It was half way through the second semester, as cold rain splattered on the ground-to-ceiling glass windows of the third year novel class, when Briony, attractive, articulate and sensitive Briony – who the creative writing selection committee said, ‘shows creative promise’ – discovered that Fatima Paharjarma, had scored a two book contract with Praxis Publishing, based on a final draft of her novel, called, “Love and Chess in Tehran.”

The class teacher, Tony ‘Happy’ Jack, balding and in his 50s, was popular with the students because he never criticised their work. He let Fatima’s success slip while handling back their fortnightly assignments. Happy or just ‘Hap’, hadn’t published a comma in seven years and survived by his vicarious ability to pass off a student’s success as his own.

The applause from the students was warm in the overheated classroom, with a round of ‘well done’, ‘that’s great’ and one ‘go girl!’ interspersed between gentle hand clapping. But if you were an omnipresent narrator hovering god-like above the celebration, you’d note the smiles of the 15 female students and one male, were crafted and restrained.

That same narrator would also know that they’d spent far more time workshopping Fatima’s novel than anyone else’s, in large part because she couldn’t write English. Fatima would recite her story of how her father, a Professor of Physics in Tehran, played chess in the parks before he was arrested and killed by the secret police. Fearing for their lives, her family fled in the middle of the night to Turkey, then South Africa and on to Australia. Briony would record Fatima telling her story and then spend half the night transcribing it. The next week, the class knitted the story together.

Briony stopped clapping and shifted in her seat. She looked around at the other women. Most were in their 20s and 30s. They wore the uniform of inner suburban dwellers: black boots and tights, a cotton dress with a colourful pullover or cardigan. They were erudite and compassionate and used both to tear down writing they disliked.

Kevin, the lone male and full time heroin user, passed the creative writing entrance test by copying and submitting large slabs of William Burroughs’ work and calling it his own. Even though the selection committee couldn’t understand a word, they praised his experiments with non-linear narrative. He was admitted because, as Hap would say, ‘the creative writing program is a broad church.’ Kevin spent most of the two hour seminar nodding off.

As the congratulations faded and the reality of Fatima’s success sunk in, Paula handed around copies of the last chapter of her 700 page novel about her divorce. The draft still used the names of real people, which she said she’d change using the Microsoft Office replace function in the final edit. The last chapter focused on her recovery from breast cancer and finding a new admiration for the resilience of women and all things Sapphic.

Briony wasn’t jealous but she felt cheated. Fatima’s life story was far more exotic and fascinating than her own. She’d grown up in a country town where the boys would drive up and down the main street on a Friday night and yell, ‘show us your tits’ before retiring to one of two local pubs where they’d get shitfaced. The quality of male was so unappealing, there was no desire to show one’s tits, even if they asked politely. Fatima was beautiful. Her picture on the book sleeve was magnetic. She’d win the Booker on good looks alone. The lads back home would call her ‘fuckin’ hot’, while they conjured with the fact that she was a foreigner and a ‘towelhead’. But they would go for her like a heatseeking missile.

The scent of fresh coffee wafted down the corridor and mixed with the scent of wet woollen jumpers. Briony tried to look attentive. Tried to walk a mile in Paula’s narrative, which wasn’t easy because it had no forward drive or characterisation. The sentences plodded after each other like prisoners of war. Her ex-husband was a ‘cunt’ and so were his mates. The women he was screwing were ‘pox-infested slags’. Briony looked at the class clock. One more hour to recess. She corrected where Paula had changed tenses three times in the same long paragraph.

To look eyes-down and focused, she calculated her fees for the three year writing program would be around $40,000. There were 600 students in the program, so the gross would be close to $24 million. Deducting wages – it was hard to imagine Hap drawing a wage as he did so little – that put the net around $18 million for the cohort. That didn’t include monies from the post graduate writing programs or the short courses.

Briony’s 200 page novel sat in her backpack at her feet. Hap advised the class two years ago, when they were still green in mind to all things fictional, to write something they knew about. She knew how to drop a gearbox in to the land rover, muster cattle, pull a calf out of a dam, fix fences, shoot and more. But none of these things seemed very literary. Where was the pain? The conflict? The clever plot turns? The tragedy or insight?

