LIFE’S BLOOD: an interview with Marcella Polain

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

Marcella Polain was born in Singapore and immigrated to Perth when she was two years old, with her Armenian mother and Irish father. She has a background in theatre and screen writing, and now lectures in the Writing Program at Edith Cowan University. Polain was founding WA editor for the national poetry journal Blue Dog, and has been poetry editor for Westerly and was inaugural editor for Indigo. Her first poetry collection, Dumbstruck, won the Anne Elder Prize; her second, Each Clear Night, was short-listed for the West Australian Premier’s Poetry Prize. Polain has published essays on writing and completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia in 2006. She has recently completed a third poetry collection, Therapy like Fish. Interviewer: former student of Polain’s, Jas Shenstone.

INTERVIEWER

People seem to have a fascination for a writer’s process. Some perhaps are hoping for inspiration and others may just enjoy the behind-the-scenes glimpse of how a writer works. How do you approach a new idea, a fresh page?

POLAIN

My process is long and unruly. I have tried to make it more orderly but if I plan a lot before I start writing the words just die on the page. For me, there is something necessary about not-knowing that in some way energises the language. So I seem to have two ways of approaching a new idea. In one (and this is usually with bigger works like novels) I have a vague sense of the story that may have bubbled away for years, and I begin when I feel the impulse physically. It may sound odd but the only way I can describe it is this: a buzz of anticipation (as if I am looking forward to a special occasion), an actual leaning forward of the body, a sensation in my chest and throat as if I am about to speak, sometimes a tingling at the back of my head. I need to listen to my body. If I do take my queue from it, the writing begins quite well, and there is often a pleasing balance of not-knowing and control. The other way I write is to begin with no idea and no physical sensation. I simply set aside time and sit down and write the first half-decent line or sentence that I think of.

That’s where the two begins become one quite similar process, because in both I just follow my nose, writing from one line/sentence to the next and the next, looking to be guided by the words already on the page. Hemingway said we should write one true sentence. (He didn’t mean factual.) That’s what I try to do. Then take my queue from that sentence and write the next true sentence it suggests. Pretty soon I will have the beginning of something. It may be the idea I brought into the process or it may be one the process has uncovered. If it’s the former (borne of the first way I begin) then I most likely have a guiding sense of its form and subject. If it’s the latter (borne of the second way) I most likely don’t yet know anything about it apart from what’s now on the page. The more I write of a piece, the more alike the experiences become: writing always into the unknown, one true line or sentence at a time, to uncover what I am trying to say. I usually work in fragments that, for a long time, can seem as if they have no connections. This is a deep imaginative, creative and intellectual challenge; it’s fabulous problem-solving. It is important to remain calm, acknowledging anxiety about all the not-knowing for what it is, and have faith enough to keep going. In the middle of novels, which take me years, writing feels more a test of desire, faith and perseverance than anything else: how much do I want this?; how important is this to me?

INTERVIEWER

Are there any sentences in your own work—or someone else’s—that stand out for you, true sentences that have lasted and stayed with you?

POLAIN

Many, but I have a poor memory for such things. They arrest me and I read them over and over, get a physical reaction – breathless, skin-tingling, tears – and think I will remember them but don’t. Now I try to use a little sticky-note to mark them as I read. But then I run out of notes or forget to keep some with me; anyway, all my books with sticky notes are in my work office where I keep my favourites and I am home without them!

INTERVIEWER

You write poetry and prose.  Have you or have you ever wanted to write a play or a script?

POLAIN

I spent several years writing plays and scripts as a theatre arts undergrad at Curtin and film student at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, then working as a freelance scriptwriter. I had a play professionally produced and sold a script but I pretty quickly realised two things: 1) Film was not for me, as I don’t like relinquishing control of my work; and 2) I needed a steady income to have some material comfort.  So I went back to uni and became a teacher instead.

INTERVIEWER

When you were a child did you want to be a writer? Were you encouraged to write?

POLAIN

I always wanted to be writer. At home this was actively discouraged. But I was encouraged by a couple of wonderful teachers. It is very hard when a child with a calling is treated badly over it by his/her family, but perhaps it is a good test of will. Perhaps that is a stupid thing to say because I am sure we lose a lot of artists in this way.

INTERVIEWER

What are you writing at the moment?

POLAIN

I’m finishing a novel-length manuscript.  I’m also writing a few essays, which is unusual for me. I’m looking forward to returning to poetry.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find films influential to your writing?

POLAIN

I love cinema. The narrative of films doesn’t influence me but the cinematography, the visual images, do.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say words or images are more important when you’re coming up with an idea for something to write?

POLAIN

Hmm. That’s a good question. Given my last answer, I’d expect I would say images but I think it’s words. It’s their rhythm, tone, diction. It’s what is not said. Often overheard dialogue sparks something. Although, I do store up visual images and use them once I start writing. Often as detail for character and place.  Does that make sense?

INTERVIEWER

What brings you back to the blank page?  What gives you the courage to keep writing?

POLAIN

I think I write to find out what I think, to see what will happen, to see what I can make, to get a message across, to give a voice to someone, to investigate something. How can anyone live and not experience many things each day that would drive them to that blank page? What would life be like without making art? I wouldn’t want to live. Its life’s blood to me.

THE SENTENCE MAKER: an interview with Andrew Croome

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

Whether in person or over the wonderful, magical internet thingy, Andrew Croome is fantastic company – smart, thoughtful, and disarmingly friendly.  His most recent novel is Midnight Empire (Allen & Unwin, 2012), an espionage thriller that deftly explores drone warfare.  Described by publisher Allen & Unwin as a ‘Cold War historical novel’, Croome’s first book was Document Z (2008), which examined the infamous Petrov affair. For Croome the book won the Australia/Vogel’s Literary Award in 2008 and the University of Technology Sydney Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. In 2010 Andrew Croome was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year.  If all this isn’t enough, Croome has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, which investigated the relationship between fiction and history. While others might ask him about the moral ambiguities of bashing up countries by remote, we ask him about the big issue – literary craft.  Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.

INTERVIEWER

How do you start a novel?

CROOME

I think with two things. The first is an idea – a zone or a topic that feels ‘big’ enough. Ideally, it will be something I don’t necessarily know too much about – so that there’s a process of discovery and mystery in the writing – yet it will also not be so alien that it feels beyond me to capture. This relates to the second thing, which is to find something outside the ordinary: a distance on the ordinary that will act as a kind of ‘source’ for the writing, that will offer an essence or an imagination at the core of the novel. In Document Z, this was the Cold War and the period of the 1950s and often the aura of photographs from that time – not necessarily of the historical figures I was writing about, but perhaps just of streets or crowds or buildings. In Midnight Empire, it’s the landscapes: the deserts of Nevada or the distant mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan. I feel like that – finding the ‘source’ – is where novels begin. The rest follows later.

INTERVIEWER

I’m really interested in your idea that for you a story starts with a sense of place, especially as your novels have considerable plot and story momentum.  At what point do you start thinking narrative structure?

CROOME

For me, narrative structure comes last of all. Before that has to come the narrative situation – the premise – and the characters who will occupy that space. Some would argue that characters and narrative are in fact one and the same, because the former tend to dictate what is possible in terms of story, and I think that’s mostly true. Plot and momentum are important, but for me any narrative structure is for the most part about meaning. It’s one of the spaces in a novel where the logics of the subject assert themselves. Only once the story is underway does narrative structure come to the fore, especially in the later stages. Document Z and Midnight Empire were different in that the events of Document Z (but not the narrative) were defined by history, whereas in Midnight Empire the story is pure invention. That made them quite different projects, and in terms of narrative I think Midnight Empire was more challenging. I was trying to weave tropes from the worlds of the war on terror and poker together, and to find a narrative that made sense in both.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have moments where you ask yourself, where is all this going?  If so, what do you do – keep writing until the story resolves itself?

CROOME

Yes. I think uncertainty about direction is an important part of the writing process – part of exploring the terrain the writer has chosen. Too much planning probably inhibits the ability of a work to set its own course, to follow paths and find conclusions that are unexpected. Thus, I see not knowing where something is headed as just part of writing – which makes the solution more writing (which could also be re-writing). That said, I usually do have a final destination in mind that I am writing towards. In Midnight Empire, I knew that I wanted my protagonist to end up in Europe, playing poker and existing ‘off the grid’. When I began the novel I didn’t know how or why he’d get there, even if I knew he would. The reasons for that were ones that the novel assembled over time. Alongside ‘Where is all this going?’ another important question is ‘Where has all this gone?’ That is useful for understanding the story that you’ve reached, then for redrafting in order to tell it better.

INTERVIEWER

And what about ending a work?  With your two novels have you found that they’ve ended quite naturally and neatly, or do you rework and rework, sometimes going back to earlier chapters to make adjustments?  I’m reminded here of something Peter Carey once said, and I’m paraphrasing: that if chapter thirty doesn’t work it’s likely that something in, say, chapter three isn’t working.

CROOME

I think that there are few, if any, endings in novels that are as satisfying as the journeys which arrive there. In the sense that journeys determine endings, I’d agree with Peter Carey that if the ending is troubled, the cause of the trouble is to be found elsewhere (and the problem perhaps bigger than a failed ending). I think all that should be asked of an ending is that it live up to the journey. My favourite endings, when I think about it, have more to do with poetry than story – things like Cormac McCarthy’s brook trout at the end of The Road (‘On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back’) or John’s dilemma at the conclusion of J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime, as to whether he will nurse his ailing father, or abandon him (‘One or the other: there is no third way’). Mostly the task of an ending is really to carry the reader out of the experience of the novel, without being disappointing. If the ending is doing that, it could be that the journey is working too.

INTERVIEWER

Both Document Z and Midnight Empire are intimately concerned with the politics of the respective eras. Do you see yourself as a political writer? What motivates you to write so knowingly of political context?

CROOME

While my books are concerned with different types of politics, I don’t see myself as a political writer. That doesn’t mean that my work is without politics, just that the politics are driven by questioning and exploration, rather than by ideology or message. I am intensely interested in politics, especially those that are used to justify or enable actions that are morally fraught. I enjoy characters who are driven by beliefs, who consider themselves to have thought deeply about their world, and who see in the ordinary and day-to-day the influence of global forces. If I had to say what motivates this, I think it’s that all politics are a way of seeing the world and, in a novel, threading together these different ways of seeing seems like a way to get at a little more of the truth not just about those views, but of the greater shape of things. One of statements I think Midnight Empire makes is that while there is danger in following ideology, there is danger in following nothing too.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned Cormac McCarthy and JM Coetzee earlier.  Which other writers inspire you in terms of technique and craft?

