THE THINGLINESS OF THINGS: an interview with Jen Webb and Paul Hetherington
Posted on July 17, 2015 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
The scholar who admits to taking images on her phone when tipsy. The poet who exhibits his work in art galleries. A little capital city that was boldly designed from the ground up. And the book the three of them have created. No, this is not the start of a joke; it’s a very serious business. (Well, mostly.)
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. She has published 18 books, some creative, most of them scholarly, with several translated and republished for Chinese, Korean and Indian readerships. Her scholarly work for the most part deals with art, visual culture, and representation. She also makes and exhibits artist books, incorporating her photographs and fragments of creative writing, and has published and performed her poetry across Australia and New Zealand, and in Canada, the UK and the USA.
Paul Hetherington has previously published eight full-length collections of poetry, three poetry chapbooks and a collaborative book of poetry and digital imagery with Anita Fitton. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards (poetry) and was a finalist in the 2014 international Aesthetica Creative Writing Competition. He was also shortlisted for the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize and the 2013 Montreal International Poetry prize. In 2014 he was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome. He is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) there.
What is it that they have created? And why?
Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone
INTERVIEWER
Congratulations on the publication of Watching the World: impressions of Canberra (Blemish Books, 2015). It’s a beautifully produced collection of images and poems focussing on one of the world’s most intriguing designed cities – in a way it is both a unique coffee-table anthology and an exploration of a place. What was the motivation for the book?
WEBB
The motivation was the Centenary of Canberra, 2013: the celebration of a hundred years since the establishment of Australia’s national capital. There’s a lovely line in a Dorothy Porter poem: ‘Imagine a city/where it’s mostly/imagine’ (from ‘On Reading EM Forster’s Guide to Alexandria’, in her collection The Bee Hut, Black Inc., 2009). A small group of us here at the University of Canberra wanted to put on an exhibition as part of the Centenary celebrations, and riffing off Dorothy’s line, we called the exhibition Imagine Canberra.
Paul and I decided we would do a collaborative poetry + photography piece, works that reflected our own personal and idiosyncratic Canberra(s), and we exhibited these in little balsa-wood cheese boxes, their circular shape mirroring Canberra’s endlessly circling roads, and the great circles on the Griffin-Mahoney designs of Canberra. Getting the work together forced us to spend quite a bit of time moving around in, looking at, and thinking about this place: at once our hometown, and the government centre of the country.
We showed the work twice: in the Belconnen Arts Centre, as part of Imagine Canberra, and again at a creative writing conference held at the end of 2013. By this point we had come (a) to really like the ideas in the work and (b) to want to improve it – change the saturation in the photos, for instance; sharpen up some of the lines of poetry; develop it all a bit more.
HETHERINGTON
Jen has nicely summed up how the exhibition and publication got underway, and what we then did. It was a chance to extend my collaborative work with a poet and artist I admire a great deal – and someone who is a very supportive and generous colleague, too. I thought Jen’s photographs for this project were wonderfully engaging from the first time she showed me a few of them – representing views of Canberra, a national capital, that were at once intimate, observant, unexpected, and full of the quotidian stuff of the city.
Yet, this was not so much the quotidian doings of Canberra’s citizens – although Jen’s images do represent those doings in judicious and creative ways. The images captured the quotidian life of the city itself as expressed in buildings, places, monuments, scenes and occasions. There are large views and vistas, and small, exquisite details. Some of the images have a relaxed and deceptive apparent casualness that welcomes the viewer while being sharply observant.
They were superb images to work with as a poet; and posed the challenge: how shall I find words that will have their own life and poetic structures while also complementing Jen’s visual imagery, and which will create some sort of implicit dialogue between image and poem? I did not wish my poems to be ekphrastic or descriptive works; I wanted them to be companion pieces; pieces that spoke to what Jen had seen and made; and which saw and were made differently, but in strongly connected ways. The original project title, ‘Circles and Intersections’, acknowledged this process – of the way we both circled and intersected with each other’s work, and its creative imaginings; how we didn’t try to find too many straight lines of connection; how we made a book that celebrates the circuitous and lateral connections that Canberra as a designed city embodies and expresses in various ways for all of its occupants – and for visitors, too.
In such ways, the book is certainly an exploration of place; and it is an exploration of how seeing double sometimes has a multiplying effect. Our joined imaginings about Canberra are an attempt to provide multiple perspectives that arise from the nearly simultaneous consideration of laterally related visual and verbal imagery.
INTERVIEWER
The Porter line about cities and imagination seems fantastically appropriate to Canberra, especially when paired with the stated ambition of Walter Burley Griffin, the American landscape architect Walter Burley Griffin who, in collaboration with Marion Mahony Griffin, won the international design competition for Australia’s national capital: ‘I have planned a city that is not like any other in the world.’ I wonder if you both could talk more about the intersection between the urban imagination – or the imagination of the urban – and the visual/poetic imagination. By this I mean, do you believe there is a direct link between Canberra being a place of such imaginative deliberation and how you produced the work in Watching the World?
HETHERINGTON
That’s a good question, and one that’s not easy to answer. This book is a culmination for me of nearly 25 years as an inhabitant of Canberra, and it incorporates many years of responding to the city on a daily basis – responses that are no doubt embedded in the rhythms and cadences of my poetry as well as in its observations.
In terms of the city more particularly, I have always been attracted to poetry, and to art in general, partly because it is made – because it is designed – and I remember when I arrived in Canberra a key aspect of the attraction of this city for me was the attractive strangeness of finding a place that would be a home in the usual informal ways associated with homeliness, while also being conspicuously and rather grandly conceived and ‘made’ – even if not made entirely in Walter Burley Griffin’s and Marion Mahony Griffin’s original image.
Exploring the city poetically for this book constituted a re-engagement with what I knew in this way – as a citizen of a city who had carried my impressions of its original and attractive strangeness with me for two and a half decades but who also wished to reappraise it. In doing so, I realised that I’d never relinquished the sense that Canberra was not like other cities and that I enjoyed this idea of its difference (some people criticise Canberra for that – they suggest that it is sterile, or too organised, or what-have-you – but I have always liked the sense of reserve the city possesses). I used this sense of difference as my point of departure for the poems I wrote.
I was also reminded that Canberra is a city that is in the throes of growing up – simultaneously a fully-fledged national capital and a mixture of suburban and semi-rural spaces. Much of its current charm comes from the way the grid-lines of its original design, and the beauty of its landscapes, are sprawling in ways that are creating a more modern, more haphazard place, despite the efforts of planners to control and moderate such development.
Jen’s photographs capture this in-between, sprawling moment in our city’s life very well and with considerable subtlety, and I love that about them. My poems respond to that quality; as well as to the thoughtful, sometimes playful, sometimes almost quizzical spirit of her work and, as a result, they are about her images of the city as well as about the city as I know it.
I suppose, then, that the poems are written out of an attempt to say, isn’t this interesting – to be here; to see a city like this in its current stage of development; to live in a place that’s so extraordinary but which I mostly know in a daily, ordinary way and which Jen has helped me see freshly. I tried to find words to speak directly and simply of such things – a complex city’s complicated life.
INTERVIEWER
Jen, was this shifting between the ordinary and the extraordinary, as Paul describes it, something that you tried to work with when producing your images?
WEBB
I don’t think I ever aimed to shift between the ordinary and the extraordinary. My conscious aim was to find images of Canberra that were entirely quotidian, even banal. If there is a shift to the extraordinary here and there, that’s quite likely because the everyday world itself is extraordinary, or at least contains the extraordinary. I used my smaller camera and my phone camera, and deliberately just took snapshots – a shameful thing to do, no doubt, but I had a vague idea that this would allow me to be very ordinary, and to capture images en passant, as it were: not capital P Photos, but the everyday glimpses of the city we Canberrans see, often without noticing them, because they are so very familiar.
Walter Abish has a sort of a treatise on this in his wonderful novel How German Is It (W W Norton & Co Inc, 1980) where one of his characters presents a lesson on the familiar, and how very hard we – or the familiar things themselves – must work to achieve that status. I’ve always been taken by the idea that, when looked at aslant, everything becomes new and strange. And that because photographs – even snapshots – freeze the moment, they afford a sudden stasis in which we can look again at what has just flickered past our eyes, and in looking, come to see.
After Paul wrote the first group of poems that responded to my photos, I was quite captivated by the almost delicate tiptoeing into his lyrical versions of Canberra. Especially in a couple of the very short poems, there was a sort of catching and releasing of breath. His response to my shot of the RAAF memorial on ANZAC Parade, for example: ‘Hands that have left/no print/being wings’ seems to me to be a sort of sob, or stutter of breath; a hesitation in Paul’s articulation that reflects the stutter, or perhaps shudder, in history caused by all those unnecessary deaths, and all the sorrow and rage that accompanied them.
After reading his poems, I went out and took more photos, still aiming at the banal but perhaps a little more infused now by lyricism; and then in the process of preparing the photos for the exhibition – cropping and cleaning – I deliberately over-saturated them to make them un-real, more like 1960s picture postcards, more like an evocation than a record – attempting in that way to creep a little closer to the poems themselves. It seemed to me that the process we followed in this collaboration – back and forth, show and tell, revisit and reshape – led to the poems and photos leaning closer and closer to each other until they became less two discrete bodies of work, and more a single statement, if that makes sense.
INTERVIEWER
Another example of the image and the poem merging to become a single statement is ‘Conversations’. Could you both talk a little about how this particular work came together?
HETHERINGTON
These works – Jen’s photograph and my brief poem entitled ‘Conversations’ – began with her image of chairs on a table in what looked like a cafe. I liked this image immensely, not only because of the shapes of the chairs, but because of the way the image foregrounded them. A detail that is usually overlooked or taken for granted – the putting up of chairs at the end of the day, often for cleaning purposes – was placed centre stage. And it was placed in such a way that the usual narratives associated with such details were obscured – was this, indeed, a cafe; if so, where was it; and what was the connection to the shop where, as the sign says, there was a ‘suit sale’; etcetera?
The image was like a quotidian fragment with almost no contextualising narrative. It said to me: ‘Look at this. This is what happens every day in many, many places. And, ordinary as it is, there’s something noteworthy about it; and even a kind of beauty inherent in the daily rhythms of the opening and closing of shops; and of people coming and going.’ And, as I looked, I thought the chairs were like faux gold crowns – not only in their upturned shapes and colour, but in the way the act of placing them on tables at the end of a day ‘crowned’ the day’s business. The image also reminded me that conversations in cafes are often of a particularly ephemeral nature; that cafes are frequently less than entirely satisfactory; and also that there’s a certain drabness about the decor of many such places.
In my poem I didn’t want to say everything suggested to me by the image; rather I wanted to make a work that might complement the image and provide the reader/viewer with the chance to look twice, as it were, at what Jen had made – once to ‘read’ the image in the first place; and then to read it again through the poem. In this way the poem was written to be at the image’s service.
However, I also wanted the dynamic to work the other way, so that readers of the poem could afterwards attend to the image, importing its visual information back into my words. The poem is deliberately restrained as a result – to allow such a dynamic to occur. It says what I hope is just-enough-and-no-more to be part of that larger conversation between image and word:
Conversations
The café was more drab
than he’d remembered,
neglected conversations
strewn in awkward pride
like yellow crowns.
WEBB
Ditto to all Paul said. I took that photo extremely late on New Year’s Eve, slightly tipsy, when we stopped off at the Belconnen shops to pick up milk for the morning’s coffee. The place was almost entirely deserted, with everything but the grocer shut down and asleep. I loved the colour of the chairs and the shape of their legs in the air. When I showed Paul, he responded as he said, which led me to revisit the chair images I’d shot, change the saturation, change the cropping etc. I decided, after reading ‘Conversations’, to pull in very tight around the chairs so that it was AllAboutThem. They are, of course, awkward in that upside-down context – gawky, inelegant, and yet entirely chairs. Thinking about the ephemerality of conversation in cafes, I came to feel that the chairs were utterly uninterested in what we have to say, and that perhaps what matters to them are the long quiet nights when they commune only with each other. (I know of course they are only made objects and not sentient beings, but you know . . .)
INTERVIEWER
Do you see the publication of Watching the World as the end of this project?
