Readings.com.au: Interviews

Andy Griffiths

2008-08-26T00:00:00Z

Andy Griffiths, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly, August 2008

Phenomenally popular children’s writer Andy Griffiths is the author of the Just series, The Day My Bum Went Psycho, The Bad Book, and most recently, The Big Fat Cow that Went Kapow! and the Schooling Around series. Andy will be appearing at the 2008 Melbourne Writers Festival. Jo Case spoke to him for Readings.

I read that you got the idea for the Just series, and naming the character of Andy after yourself, from watching Seinfeld. How did that work?

This was around about 1995, 1996, when I was trying to figure out how to make a really compelling book with a voice that would really speak to my audience. I played with first-person, second-person, choose your own adventure ... and I couldn’t make it work. And I started watching Seinfeld because everyone told me I should. I’d resisted for a long time – it was an American sitcom, and American sitcoms are the most unfunny thing in the world. But finally I watched it and just loved it. And the fact that he’s in his own sitcom! That’s how I told stories to kids as I grew up and even now. I’ll tell my daughter an outrageous thing that happened ‘I was on my way home ...’

So, that was your natural storytelling mode?

It was my natural storytelling mode, but it was so different to what anyone else was doing. And I was thinking, really, putting yourself as the character hasn’t been done before in Australian children’s fiction. So, it might not be regarded as proper writing.

I’m sure it is now.

Well, it depends who you talk to. But, at the time it was a risky strategy. But at the time I also thought ‘well, what have I got to lose?’

You self-published the first Just book?

I published a book of 200 practical jokes. No, that wasn’t ... I did begin self-publishing lots of little books. 12-page books. And I’d sell them at markets – Monash Uni, Melbourne Uni, they were lucrative places. I’d spend all day and sell 50 books for $1 each.

Was that something you did more for fun?

No, it was trying to make some money from writing. Which everyone said was impossible. You know, ‘you can’t make a living from fiction writing in Australia’ was just a given. This was going back to 1992, 1993. I’d left teaching to come back and study writing in Melbourne. I lived off savings. And I was trying to make those savings stretch. And that’s why I started self-publishing in little book form. So I could make them for five or ten cents each, sell them for $1 or $2.

So, you were doing that in your kitchen?

Yeah. I’d get a printer to print them up. And I’d sit there stapling them. But I could make $50 or $60 a day from my creative writing. And that, to me, was wonderful. I thought ‘I’m doing it! I could do this forever!’

And how did that go to the next step then?

Of the little books I had, the funny ones were the ones that really captured people. The Day My Bum Went Psycho was a short story before it became a novel. I thought, humour is obviously my thing, so I’ll stop doing everything else.

So, originally you were doing other kinds of writing?

I was doing more serious kind of fiction writing, more adult. And some freelance journalism. I thought I might go into that. But of everything I did, the funny stuff would get the reaction. So I thought, okay, I’ll just concentrate on that. I thought ‘I’m just going to do the stuff that amuses me, no matter how weird or wacky it is’. If they don’t sell, then they don’t sell. It felt risky, but in the end it was a good idea. Because I wasn’t going to second-guess kids. I wasn’t going ‘oh, what do kids like?’ Poo, bums, okay, I’ll write poo and bums. I was amusing myself in a Monty Python type of way.

So, you just wanted to make a living from writing and not have to do something else?

Yeah. When I was a teacher I was tormented by ideas for books and torn between following that and actually doing my job. So, that was hard. So, when I committed to this, I just thought, ‘I can buy food. And pay rent.’

So, the first thing that you actually had published was an educational textbook?

Yeah. That was my grunge collection, which was called Freaking Out. I sent it to an agent who sent it round to all the publishers and they all politely refused, because they couldn’t see any commercial potential whatsoever. Then an educational publisher, Longman, said ‘this would be a great little creative writing book’. And they assigned Terry Denton to the project as Freaking Out’s illustrator, just because they knew he had a good sense of humour. I didn’t meet him. And the book came out, and it did really well, because it was a kind of kooky, funny ... it brought humour to the process. You know, writing was this deadly serious thing. There’s one book called There’s No Magic Formula. And mine was called Swinging on the Clothesline: And Other Instant Stories.

And one of them sounds like a teacher talking to you.

Exactly! Then there was another one of those called Rubbish Bins in Space, which Terry also illustrated. By that time, I was starting to get offered invitations to go into schools and run workshops with the kids on the basis of my educational publishing. And I’d be presented as a writer, and the kids would say ‘well, what have you written?’ And I’d say ‘I’ve published ten books’ and I’d produce these little self-published books. I’d sell them to the kids for 20 cents each. And I’d literally walk away with shopping bags full of 20 cent pieces.

How did you go banking them?

Well, I didn’t. I spent them. But I was being paid for the schools, too. And that was incredible money. That was $300 a day, all of a sudden. Coming from $60 a day. And I’d be entertaining the kids and running ideas past them. And that was really valuable feedback. Because day after day, session after session, I’m confronting the audience. I can watch an idea die, I can watch an idea work ... and then see it die. I was honing the Just Tricking approach all through that.

And Terry offered to illustrate it for me. That was the big step into real publishing, was he was an established illustrator, and they knew that they wouldn’t lose all their money.

I heard that you did a stand-up comedy course in order to get better at doing your school appearances.

Yeah. This was right at the beginning when I was getting invited to schools and I was talking to groups, and sometimes they would laugh and sometimes they wouldn’t. I could go five minutes without a laugh, and then I’d go ... this is good. And they’d just stop again. I didn’t know what was funny.

Where did you go?

There was a little ad in the paper. Peter Croft’s. He’s an ex stand-up comedian. He got out of stand-up and into teaching the techniques of audience psychology and how to make an audience laugh, how to relax them, how to charm them, how to make them like you. The first, number one, thing. Most comedians aren’t trying to make you laugh, they’re just trying to make you like them. As a visiting writer, I would often be introduced with great fanfare. ‘You all be quiet, we have a writer, he’s going to teach you something.’ I knew what they were thinking: ‘who’s that wanker?’ So you break that down first, make them laugh. So yeah, part of the course was doing stand-up comedy in pubs.

So, you did stand-up comedy in pubs?

Yeah, about a dozen.

Did you enjoy it?

No, not enough to keep going. I won a few and lost a few and drew a few ... And my first love was always books. So, it was books and then the comedy. But I got really good at speaking. I still love it. You take a thousand kids, orchestrate them. It’s great fun.

The teacher character in your new Schooling Around series (Mr. Brainfright) is great. How did you come up with Brainfright?

In one of the Just stories, there’s this teacher, Mrs Livingstone, who Andy meets his match with. She tells these ridiculous stories. A tear comes to her eye as she remembers these cannibals in Africa who ate her husband. And the kids are like ‘ohhh, did she really lose her husband to cannibals?’ So she gives as good as she gets.

She was an early model for Brainfright. I thought, let’s bring a really wild teacher in there. And that’s what I did in the classroom to a lesser extent. I couldn’t bring myself to do the deadening textbook stuff. I’d go, ‘this is not teaching English. This is child-minding’. And so I had them making little books, or we’d put things into jars and write labels for them. So, you’re engaging creativity and a sense of playfulness. And of course they want to do it, they’re being inventive. And they’ve got an audience, in each other. And it’s that audience that you get the general engagement with the writing.

There’d be nothing like having your peers like what you write.

That’s what I say. I say ‘it’s not for me, everyone in this class is going to see it, so you’d better have something good’. So yeah, Brainfright is my idealised teacher.

Just as Andy is my idealised prankster self. He does stuff I would have liked to. If you were brave enough and stupid enough and careless enough of the consequences, that’s what that is. And he’s a proxy to come in and try all that stuff and then watch it create anarchy. And he gets punished mostly. He never, ever succeeds.

My son pointed that out to me recently, that in your books, bad behaviour never turns out well. I wonder if the kids get the morality of the tale more than the grown-ups.

He must be very perceptive. Because most radio hosts, I’ve been doing interviews with over the past few weeks start with ‘there’s no educational value and no morality in these books, they’re just wild’.

Very early on I realised that if Andy’s playing all these pranks on people and succeeding, he’d actually be a very unlikable character. So, I’ve said he can play any joke no matter how horrible, as long he’s the one who ultimately suffers. And I think we know, on a subconscious level, that that’s fair game, that we can enjoy that. Because nobody’s getting hurt, except the person who deserves it. Whereas if you push a little old lady over and make her slip on a banana skin, it’s funny to a degree, but it’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s funny until the bit where you cut the tape and show them in pain. I wrote a story about that actually. ‘Unfunniest Home Videos’ [in the latest Just Shocking]. I thought Andy would be the kind of kid who would film his friend Danny having an accident to win the money. And then the formula is, how is this going to backfire so he’s the one who ends up getting hurt?

I wonder, did the storm over The Bad Book take you by surprise?

A little bit. I fully expected it with The Day My Bum Went Psycho, and we got it, and it was just enough to give it super publicity. It was perfect. The Bad Book did take me by surprise, because I’d grown up with cautionary literature. It was really a parody of that cautionary children’s literature. It’s quite black – you know, kids falling into fireplaces and the terrible things that happen. So, when we did it, what we did was update it to modern things. So for instance, there’s a kid asking if he can do this really dangerous thing. ‘Can I feed the lion?’ And his mother says yes.

That’s one of the Bad Mummy stories?

It’s called ‘bad mummy’, but they don’t read that. Everyone’s being bad. I did have a lot of fun with it, but then everyone got really upset about it. The cat story was changed (in the next printing) as a result.

There’s a traditional verse called Little Willie He sets fire to his sister, cuts his sister’s head off, cuts the baby’s ears off. Quite traditional black humour. So I wrote, ‘Little Willie took a match and set fire to the cat / said Little Willie as it burnt, I bet the cat hates that’. Black humour. Understatement. But everyone said it was encouraging kids to set fire to cats. And then he sets fire to himself, sets fire to his bum. And then he sets fire to his head, and says ‘soon I will be dead’. And no one blinked an eyelash at those parts.

So it was the setting the cat on fire that was the big thing?

No more cats on fire!

That’s interesting. It kind of highlights what our modern taboos are.

Well, we found them! Talkback DJs around the country were able to produce instances of cat cruelty. Not from my book. I remember this redneck DJ in Queensland. And I said ‘for goodness sakes, a show like The Simpsons, you know, I’m operating on that level’. And he said, ‘Oh yes, well we could talk about The Simpsons!’

That sounds like it was a bit of a nightmare.

