Readings.com.au: Interviews

Abla Amad

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Abla Amad, interviewed by Joe Rubbo, Readings State Library of Victoria Manager

On the eve of the publication of her new cookbook, Abla’s Lebanese Kitchen, legendary Carlton restaurateur Abla Amad took the time to chat with Readings’ resident foodie, Joe Rubbo, about her approach to cooking, the history of her restaurant, Abla's, and her new book.

I arrive at Abla’s late on a Friday afternoon. In the dining room, a few tables of diners still linger over coffee and Lebanese sweets. If you haven’t yet dined at this landmark Melbourne restaurant, then I suggest you do. By coincidence, I was here the night before and enjoyed a terrific meal that was entirely consistent with my memory of the last time I ate here. As a customer once told the restaurant’s owner, Abla Amad: ‘Every time I come here the experience is as good as the last, if not better. Abla, I never want you to change.’ It’s true. I don’t, either. I met Abla that night, too – she still does the rounds of the tables to thank diners for coming – and told her I’d be there the next day to interview her. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I knew someone was coming and I’m not so nervous now.’

In 1979, Abla’s late husband, John Amad, helped her secure the current restaurant location on Elgin Street and, encouraged by supporters and admirers of her cooking, Abla opened the doors. It’s still going strong. Thirty years in business is an amazing achievement in this notoriously fickle industry: a testament to Abla’s skill in the kitchen, which she attributes to her husband’s passion for eating.

She still runs the kitchen, keeping watch over all the food preparation and service with an inscrutable eye for detail. When she emerges from the kitchen, she tells me they are busy preparing for the night’s dinner service: they are fully booked, upstairs and down.

She’s found the time to write a new book too, an updated version of her last, The Lebanese Kitchen. There are many new recipes in this handsome volume. Before we can discuss the book, Abla excuses herself to show it to two regular customers dining by the front window. They want to buy the copy I’ve brought with me – then and there. She has a faithful following, built over many years. In the introduction to her book Abla writes, ‘many beautiful customers have been coming to my place for a long, long time – some of them for twenty or thirty years – and now their children and grandchildren are coming along too’.

Abla came to Australia as a teenager in 1959. It was meant to be a holiday, but luckily for us, she stayed. When she first moved here, she lived with her uncle in Elgin Street, a few doors down from the restaurant. ‘He was a bachelor,’ Abla says, ‘and a good cook. I used to watch everything he did.’

Surprisingly, Abla learnt about Lebanese cooking here in Australia – from her uncle and from a group of older Lebanese women who gathered together to prepare meals for family and friends on weekend afternoons. Abla, out of respect and admiration, refers to these women as her aunties. She used to watch them and help prepare the traditional Lebanese dishes she still cooks today. Her education in cooking for loved ones translates into the generosity of spirit felt in the restaurant today.

She sees The Lebanese Kitchen as a way to pass on her knowledge of traditional Lebanese food preparation, telling me that ‘many young people, the new generation of Lebanese Australians, love the book’.

What’s not to love? It is full of great recipes, adaptable to many different occasions. I like the idea of making the Okra in olive oil with Lebanese rice as a simple mid-week meal. There are also great recipes for mezza – dips, pickles, silverbeet rolls – that are perfect to take to a picnic, or the baked quails for a dinner party.

For Abla, all these dishes recall memories. She remembers charring eggplants for her mother to make a smoky baba ghannooj, eating salads her mother prepared after collecting the silk from silkworms, or cooking garfish for her husband and his friends here in Carlton. These recipes are laced with stories and history: this book is a concise catalogue of an incredible woman’s life’s work.

In approaching these recipes, Abla emphasises patience, cleanliness, and that you show care in what you’re doing. ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you have to have your heart in it, whatever you do. If you force yourself to do something it never works. But I never, never once forced myself to cook.’

I asked Abla if she herself has ever used a cookbook. The answer was simple: ‘no, never.’ And why would she? But, for the rest of us, we could do a lot worse than having a copy of Abla’s Lebanese Kitchen on our bookshelves.

Joel Deane

2010-03-16T00:00:00Z

Joel Deane, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Joel Deane is well known in literary circles as a poet: his collection Magisterium was shortlisted for the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2009. He has also been a journalist and a political speechwriter (for Steve Bracks, then John Brumby). Jo Case spoke to him for Readings about his eagerly anticipated, utterly engrossing debut novel, The Norseman’s Song.

This is a wildly original novel – combining the confession of a nineteenth-century whaler with those of an ex-con taxi driver and a dying former journo in contemporary Melbourne, all of their lives steeped in violence. Where did your inspiration come from?

The genesis of The Norseman’s Song comes from a shred of family history and a meeting I had when I was 15 years old. The history is that one of my forebears was a Norwegian seaman who jumped ship in Melbourne in the nineteenth century.

The meeting was with a 95-year-old relative. This old man was the size of a redwood, walked like Frankenstein, had fire in his eyes, ranted about the decline of morals, yet had, I knew, fathered at least one child out of wedlock. I loved how cranky and contradictory that rellie was and decided to write an imagined history about a Norwegian with that old man as the physical template.

At the time, I was 15 and knew I didn’t have the chops or the depth of experience needed to write that book. That’s why I started working as a copyboy in a tabloid newspaper when I was 17 – to season myself. Along the way I held onto what became a 20-year-long daydream about the Norseman – influenced by my experiences as a newspaper journalist and the taxi-driving stories of my father and grandfather. Other stories and experiences fed into that daydream, such as the one about a Turkish soldier’s head that was found in Echuca decades after it was souvenired by an ANZAC. Or the one about the exorcist I once knew who stood trial for the accidental killing of a woman. There are too many to list.

By the time I sat down to write the first draft of The Norseman’s Song that daydream was closer to a nightmare – and it was a nightmare I’d never told anyone about. Maybe that’s why the first draft came out in 33 days straight. Telling aloud for the first time a story that had been internalised for so long was an incredible rush – it’s the closest I’ve come to an out-of-body experience.

The novel has an intimate yarn-spinning quality that draws the reader in – like (the very different) Shantaram, it’s a fabulous work of storytelling. Were you influenced by other ‘yarn-spinning’ works of literature, or by oral traditions of storytelling? What made you decide to tell your story in this way?

Bruce Springsteen once said that he wanted his breakthrough album, Born to Run, to explode in people’s stereos. When I was writing The Norseman’s Song I was fired by a similar ambition: I wanted it to go off like a hand grenade. I wanted it to be a fable like no other. I wanted it to tell a story about men and violence and the lies we tell to rationalise our lives, our beliefs and our histories. I wanted it to be bristling with voices and stories. I wanted it to drag people along for the ride whether they wanted to go or not. The best way to achieve all that was to tell a great story.

My influences were too numerous to list. The ones that particularly inspired me, though, were The Icelandic Sagas, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and, of course, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.

Another influence dated back to my days as a journalist. I was struck my the way people talk about incidents – the way they talk around events and come back to them, as well as their verbal ticks. I wanted to write like people think and talk.

This is your first novel, but you’ve also written journalism and – most notably – poetry (which is evident in your prose, particularly your imagery). Do you think your experience in these other forms influenced the way you approached writing a novel?

Definitely. Writing a novel is very different to writing a poem. You need the feel for language as music, which I developed through poetry, to make a novel fly creatively, but you also have a story to tell and, if you want to tell that story, you need the grunt to climb a mountain of 70,000 words – or more.

Poetry is the impetus of all my creative writing, but my fiction is equally reliant on the muscles I’ve developed through years as a reporter, editor, producer and speechwriter. In other words, I know what’s required, physically, to write 10,000 words a week.

The other thing I’ve learned through poetry and speechwriting is that writing is performance. To perform properly, you need to train by reading widely, you need to practice by writing constantly, and you need to improve by revising and editing ruthlessly.

There’s a lot in this novel that is confronting – your contemporary characters are racist and misogynist, shockingly so at times. Were you using these characteristics to comment on our society, or were these merely characteristics you thought these types of characters would have?

I didn’t setting out to write archetypes or deliver a message. What I was trying to do was understand some of the forces that make our nation what it is, for better and for worse. I’m talking about violence, I’m talking about mateship, I’m talking about racism. I wanted to write about an underbelly of contemporary Melbourne through the taxi driver, Farrell. I also wanted to go back to the limits of lived or oral history through the old journo, Bob, as well as inventing a mythic history through the Norwegian.

The only rule I set myself during the writing was to not flinch from the ugly stuff. I loath boutique fiction – the kind of books that are more about the novelist wanting to be loved than trying to tell a story that’s never been told before. I’d like to see more novels be true to the meaning of the word ‘novel’.

The taxi driver and his passenger, ‘Bob’, take us on a meandering night-time tour of Melbourne’s suburbs (Doncaster’s ‘houses too polite to tell apart’, Footscray flats, the oft-disparaged ‘Lego-land’ of Caroline Springs). What was the idea behind this tour of Melbourne and surrounds?

The idea behind the tour of Melbourne is that Bob and Farrell’s taxi ride is an odyssey. At the beginning, they’re both lost: Bob is searching for a way to end, Farrell for a way to begin again. The places they go and the people they meet along the way are part of that odyssey. You could say it’s an odyssey of Melbourne’s modern and mythic history. As for Doncaster, I live there and couldn’t resist giving my suburb a walk-on role.

Both ‘Bob’ and the Norseman of the title observe the intimacy of killing (the Norseman says ‘it binds the killer to the killed as surely as consummation binds the groom to the bride’). How integral is this idea to the book?

I’m the kind of person who can’t sit through violent movies – once I made it out to the foyer of a cinema before I fainted. Why, then, have I written a novel that, at its heart, is all about violence – not just acts of violence, but the reverberation of those acts? Hard to say. All I know is that violence both distresses and obsesses me. I guess I’m trying to understand why we do the terrible things we do.

Andrew Porter

2010-03-09T00:00:00Z

Andrew Porter, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

This is shaping up to be another big year for short stories – and the pre-publication hype around Andrew Porter’s silkily elegant, delicately barbed short stories in The Theory of Light and Matter recalls that around Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in 2009. Jo Case – one of the many new fans of this award-winning writer – interviewed him for Readings.

In your title story, the narrator concludes that: ‘guilt, like any self-inflicted injury, becomes a permanent thing, as real as the act itself.’ Guilt – sometimes deserved, sometimes misplaced – recurs as a central theme in many of your stories. What is it that draws you to writing about it?

Well, in writing these particular stories, I think I was focusing a lot on characters who were having trouble moving forward in their present lives because of their inability to come to terms with something that had happened in their pasts. Usually their feelings about whatever had happened in the past were complex, but inevitably they always seemed to come around to questioning their own responsibility, their own guilt, and I suppose this is something that has always interested me. In other words, I think I’ve always been interested in why certain memories stay with us, or haunt us, and, more specifically, in why the memories that tend to haunt us the most are also usually those memories in which we question our own responsibility, or own culpability, in terms of the way things played out.

I was particularly impressed with your devastatingly effective endings – often double-edged, always beautifully crafted and prompting the reader to think further. How hard did you work to create those endings?

Endings are usually pretty tricky. If you’re lucky, they’ll sometimes present themselves to you during the writing process – you’ll suddenly see the final scene or realise the line you want to end on – but other times, the ending will elude you, and it might take quite a while before you actually find the exact sentence, or the exact piece of dialogue, that you want to end on. So, in answer to your question, I’d have to say that it really depends on the story. For example, the ending of my story ‘Hole’ came to me immediately, whereas the ending of my story ‘Azul’ eluded me for about five years. All I know is that I won’t ever say a story is truly ‘finished’ until I feel the ending is just right.

An uneasiness, a restlessness runs throughout these stories. Characters have misstepped, lost their way, wondered about the path not taken. Many stories seem to be as much about what didn’t happen as what did. Do you agree?

Yes, absolutely. In trying to understand the events of their pasts, many of my characters find themselves wondering ‘what if?’— almost as a way of trying to cope with or understand what has happened. And, of course, the ‘what if’ scenarios then end up becoming their own sort of reality, their own part of the story, and in some cases even add a certain level of complexity to what has actually happened.

The phrase ‘not right’ recurs throughout your stories, applying variously to your characters themselves and their behaviour. Was this a conscious theme, or is it something that simply came through as your wrote?

That phrase does appear a lot in the stories, though I don’t know that I was thinking about it consciously as I was writing them. I suppose, on some level, a lot of these stories are about characters who are perceived to be outsiders in their respective communities – whether it be the brother in ‘River Dog’, Mrs. Bently in ‘Connecticut’ or the Amish teenagers in ‘Departure’ – and so I found myself writing a lot about the idea of what is considered ‘normal’, or ‘right’, in contemporary society, mostly as a way of underscoring the kind of alienation that many of these characters feel.

Your stories are notable for the very real and often surprising dynamics in their relationships. There’s a deeper poignancy for the way that your characters are often frankly unromantic, or pragmatic. (For instance, in the title story, the narrator first realises she’ll marry her boyfriend because she could settle down with him ‘and not be unhappy’.) Do you work to eradicate false sentiment from your stories, or is that something you instinctively avoid?