WEBB
I think the Watching the World project is over; we’ve exhibited the work (twice), reworked it, and now published it. But the notion of watching the world is by no means over. Paul and I worked on two other photography+poetry collaborations last year, and are presently working on another, and all have involved, to a very great extent, looking closely at the everyday things of the world, and responding to them. I find myself uninterested in whatever is ‘grand’, whether it’s abstract theories or material objects that are labelled as such. I tend to photograph the un-grand: water, street signs, graffiti, leaves, stones. I like to see what they might say to me in their small voices. Paul has a wonderful ability to find the smallest gesture, the most ordinary story, and translate it into a clear and captivating poem. So many of his poems treat the everyday: family relationships, something someone once said, the look of a jar or cup or dress. I think our two different-but-related aesthetics work well together.
I have been very interested, for a long time, in phenomenology as a way of pursuing research projects, and therefore interested in the thingliness of things, in ways of figuring out what it might mean to be. Related to that is a body of reading I’ve done in the writings of scholars like Humberto Maturana and Franscisco Varela, who described the reflexive mechanisms that operate in all living beings that allow them to interact with everything in their environment; this interaction means there is a constant flow of knowledge between living beings and environment, and that each is continually changing the other. They were writing as biologists, but the concepts they posited have been adopted by sociologists and philosophers et al, because they open up a very interesting space to think about cognition: knowing, being, seeing. They offer a great phrase: ‘Anything said is said by an observer’ – and in that seeing and saying, the thing is changed. I’m intrigued by how the act of observing – of watching the world – might change both me and that part of the world I am observing and ‘saying’, and might afford new ways of understanding. That’s probably enough said on that!
I very much doubt we’ll ever take the original Watching the World objects out for a spin again (in fact, I’m keen to burn them ceremonially!). I’m confident that we have more projects to come that demand we bring ourselves very close to those everyday objects, converse with them, watch what they do, and have a bash at rendering them in photos, poems or other modes of representation.
HETHERINGTON
I think the answer has to be yes and no. The Watching the World book, and the related exhibition that the book grew out of, have now been produced – although, as this interview is taking place, the book is yet to be launched and it has yet to fully find its place in our literary and visual culture. But I suspect that those projects are unlikely to reappear in any other guise or manifestation.
On a broader level, the book is one of a number of joint projects that Jen and I have embarked on, all of them connected to poetry, imagery and collaboration, and in that sense – as one manifestation of that larger collaborative enterprise – it is perhaps a kind of staging post: a place where we may pause and reflect prior to producing further work.
More generally, still, I tend to think that making art is a more-or-less continuous process in which new work builds on and develops previous work; and in which there are cycles of development and recurrence. I suspect that the writing and photographs in Watching the World have already enabled other kinds of creative work for both of us, and that they will return in some form or another, perhaps years hence – and possibly when we believe that they belong only to the past. In such a recurrence they will no doubt be reinflected and perhaps even wearing disguises of some kind, but in that way they are likely to continue to be part of a future conversation that Jen and I have with one another; and they may help us make further work at that time.
I believe that artists are almost always looking back as well as forwards; that the forwards-backwards dynamic is, indeed, how the engine that drives creativity works. As we watch the world today, we understand where we have been a little better; and we also prepare for what we will do in the future.
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Watching the World: Impressions of Canberra by Jen Webb and Paul Hetherington will be launched on Tuesday 21 July at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The publication can be purchased directly from Blemish Books.
SONGS OF TRUTH AND PASSION: an interview with John Stokes
Posted on March 20, 2015 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
In Canberra, among the crowds at a poetry event (indeed any kind of literary happening) there is likely to be a man, a particular man, who goes about his business with such goodness and grace. He is John Stokes, and he is worth listening to. According to his biographical statement, Stokes has lived long stints in the ACT region from about 1965, most recently for 30 years. He has won or been shortlisted for many prizes, including the Blake, Rosemary Dobson and Newcastle Prizes for Poetry. He represented Australia at the 2011 International Poetry Celebrations in Italy. Stokes has published works in Australia, Japan, Italy, UK, and USA. Publication credits include A River in the Dark, Dancing in the Yard at Eden, and now, Fire in the Afternoon. He has works in numerous Australian and international reports, journals and anthologies. Who is he? And what makes his poetry tick?
Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been writing poetry for many years and Fire in the Afternoon (Halstead Press, 2014) is your third collection. What is your motivation?
STOKES
Good place to start. I write because I have to. I’m wired-up that way. It started when my juvenilia was encouraged by one person – so much depends on one person – in the face of derision by family, playground denizens and, in the case of the English teacher concerned, his own colleagues. I was ‘selected out’ to go to a streamed school.
I can only deal with your question by referring you to snippets of my style at the time. Here is the ending of an early poem:
He remembers nothing
but a word – the word for joy
Soft on the waterlight
he comes, unafraid of silence.
(‘The Rushcutters’)
The motivation here was a burning desire, possibly fuelled by loneliness and sublimation in a profession – at that time surveying – which insisted on absolutely no emotion, to write about some sort of romantic melancholy.
A game-changer came with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He seemed to change from a rich, historic and sensual ‘mouth music’, as in ‘Tollund Man’, to a position that you could attain a useful, interesting wisdom by reproducing ritual, none-human sounds you created but didn’t control, as in ‘The Rainstick’.
I did not agree. I got terribly steamed up about this and spent many years trying to appeal to the subconscious instead:
… The disbelief comes flooding in with the warplanes, under a weird, spotlight moon. It’s twilight in hell again and welcome, friends, to the brotherhood of fear, the burning gift, the spatter of fire on our roofs
(‘Storm: The Talisman’ in Fire in the Afternoon)
The imagination is now completely freed. But I feel that everything should still come home from the real; the actual; complexity expressed in plain language:
The Artisan’s redheaded daughter
Makes careful maps of the stars.
Noting the times of their dying;
The furrows deep in her orchard,
The shadows’ silent wandering;
A curious richness under the earth.
(‘Music for a New England daughter; 3rd Canticle: Soft in an ear at the gateway’)
I believe now in the project of letting plain-speaking express our deepest hopes and fears; holding the needs of love, sex and chaos. Watch this space.
INTERVIEWER
You say that your ‘imagination is now completely freed’. Do you feel that as you’ve developed your poetic craft your imagination has been able to find a level of primacy? Or, in your experience, is there still a productive tension between technique and imaginative freedom?
STOKES
What a curly one. If you mean is there still a gap between fact (the written) and imagination (the writing), I would say yes! definitely. But fact and imagination are a married couple. They are caught in a battle of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Their coupling, the uniting space between them, makes for art.
Let’s talk about imagination first. It’s a great faculty. It allows you to reach directly to The Other. It allows above all for you to be in empathy with the downtrodden; the lonely relatives of the slaughtered; the joys and sorrows of humankind and other creatures. Without it there can be no good politics. Only dangers. When I said earlier that the imagination was freed I meant it should still come home to report, in my case be written up; communicated.
About technique: I was impressed when an author said that in writing, start with an idea… and force yourself to write it up. Of course there are as many ways of doing this as there are people. Especially Mad Aunts like memory and desire.
After the idea comes the fleshing. The truth of the body:
Foxes came down
out of the pine-trees
to bite the dog’s tails
(‘The Case of the drowned goldfish’ in A River in the Dark)
These lines were described as lies; fantasy. But they are absolutely the truth. In this stage I write from the body, stuffing it all in, breaking it up into cadences depending on the mood or ‘world’ as the piece demands; looking at the emotional weight. Most of all I look at rhythms. In the lyrical style, and depending on the place and age-group of a piece’s audience, all is rhythm.
Then comes the hardest, best bit. The going away, the coming back, the stripping the poem down to its raw self. The allowing of it to become readable. The finding out what the thing is really about. So important. It takes any time between five minutes and a lifetime. For me the tension, the instincts, the balance of the elements, come from selecting for the people. This can be hard. In the war between a choice of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, there is no right answer. It is enough to see you have a choice. If you are were offered an alternative of losing your sight or losing your mind, what would you say?
… See, the sweet hollow
Takes the old, poured water, the shallow-tongued,
And one. By one. The corn-flowers grow…
Drink go hunting and leave no shadow
(‘The Offering’ in the anthology Dazzled, long-listed for the 2014 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize)
For this moment, I am taking so-called ‘fact’ and so-called ‘fiction’ in equal measure. But I’d like to get back to you on that.
INTERVIEWER
Your poetry seems to be influenced by place and memory. Can you talk a little about how these elements work for you?
STOKES
Whisperer. Measurer and turner of knives.
What is it, memory, you are trying to tell me?
(‘East of Gotham City’ in Fire in the Afternoon)
For me and in the moment, place and memory are lovers. They interweave and part, interweave and part. Memory can be silent. It is different for every person or creature that has it. But it’s tricky. It can fade, or overwhelm you, or tell lies in your ear. One of its tricks, of course, is to not confine itself to the past – as the White Queen said. I am only an artisan of words, but so far I cling to memory to lend power to my dreams, to reach out to those myriad listeners out there, hoping to find common ground. To make memory manifest.
On place: this too is tricky; a dark angel. For me place is not a real thing, technicolour though it is, but all the more strong for that. For better or for worse, it gives memory a reason to occur, a talisman for my work. My old landscape lecturer used to challenge us by saying: is the impact of place just where you want to be, what you have been brought up in, where you come home to? She suggests an urban or desert person is quite capable of falling in love with the corresponding place according to their oldest memories and longest residence without travel.
Ah, not so. Too sweet. In my writing, there comes the famous Rape in the Garden Problem. What if in some beautiful park, a woman is brutally raped? Would not that experience colour forever her fears, her values, of that place? Maybe not forever, but I feel that it would – it would destroy beauty.
But for my latest published book and the one I’m working on now, I owe it to her, myself and others to look frankly at such a happening, to confront, to dare to take a hard look. As an act of truth.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps this link between memory and place in Fire in the Afternoon is at its most prominent in ‘The Woman on the Island’. Can you walk us through this particular poem?
STOKES
Right. There are 1001 ways to tell a story poem and too much self-appraisal is bad for other people’s souls. But here goes:
Seabreath. You imagine roaring
over the barking of the seadogs
First, the mindset: the ancestors of this poem are Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and Dorothy Hewett with her ‘Peninsula’ poems. The relatives include ‘Guerilla Bay’ (in this book) and ‘The Timing of Eels’ (about 2000). Now the place: Montague Island off Narooma, NSW: bare, windswept, home to penguins, a lighthouse, and the smell of the ‘seadogs’ (seals to you). The central, true-to-life idea: the story of a wife of one of the 19th Century lighthouse keepers; she lived on the island for decades and had some eleven children, two of which died early.
It meant every year another child
pushed against the spume
So far so good.
Now the necessary second, counter-idea – also true to life: the lovely workhorse. Its job on the island was to haul loads up from the sea to useful ground. Like its relatives on other lighthouses, it hated its job, and the place where it happened. It was not stupid – as soon as it spotted the supply boat coming across from the mainland it used to make itself scarce. You had to chase it all over the island. On reflection it must have been quite smart: once a year it would swim all the way to the mainland and would have to be brought back again like an escaped prisoner.
… and all for the stories: [important principal of life]
the workhorse that wouldn’t [work]
and swam, every year, to the mainland [note important paired commas]
Deep water:
the giving up of hard men
And this:
bending to their sober duty [no escape; having a drink over on-shore was a capital offence]
Then:
The child-cry of the seawind.
Note the echo of the first line. It keeps the unity of the poem; also prompts a feminist and work-praising-title for the poem, which needed one at this stage – and the lady deserved it. Note, also, the claustrophobic text reflecting even present lighthouse-houses and the cabins of ships-of-the-line. I could have ended this piece there. It wasn’t too bad. It had atmosphere. It spoke to the listener. It has nice word-texture fitting the hard place and the human bodies. But it isn’t a poem. It’s a description. What to do? Put it away in a dark place. For a year.
Suddenly it comes. The key, the shock phrase. The phenomenon known as ‘black light’. With the passing of the flash and the constant widening of the iris in the eyes – and things in the brain – darkness and the shadow of darkness have a ‘light’. You don’t see it, so much as feel it. I have felt it. Yet it is a technological trick; it is non-human. Into the poem it goes, uniting with the black, Victorian clothes of the woman.
Now we have an imbalance. Unsatisfying. What to do? For better or for worse, the individual poet must now speak. In his or her own ‘voice’. So add the extra, last stabbing-line from the body to make a crashing, foot-rhyming couplet:
The night-piercing of the Sun.
