The first thing I did after finishing Anna Funder’s debut novel All That I Am was to order a copy of Ernst Toller’s autobiography I Was a German. Toller features as a ‘character’ in Funder’s much anticipated book. We meet him holed up in a New York hotel in 1939, increasingly despairing of shaking the United States out of its apathy about the Nazi threat. Having failed as a script writer he spends his days dictating a new version of his autobiography to his secretary, a version that will include the interior, emotional detail missing from the first. No emotional ingredient is more important than Dora Fabian – activist, feminist and the brave soul who smuggled Toller’s manuscript out of Germany. In Funder’s version of events Dora is the great love of Toller’s life.

I was curious to know if this revised autobiography actually existed or if it was one of the narrative devices employed by Funder in the service of her story. It’s the sort of curiosity Funder’s publishers have pre-empted by emblazoning the words ‘A Novel’ on the cover of the book. This is a work of fiction, the cover declares. The story contained herein is a product of the author’s imagination and no correspondence will be entered into. But the declaration is undercut by the use of real names (Toller, Fabian, Bertold Jacob, Hans Wesseman) and the tantalising appendix on sources, in which Funder says

When Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933 my friend Ruth and her friends fled into exile. From there, they tried to bring him down. This is their story, or what I have made of it. It is reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast’.

This is an open invitation for anthropological inquiry into the beast that Funder has created. Curiosity about which parts of the story were ‘bones’, and which, ‘feathers’, distracted me from the compelling, rich narrative.

As is to be expected from the author of Stasiland, the brilliant account of how the German Democratic Republic’s secret police colonised the lives of its citizens, Funder evokes the Weimar era with a tactile, even claustrophobic, clarity. Berlin has all the heady decadence one expects, complete with an evening in a night club where naked statues provide the entertainment and the patrons snort cocaine. When the characters at the centre of the novel are forced into exile by the rising Nazi machine, their dislocation in a London that doesn’t really want them (or at least doesn’t want their warnings of what is coming) is palpable. In their former lives, they were movers and shakers in the cultural and political life of Germany. In London, they must battle anonymity, language barriers and the baffling social subtleties of the English upper class. They must also be seen to honour the condition of their visas – no political activity – or face deportation back to Germany. It is a test that some will face with jaw-dropping moral courage. And some will catastrophically fail.

This is an important story. I – English born and a historian by training – knew very little about how actively the Gestapo harassed and brutalised political refugees in London. I knew a little about Dora Fabian but not enough to place her alongside resistance heroines like Sophie Scholl or Helene Moszkiewiez. There are moments in this book where readers must stare down uncomfortable contemporary parallels, such as when the St Louis is refused entry to the USA and ultimately returns its boatload of Jews to Germany. More than 250 of the ship’s passengers died in the holocaust.

The hybrid of fiction and history is not without its pleasures. For those of us with unfashionably modernist compulsions to sort the ‘real’ from the ‘fictional’ sleuthing has its rewards. It’s a pleasure Funder well understands, as she recently told me: ‘I think that detectives and novelists have overlapping areas of psychological concern – both are interested in accounting for human behaviours from the evidence we see of them.’ But the form also creates a tension that a work of straight-up fiction avoids. Just as it takes time for gruesome events to comfortably form the butt of jokes, does it take time for historical events to be treated with the licence and informality of invention? We are dealing here with living memory. Indeed, one of the characters (Ruth Becker) is based on Funder’s friend Ruth Blatt, whose extraordinary trajectory brought her to Melbourne via a German prison and exile in Shanghai.

But in Funder’s novel Ruth is not transplanted to Melbourne, but to Sydney. And she appears on the page not as Ruth Blatt – her real name – but as Ruth Becker; perhaps Funder’s nod to the liberties she has taken in imagining her life. By Funder’s own account, Ruth never spoke about her relationship with either Toller or Fabian in Funder’s presence. Fabian and Blatt were not cousins – as the novel has it – but friends. These re-workings of historical fact into imagined fiction make sense when the work is approached as a novel – that is, a form with certain conventions. So, the shift from ‘real’ Melbourne to ‘imagined’ Sydney creates a contrast between the diamantine beauty of the harbour and the grey, dour London of the preceding chapters: precisely the light-and-shade contrast that fiction works with. Making Ruth and Dora cousins is a useful shorthand for their bond and sometimes conflicted loyalty.

Wise and considered readers and critics I know are recording these ‘shorthands’ as factual on their blogs and in their articles. When I asked Funder what she made of this tendency she said that ‘there are boundless inaccuracies out there. I provided notes in the novel both to honour sources, and to enable people to go and find out what is on the historical record if they are interested’. The credentials Funder established with Stasiland perhaps account for a good part of the expectation that Funder has stuck close to the historical record in all things. Funder told me that in All That I Am ‘I made up the plot. I made up the characters’ interior lives, interactions, gestures, relationships, involvements … That said, everything that happens in it might have happened, there is nothing important in a plot sense in it that is contradicted by the historical record as I came across it.’

Funder resolved the history/fiction tensions in Stasiland by explicitly writing herself into the non-fiction narrative. She situated herself as a sympathetic, inquiring and insightful historical observer of the German Democratic Republic. In All that I am Funder is absent. She does not tell us when she is speculating, embellishing or outright inventing. We are left to ferret this out for ourselves – a process that has its joys, but can prove mightily distracting when one wants to get lost in such a fascinating story.

S.A. Jones holds a PhD in history from the University of Western Australia. She is the author of the novel Red Dress Walking and numerous essays.

Andrew Nicoll, author of The Good Mayor, has just released his second novel, The Love and Death of Caterina. Despite being kidnapped by S.A. Jones at a writers’ festival a few years back, he agreed to talk to her about his new book.

The love and death of the eponymous Caterina are both instigated by Luciano Hernando Valdez, a celebrated author in an unnamed South American police state. Valdez leads a luxurious, feted existence. Amidst the prevalent poverty and corruption he swans between his elegant apartment, the polo field, the university where he lectures and the bars where he takes his coffee. He enjoys the favours of beautiful women whilst making cruel observations about how long they can sustain their charms. But Valdez has a problem: he is crippled by writer’s block. The pad he takes with him everywhere contains nothing more than variations on the line ‘The yellow cat crossed the road’. On inspired days the cat becomes ‘scrawny’, and sometimes ‘tawny’.

When a stunning young student by the name of Caterina has the audacity to pen a note to Valdez saying ‘I write’, he is captivated, seeing in Caterina a means of unlocking his creativity. But Caterina is no neophyte and her literary talents soon start to threaten the relationship.

Valdez is a contradictory character. On the one hand he is revered as an artist who has perfectly captured the nation’s soul and made it intelligible to his countrymen. Yet he is so myopic that he hasn’t noticed a deep scar on his upper lip and is seriously disconcerted when Caterina asserts its existence. Valdez cuts against the conventional wisdom that writers are peculiarly sensitive beings with heightened powers of observation.