I think it’s probably something I instinctively avoid. Or maybe it just comes from reading a lot. After you’ve read a certain amount of literature, I think you begin to develop a kind of radar when it comes to false sentiment.

The story ‘Azul’ is striking in its depiction of a couple unable to have children who experiment in parenting a teenage exchange student, seemingly for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways – knowing they’re wrong but somehow unable to behave differently. What was the original idea behind that story?

Well, I wrote the first few paragraphs of ‘Azul’ in my early twenties, then put it away for a long time and kind of forgot about it, so it’s hard for me to remember the exact inspiration for that story. All I know is that when I rediscovered those paragraphs several years later, I saw a lot of dramatic potential in them. In particular, I found myself wondering: why had this young couple decided to host an exchange student? What was wrong in their own relationship? And how did they think that the presence of exchange student would help? I think that almost everything that happens in the story grew out of me trying to understand the answers to these questions.

There are some brilliant and original metaphors in your stories. For instance, in ‘Coyotes’, the teenager daydreaming of taming coyotes ‘like regular dogs, and let[ting] them sleep in our rooms’, as his parents’ marriage fails, partly due to his dad’s unsuitability for domesticity. How hard do you work to get these metaphors just right, to make them seem as natural and effortless as they do?

I’ve always felt that metaphors should grow organically out of the story. In other words, they shouldn’t be something that the writer forces, or imposes, upon the story. And so they’re not something I really find myself thinking about until pretty late in the revision process – for example, when I’m looking for a title. I guess I’ve always felt that metaphors exist all around us in our everyday lives, and so if you just try to write honestly, then the metaphors will take care of themselves.

There is a sense of inevitability driving many of your stories – we know or sense that particular characters or situations are somehow doomed and the narrative drive is about finding out the complexities of how that happens, often through a series of seemingly small actions. (Particularly in ‘Hole’.) Is that inevitability a central interest of yours when writing?

Well, it’s certainly a narrative strategy that I tend to use a lot. In some of the stories, for example, I wanted to keep what was going to happen a mystery to the reader, but in other stories – like ‘Hole’– I wanted to let the reader know from the start what the outcome would be. I suppose this was my way of shifting the focus of the story from ‘What happened?’ to ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ And it is those questions – in that story and also in others – that tend to interest me the most.

Thanks so much for taking the time talk with me, Jo. It’s been a pleasure.

Foz Meadows

2010-03-09T00:00:00Z

Foz Meadows , interviewed by Callie Martin, Kids' Book Specialist, Readings St Kilda

First-time author Foz Meadows talks to us about her new Young Adult book Solace and Grief, why vampires are just so hot right now and why she will never forget her 16-year-old self.

So, tell us what your book is about.

Solace & Grief is about Solace Morgan, a teenage girl raised in foster care doing her level best to conceal the fact that she's a vampire. After encountering a faceless man, Solace runs away and finds herself in the company of her first ever friends, none of whom are exactly plain old human. They live in an abandoned warehouse; they drink and joke, but once Solace decides to try and learn more about their respective abilities, they soon find themselves in over their heads with the mysterious Professor Lukin and a string of increasingly dangerous occurrences.

What was you inspiration for the novel? Actually, why the vampires?

Blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer, basically. I was working in a job that bored me, re-watching Buffy (as I do from time to time) and the opening prologue just occurred to me. The thought that may have triggered it off was that all the vamps in Buffy are innately evil (excepting Angel and Spike on occasion) but humanity has a choice to become evil or not. I also really like the idea of a female vampire because it’s usually fragile girl encounters brooding vampire male. I think its more interesting if she’s the one with fangs. I’m not the only one to have done that but it’s interesting that all the other writers to be popular at the moment, Claudia Gray, Cassandra Clare and of course, Stephanie Meyer are all writers I didn’t become familiar with until after I finished writing. I think there was something in the air at that time.

Do you think its terrible timing or fantastic timing that you happened to write your vampire book now, hot on the heels of so many others?

Honestly, I think its more good luck than bad. Had I not been shopping it around when I did I think it would have been much harder to find an interested publisher. I’m a young, un-agented first-time author and while I flatter myself that I can string a sentence together, I think it did help that this book was part of a trend.

Was it a deliberate decision to focus the book on friendship rather than on a specific romance?

I think it grew out of the fact that I was never going to sit down and write a romance, that’s just something that has never occurred to me to do. When I was at school I had a big group of friends and we were all geeks, roughly the same number of boys and girls. I think that’s something that a lot of other novels I’ve read miss out on, that group dynamic. It narrows down the relationships but my memory of that age is of a large rotating group that had seven or so core members. And there were always group politics and who was talking to whom. The big thing about being that age was finding a group of friends with whom I really connected and I wanted that to be the story.

How does the voice differ in writing for young adults and for adults?

I don’t think my style changes, the only exception is in writing for adults I feel no compunction whatever about swearing and I feel no compunction talking about drugs or alcohol. A strange taboo I think, when I remember my own experience in high school and we loved to swear. But authors like Justine Larbalestier in her novel Liar, I was cheering as I read it, she uses swearing and I think, yes, that how they would speak.

Do you write for yourself as a teenager?

A little bit, yeah. On the one hand I never want to forget what its like to be a teenager but if the point ever comes that I sit down and think, wow, being sixteen was so awesome, then I will be truly lost. There were awesome moments but there was a whole pile of stuff as well and the stuff is what’s important. Parents just see the youth, the lack of responsibility and the potential but they forget kids are doing everything for the first time. And that first time can really, really suck. Especially when all of the people who are meant to be advising us have usually banished and repressed the memories of how hard it was the first time. So if I were writing for my teenage self I would be writing to show I hadn’t entirely forgotten.

What do you think of the idea that there is too much darkness in kids books, especially YA books?

I think that’s rubbish. If we want to go back to the 1950s view of adolescence, I think they might like to look at the statistics that are now emerging on abuse in families, depression among women, child abuse. At the time, that era, it was something that was not to be discussed, if the victim came forward they were brutally repressed, children had no outlet. And over the top of this era we have an image of the 1950s as Happy Days but it’s just a candy coating. Going back to what I said before, you’re doing everything for the first time and if there are questions you can’t ask and can’t answer then you need to find someone who is going through the same thing you are. Even in a fantasy world, what makes fantasy real is the extent to which characters are human and if we can identify with the characters and the emotional transformation they go through remind you of something you are trying to get through in your life. More than anything else it tells you, you are not the first person going through this.

What would you like readers to take away from this novel?

Oh, that’s a tricky question. I think I would like them to take away that high school is not the be all and end all of human existence. Things do go on outside of it and once you’re not there anymore, the things that were important while you were there cease to be. And that’s actually a really, really good thing.

Foz Meadow, favorite authors?

Ooo, long list. Tamora Pierce, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Katherine Kerr, Kate Elliot, Robin Hobb, Nick Harthaway and Douglas Adams, although I have to say I am more of a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show than the books.

Finally, is Scott Westerfeld your BFF? (Popular American YA author Scott Westerfeld launched Solace and Grief in Sydney)

I have no idea how I got him to launch my book. It was a shot in the dark, I am a huge fan of his work and he gave me some advice when I trying to get published, so I thought what the hell and emailed him.

fozmeadows.wordpress.com

Patrick Ness

2010-02-15T00:00:00Z

Patrick Ness, interviewed by Andrew McDonald

Patrick Ness won the 2008 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with his first book for teenagers The Knife Of Never Letting Go - the first in the Chaos Walking trilogy. The sequel The Ask and the Answer came out last year and won the 2009 Costa Children's Book Award. The third and final book in the series Monsters of Men is out in May 2010.

Andrew McDonald spoke to Patrick Ness with 'Asks and Answers' about the Chaos Walking trilogy, writing about violence and the question that aspiring writers should be asking.

ASK: The voices in Knife and Ask are so distinctive and strange and absorbing. Is it like method acting when you write from these points of view and do you need to 'warm up' before you can write them?

ANSWER: Not 'warming up' so much, but they do definitely need finding. I spent a good amount of time having fun finding Todd's voice. There were times when he was more difficult, less difficult, a bit younger, a bit older, all those things. But I always say that voices are alchemical: you search and you search and you search, and then one day they're just suddenly there on the page, ready to go. Once I'd found Todd, I was off and running.

ASK: The fact that men's thoughts can be heard by everyone and women's thoughts can't be heard by anyone acts as a powerful metaphor throughout the books. Would you prefer to be born into this world as a man or a woman?

ANSWER: I don't think either side has it very easy, really. But then, the books are really about how it's so important to deal with what's given you in the best way possible, regardless of how hard it is, so maybe that's the best way to think of it. How would I deal with it if I was born a man? And how would I deal with it if I was a woman? And actually, since I'm the writer, I'd probably be most like Todd and Viola (I'd hope!). It's a good question to set off a long discussion, though.

ASK: The Knife Of Never Letting Go, book one in the Chaos Walking trilogy, was narrated from the point of view of the boy Todd, whereas book two, The Ask and the Answer, has its narration split between Todd and the girl Viola. Was this a conscious decision to keep the series fresh and can we expect a similar change for book three Monsters of Men?

ANSWER: I always knew it would be that way from the start. I knew book two would get bigger and wider and raise the stakes, and that would need two voices from two sides of a simmering civil war. It certainly did keep me fresh, which is always a good idea when writing a long book, but it also good fun switching between them and how different they are. As for Monsters of Men, I couldn't possibly give anything away! But just to say that, yes, there are some new things in store. You might be in for a few surprises.

ASK: The Chaos books are quite graphic and gory in places, and violence plays a large part in the depicted world; a world that is undoubtedly a man's world. Are there scenes like the ones containing violence that you find harder or easier to write?

ANSWER: Well, women aren't absolved from violence or difficult actions in this world. Mistress Coyle is either a freedom fighter or a terrorist, depending whether you're on her side or not, so I wouldn't agree that it's entirely a man's world at all. Violence is difficult to write, and it should be. I think if it's coming easy then there's not enough at stake. Every scene of violence should contain all the peril and terror as if it were against someone you loved. That has to be the benchmark, otherwise it's just cheap and exploitative. You have to earn it and it has to mean something. And when it's those things, yes, definitely it's hard to write.

ASK: As well as being a writer you've also taught creative writing at Oxford University. You must get asked questions by aspiring writers all the time. What's one question that you think aspiring writers should be asking more often than they currently do?

ANSWER: They should be asking, "Will you please leave me alone so I can write?" Aspiring writers (and I know this from firsthand experience) worry so much that they're doing it wrong, they can waste all their time asking about the "right" way to do it, when there really is no right way. There's only a right way for you. And the best way to find that is to shut off the world and get down and do some writing. Talking about writing isn't going to get anything written.

SPOILER ALERT! Only read the highlighted text of the last question if you've finished reading The Knife Of Never Letting Go.

ASK: Do you miss Todd's dog Manchee as much as everyone else reading the books does?

ANSWER: Oy, spoiler alert! This was kind of like those violent scenes above. I was upset when I wrote Manchee's great act of bravery, upset when I rewrote it, upset when I edited it, upset when I proofed it... That's how I knew it was working. But yeah, he was great fun to write. Todd got himself a horse, though, in The Ask and the Answer, as did Viola, and they play very important roles in Monsters of Men. Nothing like a loyal animal.

Rachel Cook

2010-02-10T00:00:00Z

Rachel Cook, interviewed by Holly Harper, Kids' Book Specialist, Readings Malvern

Closets Are For Clothes: A History Of Gay Australia has been heralded as the first of its kind in Australia. What prompted you to start writing it?

The publisher Black Dog Books approached me. I think they had been trying to get this idea off the ground for a couple of years. It was of definite interest to me as I had worked in queer media for a long time and I had also studied gay and lesbian history as part of my cultural studies degree. It was also of interest as while there has been a number of teacher resource books that deal with homophobia there was actually nothing for the kids themselves. Homophobia often stems from not actually knowing any gay people, hopefully this will make gay people seem a little more real.

Closets follows gay and lesbian history in Australia from the 1700s up to today and includes many first-hand accounts. What sort of research did you have to do for this book?

Although there isn’t a book that deals with the entire history of gay people in Australia since white settlement, there are books which are very detailed and focus on specific time periods. There are books which are focused solely on Mardi Gras for instance. It was a matter of reading many different books from Australian historians and from British historians too and then taking what was relevant for Closets. I also spoke with people, interviewed people, who could give first-hand accounts of what had happened in different times in history.

Were there any areas of research that you found particularly surprising?

I found it really surprising that people were calling for a more tolerant approach to homosexuality as far back as the mid 1800s in Europe. There were a lot of educated people who wanted the death penalty for homosexuality abolished and there were people who saw nothing wrong with it. I think many people think activism about attaining gay rights only started in the 1970s but the fight goes back much longer.