Here, then, is the full poem: the form in which all poems should be read:
The Woman on the Island
Seabreath. You imagine roaring
over the barking of the seadogs
the black-dressed woman hopping from rock to rock
nine children dropping from her womb
and two bled out in the moorland
in sight of the lighthouse brushing
the granite under blown stars
It meant every year another child
pushed against the spume
and drunken stuttering of the light
hurt over grass and strict weather
the splutter and stink of the sea-oil
lamps blackening the close room
licked by wind licked
by wind. And all for the stories: black light
the work horse that wouldn’t
that swam, every year, to the mainland
the giving up of hard men
bending to their sober duty
The child-cry of the seawind
The night-piercing of the Sun.
It will have to do. Nail it up. Look for another piece of paper…
INTERVIEWER
What’s your hope for poetry?
STOKES
Your question is too big. It bursts the heart.
I was your seafall
And you are my desire
(after Robert Lois Stevenson)
So many types of poetry, you see; as many as there are, or have been, or will be people to make or imagine it.
From my small corner of this great play I see that these many poetries are made to entertain, to amuse, to move, to scare, to comfort, to harangue towards war or peace, to attempt to change politics for better or for worse. You don’t have to write down poetry to have it. You can dance it. You can accompany it in music or painting. You can see it in movement… She was poetry in motion. You can ad-lib it. You can, like the temptation of the Buddha, contemplate keeping it all to yourself (luckily for some he was said to have rejected the idea).
One hope I do have for poetry: that it stops making academics feel besieged by the barbarians (or other poets), and that it stops making the barbarians feel besieged by the poets who are seen to be deliberately arcane or obscure for invalid reasons, to the point of aggression. This seems to be a peculiar state in Australia at this time.
I hope that ‘Poetry’, its memorable rhythms, will keep on shedding light on the human conditions. I agree that it is, after all, the most metaphysical of the arts; a mainline to the deepest wishes and follies of our tribes. Without poetry, history would not change. But its loss would be a terrible impoverishment. A loss that we would feel forever, without knowing why.
Let’s bring this talk to a close…
For me, poems are songs of truth and passion. They conjure up an intensity of meaning or non-meaning out of the silences. My hope is they will continue to sing, in shade, as in sun. To clarify a difficult line from Auden regarding an imaginary trial of Yeats: ‘Poetry makes a nothing happen’.
Thanks for hearing me out.
*
John Stokes is an Australian poet, author, essayist and performer who has published widely in Australia, Europe, U.K., U.S.A and Japan. He has won or been shortlisted for many prizes including the Blake, Newcastle, Rosemary Dobson and WoorillaPrizes for Poetry. He has represented Australia at festivals and his publication credits include A River in theDark (Five Islands Press); Dancing in the Yard at Eden (Orta San Giulio); Fire in the Afternoon (Halstead Press) and numerous journals and anthologies. His website is: www.johnkarlstokes.com
John will be launching his new book, Fire in the Afternoon, this Saturday as part of The Newcastle Writers Festival Big Poetry Book Launch, along with Jean Kent, Jennifer Compton, Jan Dean and Beth Spencer, who will also be launching their most recent poetry collections.
LOVE, CHOOKS, AND SOLITUDE: an interview with Nigel Featherstone
Posted on December 12, 2014 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
Nigel Featherstone (by Jonny Lewis 2012)
Nigel Featherstone has been our brave leader at Verity La for the past four and a half years, and in that time has published and promoted the work of numerous established, as well as emerging and marginalised, writers. Humble by nature, he has rarely drawn attention to his own achievements, and yet there have been many. A respected and awarded author, Featherstone has published numerous short stories and articles; a critically acclaimed novel, Remnants (Pandanus Press); and three hugely popular novellas, Fall On Me, I’m Ready Now, and the recently released The Beach Volcano (Blemish Books). Now, as he prepares to depart the journal in order to focus more exclusively on his own writing (and his chooks!) the time has come to discover more about the reclusive editor who’s been responsible for making the Verity La magic happen.
Interviewer: Michele Seminara.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been editor of Verity La for quite some time—what will you take from the experience, and what’s prompted you to move on?
FEATHERSTONE
There are a couple of reasons. First is this: I’m exhausted. It’s been a brilliant experience getting Verity La up and running and keeping it going for the last four and a half years, but publishing every week, as has become the routine, does end up taking its toll. I’ve learnt so much, about writing, about reading, about editing, about the publishing process, about getting work into the hearts and minds of readers. I’m also just a little pleased with how the journal has developed—it’s become a more sophisticated entity than the one originally envisaged. However, I’d rather leave now, before I become bitter and twisted. More importantly, there are some challenges ahead for online literary journals—or any kind of journal. Creating a publishing model that might allow contributors to be paid (and perhaps, just perhaps, the editorial team as well) really does have to be a priority, as difficult—or near impossible without public funding—as it might be. And building the readership. We’re fortunate to have some rusted-on readers and some people who really champion what we do, but we could be connected with a greater range of folk. I have no doubt that the new editorial team will rise to the challenge…as I now spend the rest of my life feeding my chooks. Which brings me to the second reason: I just want to read and write; that’s all I want to do (not forgetting the chooks, obviously). I’ve been lucky enough to have spent much of my time over the last few years focussing on writing and reading, but the more I do it, the more I truly hunger for it. I do think it’s important to help grow the literary community, though for the next while I’d like to focus on my own work. But I also enjoy interviewing authors (and other artists) for newspapers as well as for Verity La, so I look forward to continuing to do that. If people will have me.
INTERVIEWER
This hunger to ‘just read and write,’ to retreat and live a quiet and creative life, is strongly expressed—through the character of Canning—in your most recent book, The Beach Volcano. How important do you think solitude is to creativity?
FEATHERSTONE
Intriguing question. I’m not sure I can answer for the link between solitude and creativity generally, but I certainly know solitude is important for me. Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to spend time at some wonderful arts residency facilities, including Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River in NSW and Varuna up in the Blue Mountains, also in NSW; for three months last year I was a Creative Residency Fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy courtesy of UNSW Canberra, which was a very different experience, though solitude was certainly in good supply (or perhaps I just made sure it was in good supply). I do enjoy having a very focussed time to write and read, and to forget some of the more banal things in life, like answering the phone and paying bills. Back in 2010 I spent a month as a writer-in-residence in the Kingsbridge Gatekeeper’s Cottage in Cataract Gorge, courtesy of the Launceston City Council (Tasmania), and that’s where the scratchy handwritten first draft of The Beach Volcano came into being. You’re right that the protagonist of the novella, Canning Albury/Mick Dark, likes his solitude too, including in Launceston—a nice connection there. But it’s interesting because I’ve never thought of the creative life as one of retreat and quiet, because in a way it’s actually about connecting with the world in a deeper, more profound way, and while I do like quiet and peace when I’m writing, it’s rarely peaceful in my head—there’s a lot of noise and activity going on. So perhaps that’s why I find solitude so important: I need as much help as possible to get the words down on the page in the order they’re meant to be in. These days I live in Goulburn, a regional town on the NSW Southern Tablelands. When I’m home I can spend good long stretches reading and writing and getting around the house in ugg-boots and tracksuit pants and woollen jumpers with holes in them; often the only conversations I have are with my characters and the chooks and the dog. I’m sure it’s a recipe for madness, but it’s an enjoyable madness. Mostly. For the time-being.
INTERVIEWER
The Beach Volcano is the third—and you’ve said the last—in a series of novellas which began with Fall On Me (2011) and I’m Ready Now (2012). What is it, besides their form, which makes these books a series? Were they all conceived in that Gatekeeper’s Cottage in Cataract Gorge? Are they triplets, perhaps?
FEATHERSTONE
Yes, all three novellas started their lives in the Kingsbridge Gatekeeper’s Cottage in Cataract Gorge, courtesy of the Launceston City Council back in 2010. I actually intended to write some short stories, but a month later I left with some scratchy notes, which would become these novellas. They’re not a formal trilogy, but they are thematically linked—all three try to go behind the curtains (and, perhaps, beneath the sheets) of modern Australian life. We seem to be living in an era—in Australia at least—where family is defined so awfully narrowly: mum, dad, two kids. Worse still, there’s this idea that to have a real life, a proper life, you should be part of that construct and do those things. To my mind, families are made up in many different ways. Aunts and uncles raise children. Friends raise children. Clearly two men or two women can raise children. Some couples make a deliberate decision NOT to have children. Some people never form relationships with anyone. I always love hearing about how some people have creatively redefined how they live: for example on the TV the other day was a couple that comprised a gay man and a lesbian who clearly were very committed to each other but went outside the relationship for sex. All this fascinates me. Not that the families in my ‘Launceston’ novellas are that radical, but they are trying to work themselves out. Families can be forces for good, but they can also tear each other apart from the inside. Family as the bedrock of society? What rubbish. Good relationships are the bedrocks of society. All this sounds like I have a moral or political axe to grind. Perhaps, in a very subtle way, I do, but I feel that my job as a fiction writer is to get as much life on the page as I possibly can and draw the reader through the story till the end (and beyond, if I’m lucky). That’s all I have to do. Which is one of the hardest things—near impossible, most days.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned that for you the creative life is about connecting with the world in a more profound way, and that your job as a fiction writer is to get as much life on the page as you possibly can. Do you feel that writing is a sacred calling, and what level of responsibility do you think it entails?
FEATHERSTONE
I certainly don’t believe that writing is a sacred calling in the religious sense. I don’t believe stories come to me from some higher power—it’s just hard work, plain and simple. Sometimes they come together in a way that might mean something to a reader, sometimes they don’t. Then again, there is something miraculous about fiction. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is surely a miraculous book. I feel the same about Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. I’m currently reading Quest for Corvo by AJA Symons and that has to be a miraculous piece of work. Do these writers see writing as a sacred calling? I don’t know. Perhaps what I do know is that I treat writing and reading with considerable reverence. I do believe that writing and reading—any kind of creativity—is an extraordinary human capacity; the other is love. These are the only things I care about. However, there is something especially important about fiction: the ability to think and dream and explore, to record and communicate, to broadcast. This is the lofty side of literature, then there’s the practice. I am very protective of my writing time—I’m fortunate to live in a regional town so I don’t have the big-city distractions and it’s possible to live relatively cheaply. On a good week I can spend the majority of my time writing fiction, and on these days I’ll try not to answer the phone or emails, I’ll try not to get stuck on Facebook or Twitter; I also love it when I don’t need to leave the house at all. I’m lost without writing and reading, perhaps in the same way that a religious person is lost without prayer. As to responsibility? The best way for me to answer that is to quote Ben Okri from A Way of Being Free. ‘Writers have one great responsibility: to write beautifully, which is to say write well. Within this responsibility is that of being truthful. To charm, to amuse, to enchant, to take us out of ourselves, these are all part of beauty. But there is a parallel responsibility: and that is to sing a little about the realities of the age, to leave some sort of magical record of what they saw and dreamt (because they can’t really do it the same way when dead) and to bear witness in their unique manner to the beauties, the ordinariness, and the horrors of their times.’ One day I’d like to get close to what Okri’s talking about.
INTERVIEWER
It seems that words are an absolutely essential part of your life, both as reader and writer. Has it always been this way for you? What were your experiences of reading as a child? And when did you know that you were a writer?
FEATHERSTONE
I was certainly a regular reader as a child. I was lucky to attend a school with an excellent library, and it seemed as a family we were always going up to the local municipal library, which I remember very fondly—going there always seemed to be such an adventure. I do recall my mother reading to me; Afke’s Ten by Nynke van Hichtum, I especially remember. I’ve kept many of the books I read as a child. They include The Lotus Caves by John Christopher, My Side of the Mountain by Jean George, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm by Norman Hunter, and The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. Later I read and loved Orwell’s Animal Farm, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and a short novel I remember that had a huge influence on me was The Dingo Summer by Ivy Baker. As an early adult I loved Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and, of course, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. Brokeback Mountain also had a big influence on me in my twenties. It’s just come to me that one summer when I was about ten I decided to read the dictionary, which my two older brothers thought was very odd, but I seemed to have a good time. I still love collecting dictionaries and thesaurus, especially very old ones that have words in them that aren’t used as much anymore.
