Leave something of yourself behind: Olga Lorenzo’s last interview
With Olga’s passing, we have lost a tremendous reader, writer and teacher,
but her legacy thrives in the pages of many stories.
I’ve always loved literature; I read very widely as a child. I escaped into literature. My mother had hardly gone to school, but she would take me to the library and introduce me to the greats. She would say, ‘You have to read Steinbeck. You have to read Balzac.’ She understood the greats in English and in French, when she was a Spanish speaker. Brilliant woman.
So, I had grown up loving literature, and then the opportunity to recognise talent, encourage it and mentor it came up, which was very, very exciting.
I stopped working as a journalist when I had my children, and when I tried to get back into the field, I couldn’t. I worked as a subeditor for a long time, including at The Age. In 1996, I published my first novel (The Rooms in My Mother’s House, Penguin 1996) and asked my colleague, Jennifer Byrne, who was editing at MacMillan at the time, where I should go if I wanted to move into publishing books—novels—and editing them. She said there was only one place to do it: Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT.
On the strength of that I did an Advanced Novel subject and one editing class with Kirsty Elliott. Penny Johnson was also a student at the time. We were part of a small group that edited Australian Short Stories with Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood.
Before that I had started teaching everywhere—at the CAE, at the Victorian College of Arts, at Melbourne University, at Holmesglen TAFE, at Kangan-Batman TAFE. I was more than full-time!
I taught right around a lot of different subjects across both fiction and nonfiction—journalism, research, writing childhood, novel. It was really, really hard! I had three young children and a lot of prep to do for each class.
And I realised that I loved teaching, and I got really good feedback. This was a big revelation to me. But I had loved journalism, so I thought, ‘This is something I’m gonna do just for a while.’ But then I realised, no, actually, teaching is what I want to do, so I actually fell into my life’s purpose.
“I wanted to teach novel. It was what I loved. What I have loved all my life. Literature, particularly fiction, and particularly novels.”
Of all those programs where I was teaching, including the Victorian College of Arts and Melbourne University, the best program was at RMIT. The students were brilliant, the program was brilliant. The office space was crap! There were a lot of things that weren’t ideal, but on the whole, it was by far the best place. So, I ended up quitting all the other ones as my contracts finished, and just staying at RMIT.
“I could always see talent. When you run into it, you just know it. ”
Talented writers have a gift for the musicality of language, for the cadences of language, and how that communicates emotion. It’s almost like you have to have a writer’s ear for that. And you can see it straightaway when somebody has that. You can see when they have a great imagination, and they can conjure up a reality. You can see when they’re astute about psychology. I just loved seeing all of those things in people. Their developing into great storytellers.
One of the things I really prided myself on as a teacher, because I had read so widely, and enjoyed stories at such different levels, was that I was never a literary snob. It’s really important for people to write at any level. If it’s publishable, that’s all that matters.
We had a lot of refugees from Melbourne University, some of whom had been told that they couldn’t write. That they ‘just couldn’t write’. This had stopped them from writing for many years. I mean, I got my masters and my PhD at Melbourne University, and I finished my undergraduate degree there, so I appreciate the institution. But they did teach writing very differently to how we taught writing at RMIT. It wasn’t just Melbourne University, either. We had plenty of refugees from other writing courses.
One of the things I discovered very early on was that sometimes you could work on a project for a long time, but it wasn’t the right project for you. The evidence was in the fact that it wasn’t coming together. I tried very hard to not make a judgement about a person’s ability, even to myself, and I saw it pay off lots of times, where somebody would struggle with something for years, and then try something else. Right there, they found their voice. They just took off!
Then sometimes I’d mourn the embarrassment of riches who didn’t seem to have the drive to carry forth and end up being published. Jane Fraser springs to mind. She was a great writer and did amazing presentations. I learnt a lot from her. I remember saying to her, ‘You gotta get this stuff published.’ But she didn’t. To her mind it didn’t pay enough, it was just too difficult and she couldn’t see herself doing it.
“I must say, I was always looking to challenge my students. That’s the sort of person I am. ”
I’m first and foremost a mum, I just adore my kids, and I’ve got great maternal drive, with a great nurturing instinct. But my style of nurturing has never been enabling, it’s always been challenging you to do your best. So that’s what I was trying to do. And sometimes that could be very hard for people. I think I might have discouraged some that I definitely didn’t want to discourage. And I hated that.
It’s tricky when you’ve got anywhere from ten to thirty different personalities in your class, and you don’t know them. You’re trying to work that out, and work out what’s going to be best for each person, as well as the group.