It became quite tedious. Halfway through. And I just thought ... if people are doing that, they’re not laughing. And the publicity started affecting the book negatively, too. People didn’t have it in their libraries. Even now, the Victorian Premier’s Reading Challenge, which I’m an ambassador for, doesn’t have it on their list.

But it’s got your other books?

Yeah. The bums came on over a year or two.

I hear there was a controversy over a poster with the bums?

Yeah. Just the cover. We couldn’t have that cover [of The Day My Bum Went Psycho] on a poster promoting reading because some people might be offended by that cover. David Kemp, who was the Education Minister ... They’d had done a deal with Pan that I’d be the ambassador for Reading Week. They did a deal that that book would be on a poster that would be distributed to every school. And they rang up Pan and said ‘we can’t have that cover on the poster, that’s too outrageous’. And my publicist went straight to The Age.

Good publicist.

She was brilliant. So that story got us a lot of attention. But I knew the title would anyway. And I was partly challenging the librarians that I’d met promoting the other four Just titles. They were telling me that they would take my books out of the library if a parent complained. And I said ‘one parent can complain and you take the book out of the library? That’s not right. You’re the professional here and these books are clearly working for a lot of kids. Why don’t you just tell that parent that their kid can’t borrow it and leave it at that?’ But they’d never thought of that.

That’s an interesting approach.

I just thought, it’s around the wrong way. And a lot of writers still are scared to publish something like that. But it was exactly that attitude that was keeping the books boringly safe. So I came up with a deliberately out-there title. ‘Put that in your face. Deal with it. See if the world crashes down around us.’ And it didn’t.

So you deliberately conceived something that would push the boundaries?

It started as a joke. To begin with. I had that little book I sold at the Monash Uni markets. And then a journalist on a publicity tour in Tamworth asked me ‘what are you working on now?’ and I said ‘I’m working on a serious novel called The Day My Bum Went Psycho’. And she was quite straitlaced and she reported it on the news that night. And it became a running gag and then eventually, I’d written four collections of short stories and I didn’t want to get tagged with that forever. So I thought, I’ll write a novel, and I’ll call it The Day My Bum Went Psycho. And it served the purpose of putting it into the conservatives’ lap, who I felt were having this unhealthy influence over children’s publishing.

‘Children’s literature should be nice, it should be educational.’ No, that’s not it. The books I loved as a kid may have had those things, but that wasn’t their primary focus. Their primary focus was entertainment. Just whatever grabbed the imagination. That’s what I’ve always been true to. I think your first job as a children’s writer is to grab the kids’ imagination and take them on a ... maybe not a wild ride ... other people like gentler rides. And as I’ve gone along, I’ve tried the gentler kind of humour. The Cat on the Mat is Flat, the Schooling Around series.

Since The Bad Book, your books have been gentler humour, and I wondered if that was a reaction.

It sort of was. I remember a mother, at the height of The Bad Book, saying ‘what’s next? The really bad book?’ And saying ‘no, actually I’m going to write about kittens and puppies and ponies’.

You’ve said that you wanted to shake up children’s publishing a bit – that you felt children’s publishing was too tame? Do you think it has changed with the success of your books?

Not as much as I would have liked. I hear from publishers that there’s a lot of copycat stuff coming in. There’s a lot of gross-out books. People misinterpret what I do. And it grosses me out when I see them. ‘Little Johnny opened his lunchbox and ate his sandwich and it was a snot sandwich.’ There’s nothing else going on.

At the same time though, over that same 10-year period, there’s been Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, Lemony Snicket, Diary of a Wimpy Kidcal. That’s the stuff that we need. So, I feel much more relaxed now. I’m thrilled, because we have a range of at least half a dozen authors writing really good quality humour, which didn’t exist ten years ago.

Emily Perkins

2008-08-25T00:00:00Z

Emily Perkins, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

New Zealand writer Emily Perkins got her start with the short story collection Not Her Real Name, but has since turned to the novel. Her third, much praised novel, Novel About My Wife, is a psychological thriller about a husband trying to piece together the shadowy identity of his mysterious wife, Ann, in the aftermath of her death. He reconstructs the last year of her life: a year in which Tom lost his job, their first mortgage loomed large, and they awaited the birth of their first child, all while Ann became obsessed with a local homeless man she was convinced was stalking her.

Emily Perkins will be a guest of the 2008 Melbourne Writers Festival.

What made you decide to be a writer?

I just always did write, which was definitely something that came out of always reading I think. Out of always being an avid reader and loving just living inside the world of books, or the different world that books created I think quite naturally made me want to express myself within that form. And then it just developed, so I wrote the usual kind of bad poetry as a teenager. And then in my late teens and early twenties I was acting. I went to drama school and all through that time I was writing short little snippets – dialogues and monologues – that didn’t really ever reach completion. And then I enrolled in a writing course at the University of Wellington and that was when I started finished things.

And a visiting publisher from Picador read your work?

The publishing director at Picador at the time was out for the Writers and Readers Week in Wellington. And he was doing something that I now know was fairly unusual actually in the publishing world, he was actively looking for new writers, he wasn’t just waiting for the slush pile to reveal something. And he was just really encouraging and said ‘send me any more stories, as you write them’. Which I did. Now, when I think about it, it seems such a funny thing to do. Sending these individual typewritten stories.

But I guess he asked you to.

Yeah, but I didn’t know that that was maybe not the way you were supposed to go about it.

Do you think that it was maybe an advantage that you didn’t know?

Definitely. You know, that’s the great thing about not knowing, I suppose. And that’s also in a lot of ways that’s the story of New Zealanders in a city like London, or in much bigger places. You don’t know what the rules are, so you don’t know what you can’t do.

Do you think that these days – it seems that these days with those courses, everyone knows what to do. They have a real focus on ‘how to get published’ as well as the writing.

I think it’s interesting that you say that because I think you’re absolutely right. It’s something I really resist as a teacher. I would rather my students were experimenting with language and learning about developing their close reading skills and their critiquing skills and their rewriting skills and learning about technique but absolutely NOT with an eye for publication. Because ... you know, if it happens, it happens. That’s great.

I think it’s a lot to do with the fact that people now pay through the nose for their tertiary education. Now that students are putting themselves in hock for their education and they treat creative writing schools as some kind of entry way into publication and to my mind, that’s absolutely not the role of a creative writing school, or creative writing at an academic level. So, something that you always have to negotiate.

Your first book, Not Her Real Name, launched you onto the scene as a new literary star. What was it like to start your career with that kind of big bang?

When you first publish something, you’ve been writing in the dark, you’ve got no idea what people’s response is going to be. It was fantastic! I don’t want to sound falsely modest, but there was an element of it that surprised me.

Did the success of the first book present a challenge in writing your next books?

I think the real challenge for me, which was a major challenge, was moving from short stories into novel writing. And it’s still something that I feel quite consciously engaged with, I suppose. I was still learning about novel writing ... and I still am, there’s so much to learn because every book is different and you want to write every book in a different way. So you always start over feeling like you don’t really know anything. That was the case, moving from the short stories to my next book, but it’s also been the case for every book after that.

What made you decide to make the move from short stories to novels? Was it ‘that’s what you do next’ or ...

Well, kind of. To be honest, there was probably an element of that. Although now I certainly wouldn’t see the short story as any kind of training ground. I see them as very different forms. But there was a certain amount of expectation that that’s what you do next. But it was also partly because I thought, I didn’t know how to do it, and I was just really curious about that. I suppose I just had a curiosity about novel writing at that stage that I didn’t have about writing short stories.

What was the inspiration for Novel About My Wife?

There were a few different factors. There was this character of Ann, who I knew was this reinvented person. I didn’t really know how or why. I wasn’t sure what she’d done or why she wanted to reinvent herself, but I was interested in whether or not that transformation was possible as a kind of conscious act. I mean, we all reinvent ourselves all the time, but to really try and do it in a wholesale way.

I was also really bugged by this guy in England that I met ... this English guy ... who sort of made this pronouncement about Australians and New Zealanders in London being on the run from racial or cultural issues at home. It was so infuriating. And it was so much so that I thought “maybe there’s something in this. Maybe I can use my kind of revulsion for this perspective in terms of this novel as well. And London I suppose is a kind of influence on this novel. I’d been living there for kind of ten years and there were a lot of different aspects of London that have found their way in there.

It seems that you have great fun poking at the sacred cows of modern society, particularly modern urban hipsters.

I think Tom’s got a certain amount of self-knowledge about that sort of thing. I’m interested in the fact that a lot of us live within a particular presented cultural values system, that we don’t necessarily agree with, but we go along with it. And Tom’s in that position I guess. He’s critiquing it, but he’s absolutely in the tide of it at the same time.

I also liked the fact that Tom was complaining about kiddie bores and pretentious children’s names and ended up calling his child Arlo.

Well, again, it’s different when other people are doing it. And I think it’s particularly true of when people have children. And particularly when a certain type of man has children who’s always maintained that he’s going to be free of all of that, and then suddenly ... it’s like nobody’s every had a child before.

This is the first novel where you’ve really written about having children.

I’m not even sure if it’s the kind of writer I want to be ... but seems that I am the kind of writer who follows my own sort of generational trajectory I suppose. I guess I am following things that I know and have been around. Although obviously it’s a very fictional expression of that. I’d lived in London quite a while and I’d written a couple of short stories set there before but it took me quite a while to feel that I really knew the territory well enough to set something there. So I suppose in a way different stages of life are like different countries, and I’m the kind of writer who feels more comfortable writing about something I’ve been to.

I never quite worked out exactly what happened at the end ... is that something you intended?

Actually, I worked on a couple of earlier drafts where things were a bit more spelled out. But because I really wanted it to be clear that this was Tom’s version of events, this wasn’t the version of events. He had his chance to know Ann and to enter her world when she was in the room with him. And it’s too late now. And he can only guess. He can only make the attempt he’s making. Which I don’t think is a totally doomed attempt, because trying is all he can do. It’s a worthy act in itself. But he can’t ever reach absolute knowledge. And because it’s his book in a sense, I think absolute understanding has to be elusive. For me, the point wasn’t really to have that sort of ‘ohhh!’ moment. When there was more information in there it just felt wrong. It felt like it was shutting the novel off.

Terry Denton

2008-08-09T00:00:00Z

Terry Denton, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Award-winning author/illustrator Terry Denton had been successfully working in children’s books for over a decade already when he was first teamed with Andy Griffiths, to illustrate an educational textbook Andy had written. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership. Terry is a prolific writer and illustrator, creator of the Splash! and Wombat and Fox series, illustrator of the Maxx Rumble series, and much more. Jo Case spoke to him about his creative partnership with Andy Griffiths (the Just series, The Bad Book, The Cat on the Mat is Flat and The Big Fat Cow That Went Kapow, What Bumosaur is That?).

