I read it, and it was great fun – particularly the raunchy historical Scottish sex, and the time-travel element. I gave it to my sister (now a bookstore girl herself) and she went on to read the whole series.

I found out the author, Diana Gabaldon, was going to be in town at a dinner event hosted by Dymocks Camberwell on my sister’s birthday, on the back of her new book An Echo in the Bone. I took Sonja along for her birthday, and followed it up with a few questions about what it’s like to meet your favourite (and a very famous) author…

Pictured: Diana Gabaldon, Sonja and I.

It was a massive event, hey? What did you think of the crowd and the other fans?

Yeah, it was a big event – but then I haven’t been to any other author dinners so I’m not sure what’s normal. I believe there were 200 people in attendance. The crowd was generally women in their 40s and 50s, I was possibly the youngest person in the room. This wasn’t surprising, considering that the themes in her novels generally appeal to that audience. I must be weird.

You’re not weird! Maybe other young people just haven’t discovered her because her books are marketed a certain way? When we walked in the room, you were talking about the role that authors seem to play in this day and age – as presenters and actors. It contradicts their actual job – sitting in a room alone, forming this massive work, yeah?

This I definitely don’t understand! Writers seem more inclined to be of the ‘hermit’ variety of human (at least at times). Creatively, they like to be alone where they can get their head around how best to execute their art. It seems so odd to me that part of the job for a highly successful author these days is to stand up in front of a massive crowd and deliver a perfectly memorised 45 minute speech, before sitting down to sign books with their perfectly practiced plastic-looking camera-smile. All for the sake of sales. What if you had stage fright? I would be wondering when it was I signed up to be an actress.

Yeah, there’s a real contradiction there – though DG did seem quite happy to talk to us all. What did you think of her in person? And what of her speech?

DG as a person exceeded my expectations! She was very professional – she seemed comfortable in displaying herself and grateful to us for appreciating and supporting her work. She was a shortish gypsy-looking woman with long hair and an attractive face that seemed younger than her years. Her voice surprised me: a raspy fast-paced American accent that gave the impression she could barely keep up with her own thoughts, and with it she successfully entranced us. Her talk was witty, honest and delightfully nerdy. A scientist by trade, she is clearly intellectual. I loved that she had the guts to read one of the great erotic scenes from An Echo in the Bone. She knew what we would want, and she delivered!

She did speak super fast, like her brain was working a million miles an hour, though she also managed to come across as calm and comfortable! You had a bit of an awkward moment when you got your books signed, though, didn’t you?

Ha! I knew you would bring this up. You had been telling me earlier I should say something to her, and I didn’t know what to say because I know I am just another number and I don’t want to try and say something clever just to be remembered. Anyway, without anything planned we leaned in for a photo and I thought it would be nice to just connect with her for a moment. So I said (stupidly) ‘Ha, everyone must smell like wine’ (because they have to lean over her for the photo). It seems she didn’t even hear me, as she replied ‘There you go, thank you’, handing me my signed book. I walked off in a state of embarrassment and started giggling my arse off with you as soon as we were out of hearing distance. Ergh. I blame the wine.

There were some hardcore fans aiming accusations at her about the books and characters, weren’t there? It was almost like they felt they had this sense of entitlement and ownership over the works and the author as well, yeah? And then there was the dog lady…

Oh the dog lady. During Q & A this lady asked a question about DG’s many dogs and then proceeded to have a conversation with her about breeding and the appearance of her own canines. Hello? She doesn’t care, and the whole room is listening! As you said, another woman was almost making accusations at DG rather than asking a proper question.

As far as their feeling ownership, I agree that it seemed that way. It was DG’s brilliance that brought this imaginary world into our lives in the first place – so what gives these people a right to the way the story goes?  It is her creation. I guess some people see it differently. It was so good though how when DG didn’t understand one of the ’smart’ words in the aggressive woman’s question she just said ‘Sorry, I don’t understand?’ which made the woman look totally ridiculous.

You don’t think an author has some responsibility to his/her readers? The people who are supplying them with an income?

Well, to some extent. Especially when working on a series such as DG’s ‘Outlander’. There needs to be consistency in both the content and writing style from book to book. Otherwise readers’ expectations will be understandably upset. But my point is some people seem to feel a need to challenge someone who has been more successful than them. I’m not sure why. As you know, I’m also bothered by the slow pace in her most recent novel, Echo in the Bone, and the depth in which she describes her characters’ movements. If she loses my interest then yes, there is obviously something she is doing wrong. But if I were inclined to ask her about it, I don’t think I’d do it in an assuming, superior sort of way that attempts to put her off and make myself look good in front of others.

Hehe, I’m glad. But then I know one question I asked at a recent writers fest I really stuffed up, and it seemed accusatory. Sometimes it’s an accident I think.

Does it make a difference, meeting an author (to the reading experience)? Would you want to meet anyone else?

I don’t think it makes a difference to the reading experience. Do you? But I suppose I can now see parts of her own personality that she has put into her main character, Claire, and I like that I can see this. It makes Claire even more real, somehow. But when I said this to one of the ladies at the dinner, she hadn’t noticed. I will probably think of her more now as I read, I don’t know. There are plenty of authors I would love to meet, if only to see what they are like. I don’t think it changes anything unless you love their book and they turn out to be a nasty person. I wonder if you would be loyal to them anyway because of their work or write them off because of their personality? I’m sure you have had experience with this.

Well, with some it has enhanced the experience, with others … I’ve never read their books again. Meeting both Gail Jones and Alex Miller (my two favourite Aus writers) were memorable experiences. Another author (who I shall not name) treated me like a little girl. I’d travelled pretty far for that event too. So, regardless of the fact I like this author’s writing, I have been turned off picking up their books! So it can have an effect.

Which author would you most want to meet then? Let’s make it fun and say – alive or dead? And lastly, what was the highlight of the evening?