How do you think the experiences of queer youth in Australia have changed over the years? Are things improving?

Many laws have changed so that gay and lesbian people have much the same rights as the rest of Australia. There is still some way to go but we are getting there. People are not nearly as closeted as they were. We see gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people on television now and that sort of visibility goes a long way. We are no longer so hidden. Ignorance is what has lead to homophobia and the best way to combat that is via education. These day’s queer youth have a lot more access to social support groups. This wasn’t the case a few decades ago and to be gay for many people was a very isolating experience. We still see queer youth being bullied though and until that becomes completely unacceptable behaviour to everyone we must fight on.

Tom Rachman

2010-02-03T00:00:00Z

Tom Rachman, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfectionists is a sharply observed, beautifully characterised look at the employees of an international newspaper based in Rome.

You have worked at various newspapers, including as a foreign correspondent in Rome and as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. How much did you draw on your own experience for the novel?

Using what I’d observed during my years in journalism, I sought to invent a realistic paper and to offer a peek into the workings of the international media – the flavour of a newsroom, the ambitions of reporters, the lives of expatriate editors. That said, each character and story was invented, and the paper does not represent a particular publication.

The book is told in the voices and from the perspective of various employees of the paper, from foreign correspondents, to sub-editors, to the editor-in-chief and the chief financial officer. Was it challenging to capture all those unique voices and bring them together to tell one wider story – the story of the paper itself?

Weaving the strands into a single novel presented certain challenges: for example, ensuring that all characters remained animated in the reader’s mind even after they had stepped from the spotlight of their own story and into a supporting role in another’s. Also tricky was ensuring that the tale of the paper itself be captivating, without the hook of a single leading protagonist. To manage this, I tried to build a newspaper that was not simply an organisation but the sum of the unusual characters who produced and read it – just as a real newspaper is.

This is a very funny novel, though it is often also deeply sad. What appeals to you about this combination?

I suppose it’s my world-view. Life is so often sad and maddening and unjust – and then it’s over! If we responded to this with bitterness alone, we would be a uniformly grumpy and unproductive species. But we have humour thankfully. I have always loved stories that express this – the humour that arises precisely because life is sad. Small, nervous people pretending to be tall and bold: it is sad and funny at once.

The Imperfectionists is infused with tremendous affection for the newspaper and those who work there. Do you share that affection for newspapers as a form of media?

I do. So many mornings I have spent getting my fingers inky, devoting far too long to the newspaper pages. This isn’t to say that I adore everything about papers. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the media is hating it. My father – a devout newspaper reader – spends much of each day denouncing the publications that he nonetheless buys without fail. I’m truly sorry at the decline of newspapers. Life won’t be the same without them.

The book begins with a 70-year-old foreign correspondent, well past his prime, hopelessly out of touch with new technology and in professional freefall. Is he a metaphor for newspapers themselves?

He could be interpreted that way, and it’s certainly true that newspapers are similarly in freefall. But his problems extend beyond technology, including sexuality, his sense of usefulness in the world, the cost of his past egotism, his regrets. His case is more that of an ageing striver who can’t bear to see strength abandon him. And in this, perhaps, he may share something with newspapers.

Many of the successful characters in The Imperfectionists have lonely or dissatisfying personal lives – and one character finds professional success after he no longer wants to think about his home life. Was this a deliberate theme?

Yes. The ambitions that churned through journalism – my own included, at certain times – were not those of contented souls. Every scoop, every page-one story, every promotion produced a shiver of triumph followed by a gradual return to the previous state of dissatisfaction. Then ambition rose again, insatiable. I found this effect fascinating in myself and in others, and hoped to depict it. To be clear, I do not think that professional aspiration and personal happiness are exclusive. Only that ambition risks feeding just itself, offering little to its host.

Many of the chapters in the book, which also work as self-contained stories, unfold in unexpected ways. I often felt sure I knew where a story was heading, only to be surprised when it didn’t reach the conclusion I imagined it was leading up to. Was this an effect you worked for, in writing the book?

An ending produces a note that is left ringing in the reader’s ear, a tone that resonates backward through all that happened in the story. If this final note is the same as that which sounded throughout the story, then the tale risks blandness – you may think, Why did I bother? If it’s wildly dissonant, however, that’s worse, since it undermines the credibility of the story. What I sought were endings that deepened the reader’s understanding of what preceded, illuminating the characters suddenly and starkly, so that the story ends not with a full stop but that it reverberates afterward.

Garry Disher

2010-02-03T00:00:00Z

Garry Disher, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Garry Disher is one of Australia’s most popular crime writers, most notably over the past several years with his Challis and Destry series, set on the Mornington Peninsula. In Wyatt he returns to ‘old-style hold-up man’ Wyatt, last revisited 13 years ago, in response to popular demand – and it’s a beauty.

The Wyatt series is told from the point of view of a criminal who the reader can’t help but root for. This type of book seems to be increasingly popular at the moment, with the success of the ‘Dexter’ series, for instance. What appeals about writing from the criminal point of view?

Crime-from-the-inside films and novels might be growing in popularity now, but they’re not a new form. I wrote the first Wyatt novel 20 years ago, drawing on an American hard-core tradition of 50 and 60 years ago. I think Wyatt and Dexter are popular because they appeal to our darker sides. Obviously most of us won’t pull the perfect robbery or kill those who’ve done us wrong, but we need to be able to imagine doing it. Most of us are hemmed in by doubts and scruples, our lives seem subject to random forces, and so it’s liberating to follow characters like Wyatt and Dexter as they impose a kind of order and, without guilt, do the things we wish we could do.

Wyatt is ‘an old-style hold-up man: cash, jewels, paintings’. He avoids the drug scene and is restricted in what he does by the fact that new technology has outstripped his expertise. Is there a certain appeal in writing an ‘old-style’ criminal like him? Does this add an extra challenge for you when deciding which situations he’ll be embroiled in, and how he’ll deal with them?

It’s probably beyond my skills to create a loveable drug dealer. The face of crime has changed with drugs. There’s a greater chance of viciousness and unpredictability when greed, addiction and huge profit potential are involved. Besides, it’s more fun, and somehow more worthy, to show Wyatt holding up a payroll van rather than ripping off an addict or a dealer. The problem for me (and him) is finding ways to get the cash without having to hire a dozen guys with specialist technical know-how and gadgetry, not to mention showing the reader how it all works.

Your books – both the Wyatt and Challis and Destry series – are often very Melbourne in tone. Wyatt evokes a range of city locations, from Frankston’s teenage mothers, to dodgy stallholders at the Queen Vic markets, architectural monstrosities in Mount Eliza and young yuppies in Southbank. How important is place to your writing?

Setting should be a vital element of all fiction and it’s crucial in crime fiction. From a writing craft point of view, I can’t see the characters until I see the ground they walk on, and vice versa. Setting is useful in all kinds of ways: adding to our sense of the characters, creating an appropriate mood (e.g., distress), appealing to our senses (we’ve all had a bus belch on us), and, more broadly, showing the social as well as the topographical diversity of a region.

Wyatt is a fast-paced crime novel, peopled with a web of criminals and cops all seeking to outwit – and ultimately trump – one another. How do you plot a novel like this? Do you plan all your twists in advance, or do some of them come to you as you write?

Although there’s a common pattern to the Wyatt novels (as there is with the Challis and Destry novels), I use subplots and minor characters to mask it. The story arc is simple: Wyatt identifies a job, is betrayed before or during the robbery, and gets his revenge (and the gear back) at the end. Sounds simple, but I can spend months planning these novels, balancing personality traits with plot demands, and carefully placing the sudden reversals and partial resolutions. And all this so the whole thing feels organic rather than contrived before I start. But when I write, I always listen to the niggling voice that takes me away from the plan.

Your crime novels are engrossing reads that are pretty faithful to the genre, but are notable for being interwoven with sly, often very funny, political and social observations. In Wyatt, there are references to the war in Iraq, a disdain for the very rich and backhanders about an unspecified Prime Minister and The Footy Show. Is this element something you enjoy writing into your books?

One of crime fiction’s great strengths is telling us about the world we live in. It’s a barometer of prevailing social tensions. It casts an unimpressed eye over the powerful. Most ‘literary’ novels let us down in that regard. Nevertheless, putting the boot in must always come second to the storytelling.

This is the seventh Wyatt novel, coming after a long hiatus. What made you decide to bring Wyatt back – and are you planning an eighth?

I think writers need to keep refreshing themselves. After writing the first six Wyatts, I needed a break. But Wyatt was always alive in the back of my head, and I was always being asked what had happened to him, and another novel was needed for the German market, where Wyatt is very popular.

David Carlin

2010-02-01T00:00:00Z

David Carlin, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

David Carlin’s extraordinary memoir, Our Father Who Wasn’t There has already been praised by the likes of Christos Tsiolkas and Joan London.

Sensitivity towards your family’s feelings – particularly your mother’s – was obviously a factor in writing this investigation into the life and death of your father, who killed himself when you were six months old. How did you deal with this?

The idea that this was something that shouldn’t be talked about was obviously seared very deeply in my mind, and, I believe, in that of my siblings too. This is discussed in the book. It took me a long time to get to the point where I thought I could write about the story. I talked to the various members of my immediate family about what I was thinking of doing. My mother was the crucial one – if I had sensed that she was against the idea then I would not have wanted to go ahead with the project at this time. But she was remarkably supportive, as indeed the whole family has been. I think the idea of having such a personal story revealed has been confronting, but there was also a sense in which everyone was actually curious to find out what the story was, since for the most part, people only knew their own little bit of it.

Throughout the text, you piece together scenes of your father’s life through a combination of facts gained through research and interviews, and imaginative reconstruction based on the facts. What was this process like?

I found it absolutely fascinating to do the research – the interviews were very interesting because in almost every case it was the first time the family and friends of my father had been asked to tell their story of what they remembered of him and their impressions of his character. This gave what they said a vivid and fresh quality that was very powerful. I also loved fossicking around in libraries and newspaper archives to discover a feel for the times I was writing about. And the discovery of Brian’s medical records, and everything that flowed from that regarding the insights into psychiatric approaches in the 1950s and 1960s, was very absorbing. I felt like a detective trying to understand the motive for a crime in which the victim and perpetrator were both known.

Since I myself had no memories at all of my father, I knew that the only truthful way to write about it was to acknowledge and explore how strongly my impressions of the story were mixed up with fantasies and imaginative flights. I don’t think it’s possible in such a story to be ‘objective’. I wanted to investigate rather how the picture was built up in my mind from the mixture of other people’s memories, historical documents and my own imaginings. At the same time, I think it’s important, for the reader’s trust, to signal as clearly as possible the moments where the line is crossed from the episodes of the story that I have been told or have read, to those I have found myself wanting to imaginatively embellish.

The book seems to double as an investigation into depression itself – how it works, how it feels, how it affects sufferers and their families, and how we attempt to treat it. Was this part of your intention in writing the book?

It wasn’t a conscious intention. However, I think it inevitably came in as part of the search for the motive for my father’s death. I was trying to understand as much as possible how he might have felt and thought. The difficulty with any kind of mental illness is that it is much harder to separate the illness from one’s own sense of self than it is with a physical illness. Cancer or a virus, for instance, can be imagined as malign invaders attacking us via our body, whereas something like depression can seem to be a part of our very soul. It was very interesting to find out how mental illness was treated in Australia in the middle of the last century – I think there must have been half a dozen different labels, apart from depression, applied by doctors trying to describe my father’s affliction. And with any chronic case of mental illness, particularly where the person manages to function at a high level of normality in everyday life, it is just so hard for others around that person to fully comprehend what is going on or what the problem is. It is very hard to empathise.

You write: ‘Shame is scattered like a condiment across this story.’ Was it confronting to go public with this family shame? What made you decide it was worth it?

It is confronting, both for me and for the family, to have the story told so publicly. But one thing I noticed very early on when, on occasion, I read early sections of the book in public, was the strong response of the audience and the number of people who would come up to me with stories of their own families. Many people seem to relate the story to their own families, because I suppose it is relatively common for families to have these ‘skeletons’ — informal taboos around difficult or painful stories of their own. Shame is a very powerful and complex emotion that, like guilt, sometimes affects our behaviour in ways that we aren’t aware of. I think that shameful stories, which we feel we need to keep hidden, nevertheless have a kind of irresistible force to them that means they will tend to surface eventually. We wish the world, and our emotions and actions, were less complex and contradictory than they really are — that is why we love stories of clear good and evil, they are so much simpler and more comforting! But the real messed-up muddling-along world is pretty fascinating, I find.

Running through the book is the question of whether your father’s focus on his mental illness – his determination to solve what was wrong with him – exacerbated it, or simply made it more obvious to observers. What are your conclusions about this?