How did the creative partnership with Andy Griffiths come about?

We worked on an educational book or two together and they were looking for some funny illustrations, I guess, and they came to me. And we realised that we bounced off each other pretty well. And he was writing short stories and having difficulty getting them published, so we went together as a team and approached a publisher or two, and that got them started. [The short stories would become the Just series, starting with Just Tricking.] I think that they were a bit confused about his stories to begin with but I think that when they saw the package and how we were going to approach it, they understood.

I think it was just the two of us going together. It all evolved in that process. I think they just liked the idea of the two of us working together.

You must have presented well as a team.

Yes, we do work well as a team. It’s good fun.

Andy said that the fact that you were already a known and successful illustrator was probably a part of publishers picking up the Just series as well.

Yeah, I guess that’s true, because I had been there for about 10 years before. So, I did have an established name and I’d won a few prizes, so that probably helped. But in the end what mattered was that the stories were good. I think it made to look at them more seriously if I was prepared to illustrate them. But I think that the stories were just looking for the right publisher.

I guess my thing is that even though he needed me in some ways to get that first break, he was going to get that anyway. It made no difference.

But you sped it along. And the illustrations are obviously a big part of the package, especially the Just stories.

Yeah. But I still reckon they’d survive without them, though.

The good thing really since then is that we’ve really expanded our collaboration, and that’s been really good fun.

Yes, I wondered how that happened – how you branched out to The Cat on The Mat is Flat and The Bad Book?

Well, with The Bad Book, we decided to just do something really bad, to address that whole badness thing. We probably went too bad in the end. Though a lot of kids would disagree with that. A few adults thought we went too bad, but it gave us then an insight into another way of working. And out of that came The Cat on the Mat, which was an attempt just to get that level of humour without the badness, to see if we could spread it across a book in this different kind of form. It’s quite a bit younger, really.

When you started working on the Just series, did you realise you’d end up with such a long partnership with Andy?

No, we didn’t really know what we were trying to do in the first book. It was just the idea of marginal humour, I suppose. I think I did a lot more illustration than either of us would have imagined I would do at the beginning, and then it started evolving. And I suppose it really changed at Just Crazy, it started to expand in different directions. And then at Just Disgusting, it really took off.

We did a little book called What Bumosaur is That recently, and that was a lot of fun. We went away for a week down to Wilson’s Prom and worked for an intensive week, coming up with bumosaurs. So, that was really good fun. Not only because we work together so well, but just the other things we talked about and plans we made.

The margin illustrations in the Just series must be really fun to do.

Yeah, it’s a really intense process when it happens, because Andy spends nine months doing the stories and the illustrations to do in about a month, a month and a half. They come to me as double page spreads. It’s just a matter of that six-week, wild, coming-up-with-600-drawings, process.

You must have to really closely schedule that in around your other projects.

Yeah. It’s drop everything else and do that! While it’s sort of slightly nerve-wracking and intense, it’s an exhilarating process, too. Free ideas.

Andy told me that he told you to just do whatever you like in the margin illustrations, that they didn’t need to be too tied to what was happening in the story.

Yeah, that’s probably how it started. Some of them are linked to the story and some of them aren’t. But then there’s these characters we invent. Very early on, we had this character of Mr Scribble, who was just a pile of scribble, and for me then it’s a matter of working out what a piece of scribble can do. And then in the most recent one, Just Shocking, I invented this character of Spleen Boy, who’s just this spleen without a body who runs around creating havoc. I run into kids who just love that whole idea. Both of those characters, they just love them.

Have you ever been tempted to take some of the margin characters or illustrations and spin them off into something bigger?

It’s an idea I have, that it would be fun to do. A book which is a series of visual ideas. And we have talked about that. We’re about to start another series with a working title of Foolish Fables. They’re fables. But I think after that I’d like to try something visual using those characters and seeing what you could do with them. Going from a visual point of view, just inventing characters and doing stuff with them.

I wondered if you got stung by The Bad Book controversy as well? I know that Andy copped a lot of flack...

He took all the flack.

Were you surprised by the reaction?

Not really. To be honest, I thought there would be a little more than that. There was not a huge amount of negative reaction. There were a couple of bookshops in Sydney and a few schools here and there. Quite a few people defended it. Andy spent a lot of energy defending it. But he liked it like that. Deep down, he LIKED the idea of going out and defending it. In some way, he’s a crusader. My attitude was, they can say what they like, really. I mean, the book’s out there. And kids love it.

Did you have any regrets with The Bad Book, or is that something you’d do all over again?

I think, if we made a mistake with that book, it was our illustration approach. Initially, the idea was to illustrate it in almost stick figure-ish kind of way. And in the end, we chose to soften the approach to make it more palatable maybe. We decided that the text was BAD. The drawings perhaps didn’t need to be that bad. I think that now both of us think that was a mistake. We should have signalled the badness in the drawings as well. The book would have had a much more feral kind of look.

And there’s a couple ... there’s the little boy who runs across the road and gets skittled. But I talk to children about that, and that’s one of the things they mention the most. They get the joke. But it strained the sense of humour of a few people. There’s one image ... it illustrates the story of ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Poo’ ... there’s a picture of a lady who looks very much like my mother sitting down at a table like my mother may have and drinking a cup of tea and eating poo off a plate. And maybe, if it were a more feral stick figure-ish kind of picture, it might have worked better.

Your poor mother!

It’s out there, now. I think what I might have changed would be to do it in a more inventive and out-there kind of drawing style.

But I guess, I bet you can look back on any project you do and there’s some things you might do differently.

Sure. That’s really true. Every project I do, I look back and think ‘I could have done that better’. You always imagine you could do it better.

But I guess you have to finish it sometime and send it off.

That’s right. Yeah. I think both of us would not, NOT do The Bad Book. In fact, we’ve often talked about doing a second one.

Really?

I still love that idea. I think we should go there. It just may take a bit of time to get there.

Would you call it The Bad Book 2 or something?

Yeah. The Badder Book. I think we both have to realise that we can do softer stuff, but we shouldn’t lose that harder edge either, and we shouldn’t be afraid of going to places like The Bad Book. Because there’s a big readership for it out there. There’s a lot of people who want that sort of thing who get something out of it.

It sounds like you guys never run out ideas of things to do together.

I suppose that’s because you keep refreshing the model. Andy’s come back to doing Just books. He was going to stop about four, I think, and I think we’re at six now.

Yes, he said that it was because kids at schools kept begging him to do another one, so he ended up doing it.

Yeah. But I think, also, he likes doing them! He’s still getting something out of that. But you keep yourself keen by pushing off into other areas as well. That’s the challenge: not to stick with one thing, really. Keep moving.

Jacinta Halloran

2008-08-04T00:00:00Z

Jacinta Halloran, interviewed by Georgia Blain

Melbourne GP Jacinta Halloran won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for an earlier version of her first novel, Dissection, which is being launched this month by Helen Garner. That’s two pretty auspicious ways to kick off a writing career. Georgia Blain spoke to Jacinta for the latest in Readings series of Australian Features showcasing new and emerging writers, sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL).

Each of us has a carefully constructed sense of self. We build it, gradually, from a young age, and try to fortress it against the inevitable small daily chips that chisel back the armour, and the larger blows that run the risk of cracking the core. In her very taut and lean first novel, Jacinta Halloran takes a female GP protagonist, Dr Anna McBride, and puts her under the microscope as she suffers one such blow. Following a case of delayed diagnosis necessitating the amputation of a young man’s leg, McBride finds herself facing a negligence suit. Despite being aware that her mistake is one any doctor easily could have made, the experience is a shattering one.

The novel is a beautifully executed dissection of a rapidly crumbling inner core. With precision and skill, Halloran lays McBride bare, examining her as she cracks and disintegrates, page by page. It is, at times, a painful read, a little like watching a car crash, as we see the effect of this one mistake running through McBride’s professional life, and then into her personal life. It is also a thought-provoking novel, because it is so much more than just a careful examination of individual self doubt and suffering. It questions – in a much broader sense – the infallibility that we expect from others and the consequences of those expectations.

Halloran, who is herself a GP, said the impetus for writing Dissection came from an article she read about a doctor facing a negligence suit. What intrigued Halloran was the woman’s discussion of the failure of her marriage, which she attributed to the stress of the impending court case. “The details of the negligence case in my novel – who did what to whom – are backgrounded, intentionally,” she said. “I wanted to focus on the emotions of my protagonist – her self-doubt, her terrible guilt about doing harm, and the loss of equilibrium and confidence that begins to infiltrate her faith in her marriage.”

Halloran believes most doctors (and particularly female doctors) worry about being sued. It’s an inevitable aspect of an occupation that has become increasingly demanding and challenging. “Doctors are required to keep up to date with an ever-expanding range of medical information; they have real time constraints (especially given the current shortage of GPs nationally); they work essentially in isolation; and as primary caregivers they are constantly required to be vigilant for the rarer, serious condition among the plethora of common, more minor complaints,” she said. “It’s perhaps unwise to generalise about the issues faced by female GPs, but I would say that there’s some evidence that women tend to spend longer with patients, especially those with mental health issues. Many female GPs have children and work part-time: in such a situation one can find oneself ‘giving’ and ‘caring’ full-time, and this can be very draining. ‘Compassion overload,’ it’s sometimes called.”

“If a doctor does become the subject of a negligence case, it’s not just the difficulty of going through the legal formalities – of speaking in a different language, that of the law,” Halloran said. “It’s the whole self-analysis that such a suit engenders. Doctors, by nature, are usually high-achieving and self-exacting people, and the concept of harming a patient is very confronting to their sense of self.” This is certainly the case with Anna McBride, who has, until her mistake, never really questioned either her profession or her role in it. Now, she doubts every action she takes and every decision she makes, and this doubt eats away at any faith she has in her work having worth or value. In the process, which is inevitably one of self-absorption, she cuts off from her husband and her children, causing further destruction to her sense of self.

Halloran depicts McBride perfectly – a middle-aged woman who suddenly looks in the mirror and sees all her fallibilities painfully on display. There is also considerable compassion in this depiction. She is a woman we feel we know. One of the other very powerful aspects of the book is its understanding of how life and human interaction do not sit neatly within the expectations of the medical and legal professions. There are rarely definitive answers or clear rights and wrongs, but we frequently expect this from our doctors – and the law certainly demands it when it is called upon to judge their conduct. As Halloran says: “Anna McBride is not a bad person but neither is she perfect – as a doctor, wife and mother, she has made mistakes. Hasn’t everyone? I have tried to make Anna a real woman, riddled with self-doubt and negativity yet capable of love and kindness, and I have tried to make her relationships with her husband and children also real. Relationships are full of ambivalence – in general life is full of ambivalence, too, and shades of grey – and I have tried to capture this in this novel.”