Hmm, tough one. At the moment I would probably say Vladimir Nabokov. I am intrigued by him, as are many. But there are still so many authors I haven’t read so it could change later.

The highlight of the night for me would be the reading. I particularly remember the point where she said unflinchingly in her accent: ‘A shiver ran through him at the warmth of my mouth and I lifted my hands involuntarily, cradling his balls.’ Ha! I love her unabashed countenance and wish I had such a quality without worrying about putting people off. Care to share your highlight?

Okay – mine was when she said how when people asked her: ‘why would you have a thing for a man in a kilt?’ her reply was: ‘You can imagine it’d only be ten seconds before he had you against the wall’. Aye!

Readers – have you had the chance to meet any of your favourite authors? Was it wonderful or woeful? Who would you most like to meet?

Prompts: LiteraryMinded
Responses: Kathy Charles

LM:

I have this photograph of John Belushi as a canvas print in my hallway. Recently a friend asked me why I had a picture of Guy Sebastian hanging on my wall. Guy Sebastian aint got lapels like this.

History (destroyed, captured, mythologised).

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the idea of ‘Dark Tourism’, which is when people visit places where death and suffering have occurred. When bad things happen there is an inclination to erase any evidence of the event, which is understandable, but I think it is just as natural to want to see these places for yourself. Los Angeles has a booming Dark Tourism industry, due to the number of scandalous incidents the town has played host to. But LA is also a town that constantly reinvents itself, and so many of theses sites, like the Ambassador Hotel where Senator Robert Kennedy was assasinated, are being lost to development.     

Fame.

I was once a paid-up member of the David Bowie Fan Club. This was mainly so I would be one of the first to be able to buy tickets to his Melbourne concerts. The first night I was in the front row, within spitting distance of the man himself. I like to think we made eye contact on more than one occasion. The second night I was way up the back, but Bowie decided to mix things up and play the entire first half of the album Low which more than made up for the crappy seats. David Bowie is an architect of our modern idea of fame, and managed to combine both style and subtance without forsaking one for the other. In an interesting side note Gus Van Sant directed this music video. He also directed a music video for the boy group Hanson of ‘MmmBop’ fame. Someone once told me that my head was so full of trivial pop culture nonsense that there couldn’t be much room for anything else. I guess they had a point.

‘For every two minutes of glamour, there are eight hours of hard work’ – Jessica Savitch

I once saw Paris Hilton shopping in Bel Air. There was one lone photographer with her and it seemed pretty obvious in the way they interacted that she had enlisted him to follow her around. Celebrity is largely an illusion. When the young and beautiful hit the town in Hollywood they have their publicists send out a press release so the paparazzi will know where to find them. The same actors who shield their faces and beg for their privacy know very well that if they choose to lunch at The Ivy they will be photographed. The reluctant star is a very carefully constructed persona that plays on our sympathies. It takes a lot of hard work to make it look so unwanted.

Classifying and cataloguing.

Some people believe that numerology plays a significant role in celebrity death. There is a group called the Forever 27 Club that refers to musicians who died at the tender age of 27. Members of this club include Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. Chris Farley died at exactly the same age as his idol John Belushi. Then there’s John Lennon and his connection to the number 9. I think such superstitions help us fathom why people we love die and admire die so tragically. It gives us some kind of weird logic we can grasp onto.

LM:

In 1932 a young actress named Peg Entwhiste moved to Hollywood with dreams of being a movie star. She was signed to a contract at RKO Pictures but only ever received a small role in one film. When RKO decided not to renew her contract she walked up to the end of Beachwood Drive and made her way through the thick brush to the Hollywood sign. When she arrived at the sign she climbed the ladder to the top of the 50-foot letter ‘H’, looked out over the town that had rejected her, and jumped. She was 24 years old.

Tragedy.

It makes me sad when people who seem to have so much going for them die tragically and needlessly. Every time I listen to a Kurt Cobain song or watch a John Belushi movie I can’t help but wonder what else they could have achieved had they stuck around. Some days it’s enough to bring me to tears. Most people have little sympathy for celebrities who throw it all away, as they appear to have it all. I think the idea that you can be rich and famous and still miserable scares us. Sometimes it’s easier to judge than empathise.

End credits.

In the song ‘Sunset Strip’ Courtney Love sings: ‘Rock star. Pop star. Everybody dies.’ No matter how famous you are, in the end we all fade to black.

www.kathycharles.com

Text Publishing’s Hollywood Ending page.

Part One of this interview can be found here.

Pictured: Emily Maguire and I before the Sleepers Salon in October.

I ask Maguire about the setting. Is it pertinent for this story to be set in Sydney? She says it probably could have been a few cities, but ‘western Sydney is – the cliché is ‘melting pot’, but it’s not very melty actually, it’s more like lots of different kinds of people clashing with each other.

‘Part of it is, Adam is an outsider, his expectations of Sydney are Bondi and beaches, sea water, all that side of it, and it’s not that, y’no?. But there are two universities near there so there are students, there are a lot of international students, there are a lot of immigrants, but it’s also partly, newly gentrified so you have wealth cropping up and – it’s a clash.

‘There were a few other places in the world, there are probably parts of Melbourne, there are certain American cities that have that too. But as an Australian writing, and as someone from Sydney, I think that particular area is the kind of place where you do get these odd mixes of people who have smashed into each other and are a bit stuck where they are and so you get these weird kind of friendships.

‘There are a lot of street characters there too, they’re known as that although I’m sure they don’t think of themselves as characters – they’re living their lives – but, people who’ve lived there a long time can tell you the stories about these street people. “The man with a stick” is kinda based on a real guy.’