This is a very difficult question because it is hard to separate his character from the illness. I think that some sorts of mental illness, and I think my father’s was like this, have an obsessive quality, and to be treated effectively there needs to be some way to counteract this tendency to obsessive thoughts. I do wonder out loud in the book as to whether his search for answers would have found a better response from treatments available these days — I guess we would certainly hope that would be the case. But I find that a very poignant element of the story; both that Brian was so clearly striving to ‘cure’ himself, and that, at the same time, there were hints that this very striving might have been part of the problem!

Did you achieve a sense of closure in writing the book? Did the writing and researching process resolve some of the questions you had about your father?

I am not really a big fan of the word ‘closure’, which I find I can’t say without a very bad mock-American accent! I think it tends to suggest a neat and easy conclusion to very complex things, as if life had a Hollywood three-act structure. But, yes, since when I began, I knew virtually nothing at all about my father, it has been a great process of discovery for me, and it has freed me up and given me confidence to take risks in telling stories. It is remarkable, when you think about it, how powerful stories are, and how much effort goes into controlling which stories, and whose stories, are told and are listened to. Sometimes this control is overt and political, but at other times it is something that we carry within us, that we have absorbed unawares from within our culture.

Kirsten Tranter

2010-02-01T00:00:00Z

Kirsten Tranter, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Kirsten Tranter’s first novel, The Legacy, a genre-mixing post-9/11 mystery, is among the most eagerly anticipated debuts of 2009.

The structure, characters and situations in The Legacy borrow heavily from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. What made you decide to write a contemporary twist on that novel?

I’ve always been drawn to literature that responds to other works of art, other literature; that reshapes stories or tells them from different perspectives. I have been fascinated by Portrait ever since I read it as an undergraduate at Sydney Uni. It was presented to me by my eccentric and brilliant tutor at the time as a cruel revision of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a perspective that I’ve never been able to really shake off. I think it was seeing the book in these terms that drew me to thinking about making my own version of the story, seeing it as a version of a manipulable narrative idea. A long time passed before I found what seemed like the right way to go about it.

In the meantime, I became completely immersed in the literature of the Renaissance, while I was working on my PhD at Rutgers, and of course in the Renaissance, literature is all about revisiting and recycling the classics and other stories. Shakespeare does it, Spenser does it; everyone does it. It’s a habit of mind pretty alien to how we mostly now think about originality and creativity that I became somehow comfortable with to the point where re-writing Portrait of a Lady didn’t seem quite as crazy or hubristic as it had done before.

It is such a compelling, and yet a horrendous story. I hate what happens to Isabel, even though she’s not my favourite character in all literature. Like many readers, I wanted it to end differently – but I wanted to find a way of revising it that wouldn’t be simplistic, that wouldn’t simply give the Isabel character an easy way out or cheesy happy ending. Instead, I wanted to find a way of retelling the story that investigated that very feeling, that very desire (ambivalent and complicated as it is) to rescue her, to make a different ending for her.

The Legacy is rich in intertextual references and nods to various literary genres. There are echoes of Brideshead Revisited (the university student infatuated with the glamourous family of a classmate); The Secret History (intrigue within an East Coast university Classics department) and various nods to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance. How much of this was conscious? And what were your literary influences when writing this, apart from Henry James?

Donna Tartt and Evelyn Waugh were major influences, yes – Donna Tartt especially for the way she writes a mystery that kind of transcends the genre and manages to be both literary and really accessible; and I was also reading a lot of Edith Wharton and Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s The Big Sleep is the other major intertext apart from Portrait – I just love its dizzying, surreal twists, and the very minor character of the clever bookshop assistant was the inspiration for my narrator Julia. A lot of it was conscious and came from, as I mentioned above, an immersion in Renaissance literature and its habits of compulsive allusion.

I love the way literature is made from bits and pieces of other literature, always in conversation with what has gone before, and I’m happy to play with that in a fairly self-conscious way – but it was important to me that the story always remain accessible, that the reader doesn’t need to have read Henry James or Raymond Chandler in order to enjoy or understand my novel. It’s not just books that are made from other books; especially for people like me who are obsessive readers and movie watchers, stories, especially the frameworks of romance, actually frame experience to a huge extent, and that was something I was trying to get across in the book as well.

Ralph and Julia first become friends by quoting Chandler to one another, by acting out parts from a movie they both love, and in some ways they live like that too, imagining themselves as the stars (or in Julia’s case as a marginal character) in the stories of their own lives. Life imitates art, as the man said. That’s something I remember about the intensity of life and love as a very young adult, learning how to make sense of bewildering emotional experiences through the frameworks of literature and film.

The Legacy is, among other things, a post-9/11 mystery novel, with the central character’s disappearance at the World Trade Centre on the day the towers collapsed at the core of the novel. It explores ‘the secret cherished hope of everyone who lost someone on that day, after all – that she was not dead, but missing’. What drew you to this as a theme?

It was hard to go through 9/11 as a resident of New York, as I was at the time, and not to be profoundly affected by that very desire and hope, which was everywhere, written up in all the hundreds of ‘missing’ posters that stayed up for months afterwards. In the aftermath I started thinking about building a story around that idea – that kind of hopeless hope. It came together with my thoughts about Portrait in a way that just seemed right. The ending of Portrait is ambiguous enough that I go back to it every now and again, looking for some kind of clue or possibility that it just doesn’t have to be that way … but it always is the same old horrible thing! I suppose that desire seemed to me to have some affinities with that desire on the part of people after 9/11 – a desire for a different ending. What was interesting to me was not so much the actual fate that Ingrid meets, but rather to explore the desire for her to have escaped that particular fate, the meaning of that desire.

A strong sense of inevitability underlies the novel. These characters – Ingrid, Ralph, Julia – engineer their own fates, often driven by pride and perversity. How important was this sense of inevitability to you when writing the novel?

It was very important. Julia has to make a decisive break at the end of the story, to stop being so passive in the face of her fate, and instead take her destiny into her own hands, even though it means giving up a friendship with someone she loves very much. Pride and perversity are definitely the things that make for Ingrid’s downfall, her tragedy. The story plays with ideas about whether our fate is fixed; whether we can know the future, or know ourselves – whether our handwriting reveals the truth about our characters, or whether tea leaves can predict the course of our lives.

The interplay between what is determined for us – by the unconscious, by social forces, by fate, by character, by the machinations of others, by whatever external forces – and what we determine for ourselves, as knowing, intelligent, imaginative individuals, is endlessly interesting to me.

Your central characters all seem to be in love with the idea of love, but unsuccessful at its practice. They’re all attracted to the unattainable in different ways. Why do you think that is? And does this reflect a wider truth about the nature of attraction, or is it particular to your characters?

The darker side of love – unrequited love, perverse and impossible desire, the interplay of power and subjection – has a lot going for it in terms of dramatic material. There’s always an element of mystery in attraction, a sense of unconscious emotional forces at work that we can’t understand, which makes it always fascinating. I think the mix of pride and perversity that you mention above has something to do with it, in terms of why love plays out so disastrously for these particular characters. But I’m not trying to say that this is a wider truth; in fact at the end, the story tries to open onto a more optimistic possibility of authentic emotional connection, for one major character at least.

There is an ongoing divide between worlds in The Legacy: between the ‘frantic light night urban world’ of Julia, Ralph and Ingrid’s university nights and the ‘high-class opulence of Ralph’s house’ that they inhabit during the day. There’s also the contrast between Julia’s student digs in Newtown, and Ingrid and Ralph’s Kirribilli residence; between Sydney and New York; between Ingrid’s life with her friends and her life with husband Gilbert Grey. What attracts you, as a writer, to characters who move between different worlds?

In a literary sense, these characters are attractive because of their element of distance or detachment – whatever it takes to retain a foothold in each of the different worlds they move between. The noir detective is an appealing embodiment of that idea, the figure who can enter any world and yet doesn’t belong to any – he’s set apart, it’s his very apartness and difference that enables him to move so easily, not being bound to any one place. But loneliness, isolation, is a consequence of that ability as well.

It’s always more interesting to imagine a world from the perspective of an outsider; it might seem more ideal, as Brideshead does at first to Charles Ryder, or the Classics group of friends does to Richard Papen in The Secret History, or England and Europe to Isabel Archer, but they are also capable of confronting its limitations, and they are forced to. The outsider who is seduced, corrupted or exploited, betrayed – it’s an interesting story.

On a personal level, I’ve spent a lot of the last ten years moving between the different worlds of Sydney and New York City (with stopovers in the still other worlds of Darwin and upstate New York), so I think I’m probably compelled to explore the peculiar conflicts that come with that experience.

In New York, at the World Trade Centre site, ‘the hole in the sky radiated so intensely that is had become presence’. It’s a nice metaphor for the overwhelming presence of Ingrid’s absence. Were there any challenges in writing a book that was driven by the absence of its central character?

I never thought of that particular sentence being about Ingrid, but now I always will! It’s true that Ingrid’s absence, her death, drives the story, but she didn’t feel exactly absent while I was writing, because she’s very much there in the first half of the book that recounts the development and disintegration of Julia and Ralph’s friendship with her. But to a certain extent she remains less than fully present – it’s part of her enigma and her mystery, her unknowability (to Julia, at least). There’s a challenge in writing about a character who presents those qualities so strongly, because I still want to create sympathy for her – she can’t seem completely unknowable or all surface, she has to give off the idea that she has depths, even if they are not easily accessible. But the book also presents a challenge in terms of deciding who the central character really is: it’s narrated by Julia, who feels herself to have been always sidelined by beautiful, brilliant Ingrid, and ultimately it is Julia’s story – she has to decide to put herself at the centre, to make it her own.

Charlotte Wood

2009-12-21T00:00:00Z

Charlotte Wood, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Jo Case interviews Charlotte Wood about her cracking new anthology Brothers and Sisters.

The stories in Brothers and Sisters were all specially written for this anthology. What made you decide to commission new works rather than anthologise existing stories?

It was initially my publisher’s idea – Jane Palfreyman’s – to commission entirely new stories, and as soon as she said it, the whole project became much more exciting. Somehow, the writers agreeing to write to a theme injected the anthology with an element of risk, and therefore of energy, that I don’t think it would have had otherwise. There was always the danger that having agreed, one might find one had nothing to say, so I suspect some of us had to work really hard, pushing our work in new directions in order to discover a way into the topic. I know some of the writers (including me) found the whole process much more confronting than they’d expected.

I think the commissioning of new works also had the unexpected side effect of giving the anthology a cohesion it might not otherwise have had. Obviously an editor’s personal literary tastes come into play in choosing contributors like this (rather than existing work choosing us, as it were, simply by relating to the topic), so I think some common ground between the writers – a precision with language, a reflectiveness, a kind of smokiness – lies beneath the collection as a whole.

I’m so proud of this book, and proud to be associated with a publisher who suggested taking the riskier path. It shows how committed A&U are to new work, and to producing a collection that we hope will have a long life as a work of art, not just a Christmas stocking stuffer.

The writers in this anthology represent a terrific mix of emerging writers (like Virginia Peters), celebrated new voices (like Nam Le) and established favourites, like yourself and Robert Drewe. How did you go about deciding which writers to include?

One of my aims was to gather together exactly this range of experience – Roger McDonald and Rob Drewe being our most experienced contributors, and Michael Sala and Virginia Peters being the newest, with the rest of us covering the spectrum between. We wanted an equal gender split, because we thought men and women might approach the topic quite differently, and I wanted to push these writers up against each other, which I hoped might result in some surprises for the reader. I didn’t want a predictable list of names, and hence the newer writers became a particularly crucial part of the book. But in my mind there was only one essential criteria – all the contributors in this book would, first and foremost, be beautiful writers.

You deliberately asked your writers to submit longer than usual pieces for this anthology. What was the instinct guiding that decision? Do you think we need more venues in Australia to publish longer short stories?

Yes, I do. I knew from the start that I didn’t want too many works in this book, because sometimes I think anthologies can become overcrowded and therefore uneven - quieter stories can be lost, new writers can be ignored in the sheer volume of material. So the decision to have fewer writers then instantly created more space, and while we weren’t prescriptive about it, we did ask that the writers submit longer pieces if it felt right for them, suggesting a rough length of around 5000 words. The resulting stories range from around 4000 to 11,000 words.

I think it’s had a very strong effect on the work, in that they were given space to really enter into the life of their stories and sort of swim around in them. Unless a writer is particularly drawn to the very short form (such as Paddy O’Reilly’s utterly flawless ‘Breaking Up’ in Scribe’s New Australian Stories) my view is that short stories can sometimes feel as if the writer is skating over the surface of things too quickly. So in this collection I think the stories have a depth they might not otherwise have, simply because there is this luxury of space and time in which to thoroughly explore what they’re saying. Short story competitions in this country mostly limit the works to 3000 words – which automatically eliminates some of the best short fiction we have. I’d actually love to see someone establish a literary prize for a short story collection, because there are more and more good ones being published these days.

In your own story, ‘The Cricket Palace’, you beautifully illuminate how childhood patterns of sibling relationships endure into adulthood and old age, with your 60- and 70-something sisters. Was that something you wanted to explore?