Halloran came to writing – like many new authors – through a tertiary course. “After doing editing and non-fiction writing subjects I felt confident enough to start a novel. [Melbourne writer] Antoni Jach was my teacher at this time and he encouraged me to enrol in a Masters of Creative Writing at RMIT, which I did. I am due to finish this MA very soon. Both the RMIT diploma course and the MA provided wonderful and very supportive writing environments.” Halloran also reads widely, naming the Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro, experimental French writer Marie Darrieussecq and the Nobel Prize winner, J. M. Coetzee, as just some of her favourite authors. “Coetzee’s prose is always magnificent – the rhythm beautiful, the words so precise, the consciousness and self-consciousness of his characters so superbly drawn. He writes in a different way from many novelists – he is always questioning the function of language.”

With her first novel now published, Halloran is planning her second. “It’s about a mother and her two daughters who set out on a journey – a pilgrimage if you like. (I was brought up a Catholic and I find religious ideas making their way into my work!) There may be some medical themes – life-threatening illness and death will feature – but I envisage the novel to be largely concerned with the relationship between the three women.”

She is also still working as a GP. “I work in a large practice as an employee, so I don’t have the added work of running my own practice,” she said. “I try to write two days a week and can of course extend this if I want to. It’s a good balance. Writing is a very solitary occupation – not only physically but mentally – your mind turns in on itself – at least, that’s been my experience to date. It can be difficult. So it’s good to get to work and think about my patients and their lives, their stories, for a change.”

Georgia Blain’s latest book is the memoir collection Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Claire Thomas

2008-07-24T00:00:00Z

Claire Thomas, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Claire Thomas has published short stories in various journals, including Meanjin and Overland. She has worked at a variety of jobs, including acting and bookselling, and is currently doing a PhD at the University of Melbourne. This month, she publishes her first novel, Fugitive Blue. She spoke to Jo Case for Readings.

What was the inspiration for this book?

The idea for Fugitive Blue came to me many years ago during an art history lecture about Renaissance artist materials when I first heard about lapis lazuli pigment and its immense mercantile value. I immediately thought – what if some of that got into inexperienced hands? What if a painting was created that was of substantial material value but without inherent artistic status? What if people through history still cherished that painting and maintained its longevity? It was that one little detail that triggered the whole story.

You have a background in art history. How did that influence you when writing the novel?

As a student of art history, I focused on twentieth-century art, and there is only a little bit of that in Fugitive Blue. In a way, it is a surprise to me that I have written a novel that features an artwork from fifteenth-century Venice. Still, that’s what I’ve done and I definitely grew to love that strange little panel painting. Fugitive Blue does, however, have a certain contemporary sensibility, which makes sense by the end of the novel.

In the writing of my book, I wanted to avoid traditional ideas about master painters and their masterpieces and instead highlight other ways of ascribing value to art. I wanted to look at the role of women in art, beyond that of the subservient muse. And perhaps, above all, I wanted to explore the material vulnerability of artworks that are often assumed to be objects that should last forever.

Fugitive Blue moves between modern-day Melbourne and various historical settings. How much research did you need to do to get the historical background right?

In addition to the contemporary sections, the book has four historical settings – Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre in the 1950s, Paris in the 1870s, Venice in the 1770s and early Renaissance Italy. In each case, I had some existing interest in the period and chose it as a stage in my story for that reason. But I did a heap of research for them all and found it endlessly fascinating, whether it was reading eighteenth-century Grand Tour diaries or accounts of life in the Paris Opera, or simply driving to Albury-Wodonga to see its trees.

The process was very simple: I’d immerse myself in an era for a few months, reading and absorbing as much detail as I possibly could. Eventually, when I felt like I was overflowing and desperate to process all the information, I’d write the related section. I wanted to know as much as possible about each period so I could write the stories fluidly, placing my characters into a clear world.

In the book, your main character falls in love with her work while restoring the striking ultramarine painting: becoming engrossed in it (to the detriment of other parts of her life). Did you become similarly engrossed in your novel while writing it?

Unfortunately, the writing of Fugitive Blue took too long for me to maintain that level of completely consuming affection! I loved it at times and thought it was a pathetic folly at other times. I wrote and re-wrote my novel over many years with a definite determination but never, I hope, to the detriment of my relationships. I am not a writer who buys into the whole neglect-or-take-advantage-of-your-loved-ones-for-the-benefit-of-your-own-terribly-important-fiction thing. I write as much as I can whenever I can, but there are other things I value just as much. I suppose what I had in common with my character was the (misguided or otherwise!) belief that my ‘project’ was worth pursuing and a certain discipline to see it through to the end.

What are the books and writers that influence you?

I love the writing of Mary Gaitskill, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, A.S. Byatt and Jeffrey Eugenides. In terms of the oldies, Henry James, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Proust and Woolf have all meant a lot to me at various times in my life, and some of them still do. Recently, I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Nicola Barker’s Darkmans and re-reading Patrick White’s The Vivisector. And I am endlessly impressed with Helen Garner and Tim Winton – their longevity and the fact that they are very much themselves. I don’t even attempt to write like any of these authors but, as a reader, they’re some of the ones I love the most.

Richard Moore, Director of MIFF 2008

2008-07-15T00:00:00Z

Richard Moore, Director of MIFF 2008, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly, July 2008

Richard Moore is the Director of the Melbourne Film Festival, which begins its 2008 season on 25 July. Jo Case spoke to him on the eve of the festival’s opening about the new programming strands, this year’s focus on Australian film, the best of the political documentaries and films with a literary connection.

What are some of the main drawcards of this year’s Melbourne Film Festival?

Well, when you ask a festival director that you’re always going to open a can of worms! Can I say the lot? I guess I’d focus my attention on the new programming streams. It’s good to refresh the program, not only for the viewers, but also for ourselves. We don’t want to keep on doing the same thing. I’ll talk a bit about them all.

MIFF Premiere Fund

About a year ago, we were given money by the returned Brumby government to initiate a new film fund, which became the MIFF Premiere Fund. So, we’re a minority investor in Victorian films and documentaries. And one of the conditions of that is that the films premiere during the festival. So this year, for the first time in MIFF’s history, we’ve got our own production slate. This year, they all happen to be documentaries. Next year, they’ll all be films. We’re opening the festival with a MIFF Premiere Fund Film, Not Quite Hollywood.

Focus on Ozploitation

Another new strand, which spins off from the Not Quite Hollywood film is called Focus on Ozploitation, which we’re co-presenting with ACMI this year. For the first time in our shared histories, we’re doing a curatorial program together. And it’s a look at some of the best or worst excesses of the 1970s, early 80s, Ozploitation movies. We’re doing a small programming stream around six of those titles: Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, Dead End Drive-In, Long Weekend, Razorback, Road Games and Turkey Shoot.

I guess if you were trying to describe the films, you’d put them firmly in the B-grade division. I don’t think there is a verb ‘to ozploit’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, but if you were looking to try and define it, you’d get close if you looked at the act of chundering, or a couple of buckets of blood, engine oil and grease. A few raw prawns, maybe. They’re close, perhaps, to the spirit of Sir Les Patterson than to anything else more mainstream. They’re a nice element of the Australian films in the festival – a good addition to the ‘Homegrown’ section that we always have. There’s quite a big selection of Aussie films this year.

Free Radicals

Free Radicals is really for films that are deliberately exploring: pushing the boundaries, pushing the form, pushing the grain of the film ... pushing everything! They defy accepted narrative patterns. They seek to subvert in some way or another. They’re films that we would normally associate with a festival like Rotterdam, rather than somewhere like Cannes or Berlin, which are usually a bit more mainstream. They haven’t abandoned narrative altogether, but they’re a bit more exploratory. They’re not what you might get in your standard multiplex.

Border Patrol

Border Patrol is a spin-off from a focus we did last year on contemporary Israeli film. This year it’s the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Israel, and we thought it would be nice to do a different version of that. There are four films, all dramas, and they’re dramas that look, in different forms and style, at the so-called ‘Israeli/Palestinian question’, from different perspectives.

To be frank, there isn’t a lot of Palestinian cinema around. One film we’re featuring this year, Salt of the Sea, is very interesting as the very early beginnings of a Palestinian cinema. There’s Waltz with Bashir, which comes from Cannes this year, an animated documentary. I’m calling it by a new phrase, ‘animentary’, and it’s about one soldier’s repressed memory of going into the Palestinian refugee camps of the 1982 war against Lebanon, where the Israelis stood back and the Lebanese Phalangist forces massacred the refugees in the camps. Obviously, anything that comes out of that area is political, but this was a good mix of the political and the personal.

Cannes Director’s Fortnight Tribute

Another one of the new strands is part of our close connection with Cannes. Every year we go to the Cannes festival – and our timing is lucky. It allows us to go to Cannes, come back, and have three weeks to get some of the best Cannes titles. This year, we have 29 titles. We also have a deeper connection with Cannes in that this year: we’re celebrating a part of their program.

Director’s Fortnight was set up as a counter to the black-tie swishery and the official awards as a champion of auteur films and a champion of new voices, new cultural zeitgeist in the late 60s. Cannes was suspended for a year in 1968, after the student riots and general unrest. And when it came back in 1969, Director’s Fortnight was set up. This year is 40 years of Director’s Fortnight. And this year, along with a lot of other festivals, we’re doing our own independent celebration of Director’s Fortnight. A kind of homage, if you like. We’re including a couple of films from Director’s Fortnight this year, and also some of the classics from among the 600 odd titles that have premiered Director’s Fortnight over the years. They’ve championed filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and many others.

Retrospective on George Romero

We’re doing a big tribute to George Romero this year. It’s been 40 years since he revolutionised horror films with that film of his, Night of the Living Dead. We’re showing the Australian premiere of his new film, Diary of a Dead. And we’re doing a tribute to George as part of it. George is coming out, along with his daughter Tina, also a filmmaker, and we’re showing about nine of his films across the course of the festival. He’ll be one of our major guests. There will be a lot of focus on his commercial zombie films, but he’s also important as a somewhat neglected figure of independent American cinema, with films like Martin and Nightriders, which are not part of the series of zombie films but are still very important and interesting social allegories.