CROOME

I admire Solzhenitsyn and his ability to draw a character, especially works such as The First Circle, We Never Make Mistakes and his prose poetry. Also Don DeLillo for what he writes about, with Underworld and Libra being an influence on my own writing. More recently, I’ve been reading Richard Ford, but in the last while, nothing has topped Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses for me. I’d also list John Le Carre and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People – alongside Conrad and Greene, these works are the template for writing about espionage in a way that goes beyond clever plotting and hard boiled protagonists.

INTERVIEWER

You said last year that writing was the hardest thing, and that sometimes you’ll spend months not writing at all.  What’s the impetus to start doing it all over again?

CROOME

Writing is hardest thing that I know how to do, and between projects I do spend some time not doing it.  Other writers might go straight from one novel to another, but for me these are such large endeavours that a break to work on other things for a time feels worthwhile. The impetus to begin again is the new idea for a book, but also the pleasure of writing itself, the satisfaction of writing sentences. After that, the impetus becomes the ability of fiction to imagine and to find and create meaning.  Once the writing starts, discipline returns.  One of my favourite observations on writing comes from Bill Gray, the author in DeLillo’s Mao II, who says, ‘I’m a sentence maker. Like a donut maker, only slower.’  Writing is work, but the impetus to do it is that it’s work that’s a little bit mysterious as well – exactly how it functions and what it achieves can be mysteries for the writer too.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NOSTALGIA AND SADNESS:
an interview with
Phil RetroSpector

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

In The Art of the Novel (1986) Milan Kundera said, ‘To compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side – and that, to me, is the writer’s subtlest craft.’  Phil RetroSpector is an audio-visual artist, not a novelist, but he may well be inspired by Kundera’s words.  Based in Galway, Ireland, RetroSpector is a mash-up – or bootleg artist – of the first order, merging an almost unbelievably diverse selection of songs with astonishing results.  His debut album, Intro/Version, features haunting remixes of Johnny Cash, David Lynch, Charles Bukowski, The Beatles and Muse.  He has also produced original audio-visual artwork for the Absolut Art Collection.  In the mash-up/boot-leg world RetroSpector is a folk hero, and Verity La now introduces him to the literary world.  Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s start at the beginning, the very beginning.  What was your earliest experience of music?  And how do you think it’s influenced the work you do now?

RETROSPECTOR

My first memory of music is begging my mother to stop singing ‘The little boy that Santa Claus forgot’.  I’d get all hysterical and bawl for hours over it.  Growing up listening to my parents’ vinyl, it was all Slim Whitman and The Everly Brothers at one end of the spectrum and anything soundtrack-related at the other. A Clockwork Orange and The Good, The Bad & The Ugly in particular were always on heavy rotation. I can still remember the first time I heard the Clockwork soundtrack; I must have been about eight years old.  I didn’t really comprehend what I was listening to, or how Walter was now Wendy Carlos, but it completely blew my mind.  I’m still hugely influenced by that cinematic sound. For me it’s all about mood.  I always say I mix emotions rather than beats.  It’s all about bringing a lump to my throat or making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  It always has been.

INTERVIEWER

‘It’s all about bringing a lump to my throat or making the hair on the back of my neck stand up’ – can there be a better motive for making art?  That cinematic sound is certainly in your mash-ups. How did you get into making this kind of music? Was it just a matter of experimenting, or were you influenced by what others were doing?

RETROSPECTOR

That’s reason enough for me. Even though my background is primarily image  based, film to be exact, I always gravitated toward music as music is arguably the most emotionally honest of the arts. But for sure, my film and visual-art base has informed my sound to some extent. Again it comes back to mood. Everything does.

It’s that same old story: failed musician becomes DJ becomes bedroom producer. In about 2004, I became disillusioned with DJing and dance music in general, so I hung up my decks and retreated to the bedroom.  I was listening to white labels from bootleg legend Mark Vidler (Go Home Productions, Addictive TV), who was cutting up The Doors with Blondie, and Echo and The Bunnymen with Abba and I thought, wow, I could do that. Now at this point, and generally to this day, the culture is dance-driven, and is all about giving an old song or hook a new twist. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to go that route. I wanted to make music with a cinematic edge and something that wasn’t all about the BPMs. I am a huge fan of the Wall of Sound and nostalgic to a fault. Hence, Phil RetroSpector was born.

INTERVIEWER

Tell us how you actually make a mash-up. What’s the process you go through from idea to finished product?

RETROSPECTOR

I spend a lot of time sourcing material to sample. The same applies to working with vocals – sometimes the resources are there at your disposal, otherwise it’s all about utilising vocal-isolation techniques. Thereafter, it’s about taking said elements into a digital audio workstation, such as Sony ACID and/or Abelton Live,and mixing them harmonically.

I tend to feel most creative when I’m feeling a bit blue.  I remember I was having a particularly bad week when I stumbled across Harry Dean Stanton’s reading of Charles Bukowski’s ‘Bluebird’.  From the moment I heard it, I saw it as a sound painting.  Bukowski’s poem resonates like a perpetual wound, tragic and lost, yet it’s incredibly beautiful.  It’s so textured.  Muse’s ‘Blackout’ provided the perfect backdrop, the way it illuminates, then waxes and wanes.   I also knew I wanted to counterpoint this despair with the operatic textures of Delibes’ ‘Lakmé’, which signify the song of the bluebird. I especially like the Bob Dylan bit at the end – ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ mirrors both Stanton’s vocal geography and sentiment.

Editor’s Note No. 1: Do yourself a favour and watch ‘Bluebird Blackout’ here.

INTERVIEWER

One of the things I find really fascinating about mash-up culture is it’s done without financial reward; clearly this is a result of not being able to profit from borrowing songs in this manner. Your work is simply put out into the universe for free, often with the mash-up artist creating ‘cover’ art-work, even videos. In the end it must come down to doing all this simply because you love it so much?

RETROSPECTOR

I suppose all comes down to cultural expression. A lot of people deem it lo-brow, fail to see its relevance. Some might argue we are digital punks, who have swapped the mohawk for a laptop.  This is our generation’s pop-art.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned earlier that you work best when feeling blue.  Your motto is ‘Warning: Please ensure glass is half-empty before listening’ and you say that you’re openly a member of ‘Melancholics Anonymous’.  I was wondering if you could tell me more about this sense of sadness that you seem to love working with so much.

RETROSPECTOR

Have you ever noticed when you break up with someone how whatever music in playing at that given moment in time takes on a weird poignancy?  I remember after one failed relationship compiling disc after disc of real schmaltz and purging myself on it for months on end. The interesting thing is I became aware of how music resonates most when it’s somewhere between nostalgia and sadness.

INTERVIEWER

Where do you see yourself taking mash-ups into the future?

RETROSPECTOR

Mash/bootleg will wax, wane, mutate and then reinvent itself with yet another moniker.  Like anything, it’s about knowing when to get off.  It’s a culture I’m really proud to be associated with as it facilitated me remixing the likes of Billie Ray Martin,The Young Punx,Giorgio Moroder, and producing audio-visual material for Absolut Art. Right now, I’m working on an audio-visual follow-up to Intro/Version, as well as a number of official remixes.  I’m also working on some audio-visual installations for gallery space. I suppose that’s really where I’d like to take it next…

*

Editor’s Note No. 2: Phil RetroSpector has generously produced for Verity La a very special bootleg, ‘Time out from Teardrops’ – have a listen, because it’s an absolute ripper.

A FULFILLING BURDEN: an interview with Craig Cormick

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

Ever met someone who’s had over 100 short stories published?  No, Verity La hadn’t either – until we met Craig Cormick.  Not only has Cormick been prolific with the short form, he’s also written across an extraordinary range of genres.  Borrowing outrageously from his bio, Cormick’s writing awards include the ACT Book of the Year Award (1999) for Unwritten Histories (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1998) and a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (2006) for A Funny Thing Happened at 27,000 Feet… (Mockingbird Press, 2005). In 2006 Cormick was a writer-in-residence at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, and in 2008 he received an Antarctic Arts Fellowship to travel to Antarctica, which he documented in his 2011 book In Bed with Douglas Mawson.  He has studied ‘bits and pieces of degrees’ at the University of Canberra, the Australian National University, the Canberra School of Art, the University of Iceland and Helsinki University, and has a PhD from Deakin University on creative historical fiction.  As a science communicator, Cormick is a regular commentator on public attitudes towards emerging technologies in the media and at conferences in Australia and internationally. He has travelled to all seven continents and his research has been published widely in peer-reviewed journals and conference papers.  But having listed all that, who is this man?  Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written over a hundred stories, numerous collections, historical novels and now, with the publication of Time Vandals, you’ve moved into young-adult fiction. What do you think is the common thread between all the work that you do?

CORMICK

I find that my writing brain is a bit akin to my reading brain, so it’s like it’s roaming around the shelves of a great old second-hand bookshop or library, finding new and interesting things in different nooks and crannies, and pulling volumes off the shelf that intrigue and delving into them a little bit before moving on.  I know authors are meant to rewrite the same story over and over, at some level, but I find my work is a long trail of grazing into different topics of interest, so my work has roamed across the savannas of historical fiction and non-fiction, climbed into the rocky foothills of relationships and bloke’s narratives, wandered into the canyons of speculative fiction and romped across the wide open plains of young adult fiction.

I really enjoy when a single line from a text, or character from history, or just an idea, works its way into my consciousness and demands to be recreated in a story or text.  Perhaps it’s my way of making some sense of the world. It means keeping a part of my brain open and receptive to the ideas that float past (and sometimes it is a lot more receptive than others), but when you feel the germ of a story growing I think of it as a very fulfilling burden – to the point that I find that before travelling to new places and countries I’m preplanning in my head how I might write about it and understand it.

Before going to Paris recently I had the idea of Napoleon revisiting the city today, and that sort of framed how I was viewing it as I went around. Then while there I discovered another perspective of having Ned Kelly bail up a restaurant in Paris in the 1920s, and while trying to dictate his Jerilderie letter, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway keep offering him writing advice. A common element in my writing is playing with genre boundaries, mixing fiction and non-fiction, blurring tenses (and probably putting too many metaphors into a single paragraph in interviews).

INTERVIEWER

I love that idea of keeping your brain open so you can catch ideas as they float past.  How exactly do you keep your brain open?