Because I’d already written about siblings in their 30s and 40s in The Children, I worried that I had nothing more to say. So I shifted my gaze to old age, and thought about what it might be like for two very different siblings to be left with each other at the end of their lives, when some of the other beloved people and defining structures of their lives had fallen away. My main character Wendy is still defining herself, rather snobbishly, by what she sees as her superiority to her sister Ruth, and her difference from Ruth. But in the end, she needs her sister more than ever.

Many of the stories in this anthology explore dark territory – though the overall emotional effect for me, on finishing it, was admiring respect for the tenacity of the sibling bond. It’s a deeply unsentimental, and deeply affecting, anthology. Do you think that dark thread, leavened with warmth (and often dark humour too), reflects the writers, their subject matter, or both?

I reckon these stories are like blue cheese, or dark chocolate – complex, layered with contrasting tones, with bite. They’re not for readers who want simple emotions on the page. The risk with an anthology about love – which ultimately is what this is – is that it can topple into sugary gush, and that’s one of the reasons I approached writers who each had a powerfully unsentimental eye, whose previous work had a smoky intensity I found riveting. Happy stories about happy families – well, there’s no story there, really. And it isn’t honest. Which is not to say that the works in this collection aren’t redemptive – there are happy endings, and moments of great beauty, and of deep, ferocious love. I think the whole book, in the end, is suffused with tenderness. The kind of tenderness that comes after a bruise, perhaps, but that makes it all the more truthful, all the more interesting.

Rachel Cusk

2009-11-09T00:00:00Z

Rachel Cusk, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Jo Case interviews Rachel Cusk, the acclaimed author of Arlington Park, about her follow-up novel, The Bradshaw Variations.

Your previous novel, Arlington Park, was concerned with themes of justice and equality in human relationships – within families, in particular. The Bradshaw Variations seems to continue to explore these questions, and to go deeper into them by looking at what happens when one couple reverse the traditional gender roles some years into their marriage. Do you see the two novels as linked at all? Do you see those themes reflected in The Bradshaw Variations?

Arlington Park was conceived as a political novel: I always felt that the suburb was merely one of several possible representations of these politics. But it was a world I knew well at the time, a world built around the early phases of family life, in which there are strong - perhaps irresistible - urges to renounce individuality and to atone for the ways in which one has rebelled against an idealised ‘norm’. So it seemed natural to use that as my template. The family world of Bradshaw belongs to a different phase, and is far more the novel’s actual subject. Some of the same issues, of course, recur, but in a less representational guise. In Bradshaw I’m talking about the reality of certain tensions in men and women’s relationships. And about the new moral struggle that characterises this second phase, between discipline and self-expression.

In The Bradshaw Variations, Tonie asks a maker of wildlife documentaries why his profession “make[s] the world look perfect” by “editing out the mess”. (And in Arlington Park, Maisie makes an eerily similar observation.) It seems to me that a large part of what you do in your books – fiction and non-fiction – is show the world as it really is, analysing it amid the mess. Is that your aim?

Well, my aim certainly isn’t to lie! I don’t know whether the world is ‘really’ as I portray it. What I offer in my writing is an experience of honesty as something both perilous and rewarding. My hope is that the reader will recognise in that mixture something true of him or herself.

The Bradshaw family home is “thick with subconscious life, like a forest in a fairy tale”. That’s a wonderful image. How does that subconscious life of the family play out in the novel? How do the roles people play within the family they grow up in influence the people they become?

One of the great difficulties I encountered in writing this book was finding ways to describe parts of life that are deeply rooted in sub- or even pre-conscious experiences. That was why I attempted to use musical form as a template. The predetermined aspect of music - the strong articulation of the ‘form’ and the way it precedes content - did and does seem analogous to me. It seems true to me that people suffer great damage when they try to rid themselves of the aspect of form that underlies identity. And yet to accept these as the outer boundaries of personal experience is extremely difficult. In my book, the attempt to find beauty within limitation - and the extreme self-discipline this requires - is something all the characters are bound up with.

Somewhere in the depths of Claudia’s consciousness swim the unanswered questions: “What is the right way to live? What is the value of success? ... if love is selfish, can it still be considered to be love?” How important are these questions to the novel as a whole?

I suppose those are the questions that can be asked - that have to be asked - as part of a process of acceptance. In Claudia’s case, they are being asked rather in the old spirit of Arlington Park, the spirit of individual powerlessness. This is the moral uncertainty which comes with the renunciation of personal identity.

You’re very good at capturing the rhythms of how people speak; the way conversations are so often defined by the subtext – what people don’t say, or the tones they use – as much as what they do say. Is there a lot of work involved in getting that balance right, and making the dialogue ring true? Or does it come naturally?

For me, somewhat oddly perhaps, it is in dialogue that I make my greatest efforts towards honesty. Working out exactly how the way a person speaks makes me feel - for reasons that go back to my very earliest memories - is absolutely central to my process. But I also find other people extremely useful as commentators in this area. I am someone who is completely unable to give a ready reply to a verbal challenge, so I am rather fascinated by people who can. I spend a lot of time not just listening to what a person says but listening to how other people interpret what’s been said. For me, what I think is absolutely unrelated to what I say. And so I can’t understand what other people are saying either. It’s a sort of disability, I suppose, on my part: I get completely the wrong end of the stick, and have to work very hard to compensate for it.

The gap between the imagined and the real, the imitation and the authentic, seems a central thread of the novel. Often, characters are surprised by the gap between the idea of something and its reality. At other times, characters fail to really see or understand each other because their pre-conceived perceptions stand in the way. What appealed to you about exploring these ideas in this book?

Well, this is something I’ve got more interested in lately. I teach an MA in creative writing, and my students are so often people who have been led to an interest in writing by exactly those questions of authenticity. The questions relate to life, but these people sense that the answers are to be found in art. My teaching has led me to conclude that there is a particular time in life when it becomes imperative to bring the two together, to reconsider experience via the discipline and morality of art.

Tonie and Thomas find it difficult to swap roles, locating her primarily in the world of work, him primarily in the home, with no defining outside identity. Do you think this is about social conditioning, inherent gender differences, or simply a problem these characters have?

I’ve been very struck in adult life by the difficulty people seem to have challenging tradition. There seems to come a point at which being different from one’s parents or from a traditional ‘norm’ becomes virtually impossible, like swimming against a current that gets stronger and stronger the older you get. And there’s a great deal of fear, too, involved in striking out on your own and defying the unwritten rules you were brought up with. Many women know consciously that there’s nothing wrong with them working as mothers, but nonetheless they feel they’re doing something wrong, something that will have vaguely terrible consequences. And it’s the same, perhaps, for men as domestic creatures. So I wanted my characters to inhabit exactly this place between knowing and feeling, and for the sense of a punishment to be fully realised.

Though they both have their issues, it seemed to me that Thomas finds it more difficult to inhabit the role of primary caretaker than Tonie does to be the breadwinner. He tries hard, but finds it hard to relinquish his ego and priorities to the extent that his wife was able to in the role. Do you think this was the case? If so, why?

Well, a woman can become very powerful through motherhood. I’m not sure a man is empowered by the world of work in the same way. A certain kind of woman, once she’s had a child, can feel capable of anything, including great destructiveness. But I wanted to show that Thomas was on the way to an important, and essentially virtuous, breakthrough in his relationship with his child. What defeats him in the end is the fear I was describing earlier; the sense that he is being punished for a transgression.

Tonie’s mother reflects that children come into the world “pure and new, unmarked” and “somehow become knotted up, full of snags and resistances”. Thomas says of Alexa that “he is forming her out of the substance of what she already is”. These seem to be two very different, almost contradictory, approaches to parenting. One is about forming a child in one’s preferred mould, the other is about guiding them to be their best self. Were you hoping to explore (or illustrate) these differing approaches in the different family scenarios?

Yes, absolutely. My own upbringing was very much the first sort: the development of individual identity was configured as a form of defiance, and one was made to feel great shame and guilt about it. And the domestic equality towards which men and women - or at least some of them - are slowly striving has this immeasurable benefit in terms of a reduction of parental authority and a greater respect for the child’s self.

You say that your motherhood memoir, A Life’s Work, which gives a starkly honest account of the emotional experience of being a new mother, has given the erroneous impression of you being a bleak person. I thought it was a very tender and hopeful book, too. Do you think this impression of bleakness is due to our cultural taboos about saying anything negative about motherhood? Were you hoping to challenge these taboos in writing your book – or simply to report honestly on your experience?

I certainly didn’t know how far I was trespassing into the unsaid and the unsayable when I wrote A Life’s Work. I didn’t really know anything at all about the culture of motherhood. All I knew was how it had been for me, and an ability to be honest about personal experience has always formed the substance of my writing process. So I was rather taken aback when it didn’t work at all in the usual way; and worse, when a sort of witch-hunt ensued in which this idea of a mother as bleak or depressive really seemed to terrorise people. It was my first experience of something that is very ugly in human nature - the primitive operation of the taboo, as you say - and it certainly made me unhappy for a while. I saw it as a small example of a much greater problem of intolerance. And of course, in the end, it is possible to feel sorry for those who are intolerant, and to feel glad that my book still exists in spite of them. It continues to do its job, I think; I still hear from new mothers who have found it and been fortified by it.

Alex Miller

2009-11-04T00:00:00Z

Alex Miller, interviewed by Angela Meyer

Alex Miller is one of Australia’s most respected – and widely read – literary writers. He has won multiple awards, attracted critical acclaim, and many of his novels have been bestsellers. Crikey literary blogger Angela Meyer is well known for her passionate fandom when it comes to Miller’s work. When it came time for Readings to find an interviewer to highlight Alex’s ninth novel, Lovesong, as part of our New Australian Writing feature series, we thought it would be nice to showcase a cross-generational conversation between this up-and-coming young literary journalist and the revered, long-established novelist.

Two-time Miles Franklin winner Alex Miller (for Journey to the Stone Country in 2003 and The Ancestor Game in 1993) is celebrated as an author who appeals equally to the emotions and the intellect. His new romantic and celebratory novel, Lovesong, echoes many of the themes Miller is known for – longing, desire, transience, the secret inner life – but is also somewhat of a departure from his previous works. For Miller, it was a delight to write, coming straight after the ‘very challenging’ Landscape of Farewell, which left him ‘very empty’.

After finishing Landscape, Miller took time off to read. Sitting by the fire with his daughter, he was on the last few pages of Edward Said’s Musical Elaborations when his daughter asked him what he was going to do next. Miller had just read Said’s memory of seeing Louis Malle’s film Les amants, which went something like this: ‘An innocuous tale of a man, an unknown unnamed stranger who comes down the road and meets an unknown unnamed woman, and they become lovers, so then he moves on and everybody’s happy.’ He told his daughter, ‘I’m going to write a simple love story’. And she said, ‘Dad, love’s not simple, you should know that’.

Love is not simple in Lovesong, but it is celebrated. John, an Australian man, meets Sabiha, a Tunisian woman living in Paris who runs a restaurant with her widowed aunt Houria. Falling in love happens quickly. But staying in love is complex, interrupted by different kinds of longing – for distant homelands, for a child. Love is constricted by compromise, and the difficulty of understanding the solitary needs of one’s romantic partner. ‘I lived in Paris for a year in the 70s, and Paris and Tunisia are part of the landscape of my memory, and therefore the landscape of my imagination,’ says Miller. ‘A great amount of this story came out of a concoction. There was no recipe. But I was the cook and I had all these ingredients, and they were what was there, available to me, and that’s how it came about. Then it surprised me.’

Miller’s ‘surprise’ was the third character, Ken, an ageing writer who ‘discovers’ Sabiha and John’s story when he perceives the ‘sadness in the depths of [Sabiha’s] dark brown eyes’. Lovesong is thus framed by contemporary Melbourne and a writer who can’t ‘not write’, absorbed by the story he slowly gathers from John. Ken first sees Sabiha at a pastry shop. ‘There are heaps of pastry shops like that around now. Especially out in the suburbs,’ says Miller. ‘So it really is the story behind this very average, ordinary – these days – Australian family. It was never going to be talked about, unless someone like him [Ken] came along and wrote it. So in a sense it’s a celebration of their secret story. But it’s also the story of how Ken can’t really give up writing. What does he do after that?’

Thankfully, Miller can’t give up writing either. ‘I’m now writing a novel based on the life of Sidney Nolan. You know, what are you going to do? I’ll keep going until I fall off the chair, or until I lose vigour or momentum.’ The framing story therefore plays with the reader’s interpretation of fiction – allowing them to question the author’s and characters’ truths and motivations, mixing in their own curiosity, empathy, and experience. ‘The imagination is the ability to empathise,’ Miller tells me, ‘it’s the ability to – not necessarily consciously, quite unconsciously – find that you’re hugely sympathetic to someone else’s situation. So much so, that you imagine a full realisation of it.’ In Lovesong, we not only have an insight into this process (through Ken), but we are free to empathise with the characters in John and Sabiha’s story, and with Ken, this grieving, seeking writer who, when asked about himself says: ‘There’s not a lot to know. My life's in my books.’