Tribute to Edward Yang

The festival’s other tribute is to Edward Yang, a Taiwanese filmmaker who is acknowledged as one of the people who started off Taiwanese cinema. He died at the end of last year. We’re screening all seven of Edward Yang’s features, including the four-hour film A Brighter Sunday. It’s rare that you’ll get to see all those films in one place anywhere. And without going into hyperbole, it’s really one of the best collections of film that anyone’s produced in South-East Asia in the last many years.

There’s a really strong Australian presence this year. Is this something you plan to keep doing for future festivals?

It really depends. Every year you go out with certain ideas. You know, we go ‘let’s do a selection of Japanese porno movies from the 1960s’. But then, you soon realise when you go out there and try to secure these things or try to find them, that it’s not necessarily going to be easy to deliver those strands. Either the print is not available or some widow is holding onto her husband’s feature films and they’re all under her bed and she won’t let them go for various reasons. So, for some obscure reason you can’t always deliver what you think you’re going to do.

So, to go back to your question, yes, MIFF is always strong on Australian films, as most Australian film festivals are, but this year, it just all came together – with the advent of the MIFF Premiere Fund, plus the B-grade exploitation films, plus the usual Home-Grown program, we ended up having a really large contingent of Aussie movies. So, yes, we’re really happy about that.

Going back to what you were saying about the Border Patrol films on Israel/Palestine, were you aiming for that mix of the political and the personal that you’ve captured?

Yes. I think that’s something I’m personally attracted to, in films across the board. This year, we’ve got some very, very strong political documentaries in our doco section. There are three titles in particular.

One is called Terror’s Advocate, by Barbet Schroeder, and it’s a portrait of probably the most morally ambiguous character in the whole festival: French/Algerian lawyer called Jacques Vergès, who was defending the Algerian freedom fighters (the Algerian resistance movement), but then went on to defend Carlos the Jackal. He married a member of the Baider Menhof gang and made a name for himself with the Palestinians as well. It’s fascinating and he’s an absolutely fascinating character. It also becomes a history of revolutionary movements from the 1960s up to now.

Another is called It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks, which is about the court case fought by a small left-wing Paris magazine called Charlie Hebdo. They fought against the grand mosque and Islam and various other organisations in Paris to defend their right to republish those Danish cartoons [a cartoon of a weeping Prophet Muhammad with a speech bubble saying ‘It’s hard being loved by jerks’.] And it’s set inside the magazine itself and takes place over the course of the trail.

The third political documentary I’m really excited about is called Yakasuni. It’s the name of the shrine built in honour of the Japanese war dead. If you’ve watched the news lately, you’ve probably seen the Japanese prime minister when he went to worship at the shrine he caused an absolute furore, because there are all these people in Japan and China and various places, who accuse the Japanese of being complete militarists. And the director of this documentary had to go into hiding and faced death threats by the Yakuza, etcetera, etcetera.

So, they’re three really strong documentaries. I think they are films that upset people, or make people have strong passions, or give rise to strong emotions.

There are quite a few films this year with links to books. What are some of the stand-outs in that area?

There are a few connected with literary themes. There’s a documentary on Dalton Trombo, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters (Roman Holiday, Spartacus, The Brave One), who had a very strong political background. He went before the Un-American Committee and refused to name names and then was banned and blacklisted, but continued to write films for various Hollywood directors. In fact, one of his pseudonyms was Robert Rich, and he won an Oscar under that name for The Brave One. It’s an extremely comprehensive documentary about his life and career.

There’s one on the experimental playwright Kathy Acker (Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?). She had a real connection to the literary underground in the late 60s and early 70s in New York and a really close affiliation with the punk movement, drawing on her background as a stripper, too. She died of breast cancer in 1997, and this is about her life and work.

There is one based on a very popular vampire novel called Let the Right One in by John Lindquist. It’s about the love affair between an adolescent and a 200-year-old vampire who is still in the form of a child. It’s not a blood and guts kind of vampire movie, but much more of a psychological thriller. It’s terrific.

There’s a piece called Persepolis based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her experiences growing up in Iran. This is the animation that makes that whole story come to life. I know this film was huge in France.

We have another documentary on the life and times of Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo. There’s a lot of good stuff, there.

Last question ... what’s the best thing about your job?

The drink after the opening night speech. Definitely.

Dmetri Kakmi

2008-07-09T00:00:00Z

Dmetri Kakmi, interviewed by Arnold Zable

Melbourne-based writer and editor Dmetri Kakmi revisits the Turkish island of his birth and the events that drove his Greek family to migrate to Australia in his haunting first book, the memoir Mother Land. In the latest in Readings’ series spotlighting new and emerging writers (sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited), renowned writer Arnold Zable reflects on the book and talks to Dmetri Kakmi.

Dmetri Kakmi’s Mother Land is a haunting account of the author’s childhood on an Aegean island, situated near the mouth of the Dardenelles Straits and the Gallipoli Peninsula. Renamed Bozcaada after it was annexed by Turkey in 1923, the Greek inhabitants still maintain its classical name, Tenedos.

Book-ended by the author’s return to the island in 2002, the narrative focuses on a three-year period, between 1969 and 1971, as seen through the eyes of the author as an eight- and nine-year-old boy. The period ends when his family forsakes their impoverishment and persecution for a new life in Australia. The memoir is distinguished by Kakmi’s vivid portrayal of island characters, and his seamless weaving of history, folklore and myth, ritual and daily reality, rendered with the sensuous immediacy of a young boy.

Two poisonous tensions permeate the narrator’s island life. First, there is the enduring tension between Turks and Greeks. The two communities live apart in separate quarters. For the Greek population, the threat of violence and expulsion is always imminent. One act of violence can engender a chain reaction of hatred and reprisal, acted out against a recent history of ethnic cleansing, exile, displacement and potential massacre.

The boy is also witness to his parents’ violent dynamic. His mother is strong-willed, restless, impulsive, and headstrong, the protectress of the hearth, liable to snap at those dearest to her, yet always prepared to do battle with those who bully them. She is a woman with ‘city ways’, acquired after a sojourn in Istanbul. The father, on the other hand, is a man of the sea; in the eyes of his wife, a man without refinement. It is a lethal dynamic, swinging between her constant belittling and his drunken violence.

While Kakmi does not flinch in depicting his father’s outbursts, he also portrays him with compassion. On the sea, Baba is a master of his craft. ‘He could navigate some very treacherous waters around the Dardenelles, a true skill that was not acknowledged because he was illiterate,’ Kakmi tells me, when we meet to discuss the book.

After arriving in Australia, Kakmi suppressed the past. ‘I deliberately forgot my two languages and about my Turco-Greek heritage. More than anything, I wanted to melt in and disappear. I wanted nothing to do with the past. It was too agonising and I missed Turkey more than I can say.’ He avoided anything to do with the island until the death of his mother in 1993. Her passing triggered a ‘tidal wave of memories. It was like the doors of perception had opened and I was virtually drowning in names, events, images, locales, and sounds.’

It was partly a sense of responsibility to his mother’s memory that drove him to write the book. ‘I could see that she was carrying a huge load, and was deeply frustrated and caged in her circumstances. I felt a duty to restore this woman’s life, though I am sure she wouldn’t like some of the things I reveal.’ His moving portrayal of his mother conveys her thwarted passion, her ferocious desire to better her life, and the secret she carried with her almost to the grave.

Kakmi returned to the island 28 years after he left. ‘When I set out to write the memoir,’ he says, ‘it was a hard facts and figures book, a documentation that aimed to commemorate the Greeks of the island, and their culture, especially since their presence had dwindled to 32 elderly people. But this approach proved dull, and would have appealed only to specialists.’ The second draft was written through the eyes of a middle-aged man, reflecting on the past. ‘While it was more personal,’ he tells me, ‘it was so sentimental that I could not live with it.’

Late one night, says Kakmi, he woke ‘with a couple of sentences running through my head. It was the voice of an eight-year-old boy, talking very rapidly, describing sitting under a mulberry tree, having lunch with his mother and sister.’ Kakmi wrote the sentences down, and when he reread them in the morning he knew he had found the voice for the book. He was able to finish a full draft within seven months.

Kakmi’s evocative depiction of place stems from a kind of meta-seeing. It is the vision of an animist for whom all is alive and language is influenced by landscape, a world in which trees can ‘pierce the pregnant bellies of clouds’, and where a breeze can make ‘earth music in the wild sage and thyme and oregano bushes’. Kakmi tells me that this is how he ‘sees things here and now, when I go into the Australian bush. Every moment is alive and connected to that great cathedral of nature.’

As we converse, Kakmi reveals the deeper forces that fostered this vision. In 2002, on one of his return journeys to Turkey, he went through a period when past and present, reality and fantasy, collapsed. He was deluged by sounds and images. ‘One evening in Ankara I woke up in my hotel room and saw a child standing by the window, his arms wrapped around himself, trembling, looking at me with burning eyes. It was me as an eight-year-old boy.’ Days later, while observing a service in a mosque, he heard voices screaming, “Quick, run, they’re going to kill us.”

‘Past and present were colliding in a violent way.’ His entire being was under siege, violated by a brutal ancestral past. While in the short term he experienced great psychic distress, his hallucinations enabled Kakmi to fully access the child he once was, and the raw terror and beauty of the past.

Though defined as a memoir, the book employs the techniques of a novelist in its structure, its development of character, and detailed reconstruction of key episodes. ‘Obviously it happened a long time ago,’ says Kakmi. ‘You cannot recall exactly what people said, or the specific details that build up a scene and make it real for readers. I realised that if I wanted to make this book work for an audience, and not merely be therapy for me, I had to take the characters that were so real in my head, seek their essence and make them universal. I also realised that facts were getting in the way of truth. By taking the boy and creating a literary persona out of him, I was able to pursue the emotional truth rather than the literal facts.’

The finished memoir is a book of revelations. The reader learns of the secrets that have festered for years, secrets that the author himself discovered only as he was writing the book. Kakmi records episodes of brutality and unexpected kindnesses on both sides that can only be fully understood against the reality of oppression. ‘A brutal regime creates brutalised people.’

To create a balanced picture, Kakmi felt it was important to dwell upon relationships that cut across the cultural divide. There are moving portraits of his Turkish friends: his school mate Refik, the Sufi-like fisherman, Ezet, Osil the grocer, and the middle-aged author’s companion and guide, Sinan. By accessing both the terror and beauty, as well as acknowledging the virtues that can be found in people of both cultures, Kakmi paves the way for redemption.

Arnold Zable’s latest novel is Sea of Many Returns, a meditation on displacement, nostalgia and exile, set on the Greek island of Ithaca.

