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Mothers Claw
Louise Davenport

dreams and memories entangle to produce an engaging fiction
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LOUISE DAVENPORT TO SPEAK AT LAUNCH OF CHOICES FROM THE HEART

Louise Davenport is one of the subjects interviewed in Choices from the heart: A collection of stories (a project of the Kew Neighbourhood Learning Centre), to be launched on Thursday 18 November, 5-6pm, at Sparechair Café, 10 Derby Street, Kew 3101 (9853 3126).  In her frank and honest account Louise Davenport, author of Mother’s Claw, speaks of her relationship with her stepmother and stepsister and her experiences of psychosis, her battle with marijuana abuse and her reaction to the publication of Mother’s Claw. She will give a short reading at the launch.

The launch will be followed by a party at her home at 7.00 PM at Unit 6/10 Clark St, Richmond 3121 (9421 3739). Pizzas and alcohol will be provided. Copies of Mother’s Claw will be available at the special price of $10.00. Stories in Mother’s Claw have appeared in the magazines Meanjin, Southerly and Westerly and in The Temperment of Generations: 50 Years of Writing in Meanjin (Melbourne University Press, 1990).

Book Description

Louise Davenports short fiction is spare in the classic modernist manner. Strong underlying emotion is controlled, oblique or symbolic. Theclaw in the title sequence is a traditional image that is strikingly re-invented through the agency of a moving statue, itself an image re-energised from the canon.

In many ways her first collection is a fractured mirror, presenting key images recurrently. Or it can be read as a mosaic autobiography, the author
s facing the childhood horror of her mothers suicide and dealing with its emotional ramifications in her adult life. Mothers Claw is both cool and healing.

ISBN 1876044160
Published 2001
111 pgs
$21.95
Mothers Claw book sample

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Contents

My Mother
s Claw
    This Story has no Denouement
    The Characters of Nineteenth Century Fiction
    My Seated Lady
Bounded by Main Roads
The Arches
The Siamese Cat
One Thousand Dollars
Christmas
Koroit Convent
Dead Dog Ditch
Guildford Lane
They Came with Icicles in their Hair
The Hollow Axis
Uncle David
John Cain's Third Term
The Other Shoulder
The Dream
My Emotion
The Red Rattler
Melbourne on a Sunday Morning
Flinders Street
The Icon
Under the Sheoaks
The Centre of a Room
Fitzroy
The Cyclone
Total Out
The Poppies
The Growth of the Shoulder
The Bare Room


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Reviews

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Like a fracturing mirror, Davenport’s short fiction presents key images recurrently. Beginning with childhood memories of the horror of her mother’s death, Davenport moves gently between stoires of her life. These stories are all coloured by the claw - the image of her mother that haunts her life.

Moving roughly along a timeline, her scattered images weave a surprisingly clear story.

To go to the heart of the truth is too much pain. I enter from an angle and light up the edges of my object with pastel relief.

Davenport’s story is ghostly and quiet, fragments of dreams and memories entangle to produce an engaging fiction.

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