I was really struck by how calm the character Katie is after she acts out, such as after she harms herself. Her calmness is what’s really confronting to Adam and the other characters. There’s a scene where she’s bald, barefoot and scarred, and she’s wearing a red dress ‘of a style Graeme recognised from his youth’, and a navy and white polka-dot apron. She is making Graeme dinner. It’s a very beautiful, sad and tense scene. I asked Maguire if she thought some readers might be confronted by the book, the way the other characters are sometimes confronted by Katie.

‘Yeah. It’s really interesting to me how different people relate to the characters when they read it – I feel like I learn a lot about them. Some people have said “she’s so irritating, she’s so self-indulgent”, which I think is partly true, but others have said “I love her, she’s great” – and I feel somewhere in between the two. I hope both things are true – that even though she is irritating and kind of self-indulgent, that’s the flip-side of what I think is lovely about her, which is the deep empathy and the way she doesn’t “mature things away”. She takes everything seriously, whether it’s a celebrity’s crisis, or cooking dinner – she really throws herself into everything – which can be trying, if you’re actually with someone like that’.

There’s a part in the book, in one of Katie’s chapters, about distraction being ‘the stuff of life’ and being what allowed Katie to ‘get on with the stuff of life’. I did sort of see it as the symbolic part – of contemporary existence in general. But Maguire said that’s only one part of it: ‘I don’t mean to highlight it in just a cynical, critical way because I think distraction is a big part of actual survival. The characters don’t really have a religion or an afterlife to look forward to and you do kinda get to that point of “what’s the point?” And part of that is just connecting with other people and finding beauty in the world and things to care about. So that’s the other side of that. So it can become a really negative thing if you never stop to reflect – if you’re always concentrating on the next thing so you never have to stop and you never have to think about your life, but to an extent it’s quite a healthy coping mechanism, too.’

Because I always love to know what authors read, particularly if I admire them and their writing, I ask Maguire about some of her favourite books. She goes back often to Graham Greene. ‘He’s a Catholic writer, in that his Catholicism comes into his work, but he’s very cold and hard. His writing is old-fashioned in a way but it’s sort of the way I write too, and what I love, that old-fashioned psychological realism. Characters that really start delving into their soul, and books that examine how they make choices in their life. One of his books in particular, The Heart of the Matter, was hugely influential for Smoke in the Room.’

Jane Eyre is Maguire’s ‘touchstone book’, but more for her as a person, than a writer. ‘It’s just a really important book to me … I just love it’. She also cites Nadine Gordimer – the South African novelist, ‘who is my idol in the way she can write about politics or political situations, but her novels are still really character-driven. You never feel like you’re reading a political novel, but it’s there. It’s South Africa and it’s the context of the lives of her characters. She’s wonderful’.

After our talk, I watch Maguire in Q&A with Steven Amsterdam at the Sleepers Salon, and learn that at an early stage of writing this book, she suffered a stroke. What happened, was that she came back to the draft and found it somewhat ‘cold’. The book you read now has come about through a life-changing experience. And the characters have their own revelations – through circumstance, through inevitability, and through conscious decision. It’s sometimes up to the reader to think about just which of these things has affected an outcome (choice or inevitability?). And I’m sure Maguire would be able to see deep inside you, depending what you chose.

You can find more details about Emily Maguire and her books on her website.

Smoke in the Room is published by Picador.

I caught up with Emily Maguire one afternoon in Melbourne to ask her about the book. We sat in the corner of a pub and listened to the kitchen staff belting out 60s rock & roll. I’ve always thought Maguire looks a bit like Christina Ricci – her eyes are large and warm, very deep, and she has the same sort of edge. She is someone whose writing and talks (I have seen her at a few writers’ festivals) indicate that she is one of those people possessed by an honest knowledge about both the sadness and the beauty of the world, and I expect this has been the case since she was very young. She is also often touted, quite truthfully, as a ‘voice of her generation’, writing in both fiction and nonfiction about young people, particularly women, in contemporary Australia.

Smoke in the Room began with the character of Graeme, Maguire says. She had coincidentally been reading a lot of biographies with a similar theme. ‘One of them was of the Aboriginal activist Rob Riley, who committed suicide in ’96. And then I read a long article about Iris Chang, an American writer who wrote a historical account of the rape of Nanking. She was only 36, I think, and she committed suicide, after that book. The book is devastating.

‘So, I was thinking about the toll, that being really engaged in social justice or foreign correspondence, can take. And then I also happened to read a biography of Graham Greene, who’s my favourite twentieth-century writer, and he liked to tell this story – and I wonder if it’s a little bit of an exaggeration – about how when he was a teenager he’d feel depression coming on and he would play Russian Roulette. He suffered from depression his whole life, but he said that he found the best cure – rather than psychotherapy or anything – was to travel to really dangerous places. And so you can track the worst places in the world in the twentieth-century by looking at where Graham Greene went. He went to the most terrible places. And he said that’s when he felt best.’

The character of Graeme in Smoke in the Room is named, then, after Greene, and he too, has travelled to dangerous places all throughout his life. It’s only the young character Katie who has insight into this behaviour, in the book. Maguire wondered whether ‘someone like him is drawn to that kind of work as a way to stave off depression or apathy’. And if not, ‘is this something that will have this cumulative kind of effect when you stop?’

The other part of Graeme came about through people-watching. ‘I would see just around the area these men in their 50s or 60s who look very neat and put-together, not homeless or anything, but just look so lonely and isolated’.

Katie’s philosophical outlook on life – living honestly, emotionally, for-the-moment, no matter how hard-hitting the truth of the moment is – contrasts her new friend and lover Adam’s outlook. Adam prefers to distance himself or step back, or divest his energy in something else – pick up the pieces, despite the weight of his grief. Katie is more inclined to let it in and go with it. Maguire says: ‘Part of it is this kind of context of who you are in relation to society, because Adam is someone who has always been really privileged, and lucky, and his worst complaint is that his mum never felt sorry for him. So when this terrible thing happens to him – to lose someone – he’s almost offended by it happening, and he doesn’t really have any kind of inner resources to cope with something like that happening to him. Whereas Katie’s someone who’s – whether it’s in her nature or related to her experiences in life – a lot more accepting of the fact that shit happens. And that’s all part of life, and she doesn’t take it personally in the same way, so she’s able to kind of roll with it’.

