Owen Marshall Interview: On Writing

Monday, November 20, 2006

Owen Marshall is the writer in residence at the University of Canterbury. He has published ten books and a number of short stories. He has received numerous awards including the University of Canterbury writing fellowship, the PEN Lillian Ida Smith Award for writing, and the Katherine Mansfield memorial fellowship. His last novel Harlequin Rex won the Deutz medal at the Montana Book Awards. He was interviewed by Melissa Lam.

Would you say that a major theme in your short stories is a preoccupation with death?

I hope there isn’t. I hope that there is more of a preoccupation with life. But every life ends with a death, and that has to be addressed along with the other aspects of living. I think there are those stories that are dark. I think that you are thinking specifically of Coming Home in the Dark, which is a story with a rampant psychopath in it. I try to get a range of responses and I think humour is an important element. So sure, there is a dark side and a dark element but also there are the humorous sides; so I hope that I am not preoccupied with death.

Do you think of your writing as specifically addressing New Zealand identity or problems, or do you consider your writing more universal?

I think that my writing is indigenous. I wouldn’t say that it is a conscious thing, but I think I basically write from my own country and my own experience. I don’t consciously think I should get on to more universal themes. I am sometimes considered a regional writer, a South island writer, and I’m quite happy with those tags. I think if you do the local things, the smaller things well, the general significance will follow.

So if you do a local specific issue well, it should translate universally?

I think it should do, I think a lot of Janet Frame’s work has that small town environment. Small town in New Zealand, the other ends of the earth from where most of literature is happening.

Who are your influences?

Well, my father was a bookish man. He was a clergyman but he loved books; he and I read a lot of English literature, some of the classics were there in our library. When I started writing myself, I was very interested in H.E. Bates, the English writer, and a less well known writer Theodore Palace, a rural English writer –quite fabulous –and those two people were quite influential when I was in my early twenties. Also, people like Chekhov, Hemingway and Alden, Frame, Sargeson and so on –so certainly what people consider serious literature has been my passion for a long time.

When did you start to consider writing work? Or is it still play?

Well, I did a little bit of writing at university; then I had a year at Training College; then I tried to write around the bits and pieces of time I had as a career as a secondary school teacher. The crunch came when I was fortunate enough to get the Literary Fellowship here at Canterbury in 1981. Then I made a deliberate decision to spend more time and effort on my writing. I suppose that led to the Burns Fellowship in 1990, and with that I decided to leave teaching and become a full time professional writer.

Are you quite regimental in your writing routine? Do you have a certain time every day where you write?

There are two aspects of writing I believe. There is the magical inspirational aspect of the magic of words and there is the professional, businesslike approach: getting down to the job, focusing and working hard. That’s where you get into regimes and timetables.

Do you approach writing any differently, now that you are well-known and widely read?

I think two things have happened. I think I have less energy. I don’t think I can sit down and write for as long as I used to, though I don’t want to seem like a geriatric. But certainly, I think I have more confidence now to take risks, and even when things are not going well… Even when it doesn’t work, it’s something I need to do to stretch myself.

In an interview with the Listener you said: “The short story is like the arrow rather than the shotgun of the novel. It can miss completely or it strikes home to the bull's eye. Those economies, that focus, are what the really good short story needs.” Do you think this means that you must grapple more directly with character psychology, physiology and language?

I suppose what I was getting at there was that you only have one shot at a short story, particularly the shorter short story. With the novel, it can stumble and recover in two or three chapters; it can drift away, but then it can recover and become a successful novel. The short story has to be integrated and organic and you have to get it right.

As a creative writer, what do you think is the function of your art? Is it a representation of fact, or sometimes rather, facts themselves?

I hope to say something about the business of living. I hope that my fictions have some application to people’s experience. Sometimes or often that involves a good deal of real life being transformed within the fiction, Then sometimes it doesn’t or it’s what could have happened what, should have happened or may have happened at a different time. So I think truth in fiction is different from factual accuracy.

So is it possible that perhaps really good stories or literature can sometimes reveal fact?

