The purpose of this project is to make a limited edition special collectors edition of the novel The Antipode Room- Australian Fugue 1, which will be published on December 1, 2013. The aim is to make a limited edition eBook, and signed print book to commemorate the launch. This will also be the first book publication of its kind in Australia, hence the occasion for a commemorative edition.

The book began life in an MA and PhD in creative writing and literature and has since evolved into its own form. This is the first author-publisher new literary publication, to use eBook and printed book format in Australia, which aims to show other authors that this is a viable way of reaching new audiences and readers.

Synopsis:

Interweaving loss of self-awareness coupled with a strange excursion or journey, The Antipode Room, is a fugue narrative, telling of Ruby’s flight to Australia and her past lost life, it voices the main characters’ inner thoughts of: Ruby, Hugo, Ray and Margarita. She ends up on a murder charge in an Australian jail.

Innocents are often condemned, scapegoated, for crimes they did not commit, but is this the case with Ruby? Imprisoned in Australian jail she writes to remember what happened on that "fateful fatal afternoon" when her best friend violinist, Margy, was murdered. The Antipode Room is based in London, Sydney, Newcastle, forest in northern New South Wales, the underground opal town Cooper Peedy and the desert. The main character "Countess Ruby Rivers" emerged in London from an amnesiac fugue, forgetting her past, she reinvents her self-identity and her past. Her life is transformed when she meets the infamous conservative phenomenologist and professor, Hugo, who gives her Ruby Love, a contemporary art gallery in inner London. The Antipode Room is a point of departure, the space of the art gallery, it tells the story of their one-way trip to Australia on a mission to collect Australian artists for Ruby Love.

A chance meeting in a Sydney art galley, at the opening of the NEW REPUBLIC exhibition brings Ruby into dangerously close proximity to the leader of art-activists, Art Criminals, who had a mysteriously profound influence in another life; she has not been able to forget his words, and her lost self rushes back. Forgetting Hugo, she disappears with Ray.

The Antipode Room is 75,000 words, a medium length novel of approx. 240 pages to be published as an eBook, and printed book, with photographs.


Ruth Skilbeck, 2013

Australia's entry into new literary author-publishing.

In the new era of digital publishing, women are again able to work on equal terms more or less, in the new literary movement of independent author-publishing, as self-based authors and publishers or publishing the works of others.

For these reasons I have chosen to use this innovative mode to publish my five-novel series Australian Fugue with novels set around the world in Australia, Northern Ireland (in the civil war), and London,

“Like wandering into another country, introspective self-based writing that is derived from traumatic experience in the world involving a sense of alienation is a form of metaphorical inner journey that provides a release, albeit painful, which the writer cannot find anywhere else, or in any other way, in the culture in which she lives and writes.” (The Antipode Room)

Background context:

As founding director of Arts Features, a small arts business based in Sydney, Ruth interviewed and wrote for leading periodicals on some of the world’s most prominent international contemporary artists who were at times reviewed as “controversial”: Tracey Emin (UK), Tracey Moffat (Australia), Antony Gormley (UK), Charlie Co (Phillipines), Fiona Foley (Australia), Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie (US), David Adjaye (UK) poet, Christopher Barnett (Aust/France); Rosie Scott (Australia) amongst authors deeply concerned with human rights, and exile. At the same time as running her arts business, Ruth was taking an MA and PhD in creative writing and writing novels set in the art world, on artists and what drives them. In her first novel The Antipode Room, the first book in her series Australian Fugue, she presents a very different perspective on contemporary Australian artists to the view more usually portrayed in international curated exhibitions of Australian art (such as the current “Australia” exhibition, in London). She writes from the perspective of “Ruby Love” a young gallery director in London, who has left Australia in a state of fugue. Ruby marries Hugo, a masochist, member of the British aristocracy, conservative philosopher, with a taste for the bizarre. The novel traces their doomed one-way trip to Australia from their home and gallery in inner London to collect Australian artists. In Sydney Ruby encounters by chance the reason why she left Australia, Ray Furness, from the days of the Adelaide neo-Dada group Art Criminals. Yet Ruby remains haunted by the image of the beautiful young Margarita, playing Bach’s unfinished fugue- a music she is unable to forget. This is a novel that can be read in many ways. It contains scenes some may find shocking, so please don’t read or purchase this book if you may be offended. Yet none of these scenes are gratuitous, and are only in the book as they offer an authentic truth to the narrative, which is wholly fictional, but has the truth of art- a truth of the inner world, and morality tales, such as the Canterbury Tales, James Joyce’s Ulysses, some contemporary literary writings by women, poetry by holocaust poet Paul Celan, and Sylvia Plath, and fugal authors.

Writing style:

The literary art and fugal modality of the Antipode room, spoken and ‘sung’ in multiple voices, puts into practice fugal dissociation in poetic form. This dissociation is evident in the split between the controlled formalism of musicalization contrasted with dark unconscious shadows of trauma. This creates a wrenching affect and effect in psycho-linguistic structure, a compression of emotion that at times may be too painful or difficult to read empathetically. The narrative in parts aims to almost voice the unspeakable, in a fugal musicalized ellipsis, a pattern of gaps and omission, a haunting elegiac grace- played by the young woman violinist obsessed with finding an ending to Bach’s last unfinished fugue.

Young woman alone

Playing violin

Falling Dusk

Darkening Room

She half sits up and leans over me. The top of her Japanese robe falls open. Her breasts are pale lilies floating on a dark pond.

She leans down and kisses my mouth. “I’ve got Bach’s Art of Fugue,” she says. “I can put that on. I often listen to it as I’m going to sleep... It’s my bedtime music.” She leans and touches the player beside the bed.

The first slow haunting bars of the fugue, the searing profound beauty of a solo violin shatters the still warm air… (The Antipode Room)

Fugal modality:

The narrative is a poetic-literary example of what Ruth has termed ‘fugal modality’ a mode of art that she later theorized in her PhD on The Writer’s Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity (coming soon in eBook and printed book). As Ruth is an arts writer, and the main story begins in the Antipode Room, a gallery space, she refers to several contemporary artists in reality that she knows, as well as to fictional artists, in a roman-a-clef style. Included in the narrative as well as writings in different styles, are photographic images Ruth has taken of actual art works by artists and referenced by name or by their own nom de plume. The cover image is a new photographic work by Ruth, Blue Fugue (2013).

The cover image is a new photographic work:

Blue Fugue, digital photographic montage, Ruth Skilbeck (2013)



E-Book and printed book.

Sponsors and Grant

The funds will be used to produce the book as eBook and printed book. This is a publication of Postmistress Press, set up in October 2013, the first author-publisher house in Australia, all funds raised from book sales will go to production costs of editing, formatting, interior and cover design, software and distribution.
Postmistress Press will publish further books if this proves sustainable.

This project will provide a limited edition collectors edition of The Antipode Room, in eBook and printed book, only available to those who pre-order the first book in the Australian Fugue series.