This article proudly supported by Copyright Agency Ltd

Chloe Hooper

2008-07-01T00:00:00Z

Chloe Hooper, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly, July 2008

Chloe Hooper won a Walkley (2006) for her writing on Palm Island – and in particular, the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee and its charged aftermath. Her first non-fiction book, The Tall Man is an extended meditation on the case – and a stunning work of reportage, reminiscent of Helen Garner and Truman Capote.

You describe feeling ‘incandescently white’ when you first arrive on Palm Island. Did that feeling recede with time, or was it always with you? How did your awareness of your outsider status affect the way you approached your work?

I was an outsider to Palm Island, but also to the police force, and to the law. The advantage of that was not coming to the story with a set of defined moral or political positions. But I was invited “inside” and I hope the book takes readers there too.

How did you get involved with the Palm Island case in the first place? Had you worked much (or at all) with Aboriginal communities before that?

I’d moved home from overseas a year or so earlier and was keen to know more about Aboriginal Australia. By chance, I met a lawyer, Andrew Boe, who was working pro bono for the Palm Island community. He asked me to come and document the inquest into Cameron’s death. He said it would take two weeks … that was three-and-a-half years ago.

Palm Island is home to one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal communities, and this case seems to incorporate some of the big problems facing Aboriginal Australia: deaths in custody, police attitudes to Aboriginal communities, the underlying tensions of a violent history. What do you see as the most significant issues in this case?

The case definitely highlights all the headlining problems, but actually I wanted to avoid writing about ‘issues.’ I feel strongly that this is a book about people. It’s about the Doomadgee family struggling for justice; and about Hurley, a forceful, complicated policeman. ‘Death in custody’ are three dread words in Australia, but they don’t really penetrate our consciousness. I wanted to write a book about a confronting subject which people would pick up and keep reading, not because they feel they should but because this is a fascinating story.

Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry identified a pervasive code within the police force that required ‘police not enforce the law against other police, nor cooperate in any attempt to do so, and perhaps even obstruct any such attempt’. Do you think this culture influenced the investigation of Chris Hurley?

Well, Hurley was ‘investigated’ by two of his friends, one of whom cooked dinner for the other detectives at Hurley’s house the night Cameron died ... Even before Hurley’s trial, police witnesses were threatening members of the prosecution legal team, so you do wonder.

Perspective is a huge factor in the case at the centre of the book – and the book itself. What different people see in the same situation, and how you tease out a ‘truth’ from that. (For example: ‘One man had seen a black drunk, the other a white demon.’) How did you wrestle with this issue in writing the book and observing the case?

I tried as hard as I could to see things from both points of view. Ironically, my last book had been a satire of a true crime novel. Here I was now trying to write one, but the story resisted the genre’s conventions. This book, in some ways, is more like a dot painting: it’s in the little details of people’s lives that the truth lies.

Is it true that you’re interested in true crime as a genre?

True crime is fascinating, because suddenly people’s passions are completely exposed. I think this diverges from the genre, though. The true crime question is ‘did he do it?’. In the end, I hope the reader might ask ‘could I have done it?’

You write that Cameron Doomadgee’s world remained closed to you, as a woman. What kind of challenge did this present in writing the book, to which his story is so integral?

Cameron’s world was closed to the extent that the male world in Aboriginal society is closed off by cultural norms. I got to know Cameron’s loved ones well and I feel I understand to some extent who he was. If you spend a lot of time thinking about someone’s death, you do in a strange way become close to them.

Hurley seems a kind of semi-benevolent Kurtz figure (a parallel you draw) – isolated from higher authority, grown heady with his own power, mistaking the community as his personal fiefdom. How do you think this affected his behaviour on the morning of Cameron Doomadgee’s arrest?

The key question of Keating’s Redfern address is ‘how would I feel if this were done to me?’ I decided if I asked that of the Palm Islanders’ experience, I also had to ask it of Hurley. He was someone who had spent most of his adult life in remote Aboriginal communities and frontier towns—and why he chose to work exclusively there is another issue. But as time went on, I looked at what police in these places regularly deal with, and I did start to wonder how a normal person could not crack up.

Chris Hurley was the first policeman in Australia ever to be charged over the death of a prisoner in custody. Despite the fact that he was not convicted, do you think this represents a significant milestone for Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people?

Initially Cameron Doomadgee was just another statistic to the powers that be. A lot of hard work by a lot of people has changed that. I am hopeful about the future: I think most Australians want to know about our past and move forward with the business of reconciliation.

Debra Adelaide

2008-06-03T00:00:00Z

Debra Adelaide, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Australian writer Debra Adelaide landed a whopping $1 million advance for her much-anticipated novel, The Household Guide to Dying. Jo Case spoke to her for Readings on the eve of its publication.

This has been touted as your ‘breakthrough novel’. With ten books behind you, including two novels, does this feel strange?

Not really. I wrote this novel for myself, so while on the one hand it’s a great surprise to see so much fuss, on the other I feel content. Perhaps at the moment I don’t know what it means to have a so-called breakthrough novel. But if that’s the case, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

‘The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every rule.’ It’s also a slightly risky situation for an author – to write a book where the reader knows its sympathetic heroine, a mother of small children, will die at the end. What made you decide to write this story?

I didn’t decide, as such. It chose me, which is what I think many authors would say. But I have been interested in the topic of dying generally for quite some time, and I wanted to explore the possibility of writing about dying in a frank and comic way.

The running thread of Delia’s job – a ‘witty, ironic’ advice columnist and writer of a bestselling series of books on household advice – provides some wonderfully funny moments, and a welcome leavening humour to the very emotional main narrative. Did you have fun with this aspect of the book?

Yes. In fact in my dreams I am really an agony aunt disguised as a domestic advice columnist. And what was particularly satisfying was to make these extracts from Delia’s advice column another little narrative in the novel, one in which, in the end, the story surprises her as much as it does the reader.

As a mother, reading about a mother farewelling her children, reading this book made me cry more than once. Did you ever find yourself emotionally overwhelmed when writing it?

I think it’s more appropriate to say that intense emotions shaped parts of it, but that I was never overwhelmed, otherwise I doubt I would have been able to write a fictional story.

Delia’s response to her impending death proves some very bizarre moments: posing in her own coffin holding a martini glass for her book cover, making and freezing blood sausages (made with her own blood) for her family to eat when she is gone. ‘Why can’t just you deal with this like any normal person?’ says her mother. Do you think there is a ‘normal’ response? What is behind Delia’s (almost manic) activities?

I have no idea what a normal response is to imminent death, especially as I’ve not yet faced it. Delia is certainly manic at times, and what is behind that is her intense desire to shape, control and direct the little amount of time left to her. And then at some point, she realises how futile that is.

The book – and Delia’s advice books – is curiously old-fashioned in the way that it treats the domestic arts (cooking, laundry, cleaning) with reverence and affection, as arts that one could be proud of mastering. What was the inspiration for that? And are you, in your parlance, a ‘goddess’, a ‘domestic whore’, or something in between?

I wish! Goddess or whore, either would do me. But Delia is especially interested in elevating the domestic arts, since to her they are so fundamental. And so overlooked. My position, for what it’s worth, is that domestic work is strangely compelling. If only it were valued more ...

This book seemed, to me, to be a kind of love letter to motherhood, in all its small joys and ongoing imperfections. Did you set out to do that?

No, quite the opposite, as it’s a theme I’ve already explored in earlier books. But clearly it’s an ongoing preoccupation of mine, and I’m very happy that readers would have this reaction.

Delia says her advice column is ‘a version of me, a slightly feral one’. Obviously you are not your character, but it seems there must be aspects of you in there – like her, you keep chickens, you work with words, and I suspect the Jane Austen ruminations are as much yours as hers. How much of yourself did you put into Delia?

Lots. Inevitably. It’s one way of investing a character with some sort of credibility. It’s true that I do keep chickens and I am a writer, but Delia’s views and prejudices and obsessions are all hers, as is her story. Her life, which has been full of trauma, regret and guilt, barely resembles mine.

Delia reflects ‘I was always pathetically grateful for email, since it let you attend to inquiries or make ones of your own while your children wailed and fought and called out from the bathroom ... without the embarrassment of all that drifting over the phone’. That sentence is so very apt, I wondered: does that describe your working life?

Not at all. I’m answering these questions in total quiet and privacy. Not. But even though my children are much older now than Delia’s, and more independent, my working life is still hectic. I think we forget too easily that just running a home can be a full time job.

Delia’s editor, Nancy, is initially sceptical about Delia’s final ‘how-to’ book, The Household Guide to Dying. ‘Who on earth would pick up a book with that title?’ As the author of a book with that title, who do you imagine will pick it up and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

All I can hope is that readers will take away from the book the pleasure of having read a good story, by which I mean a story that will take them out of their worlds and make them think about mortality and other things in a new way. And in my dreams I imagine that George Clooney will pick this novel up.

Chris Turner

2008-06-02T00:00:00Z

Canadian journalist Chris Turner, author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, is in Melbourne for the 2008 Alfred Deakin Lecture Series, ‘From DNA to Deep Space’. He will give a lecture based on his innovative new book – a positive look at solving the problems of climate change – on Wednesday 4 June at 6pm. Jo Case spoke to him in Melbourne for Readings.

How can the power of the market be harnessed to combat climate change? Why do you think it will be effective?

Not only can it be harnessed, it already has been. A random example: in response to Germany’s feed-in tariff law of a few years back, which rejigged market conditions to favour renewable sources, the world’s largest solar cell manufacturer is now a company called Q-Cells which employs nearly 4000 (up from 19, circa 2001) in the previously stagnant and brutalised industrial towns of the former GDR and is growing as fast as humanly possible.

Given the right parameters – where climate-damaging actions are discouraged and climate-improving ones rewarded – the global capital market is the most powerful tool yet devised for the rapid allocation of scarce resources toward productive ends. No centrally planned economy or government agency can organise something like the technological advancement and global-scale deployment of solar power installations as quickly and efficiently as the market can. It is far from perfect, but it is the best tool we have at hand, and there is simply not enough time (even if it were possible and desirable) to replace it with something else.

Tackling climate change is often equated with doing the need to do without, to shed power-guzzling new technologies in favour of more energy efficient ways of doing things. (For example, there is apparently a high profile push for a return to drying clothes on a washing line in the US.) However, you also see opportunities for climate change to drive the adoption of new technologies that will help us to do things better and smarter. What kind of changes are you talking about here?

Forgive me for another German example: in Freiburg in southwest Germany, a visionary architect named Rolf Disch has built a community of 58 middle-class townhouses. They have all modern conveniences, are priced near standard market rates, are quite pretty and situated in a wonderfully vibrant neighbourhood. Each one also, over the course of a year, produces more energy than it consumes. These are houses as power plants, and I’d argue going without power and heating bills is the kind of going without that just about anyone would agree is a marked improvement on our current system, whether the climate were compelling us to change our ways or not.

