Tag Archives: Pierz Newton-John

Vox: Pierz Newton-John

17 Sep

There is one really fundamental difference between writing on the net and writing for the pages of a book which relates to the relationship between reader and text. In a sense internet writing always exists as part of a much larger text with which it is always forced to compete. This turns readers into skimmers and writers into copywriters. Writing on the net is a constant exercise in attention-seeking, with the text forces to double as its own advertisement.

The novel, on the other hand, is a world-to-itself. It guarantees the author not only the reader’s undivided attention, but a particular kind of rapt attention (or at least guarantees the preparedness to commit such attention). The type of novel – ‘high’ or ‘low’, Ulysses or The Twilight Saga – is irrelevant. Once the reader settles down and opens that first page, making him or herself available to the narrative, a certain intimacy and suspension is established that is simply not present online.The novel reader is implicitly committed, whereas the online reader is implicitly inattentive, restive, a single dull sentence or too-long paragraph away from disappearing altogether. If a novel is a marriage, a blog is a date with a 20-year-old with ADHD who doesn’t like the word ‘boyfriend’.

We tend to impute to literature an intrinsic value, forgetting that it is a kind of conversation between writer and reader. It depends on the quality of the attention that the reader brings to bear on the work. A great novel in a world where people are no longer capable of committing their attention is like the proverbial tree that falls unseen in the forest. Does it make a sound? Where does the artistic value reside? If the novel does truly fade into quaint obsolescence, if all our reading becomes ‘browsing’, I fear we will lose even the capacity to read the hundred-thousand-odd words in a row that a novel requires. And the imaginative, aesthetic and intellectual capacities that the novel exercises in us may atrophy too.

I don’t decry the blog and its value. I even write one (albeit with wilful disregard for the rules – I recently almost killed my readership by posting 4000 words on a philosophical problem that had been keeping me awake. I fear it had the reverse effect on my poor readers). But if the blog is ‘the key artefact of a new archaeology’, I pity the archaeologists who will be tasked with its excavation. It will be a job of monumental breadth and infinite shallowness, sifting an endless expanse of digital topsoil to reconstruct a picture of our society mind-numbing in both its detail and its inconsequentiality. The artist’s job has always been to dig deeper, revealing something true and important about being human in a certain time and place. The blog, for all its wonderful attributes, is not a capable instrument for such a task.

Having said that I remain personally optimistic that the paper book and the novel both will continue to have an (admittedly reduced) place in our culture, and I don’t believe that the intimate relation between reader and (paper) book is quite as easy to virtualize as the e-pundits imagine.I do think we are becoming an attention-deficit society, and this spells bad news for literary writers (who, let’s face it, weren’t exactly swimming in milk and honey as it was). But there will always be those determined to put into words important and hard-to-say truths, and others ready and indeed hungry to read those words. If the printed book does die, I don’t doubt human creativity will find ways to bend the available media to its own ends.

 

The Kite (Pierz Newton-John)

27 Jul

There is a church that stands on High Street that will always signify disaster. When Adam has grown up, he will dream of it again in times of sorrow or abandonment: a lonely spire, tapering into the pale light of Autumn. His grandmother, who would drop him off at his father’s flat on the weekends, taught him the word: steeple. The sound of it made him dizzy — steep, steep, steeple — and he began to notice them across the Brueghel landscapes of the city, rising up out of the far places where dreams go. At its very peak, where the building tapered to nothing, there was a metal rooster, always swinging to face the wind. He worried vaguely for the man who had to put it there. In nightmares he saw him fall.

They walked across a park to get to his father’s flat, kicking and shuffling through the fallen leaves, a chill wind in the bare branches. It was a small dark flat, full of stale air from the blow heaters. Adam breathed in the smell of pipe tobacco and wool as his father pulled his face into the folds of his jumper. His father had found a lizard on a trip to the outback and brought it home to keep in a fish tank with eucalyptus cuttings, sand, light and heat from an electric lamp: a little cube of desert trapped under glass.