Well they can, they can be more emotionally and psychologically true. There is so much in fiction a combination of fact, real information, and what we know works out there in every day life, and the process of fiction that transform it.

Do you think the first novels of most young writers have a strong autobiographical element to them?

I think that’s true. Initially the work often has a strong autobiographical element. You write from what you know, and I think that’s good advice to start isn’t it? However, it shouldn’t be a roman a clef, because that’s not fiction as such. So it’s a matter of taking and selecting and exaggerating and distorting and, as I said before, this didn’t happen, could’ve happened, should’ve happened: these things happened at different times but I bring them together; these things happened to different people, but I would ascribe them to one character and so on. So you take from experience and you take from life, and then…it goes into the melting pot.

What do you think of Hemingway’s statement “We work in our own time, which happens to be the worst time I’ve ever seen or heard about.”

My answer in many ways would be the opposite: I think that I am fortunate to live in the country that I do in the time that I live in. Two or three of the previous generations have had to go to war. My generation of kiwi men did not have to go to war. Our country has basically lived in prosperous times; I think I live in a country which hasn’t been ridden by disaster, or upheaval, or terrorism, so…I think that I have actually lived in a fortunate time. And my initial degree is in history, and when you read of the lack of freedom and the injustice and the overwhelming non-existence of personal power that was in the earlier ages, I think you generally feel quite fortunate.

Melissa Lam (Interviewer)

set the writing free/

tie the writing down/

Interview: Graham Lindsay II

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

What kind of audience do you write for?

An audience that's interested in the sorts of things I'm interested in, I suppose. I got interested in Zen Buddhism because I saw in it a description of the world that suited my sense of how it should be described. I got interested in George Oppen for the same reason. Ditto Baxter. Everyone has their enthusiasms and looks to bat them back and forth with someone. One of poetry's functions is that it has this capacity to talk about things that it might not be possible to talk about in any other way.

So do you hope to convey ideas, like those of Zen Buddhism, to readers who were neither knowledgable nor interested in them beforehand?

Yes, but discreetly. What I meant was getting away with talking about them, without getting laughed out of home, off the stage, etc. They’re the kind of ideas that can probably only stand being hinted at, or they come across as being new agey, gimlet-eyed, proselytizing. Some kinds of poetry seem to model the force that drives everything.

What does that last sentence mean?

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” (Thomas)

Is it possible to be too widely read? You say, for example, that "art is something you tell your secrets to" - does having too many hearers ruin the secret, or do you simply aim to be read by as many people as possible?

Most poets would rather have a larger audience. Maybe we’re all just frustrated rock stars who just want to break into song and dance? Poetry is a more meditative activity, that’s the way it is. The printed page is its ideal venue: it’s a private viewing, a comic book opera, the theatre of the brain. The more people in on the secret the merrier.

At the other extreme, would you still write if you never had an audience (except yourself, of course)? ie. how much is your writing a personal, self-justifying activity, and to what extent does it need to be read by others to make it worthwhile?

Poetry is a message-in-the-bottle kind of activity; we're all marooned on our own desert island to some degree. It's a way of being part of and hopefully forwarding a conversation that’s been going on for aeons about what being human means and what time means and so on. It's a method of exploring and testing thought, and recording it with a view to contributing something to the culture.

Yes, although, from your poetry, you don’t seem always completely convinced that words/writing/language is the best way of experiencing/recording the world – writing “comes//between us/and the world”, the writer is “in control//and out of touch”, and it’s possible that there are “no ideas but in things.” Any thoughts here? Also, do you ever find yourself avoiding writing about things for fear that the act of putting them in words might belittle/reduce them, or is this what poetry is for - to find expression for everything?