‘So are we saying’, says Nicoll, when asked to comment on this, ‘that only nice people can produce great art or, at least, people with some kind of empathy? Let us test the hypothesis. Gauguin was a total bastard, blithely destroying lives as he went through the world, shattering his family, breaking Vincent’s heart, but he still produced great art. Cellini, by his own account, was a pretty excessive, lascivious individual, driven by his own appetites and nothing else; ditto Caravaggio, who was actually a murderer…Rousseau made some pretty shocking confessions; Boswell’s diary was suppressed for nearly 200 years since it revealed so clearly what species of man he was.’

Nicoll has created the perfect backdrop for Valdez and Caterina’s story. Whereas The Good Mayor was set in a mythical, magical Balkan country, The Love and Death of Caterina evokes the steamy barriada, sinister underbelly and fiery exchange of Latin culture. There are elements of the whimsy of Mayor, with the landlocked country boasting a navy and the main square constantly changing its name to suit the politics of the day. But this is an altogether darker book. The setting grew out of Nicoll’s need to put his characters in an environment where their darker impulses could thrive. ‘There’s no point planting ferns in a dry and sunny part of the border; they need it damp and shady. So I needed someplace oppressive in every sense, someplace markedly divided as between rich and poor but someplace where culture would flourish.’ Nicoll’s cousin, a long-time resident in South America, helped with details.

Curiously, Nicoll subverts one of the conventions of the psychological thriller by giving away the plot in the opening line: ‘Only a few weeks after it has happened, Luciano Hernando Valdez was almost unable to believe that he had ever been a murderer’. Yet Nicoll denies he set out to play with genre conventions: ‘It was Mr Valdez who gave me that first line. I have no skill for planning and plotting. That first line just came to me and, with it, almost the whole book, fully formed. I see the writing process as being like going down a corridor. Doors and passageways open on the corridor and, if you go through, then certain ways are barred to you, but other passageways open up. Starting off by knowing that Valdez is a killer closed off some possibilities but opened up so many more.’

If Valdez is something of a contradiction, the same may be said of his creator. Nicoll is a gruff, no-nonsense Scot with a keen intellect, dark sense of humour and a penchant for suits. Even in the searing heat of the Perth Writers’ Festival, where Nicoll and I met in 2009, he never appeared without jacket and tie. He tends to be blithe about his literary success, telling one interviewer that he writes to pay off a mortgage. Yet he can also play the diva. When my partner, who loved The Good Mayor, suggested that the voluptuous love interest Agathe was a little one-dimensional, Nicoll threatened, via email, to kill himself.

Nicoll is impatient with conventional notions about the necessary conditions for writing to flourish. ‘It is not necessary to have a little money and a room of one’s own’, he insists. (Anyone struggling to complete their novels in between full-time work and family responsibilities is advised to tune out now.) The former lumberjack turned political editor writes his novels on his daily commute because ‘it’s when I have time to do it. My days are long and hard. Not like working down a mine but it can be pretty absorbing. Then, at either end, there is a difficult commute. Writing is an escape as much as anything else’. Nicoll has finished three novels in this way (the third is due out next year) and has started a fourth.

Asked to comment on the current state of literary culture Nicoll says, ‘It’s a bafflement to me’. He had a brief and rather unhappy tenure with the Scottish Arts Council following the success of the Saltire Award–winning The Good Mayor. ‘I do not understand the current fashions in writing’, he says. ‘I am bemused by the obsession with writing everything in the present tense. I’m told that this is supposed to create immediacy but it just creates neuralgia. I mourn the death of story. Page after page after tedious page where nothing happens and nothing is supposed to happen, just a failed drunk and an angry lesbian sitting in a cellar watching mould form while they internally agonise about the meaning of life. Stop! I get enough of that at home, I don’t want to read a book about it. That’s why the only books that sell are detective slasha shockas; because people know they are going to get a story. Why can’t we have stories that actually have something to say about the human condition too? Homer managed it, Dickens managed it. But the critics go along with it. I don’t know whether it’s symbiosis or parasitism but it’s a self-serving daisy chain. They tell people what is good and worthy and people buy the books, but they don’t buy them twice.’

As to the question of whether Andrew will continue to people his novels with women of superlative physical charms, like Caterina and Agathe, I asked him if we could look forward to a plain but feisty heroine in novel number three. ‘No’, came the response, ‘Novel number three is jam-packed with voluptuous beauties.’ So there you go.

S.A. Jones is the author of the novel Red Dress Walking and a voracious reader. She likes to kidnap writers in her spare time.

Argentina’s César Aira has written and published over seventy novels (though no one seems certain how many there actually are), few of them longer than a hundred pages. He was first introduced to Anglophone readers in 1996, and five of his works are now available in English. Roberto Bolaño has called him ‘one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today’.

Kill Your Darlings contributor Samuel Rutter asked Aira about his writing practice, the unique freedom of writing, and literature, the queen of the arts.

Please describe for us a day in the writing life of César Aira, author.

At around ten in the morning I go to a nearby café with a notebook and a pen (I have a huge collection of fountain pens from all the famous brands, and I’m always buying strange or elegant notebooks) and order an espresso. I write for a while, never more than an hour, and I never end up with more than a page. Back at home I type it up and then print it. That’s it. I dedicate the rest of the day to reading, watching films at home, meeting up with friends or riding my bike.

You are renowned for never revising your novels, and for following the thread of a story without retreating. Do you consider this to be a methodological process or an aesthetic position?

It’s not deliberate; it just seems to me like the natural way of doing it. Once I’ve finished something, I put it away for a few months, after which I pull it out with the utmost intention of correcting it, but when I start to read the piece I’m overcome with laziness, or with self-deception, and I leave it as it is. In any case, it’s difficult for one to write better than one actually writes.

Your works are very short – usually no longer than one hundred pages, and nearly always contain only a single scene or storyline. They are also very numerous; no one seems to know exactly how many there are, but the consensus appears to be between eighty and a hundred. How important is brevity in fiction? And exactly how many books have you published?

I don’t know how many books I’ve published. There must be more than eighty of them. But half of them aren’t really books so much as ‘plaquettes’, ten or twenty pages long. If I weren’t so impatient, or if I didn’t have so many friends in publishing who print these little books, I would wait two or three years and collect those pieces in a normal-sized volume.

With respect to the maximum of one hundred pages in my ‘long’ books, it came about naturally over the course of time. I began by writing novels of conventional dimensions (I think I even got to four hundred pages once) but I ended up downsizing to those hundred pages, which are the ideal format for the type of stories that occur to me.

I said once that these days, the thicker a book is, the less literature it contains. I maintain that position, and when someone counters with Proust or Tolstoy, I respond that I was referring to our times, not to the past.

Due to their shortness and your use of a sole storyline, some critics have described your works as ‘novellas’, as opposed to what they might consider fully-fledged novels. Are such distinctions still useful today?

Only an academic would care about that. The one thing I’m sure about is that I don’t write novels, an anachronistic genre that exhausted itself in the nineteenth century, experienced all of its posthumous transformations in the twentieth century, and today only retains its relevance in ‘commercial fiction’. What I do might be labelled ‘short stories’ or ‘fiction’, or, more precisely, ‘Dadaist fairytales’.