As to when I knew that I was a writer, well, I’m not sure there has ever been a definitive moment. I certainly loved writing at school, and I remember one year, perhaps around Grade 5 or 6, my English teacher said that we all had to write a story during the holidays. Apparently most of my fellow students and their parents weren’t impressed, but I loved it—I can still remember what I wrote about (two boys during the Second World War who had to do the work of men). So I wrote all the way through school, and not always because we had to. I remember writing some poems and stories in an exercise book under a pseudonym—an early attempt at creating a literary journal? I didn’t write much during my first undergraduate degree, but I started again as soon as I got my first job, which was over in Western Australia. I had a journal and wrote sketches and poems and stories, which were terrible, of course, but in my mid-twenties I started sending the best of them to journals and over time I became published. As of now, I’ve had over 45 short stories published, including in journals such as Meanjin, Overland, Wet Ink, Island and the Review of Australian Fiction. My novel Remnants was published in 2005 by Pandanus Books, and since 2010 I’ve been working on the series of three novellas including The Beach Volcano, all of which have now been published by Blemish Books. After years of supporting myself through having other jobs, these days I manage to scratch out a somewhat precarious living from writing and related activities (for example, tutoring in writing for the University of Canberra). So perhaps I’m a writer now?
INTERVIEWER
Indeed, you belong to an endangered breed of writer, one who actually makes a living out of his or her own creations! However, now that your time as editor of Verity La has drawn to a close and your series of novella’s is complete, the question arises—what will you write next?
FEATHERSTONE
I should make it clear that I don’t get much income from writing fiction, along with the vast majority of other fiction writers. Although I’m lucky enough to spend the majority of each week writing, the majority of my income comes from related work—freelance non-fiction, tutoring, and contract arts work. I’m also lucky enough to be able to live on the smell of an oily rag, which means I don’t currently have to take on work that strays too far from writing. I say all this because I don’t want to give the impression that I’m busy earning an average wage from being a writer—that would be a very false impression indeed. As to your actual question, I’m one of those—potentially irritating—writers who doesn’t like to talk about works in progress. It’s not a matter of superstition; I just want to put all the thinking and communicating into the work itself. What I CAN say is that I’m not working on any more novellas. I certainly feel that I’ve done all I can with that wonderful form…at least for the time-being. So there’s the option of starting work on a much broader canvas, or continuing with my love of the short story, or perhaps going in a different direction altogether. Because the publication of The Beach Volcano draws to a close the first 20 years of my writing life, I do feel that I’m entering a new phase. Exactly what this new phase is, I’m not entirely sure. Of course, there’s always the option of not writing at all—as much as I love writing, especially fiction, and it’s not overdramatic to say that I’m lost without it, I don’t have to do it. And, by Christ, the last thing the world needs is another novel—there’s a strong argument that suggests there are already too many. So maybe I’ll just read for the next 20 years. How good would that be.
You can buy a copy of The Beach Volcano from Blemish Books, or visit Nigel’s blog to read more from him.
SUCCESS SMOKE AND
JOY BOATS: an interview with
David Stavanger
Posted on September 19, 2014 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
After winning the prestigious 2013 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, poet David Stavanger has just launched his resulting collection, The Special, to an appreciative audience at the 2014 Queensland Poetry Festival. No stranger to live performance (as alter ego, Ghostboy, he has been instrumental in establishing the thriving Queensland slam-poetry scene and is a veteran and award-winning spoken-word artist), Stavanger is also no newcomer to the page: his poetry has been widely published and his chapbook, ‘And the Ringmaster Said’, was released by Small Change Press in 2012 to positive reviews. Stavanger was also commissioned, in 2012, to be Queensland’s sole Workplace Writer in Residence, and has recently acted as a live poetry-writing, reading and educational installation at Brisbane Square Library. A lapsed psychologist, this self-titled Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of Australian poetry has described himself as ‘two writers in one skin’. Interviewer Michele Seminara speaks with them both.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me that some poems – while striking on the page – can sound quite dull when read aloud; and that conversely many of the most interesting poems to listen to as performance can appear flat when read on the page. As a poet who works with both mediums, what are your thoughts, and were the poems in The Special intended for page, performance, or both?
STAVANGER
Any art can be dull, even if it’s well written or well performed. I find poetry most exciting when it transcends my expectations of YouTube or the poetry journals, and places me in its own hands – whether that be on a page or a stage. Poetry that might fail. My writing in the past has always taken me towards performance as it is driven by varied rhythms and the tension between yourself and a live audience – it has also been very much improv-based as well, pieces cutting and changing live (even forgetting lines is something I see as part of the work sometimes, heckling too – they’re live forms of erasure and found text to me, a way to respond to and rewrite in the present, tense).
The Special was intended as its own document –I didn’t consciously write it as ‘page poetry’ as I don’t believe such a thing exists. I think such divides are theatrical and work well as a device for festivals to use to draw cross-over audiences. There are people who love the idea of poetry wars, but there is nothing to fight for. The Special was written out of urgency, observation and retreat. Some pieces I had performed as Ghostboy and some can – and will –be performed live. I love trying to find new ways into a piece of text; some I just can’t fit into, like that jacket you shouldn’t have bought. Having said that, it was edited very much with the intention of creating a cohesive poetry collection that could be read by others and be still in your hands – even if the voices of the book remain central to the life of the collection.
INTERVIEWER
I love your way of seeing forgotten lines and heckles during performance as forms of in-the-moment erasure or found poetry. Would it be true to say that it’s the poems that might fail, the poems that expunge or are fractured, that hold the most interest for you?
STAVANGER
Failure is measured in a different way once you step away from a conditioned sense of success. Poetry in your own hands is better than poetry in the hands of someone else, even if you drop it. Many of my failures have more integrity than many of my successes, where I was often unconsciously chasing the dragon to the top of the mountain. There is only smoke up there. The solid thing is ‘the work, the work’, as UK poet Jacob Polley says. Being a poet in today’s world is humbling, it is to live in a fractured way; it often places you at odds with a lot of what is valued around you. Musicians are increasingly in the same boat but they have the joy of song which can transcend much. Forgetting lines reminds me how little this all matters these days – last week I forgot a whole stanza in front of 200 people live in Cairns. I still sold some books. It was terrifying and I eventually had to try and re-create the middle of the poem on stage. That failed too. But I’m glad it happened. Success.
INTERVIEWER
Human imperfection and fallibility – and the beauty as well as the horror they entail – are strong threads running through The Special. Has your time working as a psychologist informed your poetry in this regard?
STAVANGER
Yes and no. I worked for 10 years in various settings and there were particular clients and situations that accumulated and informed the way I now look at the world, having added their own cracks to the window I look out at the world through. But I was kind of broken before that too, and my own family narratives are in this book, as are the ones that were sewn into my family’s story before I was born. And the last ten years have brought their own beauty and horror (and beauty as horror), as well as finding myself increasingly reactive to the faux optimism that is peddled and exploited in both the arts and psychology and broader culture – we need Oscar Wilde and Joan Rivers to return, not Jesus or Freud. I come from more of a humanist view of things, that it is hard in many ways to be here and that art can explore and bend that but it can’t solve anything either. Hence, there is a lot of gallows humour and direct incisions – via recollection, dreams and diaries I have never written in – in the collection. It is very spare and stretched in many ways, as that is how I feel about walking around in the world. But underneath it all, there is always joy, always laughter, even if sometimes it flows dark and unseen. Yes and no.
INTERVIEWER
It’s interesting that you say the poetry in The Special is ‘spare and stretched’, and that this reflects your way of being in the world. In reading the book I felt that I was inside the consciousness of someone who often felt quite detached from the everyday experience of his own life. Is the dichotomy between one’s internal and external reality something you’ve consciously tried to explore in these poems?
STAVANGER
We all bring our own consciousness (and subconscious) to other’s work; reading and inhabiting text is an act of transference in my eyes – our response holds up a mirror to the reader as much as to the poet. Sometimes that mirror is black. I’m glad it made you feel something at all. I think detached is an interesting term – a poet is often removed from the poem to a degree anyway, even in first person. Furthermore, anyone experiencing any form of mental illness is to a degree outside the experience looking in. Many of these poems have nothing to do with my own life, they are more accumulations (some intimate, some more experiential or from another point of view, some fantastical or absurd). Many of these poems have everything to do with my life too. Black humour always creates distance from the writer to a degree, even if it is a device which throws the reader into the heart of the work. What is intimacy on the page? Holding the words in your hands is more than enough. I don’t know much about reality – some of these pieces were the only anchor I had during times of heightened flight or fright or rapid mood cycles, others are fragmented dreams, others responses to both my inner worlds and the people that have passed by on the outside, solid and shadow. I know the last two poems are the most stripped back & immediate to me, as is the triptych for my dad and the one for my grandfather (who was maniac depressive, a small child in a man’s suit).
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned that these poems were born of urgency, observation and retreat, and that the last ten years of your life have seen a lot of change. How has the ‘work’ of your poetry evolved in this time, and what has it meant to you?
STAVANGER
My writing has become a lot less reliant on performative tricks (but can still be performed), has become a lot more intimate (yet the first person at times is less and less me, it is almost dissociative observations at times), it has become more filmic and picaresque, less pressured, and is more informed by the future and the present than the past. I am also realising the limitations of form and the limits of being naive (or even being nieve) with form too, and trying to decide whether to study form more or abandon it as a trap – a beautiful suitcase with nothing inside.
INTERVIEWER
The opening poem of your collection tells us that ‘to special’ is ‘to observe a suicidal or psychotic mental health in-patient overnight’, and while the poems do go on to explore the darker aspects of the human psyche, the final line of the closing poem affirms ‘I wake up living.’ What comes next for you?
STAVANGER
I love that last poem. A friend pointed out that the book’s opening lines are ‘Surviving a plane crash / is good for you’ and ends with ‘I wake up living’. That last poem is an Appendix as it is the one poem truly about the future, which is where my writing is headed. I have the start of a novel I have had for a while (cliché); I have a couple of ideas for writing poems to two more structured themes over the next 18 months; I also want to have a stab at writing a collection of kids poetry – I work in schools a lot, and there is very little of it around (especially Australian). My most immediate thing is to launch this collection – at least across the neighbour’s fence – and also develop The Special(s), which is a collaborative extension of these poems with a bunch of Brisbane artists in various mediums loosely based on David Shrigley’s project Worried Noodles (one of my favourite poetry books). Apart from that, sleep and hot tea.
INTERVIEWER
I had better leave you to it then. But first, one last request: a ‘found’ poetic question, sourced from within those I’ve just asked of you.
poet-patient-psychologist
your thread is stretched and spare.
forgotten lines erase mental perfection;
fractured humans fail…beauty
as well as horror affirm the living—
what wakes in you?
Could you reply with a poetic answer ‘found’ within your own answers?
STAVANGER
Dull art, cutting life, found observation.
Success smoke, broken wilde, joy boats.
Naive suitcase, hot tea heart, noodle trap.
IN LOVE WITH STRANGENESS AND SURPRISES – an interview with Walter Mason
Posted on August 8, 2014 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
Walter Mason
There are those in the writing world who’d sell their grandmother to move forward. Then there’s Walter Mason, who, despite being a well-published author of travel memoir and highly regarded public speaker and teacher, is one of the most generous people you’re likely to meet. Paraphrasing outrageously from his bio, Mason spent his childhood in rural North Queensland. For many years he was a bookseller, working at the famous Berkelouw’s on Oxford Street in Sydney, and later at Adyar, the metaphysical bookshop in the city’s centre. Later he moved into a key role in a buying group for independent booksellers, and spent several years working with many of the most highly regarded and long-established bookshops in Australia. He first visited Vietnam in 1994, and has been back many times since. A lifelong interest in Eastern spirituality has resulted in Mason being the author of Destination Saigon and Destination Cambodia, both published by Allen & Unwin. He is currently a part of the University of Western Sydney’s Writing & Society Research Unit, where he is pursuing a PhD on the history of self-help books in Australia. He lives in Sydney with his partner Thang Ngo, a prominent Vietnamese-Australian community leader, and attends a Vietnamese Buddhist temple weekly, as well as going to church (which makes the mind boggle). Somehow, amongst all this, he had time to chat with Verity La.
Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone
INTERVIEWER
In Destination Saigon you write with such love for Vietnam, though it is a love that’s not uncritical. What was the original motivation for the book?