CORMICK

It can be a lot harder than it sounds with the pressures of everyday and the insistence of real-life upon you, but I believe you can learn to get into that zone easier if you work at it. There is a good description of it in Dorothy Porter’s verse novel The Monkey’s Mask, where she has a passage about waking up and finding you seem to be wired just a little differently, like you see and hear everything a little differently, or if you are suddenly viewing life via Instagram: ‘Is this how poems start, when every riff on the radio hooks in your throat. Is this how poems start? When the vein under her skin hooks in your throat, is this how poems start?’

Call it what you want – the zone, a feeling, a reaction, a heightened sensibility or even a visit from those elusive prick-teasing bitches the muses (who delight in leaving you waiting at their pleasure) – but it is undeniable that there are times you seem more acutely aware and responsive to creative expression, and while I do think you can learn to slip into that state more easily with practice, conversely I don’t think it is a place you can live in for too long at a time. I have heard people talking about over-drinking from the well of creativity, and that might be one way of viewing it, or understanding it, but I think of it more like swimming underwater, in that you can do it repeatedly, but you just can’t stay down there too long.

INTERVIEWER

Why?  What’s down there under the water that’s so frightening?

CORMICK

It’s not that it’s frightening to be down there so long – it’s just that it’s not possible to be down there too long without naturally bobbing back to the surface. If we want to keep playing with metaphors, I could say that you  can, of course, weigh yourself down with  leaden prose, heavy chains of ego and other weighty matters, but they can drag you down and you will have trouble ever resurfacing again. And if you don’t resurface  you won’t be able to see your work with that  same surface view point of other readers, and so you risk losing perspective and believing there is great weight and depth to any old crap you produce.

INTERVIEWER

After all these years of writing, is there a story form that you keep coming back to, due to sheer enjoyment?

CORMICK

I can’t actually say that there is, though I do find I get a little dissatisfied if I write a story and find it too close in form to something I have done before.  But I also find that some story forms that I think are quite innovative, my wife raises an eyebrow at me and asks if I am writing just for the enjoyment of myself rather than considering the enjoyment of the reader. She’s got very astute ‘bullshit radars’ which is an asset that can’t be over-valued. Every artists needs a bullshit radar of some type.

INTERVIEWER

How do you juggle that balance between the enjoyment of the reader and the enjoyment of yourself, particularly when it’s you who has to put in the hard yards to make the story work in the first place?

CORMICK

Write for yourself, but rewrite for the reader.

INTERVIEWER

Who are the writers and what are the books that have been critical to your development as a writer?

CORMICK

People sometimes ask who were my mentors as a writer, and I guess there are dozens of them – but they are all people I’ve only known through their work. And earlier this year I was at the Lifeline Bookfair in Canberra, which is one of the largest second-hand book fairs in the world I’m told, and I had one of those moments – browsing amongst the books I kept finding books that had been quite influential to me over the years. It was a really odd experience, like seeing your life played out through finding an old photo album in a bottom drawer at your parents’ house, but here it was played out in books. It really made my head spin that I just seemed to keep coming across individual books that were of some significance to me as I was growing as a reader and a writer. Nigel Krauth. Patrick White. Bo Carpelan (best opening section of any novel), Mario Vargas Llosa. Ernest Hemingway. Ryzard Kapuchinski. Xavier Herbert. Graham Greene. Salman Rushdie. Margaret Atwood. Mudrooroo. James Joyce. Barry Dickens. Roddy Doyle.

But to answer the question in more detail, the earliest books that really made a dent in my understanding of what I should or could be writing were the Jindyworobaks, those Australia poets who were driven to try and find Australian myths rather than say Greek or Roman ones, to use in their imagery, mixing Aboriginal understandings of the land. I had the privilege to hear Roland Robinson reading a poem, at an early Word Festival in Canberra and it really wowed me. So I spent a lot of time looking at Aboriginal ways of looking at and expressing things and how that could be incorporated into a new Australian way of writing, which came to expression in Unwritten Histories (published by Aboriginal Studies Press in 1998, which won the ACT Book of the Year Award).

Next along my journey was magic realism, predominantly the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I found that very exciting to have permission, as it were, to mix the fantastic with the everyday, and I looked for a way to incorporate the Australian tall tale into the everyday. Looking back I find that myths and epics and fairy tales have always been something I have had a strong interest in, and that were influential in my work. I lived for a year in Iceland and another year in Finland and got into the myths and epics of both countries in a big way too.

But, you know, having started answering this question I realise it’s going to a whole essay, not just an answer, and is going to range across Eastern European literature and literature of dissent, prison literature and censored voices. Then whenever I visit a country I try and read up on its emerging literature, and write something in response to it, which I have done in India, Japan, USA, South Africa, France, South America, China, Antarctica – the list is long, but so is the list of stories written.

Although, I also find the older I get the harder it is to find that same marvellous buzz I used to get from reading when I was young – but every now and then it does happen – like when reading the occasional Murakami, Cormac McCarthy or just rare surprises.

At the moment I’d describe my key interests as Slipstream, that merging of genres and styles, literary fiction with speculative fiction.

And my  favourite novel of all time: Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. Favourite collection of short stories of all time: Fishing the Sloe-black River, by Colum McCann. Favourite poem of all time: Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas.

INTERVIEWER

We started this interview with a mention of how you are now writing young-adult fiction.  Tell us about Time Vandals.  What did you learn from the production of this story about yourself as a writer?

CORMICK

Time Vandals is a venture into speculative fiction and also Young Adult fiction, which I really enjoyed writing. I suppose my inspiration was Artemis Fowl, which I also really enjoyed and wanted to have a go at the genre. The back story of Time Vandals is probably more interesting than the book itself. I had been reading time-travel books and thought, no one seems to ever have  a humorous take on it, and so set out to write a humorous book. I got this concept of a young boy and girl who are recruited to a secret organisation to stop people causing changes to the time-line, and I looked at the science of it and mapped out what would be the real interesting points of history to use – the Titanic, Hitler, etc… And then, just when I’d finished the first draft, I’m googling time-travel things and I discover there is a book coming out in the UK called Time Riders. I read through the details and can’t believe it. A secret organisation set up to stop people disrupting the time-line. Young guys and girls recruited to it. One is pulled off the Titanic. Somebody had changed time so that Hitler wins World War 2…  (“Faaaaaarrrrrkkkk!”)

I actually have a bit of a track-record for similar things happening, so after getting really miffed for a few days I decide I can do a better book and look for things that will make this different and beyond the clichés, which was where my first draft was wobbling into to be honest. So it’s now about alternative realities (which is closer to actual quantum physics) and has humour and has zombies – and I think is a really good book. So now the promo begins, which can be pretty fierce for YA fiction, but I’ve kicked it off with a YouTube film and a Facebook site, as YA books are no longer just about the book, but about all the associated mediums that it can exist in as well.  Check it out http://youtu.be/mI7ajf2sfFk

But back to the original question: what did I learn from the writing of it? I actually found it was quite fun to write, which isn’t necessarily my normal writing experience – it can be very enjoyable and satisfying – but not what you might call fun as such. But we’d better keep that a secret or even more people would be writing YA books than are writing them now.

INTERVIEWER

What would you like to tackle next?

CORMICK

For what looks like a short and simple question, I find it is actually a HUGE question. There is just so much floating and bubbling around in my brain that I’d like to be tackling next, some projects half-begun (some probably half-baked) and some just ideas. And they move around from being vague ideas to becoming obsessions and then fading back into my head again, and at times there is nothing I would rather do more than write and write and write, and just cut myself off from work and family and eating and sleeping, so I could then just capture some of these ideas and really get them down – but that’s not the shape of real life, so when they come close enough to capture I throw out my net and some become short stories and some become books and some float around near me and then flitter back into the distance. I guess every book/story/essay etc is something that is buzzing around your head and the only way to rid yourself of it is to capture it.

I’m currently completing two books that I’m writing at the same time, while on a literary grant. One is a non-fiction travelogue and the other is a speculative fiction history that I’d like to make into a series exploring alternative histories.

But I also want to write a fiction book set in Antarctica and a book about Ned Kelly (who is a reoccurring motif in my work (Peter Carey inscribed inside my copy of his True History of the Kelly Gang ‘To Craig who will be the author of the second best Kelly book ever written’), a speculative fiction collection/book about Captain Cook and so many Australian history stories and a love-triangle story based on a Japanese classic text and rework some of my books that have as yet to be published and on and on it goes.

Dorothy Green once asked how many people would still consider writing if everything had to be published anonymously. That perhaps should be updated to ask how many people would still consider writing if your chances of commercial publication were small, and your chances of being read and making an impact after publication were smaller. Self-publishing and e-books provide new options for authors, but I think deep down we all just want to write, become rich and famous, and let somebody else look after the editing and marketing and publicity and all those other non-writing parts of the writing trade. But reality is the more you write and the more you publish the more you have to do all those other things and they start to get in the way of your writing as well.

But having said all that, there are also many days when I wonder what else I could be doing with my life if I was not writing. Fixing stuff up around the house. Working with charities. Just relaxing and reading more. Doing more family things. Watching TV and movies. Hanging out with friends. Becoming more a social animal.

How do we measure our worth as a person and our contribution to life? I’m sure that sitting at home and writing may not be as great a contribution to society as getting out and helping people in need, but it does add to our cultural output as a society and is undoubtedly more beneficial to society than some other popular social obsessions like getting drunk and driving noisy cars fast, going to football matches and screaming abuse at opposing fans, or just shopping for the sake of shopping (unless you’re buying books – you get an exemption from crass consumerism if you’re buying books!)

ALWAYS KNOWING WHEN TO TURN THE PAGE: an interview with Nathan Curnow and
Kevin Brophy

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

More and more it’s being reported that poetry is experiencing a resurgence, primarily due to the form finding a home – or endless homes – on the internet.  Poetry seems to suit blogs, online journals, even in the social-media space (amongst the torrents of Facebook and Twitter drivel it’s always a pleasure to find some carefully crafted words, or tips on how to find some).  Although no one’s yet collected the statistics, an increasing number of people might be experiencing poetry, which can only be a good thing. Long-live the creative wordsmith.

Two poets who should be at the forefront of this resurgence (if they’re not already) are Nathan Curnow, a regular here in Verity La Land, and Kevin Brophy – we can all thank our lucky stars that they’ve recently co-authored Radar (Walleah Press 2012).  Astute readers will remember that we published Brophy’s ‘Flicker‘ and Curnow’s ‘Blessing‘ in August and September 2012 respectively.  Go on, grab yourself a copy – you won’t regret it.