You’re also dealing with various levels of ability to take feedback on board. I wanted people to believe me when I said, ‘This is how I’d like you to take feedback: I’d like you to see it as me trying to help you. I want you to remove it from your ability to write. This is not any pronouncement on your ability to write. It’s about where this project is and how you might improve it…’
Early in my career, I did a whole PhD on shame and how easy it is to become discouraged; to take something and decide that it’s about you, not the project. I did try to establish a connection with as many people as I could. I tried to work out: where are you coming from? What are you trying to do? And how can I help you? People said to me sometimes, ‘Olga, when you look at a person, you really look at them, and you talk to them.’ But I didn’t always get it right.
“I remember I had a very accomplished media person burst into tears one day in class saying, ‘This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done’ before she stomped out of the room. And I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, it is!’”
That project got published, though, so maybe it wasn’t all bad…
RMIT’s PWE had so many high achievers. As early as 1999, I took a class with a super cohort that included Martine Murray, who went on to become a great children’s writer, and Andrew Trounsen, who continued his illustrious journalism career, and Carrie Tiffany, who we know as one of our stellar girls, and Paola Bilbrough, who has continued writing and teaching, and has remained a friend of mine. That was an amazing class. Then in the mid-2000s I had a class with Toni Jordan and Melissa Cranenburgh and Chris Womersley. (This was the class with Jane Fraser in it.) Then there was Peggy Frew and Lucy Treloar and Clare Strahan and Kate Richards. And Ilka Tampke and Lisa Bigelow and Jennifer Hansen. Fran Cusworth. Dani Binks writes and is now an agent. (She’s my daughter Ellen Spooner’s agent.) And later Kate Mildenhall and Sarah Vincent.
“So many great talents. ”
I always took the word ‘professional’ in Professional Writing and Editing very seriously. The PWE program at RMIT was about getting people published: out there to make a career, if they could; to make a living, if they possibly can. As a student of the course for a very short time, I learnt from the greats, like Judy Duffy and Laurie Clancy. And I learnt from my students, too. I never stopped learning.
Halfway through my twenty-one years of teaching, I discovered the gurus of structure, who came from filmmaking, like Robert McKee and Michael Hauge. That was very exciting and changed the way I taught, especially those students who were lost.
I remember one student in the very early years coming in with 200,000 words. And you think, ‘Oh, yeah, big, fat novel!’ And then you realise there’s no structure to it, no organisation. She was lost. And to be lost in 200,000 words is very severely lost… What did Dante say about it? ‘…within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’
But with insight into structure from the screenwriters I could say, ‘Look, these sorts of structures don’t work for everybody, but when you’re in trouble, this might help.’ You have to write instinctively, you have to let that creativity happen in the first instance, but if it’s not working, you can learn something about form and structure. It can free you up.
“I loved teaching so much. I had always wanted to keep teaching into my 70s. I was not ready to stop when I was forced to by my health. ”
I try not to look back. I try to live in the moment all the time and control the things I can, such as caring for myself day to day. Preparing for this interview has been quite hard on me, because I had to dig out my notes and old photos, and reflect, but I did it because I love the program so much. And although it was bittersweet, I did so enjoy looking at photo albums of bushwalks with my young children and some of my students.
I taught my last class in mid-2018, after I was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer on 7th July 2017 and went straight into chemo. I stopped teaching for the rest of that year, then went back and taught for the first semester of 2018. At the time, I was going through a very gruelling breakup so was under a lot of stress when I was told that the cancer had come back and they gave me a prognosis of only a few months.
“My only challenge in life right now is to try to survive. I’m not trying to challenge myself in any other way. ”
But the other day my son-in-law, who is a very talented musician and artist, picked up my first novel and started reading it. He said, ‘Oh, Olga, I love it so much! It’s riveting. That’s something special you do that no one else does!’ Sometimes people say something and connect with you, and it inspires you to follow up with something that fully touches people, and leaves something of yourself behind. That’s really important to me. For the first time in a long time, I thought, ‘Maybe I could go back to writing.’
You know, I don’t give up on the idea that I might go back to teaching. But my health is just so precarious. I’ve made such great progress—that I’m still here, when I’m not supposed to be.
I’ve had teachers who have influenced me all my life. I have a great love of poetry and I remember a lot of the poetry that I learnt from my third-grade teacher. She’s actually one of my best friends, and is in contact with me, and looks after me, and has been like a rock for me during my illness. She planted a seed when I was a little Cuban refugee girl… I was just in third grade, and she saw something in me, and what she started affected my whole life.
This interview was recorded via Zoom on 18 May, 2020 towards the end of Melbourne’s first covid-19 lockdown, while gathering information for RMIT’s new Professional Writing and Editing website. Thanks to Penny Johnson and Astrid Edwards for the honour and opportunity.