Katie really reminds me of that line in the movie Adaptation: ‘You are what you love, not what loves you.’ She’ll go on loving, believing, feeling, expressing – whether or not it is reciprocated.

Part Two of this interview can be found here.

You can find more details about Emily Maguire and her books on her website.

Liz says:

One of the reasons I took a year off from work/Melbourne life to come and volunteer in Bali in the first place was to have more time in my life for my writing. Bali is much cheaper to live in, and that was a factor in my decision to come here. My risk seems, in the end, to have been successful as I’m now much-more published and have gained a much higher profile for my writing. I think writers owe it to their talents to think creatively about how to find more time to write.

I don’t mind you asking about how I can ask people for their money. Trust me, the same question has crossed my mind many times. Who am I, etc.? But isn’t this just extension of even being a writer? Who are we to put our words out there? And yes, I did just go out there and ask for it, and most people won’t ask for what they want. I find most writers and artists dreadful at believing in and promoting themselves and asking for what they need or want. I have felt very guilty, at times, when I read stories about kids needing surgery or people losing their homes, but dreams are vital and important too, and I work actively in my other life to help poor families in Indonesia.

I had been asking people for money for two years as a grant writer, so it seemed a short step to asking for myself. There are precious few grants that let you take time off to write your opus, and still pay the rent; they’re highly competitive and often go to established writers. It’s just as crucial for society to support the arts as to alleviate poverty.

Also, I help other writers every chance I get - refer to a publisher, network, talk about their book, etc. I firmly believe that a ‘rising tide lifts all boats.’ A number of newly-established and as-yet unpublished writers have given me money for November. I will help them out, in turn. I am in an unusual situation. Through my networking, and by helping other writers, I have direct access to editors at Random House, Harper Collins and Anvil Press (PI), as well as Insight Publications in Melbourne. So networking, and supporting other writers, works to help ourselves.

I’ve had a number of people tell me that I’m sort of living their dream, and inspiring them. Most of the contributions have come from friends and family, and more than half of the contributions have been over the $10 I asked for, with several at $50, $70 or $100. It will be interesting to see if any of my donors get motivated in their own life and follow through on their own projects. Already, I’ve had one friend decide to make more time to write by sending her eldest to school early. I love inspiring others!

As for fund raising, I’ve raised about $1200, and there’s still promised payments to come in. I’ve got enough to take off November, and part of December. I asked for more than I needed, expecting to be short of my goal.

Since I started my fund raising, I’ve noticed a number of other writers out there also asking for money to support them during November to write a book, but none seemed to have used social networks, or gotten ‘ballsy’ about asking, like I did. But I have to say, I worked in business and retail for many years, so some of these skills have rubbed off on my writing. I think every writer should take a marketing course or read marketing books, ie Guerilla Marketing for Writers.

A friend told me about several bands (Radiohead, Meridian, Porcupine Tree) that raise money from their fans for a new album. The bands then give donors a special edition, signed CD. He suggested I give people something back in exchange for their money, hence the offer to give people who donate a copy of my book once it’s published.

I got the attention of the book editor at The Huffington Post, who’s asked me if I want to blog about raising money to take time off to write my book, then blog the actual writing of it. If this comes about it will hopefully help to get publishers interested.

But now I’m finding an interesting thing: now that I have to write the book draft, I’m getting incredibly nervous. Part of the reason I set it up this way was to force myself to sit down and do it. I can’t back out now, or I’ll lose face and disappoint people. I wonder if one reason we don’t ‘make the time’ or ‘find the time’ in busy lives to write our great works is because of fear, not a lack of time. Theodore Sturgeon wrote his short stories in 15 minutes every morning when he was starting out and working as a steelworker all day.

You can follow Liz on Twitter, to see how it all pans out.

Who is your favourite superhero and why?

I’d love to say it’s some less-well-known-to-the-general-public superhero like Machine Man or Metamorpho, but to be honest it’s a tie between Superman and Spider-Man, partly because their costumes are so striking and colourful, partly because they’re both nice-guy superheroes who always try to use their powers to help people and do the right thing, and partly because their comics, when done well (like Amazing Spider-Man #1-36 and All-Star Superman #1-12), are just plain straight-up gee-whiz fun.

Plus: flying guy with laser eyes and bouncy dude who sticks to walls. What’s not to like?

Who is your favourite poet?

I always find this question tricky and bat it away with a list. Some poets whose work I love  include Jas H. Duke for his straighforward storytelling and cynical humour, Stephen Dobyns for his blend of fantasy and the everyday, and James Tate for his restrained surrealism. I’m also a big fan of alicia sometimes for her science-geek tendencies and palpable passion, and David Prater for his playfulness and ability to accurately capture 21st century life.

I’ve just recently developed two new poetry crushes, on US poet Bob Hicok, who has a great eye for both engaging personal narrative work and playful flights of imagination, and on Australian poet LK Holt, whose work appeals to me for its grounding in both the historical and the scientific.

Tell me about the mining of childhood?

I don’t do it deliberately, if that’s what you’re asking. In fact I never really thought about it until you asked, but I can see why you’d ask something like that after reading my poetry.

I’ve always tried to keep in touch with what you might think of as a child’s way of seeing things, which is to say that I try to look at things with fresh eyes, with an open mind and a sense of curiosity and a willingness to let the imagination run wherever it wants to run. That way of seeing isn’t exclusive to children, of course, but when I tap into that, it can be a good way to come up with an idea for a poem.

