photo by Tim McLean

Newcastle writer Patrick Cullen’s stories have been anthologised in those bastions of short fiction, Best Australian Stories and Sleepers Almanac, and his novel-in-stories, What Came Between, has been praised many times over. His short story about the friendship between Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, ‘Carver’s Unkempt Lawn’, appears in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings. Killings asked him to share his thoughts on reading and writing, and the germination of his tale.

Looking back at what I’ve written over the years I’ve probably followed a typical writer’s trajectory: teen poetry that ran on into my early twenties, evolving into prose and a largely autobiographical (and wholly unpublishable) novel, then finding a form to call home, which for me was short stories. Thinking about those earliest days I’d say that every time I sat to write I was as serious then as I am now, though experience tells me that taking writing seriously and having something good come of it are not always correlated. But you keep going regardless, writing whatever you’re fired up to write. Inspiration comes from anywhere and at any time, and much of the creative impulse comes from the challenge of trying to make something out of random fragments that lodge in my consciousness. The randomness of inspiration is probably echoed in the way influences work on you. Read more