MASON
I had wanted to write a book about Vietnam since I was 26 years old, but fortunately I waited some years. The original motivation was my gorgeous partner Thang Ngo, who I have been with since I was nineteen. We kind of discovered Vietnam together, because he had left as a young child, and so going back was quite a foreign experience for him, too. Ultimately I was the one who became obsessed with the place, and it pretty much became my life. I learned Vietnamese, became a very serious student of Vietnamese Buddhism and just spent lots of time there, going back year after year, making real friends and establishing close relationships with his family and other people I met along the way – especially Buddhist monks and nuns. I’m not such a good Buddhist anymore – a backslider! – but I get better when I am in Vietnam. I’ve gotten a bit too tubby for all that bowing, though. Twice a month we are meant to do a repentance ceremony which involves 108 full prostrations – man, that takes it out of you! Especially if it’s 35 degrees out. So yeah, it was good old-fashioned love that took me to Vietnam. And once I was there I could never forget it.
But the book was originally going to be an account of Buddhism in modern Vietnam. My publisher at Allen & Unwin – the wonderful, now retired, Maggie Hamilton – thought that was a tough sell, and asked me to sketch out a more general book about the place which still incorporated my major passions. She loved what I presented, and so did everyone else there and a book was born. I think they thought it was going to be a spiritual travelogue, but when I finally submitted it they were shocked to discover it was kind of naughty and wide-ranging. They liked it more, then.
INTERVIEWER
Can you explain what you mean by ‘naughty and wide-ranging’?
MASON
Well, naughtiness and spiritual transcendence are the two poles between which I wander. So I can spend a month in retreat, waking at 4am to meditate for hours, subsisting on one daily meal and spending my entire time in prayer. And then, the day the retreat ends, I will go out to celebrate with a bottomless jug of Kamikaze (a lethal and mysterious iced cocktail popular in South East Asia) at a drag bar, getting home at 5 am with a half-dozen brand-new friends. I am a reprobate and a saint simultaneously. It’s exhausting work.
My publisher was shocked to see that, having just read a chapter about my genuinely moving communion with the Bodhisattva of Compassion at a serene mountain nunnery, I go on to describe a drunken rampage with a gang of fishermen at a karaoke bar that night. I wake in the morning with a shirtless, tattooed tough staring down at me, and my Great-Aunt told me the scene made her uncomfortable when she read it. There’s no hope for me, I’m afraid. I always say my twin passions are monasteries and gay bars. I am also completely fascinated with other people’s lives – always have been. It takes me about 24 hours in a brand-new place before I am intimately involved with someone’s life drama.
I think it’s because I grew up in a small town, where a healthy interest in the affairs of everyone is a necessity. I have never been able to cultivate that big city sangfroid. I knock on doors and ask dumb questions and am willing to sit and watch and listen where others might wander off embarrassedly. I am also easily led and tend to say yes when people ask me to do things. There is an element of gaucherie, I suppose, but I think it stands me in good stead as a writer. It is not a cultivated skill or a clever talent, though. A pure accident of temperament.
INTERVIEWER
I want to ask you about how you approached the writing of your two books. The stories seem to work as vignettes; they are almost tiles – when they are all put together they start to reveal the nations you’re investigating. Is that how you see it?
MASON
Yes, precisely. Each story is meant to be an essay that works all on its own, but that builds toward a greater understanding and a fuller picture – of the place, its culture and history, of my friends there and also, I must admit, me. It is very intentionally memoir. Someone told me that reading my books is like spending a drunken night out with me. The voice I use when writing is very much my own, real voice. I dread didacticism, and want people to have fun more than to ‘learn something’. I do think that people absorb more when they are having a good time, and that is what I hope happens in my writing. That said, one reviewer said that my books were ‘gently moral’. Perhaps I can’t escape my Methodist upbringing.
When I first wrote Destination Saigon it was organised in a much more conventional way – long chapters with beginnings, middle and ends. Maggie Hamilton saw through my dull old ruse and said, ‘There are fabulous stories hidden in here every couple of pages. Let’s just throw out the stuff connecting them.’ So we did – we went through and cut out tens of thousands of words, making it many small chapters. And then even I thought it was quite good. There is a sense of speed, of excitement and, occasionally, bizarreness, which matches my style perfectly. Suddenly it was recognisably me, and not just me copying the literary forms of everybody else. That’s where a good publisher comes in handy – they can see the other options and they are willing to take risks.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned memoir, which is interesting because both Destination Saigon and Destination Cambodia certainly have their memoir aspects, sometimes in ways that are quite emotionally explicit. Primarily do you see yourself as a memoirist or a travel writer?
MASON
I see myself primarily as a memoirist, but travel memoir is a growing area and the two mix perfectly. I really believe that the ‘journey’ aspect of travel writing is less interesting these days. People want to know more about relationships, understandings and circumstances, and less about the relentless number of cities you managed to visit with a mangle strapped to your unicycle. I am not a fast mover, and I like to stay awhile in places. I like to drift on the edges of life, and my writing reflects that. For me the best travel writing has always been as much about the author as about the place. One of my favourites is Gontran de Poncin’s From a Chinese City, which is all about a French count in the 1950s stopping in Saigon’s Chinatown and trying to make friends. Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala is another exquisite example – a family memoir as well as a constantly fascinating travelogue. And, of course, in Australia we have Robert Dessaix’s travel memoirs, which are superb and have had a huge influence on me.
I have noticed, too, the growth of travel fiction, which is very interesting, and I often dream about writing it myself. Australia has produced some excellent examples here, too – Felicity Castagna’s Small Indiscretions and Laura Jean McKay’s Holiday in Cambodia. Australians are addicted to travel, so it’s only natural that it should invade our literary space as well.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a strong sense of melancholia in both Destination Saigon and Destination Saigon, especially in the latter. Why do you think that’s so?
MASON
Oh! So interesting that you noticed – some people don’t. I grew up in a rural area and was bullied mercilessly at school from the first day of Grade 1 up until I learned how to use my mouth and my wit to defend myself, and that wasn’t till I was 12 or 13. I am always fond of quoting the old Shirley Bassey song (latterly the Kath & Kim theme song): ‘There’s always a funny man, in the game, but he’s only funny by mistake/But everyone laughs at him just the same, they don’t hear his lonely heart break.’ I think at the heart of all humour is melancholy – in fact, an immense seriousness about life and its unfairness. This is why panels about humour at writers’ festivals are so rarely funny. Start digging beneath the skin of a funny person and you stumble upon a well of sadness. Is that mixing metaphors? This is what people who don’t ‘get’ humour always fail to realise. They think the only valid reaction is a frown and a stern chastisement.
I am really interested in this because I have some very dear friends who rarely laugh and who generally disapprove of anything that might induce a smirk. And yet I was raised in an environment in which anything but a smile was considered indulgent and impolite. People in small towns laugh and chat at funerals. Interestingly, this is how people in Vietnam and Cambodia also react to serious and even painful events. If someone falls and hurts themselves people will laugh, not out of cruelty but out of a desire to defuse the pain of a situation. It can take some getting used to.
So yeah, I hone in on sadness and I recognise it in others. My melancholy is probably greater in Cambodia because it is a place that is still dealing with its own trauma, and people have some very real problems, many of which are not addressed by the various forms of aid that flood into the country. Also, in a practical and selfish way, I was more alone there because I couldn’t speak Khmer, and so I felt my existence mediated through friends who helped me function. That can be immensely frustrating and also isolating. Travelling alone is always a fraught thing that leaves you too often in your own company, reflecting on your life and circumstances. Dangerous for a closet depressive like me.
INTERVIEWER
What have you learnt about yourself from being a writer?
MASON
It seems cheesy to say it, but actually giving myself the time to finish a major piece of work has changed me immeasurably. I am very much a late bloomer – I am one of those who basically wasted his 20s and 30s and never applied himself properly to anything all. I went back to university at age 35 and finishing my honours thesis (on Queer motifs in the work of Sumner Locke Elliott) taught me that I could actually do something substantial. The offer to write Destination Saigon came almost immediately after that.
How am I different? I feel like I belong to a community of people and, in a small way, to a part of Australia’s history. Even if I never write another book (and I plan on writing dozens more) there is every possibility that in 40 or 80 or 100 year’s time some earnest grad student will stumble upon my two first books and rediscover me. I guess I have acknowledged the truth of my own ego and my thirst for immortality. My grandfather was an inveterate self-publisher, and a part of me wants to do well for him (we share the same name). He instilled a love of literature in me, and was a really remarkable man. I have been given all the opportunities he never had, and I know he would have been confused but proud of me.
I hold myself to quite a strict set of personal standards about what I say and write, and I do see my work as having some kind of greater aim: the encouragement of friendship, respect between cultures, the building of global communities. It’s important to me at this stage in my life that I don’t condemn, blame or hurt other people, and I do my best to make my writing and my public work reflect that. I am absolutely in love with all of the strangeness, diversity and surprises of this life, and I want to write about them. These are quite deeply held spiritual values, and I am aware that they may cause others to giggle about me or dismiss my work. Nonetheless, that is why I am here. I am also aware that I fall short of my own expectations every day, and so I must keep trying till I draw my last breath.
I have learned that I can make people laugh but also learn something new, and that I can tell stories and make connections between people in surprising and delightful ways. It’s tremendously satisfying to know this, and to continue to practise it as often as I can.
MEMORY, MARRIAGE, AND MUSIC – an interview with
Andrea Goldsmith
Posted on September 14, 2013 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
The first Verity La interview with Andrea Goldsmith was in December 2010. Back then we focused on her novel Reunion (4th Estate, 2009), and Goldsmith spoke eloquently about the magic of imagination, the lure of language, and the ‘moral power of fiction’. Since the publication of that acclaimed work, the Melbourne-based novelist and essayist has travelled overseas, including to the Galapagos Islands, and more recently has seen the publication of her seventh novel, The Memory Trap (4th Estate, 2013). This is a work that eminent Australian literary reviewer Peter Peirce has described as ‘an adult entertainment – passionate, thoughtful and disconcerting – and altogether welcomed’ (Canberra Times, 27 July, 2013). What inspires Andrea Goldsmith? How does she feel about what she creates? And what are her hopes for the future? Interview: Nigel Featherstone.
INTERVIEWER
A novel is a study of complexity, but it could also be true that the act of writing a novel begins with a simple idea. What was the original inspiration for The Memory Trap?
GOLDSMITH
I had long wanted to write a novel that centred on a genius. In particular I wanted to explore how much bad behaviour could be excused in a person who demonstrated a unique gift. While I touched on this notion in my third novel, Facing the Music, there was more I wanted to explore. So the first character to emerge in The Memory Trap was Ramsay Blake, a genius at the piano but a half-baked individual in most other respects.
Memory and memorials happened along by accident. I’ve recounted the story in a long essay called ‘Imagining Memory’:
Kathy Temin’s ‘My Monument (White Forest)’ (2009)
It was 2009, a bright day in early spring, when I took the afternoon off work and made my way to Heidi Gallery and gardens. There was a haze of fresh green on the deciduous trees, the Yarra seemed less brown than usual, and a rowdy party of magpies, peewees and rainbow lorikeets dashed through the still crisp air. I meandered around the gardens until the lengthening shadows made it uncomfortably chilly, then made my way to the gallery. There I found a sculpture exhibition, the work of Kathy Temin. I knew nothing of her art or her background, so I entered the long room of the main exhibit with no expectations.
I found myself in a forest of white trees constructed of fake fur and soft stuffing. There were stocky trees and slender trees; there were trees of squashed spherical cushions, others were cone-shaped, still others were cylindrical. Some trees were not much more than a metre tall, others stretched to two or three metres in height.
As I moved among these soft white structures, I was simultaneously dwarfed by them, absorbed into them and captured by them. For reasons I could not explain, Kathy Temin’s sculptural landscape had transported me back to Auschwitz. It was not Auschwitz 1, so nicely spruced up for the visitors with its familiar gates and infamous words, Arbeit macht frei. But Auschwitz 2, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the ultimate death factory, with its equally familiar peaked gatehouse under which the trains entered the camp.
Kathy Temin’s white, fake-fur trees took me back to Auschwitz.