Poems like ‘Infinity Plus One’, which is a mashup of every playground myth about love, and ‘You Should Have Killed the Monkey First’, which starts with an eight-year-old’s insight into why the baddies never won on superhero cartoons, are good examples of that way of doing things.

I do take other approaches with my poems, but it’s a fair cop to say that there’s some kind of childhood-inspired thread running through them, for sure.

Is love and longing the stuff of poetry?

Not necessarily. I mean, it can be… These days I find that stuff pretty hard to write about. I’ve cranked out a decent chunk of wistful love poems in my time – both of the unrequited and requited sort, but having done a bit of that stuff, I find it really difficult to come up with new and interesting ways to tackle such universal themes without delving into cliche or repeating myself.

My current preference is to try to approach poems with more specific, less big-question subjects in mind, like ‘what if someone got all of the superheroes’ powers all at once?’ or ‘what’s it feel like to race your bike to the train station with only five minutes until the train leaves?’

What are the best moments?

The ones that you are aware of while they’re happening.

Will you share a poem from The Third Fruit is a Bird?

You mentioned that you liked ‘Received Wisdom’, so let’s go with that. Here’s a bit of that childhood-mining, then:

Received Wisdom

Chewing a greylead pencil could give you lead poisoning. Writing on your hand in biro could give you blood poisoning. Philip Odlum ate Clag. Everyone else ate playdough. If you ran with scissors you’d trip and stab yourself. If you swallowed an apple-pip an apple tree would grow in your stomach. Those yellow flowers with sweet-tasting stems? A dog pissed on them. Fight behind the shelter-sheds. Will you get with my friend? Last year a kid fell off the monkey-bars and broke her arm. Another kid got hit in the eye with a tennis ball. His eye fully fell out. It was just hanging there on the end of the nerve. If you ate the crusts of your sandwiches your hair would go all curly. Meat pies were made of kangaroo. Kentucky Fried Chicken was really rabbit. Hot dogs were full of rat poo. Sitting down while doing a wee would turn you into a girl. If you held on and didn’t go to the toilet, and you fell down the stairs, your bladder would burst and you would die. When a man and a lady love each other very much they hug each other in a special way. That’s where babies come from.

Tell us about your Twitter novel – what and why?

I’m writing a story in 140-or-less-character instalments using twitter. It’s called ‘Aramis Fox’. It’s the story of a guy who gets superpowers and tries to work out where they came from at the same time as working out what to do with them. It’s updated fairly regularly (here), with a story-so-far version in a slightly more easily read format here. I try to update it at least every three days, and so far I’ve been reasonably successful.

I started it because I’d seen serialised fiction done online by other writers – using twitter and blogs – and I thought it would be an interesting thing to do. It was also a way to kind of trick (or embarrass) myself into committing publicly to writing something on a regular basis. I don’t have much spare time for writing at the moment, so the micro size of twitter posts made the task seem quite doable.

I’m hoping to learn something about the way I write (and the way I can write) from the process. So far I’m pretty happy with the way it’s worked out. There are things that I’m doing quite naturally to work within the restraints of this format – the brevity, the regularity, the comparative improvisation – that are different from the way I normally approach writing.

When I’m working on a post I tend to rewrite it a few times to get it to the right length and to make sure it gets across the point I’m trying to make. I think this close revision-in-progress of every sentence has produced some interesting results. It reminds me – if you’ll forgive the hubris of the comparison – of what Richard Brautigan said about teaching himself to write poetry so that he could learn to write a good, strong sentence. Once he was confident he knew how to write a good sentence, only then would he start writing a novel. You can see that approach in the muscularity and poetry of his prose writing, and I like to think there’s something similar happening with this story.

One of the most satisfying things, though, is the distinct sense of the story moving forward and making progress – however slow it may be – that comes with uploading each new post.

Words are cool because…

…they’re the perfect building block: you can carry as many with you as you need, there’s an inexhaustable supply, their variety is almost incalculable and they fit together in an infinite number of ways.

Visit Adam Ford’s great blog here.

The Ice Age
Kirsten Reed
Text, 2009
9781921520747

Prompts: LiteraryMinded
Responses: Kirsten Reed

One of your own ‘on the road’ experiences…

I was seventeen, hitching a short distance (about forty miles; this was a leg of my journey for which there was no connecting bus). The sun was about to set, and I was starting to worry, as I stood by the roadside collecting weird looks and the occasional lewd shout, but no ride. Finally a maroon van pulled sharply into a driveway in front of me, stopping me in my tracks—as daunting as it was promising. The passenger door swung open to reveal an old man with dyed black hair in the driver’s seat, who asked me where I was headed through a hole in his throat. It was a little spooky. I was reminded of the hitchhiking scene in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, when his driver’s head morphs into a shrieking bug-eyed monster. Oddly, this calmed me, as I realised the probability of this old man’s head mutating was quite slim. Talking through a tracheotomy was probably as freaky as he was going to get. As I hovered outside his open door, the look on his face said ‘Stop judging me and get in the damn van already’, and I hopped in. His name was Pierre. He explained raspily and breathlessly that he used to be an actor, before the operation. After, he ran a restaurant. He chauffeured me to the door of my lodgings. In the course of the forty mile drive he’d offered me a job, given me a good luck talisman from around his neck, and insisted on giving me all the money in his wallet (thirty bucks) to help me along on the rest of my trip.

Kerouac/Nabokov

At first the speculation that I’d written The Ice Age under the influence of these two took me aback slightly. When I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking of anything except my characters and story. I mostly just mined my own life. I don’t remember much about On the Road or Lolita, apart from a few lasting impressions. What I recall most vividly is the unapologetic spirit of expression contained in each, which alone makes these books iconic. Given the intuitive quality of the creative process, pinpointing the inspiration behind my writing is an inexact science. I used to think all my ideas were completely original, until I came across a story about Helen Keller. She was told a children’s story via sign language before she learned to understand and communicate by this means, or any. Later, she penned the story, thinking she had written it herself. This always serves to remind me: no one creates in a vacuum. Plus if I am going to be compared to other authors, I have to acknowledge it’s flattering to have these two names crop up with regularity.