You have cited Osvaldo Lamborghini as an important influence in your formation as a writer. He was part of the literary avant-garde in Argentina, and although his work is now more widely appreciated, he did receive much critical or popular attention during his lifetime. You, on the other hand, continue to publish ambitious books that are nonetheless widely celebrated by the press and the literary community. Is this a sign that avant-garde literature is more appreciated in our times? Does the literary avant-garde even exist?

According to my own personal definition, the avant-garde’ is whatever does not accept the established values (of quality, or readability, of order, of beauty) and proposes the creation of a new set of values. There will always be someone who proposes them, and so there will always be the avant-garde in literature and in the other arts. And they will always be very few, because it’s very bad business.

You once said that you don’t consider yourself a writer as such, but as an artist whose medium happens to be the written word. What draws you to literature in particular, over other arts such as music or painting?

When I was twenty years old I wanted to make music or cinema, or be a plastic artist. For music or the plastic arts one needs a bare minimum of natural talent, which I didn’t have and still don’t have; and to make cinema in those days (in the 1960s) was very difficult. So I wrote. I believed, and continued to believe for many years, that I had chosen literature out of desperation, because I couldn’t do anything better. Only now have I become convinced that literature is the queen of arts, the most difficult and the art that contains all the others. And I see that when I wrote I was practising those other arts.

How important is the issue of identity in your work? There is often a very blurred line between the ‘I’ who narrates your novels and the ‘I’ who is César Aira, author. I’m thinking in particular of How I Became a Nun, where the protagonist shares your name and much of your personal history, but where there is a clearly fantastical diversion from biography into fiction.

It’s one of the many games allowed by fiction, and I allow myself all of them. In this like in everything else, I follow my whims; I follow the spontaneous decisions made in the moment. For serious deliberation and sensible decision-making there’s real life, where I conduct myself like the most proper middle-class family man. Writing is my freedom, where I receive orders from no one, not even from myself.

It’s notoriously hard to find some of your older works – you have published books in Argentina, Spain, México and Chile, often in small publishing houses and small editions. You now have dedicated readers living across the globe, and this arguably makes you an ideal candidate for electronic publishing. What are your thoughts on e-books? Is it something you’d consider pursuing in the future?

For me, all the pleasure of writing a book ends once I’ve written it. What happens afterward (publication, translation) hardly matters to me, because I’m already writing another book, and I’m focusing all my attention and my libido on that. In that sense I could also accept electronic publication, although for the moment I consider it phantasmal, as everybody else my age surely does.

Several blogs and literary reviews in the United States have greeted the decision by New Directions to publish your work in English by calling you ‘the next Roberto Bolaño’. What do you make of the Bolaño phenomenon in the USA? Do you think his success has changed the way Latin American fiction will be received in the 21^st century?

I’ve hardly read Bolaño. He’s not my cup of tea. What’s more, I come from a time when success was suspicious. I’ll always be marginal. I’ll always have readers, but I’ll never have an audience.

Your translator into English is an Australian, Chris Andrews. How much collaboration is there between yourself and Chris in the translation process?

Chris is an excellent poet, and that in itself is a sufficient guarantee. Generally he sends me a series of questions, and generally I have no idea about how to answer them, so he figures them out himself and he does so very well.

We’re very pleased to have you here for the Melbourne Writers Festival, where you’ll be participating in two sessions: one in English with Chris Andrews and the other in Spanish. Do you plan on attending other events in the festival? What do you think of Melbourne, a UNESCO City of Literature?

I’ll definitely go to see something, but I’m more interested the country itself, which I’m visiting for the first time; in the city, the views, the bookstores, the museums. Travel is good nourishment for a writer; there’s always something from a journey that ends up in a book. I didn’t know Melbourne was a ‘UNESCO City of Literature’. For me all cities are cities of literature, as long as they have good bookstores.

César Aira will be a guest of the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival. Aira will appear in conversation with his translator, Australian Chris Andrews: in English, 4pm on 27 August; or in Spanish, 2:30pm 28 August. Or celebrate 75 Years of New Directions, publisher of Aira and experimentalists Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound.

Samuel Rutter has studied at the PUC University in Chile and recently returned from a year working in Spain. His fiction and poetry can be found in journals such as Kill Your Darlings, Island and The Big Issue, and his criticism has been published in journals in Chile and Venezuela.

Fears are something we are thought to grow out of, as we leave our childhood beds and the threat of monsters hidden beneath them. Yet, the ‘things that go bump in the night’ encountered as an adult have the potential to be far more real and dangerous. Pin Drop, currently showing at Malthouse Theatre Melbourne, takes us to that most unsettling of places – the liminal space between the realisation of a threat and the terror itself revealed. The stranger breathing down the end of a phone line, the man following behind us as we walk along a lonely street, and the more ethereal terrors – eerie shadows cast by light, the creak of a floorboard in an empty house, a certain phrase or word that chills. Killings interviewed Tamara Saulwick on the inspiration for her performance, and her exploration of those most disturbing of emotions.

Pin Drop is essentially an exploration of a single emotion – fear. Where did the inspiration come from to explore that particular sensation?

There are probably a number of answers to this question. One of them is that I was interested to make a work that could to an extent sustain a single note in the way that perhaps an old-style suspense movie is able to do. The catalyst for this came from a new music performance I saw a few years ago which managed to do just that – it seemed to just build and build. Fear can work in a similar way and seemed a well-aligned theme with this idea of sustained suspense. Fear is also of interest to me because it is something we all have in common and our own personal relationship with. I felt sure that there would be a multitude of compelling stories out there related to this theme and discovered that I was right. And of course, I also have my own experiences and relationship to the topic, and a subsequent interest in the similarities and differences between my own experiences and those of others.

The play is a deeply unsettling experience, partly because the audience is kept always within the moment before the revelation. Many of the stories are left unresolved and we are rarely allowed to experience the full horror of the threat – we are kept always within the space before. Was it important to your project to not provide that moment of catharsis when the object of fear is revealed and resolved?

The space of not knowing the full picture is integral to how we experience fear and indeed also to the stories in the piece. In these situations there is a lot of guess work. I was interested in this grey zone –and I think it is in this space where the imagination is very alive. The ‘space before’ as you describe it is for me is the really interesting bit – it is where we are wrestling with ourselves. Some of the stories are told through to their conclusion and others are left hanging … these decisions were based on an intuitive response to the material and how it would work within the dramaturgy of the piece as a whole.

Pin Drop is very effective in its use of ‘real’ people telling remembered tales of their experiences of fear. Yet, though of different ages and races, all the interviewees are female. Was that a deliberate decision? Do you think that women experience fear differently to men or is fear a universal experience?

Fear is an enormous topic – there are so many ways in which it can manifest. It was important for me to narrow that down in order to gather more specific content, which in the case of Pin Drop is the fear of threat from a stranger. For example, walking alone down a quiet street, or a bang outside the window at night. I do think that the male/female experience of this territory is to an extent distinct from one another. My decision to interview just women was driven predominantly by the desire to continue to focus the material. I think the work could equally be made by gathering stories from men.

