'One of my first sightings of Laurie was in a framed photo in the old Eagle Bar at La Trobe University. Entitled ‘The Coach,’ the photo featured a young and rather fit-looking Captain Coach addressing his players at the quarter or three-quarter time break. The players, it has to be said, look completely uninterested in proceedings; but according to the picture’s caption Laurie is pulling out all the rhetorical stops. The caption reads:
Senior Lecturer in English Laurie Clancy urges on the football team in mid-1969 with accounts of existentialism and the thinking of Kierkegarrd.'
(Author's introduction)
'Laurie Clancy was already a lecturer at La Trobe University when I arrived there in 1970. In those heady days when universities were expanding rapidly, and there was a widely shared belief among both staff and students that the humanities mattered, teaching in an English department could be an exciting experience. The La Trobe English staff was young and enthusiastic, ready to try out new ideas about teaching and assessment, and staff meetings could be lively—and even acrimonious—as everyone had their say. What I quickly learned was that Laurie was a colleague who was easy to work with: he was a voice of reason at staff meetings; eschewed the factionalism that seemed to bedevil English departments in Australia during those years; and could always be relied upon to take a practical approach to things. Unfailingly sociable and never less than co-operative, with a strong sense of esprit de corps, he was a stalwart in the department, generous with his time in his dealings with both staff and students. As a teacher he was readily accessible to students, willing to spend time with them, mindful of their welfare, and full of encouragement for those who showed promise. My memory is that he was never less than busy, but never asked for relief or special favours to get more time for himself. He did not shirk the various administrative chores that came his way, handling them with a minimum of fuss, and sat on committees when it was required of him. Conscientious though he was about his university responsibilities, he did not spend more time on campus than he needed to, because he lived a double life, somehow managing to reconcile being a full-time academic with being a creative writer and journalist. Within a few years of his going to La Trobe he was probably the best-known member of the English department, with a solid reputation as a fiction writer and as a reviewer as well as an academic. ' (Author's introduction)
'Laurie Clancy is very much a writer of the modern secular city. Although he was brought up in a Catholic household, he had left the Church well before he left school. The world he describes in his fiction is a post-modern world, where there is no God to offer comfort or authority to offer meaning. Clancy approaches this world from a realist perspective, but his realism breaks down as his characters find their efforts to make sense or to find fulfilment break down into fragmentary episodes of frustration or futility. Indeed he published many of these individual scenes as separate short stories. Even in the novels the narratives tend to collapse into series of fragments, rather than follow any kind of progression towards unity. These fragments record the frustrated attempts of his characters to create a unity in their experience, or to bend the outer world to their desires. Their constant failures produce an absurdity that ranges from the farcical to the tragic. ' (Author's introduction)
'By the time Laurie Clancy’s second novel Perfect Love was published in 1983, Clancy had established himself as an academic, critic, short story writer and novelist. Westerly had published his first short story ‘The Wife Specialist’ in 1971. A debut novel The Collapsible Man followed in 1975, to some critical acclaim. It was to share the National Book Council Award of that year. A collection of short stories under the title of his first published short story appeared in 1978. He was already working on his Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction, though it took a decade to complete, being published in 1992. ' (Author's introduction)
'Throughout his career as a writer and a critic, Laurie Clancy was also a teacher. He put as much thought and energy into this as he did into his other responsibilities, and is remembered fondly by his students from La Trobe University, where he lectured in English and Australian Literature, and RMIT, where he taught creative writing in the TAFE Division. These memoirs give a glimpse of him in the classroom, and acknowledge the lasting effects of his work. —John McLaren.' (Introduction)
