Readings.com.au: Interviews

Michael Sala

2013-05-17T00:00:00Z

Michael Sala, interviewed by

Michael, I loved your book – congratulations on a fine debut. But love’s a loaded word isn't it in the context of this novel? We hang on to it in our kin and other close relationships - sometimes as a “last thread” – but there can be a whole history of devastations under its veneer. Maybe I should say then: I loved the steadfastness you exhibit in your examination of a sometimes quite gut-wrenching family history. Did you struggle with trying to retain some critical distance – or is there really no such thing when dealing with “the source of the sadness”, as you refer to it at one point? Love is a loaded word in The Last Thread, and I think that one of the themes of this book is the idea of love, what it means to different people and how it gets corrupted. I’m not just talking about love between people, but about the way people see themselves. I made many false starts before I wrote The Last Thread. For a long time, the material was too confronting – too painful, too raw. It amazed me how, when I started writing about what I remembered, my childhood returned to me in such a visceral way. It had always been there, but had just expressed itself more subconsciously; through my relationships; through binge drinking; in a certain self-loathing and insecurity. For a while, when I began writing about the difficult events in my life (my father’s abuse of my brother, my stepfather’s violence, my younger brother’s disappearance), I became more depressed and felt far more vulnerable, but gradually I started to find my feet. Critical distance to the material in my childhood was a massive challenge, but it was a crucial one too. On the one hand, you have to feel the material that you are writing about in order to really bring it to life. On the other, you can’t let that raw feeling dominate you or the story. Almost a character in its own right in the novel is the city of Newcastle. In one passage, the mother character, Nici, says “the city just becomes the memories you have of it”. You reside there still I see in the biographical note in my proof copy. Does the city have a pull all of its own, or is it so constitutive of your identity (as uncertain as that was in your early years), that you cannot imagine living anywhere else? I did intend Newcastle to become a kind of character in this book that changes and grows over time. I think what my mother says at that stage of the book is an interesting idea, but I don’t agree with the underlying sentiment, or maybe I think the idea should be carried through to its natural conclusion. Yes, the city you live in is partly a product of your memories, but you are constantly adding new layers of memory to the picture. The more time that you spend there, the more your experience of the place diversifies and changes. I guess it’s about how you live your life: whether you repeat the past or build from it, and perhaps that’s reflected in your view of wherever you find yourself. My reasons for staying here are practical. My wife and I both have children from previous relationships. It’s not a bad place to live either. One of the few times that I’ve felt an uncomfortable closeness to the past was when I dropped in at Newcastle East Public, the first school that I went to when I was four. I lived nearby and had to vote in an election. It’s a lovely school now, but for me the experience was terrible. As a child, I didn't know a word of English and didn't get any help with that, and the teacher used to treat me badly. When I went there to vote, I didn't really recognize the place, especially with all the voting booths up, but I had some gut instinct, a negative reaction to the place that surprised me. It was like the spirit of my experiences still lingered in the brickwork. But generally, the thing about living in Newcastle is that the suburbs are remarkably diverse. Each suburb seems to have such a different character. Right now, I’m living in an area I've never lived before, in this old house up on a ridge that overlooks the city and the ocean all the way to a shipwreck (the Sygna) in the distance, and I love it. I've lived in Newcastle about twenty-five years and yet – with the way the city changes around me, and with how my life has changed – I don’t think I’m living in the same city at all. Ultimately for me, living in Newcastle is about being in a position to enjoy my family – my wife, my children – and I think that I carry a lot of what matters to me inside my head. The “Michael” character in this novel visits Holland, the country of his birth, for the last time as a 13 year old. In that several of your characters in the book are reckoning with versions of events, stories of the past that have accreted new layers over the years (and not just personal stories, but also ones for instance associated with the murky years of WW2 in occupied Europe, of resistance and collaboration) – did you return to Holland for your research for this book? Or is it written entirely from your own memories of that time, with some imaginary excavations of events you were too little to comprehend fully? I haven’t been back to Holland since I was thirteen. So, in a sense, the Holland that I came from is a product of memory coupled with imagination. It’s more of an emotional place than a physical one. But The Last Thread is not a book about the past; it’s about how the past relates to the present. It’s about what I live with now as an adult. It contains lots of my strong images of Holland, but it’s not about depicting Holland in an exhaustive way. I think that a destructive nostalgia motivated my mother, whether it was for a place, or for her own mother’s love, and that is what the town of my birth, Bergen Op Zoom, represents for me more than anything else. I like your idea of imaginary excavations. At the best of times, memory is not precise, and how can I remember precisely things that were said, when they occurred in a language with which I am no longer that competent? But I have carefully attempted to brush back the muck, to capture what happened as I remember it. One scene that I struggled with in this way was a visit to an aunt when I was nine, just before we left Holland for the second time. She literally spoke as if I wasn't there and decided to summarise the whole scandalous past of my family for my mother. It was horrible but fascinating, my grandmother’s involvement with the Nazis, her intense anti-Semitism, the callous way that she’d treated some of her children. I’ll never forget how dramatically my view of the whole world changed in just a couple of hours, just through listening to someone talk. I never looked at my grandmother in the same way again.. “Gezellig”, a Dutch word meaning cosy, an atmosphere in which one feels warm and secure and happy, is much sought after but rarely found in the peripatetic family life this novel describes. The family was tainted in Holland as a result of the war years; after migrating to Australia, dysfunction prevails most of the time for Michael and his brother Con growing up, and there is always the pull of “home” for the parents – an occasion for usually calamitous return visits. Towards the end of the book I started to feel there was no end of misfortune for Nici in particular: “Her voice had an arthritic edge of cheerfulness. You could almost mistake it for hope”. Then there’s the adult Con’s desolation; and step-brother Tomo’s emotionlessness. Did your editor implore you at any stage for more light, more feel-good characters, more Gezelligkeit?! I was probably more worried about that than my editor. Rebecca really liked the balance of the characters and the way the story came together, and I suppose that I’ve come around to that point of view too. Gezelligheid is really elusive for most of this book, but it has a strong presence nonetheless, as an idea, an aspiration and an occasional interlude. There’s some dark subject matter, but I don’t think of this book as bleak. All the major characters are flawed and damaged, but they also have unique strengths. Flawed characters are so much more interesting in my view. My older brother is in many ways still amazing to me now. On a physical level, he’s always been remarkably brave and brilliantly adaptable to whatever environment he happens to find himself in. My mother has always been so tenacious. It’s true that my younger brother is depicted as having a sort of emotional insulation from the world, but underneath that, there’s a very sensitive and gentle quality to him. I suppose that I see all of their characters engaged in some sort of struggle throughout the narrative. I remember from my own teenage years being very affected - but also comforted - by the work of the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller. I’m not suggesting she’s an influence on your work, but she came to my mind when reading The Last Thread when you talk about Michael’s anger and shame, his guilt and self-loathing when thinking about the violence and emotional abuse he has been exposed to. The fear that he is becoming like his father etc ! What were the influences that possibly fed into this book? From literature, from autobiography, from elsewhere? I haven’t really read much of Alice Miller, but I share her attitude towards the justification for violence against children. To me, hitting a child is a failure of reason on the part of the parent. No one’s ever been able to give me a good rationale for doing so. A while ago, I watched a parent distracted by a conversation, and her two children decided to set off by themselves across the road. The older one was about six and holding the hands of a kid that looked about three. He was being quite adventurous but lost his nerve half way across the road, at the traffic island. The mother suddenly looked around, saw them stuck there in the middle of the road, and ran after them. Once she got them to the other side of the road, she slapped the older boy across the face. As the boy began crying, she said, ‘I did that because you could have got killed.’ That reasoning made no sense to me. I think that the mother’s response, while understandable, came from fear and guilt. Failure is a part of parenting. In my book, for example, I relate a few of my actions as an adult that I see as abusive. I wouldn't do those things again. These are my failures. These aren't major disasters, but neither should they be explained away as somehow necessary or given the illusion of a logical framework. They were very disturbing for me and so they should have been. It’s your job to be disturbed as a parent sometimes. Many people don’t want to be too much like their own parents, and with an abusive parent, as Miller argues too, that becomes all the more pressing. Meanwhile the literature that I've read has influenced me more on a stylistic level. There’s too much writing too name, but I've read a lot of work that’s beautifully detailed, that uses simple, clear language to really break open experience. Works like Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Primo Levi’s If this is a Man, and JM Coetzee’s Boyhood, spring to mind. I had a little eureka moment in the book. Towards the end you describe a pair of 19C brass candle-holders from a ship, that the mother gifts to Michael. “They’re designed with hinges so that the candles always stay level. The ship might be going down, but at least you’ll be able to see the look on people’s faces, the water coming in.” It strikes me that this could stand as a metaphor for your project with this book. You’ve been prepared to stare down some really strong themes, and the candle-holders, like Michael, are still around to tell the tale. Michael has the occasional nightmares, but he also has love, a child of his own to care for...an equilibrium, of sorts? There’s a kind of question in that image of the candleholders for me. If the ship is going down, if you’re stuck down there and heading towards the bottom of the ocean, is there a point in seeing the looks on people’s faces, the water coming in? There were definitely times, while writing this book, that I wondered if illuminating all of this experience was worth it. I was often plagued by doubt. I didn’t want to get consumed by it, and that’s always the risk, and it’s probably inevitable that it happens for a while, but somehow you have to find a way of pulling yourself free enough to be able to tell the story without becoming damaged by it all over again. Because in the end, the story isn't about the damage, it’s about the interesting perspectives and experiences of the people involved. I didn't want to become that figure of my aunt towards the end of the book who is consumed by the bitterness of her experiences, but at the same time, I think the past matters. I don’t think that you can bury it indefinitely. You need to be able to look at it with a steady eye, and that takes practice and it helps if you can find a good balance in your life as a whole. My daughter, towards the end, is a really important part of the book for me. Becoming a father really put me in a position to write this book. Until that moment, I was really anxious that I would somehow fall into a way of echoing the destructive parenting that I had experienced as a child. Becoming a father gave me a lot of confidence and motivation and it led to me making peace with some of the more difficult parts of my childhood. I now have a son as well as a daughter, and the feeling, when I see either of them, tells me everything that I need to know about my relationship with the past. <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/products/14690441/the-last-thread">The Last Thread</a> is the Regional Winner (Pacific) of the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize.

Rosalie Ham

2011-07-13T00:00:00Z

Rosalie Ham, interviewed by Michelle Griffin

<img alt="ham" src="/system/uploads/assets/0001/6807/ham.jpg" /> Rosalie Ham made her name with her much-loved debut, <a href="http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781875989706">The Dressmaker</a>, continuing her success with <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780975192160">Summer at Mount Hope</a>. It’s been more than five years between novels now – but both fans and newcomers to Ham’s dark wit and stubborn characters will embrace <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781864711905/rosalie-ham-there-should-be-more-dancing"> There Should Be More Dancing</a>, a novel set in her home suburb of Brunswick. The Age’s Michelle Griffin spoke to Rosalie Ham for Readings’ New Australian Writing series. In the 25 years that Rosalie Ham has lived in Brunswick, she’s watched her corner of the suburb change in fundamental ways. ‘When we came here, there was no one in the park,’ she says. ‘There was no one there, just a bunch of teenagers who would smoke and drink and root each other, and some older people passed out in the toilets. Now you have to queue for the swings with your toddler, if you have one.’ Ham, 56, is not one to decry the ways of New Brunswick – ‘now there’s good coffee just there and a good pub – you don’t have to travel far’ – but her third and latest novel does work on one level as a serio-comic love letter to the old Brunswick, to the pub-reared boxers and pub-soaked fathers, the linoleum kitchens in the tiny worker’s cottages and the broken cars in the front yards of the share-houses. While Ham’s first two novels were decidedly rural, almost all the action in the new book takes place within 500 metres of her home. The house where her protagonist Margery sits fuming over her cross-stitch is ‘just down there’, she says, gesturing down the road. ‘I pass it four or five times a week walking my dog.’ It is one of those un-renovated opportunities that the real estate agent son-in-law in the novel paws so covetously: ‘a detached, two-bedroom weatherboard cottage with kitchen and bathroom tacked into the back and outdoor lavatories’. Ham took a photo of the house down the road so she could physically map the landscape her characters inhabited. ‘If it’s true and it’s real, it comes out of your head and down your arms and onto the page. There’s the park and the pub and Sydney Road and Union Square – it’s easy to map their progress. They covered a huge terrain by going not very far.’ She thought that if she wrote an urban novel, it would change her style along with her landscapes. Her break-out first novel, The Dressmaker (2001), was set in the Mallee. Her second book, Summer at Mount Hope (2005), unfolded in a Victorian vineyard a century ago. But as Ham readily admits, her readers will recognise both the stubborn, honourable characters and the assured comic voice. ‘I put all the standard goodies in it,’ she says. ‘Love and deceit and betrayal and lies and lust.’ There Should be More Dancing had a lengthy and troubled gestation, unlike The Dressmaker which Ham calls ‘the one I got for free’. ‘Tragically I came under the influence of Marilyn Robinson. I read <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781844081486/marilynne-robinson-gilead"> Gilead</a> and tried to write my book in the first person. But I’ve found it’s better to write in the voice of Rosalie Ham. It’ll come out anyway. So I rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. It took probably five years from the nucleus of the idea and mapping out and not writing anything until the time I actually sent it out.’ The story begins outside Brunswick’s borders, on one of the top floors of what is recognisable as the Sofitel in Collins Street. Margery has booked a room and plans to fling herself to her death rather than face the injustices visited upon her by her family and other enemies. This, says Ham, was not the most attractive pitch to shop around to publishers. ‘It’s not a very good premise – a little old lady about to end her life. If you’re going to tackle something like that, you need to do it with humour.’ <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781864711905/rosalie-ham-there-should-be-more-dancing"> <img alt="there-should-be-more-dancin" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/6811/there-should-be-more-dancin.jpg" /></a> If nobody else writes with quite the same wry warmth and pitch-black wit of Ham, she does share something of the melancholy and humour of local animator Adam Elliot. There’s lot of fine-grained detail, from the perfectly slicked hair of Margery’s sweetly punch-drunk ex-boxer son, to the daily indignities suffered by the tiny, arthritic and almost silent neighbour Mrs Parsons. Both are based on real people, says Ham. ‘He was someone who used to visit his mother in the nursing home where I worked. He visited every Friday at the same time and he wore shorts and a Collingwood guernsey no matter what the weather. He’d obviously drunk a little too much in his time but he was just adorable ... he had to go in.’ As a child, Ham would travel down from Jerilderie to visit her grandmother in Castlemaine. Next door lived the little old lady who would become the novel’s Mrs Parsons. ‘Her blind would go up or down during the day, and we would go over and tie or untie her shoelaces because she couldn’t do it. It stuck in my mind that you could do that for a person.’ The 25 years Ham spent working in nursing homes has given her an eye for the way the aged move, an ear for the timbre of older Australian voices and an abiding affection for the stories that can be spun out of a life span’s experience. ‘If there’s a roomful of people and I don’t know anyone, I’ll go talk to the old person,’ she says. The old ladies of the latest novel are neither twinkly vessels of wisdom nor bitter husks of malice, two of the archetypes set out so often for the oldest woman in a story. Instead, we get a spirited heroine with a sharp tongue, a fierce sense of outrage and an opportunity to learn some home truths she’s been avoiding for decades. In the novel, Margery uses her cross-stitch samplers as both a shield and a weapon, brandishing parables ripped from a doctor’s calendar to comment on indignities, and avoiding any real engagement with the world as she bends over her threads. The dramas that play out, betrayal and love and honour, remind us, too, that love and anger do not always fade away. ‘A theme I had in A Dream at Mount Hope was how to live a life. That was a kind of anti-romance where romance and passion lost out to friendship and loyalty. This is the same thing, a book about how to live your life well. I think I’m done with that now.’ With a third novel finally on the shelf, Ham is ready to start digging away at the next idea for a novel. She’s also waiting with fingers crossed to see if the film adaptation of The Dressmaker is going to be filmed next year. The director attached is Jocelyn Moorhouse, who is best known for Proof – but also, perhaps, for her attempt to film Murray Bail’s <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921351693/murray-bail-eucalyptus"> Eucalyptus</a>, before Russell Crowe started demanding rewrites. Strong-willed actors permitting, Ham is hoping she’ll get an opportunity to play an extra in a dance scene. Otherwise, her only involvement with the production is enthusiastic support and ‘beaming idiotically on the red carpet,’ she says. Which brings us to the endearing title of her new novel: There Should Be More Dancing. Should there be? Ham says yes. The title is a family heirloom. ‘There’s a bit of a family joke that comes from my mother and now has been taken up with my boy [her stepson],’ she says. ‘Every now and then, when things are serious, we always exclaim “there should be more dancing!”.’ Michelle Griffin is a journalist at The Age. You can follow her on Twitter - <a href= "http://twitter.com/#!/michellegriff">@michellegriff.</a>