Your performance in the play is a kind of schizophrenic inhabiting of the multiple interviewees relating their tales of fear. Yet it is also a very physical performance with your body and the shadows cast by the play of light an integral part of the experience. Do you see your character as fearful or to-be-feared?

I don’t really see myself as a character in this work. I see myself more as a facilitator or transmitter of the stories and voices of the interviewees. So in this sense my role is a very fluid one – sometimes inhabiting their stories with my own voice, sometimes accompanying their prerecorded voices with movement, sound or image, and sometimes being in a kind of duet. I think in the audience’s mind I could be seen to be slipping to and fro between perpetrator, victim and witness right throughout the work.

Were any of the recounted experiences of fear your own?

No – all of the stories, and indeed every word spoken in the piece came directly from the interviews I did with other people.

An assemblage of household objects are the only elements on the stage. How did you select those objects and what are their significance? Do you see the everyday as having the greatest potential to be menacing?

The objects were chosen for their look, for potential associations, but more importantly for the sound that they make. They are all used to generate live sound that is incorporated into the audio design of the piece. In Pin Drop there are so few visual elements, that people will inevitably create associations with these objects, so a pair of scissors or a kitchen knife have the potential to quickly take on menacing associations.

Pin Drop is described as a ‘sensory experience’, and the performance does indeed happen largely within each audience member’s mind and senses – in their reactions to the sound scape and the lighting effects. Do you feel it’s important to make the audience an active part of performance rather than passive observers?

Absolutely – for me this is critical. My aim in making this work was to create an evocative rather than descriptive space for the stories, one that invites the audience to enter into it. In the program notes I wrote that in Pin Drop personal accounts provide anchors against which image and sound can pull. There is space for the audience to bring their own imaginations and memories to bear on the work, and from the spaces between prerecorded voices and live performance, between what is heard and what is seen, between performer and audience, the piece emerges.

- Pin Drop is currently showing at Malthouse Theatre Melbourne until 7 August.

- photo courtesy of Ponch Hawkes.

For Issue Six, Kill Your Darlings was delighted to speak with North American writer Ron Rash. A poet, novelist and short story writer, Ron Rash has won many awards for his work, including the 2010 Frank O’Connor prize for his short story collection, Burning Bright. We spoke with Ron about his Appalachian stories, the evolution of his writing from one form to another, and the ‘dream state’ of writing.

Ron Rash: I think that, in many ways, the best training I have received as a prose writer is reading and writing poetry, because it demands vividness and concision. I was actually, earlier in my career, better known as a poet. Some people have chastised me for not writing much poetry now, but I hope when readers read my novels or stories that they sense that I am a poet writing prose. A lot of the poetry gets into the prose.

Kill Your Darlings : One thing that struck me about Burning Bright, as indeed it did in your novels Serena and One Foot in Eden, was the precision of your language. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you craft your sentences? Is it a very laborious process?

RR : It is. Actually, when I’m working on a story or a novel, during the last couple of drafts I’m just purely concerned with sound. I’m reading the words and the sentences and the paragraphs, and I’m listening to how they sound. And by that I mean I’m listening to which syllables are stressed, which are unstressed, and what type of rhythm each gives the paragraph. I’m very conscious of every word.

KYD : Does this mean that writing takes you much longer than it might an author who has written prose from the outset?

RR : I think so, because of what I tend to do… I think I wrote 14 full drafts of Serena. And I’m talking about full drafts. I don’t ever reread my novels because I always find places where I wish I could have done it better.

KYD : Just going back to the fact that you do, evidently, focus so closely on the words and the stress and the cadence of your prose – I read that your first novel, One Foot in Eden, actually began as a poem. How did it evolve into a novel?

RR : Actually, the poem/novel began with an image. Every novel I’ve written has come from a single image. For One Foot in Eden, the image was of a farmer standing in a field, and his crops were dying around him. That was all I had. I remember that image came to me essentially out of a dream. I woke up and kind of dredged it up, and that day I wrote a 14-line poem about a farmer in a field with his crops dying. But when I finished it I knew that… The image that I had in my head, that poem couldn’t contain it. And then I wrote a short story and that didn’t contain it [laughs]. And so I thought, well, looks like I might have to try and make this a novel.

KYD : Were you apprehensive about venturing into a new form?

RR : Oh yes. Very much so. Because I’d tried a few novels before and I’d never had any success, and I was fearful of that kind of commitment. Because I knew that it was going to be a commitment of a couple of years.

KYD : So, One Foot in Eden began with an image, which evolved into a poem, and then a short story and finally a novel. Do you generally get most of your ideas for both your short stories and the novels from an image and then write from there?

RR : Yes. Every novel or short story. When I wrote the title story ‘Burning Bright’, I had an image of this woman looking out towards the mountains and I knew it was a time when fires were possible. The whole story started with this image of a woman looking out at the mountains. That’s how it happens.

KYD : Once you receive an image, how exactly do you begin to build on that?

RR : The best way I can explain it is that when I get this kind of image, when I get a true, important image – and I know when it’s important because I can’t get it out of my head – the image nags at me. I don’t know where the novel’s going; I don’t plot out my novels and I don’t outline them. Very often I don’t even know who the characters are. I just start with that image.

What happens inevitably, with a novel at least, is that there comes a time after maybe six months, or a year, where the book just seems to die. It reaches a dead end and I can’t seem to work out what to do next. Sometimes this will last several months, sometimes a few weeks. I think writers need particular beliefs, whether they’re true or not doesn’t matter. And the one I have to believe in, or that I make myself believe in, is some ways a little bit like what Michelangelo believed. You know, he would look at the untouched block of marble and he would believe that the statue was already in it; that it was just a matter of finding it. And what I believe is that if this image is so strong, if it haunts me day after day, if I can’t get it out of my head, and I can’t forget it, then I make myself believe that the whole novel is out there. It’s just a matter of my discovering it.

KYD : I’d heard of Michelangelo’s belief about his blocks of marble, but I’ve never heard a writer thinking of a novel in the same way. You often hear of writers speaking of how they don’t know when their novel is going to end, or they’re not particularly sure about their characters, but I’ve never heard of a writer thinking of the novel as fully formed before it is written. I think it could be enormously useful.

RR : It’s very helpful to me, and it sounds crazy but it works. It’s a great help in those bleak months of despair. You sit there thinking, ‘I’ve lost a year of my life writing this novel and now it’s not working and I’ll never complete it’, and I make myself believe that that novel is out there somewhere. The older I get, the more I write, the more mysterious writing becomes. Where does it come from? Say you write a short story – why is it that one day you think of an image or a character, and you’ve never thought of that before, and then one day it just comes. You know? Why is that? It’s not something that I think can be easily explained.

KYD : Do you think there’s a danger in questioning that too much?

RR : Of where it comes from?

KYD : In trying to analyse the intuitive, creative process.

RR : Yeah, I do. I think writers work best on intuition. Les Murray talks about writing as being very similar to a dream state. And I think he’s right about that.