You believe that frightening and guilt-tripping people about climate change is counterproductive when it comes to creating behaviour change. How does that work?

I’d say in a handful of distinct, but related, ways. First off, fear is a poor motivator for thoroughgoing long-term change. Fear provokes conservative responses; we’re hardwired, when afraid, to want to bunker down and protect whatever we’ve got against the anticipated onslaught. The last thing someone worried about the collapse of everything they hold dear wants to contemplate is switching their water heater to solar.

And the doomsday scenarios around climate change have been so convincing that you now hear the argument that the problem’s too big to be tackled from the same quarters that just a few years ago argued there was nothing to worry about.

Finally, I’d argue the finger-pointing and shaming approaches endemic to the environmental movement are far too divisive to be effective. When the goal was, for example, the protection of a single animal species, perhaps it was effective to demonise those whose actions directly caused that animal’s demise (through hunting, say, or habitat destruction). But climate change affects everyone, and there is not one of us – least of all in prosperous industrialised nations like Canada and Australia – without blame. The scope of the problem obliges us to create the largest, widest, most diverse and multivalent movement for social, political and economic change in human history, and we will not get there by stratifying ourselves by degrees of guilt. We’ll get there – if we get there – by creating an enticing vision of a world people will fight to be part of.

Halfway through writing this book, you changed from an observer, in your role as writer and journalist, to a ‘committed participant and activist’. What influenced this change?

Several influences, but most of all it was the realisation that I’d never been so fully engaged by a subject as a journalist, never so fully convinced that the story I was trying to tell was the most vital story I could possibly be covering, and ironclad in my certainty that the story’s outcome would provide a definitive statement on the success or failure of the whole durned human comedy (to quote my beloved Big Lebowski).

The sort of audible click moment of all this came around a campfire at a conference in rural Germany, an intimate affair focussed on the mutually reinforcing catastrophes of climate change and peak oil. This was, on its surface, a sort of business conference, but here we were around a bonfire on this German manor that had been turned into a conference facility, late into the night: a dozen conversations still circulating at fever pitch between journalists, activists, scientists and business executives. Not because it was our job – though it was, in every case – but because this was the most worthy life’s work any of us had found and we knew it. Or in any case, I now did. To use a Texas Hold ‘Em poker term, I went all-in on the climate crisis that night, and I’ve written about almost nothing else since.

You have observed the way that various communities around the world are addressing climate change with new technologies and solutions to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. What are some of the innovative solutions you’ve uncovered?

I certainly don’t have space here to enumerate them all, so instead I’ll mention just one, which is dead simple and cheap and isn’t even a direct response to climate change. In 1962, the city of Copenhagen became the first Western city to close its main street to motor vehicle traffic. In the years since, it has expanded its downtown pedestrian network to include a half-dozen streets and a dozen squares, transforming itself into Europe’s most pedestrian-friendly metropolis and a model to the world that has been imitated by cities from Oslo to Barcelona, including, most impressively, downtown Melbourne. In recent years, the encouragement of commuting by bicycle has been particularly successful in Copenhagen, where 36 per cent of downtown workers now get to their offices by bike – not in order to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to zero, which they have, but mainly because it’s such a pleasant city to bike around and because the social and health benefits of biking a lot are so convincing.

The architects of this transformation – particularly the visionary urban theorist Jan Gehl – call their work ‘reconquest’. They began not to beat climate change, but to improve the quality of life in a dreary, car-choked city. This is one of the most vital battles in the sustainability revolution – reorganising human systems for people instead of their cars – and its success in Copenhagen and everywhere else Gehl has worked demonstrates that reducing emissions also augments the quality of life in a community in substantial measure.

Are you optimistic about the future, given the immense challenges that lay ahead?

Absolutely, yes. I began my book in 2005 as a kind of dare – could I find solutions? How hard would I have to squint to make them look viable? Would anyone pay any attention? I’ve watched marginal, drawing-board stuff vault rapidly into the centre of the mainstream in the past three years at a pace I never in my wildest dreams would’ve predicted. Last year, Wal-Mart and GE partnered to sell 100 million energy-saving compact flourescent lightbulbs in the United States. This doesn’t make them perfect, but never in a million years would I have predicted, back in 2005, that I’d be saying ‘Wal-Mart’ and ‘sustainability’ in the same breath and meaning it. We’re turning the corner on this thing very quickly, and the only thing I find frustrating nowadays is when I’m told that something I’ve touched with my own hands is impossible or that the cost is too great. If you think we don’t have the tools, you aren’t looking closely enough, and if you think the project is too great, I’m disappointed at your lack of faith in humanity. When John F. Kennedy pledged to put a man on the moon in 1961, there were engineers at NASA who suspected it was impossible; by comparison, I’ve now slept in too many rooms heated by the sun and powered by the wind to count.

And finally, not acting is not an option. You know where I heard that most recently? In the conference room of a multinational oil company.

Chris Turner will be speaking at the Deakin Lecture Series this Wednesday June 4th in Ballarat and this Thurs June 5th at BMW Edge, Federation Square.

Arnold Zable

2008-05-30T00:00:00Z

Arnold Zable, interviewed by Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings

Arnold Zable is one of Australia’s most accomplished storytellers. His lyrical novels explore the experience of migration, and his latest, Sea of Many Returns, is set between the island of Ithaca and his home city of Melbourne. Mark Rubbo spoke to him for Readings.

Sea of Many Returns is mainly set in the island of Ithaca, geographically, quite a departure for you, how did this come about?

Ithaca is where my partner Dora’s family comes from, and I have been a regular visitor since 1987. I first travelled in Greece in 1973 and felt an immediate affinity with the land, its people, its culture and history.

The images you create of the locations are incredibly vivid. To what extent are they a product of your imagination?

Having spent much time on the island, many of the Ithacan images are based on what I have observed over the years. The Carrum scenes are derived from many walks in the area. My descriptions of locations such as Kalgoorlie, the Black Sea, the Danube River, are based on research, but at some point the research ends and the imagination takes over.

The structure of the book is different to your earlier books. Apart from the prologue, the novel is written in the form of the journals of Mentor, who emigrated to Australia in the early twentieth century, and his granddaughter, Xanthe, who was born in Australia and is returning to visit with her daughter Martina. What was the intention behind this structure?

The structure enabled me to imagine two related, but quite different, points of view formed in two different eras, extending into four generations of one Ithacan family. It also enabled me to cover over a century in time, right up until 2002, and to recreate tales I have heard of, for example, the late nineteenth century Ithacan voyages to the Black Sea, and the creative partnership between the architect Walter Burley Griffin and Melbourne coffee palace maestro, Antonios Lekatsas.

The Diaspora, European, Jewish, and now Greek, has been a central feature of your work. Is that because you are the child of immigrants?

That has a lot to do with it. I grew up in an immigrant community which included many Greeks, Italians and Jews, and observed first hand the severe disruption to people’s lives caused by migration.

You have been, and continue to be, an indefatigable champion of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers – does that inform your work or vice versa...or neither?

It does inform my work. The current generation of refugees are experiencing the intense challenges faced by previous generations. We tend to forget, or fail to imagine, how difficult it is to start life anew far from the homeland. We forget also that nostalgia, the longing for the return to homeland, is a deep and enduring aspect of the refugee experience.

Reading the book, I got the sense that the islanders that came to Australia are never really part of the society. In one particularly powerful passage you describe the anti-Greek riots in Kalgoorlie during World War I. It's an incident that seems to destroy the two characters’ emerging sense of belonging.

These riots are among our hidden narratives, darker episodes in Australian history that have been overlooked or conveniently forgotten. The riots, related incidents, and general distrust towards ‘foreigners’ did alienate many immigrants and it took a long time to build a sense of trust and belonging.

As with all your books, Sea of Many Returns is full of wonderful stories and characters. I particularly liked Mentor, the frustrated magician, who hires a hall to make his dream come alive. He describes his performance as a ‘farce interspersed with rare moments of competence’. Where did that come from?

Dora did have a maternal grandfather who became a magician and hypnotist. I have long wanted to imagine what led to that. This is what fiction enables one to do. The performance acts by the way, are partly based on a rare program of one of his shows that I came across in my research.

Although ostensibly Christian, the lives of the islanders are permeated by the myths of the past and your characters constantly refer to these. One character says, ‘life is a hole in the water’. Another says that in life you need only know, ‘Christ and Marx and perhaps Odysseus’. How did you find these?

By listening. In some ways the novel is the result of hundreds of conversations with Ithacans, on the island, and in Melbourne. I am drawn to the quirky sayings and observations that define a person or a culture. Ithaca is inevitably associated with Homer’s Odyssey, and the tales I have heard on modern-day Ithaca have affirmed the enduring resonance of the ancient archetype for voyagers of all times.

After finishing a book by Zable, one always wants more. What's next?

I have a number of projects I am working on. One will emerge as the leading contender. I have a lot to learn about the writing craft, and I am enjoying a chance to read other writers, and playing with new ideas.

Anya Ulinich

2008-05-29T00:00:00Z

Anya Ulinich, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Brooklyn-based, Russian born Anya Ulinich takes a sharp, blackly comic look at post-Cold War Siberia and twenty-first century America in her first novel, Petropolis, exploring migration, motherhood and identity along the way. Jo Case spoke to her for Readings.

Sasha is, in some ways, an unlikely heroine: chubby, awkward, not especially good at anything. What was the inspiration for her character?

Sasha is maybe an unlikely heroine, but she is a typical human being – aren’t most of us not particularly beautiful and of average abilities? I wasn’t particularly interested in creating a larger-than-life character: an undiscovered genius lingering in Siberia; or an “ugly-duckling” story about misperceived beauty. That would be too easy – the story would reach its climax in a predictable way. Sasha fumbles through life the way most people do (maybe more so, because she is an illegal immigrant in the U.S., so she exists on the margins of society for much of the book). She is, basically, surviving. The world owes nothing to Sasha Goldberg, and throughout her journey, she finds happiness, fulfilment, and love in unexpected places.

The fortunes of your characters – Sasha, Katia, Victor, Nadia – are remarkably fluid. They plunge from good to ill fortune and back with great frequency. Do you think we all live on fortune’s knife-edge, or is it particular to these characters and their circumstances?

Some people live more on fortune’s cutting edge than others. For example, a person born upper-middle class in the U.S. could live a life with no upheavals, unless they are self-inflicted. But the poor, and people who live in rapidly changing societies, like the characters you mention above, have much less stable lives.