Nathan Curnow is a poet, playwright and performer who has toured Australia and New Zealand and been heard widely on ABC radio. He is the author of The Ghost Poetry Project, a collection of poetry based upon his stays at ten haunted sites across the country and released by Puncher & Wattman (2009). He has also won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize and co-edited the 30^th birthday edition of literary journal Going Down Swinging. Kevin Brophy teaches creative writing in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. From 1980 to 1994 he was founding co-editor of Going Down Swinging. In 2005 he was awarded the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry. In 2009 he was co-winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay.

Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.

INTERVIEWER

Congratulations on your joint collection Radar – it’s a truly wonderful read. How would you both describe the book?

CURNOW

I like to think it’s an attentive book, from my collection of poetry to Kevin’s collection of prose-poems, two different forms and styles scanning memory, dreams and experience through language. We didn’t set out intending to come at it from different angles, but I’m so pleased that it turned out the way. Perhaps my work monitors the open skies while Kevin’s searches the ocean depths.

BROPHY

The book fits us between its covers because I think we are both poets driven by a lyrical impulse, interested in pursuing narratives-of-feeling, both of us schooled (though in different eras) by Melbourne’s performance scene, and both committed to a poetry of plain speaking. The book is most definitely two books for the reason Nathan suggests: the forms are very different. Free verse has its own modern tradition now, especially in English poetry, and Nathan exploits it, revels in it. He knows how to make a line work, and how to bend a line ending. There’s none of this in the prose-poems, which are visually not-poetry, and work much more as mental swirls, as clouds posing as paragraphs, slightly exotic as a form. Both of us, though, I think, head out into fiction at times…

INTERVIEWER

How did the idea for the book come about?  Was it along the lines of ‘I’ve got some poems, you’ve got some poems – let’s do this’?  Or was there something deeper going on from the very beginning?

CURNOW

I guess the deepest thing going on is that we’re mates and have liked each other’s writing, and approach to writing, for some time. I had been sitting on a number of poems when Ralph Wessmann from Walleah Press approached me with an offer of publication. What I had amounted to about half a collection so I made the suggestion of a 2-in-1 book. Thankfully Kevin jumped at the opportunity, which was a real thrill seeing that he’s been instrumental to my development over the years. I don’t even think he had anything written at the time, and we didn’t look over each other’s work until the latter stages. All I knew was that he was heading to Europe and had promised to write, which was enough for me. It’s kind of like if the film director Terence Malick says he’s happy to work with you. The only answer is ‘Wow, let’s do it!’ and then you figure it out as you go.  Perhaps Kevin could speak about the process from his end, because I think he was exploring a different approach to how he usually works.

BROPHY

I believe that Ralph and Nathan were looking for a female Tasmanian poet to partner Nathan with the book. And somehow they stumbled across me. I liked the idea because I did want to try writing a book in a creative frenzy, over about six months, and knowing Nathan’s work I knew he would be both professional and lively. I was relieved when I read his first draft, to see that he had taken an autobiographical approach to his collection, while I had taken a more ‘fictional’ and speculative approach to my little paragraphs. I was pleased to see that the two halves would be different enough, and both hopefully engaging for their own reasons. Of course there was something deeper going on and that might make the reading of the book a little more interesting and unsettling than many poetry collections.

INTERVIEWER

Radar certainly is more interesting and unsettling than many poetry collections. Two themes that have emerged so far in our interview are the notion of autobiography and the slip to and from fiction.  I wonder if you could expand on these elements of the work.

BROPHY

One of the great twentieth century poet-eccentrics (later adopted by the Language poetry movement), Louis Zukofsky, wrote that ‘the test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection.’ That’s ok, and as poets we want to ‘afford’ our readers those pleasures. But they are not the full range of pleasures. The critic Kenneth Cox, an admirer of Zukofsky, finally decided that with Zukofsky ‘What is lacking is afflatus’. He meant ‘the breath of life that sends a thrill down the spine and gets engraved on memory’. Whether it is autobiography or fiction does not really matter; what matters is whether the body and its breath are in the work, along with those other pleasures poetry can afford its readers. Nathan’s work heaves with afflatus. One of the reasons I pushed out of the line into the paragraph was to get at that part of me that brings the world and its afflatus into the words. I would be pleased if our poetry looks unsettled, and even more pleased if the poetry is unsettling.

CURNOW

As Kevin says, the line between autobiography and fiction doesn’t really matter, what matters is the strength of the piece, how it works and conveys. Although much of my work uses autobiography as a launching off point, I don’t primarily write to tell people about my life, because I know that writing can never give the whole picture. Poems are inadequate frames and writing demands twists and turns which askew everything. Still, much of my work in Radar presents as autobiography which I’m not particularly comfortable with at times, and it’s the reason I’ve included the poem ‘To the Google Earth Tracking Vehicle’, kind of warning the reader that while I’m trying to be honest, it’s also just a pose and can’t escape being that. So the line is hazy and complex, and what matters most is the ‘full range of pleasures’ for the reader that Kevin refers to. This is why I’m so excited about the direction he takes in Radar, because he’s still showing me how to write about life in new ways. His pieces are full of strong images and a deceptively simple tone that presents characters we can all relate to, ones with obvious failings. They are portraits that speak honestly and intimately about others, about all of us, and so therefore, indirectly, about what Kevin does (and perhaps doesn’t) know about himself. I like that you refer to it as ‘the slip to and from fiction’, Nigel. It’s so slippery that it almost becomes a non-issue.

INTERVIEWER

What hopes do you have for Radar?

BROPHY

This is the toughest question. I hope that Radar grows up into a fine classic book without feeling it has a split personality or a repressed side of itself that won’t stay repressed. I hope Radar has a large extended family of readers who get together once a year to talk about it. I hope Radar gets to talk with critics and other books along the way, and that in its retirement, when it is hopelessly out of copyright and looks like something left over from the era of ink and paper, it can hold its own at the bar and sink a few with those old-timers who are still on their feet. I hope that it doesn’t get too garrulous with age, and always knows when to turn the other page.

CURNOW

All of the above from Kevin. I hope the book is returned to over and over. I hope its owners read it to people that they love and that it inspires them to write. Plus I sent a copy to Missy Higgins, who I’ve never met, so I hope she likes it too.

*

Radar can be purchased by visiting Walleah Press.

LOOKING UP ELEPHANTS' TESTICLES: an interview with
P.S. Cottier

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

P.S. Cottier, also known as PS Cottier, also known as Penelope Cottier, is a poet and short story writer who lives in Canberra, the national capital of Australia. Her book of short stories A Quiet Day and her two poetry collections The Glass Violin and The Cancellation of Clouds have been published by Ginninderra Press. Her poems have found homes in myriad places, both Australian and international, from The Canberra Times to extempore to Gloom Cupboard and beyond. She endeavours to publish a poem a week on her blog, pscottier.com.  Thanks to Blemish Books, her poems are sharing the pages of Triptych Poets 3 with those of JC Inman and Joan Kerr. Thanks to Verity La, you get a glimpse at the person behind the poetry, plus a pun or two. Play is serious business, you see. Alliteration and rhyme too.

Interviewer: Duncan Felton

INTERVIEWER

Penelope, your collection Selection Criteria For Death is upcoming in Triptych Poets 3. With a respectable handful of other books published, along with poems in journals, e-zines and on your blog, what does being published in print mean to you? Does the whole submission/acceptance/launch/review process still give just as much of a buzz? And to what extent is this kind of acceptance a motivator, rather than the pure joy/hard slog of the solo creative process?

COTTIER

I think I’m of a generation — or the generations — for whom a book in print is still unquestionably the most important object when we are talking of literature. Now, to contradict myself and question that emphatic statement a little, I also love seeing my work in e-zines and even on my own blog. And Triptych Poets 3 will be an ebook as well. But the sensuality of a book, its ability to stroke the reader as she reads, to have a presence in a room when we leave it… The trees still make a noise, even when wedged between covers.

This book is a little different, as I am being published with people whose work I have not read, something that has only happened to me before in anthologies. So there will be a real sense of discovery reading the other 66%, after, of course, having a good long gloat over my 33%.

I worked on poetry for ages before sending off any for possible publication, and when writing itself is going well, that is still the best thing. However, when people say yes, produce a book, and feed me cheese at launches, that is indeed nice.

Sending off my work is the least best part of the process, particularly if it’s to the type of journal that sits on decisions for twenty years. I’m over sending to certain journals because of that. Those extra slow ones, and the ones that publish two poems by women every third issue and call it a ‘Special Women’s Edition’, are another of my least favourite entities. I’d rather occupy the intertubes (spellcheck made that interludes, which was almost appropriate) and publish on my blog instead. I truly hate the fact that there is a hierarchy of publication in poetry, which would seem to defeat the purpose of using words to show the world in a slightly different light. But I always was an incorrigible idealist.

INTERVIEWER

In Selection Criteria for Death many of your poems feature animals as subject, as metaphor and otherwise. I noticed: cockatoo, crow, crabs, elephant, swan, gecko, guinea pig, wolf, and the list goes on. And your PhD thesis was on animals in the works of Charles Dickens. What is it that keeps you returning to animals in your writing?

COTTIER

That is truly a challenging question, Duncan. About halfway through writing my thesis (which quickly developed the pet name ‘Dogs in Dickens’, despite there being a whole lotta diverse animal in there) I had a vivid memory of borrowing a book from the mobile library near my parents’ house as a young child. It was called The Encyclopedia of Dogs or All About Dogs or some such, and I remembered seeing a rather disturbing illustration in black and white of a man with a dog in it, which fascinated me. About twenty-five years later, I realised that the man was Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, and the dog was Bullseye. So perhaps all my life I’d been waiting to rediscover that particular dog? Which kind of throws a tack amongst pedestrian ideas of linear progress, doesn’t it?

As long as I can remember I have found it hard to draw the divisions between animals and people that others find easy. I first became vegetarian at eleven, for example, simply because of a sudden realisation of the cruelty involved in any slaughter. (It’s been on and off since then. Oysters are usually my downfall.) Yet other people who are kind think nothing of chomping down on dead things, which I find mystifying. I suppose they just dwell on the deliciousness more than the morality.