It also becomes unclear whose version of the story we are actually experiencing. When I say this, Miller smiles. ‘Well it’s a triple-play,’ he says. ‘It’s very ambiguous.’ When Ken invites John and Sabiha for dinner, Sabiha insists: ‘We cook for our friends … you are part of our story now.’ Ken reads it a permission to write the story and it ‘enlivens his own imagination and sensitivities towards Sabiha’. Ken likes to read her statement that way because that’s what he wants out of it.

John and Sabiha’s story, set in Paris, is romantic, yet poignantly ephemeral. Miller says he ‘wrote the book purely for pleasure. Normally I have a whole complex of reasons and senses of responsibility … and a need to get stuff out that’s been with me for years and years.’ The essence of this pleasure comes across in the novel. The first flush of romance is as delectable as the sweet treats Sabiha bakes with her aunt Houria, but is weighted by the fact we have already witnessed ‘sadness’ in Sabiha’s eyes later in life. As in some of Miller’s other works, something is sought outside the marriage – but here, the motivations are more defined (by the obsessive desire for a child). But these dark and very human moments are compelling – and drive the reader on.

Miller’s unadorned prose has a sneaking effect. Simple moments between characters catch you up hours, or even days, later. I relay this to Miller with the example of Landscape of Farewell. There is a scene where Max, the German character, is fetched a cane by Dougald, his Aboriginal friend and temporary housemate. I was telling my sister about how much I loved this moment – the way Max imagines Dougald’s perception of him as an old man, and accepts this – and I searched for the moment in the book to read it to her, as I mark my favourite passages by turning the pages down. I was surprised to find I had not marked the passage at the time – the moment in the story had only resonated much later.

In this ‘simple romance’, Miller has created many moments of resonance, such as the devastation caused by two fragrant, honey-dipped briouats and the light brush of a woman’s hip against a man’s shoulder. Lovesong is a tender, astutely charming and multi-layered treat.

Angela Meyer’s blog LiteraryMinded is hosted by Crikey. She is the acting editor of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tony Birch

2009-10-16T00:00:00Z

Tony Birch, interviewed by Jo Case, October 2009

Jo Case interviews Tony Birch about his new short story collection, Father’s Day.

The stories in your first (interlinked) collection, Shadowboxing, were semi-autobiographical. Did you draw on life for any of these stories – and if so, to what extent?

The stories in Father’s Day are not autobiographical, in the sense of drawing on my own experience and memories too strongly, although the story ‘The Chocolate Empire’ is a notable exception. It is closely based on being stuck in the famous Melbourne flood of 1971 after having wagged school for the day. I put myself in one of the situations that wayward teenagers dread.

The Father’s Day stories do though reflect my view of, and maybe even preoccupations with two issues; firstly, the relationship between men and their families, and men and boys in particular. Secondly, I am attracted to, and interested in lives of men who live on the margins of society, either by choice, or as an outcome of being estranged from both family and society due to some past transgression. But while Shadowboxing was a hard book, in that one of the key characters, Mick Byrne, the punch-drunk father, was an unlikable character in many ways, generally the men in Father’s Day have redeemable, even admirable qualities.

Once again, these are very Melbourne stories, firmly anchored in setting like Sydney Road, Brunswick; Church Street and Bridge Road in Richmond; the Yarra; or the St Albans train line. How important is place to you in your writing?

I never consciously set out to write ‘another Melbourne story’, but I am a dedicated wanderer (and runner), so I tend to discover the seed of a new story while I am out walking or running. It may just be an observation, something I overhear, or perhaps see out of the corner of my eye. Some of these moments vanish while others stay with me. They nag at me, demanding to be written into story. When the time comes to write the story I will reflect back on the place, the location of the original idea, which is generally somewhere around the inner city of Melbourne – a place and a landscape that I know well and have great affection for.

The only place that I have a self-conscious desire to return to again and again is the Yarra River. I love it, and the stories it holds. My ultimate ambition as a writer is to produce ‘the great river novel’ – although I guess that Mark Twain has done that already.

Many of your stories take us into the world of Melbourne’s underclass – the residents of a halfway house, an immigrant living in a Housing Commission flat, an autistic man who lives alone and mysteriously collects junk mail. What draws you to exploring these lives?

Firstly, as I spent my teenage years on a Housing Commission estate I knew it as ‘home’, not as a place on the margins of society. It was a good place to live. It was vibrant and contained a sense of community that held me securely. While I accept the label of an ‘underclass’ and have witnessed the sense of marginalisation it defines, the characters I have created in this book are men who I want to place at the heart of what it means to engage with the human condition; men who through their actions and gestures demand that we look at them and consider their human value rather than look away from them and ignore them because they are ‘different’.

I truly believe that our measure as a decent society has to be based upon - to quote a line from Raymond Carver – not just some of us, but ‘all of us’. I would hope that my writing reflects this.

I’m struck by the deep empathy and compassion in these stories, and equally by the happy lack of sentimentality. How do you strike that balance?

If the stories are empathetic and compassionate, and I hope that they are, it is because the characters in these stories have asked that of each other. These are fictional characters, but they are also characters that reflect the generosity that I have witnessed between people who are equally marginalised, equally disadvantaged. I could have just as easily written a book where people turn away from each other. It would not be difficult, as it also reflects what often happens in the real world. I was guided by ways in which the sometimes powerless in society turn to each other, not by those of us who are ‘better off’ but too often turn away.

I do not find it difficult to avoid sentimentality in writing. These are stories that delve into our emotions, and seek an emotional response from readers. My rule of thumb is simply – don’t write emotively when conveying emotion. It is a cheap trick that will inevitably produce a sentimental outcome.

Surprising or unexpected connections between people are a common thread in many of these stories: the young boy’s infatuation with his father’s girlfriend; a stranger who intervenes to save another’s dog; a boy’s easy warmth with his little-known grandfather. Was that a conscious theme or interest?

These are chance or brief encounters. They also reflect gestures that are exchanged between people every day. Most often we quickly forget about them, or as is often the case, we fail to recognise them at all. But they are so important. I have seen a mother on a crowded tram briefly lean down and pat her sleeping child on the head; or I have seen a person fall in the street, and while most of us have continued walking by, or stood back, someone has stopped and offered an arm of support. They are the moments that become the beginnings of many of my stories, stories of recognition, where someone, such as in the story ‘Two men and their dogs’ came forward and offered friendship when it was desperately needed.

Another recurrence in these stories is imperfect families – and the depth of seemingly precarious bonds, like that between the father and son in ‘The Last Time I Saw Cherry’ and the brothers in ‘Gifted’. What attracts you about exploring those relationships?

I have seen many perfect families. Unfortunately or not, they were in black and white and came into my life from America, via television in the 1960s and 70s. Family life is complex and sometimes difficult. As I get older I feel that I am a little like the narrator in the title story of the book, ‘Father’s Day’. This man is stuck, in a way, between his young son, who will not communicate with him, and his own father, who he also has an awkward relationship with. I really like this story because it takes a little magic, in the form of the invisible giant rabbit from the wonderful movie Harvey to create a moment of beauty and tenderness. It is just a moment, one of those brief gestures I like to create. But I hope that it is full of meaning and resonance, and that it contains hope itself.

Anna Goldsworthy

2009-10-01T00:00:00Z

Anna Goldsworthy, interviewed by Andrea Goldsmith

Anna Goldsworthy has been a freelance writer and literary critic for years – but her passion has always been the piano, and her career as a concert pianist. In her exquisite debut memoir, Piano Lessons she combines her talents for writing and music, writing about her long and passionate love affair with the piano and her special relationship with her gifted and dedicated teacher. Award-winning Australian novelist Andrea Goldsmith spoke to Anna about Piano Lessons for Readings' New Australian Writing Feature series.

Obsessive. Anxious. Egocentric. A perfectionist. In the current era, where the range of what constitutes normal behaviour for a child is hardly thicker than a fingernail, these qualities are invariably pathologised. Teachers recommend specialist intervention, parents whisk their ‘at risk’ child off to a psychiatrist or a psychologist or some other person equipped to plane the edges, polyfill the frailties, rein in the extremes.

Obsession, anxiety, singular focus, perfectionism typify the creative individual – whether musical prodigy, emerging scientist or established artist. Indeed, without such qualities the ranks of great musicians, artists, writers and original scientists would be bland and depleted. It is these qualities, after all, that acquaint a child with a passion in the first place, and then hold her/him at the keyboard, the writing desk, the easel, the laboratory bench while that passion shapes and develops a raw talent.

There is so much suspicion of passion these days, particularly when it comes to children. And should there be a leap of the heart, a lurch of the imagination, it is readily stifled in the raucous flash and jangle of our carnival culture.

Anna Goldsworthy’s wonderful and generous memoir Piano Lessons shows what it is to be driven – obsessed – by music, by ambition, by excellence. At the centre of her book is a remarkable teacher, the Russian pianist, Eleonora Sivan. Mrs Sivan, as she is known throughout Anna’s childhood and adolescence, is the sort of teacher that every child deserves but few ever have the good fortune to know. Anna Goldsworthy has honoured a great teacher by setting down her wisdom, her humour, and her great passion for music. Piano Lessons is dedicated to Eleonora, as well as Anna’s two Reubens: her grandfather who connected her with Eleonora Sivan in the first place, and her son Reuben, just nine months old as his mother’s first book is published.

We arrange to meet in the evening, after young Reuben has settled for the night and after Anna’s own teaching and practising have finished. I begin by asking about Eleonora Sivan’s response to Piano Lessons, particularly in the light of her insistence, recounted in the book, that artists need always to acknowledge the gifts other people bring to their own gift. Anna says she was tremendously anxious about Eleonora’s response. ‘I intended it as an honouring of her. It’s a privilege to have such a woman in your life.’ And she smiles. ‘Eleonora loved it.’ Later in our conversation Anna says that Eleonora will always be her teacher. ‘Her approval has always been very important to me.’

Eleonora is present all through the pages of Piano Lessons, her voice strong. ‘I’ve had her speaking to me for hours every week since the age of nine,’ Anna says. ‘Her voice is in my head.’

For the past several years Anna has taught piano at the University of Melbourne and I wonder how her own teaching has been affected by such a powerful model. ‘It’s really hard in so many ways, partly because I DO have this example. I really can’t emulate her, I’m different. But yes’ – and again a smile – ‘I am part of Eleonora’s music tradition.’ It is a tradition that stretches back to Liszt. As grandfather Reuben told the nine-year-old Anna: ‘Mrs Sivan is from Russia … She’s on the Liszt list … Liszt taught the teacher of her teacher’s teacher.’

Piano Lessons honours a great teacher, but at the same time it is also the story of a vocation. Anna was a top student at high school. She won prizes for maths and for overall scholastic achievement; it seems she could have done anything. So why music?

‘Perhaps because it was the hardest. The piano demands all of you. It demands the integration of emotional things, spiritual things and intellectual things. As a consequence it is very demanding but also very rewarding.’ There’s a pause before she adds, ‘I didn’t really choose. Music reels you in.’

‘The real choice was actually between playing the piano and writing,’ she continues. ‘Not between maths and music or medicine and music.’ Anna’s sister is a doctor, as are both her parents – her father is Peter Goldsworthy, the novelist and poet. ‘Writing this book has been a good way of bringing writing and music together,’ she says.

Anna plays in the Seraphim Trio, she gives solo concerts, she teaches, she wrote a book, she writes regular articles for The Monthly, and she and her partner Nicholas Purcell have a nine-month-old son. I remark how very efficient she must be. She laughs. ‘No one pays you by the hour for practising.’

Like many high achievers, Anna has been subject to intense anxiety, better managed these days, but a muscular intrusion when she was younger. ‘The anxiety controlled my behaviour in many ways,’ she said. ‘The piano teaches you that you can have some control – but only up to a point.’

For a highly anxious person there surely must have been difficulty in reconciling technical virtuosity, control and discipline with the freedom of interpretation, imagination and emotional expression demanded by the piano. ‘The freedom begins on top of the work,’ she says. But for an anxious person, that loosening up, that freedom, must have been so difficult, even terrifying.

‘Performing is a great challenge,’ she says. ‘Some performances have that special edge and you take that on faith. Fortunately, over time your playing does become more consistent and the range of possibilities narrows.’ Anna tells me about a concert she gave the previous week when everything came together. ‘I felt fantastic.’ And as she speaks, this pianist who describes herself as ‘quite reserved’ radiates pleasure and excitement. She is fired by music.

Yet, given her intense anxiety, there seems to be something almost masochistic in her choice of a performance-focused career. ‘There must be something which attracts me to that unpredictability [of performance] or else I wouldn’t be doing it,’ she says.

I suggest it would require a great deal of courage, but she does not accept what was offered as a compliment. She has learned strategies to cope with excesses of anxiety. (‘Whenever you go up on stage you need to be a little bit anxious or else you are not taking it seriously.’) And of course, she has now amassed considerable experience. ‘With artistic maturity, you learn that you can’t take your self-criticism up on stage. You can’t be second-guessing yourself. When you’re practising you can, but not on stage.’