Vikki Wakefield

2011-07-12T00:00:00Z

Vikki Wakefield, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of the Readings Monthly newsletter

<img alt="Wakefield" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/6787/Wakefield_Vikki_hi-res_colo.jpg" />Jo Case interviews Adelaide author Vikki Wakefield about her edgy, darkly funny YA debut novel, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921758300/vikki-wakefield-all-i-ever-wanted"> All I Ever Wanted</a>. Your teenage heroine, Mim, is the one straight girl in a notorious crime family, longing to escape her surrounds and fascinated by the brother and sister from the fringes of her dodgy suburb, “glossy with the sheen of parental love”. It’s such an inventive premise – a bit like Underbelly meets Hating Alison Ashley. Where did you get the idea for the story? Originally the novel was meant to be a story about the underdog and her great escape. Thirty thousand words into the story, I realised I’d made my themes redundant. My antagonists were too likable. At this point I took a major detour and the novel was less about Mim’s escape and more about her journey – I was drawn to explore what she’d be leaving behind. I had to ask myself, if Mim escaped her poverty-stricken life without learning tolerance and acceptance, what kind of person would she become? How would she live her life? As Mim discovers, that glossy sheen of parental love can be all veneer and no substance. Jordan and Kate’s parents don’t understand them at all – Mim’s much-maligned mother knows her better than Mim knows herself. And she will sacrifice herself without blinking. ‘Surely there’s a recipe for it. Follow a few steps and you can cook up your own shiny destiny.’ Tell us about Mim’s formula for a different destiny to her family and classmates – her rules for ‘how not to be’. How does she expect them to work, and how do they work in reality? Mim describes herself as ‘an outline, a caricature’. That’s how she views the suburb she lives in and the people around her. She’s as guilty of misguided judgment as the rest of society. She sets herself rules to live by – no drugs, no sex, no alcohol, no tattoos, don’t trust anybody, no dropping out of school. And, rule number one: I will not turn out like my mother. It’s an overly simplistic view – it follows that her rules for ‘how not to be’ are destined to fail. Hiding her true nature only works against her and Mim’s rules prove useful only as they are broken. The idea of things – and people – not being as they seem is central to the book, it seems. As Mim’s neighbour Benny says, ‘Outside’s one way. Inside’s different.’ But it’s not that simple – Mim also learns to see herself and her surrounds differently by looking at them through new perspectives. How important are these ideas to the book? Many of my characters are hiding something, some part of their character that they keep from the people who love them best. Telling someone your dreams and fears leaves you open to pain, but also to hope. I think that self-absorption and narrow-mindedness are an essential part of adolescence – it’s all to do with the process of separation. That period of being torn between love and loathing is so painful at the time, but liberating when you snap out of it. We call it coming-of-age, but it has little to do with getting older. It has everything to do with perspective, and what has happened in your life to change that perspective. Mim is such a wisecracking character – she has some terrific lines, like when she tells her best friend, ‘Your definition of fun is puking in a bush, and trying to get your feet on both side mirrors of Ryan’s car.’ Was it fun to write her, and to give her this smart-ass dialogue? Mim was a lot of fun to write. It was challenging to show the vulnerability beneath her tough exterior and she has a great sense of humour in some pretty dire circumstances. In my experience, teenagers with Mim’s kind of upbringing can be darkly hilarious and utterly human in the best and worst of ways. One thing you do in this book is show a much-maligned place – ‘A lost street in a forgotten suburb, an hour from the city’ – in a far more nuanced light than we generally see, in books, film, TV or even on the news. Was that something you were trying to do? And how did you know the place you wrote about so well – experience or research? The majority of this novel is written from experience. I’m easily bogged down by research, particularly the sedentary type. I’d rather see, touch or taste something before I write about it. In All I Ever Wanted, I meant for the setting to be a character, too. Along with the flesh-and-blood characters, its layers are peeled to reveal its heart. In the later chapters I’ve deliberately mirrored the description. The words haven’t changed on the page, but I hope the reader can see place differently, as Mim does. She says, ‘It is what it is, and I know every inch.’ Knowing a place well reveals its dark corners and its moments of radiance, however transient they may be. There’s some fantastic imagery in this book. Describing the local kingpin drug dealer, you write ‘Dr Frankenstein could have put him together out of spare parts’. Mim’s overweight mother is ‘lying on her couch, like leftover dough’. How important was it to you to get those images just right? Did you spend a lot of time crafting them? I’ve worked in graphic design, so I think visually. I have scraps of paper with annotated sketches rather than a notebook full of chunks of prose. I do these sketches in the planning stage so I can often refer to a character or setting sketch and translate to the page quickly. I will often discard the first image I write – it’s invariably been done before. Writing vivid description is a joy when I can nail it and, for me, short and punchy is sweeter. It is important for me to get these images just right. I hate to backtrack when I’m reading. It’s a lot like the memory game – if you attach an image to a person, you’ll never forget them. The loneliness of being different seemed to be a major thread in this book – Mim trying to be straight in her rough surrounds, Kate as an intelligent ‘nerd’ in a rough school, but also other characters who stand out for different reasons. Was this something you were interested in? I remember how it felt to be different, torn between fitting in and just being myself. At one point, so much of my identity was shaped by my peers that I didn’t know who I was. And often I felt loneliest in a crowd. When Mim and Kate find each other, it’s like seeing themselves reflected as they would like to be. It’s surprising to Mim that Kate would want to be like her. Their friendship gives Mim the courage and conviction that she needs to be herself. Mim says, ‘I think I’m an anticipation junkie’. Do you think that’s something especially intrinsic to being a teenager – a time when you’re in transition and deciding how you want that transition to play out? How does the thrill of anticipation play into the book? I think that anticipation, looking forward, is essential to every person’s wellbeing. It makes life worth living and it’s particularly consuming for a teenager. For me, adolescence was a holding cell, a time when I seemed like I was on the edges of myself, waiting to fall in. I couldn’t be trusted; I had a curfew and I couldn’t buy beer or cigarettes, but I was expected to know what I wanted to be. How is that possible? Mim is a younger me, stuck in limbo, waiting for fate to step in. But there comes a point when she has to stop dreaming, to do something. She realises that she’s responsible for her own inertia. Accountability and ambition don’t just kick in when you turn 18 – it’s an ongoing journey full of wrong turns and dead ends. Sometimes you just have to keep moving even if you don’t know where you’re going. Who are some of your influences? What books or authors do you like to read? I love writing that evokes a sense of time, or place. Tim Winton does this brilliantly, as does Marcus Zusak and Annie Proulx. S.E. Hinton’s <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780140385724/">The Outsiders</a> affected me deeply as a teenager – it was the first time I discovered pieces of my own life reflected in a book. <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780099466734/harper-lee-to-kill-a-mockingbird"> To Kill a Mockingbird</a> changed the way I read books forever. I read it so many times that I started reading as a writer, panning for the nuggets that hold such a compelling story together. <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780671038540/">What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?</a> by Peter Hedges was also a huge influence. I should never have watched the movie (although it was brilliant) because I’d imagined the characters as distinctly Australian. I could never read it again without hearing that American twang and seeing the Iowa landscape. Recently, Kathryn Stockett’s <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780241950807/kathryn-stockett-the-help"> The Help</a> held me transfixed until I finished it and Kirsty Eagar’s <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780143011453/kirsty-eagar-raw-blue"> Raw Blue</a> made me wish that more books like it were around when I was a teenager.

Peter Salmon

2011-06-28T00:00:00Z

Peter Salmon, interviewed by Kabita Dhara

[missing asset]Kabita Dhara interviews Australian author and former editor of our Readings Monthly newsletter, Peter Salmon, about his pitch-black satirical debut novel, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781444724707/peter-salmon-the-coffee-story"> The Coffee Story</a>. Teddy Everett, the head of the Everett and Sons Coffee company, is telling his ‘coffee story’ from his deathbed. As his story progresses, the reader becomes aware of how unreliable Teddy’s narrative is, and how unlikeable Teddy himself is. Of course, the idea of the main character being an anti-hero is not unusual, but what do you think having this kind of protagonist, as opposed to a traditional hero, allowed you to do creatively? I like Teddy! I don’t agree with everything he says or does, but then again, neither does he! When I was writing him, I didn’t think in terms of ‘hero’ or ‘villain’. I wanted to create a character who was brutally honest – who tells the things about himself that most of us keep secret. It’s that dark river that runs under our public persona that interests me. And given that Teddy is dying, he’s got nothing to lose by telling the whole truth. Even though Teddy is dying, and anger and guilt seem to be at the heart of his story, there is a lot of (dark) humour in Teddy’s storytelling. How important was the use of humour in writing your book? I didn’t necessarily set out to write a humorous book – quite simply, the book grew out of finding Teddy’s voice, and Teddy, bless him, tends towards the scabrous and scatological. If there was one element I wanted to be deliberately ‘comic’, it was the form of the book itself. I have a bit of an aversion to the ‘well-made novel’ (whatever that may be – discuss!), so I liked having a central character who was oblivious to novelistic convention – he does tend to give away important plot points at inappropriate moments, and to break off from key moments in the story to chat about more, ahem, elemental concerns ... Although Teddy’s story unfolds in a number of locations – America, England, Cuba – it is your depiction of Ethiopia that really stands out in my mind, so much so that it is like another character in the book. What sort of research did you do? Too much – I actually ground to a halt at one stage as the temptations of showing off my extensive knowledge of Wikipedia started to overcome my desire to tell a good story. This was particularly tempting with Ethiopia – a country with a rich past, condemned to be viewed by the West through the prism of the 80s famine. But, in the end, I consciously put aside all my research and let the story tell its own truth, only going back afterwards to make sure there were no glaring errors. This seems to me to be the trick – to do the research, but then wear it lightly. But gosh, I know a lot of stuff – you don’t want me sitting next to you at a dinner party. Coffee, its production and consumption, obviously plays a major role in your novel. There are beautifully evocative passages describing the roasting and grinding and preparation of the perfect cup of coffee, and some of your characters have an encyclopaedic knowledge of coffee. Where did your particular interest in coffee come from? And how do you brew your perfect cup? Legend has it my first words were ‘cup coff’ so it was obviously there pretty early. And working at the wonderful Readings in Lygon Street cemented the love. It really is the best drink in the world. As for the perfect cup, the best coffee I’ve ever had was the coffee I had in Harar recently – a superb coffee is taken for granted, and any family that beckons you to join them will always have a glorious cup for you. I hate tea, by the way. Just so you know. Teddy leads a cosmopolitan life, right from a young age when he moves to Ethiopia. This migration profoundly affects the family and its fortunes. How did your move from Australia to the UK affect your writing and the writing of this book? Not greatly, as much of the work was done before the move, but I think the one key thing that informed my final pulling together of the book is the loneliness that comes from no longer being around your friends. Teddy is, essentially, a man without friends and his life has been one long conversation with himself. I’m not quite at that stage, although, having said that, now I’m wondering if I wrote these questions myself and am going mad. Best not to think too much. Even as Teddy rails against his father, he is in some ways following in his footsteps. How do you think Teddy’s family inheritance, financial and otherwise, affects his own development? And do you think family inheritance is impossible to escape? Absolutely. It fascinates me – how much of our hard-fought personality is in fact passed down to us. Even those things we inherit which we attempt to reject – it seems to me that they are part of the prison of our personality too. Basically, I wanted to fill Teddy with an almost Proustian sense of inheritance, and then watch him squirm. Endless fun. You have a very distinctive style. Which books and writers do you think have influenced you stylistically? And which books and writers do you look to for inspiration? As I said, I’m not a lover of the ‘well-crafted novel’ – I like a book that is not afraid to digress, to obfuscate, and do the odd thing that annoys the reader. I really like the strange ... Books like Memoirs of My Mental Illness by Judge Schreber, and <a href="http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780803298095/">The Robber</a> by Robert Walser (best opening lines ever – ‘Edith loves him. More on this later.’). Plus Proust and Henry James, both of whom are far stranger than they are given credit for. But I guess if there is one book that informs The Coffee Story more than any other, it’s <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780141188188/">The Book of Daniel</a> by E.L. Doctorow – frankly, I owe him most of the royalties. Don’t tell him though. Please.