The energy and diversity of animals make some of my poems motor along, to use inappropriate Top Gear terminology. ‘The elephant quits the room’ in the new suite, for example, is about an escape of animals used as metaphor from the stale menagerie of cliché. You will note that it contains the phrase ‘coconut-sized cliché’ which originally started as a reference to elephants’ testicles.  I awoke one night from uneasy dreams into the shadow of the knowledge, probably gleaned from David Attenborough, that elephants’ testicles are internal and therefore can not be seen, as can coconuts. Scurrying to Google, I confirmed that this was right. I decided to leave the image, as I liked it anyway. But it occurred to me that this is perhaps the modern definition of a poet: the person looking up elephants’ testicles at 2 a.m., for purely literary purposes.

INTERVIEWER

Another element that stood out to me in your poetry was a sense of play: wordplay, humour, puns and such. Is this an essential element for you when writing? And where should poetry and comedy meet?

COTTIER

Comedy is propping himself up at the bar. In saunters Poetry.  ‘Hey love, why the feminine ending?’ Boom boom and apologies.

When I look back — and I’ll soon be getting to the age where I’ll be expected to bore the shit out of ‘the young uns’ with that sort of phrase — I can remember no happier moment than playing in the sandpit of the neighbouring boy, with his cars. He wanted a proper game of broom broom here come the cops, whereas I wanted to bury the cars and pretend they were treasure. I have been beholden to play and pun ever since. (See?) Perhaps I believe there is an ideal joke somewhere, an ideal play of words, which will transport me into God’s sandpit, and all the special buried vehicles will be revealed. (Perhaps I don’t.)

But I find the prevalence of a certain type of poetry rather offputting. The smooth move from landscape to internal musing. The notion of the self as a strangely unsocial being (although I am an intensely private person myself). The overuse of words such inchoate and luminescence. It really is all bad, IMHO. I don’t want any of that in my own work; I want energy, frequent tickling and an occasional pinch. The natural world is there, but not, I hope, contemplation of it at leisure.

I have always preferred Shakespeare’s comedies, to his tragedies, with all the fervency that only a sometimes depressed person can generate. The notion that bleak and sad is more true than quirky or comic is rather adolescent, and often produces poetry that is only a hop skip and limp from ‘no-one loves me and the weather is crap’. No names will be mentioned.

Of all the literary competitions in Australia, the one I would most like to win is the Cricket Poetry Prize, which probably says a lot about my sometimes hidden love of sport, alongside less structured play. My poem ‘All the blond Jesuses’, from the new collection, began from noticing that Jesus is often depicted as a David Gower doppelgänger in stained glass windows, and then imagining him (Jesus, that is) or multiple hims, playing in a match. I hope this poem shows how play can also be serious.

Some great poetry can be produced within traditional forms, even today. But for me, play tends to lead me to free verse and tributes to forms such as the advertisement and the blog. I’m just so incredibly playful… It’s a duty. I’m like a Staffie after a stick, I sometimes think, totally oblivious to possible splinters. However, if play does ever become a tired trick, as one sees with superannuated comedians prostituting themselves for laughs, it’ll truly be time to put myself down.

INTERVIEWER

I feel like Canberra is another essential element, a character or a backdrop in a good portion your work. What’s it like being a poet in The Nation’s Capital?

COTTIER

When I first arrived in Canberra from Melbourne, about twenty years ago, I thought it was Mongolia without the comfort of yurts. I had not trained myself in the methods by which to recognise its worth. I literally didn’t see the beauty. Now I wonder round and gaze at the cockatoos and wattle and think original things like ‘this is pretty’ and ‘those hills are a fine sight’.

I am far more engaged in the world of poetry than I used to be, so perhaps the recognition of natural beauty is linked to my ability to write. (Careful, Penelope, you’ll be using the word ‘luminescence’ next…)

There is a slight divide between the worlds of poets who write primarily for the page, and those who write for performance in Canberra, and I am glad to see some movement between these worlds. One of the things that made me submit to Blemish Books, was frankly, the fact that it is run by people who have contacts with both these two worlds.

Looking away from Canberra, I am delighted that I am now part of the Tuesday Poem blog group, and have a poem published in New Zealand once a week. Most of my science fiction poetry is published in the United States, too.

INTERVIEWER

Everyone asks ‘what’s next?’ for their last question, but not me, not this time. Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you become a poet?

COTTIER

I was never destined to be an accountant, although I did try to be a lawyer for a little while, and that almost killed me. I have always written, but after having a baby and writing the PhD, I decided to try for more publication.

I became a poet, to answer the question a different way, because I am infested by words. I look at the world and can’t help but think of weird ways of describing it. I think I am slightly blessed with synaesthesia. Smelling a flower can transport me to where I last smelt that type of flower, and I can feel the dress I was wearing back then, or taste what I had been eating, and that sudden memory, while not necessarily forming the subject matter, energises the next poem.

So it’s a bit like Proust, but shorter. And with a lot more puns.

 *

Interviews with JC Inman and Joan Kerr, the other two poets in Triptych Poets 3 (click on the link to purchase the book), have their homes at Scissors Paper Pen  and on Virgule the blog of Voiceworks Magazine, respectively.

WORKING AN INVISIBLE THREAD: an interview with
Irma Gold

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

One of the great things about online journals is being able to keep in touch with the literary world’s movers and shakers, the people who work their arses off to make things happen for others.  Another great thing is being able to respond to what’s happening in various parts of Australia – and indeed around the globe – right here, right now.  Canberra-based Irma Gold is one of the literary world’s movers and shakers, a damn fine writer, and a completely delightful person to boot, which makes her a favourite in the Verity La community.  We know, we shouldn’t have favourites, but we do, so there you go.  We’ve caught up with Irma twice before: in July last year just before her first short story collection Two Steps Forward was published, and again in December to see how that book was travelling – the fact is, it’s been travelling very well indeed.  We’ve dropped Irma another line to see what’s happening for her this year.  Lots is the answer.  Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.  Disclosure: your humble Verity La servant is one of 70 or so writers who has work in the anthology Irma talks about; it’s an amazing honour.

INTERVIEWER

As Verity La has noted before, you may well be the busiest person in Australian literature. How’s life been since the publication of your wonderful short-story collection, Two Steps Forward (Affirm Press 2011)?

GOLD

Busy! I’ve been compiling an anthology of 100 years of Canberra writing, The Invisible Thread, which has pretty much taken over my life this year. We’re soon to embark on that exciting and frightening moment when it’s released into readers’ hands. In the meantime I’m filming a series of interviews with some of the authors and planning a number of different events for the anthology during Canberra’s centenary year. I’m particularly excited about Woven Words which is going to be a multi-arts event featuring three of The Invisible Thread authors – Alex Miller, Alan Gould and Sara Dowse – reading their work. The event will incorporate music from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra in response to the readings, as well as dance, film and visual art. We’re going to have an artist creating a painting live in response to Alex Miller’s reading. It’s an ambitious event and I can’t wait to see it all come together.  All The Invisible Thread work has squeezed out time for my own writing, but after six years I think I might have finally completed my debut novel. Maybe.

INTERVIEWER

Congratulations on completing that novel manuscript!  Let’s stay with The Invisible Thread for a bit.  Tell us more about how it’s been for you as an editor to work on a hundred years of one city’s literature, with that city just so happening to be Australia’s national capital.

GOLD

I hate to say, ‘It’s been an amazing journey’, because it makes me feel like a Biggest Loser contestant, but it really has.  It was a privilege and a pleasure working with the Advisory Committee; together we spent one year reading through the work of over 150 writers. I was able to explore writers who’d been on my ‘To Read’ list for years, discover those I’d not previously been aware of, and revisit those I already loved. The Advisory Committee had a series of meetings (fuelled by plenty of coffee and pastries) to discuss all the works. Sitting around a table with a group of such intelligent and passionate people was invigorating.

Once the committee had made their recommendations, I began making final selections. Since then I’ve exchanged thousands of emails and phone calls with some of Australia’s finest writers. It is quite something to be able to personally connect with writers whose work you have long admired. Like Les Murray, who is surely one of the loveliest and most generous writers in Australia (and the first person to send me a postcard with a grinning monkey on it). Or Marion Halligan who is astute and brilliant. Or Russell Erwin whose comedic yet poetic emails never failed to make me laugh. Or John Clanchy who always offered me some pearl of wisdom. Or Blanche d’Alpuget whose description of what Canberra is – as opposed to most people’s perception of what our capital is – just knocked my socks off with its clear insight. I could go on (and on).

Recently I have been interviewing some of the authors on film for a series to be released in the lead-up to The Invisible Thread’s launch, and I have found these conversations eminently fascinating. I have gained so much personally from editing this anthology, and I obviously hope that readers will also gain much. And I do hope the anthology helps dispel the myth that Canberra is a boring place where nothing happens. Our nation’s capital is a literary powerhouse; a meeting place for ideas and imagination. This anthology attests to that.

INTERVIEWER

The anthology has a fair amount of financial support, including a grant from artsACT, the ACT Government’s arts funding agency, but you decided to start a Pozible campaign.  Why go down that path?  And how have you found crowd-funding in the context of literary publishing?

GOLD

We’ve been very fortunate to receive funding from a number of organisations, including the Centenary of Canberra, Paperchain Bookstore in Manuka ACT and property developers the Molonglo Group, but we were still slightly short of the funds required to print the anthology.  In launching a Pozible campaign we decided to set a target that would also allow us to pay the filmmaker of the interview series and the authors for appearances at our scheduled events.

Crowd-funding has proved to be very successful for a number of arts organisations and it seemed like the most appropriate way to address our shortfall. With Pozible, supporters pledge an amount (we’ve had donations as small as $10 and as large as $1000) and at the campaign’s end the donations are processed. But there’s a catch. If the target isn’t reached the organisation doesn’t receive a cent. We’ve got just eight days to go and are keeping everything crossed in the hope that we reach our $5000 target in time.

One of the unexpected side benefits of the Pozible campaign has been that in talking to people about the anthology we’ve witnessed how supportive the community is of our project. That’s been very heartening.

INTERVIEWER

Fingers crossed the campaign gets there! Back in July last year, I asked you how you keep together the various strands of your writing life; you replied, ‘there are times when it feels like there are too many balls in the air and things get a bit stressful. But mostly it all seems to work and I’m grateful that I get to do what I love.’ Do you still feel this way?  Or does the juggle simply get harder and harder?