In November, 1999, my partner and I spent an afternoon walking the paths and woodlands of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s a huge area and, apart from a few locals taking a short-cut and a small group of bored Polish schoolboys, we were alone. We wandered beneath the pretty trees still rosy with late autumn colour where over half a century earlier Jews were herded together, waiting their turn for the gas chambers. We stood in the ruins of Crematoria 2, 3, 4 and 5 where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children had been reduced to ash. We tramped along the seemingly endless columns and rows of wooden huts. We gazed at the three-tiered bunks where dozens of Jews had been crammed in together: the sick, the dying, and the steadfastly surviving.
At the end of the railway tracks and situated between the ruins of Crematoria 2 and 3 is the International Monument to the Victims of Auschwitz. Built in 1967 in Soviet brutalism style, it consists of huge cement blocks in a geometric pile. In front of the blocks and set into the horizontal brickwork are plaques carrying the terrible statistics. It’s big this monument, and strikingly unbeautiful. It had no effect on me. This place, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was monument enough.
Kathy Temin’s sculpture was called My Monument: White Forest. I did not learn the title until I was reading the exhibition catalogue at home that evening. Sue Cramer, one of the curators of the exhibition writes: ‘If not for the title of Kathy Temin’s sculptural environment My Monument: White Forest, we might not at first recognise this maze-like arrangement of furry white, oddly shaped trees as a monument.’
I knew it immediately.
Cramer continues: ‘Temin describes the work as a “memorial garden, an attempt to translate the feeling I had when visiting memorial sites in Eastern Europe.”’
I wondered how I recognised this. What was it about My Monument: White Forest that made it so unambiguous to me and so very eloquent?
It was this visit to Kathy Temin’s exhibition and the thoughts it engendered that inspired the character of Nina Jameson, an international consultant on memorial projects. And along with her came the major theme of The Memory Trap, namely memory: both at a national level with the cultivation of national identity, and memory at an individual level in the construction of personal identity and relationships.
INTERVIEWER
Although The Memory Trap is told from multiple points of view, to my mind it is Nina Jameson’s story. She’s recovering – unraveling? – from the sudden end to her marriage and returns to Australia where she reconnects with people from her past, including your flawed, sometimes utterly dysfunctional genius Ramsay Blake. Considering the genesis of the novel in Kathy Temin’s exhibition, what does Nina mean to you as her writer?
GOLDSMITH
Nina is a character, and like all my characters, she has to interest me. And she does – in two main respects. Firstly, I’ve long been interested in monuments, so Nina’s job interests me, as do many of her musings on the purpose and effectiveness of monuments. I agree with her that memory is a subset of the imagination and that memory is more in service to present hopes and desires than the events and/or people it is seeking to preserve.
Secondly, Nina is of interest to me in her relationship with Daniel, both when the marriage breaks down and a year later when he resumes contact with her. Of all the characters in The Memory Trap, only Nina is not deceived or deluded by memory, and certainly not when it comes to her marriage. (Actually, she’s not the only character: Zoe’s teenage daughter Hayley is extremely clear-sighted.)
I think that Nina carries the story in the first half of the book, but it is Elliot who moves it along in the second. This was most unexpected. But then the way in which I write my novels makes such surprises inevitable. It’s a very organic process for me. I write my way into the characters and I write many many drafts. What I begin with – whether ideas or characters – is rarely what I end up with.
INTERVIEWER
You mention Elliot, the husband of Nina’s sister Zoe. Whilst much of The Memory Trap is indeed about memory, it also seems to me to be about longing. Halfway through the novel, there is this about Elliot: ‘Cravings, his whole life rent by cravings. And if the cravings suddenly stopped, what would be left of him? Was there something about those hardwired longings that he clung to? Was it the cravings themselves that held him in thrall and not what he craved for?’ What is it exactly about this sense of longing, do you think, that drives the second half of the novel?
GOLDSMITH
I think that longing – unrequited dreams and desires – permeates the entire novel. After her husband, Daniel, deserts her, Nina longs for him and her old life; and of course, later in the book, Daniel longs to have Nina back again. Zoe, long-married to Elliot but longer in thrall to the piano-playing genius Ramsay, yearns for Ramsay. Elliot, who fell in love with Zoe at first sight, has preserved the wonderful feelings of their first months together throughout twenty years of a miserable marriage: he longs for the woman he fell in love with. Ramsay’s younger brother, Sean, once so close to Ramsay has been estranged from him for thirty years. Sean has never really dealt with the loss of his brother and still longs for him. And Ramsay, when his music seems to have deserted him longs for it to return.
Longings tell us a lot about people. They can also highlight delusions, and The Memory Trap is particularly concerned with the delusions and deceits of memory. For example, if Elliot spent less time thinking about the halcyon days of the past when he fell in love with Zoe, he might turn a more realistic gaze on the disaster that is his marriage now. And Zoe, so carried away by her dreams of Ramsay fails to see what an impossible prospect he really is as a lover/partner.
Longing creates rich narrative fuel.
The Memory Trap also reflects on monuments, both personal and national, and longing comes in here as well. All those WW1 monuments dotted throughout Europe, the UK and of course Australia, were initially built to assuage the longing the bereft felt over the loss of their sons, brothers, husbands, friends on foreign soil. There is a longing not to forget. There is a longing for the dead to be alive again. Similarly with the more private monuments people build when a beloved dies. The character of Beth, whose husband died three months before she appears in The Memory Trap, has created private monuments throughout her house.
INTERVIEWER
Many novelists say they write to work out what they think. Did you come to any interesting conclusions in the writing of The Memory Trap, either in terms of the book’s themes or the act of creating fiction, or perhaps both?
GOLDSMITH
I write fiction because I cannot resist it – nor do I want to. I write because I’m defenceless against the seductions of story-telling. I write because I delight in slipping beneath the skin of people – characters – who are not myself. I write because I love language and am intrigued by the intricacies of meaning. I write because there’s nothing else I prefer to do.
BUT – one of the by-products of writing novels is that they provide the opportunity to explore ideas and conundrums, explore them in depth, over a period of time, and from multiple points of view. This is not a reason to write, but it provides plenty of fuel during the journey.
With The Memory Trap I am wiser about memory at the end of writing than I was at the beginning. I understand how it happens that memory – whether personal memory or national (as expressed through monuments) – is more in service to present desires and beliefs than the past event it is seeking to maintain. I understand that memory is a subset of the imagination – that when we remember something we are re-imagining it. I am wiser about marriage and marriage-type relationships, and that too much is made of forgiveness in a long-term liaison. (In the case of Nina and Daniel, they both believe that one unforgiveable act is not a sufficient reason for ending an otherwise good marriage.) And I know more about the singular focus that drives a pianist like Ramsay to better his work – the same singluar focus, incidentally, that keeps Zoe in thrall to Ramsay for close on three decades and Elliot in love with his faithless wife during twenty years of a bad marriage. It’s the same passionate fuel that keeps a novelist at her desk until the job is done.
I am wiser at the end of writing – but what a failing, what a waste of three-to-four years of life if I were not. I do not write in order to become wise, but if this did not happen, I would know that the work I was producing was shallow, boring, inconsequential, a sham. And similarly the author.
As for the act of creating fiction itself, at the finish of The Memory Trap, my seventh novel, I know that writing novels, creating and then crafting a large work that has coherence and integrity, that demands of a reader a dozen hours out of a schedule already under stress, is no easier for the seventh book than it was for the first. But while the process is no easier, I understand the process better, I’m familiar with it. These days I make my way through the years of writing a new novel without the hand-wringing, wrist-slitting dramatics that accompanied the early novels. I know that the writing will come right in the end: that the incoherence of a first draft will give way to a jumbled second draft, which will eventually become a tidier third draft and so on till the final book-worthy version. I know that for me there’s no point in worrying about how my novel will end because I never know my ending until I’m ready to hand the novel to my agent – and in a couple of instances, even later. I know better now how to cut portions that might read like a dream but simply cannot justify their inclusion in the novel, and I know when I can allow an indulgent digression. I know that writing a novel is a process shot through with uncertainty – you only know you can do it when it is finished – so there’s no point in high anxiety on the way, no point in wondering if you’ll ever complete the task. Give in to the uncertainty, leap into the current; you may feel as if you’re drowning, but you won’t.
Yes, I know the process better these days, even though the process itself is as challenging as it has ever been.
INTERVIEWER
One of the most distinctive elements of The Memory Trap – and this can be found in Reunion as well – is that your main characters are very much situated in a broader context. They’re not just Australians in Australia, but Australians overseas – they’re international. What is it that you’re saying through your novels about Australia’s place in the world?
GOLDSMITH
This is interesting. I suppose it IS a feature of my novels. In fact, all my novels have at least one section or character based overseas, generally London, but not exclusively. I confess I have not been wanting to say anything about Australia’s place in the rest of the world. Rather, the fiction works better (and so does the author) with a bigger and more diverse canvas. There are more possibilities to deepen characterisation when you move people away from the familiar. And besides, my characters, mostly well-educated people who work in the arts or the professions, are the type of Australian to have worked and/or studied overseas.
In addition, I love London. I know the city well (or at least parts of it), I have spent a lot of time there since my early twenties. And similarly New York – particularly the Upper West Side of NYC – I have visited often and over many decades. The locations work in the fictions, but as well it gives me pleasure to use these places.
INTERVIEWER
The Memory Trap is your seventh novel from a career spanning almost 25 years. What is your hope for this novel? And is that hope any different to those associated with your previous work?
GOLDSMITH
Another interesting question. If you had asked it before the book was published I would have replied that my hopes and expectations were as they have been for the past few novels. But something odd – good, very good – seems to be happening with this novel. While I see The Memory Trap very much in the same vein as the rest of my work – it’s a novel of characterisation, an ensemble novel in that there are several characters, there are certain intellectual themes – it is being greeted with more excitement and enthusiasm by readers and reviewers alike. Not that I haven’t had a good press in the past, I have, but the positive response seems to be more widespread and stronger than in the past. Sales are excellent, according to my publishers, and particularly so, given the straitened times for literary novels.
Perhaps it is the themes – memory, marriage, the mysteries of music – that have galvanised readers. And the characters, too. It pleases me that so many people highlight Elliot as their favourite character. It pleases me that Ramsay interests so many readers. And the whole area of monuments. It is not something that people have commonly thought about, but as one interviewer said to me, when she read about Nina’s job she wanted to do that job too, and wondered how one went about it.
The Memory Trap deals with the malleability and deceits of memory through the lives of its characters; through Nina’s job as an international consultant on memorial projects it explores memory at a national level as well. We humans seem to have a need to memorialise, certainly we have a need to remember. Maybe that explains the response to The Memory Trap. How it is being received, allows me to hope that this book will sell overseas, will be translated into a dozen languages, will sell squillions, Hollywood will come knocking, and every fantasy that has ever filled the mind of this writer will be realised.
CHANGING THE GROUND OF EXISTENCE: an interview with Paul Hetherington
Posted on August 10, 2013 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
If there’s ever a part of human endeavour where people work extremely hard, achieve an extraordinary amount, but, in the main, unless there’s a miracle (and we all know they’re bullshit), the work goes largely acknowledged, it’s the realm of poetry, especially – perhaps – Australian poetry. So, let’s remedy the situation.
Enter this bloke: Associate Professor Paul Hetherington at the University of Canberra has published seven full-length collections of poetry, including the verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003) and It Feels Like Disbelief (2007), along with two poetry chapbooks, and the recently published collection, Six Different Windows (UWA Publishing, 2013). His poetry has won a variety of prizes and is part of the online Australian Poetry Library. In 2002 he was the recipient of a Chief Minister’s ACT Creative Arts Fellowship and he was awarded a place on the 2012 Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland. His poems have also been published in anthologies, journals, magazines and on websites in a variety of countries, including the USA, England, Ireland, Denmark and Japan.
But we’re not done yet.
Hetherington’s doctoral thesis explored the extent to which Emily Dickinson’s poems may be read as autobiographical texts and, more generally, the ways in which Dickinson might, or might not be identified with her poetry’s personae. Formerly publisher and events director at the National Library of Australia, he edited the final three volumes of the Library’s authoritative four-volume edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend (volume four was shortlisted for the Manning Clark House 2006 National Cultural Awards) and was founding editor of the Library’s quarterly humanities and literary journal Voices (1991–97). From 1990 to 2008 Hetherington edited the monthly magazine National Library of Australia News and he is a former editor of the Western Australian monthly multi-arts magazine Fremantle Arts Review. He is a former member of the Boards of Australian Book Review and Conversations (published by the Australian National University). In 2011 he was one of the founding editors of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations.