Her incomplete novel was a story her grandpa told her about him falling in love with Milly, the Mayor’s daughter. Then the marriage, a couple of kids and the battle to keep the farm from the banks. The youngest boy, Tim, gets Polio and dies. The class feedback was strong and positive. They liked her visual writing style. They liked the wide open plains. They wanted to know how Millie reacted to Tim’s death. Did she go through long walks through fields of saltbush or spinifex? Did she hit the piss or go off sex?

Then she drops the reader in to the hot and steamy jungles of Bougainville in 1944. Grandpa is a soldier who has captured a Japanese officer. He’s howling with toothache and is taken to the camp dentist. Thinking he’s about to be tortured, the officer tells the battalion colonel the position of the entire Japanese forces.

Briony’s draft ran in to a problem. In real life, the Australian soldiers liked the Japanese officer. They called him ‘Captain Fang’. Originally, she was going to have Grandpa and Captain Fang meet after the war and become good mates. They’d go the Ginza, drink beer and their wives would become friends and go shopping together. But in real life, late one evening, Captain Fang drove a knife in to the stomach of his guard and took off in to the jungle, pursued by Grandpa, who shot him in the back and slit his throat. Briony knew in the drafts, this wasn’t how the book should end.

The collective tone in class turned icy. They didn’t like how she used racial stereotypes. The Japanese prisoner wasn’t a ‘Nip’, ‘the Yellow Peril’ or even ‘Captain Fang’. They didn’t believe, even in the jungles of Bougainville in 1944, that name calling based on ethnic or racial origins, should be allowed.

There was a more serious problem. By focusing the plot on the men, far from Australia, she had forgotten about Millie’s enduring grief over Tim’s death, of running the farm and the unwelcome and close attention of the bank manager, who had offered to reduce the mortgage if she agreed to ‘special conditions’. Even Hap suggested that introducing some female characters in to the jungle might keep women readers engaged. He didn’t need to remind Briony that the three main characters in ‘Love and Chess in Tehran’, were all women. Frightened but resilient women, who would fight the Iranian secret service and their network of paid informers, to make a new life for themselves.

As the clock struck midday, Briony sat with Margaret in the cafeteria as they slurped their hot chocolates and shared a current bun. Margaret lived with her boyfriend and hoped her novel about a lesbian detective in Iceland would make her famous.

Margaret was pretty and loved Briony’s descriptive passages about the farm. She could see those wide open plains as she put her hand gently over Briony’s. Briony suspected Margaret was bi-sexual but as gender fluidity was all the rage, she didn’t pull her hand away. That would appear gauche.

“Why don’t you write some women in to the jungle scenes” Margaret said, wiping the chocolate powder from her lips. “Like the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels in New Guinea”

“They were men.”

“Write in a few female native characters who are throwing off the shackles of colonial oppression and get them to spy for the Australian soldiers.”

“Then they’d be siding with the colonial white men who were fighting the colonial yellow men.”

Margaret winced at the term ‘yellow men’ and took a bite of the current bun.

“You could introduce a love interest.”

“Not for grandpa. He’s got Milly. There’s the young captain from Ballarat though…”

“Problem solved,” Margaret said with a wink.

Back in class Hap was trying to restore order. Paula was sobbing in her chair, being comforted by Caroline, whose depressive episodes had robbed her of the ability to write. Yet she still attended class and was considered a hero for doing so.

“Fuck Kevin, you really are an insensitive prick,” Caroline snarled. “Why did you say that?”

As they filed back to class after the break, Kevin asked Paula if she was going to rewrite the novel in the third person, thereby escaping criticism that it was autobiography written with malice of forethought.

Paula’s mouth dropped open, her fists clenched as she put her angry, hysterical red face three centimetres from Kevin’s.

“This is my story you vertical stack of shit! It happened to me! That prick destroyed my life and now it’s time for payback. It’s fucking typical of a male to call for objectivity from a woman who was kicked and kicked again. It’s a story written by a woman, for women, arsehole!”

Kevin took his seat and was going to say something when Hap put his finger to his lips.

“Let’s have a minute of quiet reflection,” he said, “on why we’re here.”

Many years ago, a former head of the writing programs told Hap enrolling students who used the course as therapy, was a psychological time bomb. They relived those issues again and again. There was no catharsis in a novel, he said. It just concretised the trauma.