Still I pursued the anxiety issue, imagining what it was like for her younger self to perform. ‘[Performing] is an extreme form of human experience,’ Anna says. ‘At its best it is the most wonderful experience of grace … a sort of addictive pleasure – maybe like an extreme sport in this sense. The adrenaline pay-off is consequently very high too. And I always loved music. And Eleonora came into my life. And she compelled me.’

I ask her about the Chopin B-flat minor sonata which she mentions in her book. Anna sings the opening bars of the first movement and unconsciously her beautiful slender hands play the notes in the air. It is always a privilege to witness an artist revealing her art. Readers of Piano Lessons will know this privilege in the pages of Anna Goldsworthy’s wonderful book.

Andrea Goldsmith’s most recent novel is Reunion.

Andrew McGahan

2009-10-01T00:00:00Z

Andrew McGahan, interviewed by Jo Case

Andrew McGahan is one of Australia’s most respected – and diverse – writers. Each of his novels is very different from the last (with the obvious exception of 1988, the prequel to his first novel, Praise). His works include ‘grunge’ novels Praise and 1988; the political crime novel Last Drinks, set in post-Fitzgerald Inquiry Queensland; political satire Underground; and the Miles Franklin Award-winning meditation on land, belonging and possession, The White Earth. Now, he enters the realm of science-based fantasy in Wonders of a Godless World. A somewhat dazzled Jo Case spoke to him for Readings on the eve of its release.

Wonders of a Godless World is heavily reminiscent of myth or fairytale: its population of archetypes, the element of parable, the magic realist or fantastical element. What drew you to using this form? Was it your intention to create a kind of contemporary fable?

Actually, my intention at the very beginning was just to find some way to indulge my schoolboy fascination for unusual natural disasters. Originally, I was trying to come up with a story that involved no human characters at all, instead using only the forces of nature interacting in a kind of wordless planetary drama. I couldn’t make that idea work, but then the orphan and the foreigner emerged. The orphan – a girl freakishly in tune with the planet and its processes, but so out of tune with humanity that she can’t talk or even remember her own name. And the foreigner - a man utterly out of tune with the planet and doomed time and time again to die in natural disasters, and yet whose own outrage always brings him back to life. From there, all the weird and interesting stuff about Earth that I originally wanted to explore could be played out in the relationship between these two.

But having allowed humans into the picture, I was still keen to keep them at a distance. Hence no one is allowed a name or any normal dialogue or even, when it comes to the five or six peripheral characters, much individual personality. So yes, because of that the story takes on an otherworldly or mythic or fairytale tone, and I was happy to go along with it, but it was more of a side-effect than a central purpose.

Your narrator, ‘the orphan’, sees the world in a stark, visceral way. Because she has only a basic understanding of how her social universe is constructed due to her mental limitations, hers is almost an anthropologist’s view. She’s an outsider constantly having to interpret how things work and what’s happening. As a writer, what were the advantages (and challenges) of working with this kind of narrator?

It was strangely refreshing. We take so much for granted - any primary-school kid, for instance, knows that the world is round and that it spins in space etc. It’s such a given fact that it’s rather boring. But to have a character who has been deprived of even the most basic knowledge, but who then gets to soar into space and discover firsthand that the world is round and that it’s spinning, and to share in her utter wonder at that, well, as a writer, it reawakens your own wonder too.

Of course, it becomes more complex when the orphan is trying to decipher human motivations or her own sexuality etc, but still, the freshness and openness of her perspective was quite a reviving thing for me throughout.

A number of characters in this book suffer delusions that are also coping mechanisms. When their delusions are revealed as such, they aren’t cured – they self-destruct. Is there a place for benign delusion? Do you think we all see the version of the world we can cope with?

Oh yes, I’m assuming that most of our lives are lived under benign delusions. But in a story like this, where various archetypal views of the world are battling it out in a madhouse death struggle, no one is going to have a happy ending. I suppose there’s an echo there of the fact that when a benign delusion comes to rule over a society and repress non-believers, then it’s not benign any more.

Although there is a strong fantasy or magic realist element to this novel, its equally strong in scientific influences and explanations for events. I think that’s why the fantasy element works so well – it’s layered on a structure of fact. What was your thinking behind blending these two elements?

The science was my primary interest – at least, the science of weird natural events, and allowing for the fact that this a novel, not a text book, and so the science gets a little stretched at times. But in the meanwhile, to get the orphan and the foreigner into the heart of these natural events, they needed to be able to fly to the upper atmosphere, or to slip down to the centre of the earth, or to travel beyond the moon, and it was only by some magical or fantastic device that they could do this. But yes, it was important to chain these flights back to reality again, because fantasy without any boundaries quickly becomes pretty meaningless.

The novel seems to suggest that religion is a form of madness. For example, ‘the archangel’ looks to religion to explain the world and is comforted but also warped by it, in the most literal way. And there is a wonderful scene towards the end that suggests the myriad ways someone might convince themselves to believe something and interpret events to support that belief. Did you intend to make this correlation between religion and madness? Or is it more about the psychology of religion? (Or neither.)

I’m not sure what, if anything, the book says about religion. The phrase ‘godless world’ in the title for instance is not meant in a moral sense, it refers more to the world being purposeless or random, in the sense that ‘god’ can be seen as an attempt by humans to impose order upon nature.

Regarding the archangel and his particular beliefs … well, it seemed necessary to have one of the four archetypal minor characters represent traditional religion, and for traditional religion to be addressed by the foreigner and the orphan in their quest to achieve their own understanding of the natural world – but necessary only in the sense that they address most other attitudes and philosophies too. Religion is not the specific target here, although perhaps it’s the most obvious one. As for all the accompanying sex and sadomasochism – well hey, although I’m atheist these days, I was raised Catholic, so no doubt some personal stuff is coming through.

I felt that the novel showed life on earth as subject to rhythms and cycles of nature which exist independently of us and are neither benign nor malignant, but must be respected. Was this something you were trying to convey?

To a degree, although I wouldn’t say that it was meant to be any kind of over-arching message, it’s merely something that seemed to emerge from the drama - it’s a realisation which largely eludes the foreigner and contributes to his endless suffering, but which of course the orphan grasps instinctively. But beyond the implications of this for the story, I wasn’t trying to make any particular political or ecological point. The book is meant to be entertainment, not a manifesto.

You write fiction across a range of genres, from realist literary fiction to crime to satire – all your novels (apart from Praise and its sequel 1988) have a very different style and feel from each other. Is this a conscious exploration of different literary forms, or is it simply how your ideas evolve?

Mostly the latter. With the exception of Last Drinks, where I very consciously decided to write a crime novel, the style of each new book seems to emerge organically along with the characters and the plot, and without any deliberate decision about genre on my part.

I finished this novel wowed by the journey, but not quite sure of what I’d experienced. My head was full of questions and interpretations. Were you striving for this effect – of multiple interpretations?

Ha – yes, I don’t quite know what to make of it either, and didn’t even while writing it. If it is indeed a modern parable, then I really can’t say what the moral of the story is. But certainly things are meant to be left open to interpretation. First of all, for instance, is any of it actually happening, or is it all made up in the orphan’s head? There’s no irrefutable proof either way, nor should there be. More to the point, I think its fine for a story to sound as if it has all sorts of significance and meaning, and yet in the end to not necessarily have any whatever.

Did you have any conscious literary influences when writing this novel? What were they?

No, I didn’t have any particular literary influences for this one (although I certainly have had for some of my other novels) but of course I was most definitely drawing upon a lifetime’s reading of non-fiction books about the weather and about volcanoes and about the ocean and about space and so on. The truth is, whenever I enter a bookshop or a library these days, it’s only very rarely that I make it past the non-fiction shelves and into the realms of literature.

Sue Saliba

2009-09-28T00:00:00Z

Sue Saliba, interviewed by Leanne Hall, Readings Carlton

Sue Saliba is the winner of this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Young Adult Fiction with her highly original novel Something In the World Called Love.

Something In The World Called Love features three very strong and distinctive characters in share housemates Kara, Esma and Simon. Do you relate to any one of these characters more than the others?

I can relate to aspects of each but as an entire character, it’s Esma I most relate to. It’s Esma who embodies and explores many autobiographical aspects of my life; most particularly, a near-desperate searching for a way to feel more alive in the world. As a younger person I was very shy and really struggled with accepting certain parts of myself. I thought that if I could learn to be like those more extroverted and confident people I knew, then I would be happy. Like Esma, I thought that the way to happiness or love lay in ‘fixing’ myself up. It was actually through Esma and her journey, as I wrote the novel, that I discovered for myself that there may be a different path – a gentler, more compassionate one – to experiencing love.

One of the most striking things about your novel is that it does not use any capitalisation at all. How early in the writing process did you make this decision?

From the very beginning, I wrote the piece without any capitalisation – and it just continued that way. It felt right to me on an instinctual level and I never really thought about it consciously or questioned it rationally as I wrote.

It’s actually been readers who’ve suggested the possible reasons for the absence of capitalisation to me – Esma’s emerging character, the fairy-tale like feel of the novel, the internal world of thoughts and feelings that the novel explores, the expression of a realm without judgement or structure… all kinds of explanations that are really interesting to me.

Your novel has a very strong sense of place, being set in and around the streets, houses and gardens of Carlton and Fitzroy. You currently live on Phillip Island; have you spent a lot of time in Carlton in the past?

Yes, I have. I lived in Carlton while I was a student at RMIT and at Melbourne University. I love Carlton with its sense of community and with lots of people and energy and with its terrace houses and gardens. It makes me feel like I’m inside a fairy tale. I can still see the stairways and balconies of the houses I lived in and I can remember visiting the gardens just before night fall when the sky is that blue-black colour and the bats are beginning to cross overhead and the possums are emerging from their trees. Although I now live on Phillip Island, amongst the penguins, seals and prehistoric-looking lapwings, Carlton is still a very special and magical place to me.

Something In The World Called Love is very poetic; the beautiful language you use inspires re-reading and contemplation. You have published poetry as well. Do you wear a completely different hat when you write prose than when you write poetry?

Not completely different – but a little bit different! Writing poetry, for me, is more like creating a fragment or moment with lots of space around it, that allows it to resonate. When writing prose (and I’m thinking particularly of a novel) I’m much more aware of the various forces in the overall piece that have to work together, the characters and their motivations, the movement of the story and the character’s journey of transformation.

Cate Kennedy

2009-09-02T00:00:00Z

Cate Kennedy, interviewed by Gail Jones

Cate Kennedy is well known as one of Australia's leading literary figures ‒ and our local master of the short story form. This month, she makes her novelistic debut. Multi-award-winning Australian novelist Gail Jones spoke to Cate about The World Beneath for Readings' New Australian Writing Feature series.

Somewhat mischievously, the writer William Faulkner once suggested that most novelists are really failed poets: they try poetry, are miserably defeated, then stretch lazily into prose, haunted by the lost poetic of ordinary things. In this version novelists are thinned out, beaten flat, rendered dull and exilic, poor creatures dealing with story when they might have found a single image. Faulkner himself, of course, was never such a case: his work rang with the inner poet and retained its intensity and concentration.

I’m curiously reminded of Faulkner in reading Cate Kennedy’s brilliant first novel, The World Beneath. She began as a poet and a travel writer (the marvellous Sing and Don’t Cry: A Mexican Journal deserves more attention), then published an extraordinary collection of short stories, Dark Roots, for which she was widely cherished and critically applauded. Dark Roots announced the advent of a seriously gifted writer. Kennedy has an almost classical sense of structure and a wisely nuanced style, one which fluctuates between vernacular language and poetic lyricism and seems Faulknerian, dare I say, in its density and deep concern for the fragile selves that lie beneath the insecure surface of the everyday.

In the rapturous reception to her book of stories, reviewers routinely commented on her work as ‘dark’, ‘intelligent’, ‘moody’, ‘eloquent’ and ‘funny’, but it also has a gravitas often lacking these days in Australian letters, a sense that simple experience matters, that families are genuinely mysterious, that there is an almost mythic dimension to every life too often casually disregarded. ‘Learning to dance in public,’ is how Kennedy describes the transition from writing stories to a novel, and she mentions her debt to her famously clever editor at Scribe, Aviva Tuffield, in helping her find a way through to the novelistic mode. There is no failed poet here, and no junior short-story writer: Kennedy’s work from the beginning announced a confident style and a sure and singular voice.

One of the great pleasures in talking to Cate Kennedy is to discover how clear-sighted and canny she is about her own work. ‘I wanted to write a book about stasis,’ she says, ‘about people spinning their wheels and then encountering a crisis that knocks them sideways’. So The World Beneath is about change and redemption, but not in any corny or simple sense. It follows the thread of an experience Kennedy encountered in 1983, when she was in Tasmania during the Franklin Dam protests. She was not a protester, she says, but spoke to protesters, and learned gradually – as we all did – of the historical significance of those events.