You can read the rest of the interview in Issue Six of Kill Your Darlings, available here.

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, can it set off a tornado in Texas? Similarly, if a young tennis champion trains his forehand swing every day, could it have spectacularly lethal consequences? The notion of the ‘butterfly effect’ – where seemingly inconsequential conditions can have unintentionally devastating results – comes to mind when reading Raphael Brous’s debut novel I Am Max Lamm. It narrates the aftermath of (and lead-up to) an action that sets off one of the worst race riots in Britain’s history: ‘the unintentionally fantastic accuracy of your beer bottle smashing the teenager’s right temple’. Killings interviewed Raphael about his novel of disaster and disgrace.

There’s a lovely line towards the end of the novel, during one of Lamm’s reveries, where he remembers being told that we’re all stardust, the result of an exploding star – ‘You’re made from disaster, you make disaster’. Is chaos what interests you in writing?

What interests me in writing? The world, history, our mistakes and who we are. And chaos is an inextricable part of that. Not just in the scientific sense (because uncertainty is irreducible from nature) but in the arena of human behaviour and history. So much of our lives is governed by irrationality, genetics, by the invisible hand of fate. And chaos is implicit in all this. So it can’t be avoided in my writing.

There is a tendency – often unfair – to interpret first novels as somewhat autobiographical. Is there something of yourself in Max Lamm?

There is. Max Lamm has certain talents and positive qualities, yet he’s also afflicted by a tendency to fuck things up. In his experience of disgrace, his regrets and unrequited loves, his illnesses, his guilt, his awakening to the maddening mysteries at the heart of Judaism…in all that, there’s a lot of me.

Your novel deals with race riots, terrorism, sex workers and politics. Do you think authors have a responsibility to be politically and socially engaged in their work?

Philip Roth was asked the same question in a TV interview. He’s one of my favourite authors and I agree with his response. He emphatically said ‘no’. The author has a responsibility to do just one thing: to write well. They need not push any moral or political agenda. They need only construct words and ideas in a way that is beautiful, that is captivating, that is worthy of being read. That is enough.

Tell me about the process of composing the novel – was it inspired by the historical events it depicts or was the inspiration more personal, such as the memories from Mount Scopus High School?

I never attended Mount Scopus High School (although my cousins did). The novel was inspired by personal events, disgrace and mistakes. Ultimately, we write best about what we intimately know. Yet this personal drama plays against the backdrop of recent historical events, such as the mendacious rise of neoconservatism and the Iraq war. In fact, the emotional maelstrom of the protagonists – Max and Kelly ­– is, in many ways, an allegory for the ethical confusion and political immaturity that has dominated the twenty-first century so far.

You reference many canonical literary texts such as Dante, Fitzgerald and, in particular, Steinbeck. Have these authors influenced the way you write?

Steinbeck influenced me. He demonstrates the timeless power of a simple story featuring characters for whom we actually care. He shows that tragedy should be executed mercilessly and portrayed unsentimentally; no flourishes are needed, no grand finales nor flowery Victorian elegies. The dry flatness of Steinbeck’s prose loosens our expectations so that ultimately, the impact is more devastating. The final pages of Of Mice and Men are the finest example.

London and Melbourne figure strongly in every page of your narrative. How important is place to your writing?

I like contemporary realism. So I need a clear setting. The place is essential, because it’s where the story happens. Our experiences, what we do, our strengths and faults are all intimately connected to where we are. To create plausible, emotionally rounded characters, their histories – and therefore their locales – must be carefully considered.

Max Lamm contains one of the more disturbing sex scenes I’ve ever read (and I’m a fan of Bret Easton Ellis!). Was there a particular aesthetic point you wanted to make in your depictions of sex in the novel?

I wanted to write a challenging, fearless book that I would enjoy reading, that reflected the animal drives within us. Freud may be scientifically discredited, but the Id is, I think, his most astute allegory. The psychosexual elements of the novel will polarise some readers, but they’re essential to its themes. Sex is ultimately about procreation, about life, and therefore about death. In that sex scene, Max Lamm’s guilt – his guilt in having prematurely ended a boy’s life – disturbingly morphs his sexual relief into something utterly disgusting. I was influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon, the way that he revoltingly, beautifully explored the domination, the submission, the will to destroy that fuels the sexual act. Guilt is, I suppose, motivated by life; that is, motivated by the increasingly fashionable expectation that we lead something approximating an ethical life. Sex is about death; about creating life and in momentarily reaching, through pleasure, some transcendence above ordinary experience. All that collides in the disturbing sex scene.

What projects are you working on next? Will there be a second novel? (or possibly a sequel to Max Lamm?)

I’m going to write another novel. It’s probably about ten plagues. That’s all I’m saying.

I am Max Lamm is out now.

The first time I meet Alan Bissett he’s wearing gold shoes. They have a backstory that is a combination of Cinderella and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. This is probably the best introduction I can give to the kind of writer Alan is both in person and prose – charming, stylish, and very Scottish. Alan was in Melbourne for the Emerging Writers’ Festival as its very first international guest, and his most recent novel Death Of A Ladies’ Man sold out the festival bookshop. Before he jumped on a plane home, I interviewed him on writing process and whether one can ever be anything other than ‘emerging’ as a writer.

The Emerging Writers’ Festival is largely an exploration of writing craft and process. Do you have a particular way in which you compose your novels? Is there something that never fails to inspire you?

Reading other people’s novels never fails to inspire me, especially if they’re better ones than I’m capable of writing (hello, The Slap, which I just finished). But I’ve realised that I have no consistent writing ‘process’, as all of my novels were composed so differently. Boyracers tumbled out in a mad, energetic rush; The Incredible Adam Spark took about four years of trial and error, with no plan attached (which meant I wasted about 90,000 words of prose that the public will never see); and the whole story of Death of a Ladies’ Man appeared in a blinding flash. But this turned out to be deceptive, as the first draft took about five months, while the redraft took three years! So when I start a novel I have NO idea if it’s going to be a piece of cake to write or endless agony. The book is the boss, and sometimes it is demanding and sometimes it is sweet. You just know when you’ve got there. That’s the process.

You’ve said previously that you like to write books that ‘people can dance to’. What do you mean by that?

I like the prose to have rhythm, style and energy. Boyracers was supposed to feel like pop music. Adam Spark was supposed to feel like the speech of a hyperactive child. Death of a Ladies’ Man was supposed to feel like being on cocaine. In all three I was going for flash and kinetics. I’ve never really been capable of writing prose that just sits there on the page, functionally telling the story. So I guess that’s what I meant by reading my books being like dancing.

You published your first novel Boyracers at 25. How did you begin as a writer and what advice would you have for emerging writers?

Do it now. Now. Not later. And – to paraphrase John Connor in the first Terminator film – don’t stop, ever, until you are dead. Oh, and get yourself a peer group. You can’t underestimate the importance of feedback. Sometimes we just don’t know that we’ve written a piece of shit.

Are there areas in which you still see yourself as ‘emerging’? Do you think a writer is ever fully ‘emerged’?