Mary Horlock

2011-06-23T00:00:00Z

Mary Horlock, interviewed by Andrew McDonald

<img alt="mary-horlock" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/6531/mary-horlock.jpg" /> Hanif Kureishi has called Mary Horlock's novel <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/review/the-book-of-lies-by-mary-horlock"> The Book of Lies</a> 'an unforgettable and brilliant debut’. We think highly of it as well as you can see in our <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/review/the-book-of-lies-by-mary-horlock"> review of the book</a>. Phoebe Bond spoke with the author about childhood in Guernsey, the German Occupation of the island during WW2 and the challenges of writing unreliable narrators. You were born in Australia but grew up in Guernsey in the Channel Islands where the novel is set. How did your own experiences of island life shape the writing of this book? It was strange to move from a very big island to a very small one, although I was born in Perth, which in itself is quite separate from the rest of Australia. I like that separateness. Islands have these clearly defined boundaries, and a small island like Guernsey, even though it’s close to both England and France, has very much its own identity. Guernsey people are very proud to be neither French nor English! They have their own history and tradition. But island life can be isolating, and I think most people at one time or another have felt a certain ambivalence towards it – it’s easy to fall in love with the sea and the cliffs and how ‘manageable’ everything is, and the fact that everyone knows everyone breeds a sense of security. But this can become oppressive and alienating. Teenagers in particular have a difficult time, because once you’ve grown out of building dens on the cliffs and you want to get drunk and make all the usual adolescent mistakes, you can’t just hop on a bus and go to the next town to do it. My university friends would always laugh at me when I told them Guernsey only had one town and it was called ‘Town’, and a lot of my stories about growing up became a little comedy routine. But growing up in Guernsey shaped me, I learned to use my imagination and to make my own entertainment, and that definitely helps when it comes to writing novels. The story is told mainly from the perspectives of Cathy and Charlie, both 15 years old, born 40 years apart. Can you talk about the process you went through to find their unique voices? Cathy, the teenage voice, came so quickly and easily it almost worried me. I began to wonder if I hadn’t been this desperately repressed 15-year-old all along! She was inspired partly by my own teenage diaries (littered with exclamation marks and block capitals and green highlighter pen) but also by a couple of girls I knew at school. There was this one girl who was terribly precocious – an only child with a much older father – she talked with a very posh accent (for Guernsey) and although she was clever, she was not as clever as she thought she was. A lot of the girls in my class loathed her. I found her strangely fascinating, and I would often try to bring her into a game or a conversation, and I was always amazed at how she would sabotage my efforts. She wasn’t pretty at all at school but I saw her recently and she has become stunningly beautiful. She is also, unfortunately, quite obnoxious. The voice of Charlie was both easy and hard. It was easy because I knew quite a lot of elderly people in Guernsey and I have literally spent years hearing them talk. As a child I would loiter in the old covered market and listen to the old boys selling their wares. They often talked patois and it had this wonderful sing-song lilt. But it was hard to put it down on paper, because some of the sentences came out so elliptical and I wasn’t sure how that would travel. In the end I toned down the patois quite a lot. In The Book of Lies the past continually interrupts the present. There is even a sense that what happened in the past, is predicting what takes place the present. What literary devices did you use to insinuate this? I structured the stories very carefully so that although the chapters jump back and forth between past and present there’s always a tangible link between them. Specific places and family names keep recurring. I used places in particular. For example, there’ll be a chapter where Catherine is standing on the same spot her uncle was 40 years back, and the connections get stronger as the book moves along. I stuck to the geography of the island exactly, which helps to convey how small it is, as well. The German occupation of Guernsey during World War II plays a major role in your novel. How important was historical accuracy? How did you go about making sense of the varied accounts of what happened during World War II in order to create Charlie’s world? I do feel that novels about Guernsey set during the Occupation have tended towards cliché, and I was determined to resist that. I read absolutely everything (and I mean newspaper cuttings dating from the fifties and sixties, self-published memoirs, as well as the official history books) and of course I am very fortunate to know people who lived through the Occupation, so I had primary sources. I found most islanders were happy to discuss their memories, although I quickly realised that everyone had their own story to tell and I couldn’t rely too heavily on one person’s account. That said, I was very intrigued by the differences and disagreements, and these became integral to the novel. Charlie’s story is very firmly based in reality; his attitudes and opinions are a careful blend of real-life characters who fell foul of the Nazis and who subsequently spoke out against informers. There were not many of them, but they were quite vocal for a time. I think islanders are now far more able to acknowledge that the Occupation was not a black-and-white affair, that there were many shades of grey. <iframe frameborder="0" height="640" scrolling="no" src= "http://ebooks.readings.com.au/embed/9781921834226" width= "460"></iframe> A book by <a href="http://booki.sh">Booki.sh</a> Cathy is an unpopular, overweight 15-year-old. She is bright, and narrates her struggle with friendships, crushes and bullying in a way that transported me straight back to the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. Did you write this book with a teenage readership in mind? Someone recently asked me who was my target audience for The Book of Lies. I replied ‘my immediate family’ and that’s the honest truth! I didn’t take it for granted that I would get my first novel published, so I wrote it for my mother (whose age we have conveniently forgotten), my grandmother (who was married in 1939) and yes, for my teenage nieces. I wanted to cut across the generations because that’s just what the story does. I think it does definitely have a big draw for teenagers, but in my experience most people remember their teenage years vividly, or try to equally hard to forget them, and I wanted it to be about the push-pull mechanism of memory. The Book of Lies is full of secrets and deceit and as you read, you become convinced that both Charlie and Cathy are somewhat unreliable narrators. What challenges and opportunities did this present for you, as a writer? To me this wasn’t a challenge; I tried not to think about it consciously. What I mean is, we are all unreliable narrators: we edit and shape the story of our lives. It’s not about outright deceit; it’s just what happens when we try to put experience into words. There is inevitably a layer of interpretation that can change everything. I was very struck by this even within the narrative of my childhood diaries, which I wrote quickly and directly. I was very good at turning something embarrassing into something funny (with the addition of a few exclamations marks and an explosive squiggle). It’s partly a way of coping. I suspect it’s our inconsistencies that make us interesting. What made you decide to include footnotes in your novel? And were you ever worried it might distract from the narrative? Cathy is the girl who writes ten-page essays when two would do. She over-interprets, she over-explains. She is all about the footnotes. Sometimes she is trying to be funny, other times she just wants to show off. But she is also copying her father – a self-professed ‘Expert’ whose use of footnotes is, I should point out, much more minimal and reasonable. I did worry they might occasionally distract from the story, so I cut a lot of them. Yes, there was so much more, dear reader! The novel has garnered high praise from writers including Hanif Kureishi and Marie Darrieussecq. Who are some of your favourite writers? Did any influence you in the writing of this book? I read so widely and weirdly, I can’t really think of an author who directly inspired me. Would it be strange to say <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/collection/patricia-highsmith">Patricia Highsmith</a>? I love Highsmith – in her novels madness simmers under this taut, smooth surface, and she uses humour brilliantly. I have a very deep admiration for <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/collection/peter-carey">Peter Carey</a>, as well – the extraordinary way he can summon a voice. But, of course, considering the art of the footnote, I have to mention <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/collection/david-foster-wallace">David Foster Wallace</a>, whose writing I find brilliant, disturbing, unbelievably poignant and often hilarious. You have to find humour in the dark stuff. Well, I try to.

Malcolm Knox

2011-06-15T00:00:00Z

Malcolm Knox, interviewed by Fiona Capp

<img alt="malcolmknox" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/6427/malcolmknox.png" />Malcolm Knox is the author of three novels, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781740510523/malcolm-knox-summerland"> Summerland</a>, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781740513289/malcolm-knox-a-private-man"> A Private Man</a> and <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781741755626/malcolm-knox-jamaica"> Jamaica</a>. He is also a Walkley Award-winning journalist and the author of one non-fiction book, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781740512244/malcolm-knox-secrets-of-the-jury-room"> Secrets of the Jury Room</a>, an account of his experience as a juror, and a history of the jury system. He spoke to Fiona Capp about his latest, much-anticipated novel, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781742372990/malcolm-knox-the-life-a-novel"> The Life</a>. The first thing that hits you when you open Malcolm Knox’s The Life is the narrative voice. Half demotic poetry, half twitchy stream-of-consciousness, it plunges the reader into the head of the tormented, delusional Dennis Keith, a mercurial champion surfer-turned-recluse who now lives with his mother in a retirement unit in Coolangatta. Full of sly wordplay and ironic edgy bravado, it’s a voice that perfectly captures the eternally adolescent energy of surfing culture: a voice distilled from the conversations that Knox, himself a surfer, hears around him when he’s out in the water. ‘It’s not the Tim Winton voice that you hear in Breath – I think that Breath is beautifully written but these men don’t speak in a beautiful way. They speak in a rough, attenuated way with a limited vocabulary. It has its own rhythm and that’s what I wanted to trap,’ Knox says. Ghostwriting sports biographies, as Knox does when he isn’t writing novels or journalism, has given him an ear for the idiosyncrasies of speech and a habit of playing ventriloquist. As a ghostwriter, however, he is not permitted to put the real voice of the subject on the page. ‘It’s got to be a conventional written voice. The constraints I was breaking free of were the constraints on voice. Here, I was able to put in all the grunts and non-sequiturs and repetitions, an essentially incoherent person’s voice. We’re not allowed to do that as a ghostwriter.’ There is a strong sense, in The Life, of the novelist letting rip, and of the exhilaration that goes with this abandon, particularly in the humour of the book which is sometimes manic, sometimes deadpan, and sometimes satirical. When surf magazines and filmmakers come looking for Dennis years after his breakdown, his mother, Mo, sends them packing. ‘I wasn’t available to say no. I was “incapacitated”, she meant to say, except what she said was, I was “decapitated”. When they come knocking – them magazines, biographers, movie scouts, so-called TV producers – Mo tell them “speak to our solicitors”. Then she give them a solicitor which don’t exist. That sent the right message sent it real well.’ This narrative risk-taking is fitting for a story about a character who is himself a risk-taker: a surfer of extreme daring and freakish talent who lives ‘The Life’ and then lives to regret it. For the surfers at Dennis’s local break, The Life is the dream of being free to do nothing but surf all day, every day, and implicitly, about buying into the myth of the hotshot surfer as a larger-than-life hero or ‘legend’. It’s a myth in which everyone from the surf media and surf industry to Dennis’s family and the general public is complicit. Dennis Keith becomes that legend, known as the enigmatic DK, his signature line: ‘Well yeah ... but no!’ The fact that he’s riven with contradictions only adds to his aura. He’s desperate to prove he’s the best but can’t handle all the attention. (He is at his happiest inside the barrel of a wave where no one else can see him.) He wants the benefits of fame but longs to be left alone. He’s intensely territorial in the surf but despises the pack mentality; a surfer who hates other surfers. In other words, he has the freedom, says Knox, of the unhinged person to be passionately contradictory. ‘He’s a total believer in the violence and aggression of competition and a total rejecter of the violence of competition as well.’ But you can’t be insanely competitive – he is a compulsive, at times an almost homicidal, hassler and saboteur of his opponents in the water – and expect that there won’t be consequences. Nor can you escape the idolising, the scrutiny and the hero-worship that goes with fame. At the height of his success, everything starts to spiral out of control. He gets into drugs, his girlfriend is murdered, and he disappears from the surfing circuit and into the paranoid world of his head. In this era of celebrity culture, Dennis’s fate is a cautionary tale for our times. ‘Updike said fame is a mask that eats into the face. We all know that, but it doesn’t stop most of us chasing it. I see DK as one of a generation that was discovering that fame is all cost, no benefit,’ says Knox. ‘I don’t know if he has an exceptional insight into it, but I like that DK is ironic about it; he certainly isn’t chasing it. Yet his talent made adulation impossible to avoid.’ <iframe frameborder="0" height="640" scrolling="no" src= "http://ebooks.readings.com.au/embed/9781742692777" width= "460"></iframe> Knox well understands the contradictions inherent in DK’s competitive spirit. ‘One thing I guess I have in common with him is in being extremely competitive when it comes to a ritual with set rules and boundaries. I am a crap tennis player, for example, but on the court I will still do everything in my power to destroy you, while also detesting competitiveness in the wider sense of people comparing where they are “at” in their lives, what they own, and so on. DK’s problem is that his excellence in the former kind of competitiveness means the world will foist the latter kind on to him: turn him into a hero when the idea of a hero, being compared with others, and owned by others, is his idea of hell.’ Knox set the novel in the 1960s and 70s in order to explore surf culture at a key moment when it was morphing from a laid-back pastime into an organised, commercialised, professional sport. This transformation is mirrored in the transformation of Coolangatta from a modest coastal town of fibro shacks into the concrete jungle of the Gold Coast. While his satirical target is the dark side of surf culture – the aggression, competitiveness, tribal mentality, territoriality and drugs (the sexism doesn’t get much of a look in) – The Life can also be read more generally as a satire on the competitiveness of modern life, a competitiveness which he believes we do our best to mask. He sees this competitiveness in everything from driving in traffic to corporate life to the way we raise our children. ‘I know I’m generalising, but I do see a big change having happened in my lifetime. Eastern cities are more affluent, more desperate places. The mass cultural competitiveness which took a breather in the 60s and early 70s was beginning to cough itself back to life in DK’s time, until you get to the stage now where a cultural phenomenon like Mad Men rings such a bell because people recognise the hyper-competitiveness of the 50s as part of the way we live now.’ Just as Knox shares aspects of DK’s competitiveness, so too does he understand the impulse to idolise one’s heroes. <a href= "http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-malcolm-knox-everything-more-work-david-foster-wallace-1291"> Writing in The Monthly</a> about the American cult author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, he frankly admits to being a ‘howling fantod’ – a Wallacism devotees use to describe themselves – and to regarding Wallace as a towering genius. Asked about Wallace’s influence on The Life, he says, ‘For me, when I read David Foster Wallace, every time I look up from the page I feel sharpened and more receptive. I feel like I want to write. Not necessarily that I want to write like him, or could write like him. I feel that writing is important.’ He also admires Wallace’s humour, the mix of high and low cultural references. ‘While he is brainier than me or anybody I can imagine, he’s not a high-falutin’ kind of speaker, there’s no effort to rise above the ordinary vernacular.’ Which brings us back to the defining quality of The Life: DK’s distinctive voice. At first glance, the way the narrative appears on the page – the truncated, disjointed, often single-line sentences set out like prose poetry – gives the impression that this is going to be a demanding or difficult read. And yet, such is the pull of this voice, like a rip traveling out through the surf, that the reader is quickly drawn into DK’s world with all its outrageous, treacherous and bewildering undercurrents. We watch with appalled fascination as Dennis, who has been living in a state of pathological denial, starts to grapple ‘in fear and trembling’ with the dark truths of his past. Fiona Capp is a novelist and a surfer — author of the captivating memoir That Oceanic Feeling. Her latest book is <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781741754872/fiona-capp-my-blood-s-country"> My Blood's Country</a>.

Georgia Blain

2011-06-02T00:00:00Z

Georgia Blain, interviewed by Phoebe Bond

<img alt="blain" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/6141/blain.jpg" /> Phoebe Bond talks to Georgia Blain about her new novel <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781864711776/georgia-blain-too-close-to-home"> Too Close To Home</a>, writing about and engaging with the politics of the times and the challenges of being a non-Aboriginal writer writing Aboriginal characters. This is the first adult novel you’ve written in seven years. How did the writing of this book compare to previous novels? Can you talk a bit about the impetus to write <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781864711776/georgia-blain-too-close-to-home"> Too Close To Home</a> and the challenges you faced along the way? I started the book when I was writing my memoir, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781741667486/georgia-blain-births-deaths-marriages"> Births Deaths Marriages</a>. It was my fiction hit on the side as I tried to pin down my own life – and initially it was something I wrote in scraps, not sure whether I had a novel. However, once the memoir was finished, and the publicity was done, I returned to it – sure that there was a story there. The initial impetus came from attending a talk given by David Marr in which he argued that writers had stopped writing about Australia in the present – that we were failing to face up to the issues of the day. It was the midst of the Howard era; the time of Mark Latham’s run at leadership, and a period when inner city people with left politics were routinely dismissed as the out of touch latte sipping elite. I felt there were a few responses to Marr’s criticism: <ul> <li>artists need time to let responses germinate and brew</li> <li>artists felt disenfranchised, hopeless and powerless during this period, none of which is conducive to creativity</li> <li>and for me, I was always aware of something uncomfortable inside, a sense that it was very easy for me to espouse particular politics, to express outrage at xenophobia, racism and fear politics from within an easy white middle class inner city ghetto where I spent all my time hanging with people very like myself.</li> </ul> This sense of discomfort became all the more heightened when my daughter first started primary school – and like the characters in the book, we lived in an area just outside the fashionable parts of the inner west, an area that is on the turn, and the school she attended was very mixed. I realised how we tend to congregate with people like ourselves, how little we often see of lives that our different to our own, and I wanted to move my characters out of their comfort zone, to really put their politics to the test. Although it took a long time, the book was actually a joy to write. It’s very character driven, and the more I wrote the more I wanted to know what happened to these people. I wanted them to be alive, intelligent, aware of their flaws – people that readers felt they knew. When I finally finished, so much had happened in the Australian political landscape (we’d lost Howard and Rudd), and yet in many ways it felt like so little had changed. Political campaigns were still run on a hideous mix of fear and hip pocket incentives. And so I decided to update the book to very close to the current time. Set in an inner-city suburb of Sydney at the time of Kevin Rudd's overthrow, the characters in Too Close To Home seem to have a strong and fairly unified stance on Australia’s changing political climate in 2010. Who were you intending as the readership for this book? Do you think it will appeal to the politically unengaged? I really don’t think about the intended readership as I write. I suppose I try and write a book that I would like to read. I want a story that pulls me along, characters that are vivid and engaging, and ultimately I hope that I will be both moved and forced to see the world a little differently. I don’t think anyone is completely politically unengaged, but even if you were very close to the end of that spectrum, I would think that the human element of the story – the dilemmas that the central characters face in their relationships (and this is political in itself) would pull you in. Too Close To Home comprises a cast of characters in their forties, who work in the arts, who vote Green, who have children outside the confines of the nuclear family, and who you say, espouse beliefs that have become outdated and irrelevant. What propelled you put these characters under the microscope? I tend to explore issues that intrigue me in my own life. I wanted to put political beliefs that I hold to the test. I wanted to put the kind of people that I know and live with and spend all my time with right there under the microscope – to be brutally honest and to make myself squirm a little uncomfortably in doing so. Many non-Aboriginal writers are too scared to write Aboriginal characters into their novels for fear of breaching cultural codes. What were some of the challenges and rewards of creating Shane, Darlene and Archie, the Aboriginal family in Too Close To Home? I was very aware of the difficulties non-Aboriginal writers can face in creating Aboriginal characters but one of the key issues that I wanted to explore was racism, and the divide between black and white Australia. And I didn’t want to do this in a simplistic way – the good Aboriginal characters, the bad whites, the obvious examples of racism. I hate reading books or watching movies where racism is reduced to simplistic extremes. I think it’s dangerous when we do this because it allows us to congratulate ourselves far too easily – we can tell ourselves that we’re not like that. In fact, racism is far more insidious. It’s there in all the assumptions we hold as soon as we meet someone, the quick ways in which we will pigeon hole people, the fact that we so often hang with people like ourselves, rarely moving out of our cultural comfort zone. I really wanted Shane and his kids, Darlene and Archie, to be completely real. This was absolutely essential. I didn’t want him to just a drunk, or just a spiritual elder. He’s very rough around the edges, politically savvy, shy, a drinker, a neglectful parent and a very loving parent. His kids are exuberant, confident, cheeky and exhausting. They live in a different way to central white characters – and bridging this divide is extremely difficult for Freya, the main female character. The novel is essentially divided into two halves, Summer and Winter, and your prose beautifully evokes Australia’s climate. Can you talk about how seasonal change and the ever-present sense of weather informed your creative processes? Since I’ve moved further west, I’ve become very aware of how stinking hot this city can be. I write in little fibro sunroom that is blistering in summer and freezing in winter – so there’s a certain inevitability to the presence of the seasons in my work! Freya’s friends Mikhala, Anna and Louise, are all older, career-focused women who want (and struggle) to have babies later in life. There was a real sense of them having a finite amount of time. What drove you to explore this theme? At the time I had my daughter I was 34 (and termed a geriatric mother!). I was fortunate in having work and a partner and fertility - but so many women I know found themselves in their late thirties and early forties missing one of these ingredients. This can be incredibly painful. It’s a dividing time – you suddenly discover you’re on one side of the fence or the other – and for a lot of women (not all) there can be considerable grief involved in this, which isn’t always recognised by the world. I also hang with a lot of gays and lesbians who have had kids outside the confines of the traditional heterosexual family structure, and I’ve known single heterosexual women who’ve looked at ways of doing it on their own. Those last gasps of fertility or possibility when it comes to having kids are emotional, fraught and fascinating – perfect fodder for a novelist. What are some of your favourite books and writers? Are there any that influenced you in the writing of this book? I’m terrible at answering this question! I forget the name of everything as soon as I read it. At the moment I’m on a Colm Toibin binge, which is wonderful; I love short stories – Richard Ford and Alice Munroe in particular. I thoroughly enjoyed Fiona McGregor’s <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921844201/fiona-mcgregor-indelible-ink"> Indelible Ink</a>. So, I suppose my ‘bent’ is fairly naturalistic – but I want my books to be rich and complex, to pull me right in, so that I’m completely unaware of the craft, just utterly absorbed.