Okay then, that’s enough. Pour yourself a coffee or wine or whiskey, curl up on the couch with your favourite online-reader whizz-bang-kafoops, and let’s get into the discussion. Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone (with dictionary on standby).
INTERVIEWER
Congratulations on the publication of Six Different Windows. If I can add up correctly, this is your tenth book of poetry. What’s the motivation behind this latest collection? And is the motivation any different to what drove your previous works?
HETHERINGTON
Thanks Nigel, they’re interesting questions. Like most poets, I write poems one by one – although often in bursts of activity – and the collections that are published are to a considerable extent constructed after the event. But, having said that, it is true that most of my poetry collections do have certain abiding preoccupations – usually preoccupations that belong to particular periods of writing.
Six Different Windows deals with a variety of subjects that connect to the way I understand the past and memory. Although I’ve always written about such matters, I believe that they are inflected differently and perhaps more sharply in this recent volume. For example, my previous collection, It Feels Like Disbelief, which was published in 2007, contains a number of poems about archaeology and how we might understand the contemporary interest in so many things archaeological – programs about archaeology are even popular on television – but it is only in this book that my interest in the subject is explored at some length. These poems are partly a series of reflections about how people may have lived in the past, and they are also a consideration of how we, in the early 21st century, may or may not connect with people from other historical periods and their habits and cultures.
Additionally, some aspects of today’s human situation may be more easily understood when we refract them through the lens of past societies and practices – or they may, at least, be more approachable. Human cruelty is an example. We are all aware of the way in which human beings often behave cruelly, especially in wars, but to step back from contemporary behaviour of this kind can be difficult. Poems that explore events in the distant past have the benefit – if that’s the right word – of being about something that happened a long time ago and for which nobody now alive was responsible. My poem, ‘Sacrifice’ attempts to get at something of the ordinariness – even the dailiness – of human cruelty, and the ways in which we justify such behaviour – and the matter-of-factness of it, too. The poem can be read as simply being about the past or it can be understood as a reflection on what human beings are like all of the time – even now, today, as we speak. In this sense, my poems about archaeology are to a considerable extent a way of trying to find analogues for the present; of trying to sift aspects of the present through the perspectives of people who would not recognise many of the ways in which we live but who were, nevertheless, like us.
Speaking of analogues, this book also explores ways of retelling some of the mythological stories that have become ingrained in our culture, and which have been retold hundreds of times, but which continue to offer important ways of articulating what we know. Two long poems in the book recast the Icarus story, and the Ariadne and Theseus story. As far as we know both of these stories originate, in versions now lost to us, in the Cretan bronze age culture and civilisation we refer to as Minoan. These stories – which presumably had considerable religious significance in their original versions – were subsequently adopted and rewritten by the ancient Greek culture that supplanted the Minoans.
One of the most prevalent versions of the Ariadne and Theseus story – I guess everyone would know it – has Theseus arriving as part of an intended sacrifice of Greek youths to the Minotaur and, with Ariadne’s help, he kills the Minotaur and leaves with Ariadne, before precipitously abandoning her on the island of Naxos. This story is also part of a powerful set of connected narratives and, in retelling part of the story, I wanted to try to reclaim some space and agency for Ariadne, who in the original and lost Minoan version was almost certainly a god with important powers. But I also wanted to write a contemporary poem – to present a woman who was in many ways stronger and more knowing than Theseus, and on whom Theseus depended for his success and eventual fame. This is, in one way, a different form of my interest in archaeology – and in the creative reconstructions that attend to much archaeological practice – because there are hints in the versions of the story that have come down to us of other stories and other emphases. I cannot retrieve those lost versions, but I can rewrite the Ariadne and Theseus story on the basis of some of the hints I find, as I dig around in various sources looking for clues about what might once have been there.
My rewriting of the connected story of Icarus aims to translate that well-known story into the world of terrorism and suicide bombers – to make it utterly and disturbingly contemporary. Why do this? Partly because the Icarus story is one of those rare narratives that mean almost an infinite number of things at once. It is a story about what human beings aspire to be, and what they are, and what they might be, and how they might become something else. And, although it’s not so well known, the Icarus story – narratives about Icarus’s father, Daedalus, in particular – already deals with significant cruelty. Rewriting such a story is a way of trying to connect with one of the resonant narratives that has emerged out of what we call Western civilisation; and to make such a story contemporary is to try to speak of the past and present at once – which, generally speaking, is perhaps what poetry and other forms of literature are always doing anyway.
I haven’t mentioned the first section of the book, called ‘Corrugations’, which is about childhood. I have always been interested in childhood and how the intricacies of childhood experience persist into adulthood; and how they inform what we become; and how elusive they can be – and how delineating aspects of childhood can be a way into expressing important things that are otherwise inexpressible. This section of the book picks up themes and preoccupations that have been part of my earlier volumes of poetry, but I have been even more concerned in this collection to present poems that, while they remain lyric poems, have a strong narrative element. This is because the poems in ‘Corrugations’ are all attempts to delineate some of the key stories of childhood that are more-or-less common to everyone, however much some of the details may differ from person to person. The poems are about growing into selfhood; and about some of the values that are formed as this happens. And they are about how childhood as a reality is nothing like the saccharine version of growing up that some adults wish to remember – and sometimes wish to foist on their own children, too. Significant parts of childhood experience for everyone are fairly stark and bewildering and these poems are an attempt to locate some of the recklessness and even anarchy of that experience; and some of the sexual awakening – and something, too, of how childhood grapples with language and, as it does so, becomes changed and never again like it once was.
The book also presents poems about the importance of literature, art and culture – and, in this way, celebrates making and creativity. Some creative activity can be uncomfortable, but it is a vital part of human society – perhaps even the best part of it, along with the human capacity for love, compassion and charity. I wanted to speak of some of those things, and about how artists continue to help us see the world freshly; and about how they help us keep in touch with quotidian realities as well as the ineffable and the elusive. Contemporary Australian society doesn’t seem to know – en masse, at least – how to properly value its artists and makers even though so many Australians are engaged in artistic and cultural practice and associated activities. I think this is a real and ongoing challenge for governments in this country – to learn how to appreciate cultural capital, and individual making. We seem to have no trouble appreciating those who have a lot of money, but that, relatively speaking is banal.
There are poems about travel and about history in this book, too, along with personal poems – I have always been interested in mapping some of the intricacies of intimacy; of what may be involved when we embark on that extraordinary experience of closely knowing another. But if there is one idea that unites this volume, I would suggest that it is a desire to get at the nub of what we do and don’t know of ourselves and others, and how we speak of such things, and how the past often reveals us to be different from the way we imagine we might be.
INTERVIEWER
Further to this desire to ‘get at the nub of what we do and don’t know of ourselves’, perhaps in Six Different Windows there’s also the desire to get to the nub of what we do and don’t know of language?
HETHERINGTON
What we do and don’t know of language – that’s certainly a fascinating thing to ponder. In one sense, all poems are primarily about language and are a way of getting to know it – the bodily and sensory experience of language; the attempt to aestheticise language and make an artefact out of it (the poem); and the use of a poem to encapsulate an idea of language.
For me, considerations of language are connected to many of the most difficult questions about what poetry is or might be. In our contemporary age, when poetry and prose are sometimes almost indistinguishable – except that poetry is often written in shorter lines (and even that is not always true) – it can be difficult to say what is ‘poetic’. One of the ways I recognise the poetic is when I find works in which language is condensed, ramifying, polysemous and unparaphraseable. Part of what I wish to do when writing poems is to make works that speak in such ways – but to do so without resorting to any kind of trickery or artificial obscurity. To write directly and complexly at once has long been an aim of mine, and to register crucial human subtleties and complexities.
Much of what I know of language is elusive – and only able to be expressed satisfactorily through making artefacts (poems) out of language rather than trying to state explicitly what that knowledge may be. Writing poetry is partly an intuitive and mysterious process through which I try to allow poems to form, arrive and surprise me. I often search for poems by stepping back a little from them and trying to allow some poetic conduit or other to open. What are such conduits, and from whence do poems come? These are tricky issues, but I guess, partly, they originate in the infinite place of language-possibility, where, when one is fortunate, combinations of connected meanings effloresce like flares on the surface of the sun and are expelled as what we call poetry through one or other conduit we call making and writing – but which is sometimes more akin to being-made and being-written.
The poet has to work hard if such expulsions and arrivals are to happen, of course. I think of the painful, sometimes sickening work of making, drafting and revising many poems as being a way of honouring whatever the muse might be and of honouring the process I have just mentioned – and as a way of honouring language more generally. It is a way of saying, ‘I am serious about what poetry might bring.’ We are steeped and formed in language and because, in one sense, language always knows us better than we know it, poetry is often a way of asking language what it knows and what it might offer up.
There may be no ‘nub’ here, however. I suspect that poetry is at its best when it is no longer a literary genre we call ‘poetry’, but is language-without-any-one-name – by which, I mean, language that knows itself (which we cannot fully know) and that truly encapsulates and condenses multiplying, self-enriching meanings. This is more akin to language-speaking-itself than any genre.
In Six Different Windows, I present poems that attempt to engage with language at this level, and which also try to create beguiling narratives and suggestive situations and ideas. Some of the poems are explicitly about words – poems such as ‘Abstractions’ and ‘Pale’, for example, are about what we can and cannot name. Many other poems are about the disjunction between what we know and say; between what we do and say; and how we cannot fully speak about the import of what we know. This disjunction or gap constitutes a profound space where we negotiate meanings, and continually try and fail to get at just how things were, while all of the time seeing them escaping from us – from our grasp, from our understanding, even from our memory.
Poems can be a way of trying to close this gap, or a way of acknowledging it, or a way of naming it. Poem as way-of-seeing-and-speaking-the-gap-between-doing-knowing-and-saying may be a cumbersome phrase, but perhaps that is one good way of saying – naming – what poems often are.
In Six Different Windows the short poem, ‘A Norse Greenlander, 1450’, is most obviously about history, and the terrible privations of Greenlanders during a period of great cold:
A Norse Greenlander, 1450
Ruminating,
she sharpens
her wieldy scythe.
Her woollen clothes
are close about her torso,
keeping at bay
the bleating, freezing wind
that blows across a stub of glacier.
Three winters now
her tilling has resulted
in frost-blackened harvests.
Her remaining sheep
are skeletons,
her children
are cramped with rickets,
her husband’s ice-pale eyes
are shot through
with estuaries
of blood and forage.
As well as being about history, this poem is about what language tells us of such experiences; how words like ‘wieldy’, ‘stub’ and ‘forage’ work when activated poetically in a dense and sparse poetic tissue. If all poems are largely about words, this is an example of how poems, in largely being about words, are also largely about other things. Or, to put this differently, the more successful they are in being about words, the better they speak of what is beyond words; the better they reveal that words are, after all, grounded in extra-linguistic experience. At its best, poetry brings the linguistic and extra-linguistic into a potent proximity, and that is one of its greatest pleasures.
INTERVIEWER
Reflecting on something you said earlier, an element of Six Different Windows that intrigued me is the barely submerged violence in the poetry, from the rebellion of youth to the outright brutality of more ancient history. Is this something you’ve been consciously working through, or is it a theme that’s surreptitiously knitted its way into this collection?
HETHERINGTON
The nature of violence and unruliness; of the places that exist outside of the confines of ‘right behaviour’ have interested me for as long as I can remember. This is partly because some of the unruly places and spaces (both actual and metaphorical) are where creative energy may be effectively channelled. Poetry, for example – or, at least, my poetry – needs to flow from and into places that are often libidinally charged and which are open to a variety of impulses and desires. This is not because poetry has explicitly to be about such impulses but because unless it is gutsy and charged with true, unsaccharine feeling, then it is unlikely to sit up in the mind or on the page. Politeness and empty sophistication, unleavened by this gutsiness, tends to damage art and making, sometimes turning it into various decorative elaborations.
More generally, I believe that to face up squarely to humanity is to see how cruel and violent human beings can be as well as to observe their capacity for generosity, self-sacrifice and charity. It is to notice that many human impulses are crude; and that much of what we see as ‘appropriate’ behaviour – even as forms of sophistication – are ways of codifiying, and often concealing, fairly basic modes of behaviour. We see this almost everywhere if we look for it – in work places, in many domestic environments and, of course, in warfare.