GOLD

Ha! This is where words come back to bite! I still feel that way in the sense that I haven’t let work eat into my time with the kids (though at this point my husband would grumble about the number of evenings he’s lost me to the laptop), but not in the sense that I’ve had very little time for my own writing this year. I’m not just the Editor of The Invisible Thread, I’m also the Project Manager, which means I’m doing everything from organising sponsorship and social media to planning events and a book-trailer – and a whole lot more besides. And then I have these ‘great’ ideas that I can’t resist – like filming the author interview series – which take up even more time. At one point I hadn’t even looked at my novel in six months, which was frustrating because it was so close to being finished; I only needed a few dedicated weeks. On the up-side when I did finally get that time, I came to it with a fresh and critical eye. In the meantime I’ve accepted that I’m not going to get much time to do my own writing until next year. And that’s okay. It’s not ideal, but it’s okay, because working on The Invisible Thread – anthologising the work of a city in a way that has never been done in Australia before – has been an incomparable experience.

INTERVIEWER

When all is said and done, what drives you?

GOLD

Growing up my dad always told us kids, ‘Do what you love no matter what.’ We understood this to mean even if it’s tough or there’s no money in it (I obviously took the ‘no money’ bit a little too seriously). Dad trained to become a lawyer because it was his dad’s unfulfilled dream, and he loathed it. When he was married with two small children, he took the courageous step of returning to university for five years to become an osteopath. At the time we had no money, my mum was trying to manage my dad’s freelance work as a solicitor to make ends meet, juggling phone calls with kids in the background and trying to pretend she was in an office. But they did it and Dad is now an internationally-respected osteopath, which is because he’s passionate about what he does. We grew up against the backdrop of this story and it gave me and my five brothers unconditional freedom to find and pursue what made us happy. We have all gone in different directions (they work in the areas of physics, medicine, arts management, biology and architecture) and I’m sure this is because of Dad’s fearless example. That’s a very longwinded way of saying that what drives me is love for what I do. I’ve never had a master plan; one thing has led to the next to the next. Without writing and editing I probably wouldn’t be much fun to be around.

*

If you’d like to support Irma and The Invisible Thread project, here’s that link again for the Pozible campaign.  There are some amazing goodies on offer, including VIP invitations to some of the extraordinary events mentioned in this interview.

THE LONG RIDE: an interview with Denise Young

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

Ever had an idea for a story that became a highly prized novel that became a highly acclaimed movie with an A-list star?  Think it never happens?  Well, it does happen, because it happened to Denise Young.

Denise Young was born in Sydney, though she spent some eighteen years living in London, Wellington, Adelaide and Perth. In 1986 she came back home to Sydney for good. Her background is in both academia and theatre, where she’s worked as a teacher, actress and director. She began writing plays in the mid-eighties, as well as creating theatre pieces with actors’ companies and directing a youth theatre team. In 2000 she turned to writing prose and her first novel, The Last Ride, was published by HarperCollins in 2004, after winning a Varuna/HarperCollins Award in 2002. The novel won the NSW Premier’s Prize for a First Novel in 2005, was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award in the same year, and was shortlisted for the SA Festival Awards in 2006, amongst other awards. A film of the book, with script by Mac Gudgeon and starring Hugo Weaving, was released in 2009. Young has taught writing workshops and at community colleges, and lives on the coast south of Sydney with her husband Paul, with whom she has three grown up children.

Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.

INTERVIEWER

Where did you get the original idea for your novel The Last Ride?

YOUNG

The Last Ride had a particularly long gestation period. I was working as an actor in Perth and a Theatre Arts teacher at Curtin University, writing and improvising plays with students when I began going into Fremantle Prison as a volunteer, teaching literacy and also, rather disastrously, drama. We had one session where we played one of the drama games that always went down well with students: it was called the swearing game where you had to conduct any ordinary transaction and at the end of each sentence add a swear word. Middle class students loved the licence it gave them, the freeing up, ‘anything goes’ atmosphere but in a maximum security prison it nearly led to a serious assault and closed down the drama classes. Despite this setback, I met many men in there like Kev, the anti-hero of my novel, and one in particular who was studying for his University Entrance exam to whom I taught English. I really enjoyed how strongly somebody with no formal education responded to the poetry of John Donne, for example. This man, like Kev, was part-Aboriginal but had no living connection with Aboriginality or any of his family.

I became too close to this man for anybody’s comfort and the teaching and the relationship came to an end, but I never forgot the stories he told me, and how, despite his high intelligence, he seemed forced to keep re-creating his own miserable, neglected and abused past, without the resources or training to change. I hoped rather naively that a relationship with me might change things but that was not the case.  For a long while afterwards I wrote plays in which this character featured, but though some of them were workshopped, none of them ever was given a main-stage production. Perhaps it was too soon. I think material that comes out as part of a creative work needs time to mature like wine and this story needed to work through from a conscious to a subconscious level.

Back home in Sydney, with a new partner and children, I did some emergency fostering of children whose life experience and development were often as harsh and neglected as the guy in Perth. One night the kids were watching a TV program, now defunct, with real life crimes re-enacted and a call for the public to watch out for certain wanted criminals. There was a story about a father and son on the run after a murder and the picture of the child was so angelic and that of his father so brutal that I began to ask myself questions about that relationship: what might have caused the murder, what precipitated the escape, why would you drag a kid through that, what would it be like to be a child on the run? I started to write about what I already knew of those lives. Finally I’d found a way into the material I’d been playing with in the theatre, but now I was out of the theatre for good, I decided to write the story as prose. It took a long time even then for such a short novel; I began writing it as a crime story, a police procedural, I think they call the genre, but wasn’t happy till I ended up telling it from the point of view of the ‘innocent’ in the story: the child.

INTERVIEWER

The prose in The Last Ride is paired right back to the very essence, short sentences, basic words, which connect the reader to that innocent child, often with devastating effect.  What was the process of getting the writing to that point?

YOUNG

It was hard at first to find the style for the book because I didn’t want it to read like a child’s book, but rather a book where the child’s viewpoint is in the foreground, while over his shoulder the adult can see further. I struggle anyway with lyrical writing but know that a fiction writer needs to employ words that let the reader see things in a new and fresh way. What I ended up doing was really pushing the observational qualities of the prose, where the writer regularly stops to see/smell/hear/taste/feel so that the experience comes through for the reader as a strongly sensual one. I did this as if I was an eleven-year-old-boy. I have had three children and fostered more, so I did feel quite in touch with that childlike state of being. Also I came from a background as an actor, where thinking like somebody else was part of the job.

Using Chook’s dreams helped to convey a lot of emotional anxiety and highlight the way he’s slowly working out a strategy to deal with impossible things. I tried to make the verbs and adjectives work hard too. For example in this passage, which I opened at random, the adjective ‘haunted’ before ‘face’ allows me to draw that out in the next sentence in the way a child might: ‘When Kev has his smoke rolled, he sees him bring the match up to light it, the flame showing his haunted face. He looks as if a bad dream has come true and he needs someone to be there for him in the night.’

In the beginning there were lots of more sophisticated expressions and metaphors left over from earlier drafts and I let go some of the more hard-won of those with regret, but I ended up thinking it was more alive when I found an appropriate child-wise view. The more I wrote and re-wrote the more I found myself slipping into Chook’s voice rather than my own. I’m writing memoir now and am finding it even harder to write as myself!

INTERVIEWER

The Last Ride went on to bag an impressive range of accolades, including being long-listed for the Miles Franklin and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Novel), both in 2005.  What was it like going from that subconscious level that you mentioned earlier to the very open world of publication and prize-winning?

YOUNG

The move into the open occurred a bit before 2005. In 2002 I’d been working on the book for two years and had made the change to the child’s point of view but had a very rudimentary plot line; I knew father and son were on the run but where to and what might happen on the way were still up in the air when I was selected to be part of a mentored group of new writers at Varuna, The Writers’ House. Peter Bishop was then a very dynamic director of Varuna. The four-day session was led by Tegan Bennett Daylight and involved five writers sharing current drafts of each others’ work. This was agony in prospect, as I was sure mine was the worst and that I’d be exposed as a charlatan.

The first day at Varuna I met Tegan with her head in the fridge looking for something. Over her shoulder she tossed out a remark that she thought my work was good and should find a publisher. That astonishing revelation stayed with me throughout the session, boosted my confidence and drew out of me a massive number of words which I wrote in the studio that Eleanor Dark once occupied. There were also many helpful plot suggestions from the other members of the group, one of whom went on to have her work published after mine (and far more commercially successfully: she created a crime series based on her experiences as an ambulance driver, which has been sold in many countries). After that session, I applied for and was given an ongoing mentorship with Charlotte Wood, who read and fed back suggestions over about three further months, till I won a Varuna/Harpercollins Award in 2003. They published the book a year later in 2004.

All of this is to say that the privacy, the dreaming, the subconscious workings had already given way to a more open process by the time of publication. Maybe this would not suit everyone and I don’t seek it now, but at the time I was so unsure of what I had created that it was exactly what I needed. I’m sure that the support of Tegan and Charlotte, the questions they posed and the shape they encouraged, made it a better book than if I’d carried on writing in total privacy. I found publication uncomfortable and exposed, of course, but it’s never hard to get used to winning or being shortlisted for a prize!

INTERVIEWER

Not only did the novel come up trumps in the prizes, you were also informed that The Last Ride was going to be made into a film.  Tell us about that process of your book becoming something that would be shown on the silver screen.

YOUNG

Once my book was contracted in late 2003 for publication in 2004, I set about ‘the next’, not realising that process was going to take a long time and lead down several disappointing rabbit holes. Fascinated by the Afghan Mosque in Broken Hill, which I’d discovered doing research for The Last Ride, I was in Coober Pedy about to go on a camel trip, thinking of writing a historical novel about those early Muslim non-settlers, when I made a phone call home and found out my novel had been optioned for a film. The Cameron Creswell Agency, which represented me, also represented some film directors and one of them, Nick Cole, had read and wanted to make a film of The Last Ride. I was stunned, madly imagined vast wealth coming my way, then settled down to ride a camel for five days on the Oodnadatta Track. When I got back I read the contract, which specified that I was selling the rights, lock stock and smoking barrel to the film-maker and that my only option if I disliked the film was to have my name taken off it as the writer of the novel on which it was based. I guess if I’d been a better-known writer I might have had more clout in keeping some control of the script, as, say, Luke Davies did with the film Candy. Anyway, I signed it and discovered the proposed payments were very, very small, only rising to a decent sum when the film was actually made, if that ever occurred. My agent told me to forget about it and get on with ‘the next’.