He had also publicly humiliated Hap in the staff lunchroom by proving that, ‘show, don’t tell’ in fiction was a nonsensical ideal for writers to pursue. Since all writing was telling and if words were pictures of the things they represented, wasn’t all writing by definition also showing? Hap was glad when he retired to go rock fishing.

Then Paula said something in the hot flush of a verbal victory over Kevin; something which in a calmer, more self-possessed time, she’d never say. She said what everyone in Hap’s third year novel class was thinking.

“Besides Kev baby, you’ve written fuck all. We all helped write Fatima’s novel, which will be a best seller.”

A hush fell over the classroom, like when birds stop chirping just before an earthquake. Thunder rolled in the distance and a door slammed down the corridor. Paula’s eyes widened as she recognised the enormity of her mea culpa.

“I write story, none of you write it,” Fatima spat as her almond eyes narrowed to slits. “Workshop is just workshop. You give me ideas, sure and I thank you but I am the creator of the novel like I am the creator of my life.”

“Jesus on a stick, of course you are Fatima but you have to admit,” Paula said in a voice of gentle resignation, “you had some help. Briony spent weeks copying out those tapes…”

“Fuck Briony”, Fatima yelled and jumped to her feet. “I come here to learn how to write and I can write now. But my family story comes from my heart, not anyone else. You insult me and my dead father with your lies.”

She picked up her novel and stormed towards the door.

“I tell Guardian Herald newspaper now that creative writing workshop is a den of thieving jackals,” she hissed and fled out the door crying.

“Maybe this is a good time to end today’s workshop,” Hap said. “I’ll talk with Fatima and pour oil on troubled waters, or at least build a bridge. Next week we’ll discuss collegiality in the publishing industry.”

The chairs squeaked on the lino floor as the students pushed them back and put their coats and jumpers on. Paula made her way over to Hap, who was trying to look busy, tidying his papers.

“I’m so sorry Hap, I’m such a dickhead. It just slipped out. I’ll find her and talk to her”

“No, let me. I’ll sort it out”

Paula smiled, mouthed ‘thankyou’ and walked out the door.

Hap rammed his papers in his leather briefcase. He had to find Fatima before she talked to the media. The left leaning Guardian Herald had recently run a series of articles on how international students were making a major cultural contribution to the city. He could see Fatima’s face plastered over the front page, with the two deck 72 point headline: ‘Creative Writing Course Steal’s Refugee’s Two Book Deal.” The course had just launched its national online marketing campaign, with the slogan, “Have you got a novel in you?” It was a potential media nightmare.

Briony threw her rucksack over her shoulder and caught Hap by the elbow, as he was about to flee down the corridor, in pursuit of Fatima and her two book deal. He’d already told the Dean that ‘Love and Chess in Tehran’ would place the university at the centre of the literary universe. He visualised the media storm gathering, with accusations of plagiarism, racial prejudice and envy. It was a career black hole.

“Hap, have you got a minute?” Briony asked.

Hap prided himself that he always had time for his students. He told them that the door of the open plan office was always open. All students had to do was knock.

“This is probably not the best time, Briony, as I have something of a fire to put out. Can it wait?”

Hap saw Briony’s chest and chin fall. Her novel had creative potential but 90 per cent of it was descriptive passages. But they were good. Dropping the lead character in to the jungles of World War Two was crazy but he wasn’t going to tell her that. The last thing he wanted was students dropping out of the course.

“I’m sorry Briony, of course. Shoot but make it quick if you can”

Briony raised her chin and smiled. It was the honest smile of a plain country girl with a freckled nose and a round face. The smile of hope and ambition; of nascent dreams crying out for fulfilment.

“Only one question, Hap,” Briony said while wiping her nose. “I’m going to introduce a new female character. She’s a Bougainville native who saw her family killed by the Japanese. She wants revenge. I’m thinking of getting her to fall in love with Captain Davies. I know he’s a minor character but it’s one way to keep the female readers interested. My problem is, I don’t know anything about Bougainville females and their courting rituals. Can you help?”

Hail pelted hard against the ground-to-ceiling glass windows. Hap stared at Briony for a moment but no words would come. He wanted to move but his legs were frozen. He wanted to offer solace to Briony and her Bougainville female character problem but all solace, all patience and understanding had fled.