Craig Sherborne

2011-06-01T00:00:00Z

Craig Sherborne, interviewed by Jon Bauer

<img alt="sherborne" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/6447/sherborne.jpg" />Craig Sherborne is an extraordinary Australian writer – one who burst onto the local literary scene with an impressive splash with his childhood memoir, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781863955331/craig-sherborne-hoi-polloi"> Hoi Polloi</a>, in 2005, followed by its adolescent-based sequel, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781863955348/craig-sherborne-muck"> Muck</a> (2007). His many fans include J.M. Coetzee, Clive James and Hilary Mantel, while Australia’s most famous literary critic, Peter Craven, called him ‘one of nature’s writers’. His much-awaited debut novel, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921758010/craig-sherborne-the-amateur-science-of-love"> The Amateur Science of Love</a>, continues to be as ‘gruesomely honest’ (Hilary Mantel) as his memoirs, and is written with the same irresistible blend of darkly poignant humour and moral courage. Helen Garner has already called Sherborne’s first foray into fiction a ‘fast-moving, sharply focused, fantasy-shattering little thunderclap of a book’. Now, Jon Bauer, award-winning author of <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921640674/jon-bauer-rocks-in-the-belly"> Rocks in the Belly</a>, adds his name to the long and distinguished roll-call of Sherborne admirers, as he interviews him and introduces us to The Amateur Science of Love. Love, let’s face it, is the topic. Love is at the heart of generations of literature, film, oral tradition. If our love of love isn’t instilled through our mother’s milk, it’s promptly spoon-fed to us through fairytales. And we continue to happily devour it, ever after. Most commonly though, love stories are about a struggle against external forces: class, family divisions, war, issues of race or colour. The majority are merely extensions of the trajectory typical to fairytales. How refreshing then to read a love story that’s generated by internal struggles. A story where the impediments to love are the characters themselves. A story that acknowledges the inherent human need to destroy intimacy, even as we long for and nurture it. Craig Sherborne has achieved all this with The Amateur Science of Love, both his first novel and his third book. With two extremely well-received memoirs – Muck and Hoi Polloi – behind him, his debut novel will be scrutinised, as well as welcomed, for standing at an interesting confluence between memoir and fiction. The two genres often have more in common than we think. ‘The path Tilda and Colin follow, the fate they endure, many aspects have come from my own life,’ says Sherborne. ‘The sort of fiction that has always interested me is where there is clearly an author’s lived experience driving the book. You can tell by the details. Real events have been joined up with imagined events, imagined people.’ Narrator Colin, a sheltered country boy from New Zealand, is almost a decade younger than the cosmopolitan Tilda, who he meets while working at a London backpacker’s hostel. She’s already been married, and has sworn herself off men in order to focus on her painting career. Colin is new to adulthood – less steering towards his own future than swerving away from the pressure to step into his father’s farming boots. No surprise, then, that he’s so easily swept up in Tilda’s tornado personality. After an alternately charming and wrenching meander through the early days of falling in love, Sherborne transports the story to the wheatbelt of Australia, the lovers living off Tilda’s meagre savings and the few paintings she can sell, while Colin finds his way into agricultural journalism. From the start, their relationship is richly seeded with obvious incompatibilities, buried under the initial deluge of their love. Sherborne’s prose is what you fall for first. The enlivened, playful language (echoed in short, clipped chapters) propels the reader easily through the enchanting sections, as well as sweetening the more tumultuous or bitter scenes, echoing the bittersweet tone of his much-loved memoirs: ‘Congressing’ was what Tilda preferred to call it. Sex was too impersonal a word for our activities. Making love was too ordinary, a term everybody used. Whereas congressing made us sound like a two-person nation. A parliament of us, all to ourselves. As charming as fiction is, few readers can resist the lure of unpicking it to find out how it works, peeping through the venetian blinds of a writer’s sentences in search of the artist behind. This is especially true when the artist in question is a notable memoirist. ‘I think of fiction as imagining a different truth. One that is true for the novel being written,’ says Sherborne. ‘Lying, dishonesty and bad faith don’t apply. I certainly didn’t lie in my memoirs. They were my past world rebuilt on the page; portraiture using the paint of words and dramatic scenes.’ He confirms that those earlier books were ‘a great help’ when it came to writing his first novel, with many mastered techniques coming in handy: ‘the handling of first-person tone, rhythm, pace and structure, all that’. Sherborne, like his narrator, lived in the Victorian wheatbelt for a number of years and worked as a reporter for an agricultural newspaper. He’s not a fan of researched novels, saying ‘they come up second best to a novel that spills out of actual experience’. Colin has more trouble telling the truth than his creator does. While not easily described as ‘likeable’, the flawed Colin feels roundly real, even as he hides from the truth – about the growing lump in Tilda’s breast and the viability of his relationship. Eventually, he begins to strain against the everydayness of their love, finding himself drawn to a sultry and less blandly-familiar woman from the community. ‘Here we have a man who in the end is 30 years old, has been tested, failed, but has enough self reflection to know his failure and not be ignorant,’ reflects Sherborne on his fictional alter-ego. ‘He wants to do better than that failure. He wants redemption. He has lived enough to have gleaned a bit of wisdom and know that he wants to embrace life and be happy. He’s a better man than I was at his age.’ <iframe frameborder="0" height="640" scrolling="no" src= "http://ebooks.readings.com.au/embed/9781921834264" width= "460"></iframe> Sherborne has not dispensed with truth then, rather embellished and altered it by folding it into fiction. But his is not the kind of storytelling that softens hard reality into the airbrushed hyperbole of romance. Colin and Tilda’s story is as suffused with love’s gritty realism as it is with its beguiling charm. There’s also the solidity of characters with good and bad sides, rather than good or bad characters. In this way, Sherborne’s protagonists are a convincing blend of light and shadow. Over the years, as their relationship deepens and heady romance is replaced with everyday life, love exposes Tilda and Colin’s vulnerability, their deceit, spite and occasional heartlessness. All of it reinforces the idea that it is our blinkered search for our own happiness that makes us hurt one another, not inherent cruelty. Love, after all, is often mentioned in the same breath as blindness. ‘Tilda and Colin fall in love in that typically fierce and unprepared way we do. It blindsides them, and as their relationship develops, the blindsiding continues. Fate tests them. It probes deep into their very natures. How many of us would ever pass the serious test of fate on our natures? The more dependent on each other, the more unreliable to each other they become.’ The Amateur Science of Love is about how we destroy our own love, as well as how relationships are pushed and probed at from outside. It shows that the very equilibrium of loving someone over many years can unbalance love’s charm. Colin is gradually deterred by his very closeness to Tilda. The more familiar she is, the more real (flawed), so the less romantic his image of her becomes. Love is one of the few ways a person’s true self is expressed. Depending on the kind of person we are it may ennoble us, crush us, derange us, and redeem us. As Colin puts it, ‘Love is not simply sensations of the skin. More is demanded of you than sensations.’ That goes to the heart of the novel: falling in love is so viscerally experienced it is not even an experience, it is an act of nature – like its twin force, grief, which also comes into play over the years spanned by the novel, particularly as it gallops towards its inevitably dramatic climax. Thankfully, this story is big enough to include the light and the dark, love and its twin, staying with Tilda and Colin long after the initial beguiling force of love has passed. This reminded me, as I read, that most stories – especially films – end with the wedding, as if that’s the summit of love, rather than just the first day of a marriage. This may be Sherborne’s first work of fiction but unsurprisingly for a memoirist, it’s a work that rings pretty true. ‘There is surely a duty,’ he says, ‘if you are serious about your art, to show convincingly what it is to be a particular person in a particular time in particular circumstances.’ The Amateur Science of Love is enchanting without being saccharine, real without being brutal. Sherborne has delivered a narrative that expresses what we should mean when we talk about true love. Jon Bauer is the author of <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921640674/jon-bauer-rocks-in-the-belly"> Rocks in the Belly</a>.

S.J. Watson

2011-05-12T00:00:00Z

S.J. Watson, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

<img alt="SJ-Watson" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5743/SJ-Watson.png" /> Jo Case, editor of the Readings Monthly newsletter, interviews S.J. Watson about his debut psychological thriller <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921758157/s-j-watson-before-i-go-to-sleep"> Before I Go to Sleep</a>, which was borne out of the Faber Academy writing program in the UK. Your narrator, Christine, is afflicted with a rare kind of amnesia, in which her memory can only retain the events of the day. Each time she wakes, she starts her identity from scratch, not knowing how the years between childhood and middle age unfolded. How did you learn of this neurological condition, and what was the impetus for building a character and situation around it? I was about to start my course at the Faber Academy and I was looking for ideas for a new novel to be working on. I came across an obituary of man called Henry Molaison. He’d been 82 when he died, but, since an operation at the age of 26, had been unable to form new memories. The obituary described how every time he saw the doctor with whom he’d worked for decades and who considered him to be a friend, he had to be introduced to her as if they’d never met. He lived totally in the present. I was immediately struck by a mental image of a woman looking in the mirror, in a house she did not recognise, expecting to see a young girl reflected there, but instead seeing a woman approaching 50 years of age. The character of Christine came to me almost immediately, and I realised that hers was the story I wanted to be working on. I felt that through it I could explore some of the issues I’d been thinking about, to do with identity and love, and also power. I knew that to do that, I would need her to be able to retain memories for a few hours at a time, so her condition is not exactly the same as Molaison’s, but his story was the trigger. In fact, as I was writing Before I Go to Sleep I didn’t think my character’s condition could exist at all, but since finishing I have read of one case in the UK of a woman with an almost identical condition, so it wasn’t all artistic license after all! Christine is, as she reflects in the opening pages, ‘vulnerable as a child’, uniquely reliant on her husband and doctor to structure her days (and even her self). Yet she also proves uncannily resourceful. What interested you about that blend of helplessness and agency? I knew that it would have been terribly easy to make Christine a victim, and that didn’t interest me. I wanted the reader to understand that she was a resourceful, confident woman, who had been living a full life until something terrible happened to her. The fundamentals of her character are unchanged; that woman still exists, even if she is buried deeply. In some ways Before I Go to Sleep is the story of Christine’s attempts to reclaim herself, to take back some control, and to discover who she is. Christine is the ultimate unreliable narrator. She can never entirely trust her own ‘memories’ or assumptions – are they real or imagined? What challenges and opportunities did this present for you, as a writer? The biggest challenge was writing it in the first person! It was technically very difficult to write the story of a woman who doesn’t remember what has happened previously. Yet writing it in the third person would have resulted in a very different book and, once I’d found a structure that worked, the first-person narrative became one of the things I most enjoyed about writing this book. It meant that, throughout the story, the reader is always in the same place, mentally, as Christine. The reader knows what she knows – no more and no less – and believes what she believes. I enjoyed taking the reader on exactly the same journey that Christine is on. It also meant I could play around with the idea of ‘false memory’. It fascinates me that we can have very strong ‘memories’ of something that never actually happened, or we can misremember events that did happen, and these false memories affect us as strongly as if they were true. It leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that the idea of ‘truth’ is really quite nebulous. Before I Go to Sleep makes conscious the way we assemble our lives from fragments of experience and personality. Christine refers to ‘these trivialities ... these small hooks on which a life is hung’. Were you consciously interested in exploring this everyday assembly of the self? Yes. I think we rarely look at ourselves and think about the reasons why we act a certain way, or have a certain set of beliefs, yet in some ways we are an accumulation of our memories. Sometimes there are big events that shape us, for better or worse, and sometimes our memory of those events can be repressed. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looked at that brilliantly. Yet I’m also interested in how the smaller things, the trivialities can have a cumulative effect, how they can shape our beliefs about the world and about ourselves us. This is such a gripping read – it seems there are new revelations and questions raised on almost every page, and the reader is sucked deep into Christine’s quest to discover the truth about her situation from the start. How hard did you have to work to get the pacing and the timing of the revelations just right? Was it a tricky book to work with, structurally? Thank you! It was hard to find the right structure for the book. For a long time I struggled with how to tell the story honestly, in Christine’s voice, without making it repetitive for the reader. But once I’d found a form that worked it came relatively easily. At times it almost felt as if the story already existed, and I was just discovering it. During the edit I had to make sure it had the right pace, but at no point during the writing did I find myself thinking ‘Oh, I’d better have a revelation here.’ It all just came quite naturally! You are a graduate of the first Faber Academy, a creative writing course recently launched here in Australia, too. How important was the course for you, and how did it help you? It was incredibly important. I think really the only way to learn to write is by sitting down at the desk and writing, but a course like the one I did can really help you to speed up the process. First, it encourages you to think like a writer and to put the hours in, and second it teaches you to identify when you’ve taken a wrong turn, when something isn’t working. My coursemates and I were incredibly close and became very invested in each other’s work, and we learned from some incredible tutors. It might not be for everyone, but the Faber course was exactly what I needed at that time to help me take my writing to the next level. The story is told using two narrative modes – told by the narrator, Christine, in the present tense; and through a series of journal entries that catch us (and her) up to what has happened in her life. It reads seamlessly: were there any challenges in making these two techniques work to tell one cohesive story? The scenes written in the present tense all take place in one day, yet it is a day on which she makes the most profound journey. She literally learns who she is. The challenge was to make that a journey that the reader would experience with the same sense of excitement and trepidation that she does, and also to meld the two narrative strands so that we believe, as Christine does, that the journal entries were written by her, but a ‘her’ that she has no knowledge of. The novel has already had praise from writers as diverse as Lionel Shriver and Dennis Lehane. Who are some of your favourite writers? Did any influence you in the writing of this book? I read as widely as possible, and with every book I read I try to take something that I can use to inform my own writing. Having said that, I deliberately didn’t read any fiction while I was writing Before I Go to Sleep (which I found tremendously difficult!) as I wanted to find the right voice for the book without the risk of another’s influence. My favourite writer is probably Margaret Atwood, yet I wouldn’t say her work directly influenced Before I Go to Sleep in any way other than the fact that my desire to one day write something as brilliant as The Handmaid’s Tale is what caused me to pick up a pen all those years ago and take seriously what until then had been a hobby. Before I Go To Sleep is out now in <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921758157/s-j-watson-before-i-go-to-sleep"> paperback</a> and <a href= "http://ebooks.readings.com.au/product/9781921834240">ebook</a>. You can follow S.J. Watson on his <a href= "http://sj-watson.blogspot.com/">blog</a>, <a href= "http://www.facebook.com/S.J.Watson.Writer">Facebook</a> and on <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/sj_watson">Twitter</a>.