Adam has a photograph from early that year, or perhaps the year before – at any rate his parents are still together in it. People do not look as he remembers them. He never ceases to be surprised at the way everyone looks. There is the dog, the beagle that would have to be taken away. There is his mother, crouching next to it, her hair dark and straggling – her black eyes betraying the malignant depression that is devouring her. And his father standing behind her with his pipe and his look of an English gentleman: saturnine and thin-wristed. The black and white image is oversaturated with unhappiness. There is Adam and his brother James. Can you believe they looked like that? That seventies hair. Those tracksuits! They are so little, and already you can make out the eddy of distress in James’s eye. Later, it will become a tempest that will just about kill him.

Adam’s father traps insects for the lizard. He crouches in front of the tank, face pale in the fluorescent light. It is a strange, exquisite creature, covered in tiny rhinoceros horns, in thorns. It is as rare as a unicorn, his father says. It lifts its head, as if drawn up by an invisible set of pullies, and its eyes, which are small and black as caviar, blink mechanically. The unicorns were all washed away in the flood, according to the Irish song on his record player. Whenever he plays it, they feel the tragedy. They want to cry for the poor, foolish unicorns as they are floated away. His father feeds the lizard flies and fusses with the light, the element, trying to make a perfect desert for his lizard inside its glass cube, inside his flat with its unpacked boxes all over the floor. Autumn glare, cold in the windows.

And then they go fly kites, his father standing at the edge of the oval as Adam runs. The kite behind him flips on its string, nosedives into the mud. Next time he holds the kite and his father runs, Adam throws it up, and the kite does two little loops then a bigger one, and then in an instant leaps into the blue. It weaves high above them, the string in his father’s hand taut and thrumming, as if it were a fish fighting him up there. Can I Dad, can I? Ooh, can I? Adam leaps up again and again, trying to grab his father’s hand. But his father doesn’t notice him. He’s up there with the kite at the end of that long, vanishing curve. He lets the line reel out higher and higher until the kite is just a tiny eye fluttering its lids in the wind. Then the string runs out. Why must the string always run out? Adam wants the kite to go so high it will dip its wings into the sky itself. Then when they bring it down, he will feel the mystery of its flight thrill through his hands when he touches it, like electricity.

His father holds his arms up, for the last inch of altitude. Then at last he bends to place the reel in Adam’s hands. Don’t let go, he says. But the kite is so heavy, so hungry for height. He feels vertigo in his fingers, the same quake he feels at the top of the tower in the park. Afraid not of falling but of his power to step over the edge. Even at three – especially at three – you can know this. The kite feels heavy as a whale trying to dive. But he holds on, the string singing in his fingers.

He won’t forget the nights his parents used to fight. When the silence in them exploded, and Adam had to hold himself together because the holders themselves were breaking. Her screaming and his cold, inaudible murmurs, and then she’d take the car and drive, and Adam would run to the window to watch the headlights swing out of the driveway. Not crying, because fright had shocked him empty. She had gone and might never return. The house lights blazed on although the house itself was empty without her. All his toys on the floor and the lights blazing and nobody home. His father a ghost, a chill in his office. In dreams he would return and wander that empty house, cold to the bone, one bright empty room after another, and in the windows, a darkness absolute and terrifying.

A trial separation. Heavy, adult, dead words. She spent her days in bed, the curtains drawn, and Adam kept away from her room at the end of the house, as if from a forbidden cave. She went to hospital, no one told him why, but he felt the dread in his belly at night. He saw her leaning on a broom and weeping in the kitchen. She never noticed him standing there. He knew he was to blame, but didn’t know how he should change.

The lizard died. Adam and James came to visit one day, and the fishtank was dark and empty. James wanted to bury it, so they did: They held a ceremony standing in the tiny courtyard where they made a grave under a miniature lemon tree. With characteristic precision, their father sculpted a tiny, perfect cross. It was winter by then and blustery even in the courtyard, and they shivered in their duffle coats, James’s brow furrowed in earnest sorrow as their father ‘said a few words.’

Later they went to fly the kite. As Adam held the string, an enormous, complicated thought rose in him like a great balloon. His hands opened and the kite flew away. It raced away over the houses, it went higher and higher. His father roared. How the sky was full of tears! How the world was full of roaring! And the kite flew away over the Brueghel landscape of the city, whirling upwards until it had vanished in the clouds.

