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.

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.

When I was first offered this book to review I thought: Well, Ms Meyer, it seems that not only are you literary-minded but you’re also literally minded, because what you have given me here is a book about a Brisbane girl returning home to her family. Which, Angela—as you very well know—is the very same situation I was in when you flung this book at me. However, when I started reading I realised that maybe not everything in this world is about me after all, and once I got over the shock of that I was able to appreciate that Linda Neil’s story is very much her own, and a beautifully rendered one at that.

Learning How to Breathe is a memoir, the debut of musician-radio producer, Neil. It traces her relationship with her ailing mother, whom she is suddenly called home to take care of after years of being away. Using interviews with family members, stories from other relatives and friends, and of course, her own memories, Neil recounts what happens over the next decade as she witnesses her mother’s deteriorating health and records their experiences in various caring facilities. A shared love of music is the bond that helps mother and daughter reconnect during this difficult time, and Neil’s examination of their changing relationship is thoughtful and tender.

The childhood home is described with detailed affection. Neil’s mother, Joan, was a singing teacher and taught students out of her house in St Lucia, Brisbane, so the five children grew up surrounded by music. One of the nice touches about the book is Joan’s singing advice (which was published in various industry newsletters over the years) scattered throughout the story, helping us hear her voice in harmony with the voice of her daughter.

Neil plumbs her family history to understand where she has come from. Her self-characterisation as a bohemian-wild-child, who spent her youth playing electric violin on the streets of Sydney and living in the hills of Byron Bay before coming home as the prodigal daughter, seemed to me a little heavy-handed to begin with. But as the story and her relationship with her mum grows stronger, Neil seems to become clearer about her own development, and the writing grows too. By the end, I was overawed by the magnificent moments that fill the final half of the book—moments illustrating a family’s love.

What came across most beautifully for me in Neil’s writing is the way that she and her four siblings seemed to share and balance the role of caring for their mother over the many years of her illness. She skillfully depicts the ways each child is able to contribute their very different strengths. I adored these moments. The final few chapters are completely breathtaking, and as a reader you feel much rewarded at that point.

This book is about love, and the multifarious ways it can be expressed. It’s a book for anyone who has had to decide between caring for a loved one or institutionalising them. It’s a book for those who enjoy truthful stories, stories about discovering the light within the darkness, stories about music, and stories about Brisbane girls returning home to their family.

Lorelei Vashti is a writer and book editor with no fixed address, but that doesn’t mean she’s homeless. She swans around here in her dressing gown and here in her more professional attire. God knows what she wears here but it can’t be pretty.

9780980374667
September 2009 (Australia)
Affirm Press

If you didn’t already know that Mic Looby was once a Lonely Planet writer and editor, it’s not difficult to guess, reading his debut novel, Paradise Updated. In it, the satirically named ‘SmallWorld’ publishers dominate the guidebook industry and the bloke who made them what they are today, legendary Robert Rind, expert on the island nation of Maganda, has reached his use-by-date.

Enter the adoringly awkward Mithra, SmallWorld editor, with weaknesses for Mr Wrong and the muffin trolley. She’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime – to replace Rind and write the updated version of the Maganda guidebook, known affectionately (or scathingly) as The Bible. But the big guidebook authors come with matching egos, and Rind’s is the biggest. He is hilariously disillusioned with his status as the man who put Maganda on the tourist map (while being utterly clueless about all things Magandan). In every way a mess of a human being, Rind is impossible to hate.

Mithra, on the other hand, is one of those curious characters that manages to be endearing without ever doing much. Her character works, mainly, because everything that could possibly go wrong happens to her. And it’s damn funny. Anyone who’s been overseas is familiar with the frustration and despair that can sometimes accompany a holiday. And Mic Looby never lets up.

He never gives his characters a break, which, while entertaining to read, is also incredibly exhausting. From Mithra’s sweaty ride to the town of Bahala on the Changra Paste Express, to the horrendous combination of inner thigh chaffing and mosquito bites, we come to understand our heroine’s resentment at being thrust into the less than glamourous world of travel writing.

Then we get these beautifully crafted sentences (about baggy shorts of all things):

‘There was so much air rushing in and out it felt as if there was nothing at all between his soft, pink shame and the outside world.’ (p85)

Paradise Updated is an intelligent read, and more than a little funny. But it’s not a book to take your time with. It’s super fast, and may cause repressed memories of travel horrors to resurface. But apart from all this, a fantastically written memoir – err, I mean, fiction – about the glossy, greedy, globalised industry of travel book publishing.

Elena Gomez is an aspiring writer, blogger and journalism graduate turned publishing noob. She discovered she could write when she won the QLD Courier Mail Young Reviewer of the Year Award 2000, age 12, with a review of Luke’s Way of Looking by Nadia Wheatley. She now writes for www.withextrapulp.com.au

With Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, there doesn’t appear to have been an overriding theme or subject limitation placed on the contributors. Instead, the writers involved, who have all had supportive associations with Readings Books & Music (Melbourne) over the years, are given free reign. The result is a genuinely impressive collection.

The slightly irascible tone in ‘The Age of Terror’ by Chris Womersley is a lovely touch and very funny, recalling the best and most acerbic writings of Amy Hempel. It has wonderful descriptions which caught me out for their unexpectedness and humour (an ambulance officer feeling for a pulse is likened to a ‘trout fisherman, feeling for tremble on his line’) . There was a delighted shock of recognition, which many readers of this anthology will share, of the ‘inner-city parties populated with the absurdly tasteful’. Devastating and brilliant, for my money this is the best story in the mix, and hard to forget.