Well I’m definitely still ‘emerging’ beyond Scotland. Places like England and Australia have only just become aware of me, although in Scotland I’m now described as an ‘established’ writer. But no writer is ever fully ‘emerged’ because we should be constantly evolving. My goal, once upon a time, was just to get a short story published. Then it was a novel. Then it was another novel. I did not see myself, further down the line, writing, performing and touring my own one-woman show, put it that way. You’ve never fully ‘ made it’, you’re only ever just at the next stage. It’s a constant process of transformation. That’s what is so exciting about being a writer.

Melbourne was declared the second UNESCO City of Literature (Edinburgh is the first). How does what you’ve experienced of the Melbourne literary scene compare to Scotland– in particular your home town Falkirk?

Well, Falkirk is a very small place compared to Melbourne, so there aren’t too many opportunities for a writer there. But I draw my inspiration from there, because I grew up there and the language is important to me. That said, it is only 25 minutes from Glasgow and Edinburgh in either direction, both of which have strong writing scenes. Melbourne, quite frankly, is on fire culturally. Glasgow is too. Most of our greatest contemporary writers – Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, A.L. Kennedy – incubated their talent in Glasgow. It’s a poor city, economically, which is probably why the culture has such a ferocious edge to it. I find myself inspired by the city, and the grassroots vibe there now is very exciting, as young writers are really energising the live literature scene, stylishly cross-fertilising it with music, comedy, film, live art, fashion, etc., and using social media to spread the word. That really reminds me of Melbourne.

But Scottish literature is in a far more marginal position in comparison to English literature. The south of England is so dominant culturally and financially in the UK that places like Glasgow (and, say, Manchester in the North of England) have thriving arts scenes despite London, not because of it. Opposition breeds good art. But it does mean that a Scottish writer has to work five times harder to be recognised than, say, a writer who lives in the south of England and went to Cambridge University. The struggle is greater, but that’s what gives Scottish writing its edge and power too, and why our nation’s literature is so imbued with class politics and has a completely different identity. The contemporary Scottish novel has contained the struggle of a whole nation to be recognised.

– Alan Bissett’s new novel Pack Men will be out August 2011.

‘To understand the ocean, to glimpse its meaning is, in other words, to understand ourselves, and by extension our place in the larger order of things.’ So muses James Bradley in the introduction to The Penguin Book of the Ocean, an anthology edited by Bradley and published late last year. Gathering classic writing about the waters by the likes of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, the collection also has a decidedly antipodean flavour, with pieces from Tim Winton, Judith Beveridge and Nam Le also figuring in its bulk.

We spoke with James Bradley about the process of editing the anthology, the endless allure of the ocean and journeys of discovery.

There are so many possible starting points for reading about the ocean. Where did you begin – with any particular pieces from your personal reading?

That’s not an easy question to answer, both because I’ve been reading about the ocean for years, and because this book is actually an offshoot of another, larger project about the Pacific Ocean I’ve been working on for some years (and which may or may not ever see the light of day).

But I suppose the short answer is probably that even from the beginning I knew there were a handful of writers I thought were non-negotiable, and whose presence helped shape the collection as a whole. Some of these are obvious: you couldn’t do a collection of this sort without Melville, or Coleridge, or Rachel Carson. But some are possibly less obvious, and are personal favourites of mine, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Shackleton and Tom Farber.

Were any of the pieces you chose recent discoveries?

One of the real joys of working on a book like this is encountering writers and writing you might not otherwise come across, so while I certainly began with a pretty long longlist of candidates I already knew, I spent a lot of time reading things I wasn’t familiar with beforehand.

Some of those things were genuinely exciting. I only came to Daniel Duane’s fabulous book about surfing quite late in the piece, for instance. But in a way the two really big discoveries for me were Deborah Cramer and William Langewiesche.

Langewiesche’s piece, taken from his book about global shipping, The Outlaw Sea, is a harrowing account of the sinking of an oil tanker off Spain in 2001, but it’s also a chilling reminder of the manner in which the rich nations have largely abdicated their responsibilities for the oceans, leaving them to cargo ships under flags of convenience and manned by sailors from the third world, pirates, and the fragile craft of refugees, and of our obliviousness to the dangers faced by these people (I suspect most people would be staggered to learn that on average two large ships go missing somewhere in the world once a week).

But in a way it’s the story behind the Cramer I find more interesting. One of the things I wanted the collection to do was force readers to come to grips with the scale of the destruction we are wreaking on the ocean. But as I read my way through the subject I was struck by how little good, lyric writing there is on the subject. That’s not to say there’s not good writing about overfishing or climate change in a marine context – Elizabeth Kolbert’s ‘The Darkening Sea’ should be required reading for every politician who thinks we have time to delay action on climate change – but what I wanted was the marine equivalent of Barry Lopez writing about climate change, and the more I read the harder that seemed to be to find.

In the end it was Jennifer Ackerman, whose book about the marine life of the Massachusetts seashore, Notes from the Shore, is also extracted in the anthology, who suggested Deborah Cramer’s brilliant book about the Atlantic, Great Water. But the difficulty of finding good writing about the subject seemed to me to say something about people’s obliviousness to the sheer scale of the problem, and to the difficulty of making them understand.

The book illuminates many aspects of the ocean and humanity’s relationship to it, sampling older works alongside newer ones; poetry sitting alongside fiction and historical account. Can you describe how you selected these pieces – the ‘right’ excerpt from novels, the ‘right’ poem?

I always think that editing is, in some important ways, a lot like writing: your job is less to impose order than to let the material find its own shape, and in the case of The Penguin Book of the Ocean that’s doubly true. Early on some people suggested I should try and delineate broad themes and group pieces together, or arrange them chronologically, but that always seemed to run counter to my sense of the ocean as something mutable, and unbounded. So I tried to treat the process of selection and arrangement as organically as possible, a little like making a poem out of found objects.

You’ve spoken of your desire to curate the book in order to show the Australian experience of the ocean, and the book contains predominantly Anglophone writing. Did you decide on this focus early on?

The decision to restrict the book to writing in English was as much about self-preservation as anything: the sheer amount of material in English would take many lifetimes to read, even before you start adding in writing in French, or German, or Japanese, to say nothing of the stories of Polynesian or Native American or Asian cultures. And as always with these sorts of questions, deciding to include work in other languages creates all sorts of problems to do with accessibility and interpretation and translation, all of which I was keen to avoid.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that the book isn’t actually entirely Anglophone, though that’s not on purpose. The two exceptions are Jacques Cousteau and Thor Heyerdahl. In Cousteau’s case I had an excuse, since The Silent World was actually written in English, but in the case of Heyerdahl it was just editorial sloppiness: The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki was so much a part of my childhood that it was only at a quite late stage that it occurred to me it wasn’t originally in English, and by the time it did the piece was so enmeshed with the whole I couldn’t bear to take it out.

Building an anthology is an immensely personal endeavour, expressive of its time and context. There are of course several anthologies of the sea. Did you look to any of these while shaping The Penguin Book of the Ocean?