Cute Animals (here)

Not only did I trawl this link at length, I called my boyfriend over to look, too. (Puppy porn?) I once went missing on a family outing when I was about eight, and was later recovered in a paddock, hugging a calf. The only blog I follow on a daily basis relates to pit bull rescue. I have had pets I like more than most people. Growing up I read every animal book I could find. It’s official: I’m a disgracefully wholesome animal-loving dork.

Art vs writing

One, I usually I have to stand up, and end up kind of messy. The other, I get to sit down.

Egon Schiele:

I love him. I discovered  his work via a life drawing tutor in London. He looked over my drawings one evening, and noted I’d probably just been to the Egon Schiele exhibition in town. I’m actually kind of a philistine. True to form, I responded, ‘Who’s Egon Schiele?’ He was shocked, and confessed he’d been operating under the assumption my drawing style was a direct result of an Egon Schiele infatuation. He insisted I check out his exhibition. I did, and it totally blew my mind. It was cool at the age of seventeen/eighteen to note that someone working almost 100 years ago produced work at least, if not more, edgy, raw, rude, and emotive than any artist working today. There is so much skill and passion in his works, they seem imbued with some sort of life force. Looking at them, I felt present in the moment they were created. That, and he was just such a good draughtsman. I wished I could go back in time, and join the Austrian expressionist movement, the way most normal people wish they were alive to party in the 1960’s. I don’t have many refined cultural tastes, but those that I do possess, I deposited in the character of Gunther.

Eleanor Dark’s room

I felt like an imposter heading to Varuna, and a writer when I left. The honour of staying in Eleanor Dark’s room was palpable; I felt like I was being urged on in my quest to become a fully fledged author by her benevolent ghost. There was an autobiography of her on the shelf in there. I remember flicking through it one night, trying to get a sense of who she was, and how she went about the task of being an author. In the passage I settled on, she confessed to a suspicion she enjoyed gardening more than writing, and apparently she’d constructed all of the rock walls and garden beds around Varuna House. I found this reassuring, considering how much of my life is whittled away in contemplative hours of random pottering. The ratio of minor chores undertaken to actual creative work performed by me is probably quite staggering and best left uncalculated.

Edvard Munch ‘Vampire’:

Vampires are definitely the sexiest of all mythical creatures. David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger, I rest my case:

Teenagers

I remember being fifteen, watching Fame one afternoon on TV. A dorky, middle-aged teacher was consoling a lovesick high school student, and confessed he’d experienced the deepest, most profound love of his life when he was fifteen years old—at the time, he didn’t realise he would never feel that way again. This was contrary to the advice most adults were giving me at that age: that nothing I felt was real, and all things would pass. The implication was that one day I’d be embarrassed for caring about these things at all. We evolve as we grow older, definitely, but some experiences and people are precious, worth retaining, and their mark never truly leaves us.

Part the first of Christopher Currie’s interview with Wells Tower can be found here.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower
Granta, 2009
9781847080486

In other interviews, you’ve talked about your stories having a ‘moral pendulum’ swinging between characters, and the importance of putting the reader slightly off-balance at the end of a story. Do think that’s more of a modern feature of a short story—the idea that the story doesn’t have to exist in a neat little world?

I suppose. Although with someone like Chekhov, he would write stories that would end at an uncertain moment. On the other side, you’ve got somebody like Roald Dahl or Somerset Maugham, where the stories are very carefully plotted out. I really enjoy reading those guys, but I have a hard time believing that everything is tidied up so neatly, without it feeling contrived. I think in the ending of a short story, the reader should be rocking back on their heels a bit. That said, a story should give a suggestion of how its inhabitants are going to wind up, where the momentum of their lives is heading at the end of the story.

I like the uncertain moment. A lot of Raymond Carver’s short stories were like that. I really like the freeze-frame, where the crockery is up in the air, and you’re waiting for something to fall. I don’t really know where I stole that impulse. I’m sure I lifted it from somebody. It never really occurred to me that I was doing something weird with my stories until people started telling me. I think my stories do have sort of “lights out” endings, where a master switch gets thrown.

The one ending in the collection that seemed different to me was in the final story [the title story, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned], those final paragraphs that talk about the balance between love and fear in a family. It was lovely, and it felt more like a summing up.

Yeah, it’s a nice bit. I like those paragraphs too. That was a pretty early story for me. It’s funny how it all felt like such simple carpentry back then. I’d written this quite grotesque story, and then I thought I’d better come up with some sort of counterweight to that so I’ll have this more heart-swollen conclusion. I just kind of riveted it on the end, but I think it kind of works.

One of the most impressive things about the book, and what has been attributed to it in other places, is this sense of it being ‘old-fashioned’ writing. I suppose what I see this as is that while you have very lean prose, you’re still not afraid of a confident simile or considered word picture.

Yes, I think my impulse is much more toward baroque sentence-craft. When I’m writing, often the first drafts are really antic, and just playing with language a lot, but then I go back and try to pare it down. I do think that with good writing, you feel the pulse of it in every sentence. There should be something exciting, gleeful, or artful in every sentence. I think when writing is too spare, it’s tedious. When you start to write like that, as a writer you stop paying attention. I think when you’re writing, you have to be incredibly invested in every word and every line of what you’re doing. When I’m writing well, I can find some sort of pleasure in every line of a story, but if I can’t, it needs work.

Sometimes I read work by writers, and you can see they’re not really thinking about how they’re putting sentences together, and I think that’s unforgivable. How can you possibly expect anybody to read your work if you’re not obsessively labouring over every word you put down? When I read work that doesn’t reflect that degree of intensity I get kind of angry.