Pierz Newton-John – An Endless Wellspring

24 Jul

Pierz Newton-John is a Melbourne-based fiction writer, currently focusing on short stories, but with a novel in the pipeline. Among other places, his work has appeared in the Sleepers Almanac, Overland, and Wet Ink. He was awarded the Boroondara Literary Award in 2006 and the Alan Marshall Short Story Award in 2008.

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Alec Patric: I used to think that there were different ideas for different kinds of projects. So an idea for a poem might not work for a novel. Then again, there have been novels that have dealt with the kind of romance better suited to a love poem. There are dense, intricate poems filled with philosophical fervour that a series of novels might not exhaust. So I’m not sure anymore. And it worries me at times, because Wallace Stegner wrote in his collected stories that his first agent warned him about writing short stories, saying that a short story writer “lives on his principal, using up beginnings and endings.” I’m wondering what your thoughts are on Ideas, and since you’re about to have a collection of stories published, about living on the principal.

Pierz Newton-John: I’m uncomfortable with the premise of this question, which seems to separate the idea from the execution, as if there were some underlying seminal concept to which a story, novel or poem could be reduced. Yet even in the case of a poem, where the notion of some single underlying idea seems most tenable, no poet wants her poem’s idea explained in words other than the poem itself. From the point of view of process of course—the writer’s process—we need ideas as starting points. Perhaps we think, ‘I want to write a story about the tragically ephemeral nature of romantic love’. In my experience such theoretical starting points are usually singularly sterile. It’s only when one becomes imaginatively enmeshed in a specific imaginative landscape that something resembling an interesting story starts to take shape. For me good ideas fall out of stories, out of the process of writing them, not the other way round. Sure, I have plenty of ideas for stories, but honestly, few of them ever survive intact all the way from lightbulb-over-the-head to finished product without being transformed significantly along the way.

A good example is a recent story of mine (soon to be published in Extempore) which began with the idea that I wanted to write a sort of requiem for my old jazz guitar teacher that would incidentally explore ideas about the way in which the passion for something essentially abstract like music can clash with the need for human connectedness. Well, in truth, even that is too after-the-fact. I just felt I needed to write a story about this man who both interested and saddened me. It ended up somewhere quite different, leaving the memory of the actual man completely behind and following an imaginative excursion sparked by something he once told me about hearing the song “A Whiter Shade of Pale” for the first time. In the process I discovered the core idea which I ended up encapsulating in the first line: “Loneliness and freedom are an amalgam that hardens with age”. But that came late in the process.

So in my view ideas are secondary and emerge from the living process of writing, and it is essentially an artificial abstraction to wonder if the same idea could be expressed in some other medium or genre. The work expresses precisely itself and only incidentally does it represent something else: an idea, theme or meaning. If novels could be reduced to their underlying ideas, Yann Martell wouldn’t have written The Life of Pi, he’d just have said something like: “Hey dude, in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, why not believe in God? I mean, better to believe in the nice story than the horrible alternative, right?” I for one am glad he decided to be more long-winded about it.

As for Wallace Stegner’s agent’s remarks on “living off your principal”, well I scoff! We are talking about the guy’s agent here. Do writers have a finite store of beginnings and endings in them, like eggs in an ovary that once used up, can never be replaced? I’m equally skeptical of the Taoist notion that men shouldn’t ejaculate because they’ll use up their store of qi. Come on, we are creative beings. We draw from an endless wellspring, and if we get stuck somewhere, it’s not because we ran out. It’s because the pipe is blocked. So unblock it!

Alec Patric: I used to be an idealist. Back then, I would have applauded the notion of an endless wellspring. Ironically, this was when I spent eight years working on one colossal novel. When I finally opened up and began flowing, the ideas began to arrive thick and fast. And yet I don’t believe in an endless wellspring anymore. In fact, I feel thankful whenever I get an idea for a story, poem, screenplay or novel.

Let’s look again for a moment at what that agent was saying (by the way, a literary agent shouldn’t be reduced to a paper pushing businessman–> most are in fact, ardent, lifelong lovers of both literature and its makers.) By living on the principal, the agent is suggesting that a writer can live from eggs or the meat of that which produces them. In contrast to the agent, I’d suggest that we live on the meat, whether eggs form a large part of our diet or not.

