Five minutes with social worker, psychotherapist, university lecturer and author, Josie McSkimming
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Dorothy Porter was one of Australia’s most charismatic and courageous literary figures, achieving fame through her bestselling queer crime verse novel and its film adaptation, The Monkey’s Mask.
Josie McSkimming, watched the success of her big sister ‘Dod’ against the backdrop of their family’s complex dynamics. Using Porter’s personal diaries and letters, Josie creates an intimate story of sisterhood, creativity and blazing your own trail, in Gutsy Girls.
Gutsy Girls could describe you sisters, but it’s also the name of one of Dorothy’s poems… What is the resonance of this poem, but also the moniker?
The name of the book comes from the words of a song Dot (or Dod as I have always called her) wrote with Tim Finn for a rock musical they planned to stage. Eventually, the song became part of a show called The Fiery Maze, which was staged after Dod’s death. Dod often feared she was gutless and needed to have more courage, particularly in her private life. However, I always knew her as brave and fearless, protecting us from our father when he lurched into a terrifying rage.
Additionally, it was Dod who carefully and persistently helped me leave the stranglehold of the evangelical church – so I could become my own gutsy girl. It took me many years, but I was able to apologise to her before she died for being at times her preachy and pharisaic little sister.
I also see we three Porter sisters – Dod, Mary, and I – as the gutsy girls of the book who finally find our voices and courage after the challenges of our childhood.
Dorothy’s poems are interspersed throughout the narrative – was this a way of structuring the story, or did they flow in naturally while you were writing?
I always knew from the start of writing this memoir that Dod’s poems would be the heart of the narrative. I have read all her works many times (both published and unpublished) and I wanted to place the poems in the context of her life, for the reader to understand perhaps when and why she wrote various pieces. I didn’t want to explain her poetry, but by placing it in a context, I hoped that would make her work more accessible to those who love her work, and to those who are only just discovering it.
In that way it did take some work to think and plan where each poem should go – and I had many more included in my early drafts! So, there was both: planning, but also an intuitive process of just knowing which poem I wanted where, and I had my favourites.
Do you think you and Dorothy played the stereotypical role of big sister and little sister throughout your lives? Did that alter as you took on more ‘relationship guidance’ later in life, and then as part of her medical care ‘team’?
When we are young, we imagine sibling relationships (and perhaps many others as well) to remain static or fixed in various styles of relating. But what I have learned over many years is that relationships ebb and flow, along the continuum of closeness and distance, as well as having the possibility of transforming you and the other person as time passes. Despite our different life choices, we both felt like outsiders in the family: me because of my intense religiosity, and she because she was a closeted queer woman for many years.
At first, Dod was the big sister who initially found me annoying and tease-worthy, then we understood each other’s outsider status, but then she withdrew from me as I became more fully immersed in fundamentalist thinking and dogma. Once I began the long journey of leaving the church and becoming a psychotherapist, Dod and I became very close again – as she valued my insights and observations particularly into her turbulent family life and her many love affairs.
When she was diagnosed with cancer, we all took on the role of supporting and reassuring her every step of the way. None of us could ever imagine losing our big, bright, hilarious Dod. When she went into remission, I was immensely relieved to have the outrageous funny Dod back; I didn’t find it easy relating to her as an anxious sick person for those many months of treatment.
Despite living with the threat of family violence, you acknowledge the traits that both your parents endowed you with. Was this a conscious act of generosity, just a fact of life, or something to keep you connected to them despite the fraught relationships?
They were less traits, which I understand as something immutable and unchanging, but more ways of being. When you grow up with the threat of family violence, it is rarely bad all the time. And as a child, I tried to enjoy and cherish the quiet peaceful moments, and the family times of connection and kindness.
My mother was an extremely loving and generous woman, who gave herself unstintingly to our care. Our father was immensely generous with money, gave huge donations to charity, and taught us all the value of being socially engaged and politically responsible. He also couldn’t abide any form of animal cruelty.
They were both avid nature lovers and conservationists, and I credit my commitment to environmental causes, and birds in particular, to them. It is a powerful legacy to leave with your children and I want mine to also receive it from me. This is a conscious act of generosity towards both my parents and it does remain a thread of connection between us, now they’re dead. Anyone from a violent family background understands the gratitude for the good along with the horror and fear of the bad.
It’s delicate work writing about lives – how did you tackle what – or who – to leave in or out? Was there anyone who you took inspiration from on this?
It was a very tricky process to write about many people who are still alive, and I consciously worked at being ethical, respectful, and non-exploitative in the process. It helped that I already knew almost all of them, and so I enjoyed reconnecting after many years. My earliest drafts included absolutely everyone, all Dod’s old boyfriends, all her school friends, and even far too much detail about our great grandparents. In the end, I had to decide which relationships were the most significant in telling her story, and sadly many people were cut in the final edit. But they know who they are, and how important they were to Dod.
I read every memoir and bio I could get my hands on while I wrote this book. I particularly inspired by Robert Dessaix and Rebecca Solnit; how they write memoirs is stunning, luminous, and unsurpassed. I also loved Heather Rose’s Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, and Sisters edited by Drusilla Modjeska.
Leaving the church is a part of your story within the book, but you don’t go into how deeply painful this process must have been. Is it something you still grapple with?
In my early drafts I went into this in some detail – but I wanted to keep the focus on Dod and I, so some of my own story had to go. It is now nearly 20 years since I left the church, so I am less emotionally fraught than I used to be. I used to experience frank fear if any of my old church community knew what I was thinking, and worse what I was saying publicly – particularly my opposition to the misogyny within the church and my ongoing support for the LGBT community.
A large part of my work is now focussed on counselling others who have experienced spiritual trauma, and my lived experience is vital to that work. I have also written another book about how people re-cast their sense of identity once they leave the church, so I have researched the process in some detail. I only grapple with the fact that it took me far too long to leave, but I know that the process of extraction can be very slow when the church has become your entire social world and ethical framework.
How would you describe spirituality for you today?
I am probably an agnostic, in a place of not knowing about the presence of a god, or gods and goddesses. But my spiritual life is now about connecting with the natural world through immersing myself in it and most importantly, protecting it. I am very involved in the conservation of birds and have set up a project protecting bitterns through Birdlife Australia – named in my parents’ honour. I think they would approve.
Birdwatching for me, and for Dod, has always been a religious experience requiring rapt attention and producing ecstatic joy in every sighting – either something rare or pedestrian.
You quote several other writers throughout the book. Did you and Dorothy share reading interests and swap notes?
Dod was the intellectual giant between us! She often gave me books and suggestions of what I should read. I’m not sure I could equal her in her extraordinary good taste in books. I am so grateful to her for all the authors she introduced me to, particularly the poets when I was a teen – always looking for love and the numinous in every situation. She introduced me to the French poets Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine when I needed them. She also made me read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which changed my life.
My favourite novel ever written is The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, another present from Dod.
What’s on your TBR pile right now?
I am currently reading Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional. I am a bit late to this one, but it is intriguing and elegant – and had my attention right from the outset.
Then I want to read something entirely different: Han Kang’s Greek Lessons followed by Robbie Arnott’s Dusk. I also want to read the book of essays just published by The Australia Institute entitled, What’s the Big Idea? 32 Ideas for a Better Australia – although I fear it will make this social work heart of mine deeply despondent as I know how timid the Australian people and politicians are of many good, even essential, ideas.
Gutsy Girls is out now, via UQP.
Feature image: John Slaytor.