Sasha, is focused on becoming an artist (though she’s not particularly talented). You have also studied and practiced art. Was it a conscious decision to work this into the novel, or was it simply the way the character of Sasha evolved?

Partly it was the way the character of Sasha evolved. But I also had to give Sasha something besides her stifling home life and the abuse she suffers at her general education school. No matter how outdated and outlandish an education her Asbestos 2 art teachers give her, the art studio becomes a refuge for Sasha, a safe environment where she can be herself. The art is less important than the community. This is partly autobiographical.

Petropolis deftly combines wry humour with darker social observation and bleak surroundings and characters. Was this a conscious balance of light and dark?

Yes, it was conscious, but I think it’s also natural for me to write this way. This kind of satirical writing is typical of Russian literature (I’m thinking of Gogol and Bulgakov in particular). Russians, in general, have a pretty dark sense of humor.

Sasha’s newly created (meticulously bland) American identity (with her new name, ‘Allie’) is demolished with the sound of Marina’s voice, her Russian words and accent. How important is language to identity?

Hugely important, for me. Maybe not for everyone. When I visit Europe, I’m amazed at how easily multilingual many people are. For someone who grows up in a monolingual environment there is a huge difference between the native language, that is deeply rooted in the subconscious, and the language one learns as an adult. When I don’t speak Russian for long stretches, I miss it, almost the way one might miss an essential nutrient in a diet, or the way a child misses her mother – it’s a kind of a physical feeling.

That’s what happens to Sasha. For Sasha, the language switch is a sort of mental suicide, as is her entire life with Neal. She is trying to forget, almost obliterate her former self. Of course, meeting Marina reminds her that this can’t be done.

For me, the switch was voluntary. I embraced the English language and the American culture voluntarily, in the spirit of discovery. I was very interested in the English language. I really sort of fell in love with it and wanted to write in it. But what also helps me write in English is a kind of emotional remove I feel from it, and a sense of control that comes from having this kind of a distance.

How heavily did your experiences in migrating from Russia to America influence Petropolis?

Well, Petropolis is obviously informed by my experience. It’s also fuelled by a certain sense of political outrage one feels when one lives the life of a poor immigrant in the U.S. Like Sasha Goldberg, when I came to America, I was, essentially, a Soviet person (this was before Russia changed into what it is now). So the U.S. was the first place where I experienced extreme class disparity, for example. I grew up in an Anti-Soviet family in Moscow – we worshipped freedom and the market economy. Coming to the U.S. nearly made me into an angry little Marxist. So the scene where Sasha reconsiders Nabokov from a domestic servant’s point of view is informed by my own feelings when I was in a similar position.

Many ordinary aspects of American life seem exotic and often ridiculous through Sasha’s eyes (for example, Heidi’s parenting style, living in air-conditioned comfort in the desert, the American proclivity for hugging and kissing strangers). Did you have a similar response when you first arrived in America?

Yes. I wrote this book with an American audience in mind. Not to engage in stereotypes, but still, Americans are very self-referential. They don’t like to contemplate history, and they don’t pay much attention to the rest of the world, or even to other parts of America. Even (or especially) the people who live in the surreal and ecologically unsustainable Arizona suburbs, think that their way of life is the way of life. So I had a lot of fun showing how strange the things that Americans take for granted look through the eyes of an outsider.

The mother-child relationships in this book are often bittersweet, and reflect a range of experiences of motherhood – from Mrs Goldberg’s fiercely autocratic devotion to Heidi’s very American, quite indulgent, parenting. How important is this aspect of the novel for you?

Very important. Motherhood is one of the central themes of this novel. I began to write it when my older daughter was first born, and I was amazed at how much in love I was with this tiny baby. I wondered: what would it be like if she were taken away from me? Could I go on? So this is how the story of Sasha, and Nadia, began.

I’m raising my children in, essentially, Heidi’s world. And I found what among the American middle and upper-middle class, motherhood is very political – friendships can break up when two friends disagree with each others’ parenting methods. The minutiae of childbirth arrangements and feeding choices (drugs/no drugs; organic vs. non; breast vs. bottle) become class markers and judgement points. It was interesting to see this obsessive mothering through Sasha’s eyes.

Nam Le

2008-05-29T00:00:00Z

Nam Le, interviewed by Cate Kennedy, June 2008

Melbourne-born writer Nam Le is causing an international sensation with his first book, The Boat, attracting a rave review from The New York Times star reviewer Michikio Kakutani, using words like ‘astonishing’, ‘powerful and remarkable’. In the latest of Readings’ series of features spotlighting new and emerging Australian writers (sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited), fellow short story writer Cate Kennedy talks to Nam Le.

Nam Le’s ambitious debut collection, The Boat, is made up of seven stories that illustrate such a dazzling virtuosity with narrative voice, you start to wonder just how many lives this barely 30-year-old Vietnamese-Australian author has had. An ex-corporate lawyer, he been recognised in the US with several awards and fellowships, including the coveted Pushcart Prize, so this collection has been eagerly awaited, with writers like Charles D’Ambrosio unreservedly praising the collection as ‘tremendous, challenging and ambitious … this book nails our collective now with an urgency and relevance that feels visionary.’

It’s the scope and versatility of these stories that have garnered him this kind of critical praise. Longer than the average Australian short story by several thousand words, each one differs so markedly from the others in style, voice and setting that you are left shaking your head in admiration that they could all have been written by the same author.

That’s because Le is an author who can take you anywhere – Hiroshima in the day before the atomic bomb, nervy, present-day Tehran, a dead-end Australian coastal town – and bring it to life with extraordinary accuracy. Not only are the stories’ locales widely dissimilar, but their various protagonists emerge as entirely credible; no mean feat when you consider that they range in scope from a teenage drug runner for a Colombian drug cartel to an anguished, dying New York painter desperate to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

‘Looking back now,’ Le says of the stories, ‘I will say that by switching from place to place … I was in some way formalising the idea that there’s no place that’s not strange to us. Fiction makes strange even the places we think we know.’ But how did he achieve such a richly-detailed authenticity in creating these fictional places and voices? He concedes that it probably has a lot to do with an innate wanderlust, which has led him to travel widely. ‘I was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, currently live in the US, and have mucked around through chunks of Europe, South America and Asia. It’s not a stretch to say that the reasons why I travel and why I write or read are similar; to see other things, other places, situations and people, through other eyes.’

He agrees that the stories, in their ambitious scope, ‘are all over the map in more than just the geographical sense’. But he’s quick to point out that he didn’t write the collection merely to set the bar challengingly high for himself. ‘I never imagined, when I was writing the stories, that they belonged to anything more than themselves,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t test them for their fit within a collection, let alone any theme or scheme. I was trying to write what interested me, what moved me, in a way that tried to be interesting and moving. As for setting the bar high – I think just writing a story that works is setting the bar almost impossibly high. Sometimes it helps me to think of it this way: a story isn’t so much written as governed, and just keeping your eye on everything, having your hands on the hot, heavy levers, is all you can hope to do.’

The hot, heavy levers that Le seems to handle so effortlessly keep all kinds of subtle narrative machinery moving smoothly in his stories. He says ruefully that he’s learned the hard way: through writing an earlier novel which he considers ‘a spectacular multi-dimensional failure’, but which gave him a sense of what to expect in terms of the hard slog of writing. ‘I think it also freed me in a sort of pillar-of-salt way – there came a point I knew I’d be doomed if I turned back toward it. Short stories provided a great escape – I’d never written them, and frankly, hadn’t read too many, so I felt I had nothing to lose.’

It also gave him the chance to weave into the stories some of what has been clearly absorbed through the osmosis of travel and careful, compassionate, astute observation. Le is a writer with an uncanny knack for getting the details right, and rendering them in unforced, poetic prose. Through Sarah, the central character in ‘Tehran Calling’, he describes the appearance of the Persian written language as ‘half-open fish hooks, sickle blades, pregnant letters with dots in their bellies. An alphabet refracted in water.’ Henry, the irascible and brilliant Manhattan artist in ‘Meeting Elise’, recalls the last moment he fleetingly touched his daughter, when she was a sick baby: ‘the only thing that can make my hands feel graceless.’ Le is familiar, too, with the nuances of Australian adolescent awkwardness in ‘Halflead Bay’– so much so that he even names the deodorants the teenage boys use – and gives us a sensory world that echoes the exactitude of Tim Winton: ‘All along the walkway were canvas chairs, eskies, straight-backed rods thick as spear grass. A mob of fluoro jigs hopping on the water … Someone had a portable radio and music streamed in the air in clean, bright colours. The bay a basin of light.’

‘Details are hard,’ Le says of the process of finessing his stories. ‘You can err on every side: too many, not enough, too precise, too oblique, too suggestive, too showy, too subtle … I charge myself not with getting something right but with doing it justice. Capturing not the essence but an essence.’

He acknowledges, very modestly, that he did ‘a fair bit of research’ to find the right details (and that research must be fantastically meticulous, since he admits he’s never been to most of the places described in the stories), but it’s worn lightly and invisibly. Le comments on the delicate business of striving to create the sort of ringing authenticity that enables ‘that true empathy, that deep, clear, close inhabitation by the reader of another consciousness in another context. That’s the key, the gold in the ore – where imagination and understanding meet, recognising familiarity in strangeness, truth in otherness, and yourself, in a tricksy mess of words.’

Le’s work is never tricksy, though, and it’s clear that he’s spent a long time thinking about creating the precision and impact he wants. When we talk about the all-important connection between writer and reader, he laughingly describes the suspension of disbelief involved as a kind of seduction. ‘It’s a courtship, isn’t it? The writer sets the scene, starts the music, lights the candles, carelessly strews the right objects around – and the reader allows him/herself to be seduced. Or doesn’t. The end goal – the ultimate high – converges, if you’ll allow me to stretch the metaphor, when the writer’s and reader’s energies converge. That’s where the action is: the meeting point between “believe me” and “I believe you”.’

Allow yourself to be seduced – this is a terrific collection; intelligent, exhilarating and moving. Just as readers will find themselves immersed in the mysterious power of these stories, Nam Le himself is the first to admit that the instincts that work to breathe the visceral, sensory life into his fiction are sometimes just as mysterious to him.

‘No matter how many ways you slice it,’ he remarks, ‘no matter how ingeniously you deconstruct or reverse engineer a given story, you never know what it is that gives it life. Not in a way that’s redeemable or transferable. So what do you do? You stumble onwards. You follow your leads.’

Cate Kennedy is the author of Dark Roots and is working on her first novel.