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.

The role of a literary festival director is ironic in many ways: the closer the festival gets, the more time one spends talking about books and writers, yet the closer the festival gets, the less time one has to read. That said, I am highly lucky that outside of festival month, my job involves a lot of reading, as it’s a major part of my role to unearth and encourage all kinds of writers at all stages of their careers. What I read is not just limited to books, but covers a whole gamut of media – blogs, journalism, zines, magazines, film, even music. So I always have an enormous to-consume pile that never seems to get any smaller no matter how voraciously I attend to it. (What a great problem to have!)

With the festival upon me, I have extremely limited time for reading, and when I do get a second to myself I turn to reading books rather than things on screen. (That may have something to do with the weather – living in a freezing Coburg terrace, I spend my nights huddling under blankets!) I admit, at this time of year, whenever I do get a moment for books I turn to my comfort genre – travel writing.

I have been reading adventure travel books since I was a kid and I can really never get enough of it, daydreaming about where I might go next and losing myself in other people’s journeys. People often dismiss this genre and I agree there is plenty of dross. However,  there are also some amazing gems. My favourite travel books are Tracks (Robyn Davidson), In Turkey I am Beautiful (Brendan Shanahan), Congo Journey (Redmond O’Hanlon) and anything by Ryszard Kapuściński. I am also profoundly in love with Peter Carey’s travelogues, 30 Days in Sydney and Wrong about Japan.

I am pretty scattergun in my approach to reading; I often have several things on the go at once. The exception are big novels that just invite you to absorb them almost in one sitting, locking yourself in the house to read them across one weekend. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the last book that called me to do that. But at the moment I’m trying to read mostly Australian books, because EWF authors are mostly local. Once the festival is done, I’m looking forward to diving into Anita Heiss’s Black Book Challenge, a great list that all Australians should be aware of.

I am a chronic re-reader and I often think about texts long after I’ve closed the covers. I especially return again and again to books that moved me when I was a teenager; I never seem to be as torn apart by reading now as I was when I was young, when it felt like my whole world could shatter and be rebuilt in the space of a single novel. But when I return to the books of my youth I get to capture a little bit of that feeling again. I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading Loaded (Christos Tsiolkas), Monkey Grip (Helen Garner), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Salman Rushdie), Naïve.Super (Erlend Loe) and Looking for Alibrandi (Melina Marchetta).

People often ask me to recommend reading. At this time of the year I usually point them to the Writers page on the festival website. I pick writers for the festival because I think they have something interesting to say, so it’s a big, somewhat chaotic list of fascinating writers across all forms and genres – plenty to keep you entertained and informed over the coming winter months!

The Pitch

Our panel of publishers and editors – from diverse publications such as literary journals, newspapers, magazines and online – are here to give you  no-holds barred tips and advice about how to successfully present your work. With time for Q&A, this is one panel you don’t want to miss.

Date/time: Date: Saturday 4 June, 3.30pm-5pm

Venue: Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne  Prices: $15 full/$10 concession

Living Library

Got a question about developing plotlines, dialogue, finding your voice, structure, criticism or collaboration? Be mentored by the best at our  Living Library professional development event. Borrow one of our experts for a fifteen-minute one-on-one mentoring session, to discuss issues about the craft of being a writer. Including Kill Your Darlings Associate Editor Jo Case (editing).

Date/time: Saturday 4 June, 10.30am–5pm

Venue: Experimedia Space, State Library of Victoria, Swanston St  Prices: $10 per 15 minute session with a Book

Podcasting

Podcasts and literary programming is all the rage, and these guys do it so well. Find out how literary podcasting works with MYKE BARTLETT and ESTELLE TANG.

Date: Sunday 29 May, 12:30pm

Venue: Melbourne Town Hall

Kill Your Darlings contributors including Mel Campbell, Bethanie Blanchard, Greg Foyster and Peggy Frew will also appear at events across the festival. See you there!

But apart from articulating arguments I wish I’d made, and speaking from experience I wish I had, something that Flynn’s had me thinking is whether his advice should be applied to The Reader itself. It’s a young journal in a well-populated landscape. So should it have been started, and now that it has, should it continue?

The Reader has already survived the two initial hurdles of attrition: making it to print in the first place, then making it past the first issue. It’s done so primarily because it’s a project of the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF), with the attendant support and infrastructure that this provides. So it’s easy to make retrospective arguments for The Reader’s instigation. But to consider whether it should keep going, we might turn to everyone’s favourite benchmark: sustainability.

So, broadly speaking, does The Reader generate enough money to justify the time and effort put into it? On sales alone, no. At least not yet. The first volume didn’t sell out. Will the second? Fingers crossed. It’s not about to fall over, but its commercial viability is yet to be proven.

And this is key to Flynn’s argument. The commercial viability of any journal is, at best, tenuous. The reason? The market is small. Journals don’t just walk off the shelves. First they have to get to the shelf, and from there – even with stellar contributors and great production values – you can’t count on anything more than a casual dawdling. Most journals keep their print runs below 1000, and Flynn asserts that Meanjin rarely breaches the 1500-sales mark. It doesn’t exactly leave room for immense profits.