Geraldine Brooks

2011-05-05T00:00:00Z

Geraldine Brooks, interviewed by Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings

<img alt="brooks" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5667/brooks.png" />Readings Managing Director Mark Rubbo speaks to author of <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780732280383/geraldine-brooks-people-of-the-book"> People Of The Book</a> and <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780732278427/geraldine-brooks-march"> March</a> Geraldine Brooks, about her new novel <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780732289225/geraldine-brooks-caleb-s-crossing"> Caleb’s Crossing</a>. All of your novels are based on historical events and explore big themes. In Caleb’s Crossing, it’s the clash of cultures and beliefs. Do you have an idea of issues you want to explore and then find the event to suit, or does the event inform the exploration? It’s always all about the story for me. The themes just seep into the tale telling without any conscious thought. But I do think the stories from the past that attract me tend to be about people under stress, during moments of crisis or decision. In an interview you said that your journalistic training meant that you threw words down on the page and then fixed them up later. The voice in this book, the young woman Bethia who befriends the young Indian, is perfect in expression and tone and is as one would imagine a young woman in the seventeenth century would write. This seems to belie the ‘throwing down of words’. Can you tell us – how you do find the voice? Some days the writing is fluid, some days not. Those days, you go back to the ma- terial the next day, and revise and revise until it feels right. The voice for Bethia was more difficult than many because there is little written by colonial women or girls before 1750 that has survived, and my tale takes place 100 years earlier. I had a few shards of verbatim court re- cords, a few letters and so forth from the period, but not a lot. I had to create her voice from these scant raw materials. The impact of Europeans on the indigenous society and culture seems peripheral to the American story. Do you agree, and is this something Caleb’s Crossing is trying to redress? I would disagree with that. I think it is integral to the story, which doesn’t mean there aren’t the same controversies, the same labelling as ‘black armband history’ that we encounter in Australia when someone tries to probe first contact and the history of indigenous relations with European colonists. The book’s main setting is the island of Noepe, now known as Martha’s Vineyard. Your descriptions of the natural surroundings are very vivid, but I imagine the area as much-changed. How did you do your research? Not as changed as you might think. A third of the vineyard is undeveloped, which is one of the reasons I love it so. There’s a particular high point that I like to hike to, and from there you can see from one shore of the island to the other and not see a single man-made thing. It is true the woods are different now, as much of the land was cleared in the 1800s, so the forest is regrowth ... but the beaches and the salt marshes, lagoons and ponds are little different to the way they would have been in the seventeenth century. I saw your unashamed lobbying of US reviewer Ron Charles when you tried to get People of the Book considered for his ten best books of 2010. Are you going to try again? Absolutely! But I think I’ll have to up the ante and threaten his kid next time.

Will Hill

2011-04-12T00:00:00Z

<img alt="willhill" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5362/Will_Hill_Author_pic.jpg" /> <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780007424900/will-hill-department-19"> Department 19</a> is the new action-packed horror book from Will Hill which we loved – you can read our review <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/review/department-19-by-will-hill">here</a>. In the meantime, Will kindly agreed to answer a few questions about vampires, monsters and pneumatic stake launchers. So, Will, you’ve written an action-packed horror book complete with secret government agencies, vampires and Frankenstein’s creature. Where does an idea like that come from? This is the question most commonly asked by my mum, who is continually trying to juggle being proud of her author son and being worried about some of the things I think up! To be honest with you, it came from a number of places. Undoubtedly the biggest influence on the story that eventually became Department 19 is Dracula; from the first time I read it, when I was maybe 12 or 13, I wondered what might have happened next – the four men who survive the novel have to go back to their normal lives, and can’t ever tell anyone about what they’ve done, about the things they’ve seen, and I always wondered whether that would really be possible. Once I decided to use those characters, once I realised that if the vampire threat ever returned then they would be the men whom the authorities would ask for help, the idea of them evolving over the years into a secret government agency dealing with the supernatural came together pretty easily. The second main idea was what became the prologue of the novel – the thought of a teenage boy whose life is shattered without warning, for reasons he doesn’t, and can’t understand, who realises that everything he thought he knew about his life, and his family, was built on lies. It’s a horrible thought, but it was an exciting one as well. When I realised that the two ideas were actually aspects of the same story, I started writing Department 19. <img alt="19" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5358/Department_19_Banner.jpg" /> There’s so much detail in Department 19, from the long history of the department to the brilliant weapons like the T-Bone Pneumatic Stake Launcher. How long did the planning and writing process of Department 19 take? I started writing it almost exactly three years ago, in April 2008. The prologue and the first three chapters came out in a rush, in about three days, but then I stopped, and didn’t write another word of prose for about three months. I realised, even with just four chapters in the bag, that because I was going to be dealing with more than a century of the Department’s fictional history, a history full of people whose descendants were characters in the story, a history that was going to inform everything that happened in the novel, I needed to have everything worked out before I continued. Otherwise I knew it was only going to be a matter of time before I found myself tied up in a knot that I couldn’t unpick. So I wrote family trees for all the men who survive Dracula, I wrote timelines of their descendants and mini-biographies of all of them, even though a lot of them (most of them, to be honest!) will never actually appear in the story, lists of Commanding Officers, lists of the leading figures of each generation, lists of authorisation numbers, and set a strict set of rules for the vampires in my story. Only when all that was in place, and had been checked and re-checked a hundred times for flaws and inconsistencies, did I actually return to the story. From that point, it took about a year to write the rest of the book; it was finished in August 2009. Department 19 has many references to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Are these books favourites of yours? Did any other books influence your writing of Department 19? Both Dracula and Frankenstein are definitely favourites of mine! I got into horror when I was about 12 or 13, after I moved on from children’s books; like a lot of boys my age I went straight from Roald Dahl to Stephen King and Clive Barker, and I just devoured everything I could get my hands on. After a while I started to look backwards, at where the horror genre had come from, and I read the two great classics you mentioned. To be honest, I found them hard going when I was so young, but I was struck instantly by how influential and defining to the genre they had been. When I read them again, a few years later, I fell completely in love with both of them, and have been ever since – as will be obvious to anyone who reads Department 19, which would absolutely not exist without them. As far as other influential books are concerned, Stephen King’s work is a constant source of inspiration to me, both in terms of his characters (particularly his portrayals of older children and teenagers – see It and The Body for maybe the two greatest examples) but also in terms of world-building and history, two things that were hugely important when I was planning Department 19. And the prologue, where Jamie’s dad dies and his life is shattered without warning, was definitely influenced by Michael Marshall’s novels – he does the invasion of normal life by the extreme so well, and so terrifyingly. A lot of reviewers have mentioned that Department 19 would make a fantastic movie, and I don’t disagree! There are so many adrenaline-pumping scenes to choose from, but if you had to pick just one scene to make into a movie, which one would it be? This is hard without giving too much away! For example, I think the climax of the novel, in the chapel on the small island of Lindisfarne, is very cinematic. I do tend to think in quite visual terms when I’m writing – it tends to be a case of creating a picture, or a series of moving pictures, in my head, and then just writing down what I see; for that reason, I think the prologue would make a great start to a movie. But I think the bit that I would most like to see filmed would have to be the ballroom scene in New York in 1928. I could see the huge room full of black and white tuxedos and beautiful ballgowns so clearly as I wrote it, with the glowing red eyes beneath the ornate masks, and the palpable sense of fear, of being out of your depth, would, I think, translate very well to the screen. Fingers crossed it will happen one day! Department 19 concludes with a few loose ends… does that mean we can expect a sequel at some point in the near future? (Please, please, please!) You certainly can! I finished writing the sequel to Department 19 about a month ago – I’m revising it now, before I send it to my editor. I should warn you now, it’s a big, long, dark book – if you thought the ending of Department 19 was harsh, you’re going to hate me for what happens next! Book two, which doesn’t have a title yet, will be out this time next year, with book three to follow in 2013. The original plan was for it to be a trilogy, but I’m at the end of book two now, and the ending of the whole story (which I’ve known since I started writing the prologue to Department 19) still seems a long way away – so I think that, as long as people like the first one and its sequels, it might be as many as four of five books before it’s done. So don’t worry – you’re not going to have to wait for more from Jamie and his friends (and enemies) for very long! Will Hill, thanks for your time! Readings has some very cool Department 19 iron-on patches to give away. If you want to be an honorary member of this secret vampire-hunting organisation, simply mention this interview when you buy a copy of Department 19 in one of our stores, but be quick, it’s only while stocks last! <img alt="d19" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5366/D19_Patch.jpg" />

Andreas Deja, Disney animator

2011-04-06T00:00:00Z

Andreas Deja, interviewed by Gerard Elson, DVD Specialist at Readings St Kilda

During his time as a Disney animator, Andreas Deja has brought to life some of the most memorable animated characters of the past two decades. Gaston, Roger Rabbit, King Triton and Jafar all owe their ‘physical’ charisma to Deja’s skills with a pencil. His latest creations are the august Great Prince in Bambi II and Tigger in the forthcoming Winnie the Pooh. Gerard Elson from Readings St Kilda spoke with Andreas about the release of Bambi and Bambi II on blu-ray and DVD. <img alt="Andreas4" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5222/Andreas4.jpg" /> Andreas Deja, Disney Animator 2011. ©Disney. All right reserved. What appealed to you about working on Bambi II? Was it the prospect of animating a character like The Great Prince? Having animated Scar in The Lion King as well as Roger Rabbit you have quite a noble history of animating animals. I like to jump around and take on all kinds of assignments: do villains and heroes, and then do a little Hawaiian girl like Lilo [from Lilo and Stitch]. I tend to like the variety. When it came to Bambi II, to be honest with you, I was a little skeptical. When the director <a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_pimental">Brian Pimental</a> called me and said ‘Y’know, we could use some help with the animation. You’ve studied anatomy – we could use that sort of expertise,’ I said, ‘Why are you doing a Bambi II? Bambi is perfect! You don’t need to add to it!’ And he said, ‘I know, I know, we get that reaction all the time. We have a screening coming up with our storyboards. Why don’t you come to the screening and take a look at how the story’s going? Then you can decide if you want to help us.’ So I went to the screening and was a bit like, ‘Okay, impress me.’ I was not expecting much. But I have to tell you, I was really taken by their approach to the story. The change that happens within the characters, especially The Great Prince – he was a very stern father at the beginning, who felt responsible for his son, but didn’t seem to be that interested in educating him and raising him. It takes the whole movie for him to really warm up to him and realise, ‘This is my son. I have to be there for him.’ And I thought that change was beautiful. I also really enjoyed the way they handled the personalities of the characters. They didn’t really change them. They didn’t make them ‘hip’ to a modern audience. I really felt it was the same Bambi and the same Thumper. So then it became about the challenge: can we even animate as complex a character as The Great Prince? I say complex because that’s a character [who’s] based on realism and the anatomy and motion of a real deer. <img alt="bambi2" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5202/bambi2.jpg" /> Bambi and The Great Prince. Copyright © Walt Disney Home Entertainment. Was Patrick Stewart already cast by the time you decided to become involved? Yes, he was cast. I thought the voice casting was absolutely perfect. He has that deep authority in his voice, but he can also be very warm and tender. We needed both of those qualities. You’ve worked on some iconic characters over the years. I did a series of villains. Gaston was the first one, in Beauty and the Beast. Then Jafar, in Aladdin. Then Scar. I even got offered more villains after that! I was asked to do Hades, the god of the underworld, in Hercules. But when you do three in a row as an animator, you end up repeating yourself with the same expressions, similar mannerisms. So by the time it got to Hercules I actually asked if I could do the lead character and not the villain. Just to have a change. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the villains – I love them, each and every one of them. Because the villain motivates the story. The villain wants things his or her way. So in terms of motivation and acting, there’s so much more of a range than other types of characters. Do you prefer one or the other, villains or heroes? As an animator, you want to have that range. So villains and really rich sidekicks are the most interesting parts in these movies. The ones that are difficult are the prince and the princess types, because they usually have to be handled in a more subtle way. Their motivations and their range is a little more realistic, so you have to be more careful with the way that you animate [them]. But if you have somebody like Captain Hook in Peter Pan, or Scar from The Lion King, you can go to town! You’ve just finished animating Tigger for the new Winnie the Pooh movie. What did you enjoy about working on him? Just to have the chance to animate Tigger and give him a little encore. He was animated so beautifully in the ‘60s. I had a chance to meet the [original] animator of Tigger. His name is <a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milt_Kahl">Milt Kahl</a>, one of ‘<a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Nine_Old_Men">Disney’s Nine Old Men</a>’ and he was still very much around in the 1980s. I saw him once a year in San Francisco and could ask him all these questions. He’s one of my all-time favourite artists – so inspirational. Whether it’s Shere Khan in The Jungle Book or Tigger, there was always something new and fresh about his approach. So [with] an assignment like that, where the character exists already, you need to go back and study what was done. Take the best of that and then put your own spin on it – because you have to put yourself into it as well. It really has been one of my favourite assignments. I love Tigger. Are there any more hand-drawn animated features currently in development at Disney? It’s a little slow going right now, but it’s not gone. At the studio at this moment we have the directors from The Princess and the Frog, John Musker and Ron Clements. They’re working on a very unique story that’s based on a British book. It’s still in the early stages, so the animators right now have a little time to experiment, do some experimental animation until that picture is ready. Are you at liberty to say what the book is? You know what, I don’t know. It hasn’t been announced yet, so I’m a little hesitant to come forward with that! <img alt="Andreas-drawing" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5226/Andreas-drawing.jpg" /> Andreas Deja, Disney Animator 2011. ©Disney. All right reserved. You’ve worked on a few great shorts. The two I’m most fond of are the Mickey Mouse horror movie riff, Runaway Brain, and the Goofy short, How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre. You’ve recently been involved with a new theatrical short, The Ballad of Nessie. What can you tell us about that? We animated that one a while ago, but then it was put on hold, production-wise, because it was all hands on deck for Princess and the Frog and Winnie and the Pooh! So this predates both of them? Yeah. We animated that one before Princess and the Frog even. We had all of the supervising and senior animators—like Mark Henn and Eric Goldberg and myself—who have been doing this for decades. So when you do a short film like this, everyone gets maybe six or seven scenes and the film is done! But it was a lot of fun. It’s the story of the Loch Ness monster – sort of a juvenile retelling of that story. Nessie is actually for the first time a girl. We tried to hook up with the styling of <a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Blair">Mary Blair</a>, a development artist that Walt Disney really liked. She did Cinderella, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland. We tried to look at her work and use that as a springboard for the art direction for Nessie. One more question before we go: you worked under <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Williams_%28animator%29"> Richard Williams</a> as one of the lead animators on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. What was that experience like? He’s a bit of a fascinating figure to me. That was obviously quite an atypical film in its day. It set a lot of precedents, especially in terms of live-action/animation amalgams. It was all animated in London with a group of European artists, mostly. There were only two animators from Disney that were sent out. There was a friend of mine, <a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Nibbelink">Phil Nibbelink</a>, and myself. We were the Disney guys. Everybody else was from Europe or Canada. I got on with Richard extremely well. We had been friends before we started on the movie. I remember him calling me from London saying, ‘You know, I think I’m going to work for Disney after all! It looks like I’m going to get involved with this Roger Rabbit project. Steven Spielberg is involved, Robert Zemeckis is directing it…’ He was basically testing the waters to see if I was interested in joining the crew. But at that time I was settled in America—I’d only been here a few years—and I didn’t really want to go back to Europe. So it took a dinner with Richard Williams and the animation producer, <a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hahn">Don Hahn</a>. They took me out to a Mexican dinner, we all had margaritas, and after that I signed on! [Laughs] And I’m glad I did, because it was a very important experience for me. The main reason would probably be that I had a chance to do that kind of animation, which is very 1930s/1940s. The characters were very ‘cartoony,’ where the principles of animation, like squash and stretch, could be applied in a very broad sense. So for me as an animator, it was very good to go through that experience and animate those characters. Dick was incredibly supportive of me and I got on with him super. Do you know what he’s up to at the moment? He’s attached to Aardman Studios in Bristol. He lives there with his family. He’s not working on any of Aardman’s films. They gave him some office space and he’s working on his own film. I don’t think it’s a feature, I think it’s more of a half-hour kind of thing. He’s most likely doing it all by himself. We’ll just have to wait and see when it’s finished! Well thank you for your time, and congratulations on Bambi II. I think you’ve all done quite a job of approximating the look of the original, which is something I don’t think many of these direct-to-DVD sequels ever really manage. It’s not an easy thing to hook up with a Disney classic! Let’s face it, these guys [back then] were background painters or layout artists. They were masters of their craft. To actually tap into that and do a film that looks that lush is a real challenge. But to me, Bambi II is probably the best looking of all the sequels. <img alt="bambi2-2" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5210/bambi2-2.jpg" /> Still from Bambi II. © Copyright Walt Disney Home Entertainment. This interview was <a href= "http://celluloidtongue.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/interview-andreas-deja-disney-animator/"> originally posted</a> on Gerard Elson's blog <a href= "http://celluloidtongue.wordpress.com/">Celluloid Tongue</a>.