For such an important subject there are surprisingly few anthologies focussed on the ocean. The most famous is almost certainly Jonathan Raban’s magnificent Oxford Book of the Sea, which was published in 1992, and which is probably still the most comprehensive collection of writing in English on the subject, but there are others, such as the Everyman collection of poems about the sea and John Coote’s rather differently conceived Faber Book of the Sea.

Inevitably there’s crossover between my collection and the three books listed above, though there’s actually less than you might think (of the 45 writers in The Penguin Book of the Ocean only 15 also appear in The Oxford Book of the Sea, and of that 15 only seven are represented by the same work or selection).

But in a way the most important thing these earlier collections did was show me what I didn’t want The Book of the Ocean to be. I love Raban’s collection, but it’s a book that despite its claims to the contrary really does set out to be comprehensive, something that is made very clear by the decision to arrange the material chronologically.

I took the opposite tack. Right from the outset I wanted to put together a collection that spoke not just to my own love of the ocean, but one designed to be read as a whole, rather than a selection of pieces. Just as importantly I wanted to create a collection that spoke to an Australian experience of the ocean, which seems to me to be inextricably linked to the warm waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the immense expanse of the Southern Ocean, rather than the northern tradition anthologists such as Raban and Coote inhabit.

That’s one of the reasons the book is arranged as it is, rather than chronologically or thematically: the pieces are designed to speak to each other, and to change as you read, and new voices speak across them. But it’s also the reason it has the shape it does, beginning with Rachel Carson’s luminous account of the creation of the oceans and striking outwards, into discover and destruction and wonder, before it loops back to Deborah Cramer’s piece about the ocean and climate change and the beautiful coda from David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter at the end.

One of the great themes of this book is discovery, and the adventure that often accompanies it. Pieces like William Beebe’s tale of descending into the water in a bathysphere and Ernest Shackleton’s century-old account of an Antarctic journey really stir the imagination. Why do you think these types of stories affect us?

I’m not sure it’s necessarily the stories that affect us: certainly there are many accounts of discovery that lie dead upon the page. What matters is the capacity of great writers to show us the discoveries as they experienced them, and to allow us to share in those moments of possibility when the world is transformed by something new. That’s something that’s very definitely there in Beebe’s description of his journey down in the bathysphere, but it’s equally present in Darwin’s joyous descriptions in The Voyage of the Beagle, or Cousteau’s descriptions of the world beneath the waves in The Silent World.

While researching and selecting pieces for the anthology, you must have surveyed examples of writing about the ocean from decades, even centuries ago. Were there any time periods that particularly interested you? Did you notice a change in how people wrote about the ocean over time?

There’s little doubt people’s attitudes to the ocean have changed over time, and that’s reflected in the way it’s described and celebrated. As Jonathan Raban points out, for the Elizabethans it was mostly understood as a barrier, something to be crossed or endured, rather than a thing worthy of interest in itself. Indeed you could probably argue that our contemporary desire to imagine the ocean in quasi-mystical terms is a function both of the lingering power of Romanticism and the decreasing need to deal with the ocean on its own terms: certainly in the decades since air travel became common, and fishing was industrialised, people in Western cultures have been largely immune to the violence and capriciousness of the ocean.

But I suspect the writing I love the most is that of the nineteenth century, and of Americans such as Melville, Dana, Thoreau and du Maury, all of which are shot through not just with the Biblical roll and thunder of so much American prose of the period, but a desire for the transcendent which I can’t help but respond to. After that it’s the writing of the twentieth century, in particular the nature writing of Carson and others, with its attention to the real, and, inevitably, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.

There’s a narrative to The Penguin Book of the Ocean: how humankind has turned our will and mind towards such a beast of nature. The first piece is Rachel Carson’s beautiful writing about the ocean’s origins, and the collection closes with a scene from David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter in which a woman watches a surfer on the waves. What aspects of our relationship with the water do you find most intriguing?

There’s a wonderful piece in the collection from Thomas Farber’s book, On Water, which talks about the way water and the imagination are deeply, and inextricably connected, and pointing out just how deeply the liquid permeates our imagining of our inner lives. Obviously that’s fascinating, and I find it difficult not to wonder whether it has something to do with our origins along the lakes and rivers of the Rift Valley in Africa, but it’s certainly not accidental that Eden is described as the source of the four rivers: water, creativity, creation, all are deeply interconnected.

But in a way the thing I’m most interested in is the way we think of sleep, and dreams in liquid terms. It’s always difficult to unpick the cultural from the biological, but the association is so deep, and so powerful, it’s difficult not to wonder whether its origins are neurological rather than historical.

You’ve said that your first novel, Wrack, began to take shape when you envisaged people searching for a shipwreck. How did you engage with the idea of the ocean then, and has it changed with the anthology?

I’m not sure my actual, day-to-day relationship with the ocean has changed all that much: I still find great solace in it and its presence, and find it difficult to imagine life without it. But if the anthology has done anything it’s made me even more keenly aware of the need for people to understand the impact climate change and overfishing is having on the ocean, and the implications of those changes not just for us, but for the planet as a whole.

Shane Jones’ Light Boxes is difficult to describe well. It’s a tiny book – 167 pages – that begins with the name ‘Thaddeus’ in font so large – perhaps 36 point – that it breaks onto another line. Thaddeus describes a scene in his town; he’s watching the flames of hot air balloons and children playing. But sadness has blanketed the town thanks to February: not the month we know, but a being, a person, a feeling. February has banned flight and all talk of it, and the townspeople want to rebel. It’s a curious, compelling book, visually varied and swift to offer up different viewpoints. I interviewed Shane Jones via email.

Thanks to Penguin Australia, we have a copy of Light Boxes to give away. See the end of the interview for details.

The epigraph in Light Boxes comes from Joseph Wood Krutch, an American who wrote about nature, theatre and literature, and reads: “The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.” Was this statement the genesis of February in Light Boxes – February, who decrees that no one in the town shall speak of flight, and who may be responsible for the endless winter?

I found the epigraph about halfway through writing the book. It probably sounds lame but I think I actually googled “quotes on february” and that came up. February came from a bunch of places, mostly my own depression and a need to write something very visual. Having February take flight away seemed natural because Thaddeus Lowe is a balloonist and without the ability to fly he enters a deep depression.

That Krutch quote is, I guess, a joke, but you’ve made February into an entity that goes well past simple humour. February is at once the wintry month and a lonely, somehow powerful man who lives on the edge of the woods. His exact nature is rather elusive – on the one hand, he’s caused endless suffering to the townspeople, yet when we see things from his point of view, he seems dejected and without any agency whatsoever. He isn’t without humour or light or sympathy though (‘Lists Found in February’s Cottage Detailing Possible Cures for February: 1. Valerian Root and Vitamin C tablets taken in the dark / 2. Yoga and meditation). Whence this enigmatic character?