That said, Kate Holden’s ‘The Sightseers’ rivalled ‘The Age of Terror’ for my vote. A father takes his wife and daughter around Rome in the role of pushy guide, until he unwisely steps off the tourist path. The writing evokes Katherine Mansfield (although much darker) for the way it tracks minutely the shifting sympathies of the characters, and builds small but telling detail toward a shocking conclusion which is nonetheless inevitable when you search back through for clues. An object lesson in clever, subtle and brilliant writing.

Another highlight was ‘The Woodcutter’ by David Cohen. The story works as mad allegory, with satire thrown in, on the subject of marketing. It was great to read a tale so far out of the realist mould, which the majority of this collection falls into. An absurdist romp and an utter delight.   

‘The Nun’s story’ by Peter Goldsworthy replaces the usual predator, the priest, with a nun in a simple but elegant style, building in carefully controlled tension. The nun’s ‘enigmatic smile’ is at first just that – enigmatic – until it becomes a motif of unforced and effective creepiness.

I must mention Catherine Harris’ ‘A Grand Leap of Stupid Faith’, so interesting I suspect the narrator could easily be recycled to sustain a whole novel. Her tone is slightly bored, with nothing glamorised or touched up; the tale is seemingly tossed-off but delivered with tight control.

A game of ten-pin bowling between two brothers, in Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘After the Goths’ effortlessly and unostentatiously told, is a real treat. And what can one say of Christos Tsiolkas’ impeccable storytelling that has not already been said. ‘The Pornographic Scientist’, where a mother tries to understand her estranged, deceased son through the only means left to her – a porno he acted in – is suitably raw and confronting.

No less mentionable, Alex Miller’s musings on what defines home; Elliot Perlman’s slice of everyday tragedy; Amy Tsilemanis’ cool exposure of the covetous generation; and Cate Kennedy’s study of a man and woman’s alternative forms of resilience.

Likewise with Myfanwy Jones’ tale of a dog-walker who is surprised by a moment of tenderness; Barry Divola’s nostalgic warnings on parroting; Robbie Egan’s blistering summer; Miles Allinson’s dreamlike fun-park; and Michael McGirr’s lesson on how philosophy can’t give us concrete answers. There is not a single dud among this collection.

If a theme or feeling can be gleaned from the overriding mood of these stories, then it appears that we may be no wiser or happier. But as examples of contemporary creativity, we are in prolific and fascinating times.

Tom Conyers is the author of the novel Morse Code for Cats. He makes short films, some of which have been shortlisted for prizes overseas; written a dozen plays (Magpies opened Chapel off Chapel’s Emerging Playwrights Forum 2008); and is currently working on a feature-film project and his second novel.

[Angela: all proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Readings Foundation. More info here.]

Truckers
Mary Richardson
Mark Batty Publisher
June 2009 (USA)
9780979966682

Reviewed by Rhys Tate.

A few months ago, as an ex-truckie and sometime poet, I was invited to submit some lines to Sydney outfit Red Room and their collection of trucker poetry, a pairing even I find incongruous. My poem was titled ‘There’s nothing romantic about driving a truck’ and Truckers by Mary Richardson might well be the photojournalistic twin to that anti-sentiment.

The trouble is that people who don’t drive trucks do sentimentalise an occupation that invariably combines consistent pressure with soul-destroying repetition. Heading from Melbourne to Sydney return three times a week (many do that and more besides) with a  manifest that has your trip plotted to the nearest fifteen minutes might sound okay, until you’re six hours north of Melbourne at two in the morning and can’t see fifty feet because of the fog. There’s no pulling over for a few hours or travelling at a sane speed for the conditions; even at 110 all the way, you might have fifteen minutes spare to make a delivery window in Sydney. Miss too many windows and it’s Centrelink time, baby.

Richardson and her photographers paint a bleaker picture of US truckers, who lack even Centrelink’s dubious safety net. She makes no bones that the focus of the book is the erosion of conditions for drivers and especially owner-operators. Gayle, a truck-stop bartender whose drove with her ex-husband before they were squeezed out by operating debts, puts it simply, ‘Back then it was a good living. Now it’s not.’

Over 128 pages, a cast of drivers and their support crew flit past like strangers on a busy street. Most get a photo and a couple of paragraphs, and then it’s on to the next and the next after that. There are divorces and cigarettes and far too many artful ‘unposed’ portraits of truckers in front of their rigs. Richardson is shooting for a mood of washed-out impermanence and, even though some of the writing is a touch self-conscious, she delivers on this front.

This transience does make Truckers more difficult to recommend. Our interaction with the truckers feels guarded, as if we were fresh hitchhikers they hadn’t quite made their minds up about yet. I wanted more depth to the vignetting, more relaxation and variety to the photography. Richardson has stripped the sentiment from the occupation, but in doing so she’s bleached out much of the colour and humour which counterpoint the terrible conditions. Most truckers, in similar to people who spend far too much time keeping their own company, are merrily half-mad. I wanted to spend three or four days crossing one of the world’s great continents with each one; as it is, Truckers made me feel more like an interloper with a clipboard, knocking on the windows of parked semis at a stop.

Rhys Tate studies writing at Deakin and has recently been published in Verandah 24, The Logbook Anthology and Victorian Writer. He once drove a truck with thirteen gears and a non-synchro gearbox (sample gear change: clutch in, shift into neutral, clutch out, get revs between 1,500 – 2,000 rpm, clutch in, shift into new gear, clutch out, rinse and repeat-peat-peat-peat). He’s bogged a truck in Spotswood, ‘widened’ a front gate in Altona and backed into a tree in Malvern. His writing also tends towards minor calamity.

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.