Black Dust Dancing

After years of living with a manuscript that I barely discussed with anyone, it was strange watching the novel, through reviews and readers’ responses, take on a life of its own.
 
The first response I read to the novel was Deborah’s post on In A Strange Land. There is this similarly thoughtful and detailed response on Helen’s blog at Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony. Pavlov’s Cat wrote this post the day after the launch. Deborah also had this to say about The Advertiser‘s review.

Here is a transcript of a radio review by Gillian Dooley. I fell in love with this review when I read this sentence:  ”Reading Black Dust Dancing is a little like being at a large family gathering where you hardly know anyone and no-one introduces you.” You know what? That is *exactly* the book I wanted to write. I also very much liked the final paragraph which reads/says (?) “Black Dust Dancing could appear to be a fairly simple morality tale about the conflict between loyalty and making a principled stand. But it’s surprisingly deep and its economy and the lucidity of its language are stunning when you consider the complexities it contains.”

In The Big Issue, Kabita Dhara ended her review by saying: “Based on true events in a rural Australian town, this is a remarkable debut novel. Quietly self-assured, with a sharp eye for detail, Tracy Crisp explores the complex relationships between people in a town whose loyalties are being strained, as well as between families struggling with changing times.” On the Readings website, Jo Case opened her review by saying: “This intimate, deeply-felt novel centres on a small industrial town where the industry that supports the community appears to be threatening its children.” Later on, she says, that the novel’s “…pleasures lie within its crisply drawn characterisations, choice details and observations, and the gradually excavated fault lines in its relationships” and ends by saying that, “the reader is kept thinking and guessing as they piece together the way the past is feeding into the present. ‘Just because people don’t lie, doesn’t mean they tell the truth,’ says one character – and that observation is at the heart of this impressive first novel.” I like what both those reviews say about the relationships in the novel. I like it a lot, because it’s what fascinates me – our relationships, their complexities and subtleties, their depths and their shallows.

It wasn’t everyone’s bag of chips of course. Thuy On, writing in The Age was unimpressed (I’m summarizing, obvs) and in the Australian Book Review, Jay Daniel Thompson wrote that, “throughout Dancing, there is some richly evocative prose”, but that the story is “slow and uneventful”. I always knew that some people would think that, so that bit didn’t freak me out too much, but he also wrote, ”The key theme of Tracy Crisp’s novel is the way in which our surroundings can impact on our physical and mental well-being.” I don’t know whether I make myself look stupid by saying this, but my reaction to that was, and is, ‘no it’s not’.

The review from The Age knocked me around a bit at the time, I suppose because it tapped into my most basic writer’s fear – that I wasn’t a writer at all. But I was living through some difficult times and was more fragile than I’d ever been. So, you know, timing. Plus, you know, public humiliation and all that. I’ve recovered now, thanks to all of the reasons that writers must and do recover from such things. Because time is magic that way, because life goes on and worse things happen and better things too, and because reading the good things that people wrote was a little bit wonderful.