult to come to terms with the changes, but I'm slowly working through them. The most interesting in all of this for me is that what seemed like a pinnacle in 2003, now merely seems like a small step on a very long path. Fortunately, the path runs through a beautiful garden, where the sun shines at least some of the time.