Leslie Cannold

2011-04-05T00:00:00Z

Leslie Cannold, interviewed by Phoebe Bond

<img alt="lesliecannold" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5242/lesliecannold.jpg" />Leslie Cannold, author of the critically acclaimed <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780819563859/leslie-cannold-the-abortion-myth"> The Abortion Myth</a> (2000) and <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781920731885/leslie-cannold-what-no-baby-childless-by-circumstance"> What, No Baby?</a> (2005), which made the Australian Financial Review’s top 101 books list, talks to Readings Monthly editorial assistant Phoebe Bond about her third book and first work of fiction, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921758089">The Book of Rachael.</a> The Book of Rachael is set in Israel 2000 years ago. In your Author’s Note you mention that you don’t view the book as historical fiction. Where do you draw the line between fiction and historical accuracy and what historical details were important for you to get right? I began the fiction-writing journey in a different place on this question to where I ended it. When I started The Book of Rachael, my experience was as an academic researcher and journalist. It was outside of the scope of possibility to write anything I didn’t know or believe to be true based on available evidence. It was all I could do not to footnote! However, having written a first draft bristling with far too many, too precisely drawn facts and realising – okay, so perhaps someone told me – that it didn’t work as a novel, I was forced to reconsider my position. Ultimately, a novel has to work as a story and by the third draft of the story I finally understood this, not just in my head but my heart. There had also been enough time between drafts that the masses of knowledge I’d packed into my first go had faded. The knowledge or impressions that stuck with me were ones I decided must be the ones most important to the story I was telling so I wrote the novel with these as the foundation stones and only returned to my tomes for further historical facts on an as-needs basis. You have created a style of speech that seems to observe the conventions of the time but simultaneously feels fresh and modern. How did you go about finding the voices for your characters? That is so nice of you to say – thanks! This was certainly among the most challenging aspects of making the novel work. I wrote and rewrote that first chapter many times, making very few changes on the nature or order of events I was recounting but working constantly with the voice. Throughout, I returned to the Gospels and the First Testament to absorb the cadence and phrases of these texts, but combined this with fierce pragmatism. If more than one reader of the manuscript said, ‘that’s lovely, but what does it mean?’ or simply wrote ‘huh?’ in the margins, I’d usually – not always, but usually – bite the bullet and change it. My editor was also pretty clear about the merits and limits of the vernacular enterprise on which I’d embarked, and when she decided something was too ye-olde or just plain confusing, I was smart enough to give way. You say that the impetus for this novel came from watching a BBC documentary about the life of Jesus. Can you talk a bit about this initial inspiration and where it led you? I love documentaries, and many years ago I saw a BBC one about Jesus of Nazareth – the man, not the religious figure. It was broadcast over weeks, the narrator microscopically examining every shred of evidence about how Jesus lived and died. At one point, the names and fates, even the burial places, of his four brothers was canvassed before the breezy assertion was made that Jesus may have had sisters, too, but no one knew their names. The program moved on. But I was stuck. What kind of world painstakingly records the names and stories of important people’s brothers, but not their sisters? What would it have been like for a girl to have come of age in such a world, especially if she was preternaturally bright, as well as determined? I decided right there that I would tell the stories of these forgotten women, feeling it was both honour and a challenge to take on the task of reclaiming them for history. Eventually, it came to feel like a responsibility, too, and it was this sense of duty to the sisters that kept me going during the lean years. As a feminist, you’ve written a book set in an era when women were totally subjugated by men. Do you see The Book of Rachael as a feminist novel? What were the intentions and tensions for you in the writing of this book? I see the project of reclaiming women lost to history as a feminist project and of course I’m sympathetic to women born in times where their horizons were so limited. But it’s a novel and so once the decision to write it was made, all such considerations were set aside so I could focus on the sole and difficult-to-achieve objective of every work of fiction: to be a bloody good yarn. Indeed the highest praise I have received for the book so far has been from a not-particularly-feminist bloke who told me he couldn’t put it down for this reason. You build a strong sense of how much the spirited protagonist Rachael struggles to find her place in the world. How do you think Rachael would fare in today’s society? And was this your way of writing the journey of womankind in general. Rachael would have loved being born today. I get a smile on my face just thinking about her. She’d be the prime minister or head of the UN or something. Perhaps she’d do this by not having kids, but she might manage even with a few. I wouldn’t put anything past her. You evoke a tremendous sense of place in your novel, I often felt like I was right there with the characters walking throughthe landscapes of ancient Israel. ‘Gethsemane … where stone walls crumbled from the weight of years, and the branches of olive trees straggled towards God like a hag’s withered arms.’ How did you go about constructing this world? Thanks again, this Q & A is really good for my self esteem! Look, I have been to Israel three times, though it was a number of years ago and way before I decided to write the book. Ideally, I would have travelled there again but this just wasn’t feasible. So I dragged out all the photos I took during those years and pasted them around my desk, surfed the net for more images and put them up, and then let my imagination build the rest of the picture based on the world described in the Bible. You are an author, ethicist, researcher and a prolific media commentator. You were recently honoured as Australia’s Humanist of the Year; you are also the mother of two teenage sons and the lead singer in Melbourne-based cover band Speedy Fish. How do you fit it all in? There are two answers to that question. One is having an incredibly supportive partner and loving children. All three men in my life make me feel that what I do is important and deserves accommodation and sacrifice on their part. They take me seriously and that helps me to take me seriously. The other is by running hard and then taking a breather to restock imaginatively and otherwise. I won’t be writing books for some months, even years now, while I focus on earning money and taking the pressure off my family. It’s the turn of others in my crew now to follow their dreams. So if anyone has any speeches they want me to give or to ghost-write for them, or books or reports they need researched or written or just want to be mentored through writing their own fiction/non-fiction, or taught how to write opinion pieces or effectively tweet, give me a hoy! (<a href= "http://www.cannold.com.">www.cannold.com).</a>

Téa Obreht

2011-04-01T00:00:00Z

Téa Obreht, interviewed by Jo Case

<img alt="obreht" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5198/obreht.png" />Téa Obreht is the 24-year-old writer who has been spending more than her fair share of time in the literary spotlight lately. And for good reason too. Colum McCann says she's the 'most thrilling literary discovery in years', she was named as one of the New Yorker 's top 20 writers under 40 last year and <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780297859024/tea-obreht-the-tiger-s-wife"> The Tiger's Wife</a> - her debut novel - has been received extremely well by critics. Jo Case spoke to her for Readings on the eve of the book's release. Storytelling is central to The Tiger’s Wife – its power to transport us to other places, to comfort, to inform, to entertain. And perhaps most of all, the way shared stories create bonds between people. Did you always see the process of storytelling as integral to the book? Like so much of the book, ‘storytelling’ ended up taking over as a central theme very naturally. Of course, I wouldn’t realise this until later – one of the things I learned in writing a novel is how much of it formed on its own, almost behind my back – but I did know that the reader would have to reconcile two sides of the story when it came to the tiger and the tiger’s wife: ‘objective’ information and the perceived truth of village gossip. After that, other facets of storytelling, especially storytelling as a bond between Natalia and her grandfather, fell into place. The Jungle Book is another central thread to the story – the book remains precious to Natalia’s grandfather throughout his life, for various reasons, and he carries it in his coat pocket from childhood until his death. What is it that drew you to this book to help tell this story? In a way, it was a very similar process to what I’ve already described. At first, The Jungle Book was just a natural way for the grandfather to know the tiger, a window for a small child living in the rural Balkans to process what a tiger might mean through his literary acquaintance with Shere Khan. Later on in the draft, the book became a talisman, a way for the grandfather to cling to his own past and make it known to Natalia. I really didn’t anticipate that. I think my favourite thread of the story was that of Gavran Gaile, the ‘deathless man’ who Natalia’s grandfather encounters at intervals throughout his life, always in places where people are dying en masse. I like the way science (embodied by Natalia’s grandfather, a doctor) meets superstition (Gaile) and they vie, in increments, for credibility. And that the doctor – and eventually, I think, Natalia – are seduced, despite their rational beliefs, into believing the unbelievable. What inspired this character? And what drew you to that juxtaposition of science and superstition, which is mirrored elsewhere in the book? The character is based on an archetype who often appears in Slavic and German myth, and his presence usually forces the people around him to deal with the social necessity of death. In terms of the juxtaposition of science and superstition: my friend is a doctor in Serbia, and for the past several years, I have been treated to anecdotes from her medical life, most notably situations where she has had to struggle to get past a patient’s superstition in order to treat them. Knowing that much of the book would focus on death, it seemed that the deathless man’s continual reappearance would most naturally frustrate a doctor, so that’s how the grandfather became one. That being said, in thinking about death, I believe that we all walk a very fine line between superstition and reality, no matter how steadfastly our beliefs pull us in one direction or another. Natalia’s grandfather is especially affected by his country’s civil war – he seems, in some ways, to represent the division of the country’s soul. ‘All his life, he had been part of the whole – not just part of it, but made up of it. He had been born here, educated there. His name spoke of one place, his accent of the other.’ He has a wife from the other side, even his country house lies on the other side of the border. Was this internal division – of the man and the country – something you particularly wanted to explore? I wanted very much to understand the idea of the interaction between personal identity and place—in some ways because my own childhood was so nomadic. I thought a lot the division of any country, how, if one’s identity is made up of a whole, the dissolution must feel like you’re becoming someone different. This had to happen to the grandfather; and I think is part of what forces his sentimentality for his childhood and his days with the deathless man, too. One thing that strikes me about this book is how nuanced your characters are. For example, the reader is uncomfortably forced to recalibrate their feelings about Luka – the village butcher who beats his wife, serves customers in a blood-soaked apron and compares ‘delicious’ pigs’ feet to children’s feet – after we discovery his back-story. And even Natalia’s grandfather, in some ways the book’s hero, is morally complex. (Such as his reluctance to honour his bet with the deathless man.) Was this something you worked deliberately to achieve? In writing several of my short stories, I had struggled with my tendency to oversimplify characters. Luka was very much a villain at the start, but it didn’t seem right to throw him out there and allow him to be comfortably reviled. It seemed easy. As a writer, I didn’t feel I understood him, and thought it would be useful – and fair – to explore his character further. This lead to his youth as an artist and the difficult times he had, and also opened the door for me to explore Darisha the Bear and the apothecary. I was intrigued by your insights about the young people – Natalia and her peers – for whom the war had always been “at the center of everything”, and their seemingly paradoxical “inability to part with it” as it draws to a close. The idea that, terrible as it is, it’s both what they are used to and provides the circumstances they have planned their lives around. Are these observations based on your conversations with people you grew up with in early childhood, reading and research, or simply imagining yourself in that place? Or a combination? Well, thank you! They’re definitely a combination. I was very young when I left, so my understanding of the war was based on the stories of people with whom I later reconnected, and my own observations of its aftermath when I returned to Serbia and Croatia. In spending my childhood in Cyprus and Egypt, I also grew up surrounded by a very restless youth culture. There’s a kind of energy when people are on the brink of something, and I think that made its way into the book. Natalia’s grandfather says, after they see an escaped zoo elephant on the streets of their neighbourhood in the middle of the night, ‘The story of this war – dates, names, who started it, why – that belongs to everyone ... But something like this – this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.’ It’s those small, often surreal, moments, in this novel that brings the lived reality of this conflict and these places to life – and make the reader feel something in a way that reported facts can’t. Was that something you were aiming for? Yes. I didn’t want to tell a ‘war story’ straight, because I felt that relying on facts and historical accuracy and politics would restrict the essence what I wanted to write about. Personal and family mythology born of conflict, the way you keep people and situations alive long after they are gone, were both something in which I was deeply interested. I found that mostly in the small, surreal moments you describe. You were born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, but migrated with your family aged seven. Yet you capture the place and the experience of living in a conflict situation so beautifully. What kind of research did you do? And did you visit the place as an adult to gather details for the book? Place is very important to me; the books I love to read have a common thread of total immersion in place, whether it’s the African savannah or twentieth-century Moscow. I go back to Belgrade annually to visit my grandmother, and on those trips – particularly the last one, during which I went vampire-hunting for Harper’s magazine – I’ve come to better understand the culture, and fall in love with the region’s landscape. Of course, I did take some liberties—that’s the beauty and fun of fiction, you get to make things up! You spent your early childhood in Belgrade, then lived in Cyprus and Egypt before moving to America aged 12. Do you think your experience of these very different places has influenced the way you read and write? If so, how? Absolutely. Growing up, I was steeped in stories. Myths were in minutiae, even the copper platter on which the merchant around the corner sold his spices (he might tell you the platter had once belonged to Napoleon). I think the idea of a story behind everything is very prevalent in The Tiger’s Wife; and is ultimately something by which we are all riveted. Great-grandmother’s silver picture frame is that much more significant an heirloom if we are told that it survived a flood or an arduous ocean crossing—whether or not that story is actually true. Who are some of the books and writers that have influenced you? I am always forcing Mikhail Bulgakov and Isak Dinesen on people – I have been known to buy The Master and Margarita and Out of Africa for students even when neither book is on my syllabus. Growing up, I read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Victor Hugo voraciously. At some point in college, I switched gears completely and went with Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor. I am an indecisive reader.