Meanwhile Nick Cole set about getting funding, which depended on finding a screen-writer with sufficient cred to attract funds, then a director, ditto, then a lead actor, ditto. So the whole process went on for about five years with only occasional eruptions of information, though, to be fair, the screen-writer Mac Gudgeon from Melbourne did show me both the first and a later draft of the film as a courtesy. None of those contained the ending of the final film, as that was changed as they went along. Once a director, Glendyn Ivin, came along and then Hugo Weaving, the funding was assured in quite a short time, and they proceeded to make the film in South Australia because they were promised funding from the South Australian Film Commission and an opening at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2009.

I spent a day on-set and really enjoyed watching scenes not very different from those I’d written come alive. I thought the acting was excellent. The opening night in Adelaide by contrast was miserable. Watching the completed film I felt it was too bleak, I missed the alleviating whimsy and innocence of the child’s point of view and felt that the ending was too sad. They’d elongated the chase, which I knew about, but I thought they’d turned Chook into a harder person by the end, more like his father, and while the book’s ending was perhaps less dramatic and final, I preferred that sense that it wasn’t all over. The screenwriter struggled with the fact that so much of the book was a kind of interior monologue, didn’t want to have voice-over as a solution. I thought his dialogue was more muscular than mine in many ways and I admired a great deal about the film-script.

I watched it five times in cinemas with audiences and each time felt at the end that audiences were overwhelmed by the film and wanted more relief. It has, however, always had really good critical reviews and is still going along now with an American release. I guess, finally, I prefer my book, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

INTERVIEWER

To finish on a question about the present, with a nod towards the future: What have you taken from this rather extraordinary experience into your most recent projects?

YOUNG

My most recent project has been a non-fiction one about jade in New Zealand, which includes a memoir of my time in New Zealand as an actor in the seventies as well as some travel writing. If there was a remote likelihood of a film being made again I think I would keep a closer grip on it. As far as the writing goes, I have been less dependent on other people’s input and more trusting of my own instincts, but that may be because I am not writing fiction. In some ways what I am doing at the moment is more like journalism, which trawls more on the surface and doesn’t expose quite so much about me. Perhaps that’s what attracts me about my current subject matter!

BE FONZIE: an interview with Sean M Whelan

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns

Poet, performer and DJ, hardly covers it when introducing Sean M Whelan.  He is convener of the famous Melbourne open-mic night, Babble, and co-inventor and curator of the popular Liner Notes gigs. He is also the spoken-word front-man of The Interim Lovers and author of Tattooing the Surface of the Moon (Small Change Press, 2008).  Nathan Curnow asks him about poetry, performance, keeping cool, and about which of the Rolling Stones he’d let eat his brain.

 INTERVIEWER

So Sean, no questions about writing routines, your writing space or where you find ideas, just some straight up talk about life as a performer. To me you’re the hardest working man in Spoken Word, rarely a week goes by when you’re not on stage with either Isnod or the Interim Lovers, add to that festival appearances, Liner Notes, plus your Super Poets gigs. I guess I’m in awe of how you do it, how you live it so consistently, seeing as I find the prep and lead up of just one gig a month totally exhausting. I’ve been reading a lot about the Rolling Stones lately and I found this quote from their ex-manager, Marshall Chess. I’m interested in your reaction to it.

Marshall Chess: ‘The blues guys not only needed $s, they need the applause of fifty people even if it was only in a small bar. The Stones love that shit. Because the feeling on stage is like being held in your mother’s arms.  It’s the power. The only time they feel alive is when they’re on stage.’

WHELAN

Marshall Chess talks about need and power in terms of live performance and I can certainly relate to that. I was talking to somebody recently about playing Australian Rules football when I was a teenager and how much I really miss that, sometimes. In fact, I dream I’m playing football quite often and it’s always quite exhilarating to me when I do and I’m a little disappointed to wake from it. There was something I got from football that I don’t get from any other part of my life now. It was the combination of the rush of adrenalin and physicality and achieving something through camaraderie. The closest I get to the rush I got from football now is through performing live. Especially when performing with music, either with The Interim Lovers, or Isnod. I wouldn’t say the only time I feel alive is when I’m on stage. But when I’m on stage, that particular feeling of being alive is unique to that experience. There’s nothing else quite like it, that’s for sure. And I don’t always mean that in a good way.

It’s about being inside that moment for the duration of the performance, but it’s also about being outside of it at the same time. The inside element is about being true to the poem. It’s your chance to deliver the poem exactly as you intended it to be heard, and that’s a privilege. My favourite performers are the ones who treat that as a privilege.

The privilege being that, as the performer and simultaneously, the creator, you get to deliver every nuance and cadence and rise and fall exactly as you intended it when it ran through your head as you were writing it.

The outside element is being aware of your effect upon a room. Having that spatial awareness of the impact your voice makes as it traverses a room. Picking up on the audience reaction is a skill that the best performers have.

Also adding to the adrenalin rush of performing are the dreaded unknowns. What exactly is going to happen up there? Will the audience shut the hell up? One of the most humiliating things for a poet is to perform to a room full of people who are ignoring you, or deep in conversation with each other. Musicians have to deal with this all the time, but it’s different for poets, because in most cases it’s just you and your voice, you don’t have music to cushion the blow of being ignored. The naked voice demands attention and respectful silence, without it, the poet tumbles into the FAIL abyss. There are other unknowns too. My greatest source of anxiety (and adrenalin) as a performer is when I do material from memory. Will I remember everything? This causes me so much anguish. It’s amazing what nerves can do to the mind. It’s a totally different situation performing your poem in your bedroom at home to being on stage in front of a room full of people and sometimes words just… disappear. The trick is to keep your cool, don’t lose your bottle, be Fonzie. The audience usually don’t know your poems that well that they’ll probably even notice if you skip a line. So when you forget, wait a second, if it doesn’t come, then move on to the next part. Of course that’s easier said than done, because when I forget a line I feel the prickles on my forehead and the cold sweat breaking out. I have had some terrible times on stage, due to the unknowns turning into an unexpected and unwanted direction. But I’ve forgotten most of them. None of them have ruined me, yet. And the triumphs fortify the soul, at least for a night.

 INTERVIEWER

Jeez, I could wrap the interview up right there.  There’s so much in that.  Spot on.  Hey, if I appeared in your football dreams what position would you play me?  And remember the time I asked you to choose your top seven poets, the ones you would take to save a town like in Seven Samurai?  Well in terms of the ‘naked voice’ alone, nothing to do with their writing or performance skills (although I know it’s hard to separate all that), whose voices do you like at present?  Because it’s such an important element don’t you think?  Whose vocal chords do you find instantly appealing?

WHELAN

Oh, you wanna be in on my football poetry team? You’d be a star recruit, Nathan. I reckon I’d put you in the forward pocket. I see you as a kind of Chris Johnson like figure (ex. Fitzroy/Brisbane Lions). A dazzling goal sneak confounding opponents with supernatural skills and the cunning instincts of a fox, (a fox who knows his way around a football and the odd turn of phrase.)

Now, voice? Yeah, that’s something I get off on. I remember a few years back I was at a spoken word festival in Montreal, the Festival Voix d’Amériques, and they had a late night open mic going. 90% of it was in French. I don’t understand a word of French but I really enjoyed going along to it every night just because of the voices. You can get a lot from a poem just from the way it sounds. The heart of the poem’s intention can sometimes be completely communicated just through tone and delivery. It also helped I guess that French is a very sexy language.

One of my favourite poetic voices is a North American writer/performer by the name of Anis Mojgani. Mojgani would be widely considered a Slam Poet. I first saw him at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club, I think he’s relocated to Portland now. I find that North American Slam Poetry can be a little formulaic sometimes, in its delivery anyway, if we’re talking about voices. The poems often start off quiet and then slow build into a loud rant of some description. What I love about Mojgani is that he doesn’t really follow that formula. I find it hard to describe exactly what it is I love about his voice. It has this unique gentle earthly elegance about it. He has a brilliant sense of pace and timing too, which is very important when it comes to reading work aloud.

 INTERVIEWER

Hey thanks for putting me in the forward line.  Time to have a break soon and suck on some orange quarters.  But before we do that, thanks for the lead on Anis Mojgani.  I hadn’t heard of him before so I’ve been checking him out.  I love how he saves this poem when he breaks down and forgets it halfway through.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Anis+Mojgani+youtube&docid=1576435581698&mid=9B52707F90B1BBB853709B52707F90B1BBB85370&view=detail&FORM=VIRE1

And yes, French is a sexy language.  But yeah, it’s hard to pin down what we like about certain voices.  I think essentially it comes down to breath.  The most compelling voices seem to have mastered that somehow.  I often think of Ginsberg’s quote about Bob Dylan:

‘He had become at one with, or became identical with, his breath. Dylan had become a column of air so to speak, where his total physical and mental focus was this single breath coming out of his body. He had found a way in public to be almost like a shaman with all of his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath.’ Allan Ginsberg, 2006

We could talk more about that or about ‘formulaic’ Spoken Word but you know I can’t let you get out of here until we discuss love.  Your work often focuses upon it, as well as memory and loss.  To me you are the quintessential voice of Melbourne heart and heartbreak.   Tell me about the first love poem you ever wrote.

WHELAN

I can’t really remember the first love poem I ever wrote, although it was probably contained somewhere within the first love letter I ever wrote to a high school crush. I don’t remember all of its contents now (thankfully) but I do remember some of it being extremely cringeworthy—something about living without you is like living without air. I like to think that my love letters and poems have improved since then.

One of my earlier love poems that I’m still quite fond of is a piece called Elvis Tears. I think I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver at the time so his influence is stamped quite clearly upon it. The setting is a man and a woman sitting inside a car. They’re very close friends but he has just confessed to having strong romantic feelings for her and it hasn’t gone as well as he hoped. He is dropping her off at her house and he is concerned that perhaps there is a new lover waiting inside for her. He really doesn’t want to lose her. It starts raining and she tells a story passed onto her by her mother about the rain being the tears of Elvis Presley falling down on us all. “That man will never stop crying.”