A lot of the stories in your collection have appeared previously in other magazines and journals. Is it ever a problem working with more than one editor, say one editor at Harper’s Magazine, or The New Yorker, and another editor at your publishing house?

It really isn’t. It’s rare to find an editor at a journal or a magazine who will beat up your fiction the way they will if it is nonfiction. A piece of nonfiction gets heavily edited—the editor has his handprints on every single bit of it. A magazine’s identity is decided very much by how its features are assembled. They want a kind of continuity of product. Whereas with fiction— I’m not sure if it’s a dismissive view of fiction on the part of magazine editors, or whether it’s a case of this is a piece of art, and we need to be more respectful of the artist. I don’t intend to get anywhere near the same kind of sweeping edits with fiction that I get with nonfiction, but it’s kind of a relief when I do.

Eli Horowitz at McSweeney’s [another guest of MWF] is very meddlesome editor, in the best possible way, in that he’ll really look at a story and think what is this story about? and how can we re-arrange it? We really go through a lot of drafts, and he’s really a lot of fun to work for, even though I think every story I’ve ever done with him, I get to a point where I just think there’s no way of making this story good, so can we please just not do this. For me, the more editing the better. I really relish it.

The first story of yours I read, ‘Retreat’, was in McSweeney’s 30. It was, as I found out, the second version of the story to appear there. I was fascinated by the essay in that issue where you talked about rewriting the story from the point of view of a different character. How did that come about?

One of my big commandments in my stories is no good guys and no bad guys. The story is about two brothers who don’t get along, and they get together and go hunting. The first version of the story was told from the point of view of the younger brother, and he’s going to visit his older brother, who’s kind of a blowhard, a bit of an asshole. The younger brother shows up, and the older brother is obnoxious, and continues to be obnoxious, and at the end of it, eats a bit of rotten meat. When I went back to edit it for the short story collection, it just seemed to me like a moral and an emotional monotone: here’s this guy who’s an asshole, and who’s punished for being an asshole. I thought it would be a much more morally complicated story to tell it from the point of view of the older brother, and try to curry the reader’s sympathy for the more despicable character. It just seemed like a more interesting assignment to give myself, and a much more honest one.

So, a novel is next?

Yeah, I’ve started on that.

Have you attempted longer pieces before?

I have, but not in years. I started writing some semblance of this novel back in 2001. It’ll be exciting to do it.

How much planning are you allowing yourself to do?

I’ve got a loose plan. It’ll be a family book. I’ve got a sense of where the tensions are in this family and how things may wind up. But really, I’m going to have to just write my way into it.

Then Wells started to ask about my novel, and I switched off the tape.

To read more about Wells Tower at MWF, you can read Estelle Tang’s review of the book; Thuy Linh Nguyen’s review of Wells’ short fiction workshop; and Jabberwocky’s overview of the In Conversation session.

Christopher Currie is a writer and bookseller. You can read his thoughts and writing at www.furioushorses.com. His first novel will be published by Text Publishing in 2011.

Illustration by Chris Somerville.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower
Granta, 2009
9781847080486

Words: Christopher Currie and Wells Tower
Image: Chris Somerville

Back in March, during one of my reverential trawls through my RSS feeds, I began hearing about an American writer, Wells Tower, whose short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was beginning to garner some very warm praise. After reading Edmund White’s review in the New York Times, I knew I wanted to read it. Badly. Using my best bookseller’s cunning, I tried desperately to get Allen & Unwin (the book’s Australian publisher) to part with an advance copy, to no avail.

And I am ashamed to say, amid the other shiny new books, I forgot about it. I picked it up eventually in late July, and was blown away by the quality of Wells’ writing and narrative skills (more on that below). To my great surprise, I found out that Wells was going to be appearing at the Melbourne Writers Festival (a fact I had to triple-check, thanks to the time I thought George Saunders was coming to the Sydney Writers Festival, and had nearly booked my tickets before realising my information came from a typo in a press release). To my greater surprise, Wells was available for interview! When my good buddy Angela threw this info my way, I jumped at the chance to catch up with the author of my favourite short story collection of the past five years.

After he wowed audiences with his impeccable and impressive ‘In Conversation’ session with Chris Flynn at the festival, and signed his book for a good twenty minutes, Wells very generously gave over his time to me for an interview. Just talking to him makes you begin to compile a hefty checklist of short story writers you’ve always meant to read but just haven’t. And he talks like he writes, with a profound, considered intelligence. Which made me all the more aware of the distracted yapping that was my interviewing style. To Wells’ credit, he took my strange questions and answered them eloquently.

You’ve probably done a whole heap of media for this book—what’s the question you’re most sick of being asked?

People like to ask me whether there’s a resurgence in short story publishing, or whether we’re experiencing some sort of short story renaissance, which I couldn’t possibly begin to know. I suppose you should ask that of the person who’s never read a short story before. I’ve loved short stories for quite a while. That question is impossible to answer.

It seems as though it’s part of a cycle, though. It seems as if there’s a short story collection every few months or years that gets some attention. But I think people will always pay attention to short stories on some level.

You said you read a lot of short stories. Has that always been the case? Do you go out of your way to read short stories, whether they’re in collections, journals or magazines?

I guess I’m not really chasing as many short story collections as I probably should be. I think we had a great run in the United States in the 20^th century. We had a lot of people who were fantastically gifted: John Cheever, Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Denis Johnson—there were a lot of people who really dedicated themselves to the form, in that it wasn’t just their workbook for longer works. If you read someone like Nabokov, who was the master of the novel, when you read his short stories, you can tell it’s just his sketchbook.