Jane Sullivan

2011-03-24T00:00:00Z

Jane Sullivan, interviewed by Patrick Allington

<img alt="jane_sullivan" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/5141/jane_sullivan.jpeg" />Jane Sullivan is best known to Melbourne literature-lovers as the scribe behind theSaturday Age’s weekly column, ‘Turning Pages’. Now, on the eve of the publication of her second novel, <a href="http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921640964/jane-sullivan-little-people"> Little People</a> (the first was White Star, in 2000), we’ll be thinking of her as a novelist first, journalist second. Little People was shortlisted for Scribe’s inaugural CAL/Scribe Fiction Prize for writers aged 35 and over. Patrick Allington, the Miles Franklin-longlisted author of Figurehead, spoke to Jane about Little People’s long journey from her imagination to the page, for Readings’ New Australian Writing feature series. Don’t let the title of Jane Sullivan’s new novel fool you. Little People is crammed with big ideas and larger-than-life characters, several of whom are famous midgets. ‘I’d like people to have the sense that they’re watching a wonderful show and the curtain swings open and the characters come on and they perform, and have some of that exhilaration of a live performance,’ Sullivan says. ‘I hope it’s convincing ... but I don’t mind if it seems a bit over the top.’ In other words, even though real people and events inspired Little People, Sullivan doesn’t let history cramp her storytelling style. More than a decade separates Little People and Sullivan’s debut novel, The White Star (2000). That’s partly because she wrote another novel in between: ‘It’s gone into the bottom drawer now,’ she says. It’s also because Little People ‘wasn’t easy to write. I haven’t found any novel easy to write.’ Sullivan is also a journalist – she writes a Saturday column, ‘Turning Pages’, in The Age — and she juggles the different demands of writing fiction and non-fiction by imagining she has ‘a little toggle switch’ in her head. ‘Sometimes when the fiction isn’t going well it’s a relief to get back to the journalism,’ she says, ‘because there usually I feel I know what I’m doing and it doesn’t take too long and I just need to find out x, y and z and then I write the thing and I get paid and I see it appear. And that’s nice, I feel like I’ve achieved something, whereas the fiction can drag on for years. I never quite know what I’m doing or whether I’m going to end up with a proper novel at the end. It’s very hard to tell.’ Although The White Star is set in contemporary Sydney, it shares some themes and preoccupations with Little People. In particular, both books deal with fame, public and private personas, the allure of seemingly illogical ideas and celebrity adoption. ‘To me they seem to be very different books,’ Sullivan says. ‘Of course, there are things going on when you’re writing that you’re not even conscious of. There are themes that pop up because you think about them consciously, and there are also themes that pop up without you even realising they are there, but they somehow make their way to the surface.’ In Little People, Sullivan takes two distinct stories – two different worlds, really – and merges them into one raucous, chaotic, tense and deliberately melodramatic tale. There’s Mary Ann, the principal narrator, who must confront the stark reality of being pregnant and unwed in 1870s Melbourne. And then there’s the spectacle of a troupe of P.T. Barnum’s little people, in Australia as part of a world tour. From this, Sullivan conjures a novel in which performance and life imitate each other in an energetic mix of dastardly deeds, secret alliances, professional jealousies, dubious science, and true and false love. Mary Ann is, as Sullivan puts it, ‘the spine of the book’. She describes the little people and their entourage with the eye of an inquisitive outsider, except that, having performed an act of extreme bravery, she has become an insider of sorts. The troupe employs her, but they are mostly interested in her because she is pregnant – Charles and Lavinia Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb and The Queen of Beauty, seem to have a solution to the conundrum of what should become of Mary Ann’s unborn child. But Mary Ann (and readers too) cannot be sure of the Stratton’s motives. For one thing, when it comes to babies, they have form. For another, Charles has some rather original ideas about conception. While Mary Ann anchors the story, the colourful and eccentric troupe shines brightest. ‘There’s something in me that’s strongly attracted to the quirky and the seemingly a bit crazy,’ Sullivan says. ‘I don’t mean in the sense of psychotic or anything like that, just really oddball … out of the mainstream. I think I’m attracted to those kinds of worlds and the people in them and what makes them tick.’ What’s most interesting about the midgets is not their size but their weird public lives. Sullivan humanises the Strattons, Lavinia’s sister Minnie and Commodore George Washington Nutt by allowing them to speak for themselves. They interrupt Mary Ann’s narration to offer up their own perspectives – as does Rodnia, Commodore Nutt’s less vertically challenged brother. These voices, labelled ‘sideshows’ in the book, so sparkle that they threaten to become the main event. Charles Stratton is perhaps Little People’s most fascinating character. Sullivan pokes holes in Stratton’s puffed-up facade, imagining a rather sad but proud private man with a split personality. In a stand-out scene, a boy arrested in time reveals himself: My name is Charlie Stratton, and I am is thirty-two years and three months old; what the General used to be. The General he’s pulling himself together, he’s going onstage to astound the Antipodeans with his Napoleon. I’m four years old and I’m not going anywhere. I have been four for a long time. You can’t see me, can you? I’m hiding. I’m good at hiding. I’m like the boy in the picture puzzle. The boy in the fork of the tree, the boy-shaped space the branches make. It’s kind of lonely up here, but it’s the best place for me. As long as I keep still, you can’t see me. ‘I think he’s an extraordinary man,’ Sullivan says of the real-life Charles Stratton. ‘It’s hard when you’re reading about him to get a sense of what he was really like. What you’re reading about most of the time is the performer and he was obviously quite a talented performer, although from all accounts he was not as talented as Commodore Nutt … At this stage of his life, Charles Stratton was in his thirties, he had put on a lot of weight and he seemed a bit tired and stiff , and not very convincing. He’d been performing since he was four years old, which I just find utterly extraordinary. But growing up in that sort of totally artificial world and becoming this celebrity, I think it would have given him a strange sense of himself.’ Little People is greatly preoccupied with fame and celebrity. An example: when Lavinia first meets Mary Ann, she orders her to kneel. While Mary Ann understands that she should pin Lavinia’s hem, Lavinia later explains, ‘This is what one does before a queen, and I think I have been a queen for most of my life, long before Mr Barnum manufactured me.’ The famous P.T. Barnum hovers over the story like a God-like creator. He trained the real-life Charles Stratton when Stratton was a young boy, and as Sullivan says, ‘that kind of oddity and fame at a very early age can distort people. The obvious example these days would be Michael Jackson.’ Sullivan points out that Australians in 1870 ‘didn’t have television or YouTube […]. When somebody like General Tom Thumb came to Australia, people were absolutely thrilled to have a chance to see him. He was this huge celebrity and he’d come amongst us. No wonder they all rushed to the theatre and thronged into the streets to see him and his troupe. It was an amazing event.’ Perhaps this is why Little People is such thought-provoking entertainment. In going back 140 years to observe celebrities of another age, it invites readers to consider contemporary society’s fixation with cartoon-like characters such as Michael Jackson, Charlie Sheen or Lady Gaga. And while Mary Ann is an outsider, so too are the members of the troupe. They are Americans, sure of their prominent position in the world, some of them world famous, who are startled by Australia’s deserts and floods, its over-excited crowds and even its inadequate men: ‘All gape and guffaw,’ as Minnie puts it. Little People offers a fresh perspective on colonial Australia and its peripheral place in the world. In doing so, it also invites us to think afresh about modern Australia. Patrick Allington is the author of <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781863954365/patrick-allington-figurehead"> Figurehead</a>, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2010.

Jennifer Mills

2011-03-01T00:00:00Z

Jennifer Mills, interviewed by Jo Case

<img alt="jennifer-mills" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/4907/jennifer-mills.jpg" /> Jo Case talks to Jennifer Mills about her novel <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780702238710/jennifer-mills-gone"> Gone</a>. You’ve said, ‘My life has been research for this novel’ (though it’s in no way veiled autobiography). How have aspects of your lived experience fed into and inspired the book? I have been a no-budget traveller in many parts of Australia and the world, and hitched rides with a lot of people over the last fifteen years. Some of them have formed the basis for characters in Gone. Hitchhiking is getting harder, but it's still a great way to meet people and collect stories. I've also been homeless for periods and that definitely informed the writing of this book. Another hitch-hiker Frank encounters says, ‘People say no one travels like us anymore ... But there are heaps of us, only they don’t see us.’ Do you think that’s true? Why do you think hitch-hikers have become invisible? Were you interested in making one of these characters visible? I didn't set out to write a book about an issue, but my politics does tend to find its way into things. Invisibility ... like I said, it is getting harder, so you see less hitchhikers around. But poor people are becoming less visible too. There is a dangerous assumption in Australia that we are all successful economic participants, that we aced the GFC, and that times are good – so people who are struggling are in that position because they have somehow failed. That is frankly a bunch of bullshit. There is a serious underclass in this country and the gap between rich and poor is widening. Homelessness and poverty are much more prevalent than we like to admit. There's a growing selfishness and fear of strangers which stops people from helping each other out. The experience of invisibility is part of being hard up. That same character effects a kind of tactical invisibility as a way of dodging harm. I guess the sense of being invisible is also symbolic of Frank's wavering alliance with the world around him. Frank ‘wonders if murder and suicide and scars just come up like this all the time, in everyone’s conversation, or if it’s a highway thing’. He encounters families with murdered loved ones, missing people, brawling brothers, sisters with a father in jail, a drug runner. Yet he also encounters extraordinary kindness. Did you deliberately thread this contrasting experience of human nature through his travels? Because Frank is such a reserved character, he needed to encounter a range of other people for the reader to get a sense of who he really was. The whole journey is a kind of test for Frank as he tries out his few survival skills in the outside world. When you are down on your luck sometimes accepting generosity can be more painful than accepting meanness. In my experience, everyone likes to talk about their ‘deep’ stuff on the road - there is a real confessional quality to the encounter of hitchhiking. You can catch people at a turning point in their lives driving long distances. A lot of people end up in the Territory and in the desert because of the mistakes they have made, looking for forgiveness maybe. The book as a whole is a way to engage with the prevalence of violence and harm in all our histories, to look at how we remember. Frank observes, early in his journey, ‘The fringe of life on the coast is embarrassingly thin, a kind of joke.’ As someone who lives in Australia’s centre – Alice Springs – is this something you observe? And do you think this is reflected in our national psyche? The desert looms large in our national psyche, and has a mythical quality – we are a very urbanised society but we all come here for spiritual sustenance, or at least invoke the place. I wanted to examine that symbolic weight close up. Because Frank is an outsider in the ‘real’ urban world, he tries to get away from it as quickly as he can. It’s more of an analogy for his own veneer of respectability. Many of his observations come from that perspective of someone who is outside of society, a foreigner in his own culture. I think this is a common experience for people coming out of prison, who have a form of post-traumatic stress and experience a kind of culture shock. The characters Frank meets along his journey from Sydney to Western Australia project a variety of meanings onto the desert he crosses: freedom, a blank slate, danger. At one point, he observes, ‘There is so much it refuses to mean’. What is it about this landscape that invites these projected meanings? And what appeal did that have for you, as a writer? It was a heavy mess to wrestle with, writing about the desert and trying to come to terms with the mythology of the place. We throw a lot of our shit at the landscape in this country, partly because it is still contested, and partly because it can be so extreme and inhospitable that it challenges imported European notions of God-given dominance over nature. Either way, it becomes a receptacle for all of our fears, hostilities, desires for peace and spiritual healing, belonging, history, shame – and I wanted to go through this with someone, through the dream and the disillusionment and out the other side. But I also wanted to pick apart that tendency to weight the landscape with our own meanings, which is after all a part of colonisation. So the landscape in the book spirals away from the real. Frank seems a natural loner – he often resists conversation and company and he’s obviously lived his life very much alone. Was it a challenge to create a book where the reader is so closely welded to such a solitary character? I hope that he is sympathetic to readers. I tried to make Frank more vocal, but he wouldn't let me put words in his mouth - he's pretty stubborn. He says very little and reacts a lot rather than acts, because he's basically pretty lost and unsure what to do most of the time. I had to radically change my register to write him. To get inside his experience I had to shut down a lot of my own analytical, ‘insider’ way of thinking and try and put myself in his shoes. I was homeless while I was writing the first draft of Gone, living in my car in Alice, and that experience certainly fed in to his point of view. He's preoccupied with his basic needs a lot, such as food, shelter, and safety. Because of his particular mental disturbance about the past and his identity, what he sees and hears become a part of him in a much deeper way than they would for any other character, so I had to be very careful about every detail. But he can also manage to be quite funny and make some pretty wise observations about the state of the world as he sees it. This is a highly suspenseful novel. The reader is accompanied by a sense of dread as they read – about what Frank has done, and what he might do. We have slivers of information about his past (he’s been in jail, he’s haunted by something terrible that happened in his remote childhood home) and access flashes of disturbing thoughts in the present, though he’s mostly a sympathetic character. How did you create this atmosphere, and how important was it to keep the reader guessing and piecing the story together? The story is necessarily built up piece by piece as he travels. If you read carefully, you can see the narrative as a puzzle which fits together over time, and read Frank's story as being made up of the fragments of others. The tension partly derives from Frank's risk in going to face his past, and partly from his sense of pursuit. But as well as this, his history-myth is very fragile. Coming of age in the Howard years, and living in the Centre, most of what I write is in some way about memory and justice. I wanted readers to be so close to Frank that they would feel complicit in his story. It was hard at times to go there. I remember when I sent the manuscript to my publisher I apologised to her, saying it was ‘a bit creepy’ – I don’t think I intended to write a psychological thriller! What are some of your favourite books and writers? Are there any that particularly inspired you while writing this book? For this book I read a lot about our relationship with and responsibility to the past: WG Sebold, Bernhard Schlink, Anne Michaels. Gone is pretty much an existentialist novel. Although I wouldn't say I was that kind of writer, I drew on those modernist ideas. Patrick White is a favourite; I re-read Voss while I was writing Gone. I also listened to a lot of early Springsteen and old blues.

Meg Mundell

2011-03-01T00:00:00Z

Meg Mundell, interviewed by Sophie Cunningham

<img alt="megmundell" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/4927/megmundell.jpg" /> Meg Mundell has been a Melbourne-based working writer for over a decade, with her features published in The Age, The Monthly, The Big Issue and elsewhere, and her fiction appearing in Meanjin and Best Australian Stories 2010. Local novelist and publishing identity Sophie Cunningham, who published Meg’s fiction in her recent role as editor of Meanjin, talks to her about her gripping dystopian debut novel <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921640933/meg-mundell-black-glass"> Black Glass</a>. Once you’ve read Meg Mundell’s debut novel Black Glass, you won’t look at Melbourne quite the same way again. Set in a city that is either Melbourne in a parallel universe, or in the near future, the effect is like a shadow version of the author’s hometown. A country girl from New Zealand, Mundell has lived in Melbourne for over ten years now and her explorations inform the novel. ‘I go bike riding around under the Westgate a lot. It’s so atmospheric with all the freeways overhead … I once went up the Maribyrnong on a boat. We found these old shipyards and they were just beautiful. It’s an interesting part of the city because there’s lots of forgotten space, and lots of guarded space.’ Barack Obama is President of the US, Neighbours is on the television, Cate Blanchett is old, Docklands is derelict and surveillance systems are more intrusive than they are today. The city’s ‘undocs’ – people without papers who are usually homeless – are trying to survive on the fringes of the CBD and just to the south and west; around Melbourne’s docks, under the Westgate and around the Maribyrnong. It’s the unsettling combination of the known and the unknown that gives Mundell’s work a real edge. Mundell says she ‘took the geography of Melbourne as I remembered and imagined it … pieces of Melbourne transplanted, but then when I finished I got out a Melways and drew this big map of the whole setting of the novel and plotted out where everything happened. I wanted to capture it without being too specific. I walk around a lot but I’m not good with time. I go into a dream and it’s more the feel of the place that I remember.’ That dream-like knowing infuses Black Glass. The title suggests a world seen through the opposite of rose-coloured glasses and deliberately echoes the biblical saying ‘Through a Glass Darkly’. It also references Phillip K. Dick’s Through a Scanner Darkly. Certainly Black Glass shifts your vision slightly, and in doing so creates a dramatic new perspective. It is, like Dick’s novel, dystopian fiction, though that was not Mundell’s intention. ‘I wasn’t thinking of it as genre, it just happened that way. I read a lot of John Wyndham as a kid and I guess that rubbed off.’ Tally and Grace are the heart of Black Glass. The teenage sisters are separated by an accident that takes place in the opening pages of the novel. They have been living in the country but go to Melbourne in search of each other. The girls ‘were really the first things that came. They always felt really real and strong for me. Especially Tally. Tally became quite bossy. She started to take over. I had to think my way more into the headspace Grace would be in given what happened. She’d be a bit numbed, I thought.’ Grace is 15, beautiful, and very vulnerable. Tally is tougher, 13, and a bit of tomboy. In some scenes she could just as well be a street urchin in Victorian London as a heroine of the new world order. She is taken under the wing of a young man, Blue, who shows her the ropes of her new life, a life now full of secret tunnels and dangerous cash-in-hand jobs: The entrance to the old rail tunnel was all but invisible. In a corner of the Docklands, past the empty towers and overflowing bins, an ancient pair of railway tracks, blackened with age and lichen, led to a dead-end tangle of vines. Blue tugged aside a piece of plywood, and there was the hole. Tally laced up the sneakers, belted her detective coat tight and glanced back through the gap and followed Blue into the dark. <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921640933/meg-mundell-black-glass"> <img alt="black-glass" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/4931/black-glass.jpg" /></a> Despite living rough, Blue is a gentle presence in the novel. ‘I didn’t deliberately make Blue Aboriginal,’ Mundell told me. ‘He just popped up. I didn’t set out to address issues. I just wanted to tell the stories of people at disadvantage but they still struggled to survive and still had hope. There was one thing I wanted to get across. You can’t really tell much about people by looking at them.’ The idea that you can’t judge people by their appearance is strong through Black Glass. Both sisters take to wearing costumes that allow them to perform in their new roles, leaving the reader in fear that even if the girls find each other they may not recognise each other. The first time I saw Mundell she was in a costume also: she was at a pitching competition at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival wearing overalls which helped her, so she says, get into character for the book she’s finishing now: ‘It’s partly a collection of road stories from truckies and it’s threaded together with my narrative of three months of travelling around. I promised my mother I wouldn’t hitch and did try not to, because I wanted to have more control over who I travelled with. But I had to a couple of times. Mostly the men were quite lonely and were happy to chat. There were a few dicey moments – but more funny ones. When I did the trucking trip I dyed my hair dark red. No make-up. Dressed quite dowdily. I’m aware of how people read you based on how they see you.’ Mundell worked as a journalist for four-and-a-half years at The Big Issue and says that being around the vendors probably influenced some of the themes in this book. Being a journalist also informed her writing of Damon. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s struggling with the pressures of working with media agencies that abdicate all care and responsibility, leaving such concerns to their erratically-paid band of freelance journos – men and women who are left to scramble and compete for a living like bounty hunters from the American Wild West. ‘Damon is my very cynical take on where freelance journalism is going. He’s drawn from my own experience of having been in a position where journalism occupied one place but has drifted to another, something towards entertainment.’ The most mercurial of Black Glass’s characters is Milk. He’s a man with a God complex or, as he would see it, a choreographer of emotions – a veritable Mozart. From hidden booths at casinos, parties and public events he manipulates crowds using smell and sound. He does this so tenderly it takes you a long time to realise just how appalling what he’s doing really is. This hijacking of our senses and subtle use of surveillance combines two long-standing areas of fascination for Mundell. ‘There are instances of using smell and music to influence purchasing decisions. It’s kind of invisible. We live in such a visual culture that we ignore it, but smell taps into the limbic system, which is connected to memory and libido. For me crowd control is a logical next step because public space is now a commodity.’ Black Glass is thoughtful, intelligent fiction. But while dense with ideas, it’s wry, not heavy-handed – much like Mundell herself. And while it may (or may not) be set in the future, the novel’s sensibility is old-fashioned in the most touching of ways: in this shadow Melbourne, connection, love and friendship are all. Sophie Cunningham is the author of <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921351525/sophie-cunningham-bird"> Bird</a> and <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781920885038/sophie-cunningham-geography"> Geography</a>. Meg Mundell's <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921640933/meg-mundell-black-glass"> Black Glass</a> is out now.