The World Beneath tells the story of an unhappy family, unhappy in its own particular way: Rich, a nomadic, self-obsessed photographer; Sandy, his dippy, New-Agey, fractious and estranged partner; and their ‘emo goth’ daughter, Sophie, a 15-year-old spiky with fury and fiercely intelligent. It is a credit to the skill of this novel that these characters engage and move us, seem utterly plausible, and are situated convincingly in a narrative of transformation. Rich, whose day-job is the manufacture of banal infomercials, has returned after years of absence to try to reconcile with his daughter, and suggests a trip to the Tasmanian wilderness as an opportunity for father-daughter bonding that might introduce each to the other in the heightened space of an adventure. He kits himself out in designer trekking gear, takes his expensive camera, hoping to capture and commodify what he sees; meanwhile Sandy takes the opportunity to head off to a goddess workshop, rendered in hilarious and cringe-worthy detail. Sophie is at first attracted to the possibly glamorous returned father, but becomes disillusioned, embeds herself in her cell phone, her iPod and various forms of digital detachment, and it is in her life, most movingly, that we see the emotional drive of the narrative open out. Cate speaks circumspectly of her character Sophie, suggesting that the ethical arc of the story demonstrates we must all ‘lose what we’re addicted to’. She speaks of young people who break up relationships by text-message and record fights on mobile phones: it is unmediated experience, ‘shedding accoutrements’, as she puts it, that the author pursues as a kind of lost, forgotten or repressed knowledge of ourselves. In the idealised scenario of back-to-nature and parent-child-bonding, things go wrong, of course, and lives are recalibrated. The trek moves into terror, darkness and a wonderfully satisfying resolution.

Cate Kennedy’s adult protagonists are oddly trapped in 1983: the Franklin protest was the place at which they met and the high point of their lives, and both mythologise the past in a manner oppressive to their daughter. Asked if she has written a ‘green novel’, Kennedy responds that she ‘is interested above all in the need we have for a lonely place to retreat to, but that we want our wilderness to include a kiosk’. Critical of the wilderness industry, which she considers ‘ethically compromised’, Kennedy is also recommending a kind of anti-commercial authenticity, something modest, undeluded and based on not wishing to contain or to conquer nature. ‘You can’t project onto wilderness,’ she says. ‘It’s just there, it’s just itself, and you’re just a little speck.’ The World Beneath questions the motives of trekkers and implies that there are at times narcissistic and egomaniacal impulses involved in wishing to enter wild spaces. Sandy, in a comic echo of her Franklin days, dithers about whether or not to cut back a tree in her yard and seems to suffer a condition of terminal ineptitude. Rich, on the other hand, is a legend in his own mind, foolishly confident and dangerously ignorant. He is a complex character, driven pompously to believe that he will witness the (extinct) Tasmanian tiger – ‘we love the idea,’ says Kennedy, ‘of something that survives in spite of us’ – and pathetically to encounter his own limits and foolishness. There is a wonderful scene in which father and daughter examine the traces of the tiger in the Hobart museum: this sets Rich up for his fantasy and Sophie for her intuition about the frailty of existence. The novel follows their trek not in any simple unfolding; the plot moves between all three characters, giving each their due, complicating each with poignancy and drama.

There is a taut moment in The World Beneath, in which Sophie stumbles over a cliff. The prose then pauses. We enter a gap. We don't know at that point if Sophie falls to injury or death or is mysteriously saved; we don't know if the world releases her, or buoys her up. This event announces itself with a pull in the gut, a kind of terror of consequence and a deep solicitude and affection for the welfare of the character. In the philosophical world of the novel, we enter the complexity and the ordinary tragedy of a family off-the-rails.

And there’s more, as Rich’s infomercials might say. The World Beneath uses the Greek legendary place names of central Tasmania to imply that we might also read this story as a kind of myth. Cate Kennedy mentions the Demeter-Persephone myth – Persephone is abducted and taken to the underworld to the distress of her mother; this is Hades, a world of shades, figures living a suspended shadowy life, not fully present, not wholly animated. So the novel reads on many dimensions and with an ethical concern about what it might mean to live as if we are shades, half-aware, already half gone.

Towards the end of our conversation, Cate Kennedy mentions the ‘work on yourself’ novel writing promotes, the strange luxury of thinking something through, of finding the words for and clarifying life’s puzzling experiences. With *The World Beneath she has also gifted this capacity to her readers. To put it another way, she has assumed her readers are intelligent enough to find – in the beautiful writing and the gripping story – some extra dimension of thoughtfulness and self-examination. It's a feisty tale wonderfully told; rigorous, clever, and yes, highly recommended.

Gail Jones is the multi-award-winning author of several novels, including Sixty Lights (winner of The Age Book of The Year 2005) and her latest, Sorry.

Gabrielle Williams

2009-08-11T00:00:00Z

Gabrielle Williams, interviewed by Leanne Hall

I absolutely adored every page of Beatle Meets Destiny, a quirky and very Melbourne-ish boy-meets-girl story. So I was very happy to get the chance to speak to author Gabrielle Williams, who is just as funny in an interview, as she is in her book.

I really enjoyed reading a book set in the Melbourne I know. Did you know from the start that the book had to be set in Melbourne? And on a related note, do you think people who live in Kew are going to get upset when they read your book?

Beatle Meets Destiny was always going to be set in Melbourne because I’m extraordinarily lazy. Setting it in Melbourne – in my suburb of East St Kilda – meant that when I needed to do research I simply walked out the door, went to the shops and came back again. Research done. And dinner bought for that night. It’s what’s known in the business as killing two birds with the one stone, and I’m a big fan.

On the other hand, I could have set it in Paris, France, which would have meant an overseas trip to the world’s most romantic city for research purposes, so … well, actually, funnily enough, my next book is going to be set in Paris, France.

Beatle is a very endearing character, despite the fact that he is cheating on his girlfriend. He’s not a bad guy – just a bit inexperienced and confused. Was it difficult for you to get this balance right?

I think Beatle is gorgeous. Kind of like my dream boyfriend – except for the cheating on his girlfriend part (that, and the fact that he’s eighteen and I’m … a fair bit older). But I think you’re right; he gets himself in a mess mainly because he’s confused and inexperienced. If he just tried a little bit of honesty, things wouldn’t go so horribly pear-shaped. But he’s trying, in his own funny way, not to hurt Cilla. Maybe that’s why he’s endearing – his heart’s in the right place, even if his lips aren’t!

Several of the characters in your book believe in superstitions, astrology, or the idea of destiny. Do you share these interests, or are you a sceptic?

My sensible self will tell you that horoscopes are crap. But then, secretly, I always read my horoscope. And I’m quite superstitious. And I wouldn’t walk under a ladder, even if you paid me. And the fact is, freaky things happen and you can’t help but notice them. For example, one of the themes that runs through Beatle Meets Destiny is the significance of names like Destiny. Ironically, in real life, my agent’s surname is Darling; a German film director has recently optioned the book and her surname is Justice; my publicist is called Rose (and roses trigger a fight in one scene in the book); and my editor’s name is Cat (and cats also feature heavily). Spooky? Yes. Superstitious? Me?

You have a real knack for the language teenagers use and the way they talk to each other. Have you been eavesdropping on all the teenagers you know?

I’m a shocking eavesdropper: my kids, my kids’ friends, teenagers on trams, couples in cafes, wherever I am, I listen in to other people’s conversations. I can’t help myself. I’ve even developed the skill of holding a conversation with one person, while at the same time listening in to the people behind me or beside me. Yes, Australia, I really do have talent.

Bruce Pascoe

2009-08-10T00:00:00Z

Bruce Pascoe, interviewed by Jason Cotter

The novel has a strong sense of place, particularly in evoking the natural environment and characters of East Gippsland, a part of the world that is obviously close to your heart. What does it mean to Jim Bloke? Do you have a favourite spot you've recreated in the novel?

Jim likes beauty. Having spent so much time in institutions he has made it a mission to be immersed in beauty and peace. Like many dreams it's abraded by reality but it remains his solace. The bay called Housekeeping is one of my favourite places. It's actually two places but I've laid one piece of geography over another. Giant banksias grow close to the water's edge, crayfish seek out you company. I used to gaze at it when I was working on an abalone boat.

Freshwater is actually Lake Baracoota and the description in Bloke is a factual representation. While camping there two years ago, a Sea Eagle flew over our tent at dawn. I don't invent much, I just pull the quilt to bits and sew it back together to tell a different story. To please myself.

Jim Bloke is a likeable, self-taught man who hasn't become too hard or wary after a stretch in prison and some other hard knocks. He appears to want to settle and perhaps finally find his place in the world and the love he craves. But as much as he thinks he's got a handle on things, there is a lot about himself and the others around him he seems to wilfully ignore. Why?

He's got this plan for the reinvention of his life but it's like a shopping list. When he gets to the supermarket they're out of lamb steaks and he has to settle for lamb and garlic sausages. They're not bad but require a different recipe. The upside is that they have preservative.

Institutions teach control and Jim reckons he can institute the same rules for his life. The problem is that institutions are hermetically sealed and their environments are controllable. Wild life, however, operates on the chaos principle.

Jim enjoys playful, idiosyncratic and often funny turns of phrase, in his own speech and that of others. Did you have particular people in mind when writing each character? Do you collect examples of particular language before writing, or does it naturally grow from the characters as you write?

Throughout my life I've been surrounded by people who speak like this. I've worked in the fishing industry and, but for a few years, lived my life in the bush, so it's second nature. I've also been surrounded by strong women, so I hope people notice how Giovanna and Aunty Cookup speak. One of my dearest girlfriends used to delight in saying, I haven't had so much fun since the chooks got out.

I don't have to make a conscious effort to source dialogue, these people speak in my head all the time. Yes, I hear voices. All the characters are blends of people, so the admixture causes them to develop independent characters. Fortunately, I can anticipate what they're going to say next.

A few of the characters have a yearning for a simpler, less commercial, less greedy and cut-throat past, though their present still contains mysterious, almost magical, people and places (among plenty of others besides.) Are you suggesting all is not lost and plenty can yet be recovered?

What's the alternative? The two most terrifying things I've been confronted with are the paling fence and the fawn cardigan. It's possible to live without them, but you have to be prepared for the restrictions of bush life. When I visit cities I have a window of three days before the terror of sparrows, starlings and pavements kicks in. In those 72 hours I have a meal out, see a play at La Mama, go to a few galleries, knock about with degenerate artists and then flee. When I'm next in Melbourne, I'm going to that new Recital centre in Southbank. You could only have something like that in a city but that's no excuse for us all to live there. Australia is a beautiful place but too few can leave their suburb long enough to see it.

As for some of the difficulties Jim comes up against, is the Australian fishing industry ripe for an Underbelly style expose?

Capitalism and communism have this thing about increasing production. Growth is seen as the natural order, which is why our governments and churches encourage population growth. We can't feed all these people, so supplies dwindle and prices rise. Add ridiculous sums of money to any industry and you will attract some criminal minds. Most fishermen are honest but they have to compete for a living; the result is plunder.

Do you think Australia is currently undergoing a deeper positive shift in dealing with its Aboriginal past?

Australians are aching for a sense of belonging and legitimacy because most love their country and want to embrace it. Past generations have found it difficult because the spectre of contact history has caused them to gaze on the land through Perseus’s mirror. The young have plastic minds which allow them to ask questions of the past and I'm full of admiration for their searching enquiry. Without that curiosity and generosity we are destined to become Senator Fielding clones. Sorry to spoil your day with such a prospect.

To what extent do the indigenous communities of Gippsland maintain their connection to land and culture? Is this current connection fading or growing? If growing, has a revival of local language been part of this? And have you drawn from your own experience in portraying Jim's reconnection to his family and background?

My family was told we had an Aboriginal heritage. Some of what the genealogist claimed has been incorrect but our search has uncovered other connections. Those connections are all remote and, for many, don't amount to enough to claim identity but it's too late. The search for family revealed a radically different history of Australia. To have swallowed the fantasy history without question is a continuing indictment of my brain and my education. The quest to inform myself and find family has racked up deep obligation to many Aboriginal families and I will never fully repay those debts. But I'll die trying. There is an incredible cultural revival going on in Victoria and the Ganai of Gippsland are in the vanguard of that movement. I have sat in some of the kitchens Jim visits and heard the most radical thought expressed by people with no education and no money. No wonder I'm optimistic.

A few of your novels are interlinked. In writing and editing Bloke, did you produce further material to draw the novels together as a whole?

Jim Bloke is related to Jim Fox, the character of my first few novels. Many of the characters, or their children, come and go throughout the books because I crave their company. I say without shame that I love the way Faulkner creates a world. Others do it too, but I love the way Faulkner's world is such a truckload of kittens and chooks: chaos. I wish someone would ask me about the dogs and birds in my books. And the boats. And perfumed trees.