One of the reasons – and this connects to your previous question about language, too – that the contemporary world has invented an entire lexicon of euphemisms for death and destruction is because, thanks to television and satellites and a host of other media technologies, governments can no longer simply hide behind pat, bland generalisations as a justification for war, invasion and colonisation. Enough of the reality of warfare’s carnage and sometimes needless, gratuitous violence filters through to people in their lounge rooms and in the streets, to compel many governments to find increasingly complicated ways of reporting on and speaking about their engagement in warfare. Some of this amounts to the cynical exploitation of the resources of language.
For example, we now frequently have complex hypothetical scenarios presented as the justification for conflict (reality itself is often simply not sufficient). The most notorious recent example was the WMD scenario used to justify the overthrow of an, admittedly tyrannical, government and in order to change the balance of power in the Middle East. Much more common are phrases that have become dark clichés, such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘collateral damage’, which in anybody’s plain language mean death and destruction. Poets cannot change these things but they can try to speak clearly and truthfully – to speak against the tenor of these times.
Mind you, in this book my interest is not in the language of governments, but in delineating some of the starkness and plainness of existence – of stripping away, for example, a few of the veils that modern sophistications tend to impose on how we interpret childhood and the past. I try in Six Different Windows to capture something of the wildness of children and some of the strangeness of childhood – not only its unruliness, but the private, hidden spaces that childhood often occupies. For example, the evocation of the games of children in flirting with death in the poem ‘Abstractions’ is an attempt to say something about how childhood often possesses its own implacable logic and a kind of anarchic free-flow that adult language can neither fully name nor contain.
I remember that many years ago I took one of my daughters and the daughter of a neighbour on a picnic. My neighbour’s daughter – perhaps eight or nine at the time – was from an unhappy environment and as we walked back from our small picnic she suddenly moved towards a place where the ground fell away – I think it was a smallish waterfall, and the drop must have been five or 10 metres or more. She stood facing that space for a minute or so – maybe it was longer; it certainly seemed so at the time – as I entreated her to return and at the same time moved carefully towards her, unsure what she was likely to do. Eventually she returned to me – it seemed reluctantly – and we resumed our walk home, but I saw that there was a gap in that child’s being, and a space in her life, that was dangerously charged – and it was something that my entreaties, however well meant, could barely touch.
All children as they grow and begin to be more clearly formed – but while they also remain significantly unformed – feel wildness and uncertainty running powerfully through their bodies. It is an extraordinary, fundamentally visceral experience. I’m not talking here about the sexual drives of adolescence that are often so badly understood and managed in our society, but about that earlier wildness and strangeness of being eight and nine, or even five and six. Different ideas of gender float much more freely and unselfconsciously through the body at those ages than they tend to do later, as do a variety of notions connected to what we often call identity, but which may be better called what-it-is-like-to-be-me-here-now-in-this-world. Children are usually less alienated from their animal natures; and their pleasure in inhabiting their bodies can be extreme and profound. They are also often very matter-of-fact about what happens to them and what they do – many of the public dramas of childhood are imposed on children by parents who interpret childish happenstance through their own sets of values.
For example, young children often don’t see truth and lies in the way that adults see these things and have to be taught that a lie is a lie and is also not-a-good-thing. Lies, in fact, are often the result of a playful, inventive imagination, and the capacity to construct lies is part of the capacity of human beings to make their world differently from the way that they find it. To be able to lie is to be able to invent. This has been commented on before, but it needs reiteration in a society where many people seem to have an absurdly literal idea of truth and falsity while at the same time being prepared to believe in the literal truth of religious stories that, as far as we can tell, are not even claiming to be literally true – no matter how important they may be for other reasons.
There’s a disjuncture here between the truth as we can know it through our bodily experience in the world and the ‘truth’ that people wish to insist on as artefacts of ideology and self-consciousness. So much human conflict – between adults and children, and between adults and adults – results from disjunctures of this kind, and from the insistence of one party that they know better than another. Poetry, I hope, can be a small antidote to such insistence – a way of looking more accurately at how we are as human beings; and a way of turning our values and assumptions through a variety of different lens.
So, in answer to your question, and among a variety of other preoccupations, this book tries to tease out from childhood, from the archaeological past, from mythological stories and tropes and their connections to contemporary preoccupations, and from the ordinary happenstance of things, some of the less-remarked-upon truths to do with different ways in which we are all implicated in violence and cruelty. We all live with it and know it in myriad ways – even the most gentle and peacable among us – and it constitutes a significant part of what we all are. This is not male testosterone at work – although that is part of it, no doubt – but is about a significant part of what human beings know of themselves in general.
INTERVIEWER
If you have one hope for Six Different Windows, and one hope for poetry more generally, what would those hopes be?
HETHERINGTON
I think that the only hope I have for Six Different Windows is that it finds some sympathetic and engaged readers—and, of course, that someone decides to publish an interview with me about the publication!
As for poetry more generally, I have the – perhaps optimistic – belief that poetry is undergoing something of a resurgence both in Australia and internationally. There are certainly many people writing strong and interesting poetry in this country, and these include poets who are not necessarily well known or widely published. In a globalised world that tends to define success in terms of material prosperity, poetry offers ways into connecting, or re-connecting, with spiritual matters – and, when I use the word ‘spiritual’, I don’t mean religious belief. What I mean is that there are important ways of being nurtured, and of living more generally, which connect to what was once called the soul. We no longer make use of that word very much, but we have no obvious replacement for it either. What the soul needs is what often animates and activates poetry – a cognisance of some of the greater complexities of existence beyond thoughts of immediate gain and individual desire. Arguably, attention to the soul also breeds complexity of mind and, as it does so, has the potential to keep the body – and perhaps the body politic – healthy.
Further, because poetry represents a way of expressing complex ideas and feelings beyond what we usually acknowledge in our daily speaking and doing, it offers a way for people to register a sense of complexity in themselves – and in their associates – that may otherwise go unnoticed. In other words, poetry – and art in general – promises to alleviate that frequent neglect of what one might call ‘possibility’. Poetry is able to yield the hard-to-quantify return of stimulating an individual’s sense of who they might actually be or become, and how they might imagine themselves more fully. It can, in ways that often go unremarked – but are no less profound for that – change a person’s ground of existence. Some people might scoff at this and say that poetry is not much read and changes nothing – and for many people that may be true. However, poetry undoubtedly changes some lives and has the potential to change others. Both reading and writing poetry represent the possibility of better things in a world that sorely needs this possibility.
At the University of Canberra I have been closely involved in establishing the online journal, Axon: Creative Explorations and in founding the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI). These activities are attempts to find new ways to publish, discuss and value poetry and poets, and to conduct research into poetry. There is much to be done on these fronts because, in Australia in particular, poetry has been relatively neglected in recent decades – in the literary pages of newspapers, by larger publishers, and even by some writers centres and networks. I believe that it requires focused support and that university research into poetry needs to be pursued as actively as possible.
Overall, then, my hope for poetry is a relatively simple one – that it may prosper and be better supported and understood.
PROVOKING UNEASE:
an interview with Omar Musa
Posted on July 2, 2013 by Verity La in Lighthouse Yarns
Omar Musa is one of those rare writers who, by hook or by crook, manages to carve a path as a poet and performer and rely on little else. Verity La last caught up with him in June 2011, but since then he’s published a collection of poems, Parang (Blast! Publishing, 2013) and continues to perform his work throughout much of the world. For those who don’t know him, Musa describes himself as a Malaysian-Australian rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He is the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam, and is part of the international hip-hop group MonkeyKat. Musa’s debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, will be published by Penguin Australia in 2014. What keeps this very busy man going? Come with us. Interviewer: Nigel Featherstone
INTERVIEWER
Tell us about the motivation for getting Parang together.
MUSA
The motivation for getting Parang together was that I hadn’t put a book of poetry out in four years, despite doing three hip hop records in between. It felt like the right time. The catalyst, however, was the first suite of poems in the book that deal with my relationship to Malaysia. I wrote them all in about two weeks while I was in Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Borneo (where my family comes from). I was really proud of them and thought they signified a nice little departure from my more epic, rap influenced spoken word pieces towards a style that was more sculpted and economical.
INTERVIEWER
Can you talk more about the poetic departure – in what way exactly is this later work more sculpted and economical?
MUSA
For one thing, the newer work is shorter. Most of the poems are less than a page long. I wrote most of them in about two weeks but took two months to pare them down to bare essentials. My older work is a bit more overblown, meant for the stage and contain a lot of internal rhyme and hip hop rhythms. They have a much longer arc. My older stuff was also a lot more spontaneous. Something like ‘My Generation’, for example, is the first draft of that poem with no edits. I wanted these new poems to mirror the effect of a ‘parang’ (machete) – swift, sharp and effective. I have a friend, Jess, whose editorial feedback I trust greatly, and I got her opinion on most of them. I think they benefited from a good re-draft.
INTERVIEWER
Earlier you mentioned your relationship with Malaysia. How do you think it influenced these poems?
MUSA
My relationship with Malaysia influenced these poems in a huge way and were the catalyst for me to put the book together. The first section of the book is entirely about my relationship to Malaysia, in particular, Sabah, the state in Borneo where my father is from. As a person with a mixed background, you have a lot of questions about your hybrid identity and where you stand with regards to the ‘homeland’. I chose to explore these complex and rather confusing questions. I think as a second-generationer, you often tend to mythologise and simplify the ‘homeland’, which in reality is an ever-changing, modern country with complicated politics. Environmental destruction is a theme I explore in the book a lot, as I saw it up close, with much of my family working on palm oil plantations. I wrote these poems quickly, trying to capture the moment of return, the mixed feelings you have. The rest of the book was set in a more gritty urban Australian environment (influenced a lot by Melbourne) or in in-between places. The return to Borneo and subsequent poems tied it all together and made me realise I had a collection on my hands.
INTERVIEWER
The notion of ‘homeland’ is something that Australia always seems to be struggling with, and perhaps is currently struggling with it more than ever. As a poet, and a cultural provocateur in general, what do you hope to bring to the debate?
MUSA
I hope to bring two things that might seem contradictory. One, I am trying to tell my personal story as a guy with a complex, hybrid identity* and a Muslim background, and tell it well. I want to show that my story and voice is just as important in Australian cultural life as anyone else’s. I feel like this is a vital thing to do in the public arena, where the narrative can easily turn poisonous or reductive when dealing with people of minority backgrounds.
Secondly, however, I want to explore as many different styles and ideas as possible in my writing, to show that a person of my background can/should have the freedom to write whatever the fuck they want and not be restricted to writing only about ‘ethnic’ issues (whatever they are). I bristle at the thought that I should only write on particular topics, just because of my name/ethnicity. In fact, just to prove this point, I’m going to go off and write a suite of sonnets about the mating habits of meerkats.
*The more I use terms like this, the more I think they are a bit pointless. After all, no matter what a person’s background is, in this modern world don’t we all have a complex, hybrid identity?
INTERVIEWER
I want to ask you more about that mission to ‘explore as many different styles and ideas as possible’ in your writing. As well as your performance background, and now Parang, you’re also working novel and a stage-play? What’s the commonality between all these forms?
MUSA
I’m working on a play for the Street Theatre in Canberra named Bonegatherer and a novel named Here Come the Dogs for Penguin Australia. Bonegatherer is a historical play set in the 1800s, whereas Here Come the Dogs is very contemporary, but both of them examine the dark side of Australian society and history. I would say that all of my work leans towards the darkness, and common themes are migration, violence, loneliness and powerlessness (with a tiny bit of redemption thrown in the mix). I have always said that I am intrigued by contradiction and complexity. I would like to think that my work deals with what Cormac McCarthy describes as the ‘issues of life and death’. Stylistically I like to jump around a bit between colloquial and quite archaic language to keep people on their toes. I think often uneasiness is what I am most trying to provoke in my audience.
INTERVIEWER
Back to Parang, is there a poem that best illuminates this uneasiness that you’re trying to provoke, or perhaps even a single line?
MUSA
‘Here we are, as brave and as useless as poetry’ – from ‘Dark Streets’
*
To purchase your copy of Parang, contact Musa via Facebook at facebook.com/omarmusaqbn or put AUS$25 into his PayPal account (omar_bin_musa@hotmail.com) and he’ll sign and send a copy immediately.
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.