S.J. Finn

2011-03-01T00:00:00Z

S.J. Finn, interviewed by Jo Case

<img alt="finn" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/4919/finn.jpg" /> Jo Case talks to S.J. Finn about her debut novel, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781742700380/s-j-finn-this-too-shall-pass"> This Too Shall Pass</a>. This novel is so firmly rooted in Melbourne and surrounds, with your descriptions of judgemental hippie rural towns, disengaged urban commuters, and details like St Kilda’s date palms, trams and cafes. How important is place to this novel? Place has been central to me as a writer – perhaps before anything else. It could be because I find it more straightforward to put on paper. But there’s also no doubt it helps me to envisage a scene. In This Too Shall Pass, place is a reality, sometimes harsh and sometimes not. Descriptions of it are, of course, guided by the narrator’s mood, her thoughts; it’s seen through her eyes, so to speak. Your narrator is often unsympathetic (for example, in the way she conducts her extra-marital affairs before she leaves her husband, who she admits is basically a nice guy). Early readers Steven Amsterdam and Carmel Bird have used the word ‘uncompromising’ to describe the book. Did it require bravery to make your central character so morally complex? Do you think the complexity of her behaviour reflects the way life often unfolds, particularly in times of crisis? I guess when you present a young woman being driven by physical wants and desires, it is kind of brave. Men are expected to behave in this manner more often than women, even when there’s a strong imperative to remain loyal to the family. I would also hazard a guess that for both genders, disarray means normal limits of behaviour crumble and people often do things they wouldn’t if their life was in a more settled phase. Even when people know some things aren’t ‘right’ they continue to do them as if it’s beyond them to stop, which, I believe, sometimes it is. Something has to change and sometimes, certainly not consciously, we don’t know what that something is until our actions force it to emerge. Sexual and gender politics, as well as the more general politics of government privatisation of public health services (as it affects Jen’s workplace), are central to the novel. Do you see yourself as a political writer? I’m so glad you asked me this question. Politics is indeed central, in my view, to this novel. Perhaps strangely, after having said that, I don’t see myself as a political writer. What I do think is that politics is embedded in everyday scenarios and experiences. I’d go so far as to say that being a woman is political. Who we love is certainly political and how our institutions conduct their business – there can be no doubt – is definitely political. Politics is just not always obvious amongst the hurly burly of our lives. Jen describes several handy attributes for a social worker at the beginning of the novel: listening, basic compassion, curiosity, patience, lack of expectation. It seems these skills would also ideally suit the writing process. What do you think? Curiosity, absolutely, plus basic compassion; those two are a must for a writer, I think. The others, well, I’d say they’d come in more than handy. Lack of expectation is, in more general terms, helpful just for getting through life, something I’m still cultivating in myself.

Kevin Hart

2011-03-01T00:00:00Z

Kevin Hart, interviewed by Paul Mitchell

<img alt="kevin-hart" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/4911/kevin-hart.jpg" />Published poet Paul Mitchell, a former Readings Glenfern Fellow, interviews renowned former University of Melbourne poet Kevin Hart about his latest collection, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9780268030933/kevin-hart-morning-knowledge"> Morning Knowledge</a>. Your previous collection, <a href= "http://www.readings.com.au/product/9781920882457/kevin-hart-young-rain"> Young Rain</a>, was released in 2009, and now Morning Knowledge in early 2011. Does this represent a recent creative explosion? I finished Young Rain in 2006, and put it away to ferment for a couple of years, and then revised it a little. Morning Knowledge took about four years to write. The books I publish don’t represent all that I write; sometimes a poem may wait ten years before it fits into the right book. So I composed other poems while writing Morning Knowledge, as well as translating René Char. The title, Morning Knowledge, refers to grieving your father’s death and Augustine’s thoughts about spiritual and natural light. How do you see these themes coming together in your collection? I also cite Thoreau: ‘Have you knowledge of the morning?’ That is: Do you take pleasure in life? It’s a question we should always ask ourselves. Augustine wonders why Genesis says, ‘the evening and the morning were the first day.’ Why evening first and morning second? He tells the beautiful story of how, during creation, God first let the angels see the structure of reality, giving them ‘evening knowledge,’ and then let them glimpse the ways in which hetouches creation, and when they saw this overwhelming divine love for creation, they gained ‘morning knowledge,’ and they fell down in adoration. My father died in the early hours of the day, and the news of his passing was ‘morning knowledge’ of a bitterly ironic kind. Yet I wanted to affirm the pleasures of life, of his life, the promise of morning, and the richness of the mystery of existence. After all, there are ‘Days without creases, days with hours on fire,’ as I say in one poem. The poems about your father’s death come later in the collection, yet the entire work has the feeling of elegy, while remaining hopeful. There are elegies for my father, a lullaby for my stillborn sister, a lament over the Iraq war. . . But the book as a whole says Yes to life, and Yes to that Yes. Love is as strong as death.‘Who needs the bees?’ I ask in one poem, ‘With you the sun makes honey in our mouths.’ You are considered an Australian poet, and yet you were born in London, lived there until you were 11, and have now lived in the US for several years. How has this international perspective informed your work and in what way do you consider your poetry Australian? I live inside my poems, like a pip in a ripe pear, taking little notice of what goes on in the world of poetry. I read poems all the time, though I don’t do much to ‘keep up’ with American or British poetry. I hear myself as Australian, as someone who comes after Ken Slessor, Judith Wright, Alec Hope, Frank Webb, and David Campbell … Readers familiar with your work will recognise many of the images in Morning Knowledge, such as rats, night, shadows, cats, clocks and heat. But some new ones appear, including almonds. Why do you use repeating motifs in your work? Sometimes I think of these things as vanishing points of my world, sometimes as privileged things in that world. I turn them over and over, looking at them from fresh angles. I think of those painters who paint the same things over and over in different lights. Carl Jung said that when religion stops contemplating the nature of animals then it will cease to be of use. You have never stopped contemplating them in your poetry, and this collection seems especially concerned with cats… And birds and butterflies!I think that every animal is a poem, and every good poem is an animal: alive, mysterious, with bright eyes and sometimes with sharp teeth. You write many prayer-like lines to a ‘Dark One’. Who or what is this? We approach God only in darkness, and God gives himself only in darkness. He transcends everything we can say or think about him, though we can talk with him, like a lover in the darkness whose face we cannot see. And let’s not forget times when ‘the day peels off its shining skin’ and we see into the unnamable love that calls us. You’ve long been known as a poet of desire. This collection sees your work ranging across youthful and more mature forms of attraction and sexuality, sometimes in one poem. Sexuality is a powerful lens that magnifies the soul; it refracts intelligence and feeling, and is the closest analogue we have to divine love. Sometimes our eyes ‘go barefoot,’ as I say in ‘Summer.’

Cherise Saywell

2011-03-01T00:00:00Z

Cherise Saywell, interviewed by Jo Case

Jo Case talks to Cherise Saywell about her debut novel Desert Fish. <img alt="Saywell" src= "/system/uploads/assets/0001/4915/Saywell_-Cherise.jpg" /> This story is so intrinsically Australian, with its droughts and desert and distinctive imagery. (‘Saltbush clinging bitterly to sand. Sharp blue glitter of sky.’) Yet you wrote it from the UK. Was recreating this distant landscape a challenge, or did distance help fuel your imagination? Definitely the latter. I was worried when I started that it would be difficult – the landscape I was living in was so far removed from those I grew up in. But I think that the places of childhood and youth stay with you, they become a part of you, and in the end the distance sharpened those memories. It meant that the most important things came into really sharp focus and I could really let the words loose on those images. It wasn’t always easy, and at times I doubted myself, but in many ways it helped. Your young narrator, Gilly, abandons her newborn baby to flee with her boyfriend to the desert, for reasons we take a long time to understand. Maternal abandonment – and maternal ambivalence – are such taboo subjects. What drew you to explore them? It was a combination of things. Motherhood is rarely as straightforward as the myths make out, and I like the challenge of writing about darker things. I like to ask, ‘What if?’ Women who leave their children are often demonised, and it’s so much more interesting and illuminating to ask why. I knew when I started writing Desert Fish that Gilly would leave her baby behind and that it wouldn’t look like the sort of abandonments you hear about on the news. I didn’t want her leaving her baby on a doorstep, or in a box, or anything like that. I didn’t want her actions to be violent or hasty, and I wanted her motivations to be complex. ‘You’d think it would be difficult, the not looking, the deliberately not seeing what’s right there in front of you,’ Gilly says. How important is this idea to the book, and to these characters? Very important. The line you quote above came to me just as I was falling asleep one night and I had to get up and write it down. Lying is central to Gilly’s most important relationships and she’s learned to play along with these lies very early on, before she could even articulate what truth might mean. It’s not surprising that this practiced pretence is what she comes to expect when she tries to form relationships outside of her family. This is why she develops a sexual obsession with Pete. Their lovemaking represents a kind of truth for her. She believes it can’t stand for anything else. I like the way you gradually let the reader in on the full story of Gilly and Pete’s relationship, interweaving their strangely sinister ride from the hospital to the desert with the back story of how Pete came to lodge with Gilly’s parents, and how they came together. We know things will not end well, but don’t know how or why. How much work did it take to get that balance between telling and teasing just right? It took ages! But it was so satisfying to get there in the end. In a way, finding Gilly’s voice was the key; that, and settling on the event that leads to Pete coming to lodge with Gilly’s family. Once I knew why he was there, whenever something happened I could remind myself of where it had begun, and what was motivating Gilly, her mother and her father. When I began writing Desert Fish, I knew only one of the really important things that would happen at the end, but I didn’t know how it was going to come about and so I had to get to know the characters in order to work it all out. I’d have Pete saying or doing something, and then I’d think, no, that’s not right. (I was lucky to have some really good feedback throughout the drafting process – I go to an excellent writing group.) There was one really important thing involving Gilly and her baby that didn’t come into play until I’d all but finished and I had to go back over the whole thing and write it in properly. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier. It pulled everything together for me and became a really important motivation for Gilly’s flight from the hospital. Gilly is stuck in a claustrophobic intimacy with her parents, who inappropriately involve her in their private lives, from when she’s a young child. She talks of her father ‘including me in that way that I hated’ and her mother wanting her ‘to confide in her as though we were sisters’. What appealed to you about exploring a character in that situation? How does that affect Gilly’s actions? I didn’t want any obvious abuse because often the things that cause harm in childhood can be so much more subtle than that. Children pick up on so much about adult relationships before they have the language to articulate what they’re seeing. It makes them very vulnerable. In Gilly’s case, being manipulated into a kind of participation means that her loyalties have to be divided and that although her participation is demanded, she has no control. Being the only child means there is no one else she can share this experience with. It makes her particularly lonely, but also, eventually, capable of causing harm as a result of the damage she suffers. Gilly is a classic unreliable narrator – not only is she a practiced liar, but she lies expertly and consistently to herself, particularly about the truth of her relationship with Pete. What opportunities and challenges did this complex relationship with the truth present to you as a writer? Habitual liars can be frustrating and alienating and I didn’t want Gilly to come across in this way. I wanted her to be a sympathetic character and I wanted the reader to share her journey to truth. So I had to make sure there was an element of self-awareness about her lying. I concentrated on making sure that she always built her lies on a grain of truth to make them believable to herself. That way, her lying could be understood to function as a form of self-preservation as much as anything else. It meant I could tell the story by peeling back the layers of her lies, taking apart her carefully constructed reality, until the only thing left was what was real. You do a disturbingly effective job of rendering pregnancy and its aftermath strange, sinister and repulsive, reflecting Gilly’s feelings about it. You describe breast milk as ‘seeping like blood from a wound’ and her body as ‘occupied’ even after birth, for instance. As a mother of two, what was it like to write about the business of child-bearing in this light? And was it difficult to write that tortured relationship Gilly has with her baby? That was part of the reason I gave Gilly a daughter – I have two sons – it gave me a bit of distance. But birth is an incredibly visceral, sometimes even brutal experience. If you didn’t know what to expect, or if you were actively in denial, I imagine it could be really disturbing. I remember being shocked by the experience of my first birth but I had no trouble bonding with my baby. I had never seen him before but I recognised him. I knew nothing about him except that I had produced him, but I loved him desperately nonetheless. I felt damp all the time and I smelled different and I couldn’t really see myself in the way that I had and I was surprised at how my body didn’t feel like it was straightforwardly mine any more. When I was writing Desert Fish, I re-visited those memories and asked, ‘What if?’ I was in a happy stable relationship when I had my little boy, but what if I hadn’t been? I went to classes with my partner, I made friends who were also pregnant, I read lots of books about what would happen to my body, and I was still surprised at the experience of birth. What if I’d been only 17? What if I had no idea what to expect and then found myself on the other side of a difficult birth, longing for the father of my baby to show himself, and feeling like I was in a body that wasn’t mine any more. Then all those things that are supposed to be normal after a birth might feel strange and wrong. When I wrote Desert Fish, I reminded myself about that shocked feeling I had after the first time I gave birth. Writing Gilly’s experience was like pushing a wedge into that tiny fissure and forcing it open. Who are some of the books and writers you admire? Were there any that influenced you in writing this book? There are so many and I think they’ve all influenced me in some way. I love to read. I prefer to think in terms of favourite books, rather than favourite writers. I love Helen Dunmore’s book A Spell of Winter. I go back and re-read it every couple of years and I’d have to say that’s the one I picked up whenever I got stuck while writing Desert Fish. Her prose is really sensuous but never excessive and the story is so compelling, so layered. It really inspires me. I love Kirsty Gunn’s first novel, Rain. It’s another one I return to regularly. It’s incredibly poetic. Kate Jennings’ novel Snake is really stylish and reminds me of how differently you might approach the business of telling a story. I think Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories are fantastic, her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies is stunning. I read my first M.J. Hyland last year – Carry Me Down - and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t read her before. I read her first novel right after and as soon as This Is How came out I stayed up all night reading it. Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black really haunted me and I love Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Never Let Me Go. I love Julie Myerson’s novel, Laura Blundy, Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice. Tim Winton’s The Riders too – I read it just a few weeks back and I couldn’t put it down. Sarah Waters. Susan Hill. Daphne du Maurier. Carson McCullers. Flannery O’Connor. Honestly, I could go on and on.