I suppose it’s rare these days to find someone who devotes themselves fully to short fiction. To me the short story is such a difficult puzzle; when you find someone who’s done it well, you really enjoy going back and reading their stories again and again and trying to see where the gears are, how the machine is put together. With a good short story, as soon as you’ve got a flat paragraph, or unnecessary information, the reader is gone.

Do you see the transition from short stories to novels as the inevitable career progression of a writer?

I don’t. I suppose there is this emphasis on novel writing, as in If you’re a real writer, you’d better get to it on a novel. In some ways I think it’s more difficult to write a successful short story. That said, I’m having a miserable time getting started on my own novel, and that will be tremendously difficult too, but I agree with the famous Cortázar quote that the novel can win on points, but a short story has to win by knockout. A really gripping short story, I think, is such a difficult thing to pull off. I don’t think there’s any reason to disdain the people who’ve done it well. John Cheever is certainly one of those. Reading his novels, they kind of don’t hold together. I read a couple of them this summer, and they’re fine, but somehow there’s not the same kind of intensity.

I was interested in the time frame of the stories that appear in the collection. How far apart were they written, and published?

It was probably six or seven years. The first short stories in the book were really the first short stories I ever wrote: I wrote those stories in graduate school. I suppose I wrote four or five stories over two years, and then the rest, probably over another four or five years. But I was doing a lot of magazine work then, too, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to focus on the fiction.

Did your journalism start before the fiction, or did it happen at the same time?

Kind of simultaneously, yes. I sold my first magazine piece in the spring of 2000, and then went to graduate school in the fall of 2000. Not long after I got out of graduate school I got a contract with the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, so I’d do three cover stories a year for them, and those were quite long—about eight thousand words, so it would take two or three months to do the whole thing, with the reporting and the writing and the editing, so it was quiet a bit of work.

What is the relationship between your fiction and your nonfiction? How do they live side by side?

I think when I started writing large magazine stories, it really screwed up my ability to write short fiction. The way you write a big magazine piece of course is that you go out and do some reporting. Because I had no journalistic training, I was kind of a frenzied, paranoid note-taker—I would take so many notes because I was so scared I wouldn’t come up with anything worth writing about. I would generate huge amounts of notes, many hundreds of pages for each story. From there you would try and figure out which scenes were strongest, or whether you’d taken a good description of something, and then, for eight thousand words, you’d take five or six scenes and try and come up with a contextual argument, and thread the thing together to make it more or less work. For a while I was trying to use that same approach to writing short stories, where I would just generate these big, explosive, terrible drafts, and I’d think I’d be able to go back and condense it into something that made emotional sense. But it never did. I think with a short story it’s really about trying to define a small, private space with a lot of intensity and an intimacy of feeling, and it’s very hard to try and fumble your way into that with large, unwieldy, emotionally vague drafts. But then, a lot people I met when I was out researching nonfiction pieces have made their way into my fiction.

When you were writing nonfiction, were you reading other peoples’ work, in the same way you’d read other short story writers?

I was. I was reading more nonfiction when I was doing magazine work. But again, I think I have pretty standard canonical tastes. I was reading George Orwell’s nonfiction, and Joan Didion and Ian Frazier. It’s important to me to have a stack of books at the side of my desk so I can just crack into them and remember that writing is possible.

When you were deciding on which stories to include in this collection, were you looking at the bigger picture, i.e. will these nine stories work as a whole? Or was it more a case of looking at each story individually?

I was just looking at them individually. I wouldn’t have really known how to work in themes that would make it appear more ‘book-like’. For me the theme of the book was simply that they were the first nine stories that I wrote that I didn’t despise. I guess at one point I thought, well maybe the way to make this work is make the stories linked, and to have somebody from one story wander into another, but a lot of times that just feels really stupid and contrived, so I stayed away from that. After the collection was under contract, I went back and threw out three or four stories. Many others I re-wrote: I scraped them to their foundation and rebuilt. For me it was just a case of going through and trying to do away with what felt like cheap tricks—stories that felt like they were a bit too glib, or there were emotional parts in the story I was deliberately shying away from. That’s how it works for me, going back and working out what is the most important emotional tension in each story, and trying to address that in subsequent drafts.

Part the second of this interview will be published on the morrow.

Christopher Currie is a writer and bookseller. You can read his thoughts and writing at www.furioushorses.com. His first novel will be published by Text Publishing in 2011.

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006), and God of Missed Connections (Nightwood Editions, 2009). Her work was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2006 and the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004 and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, and China. She is an instructor of creative writing at Douglas College in New Westminster where she is poetry editor for Event magazine.

Photo by David Ellingsen.

Elizabeth has chosen to share ‘a video of me singing a Ukrainian folk song at 5700 ft in the Muskwa Kechika management area in Northern British Columbia. Not exactly a poem, but still pretty effing cool’:

Elizabeth Bachinsky on

the poetic life

I’m a traveller, a gatherer, a reader, and a performer. That’s the poet’s life I lead. 

inspiration…

I take inspiration from pretty much everywhere. I’m never quite sure what (or who) will catch my interest until they’re right in front of me.

the Queensland Poetry Festival…

I  love to travel. This summer I travelled to, and am now writing about, the Muskwa Kechika, one of the last untouched boreal forests in North America. It’s way up north. We flew in by floatplane, rode packhorses into the bush, and camped out for a week or so.  So now, I’m really looking forward to reading at the Queensland Poetry Festival in Australia.  I can’t wait to go and meet Australian poets. It’s going to rock. That’s one of the best things about being a writer; you get to meet other writers. You realise pretty quick that you are part of a rather big community of like-minded people. Of course everyone has different opinions and thoughts and experiences, but you are all connected through this thing you feel impelled to do: writing. It’s humbling and enlightening and you get to learn a lot about people. I love what I do.

Have a look at the QPF program.

See Elizabeth’s blog.

Keep up to date on QPF happenings (and general poetry loveliness) on Graham Nunn’s blog Another Lost Shark.