I heard it said once that all poems are love poems. And really, what other reason is there? Love is such a powerful force and universal source of motivation behind most things we do, that even the act of not speaking of it, becomes an act of love in itself. The absence of love, becomes a lament, without even trying. Or maybe I write so many damn love poems because I’ve been so chronically unsuccessful at it, maybe it’s the equivalent to taking a watch apart in a desperate attempt to find out how it works? I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about anything and least of all about writing. I came into the game pretty late I guess, at least professionally speaking. I started writing when I was in my early twenties but I only really showed it to friends at first.  They all liked it, but I didn’t really believe them. It was mostly pretty generous portraits of them, so they would say it was good! It took me quite a while to get my writing out into the general public. I’ve been plagued by self-doubt and a general lack of confidence most of my life. I think I was past thirty when I did my first reading. But even after all this time when I sit down to write it still fills me with dread and fear. The fear is not really knowing how this shit works. I don’t subscribe to the theory of only writing when ‘inspired’, you have to just sit down and do it, like a job. But writing to me, is like turning up to work every day and not knowing if you’ll get your heart broken or not.

 INTERVIEWER

From your answer here alone I think it’s safe to say that you know more than you think you know, especially about love, lament… and watches.

‘… even the act of not speaking it becomes an act of love in itself…’

Your line above reminds me of something the character Lucius Hunt says to his mother in Shyamalan’s The Village. (A good movie overall despite some flaws, but I don’t care if you like it because you didn’t even like Hugo!!!)

Alice Hunt: And what makes you think that he has feelings for me?

Lucius Hunt: The way he never touches you.

The smallest gestures can be the most powerful/telling, and sometimes the absence of those gestures says just as much.  It’s all related.  So I’m glad you mentioned Elvis Tears because the poem is full of these small moments.  I love listening to how you craft things.  It’s a beautiful portrait loaded with ache and yearning.   http://www.myspace.com/seanmwhelan/music/songs/elvis-tears-38204795  Finally, I want to mention the Rolling Stones photo exhibition we both went to last night. I’m glad you came along because the portraits were cool but some of the showbiz types at the launch were intense (ie. business cards, close talking and the constant referencing of their past productions). And when they invited us to go to their monthly showbiz lunch I half suspect they were asking if we would like to be their lunch.

So my last question is on a lighter note… if all the Rolling Stones turned into Zombies which one would you like to eat your brains? I’d have to go with Charlie Watts because he’s always looked like he could use a good feed.

WHELAN

Mmm, well I probably would have immediately said Keith Richards, just because he’s… well, he’s Keith Richards! Right? But Keef kinda pissed me off a little after I read his biography, which is mostly a brilliant read, except for the part when he dropped a rock on the shell of a snapping turtle, because, he claimed ‘Goddamn, it’s you or me, pal.’ Really Keef? A turtle was that much of a threat to a gnarly old rock and roller like you? In fact after reading Life none of the Stones come off appearing as particularly nice except for Charlie! But I think in a pinch I’d choose Mick Jagger as my zombie brain-eater because I’m hoping that those big luscious lips may cushion some of the pain of having my brains sucked out of my skull. Happy?

OUTSIDE THE LINES:
an interview with John Clanchy

Posted on June 6, 2012 by verityla in Lighthouse Yarns

If you haven’t heard of John Clanchy then Verity La is going to fix that.  Clanchy was born in Melbourne in 1943, but has lived in Canberra, working as a counsellor and academic at the Australian National University, since 1975. Clanchy has published nine volumes of fiction (five novels and three collections), as well as many uncollected short stories in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. His stories have won many awards, in Australia, Europe, the US and New Zealand. His novel The Hard Word won the 2003 ACT book of the Year in 2003, and his collection of stories Vincenzo’s Garden won both the same prize in 2006 and the Steele Rudd Award the year before. In addition to literary fiction, Clanchy has co-authored two detective thrillers with Mark Henshaw If God Sleeps and And Hope to Die, both now appearing in French and German. His most recent collection Her Father’s Daughter, five long stories dealing with the complex and often fraught relations between fathers and daughters, was published in 2008.  Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.

 INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing? And what was the original motivation?

 CLANCHY

I guess there are two ways of answering these questions, both relevant to what happens later.  I first began to write – in the simplest sense of beginning to form my letters – in Grade One under the fearsome eye of a very tall Irish nun with a wart on one cheek, in an ugly red and cream brick building on the outskirts of north-western Melbourne in 1948. This was the parish church school of St Raphael’s in West Preston where we were ‘learnt’ for sixpence a week, and beyond it lay the open fields and farms which became the suburbs of Reservoir and Regent. There were sixty of us in one perpetually chilly classroom and we wrote in cheap, lined exercise books with narrow black lines for making small letters and more expansive blue lines for big letters.  My motivation for writing back then was pure fear. Sister Xaveria roamed the rows of desks like a malevolent mobile metronome, a heavy wooden ruler flicking left and right in her hand and cracking the knuckles of any child stupid – or simply cold – enough to go outside the lines. This was the first lesson I learnt about writing: you’ll come to no harm so long as you don’t go outside the lines.

At the age of eleven my father rescued me from the nuns and sent me to the Jesuits.  Here we learnt Latin, the language of the Church, and one clearly superior in every respect to English. We learnt to parse, to break sentences into their constituent parts and classify them.  We learnt to write essays – usually on social, historical or ethical topics – never poems or stories since these were frivolous forms of self-expression. The purpose of education was to master what had been said by scholars through the ages, not to give vent to our own callow thoughts or feelings.  An essentially mandarin education.

I was quite a stupid child and accepted all of this on faith. I was in fact so slow that it wasn’t until the middle of a Classics examination at the end of my second year at Melbourne University that I looked up for a moment from the tasks I was engaged in – composing a sonnet in Latin in Vergilian alexandrines, and translating into the Latin of the Age of Augustus the back page of the previous weekend’s Melbourne Herald newspaper, most of it, as I remember, cricket results and a long account of a golf match – and asked myself, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I switched the following year to English language and literature, and began doing bits and pieces of my own writing, which always seemed to involve going outside the lines, though it was years before I gathered the courage to show anything to anyone else, even friends.

So – to get, finally, to the real point of your question – I was a very late starter in the business of writing and publishing stories. I was probably thirty-five before I settled to it seriously, and I’ve been caught up in a love-hate relationship with the practice ever since.  My motivation? Two-fold, I guess. First, an inward, inexplicable pressure to get stuff down (there was a lot of personal turmoil in my life at the time and writing stories about it and about my life to that point – autobiographical material, family stories – proved a way of releasing that pressure and also a way of objectifying things which troubled and puzzled me and which no other form of expression offered).  I had tried poetry but found that every poem I wrote was a tired echo of what I had studied or read. 

Second, I wanted to become part of the community of those people whom I admired most in the world – writers – and that was the reason I began, very hesitantly, to show a few of them my work, and it was through them that I got both initial encouragement and later entrées to publication.

  INTERVIEWER

From fear and writing between the lines, to community and writing outside the lines – might that be every writer’s journey.  Despite starting ‘late’, as you say, you’ve achieved a remarkable publishing record. Ultimately, what does publication mean to you?

 CLANCHY

When I first draft a story I never think about publication; in fact, it may even be dangerous to have thoughts of/desire for publication at the forefront of one’s mind. You may be tempted to tailor your story to notions of what is acceptable – to contemporary readers, to editors, to what is in fashion at the time – instead of attending to the organic demands of the narrative you’ve set in motion. Stories have their own inherent requirements – in length, in structure, in voice – and writing to external ‘public’ requirements can falsify the relation between a writer and their material.  I’m talking here about getting your story out and down in a satisfactory form in the first place. I’m not saying you shouldn’t think about the reader at all; naturally you should, as in any form of communication. The crucial thing is when you do so.

For me, the reader swims into view when I feel I’ve understood the story I’m telling, and I’ve got it down in a form that is vaguely approximate to my original intention.  In other words, thinking about the ‘receivers’ of the story occurs for me only in the revision and editing stages, and issues of ‘signalling’, of style, of clarifying language etc then become important. Until that point, the story is private, not ‘public’ and the only reader is the perfect Platonic reader, who is, I guess, in fact a shadowy, mythic projection of the writer’s self anyway.

More practically, publication is important to me for four reasons.

First, when all is said and done writing is ultimately an act of communication and even if publication means reaching as few as a dozen readers, then the circle of intentionality is nonetheless satisfactorily completed in reaching them.  I’m talking about creative writing here, not the consciously ‘private‘ writing of, say, a diary. Writing which never reaches anyone else seems discouragingly incomplete to me.

Second, there is an undeniable thrill in seeing one’s work made public, arising partly out of vanity (That’s me/There’s my name in print), and partly out of a genuine and reasonable pride at having created something that didn’t exist before (You see that? I made that).  It’s the same pride as that felt by any maker: a composer, say, or a skilled cabinet-maker.

Third, beyond the initial thrill there is a deeper satisfaction in knowing that others value what you have made.  Most writers are congenitally self-doubting, and writing can – in the act – often be more miserable than exhilarating. Getting published is a vindication of all the hard days.

Finally, if you’re lucky you might even get paid for your work. Inevitably any money you do make simply gets ploughed back into further writing (‘buying time’) – but that’s one of the ways you know you’re a writer in the first place.

  INTERVIEWER

Is there a story or publication of which you are especially pleased, perhaps even proud?  If so, why?

CLANCHY

I suppose the story I should be most pleased with is the novel The Hard Word. It gained some good reviews; it won the ACT book of the year and was shortlisted for other awards.  And it does have some worthy features: it’s a complex, cross-generational story, and it addresses a range of important contemporary social issues, including the phenomenon of aged dementia (Alzheimer’s), the plight of refugee and migrant under-classes in Australia, as well as the issue of work-life-family balance for women.  Technically too it meant an advance in my writing: I wondered whether I could write a multi-layered story (i.e. with vertical levels – thematic, generational) but combine it at the same time with an onward driving narrative (the ‘horizontal’ level, which essentially is provided by the progressive decline and eventual death of Grandma Vera).   And I thought I pulled this ‘double-axis’ story off with reasonable success and with a degree of humour – a fair achievement, given the potential grimness of the content.

But actually, you know, the stories writers are deeply (privately) pleased with are often different from the most ‘worthy’ or well-regarded ones. The story of mine I’m privately most proud of is Lessons from the Heart, which is the sequel to The Hard Word. This novel appeared, received a couple of pleasant reviews and disappeared without trace in a matter of a couple of months.  In a recent reading group about a different book, one of the participants said to me: ‘You know, I think your best writing is in Lessons from the Heart. What I don’t understand is how a nearly seventy year old male can get inside the mind of a seventeen year old girl like that – let alone sustain it for 300 pages.’

It’s the nicest thing any reader has ever said to me.