In light of this, a journal has a couple of options. It can make the operation workable within these limits, reject the figures and shoot for the stars, or develop new models.

The current approach of The Reader is option one. If the second volume does sell out, the argument for a third is strong, and the choice will be justified. But if it doesn’t, what then? Is it sustainable as a print journal? Should it become print-on-demand, an e-journal, or simply shut up shop?

With this last option, we move into a broader debate in the arts, that is, whether economic success should determine something’s existence. Arts operations have been increasingly moulded into business-like structures in the last ten years, to cut reliance on public funding. But despite this, the overwhelming majority still rely on grants, funding, donations and philanthropy for their survival. Which is not a problem, except in an economic rationalist sense. While they might not be commercially viable, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist. Just ask an opera fan.

I think it’s important to accept that most journals are unsustainable in pure commercial terms – if only to wrench the conversation back from the successful business model agenda. But the outcome of this acknowledgement might only be an ideal, and based on a small semantic turn. Should commercial viability determine the existence of a journal? No. Will it? Probably. The harsh reality of starting a high-risk project is that no one’s going to rush in to save the day. No white horse, no novelty cheque. And so every journal – old and new – should aim for sustainability, even if it remains an asymptotic movement.

In addition to the independence and security you get from cutting reliance on funding and similar sources, perhaps the more important reason for pursuing sustainability is for the benefit of the people involved. Namely, the writers, editors, designers and publishers. Sustainability shouldn’t just mean scraping by. It should mean these people getting paid, getting paid more than they currently do, and that journals are able to provide viable career opportunities beyond the ubiquitous exposure and professional development.

In this, The Reader, like so many independent journals, could improve. The rationale for the collection is to offer opportunities to, and provide a useful resource for, emerging writers. Which it does. Being published in a well-curated, well-designed collection is a good opportunity, it just doesn’t pay that much. (To find out exactly how much, you’ll have to read Greg Foyster’s piece in Volume 2.) But it’s also an opportunity for people like me to have curatorial and editorial control over a great collection. And in that respect, it’s one of the most rewarding projects I’ve been involved with. So I want it to exist. I want to sell out this print run, to be sustainable, to pay writers more. I want The Reader to run to a third print volume.

When I started writing this, I was hoping to honestly address Flynn’s piece, without offering an apologia or entertaining a hypocrisy. But I don’t know if I’ve achieved this. I can’t refute Flynn, but I can’t argue against The Reader without idealism getting in the way. And so perhaps the only argument I can make is that if you do start a journal, or get involved in one, make sure what you get out of it is worth it. And that you know what’s at stake.

Volume 2 of The Reader will be launched in Sydney and Melbourne:

Penguin Plays Rough #20
Saturday 6 November, 8 – 10.30pm
Applebee Orchard, 4 Lackey St, St Peters
Readings by Darryn King, Gabrielle Maait, Felicity Castagna and others

Horse Bazaar, 397 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne
Tuesday 9 November, 6pm
Readings by Lou Sanz and Sean M Whelan

You can pre-order a copy here.

Aden Rolfe is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and radio-maker whose work includes poetry, collage and criticism. He recently edited Volume 2 of The Reader and directed the Critical Animals Creative Research Symposium.

On Saturday 15 May, KYD Editor Rebecca Starford will be reading at A Bridge for Short Attention Spans – a showcase of thirty writers and editors (Brunswick Street Gallery, 7pm – 10pm).

Towards the end of the month, we’re participating in the Emerging Writers’ Festival. Online Editor Estelle Tang will be hosting 15 Minutes of Fame, in which emerging writers discuss their new publications. 15 Minutes of Fame is on every night from Monday 24 May to Thursday 27 May, 7pm at the Wheeler Centre Performance Space. Kill Your Darlings will also be at the Page Parlour at the EWF, an afternoon of stalls showcasing various literary journals, zines, magazines, indie titles and hand-crafted storybooks (Sunday 23 May, 12pm to 5pm at The Atrium, Federation Square).

Read Associate Editor Jo Case’s article about sharing custody of her son in The Age last week.

Also, this month, the first ten new subscribers to Kill Your Darlings will receive a double pass to Harry Brown (starring Michael Caine), thanks to Icon Films. An edgy Brit-crime film, Empire magazine describes it as ‘the UK’s answer to Gran Torino’ – and the tickets are valued at $35. Please click here to take advantage of this special offer. [Please note: your subscription will begin with Issue Two, released on July 1]. All winning subscribers will be immediately notified by email.

In 1995, Joel Magarey up left his job as a journalist, and his beloved girlfriend Penny, to ‘track across the hurtling world’. Journeying to some of the most remote places in the world, Joel embarked upon an odyssey of sorts – geographical, sexual and psychological. His trek to far-flung Bolivia, Alaska and Zimbabwe entailed many challenges, among them an importunate grizzly and a petulant financial analyst from Seattle. But along the way, Joel also attempted to dislodge the claws of anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

I spoke to Joel about the darkness and fear of such a journey, how the gifts and conditions of our lives shape us, and – of course – his book, Exposure, which is out now. Joel is also appearing at the Town Hall Program of the Emerging Writers’ Festival.

Music by Pompey. Killings podcasts appear fortnightly.