Which gets us back to–> the Idea. Henry James called it the donnee, and there was a somewhat mystical idea behind his concept of the ‘seed’ of a piece of work. It was the spark that gave something life.

We can all waffle on endlessly, with various plot points developing into narratives, with characters that draw from our experiences, and hope that in this way we have breathed life into our creations. But is it that straightforward? We might manufacture a story but an Idea is that animating principle, whether we think of it as a one sentence plot outline, a snatch of dialogue, or a vague idea of recapturing a moment of childhood.

Rather than think of these ‘Ideas’ as being part of a torrent of thought, which we need to simply open ourselves up to, I think of them as burning embers that have flown up into the air from some vast fire we never get to see directly. As writers we get more proficient in simply keeping our eyes open and letting these embers land in our carefully prepared baskets of paper.

When I’ve looked at Cri de Coeur, your blog, I’ve found you have addressed writer’s block often. Clearly you feel like you’ve now ‘unblocked’ that pipe, but was there one moment of insight that released that endless wellspring? Or was what you have written in this interview, a part of a philosophy that formed a map for getting yourself out into the wilds of literature?

Pierz Newton-John: Hehe, maybe one day I’ll run out of chickens and that’ll teach me! When I say endless wellspring, I don’t mean inspiration is always easy to come by, and certainly not cheap. Yes, writer’s block is something I used to talk about quite a bit on my blog because I never felt (and to an extent still don’t feel) as productive as I’d like. But ironically I’d now put part of that blocked experience down to believing too much in Idea over process. (In that sense, you’re still the idealist between us!) I was always looking for great ideas and if I didn’t have one, I’d stare mournfully at my computer screen, or randomly attack the whiteness with paragraphs that rapidly fizzled to naught. If I had what I thought was a good idea I’d often get to the 1500-word mark and then decide it wasn’t such a great idea after all and abandon it for the pristine promise of another white page. Nowadays I’m both more flexible and more committed. Sure, some stories are just duds, but most of the time, even if the initial idea doesn’t come off, there’s something good there, some thread that’s worth tugging on to see where it leads. I believe in Leonard Cohen’s approach, who said that a song might take much, much longer to write than you’d ever reasonably expect. Many of his songs took years to write. Well, usually I don’t take years, but I think an attitude of patience and commitment is essential. Sparks and flames and inspirations are all fire and air element metaphors, but I rather like Stephen King’s description of writing as the painstaking removal of a fossil from the surrounding earth.

There’s more though to the story of my unblockage than an attitude change. Writing is acutely personal and there’s no separating one’s psychological condition from one’s creative process. If you’re working five days a week in a soul-stifling office job, it’s a lot to expect you’ll come home at six, and be able to just turn on the creative taps. Same with being in a dead-end relationship, or just at a stagnant point in your own development. The work as a writer is to find some way to stay alive to yourself and to life despite the many forces that conspire to suffocate you. Sometimes a painful experience can do that. Pain can split you open and make you question things and force back to your creative source. It’s an opportunity. In my case, the break-up of a relationship served that function, but I’m now acutely aware of the need to maintain that openness, which I do through meditation and the continual willingness to do something new and different. Right now for instance I’m learning to dance, even though I’m remedial in the area of put-your-left-foot-in-and-your-right-foot-out. And I’m loving it!

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–> Pierz has had further thoughts regarding the nature of Ideas so he’s posted an article on his blog Cri de Coeur–> which he’s asked me to link to here and that I’d encourage you to read. I love that Pierz wakes up with an brilliant idea after our interview. (He still doesn’t like Wallace Stegner’s agent though.) Pierz’s post is a delightful exploration of our creative sources; an essay that is illuminated by a brave spiritual earnestness. Perhaps our metaphors for understanding these invisibles of consciousness are by their very nature in a process of morphing flux. It makes me think of an author like Harper Lee, writer of the one masterpiece, To Kill A Mocking Bird, and nothing else. I can’t help but wonder who her agent was.

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