I really didn’t want February to be clearly defined. It’s a month, a season, a god, a person, a feeling, etc. So you have this village and then February just kind of swirling around them. I feel like I’m not being honest in this answer because I’m not sure how to respond. One thing I don’t really like is easily defined characters. This kind of thinking while writing, “Well, character Dan would never close a door like that.” It just doesn’t interest me and I don’t think people are like that. February is capable of great compassion and horrible evils and I think people are like that.

A few things that happen in Light Boxes are things that are usually impossible. A hand appears from the sky to push a kite into the ground. People who are dead come back to life. Are there any impossibilities you would not reverse in your fiction?

Ummm, no? The great thing about fiction is that you can completely flip and bend the rules of history, science, physics, etc. It’s just exciting for me. I want to be able to do anything in my fiction. But I also don’t want to be viewed as a fantasy writer or weird or experimental. I guess I don’t like definitions when it comes to writing.

Any mere description of the plot of Light Boxes would in a way misdescribe the nature of the book, which has a unique and seriously compelling form. Almost every page has a new heading, indicating who is speaking, and the font changes to aid the story: it gets larger and smaller, it changes from serif to sans serif. How did you write this book? You’re a short story writer and a poet and a novelist. How did you categorise this book before it was published?

I set out to write a novel. What I ended up with was a bunch of short segments that were barely more than 20,000 words when put together. When I submitted the book I said it was a novel. It was just easier that way. As far as the actual writing, I wrote the book in segments, 2 or so a day, similar to how it’s presented in the book. I wrote on my laptop, on scraps of paper during my lunch breaks at work, and wrote lists in a notebook. When I had 130 or so of these segments I arranged them collage style to form a narrative and then wrote some to fill in the holes. Some of the font choices were mine, some were Adam Robinson at PGP.

Another thing that Light Boxes reminded me of was the musical form, the fugue, which features a motif that surges again and again. There are a few things that continually resurface in Light Boxes: the smell of mint leaves, the epithet of the ‘girl who smells of honey and smoke’, air balloons. How did these things impress themselves on you as motifs to be repeated?

I think the language of the book just includes repetition. And a lot of the images you just mentioned I really love and wanted to see throughout the book. Kites, balloons, snow, mint leaves, are all things with multiple intense senses. So when you read mint leaves, you can smell it, you can taste it, you can touch it. Does that make sense? I don’t think in motifs or themes. My literary intelligence is much lower than my gut intelligence which tells me “I like this, this is exciting, I think this is good.”

It’s a small book, only 167 pages. How long did it take you to write?

The first draft took about six months. Then some editing. But I sent the book out as a first draft to many presses and that’s probably why it was rejected so much.

How long ago did you write Light Boxes?

I wrote Light Boxes three years ago.

The book was originally published through Publishing Genius, which 500 copies. It was then picked up by Penguin worldwide. Did the book change at all once the publisher changed?

I think the fonts changed a little, and there were some really small edits, but it’s basically the same exact book. Which was great, because I feared they would want major changes. I thought the book was too short for a major to publish it. Luckily, my editor Tom was great. One of the first things he said was “I don’t plan to change a thing.”

You thank Jesse Ball in the acknowledgments. What part did he play? He’s one of my favourite writers now writing, with his radical and beautiful storytelling. Who else do you think is doing extraordinary things with words at the moment?

I love Jesse Ball. His first novel inspired Light Boxes a lot. I sent an early draft of the book to him and he gave some feedback and eventually a blurb. He’s one of my favorite living writers. As far as others, there are just too many to list. Jesse has a new book coming out next year, as does my friend Blake Butler who is a mad man with language. Amelia Gray will probably blow up big sometime soon. I recently read a manuscript by Kristen Iskandrian that I wouldn’t be surprised to see in bookstores in a few years.

Thanks to Penguin Australia, we have a copy of Light Boxes to give away. For your chance to win, email info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com today with the subject line ‘Light Boxes’. Winner will be chosen at random. Good luck! Please note that this giveaway is now closed.

When did you start writing? Why?

I was given a beautiful burgundy journal when I was in Year Four and for whatever reason, I thought it’d be a good idea to walk around for weeks writing down everything my family members did. I remember watching TV with my brother and writing, ‘And now James is asking me what I’m writing about all the time’. I lost interest in this pretty quickly and then started writing about what I was doing, and it still slightly disturbs me how often I think it’s a good idea to write down everything that I do. Thankfully, this sort of mental illness only ever lasts a few weeks and I revert to my regular state of just writing about things that interest me; everyday curiosities.

Why do you write?

It’s a reflex. I’ve worked in a lot of boring, shitty jobs and if I have internet access at these boring, shitty jobs I write hundreds of emails to, well, my housemate, actually, to alleviate the boredom.

My motivation for writing is entirely selfish. It keeps me entertained and it’s the easiest way for me to keep check of the changing conditions of my mental weather. It gives me some idea of how to negotiate any impending storms.

What do you admire in others’ writing?

Anybody who manages to produce more than 500 words a day that they’re satisfied with is automatically upgraded to hero status. Those who can write easily about anything that isn’t just stupid shit that has befallen them earns my admiration, although I suspect this is something that most people grow out of, and I’ve been using the remaining few weeks before I turn 25 to work towards this end.

I also admire people who can use commas properly and don’t end up with sentences that go for five lines.

What do you find most difficult about writing, and what do you find the easiest? Is there anything easy about writing?

The most difficult thing, for me, is beginning a piece. I usually start writing somewhere in the middle, pick my way towards the end and then start writing back towards the top of the page in small, excruciating increments. I can’t write on paper, only on a computer. As a particular recruitment agent once told me, ‘Your typing speed is … like a bat out of hell!’ and I’m convinced the only reason I ever get anything onto the screen is simply because I can type faster than I can think.

Opening a new document is easy. Hitting ‘save’ reflexively is easy. Changing folder icons to little colourful dinosaurs is easy. Now, anyway. I did nearly lose ¾ of my book because I decided I absolutely could not continue work on it before there was a small, pink pterodactyl next the folder name. The folder just disappeared in this little puff of smoke on my desktop, and I had a panicked 15 minutes before I located it again. I was dreading having to explain to my editor why I needed her to send me all of my writing.

What do you get out of writing?

I might throw to the piece that I wrote – ‘That One Time I Tried to be a Writer’ – for the latest issue of Kill Your Darlings …

There are moments though – the ones in between all the 3am starts, tracked changes, false beginnings and bad endings – that are, as they say, ‘worth it.’ Twice now have I had the pleasure of excusing myself from whatever office I happened to be working in at the time to go run wild, silly loops around the city blocks listening to LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Daft Punk Are Playing at My House’ on my headphones because someone wanted me – me! – to write a book. You learn to watch for these moments and to guard them carefully, because they are often all that is needed to carry you to the next. Gradually, the horrors of 3am will fall away until one day you’ll find yourself standing in the kitchen, wondering if it has always been possible to smell the parsley that grows out from underneath the garden shed, and when a housemate finally asks what the hell you are doing you’ll be able to tell them, ‘It’s finished.’

Read Michaela McGuire’s ‘That One Time I Tried To Be A Writer: Pitfalls and Pleasures’ in Issue Two of Kill Your Darlings.