My sense of the way it works is that you have this idea/feeling which you attempt to translate into some kind of communicable form (talk, poem, song, dance, painting). The trouble is it can sometimes seem much more ‘meaningful’ than the translation. Nevertheless, that’s the business you’re in, so you give it a go, hoping that someone will get the message, maybe even experience an idea/feeling of a similar order to the one that got you going. Another concern is that in reaching for a translation you could be turning the tap off, losing the innocence and purity of the pre-verbal experience (which might be what the story about the apple, the serpent, and the tree of knowledge is about?) It’s the idea of the origin of the world in each moment, and is not to say we can’t or don’t feel this in language. Maybe it’s about going back and forth between these functions, going out on the thin ice of the unsayable, coming back to language to talk about it, each informing the other? There’s little nicer in the way of sensation than writing out a feeling, riding the breath or wave of a feeling all the way in to the beach.

What first brings a poem into existence for you? Ie. do you deliberately set times aside to write, or do ideas and words just come involuntarily?

Usually it’s an idea or a feeling, sometimes it’s a word or a phrase, which I collect in notebooks. I also like to set aside times at the end of the week for catching-up on the things I’ve been thinking about during the week.

Do you ever think you will run out of poems? Would you mind if you did? Is there anything you do to help force forth a poem when they seem to be hard to come by?

I hope not. I'd like to keep on writing till I cark. I used to do a lot of walking, go out for a walk and take my notebook with me, stop and make a note as the words came, it was a way of forcing a poem. These days I’m happy enough to sit in my backyard with a pile of books and my notebook and write and read.

Or in your office, perhaps, which mustn’t have a very poetical sort of view – a bedraggled willow, maybe, or concrete slabs - so does your physical environment have much influence on what you write, and on the amount you write?

The environment is a good subject to write about, to practise writing on. Depending on where you are, sometimes it can be so stunning it’s hard to write about anything else, or to tear yourself away from it (I’m thinking about Dunedin here). If you do manage to do this, of course there are plenty of other things to write about. The view out my window here is fine. I really like the native plantings. I sometimes like to think of my office as an overhang in a rock in a field of stone, somewhere like Castle Hill maybe.

You are writing a novel at the moment. Is this a natural thing for a poet to do?

The reason I'm writing a novel is because the story I'm telling is too big to cast as poetry, it would take forever – it’s taking long enough as it is. It is a different way of writing. While I've been writing prose for as long as I've been writing – my notebook jottings are in prose – it’s still taken me quite a while to get the hang of it. It’s that thing of learning how to do it as you go.

What’s the novel about, and what kind of devices do you borrow from your poetry, when writing your prose?

It’s about the same thing as my poetry is about. It’s something I’ve been thinking about it since the early 80s when I tried to write a sequel to a poem I wrote then called ‘EXIT’. I think a lot of the devices used in poetry also work in prose, though my novel is probably what’s called a poet’s novel.

In a few words, how can we avoid writing bad poems?

Maybe most poems are pretty awful to begin with and it's a matter of resisting the urge to publish them, so as to give yourself time to fix them up, or realise they might have to be shelved indefinitely.

Yes, but that leaves the matter of assessing one’s own work, and finding the bad bits – what are some common bad bits?

Saying more than you need to, I mean something that’s already implied. Otherwise: contradicting yourself, muddled syntax, ‘clever dick’ or ‘smartarse’ writing, pretentiousness, humourlessness. But a little of these can also be leavening, like the Persian carpet with its woven-in imperfections. Sometimes I wonder if ‘bad’ writing isn’t ‘better’ than ‘good’ writing, because the mistakes can be disarming, can relax the reader into thinking maybe this isn’t going to be so difficult after all.

Can you teach people how to write poetry? Obviously you can tell people what alliteration is, and what a metaphor is, and what rhythm is, and how to achieve them all, but there must be a bit more to it than that, or else everyone who knew those things would be superb poets. Is it possible to teach people that "bit more"? Any ideas as to what that "bit more" is?

It's a partnership: the teacher shows the student something and the student finds it out all by themselves. All sorts of things teach, including poetry, especially the student's own poetry. The bit more could be about inspiration, being moved.

Can you be more specific there, or is “being moved” as precise as you can hope to get about something like writing?

Each poem is an attempt at a definition of what being moved means.

set the writing free/

tie the writing down/

Interview: Graham Lindsay I

Graham Lindsay is the Writer in Residence at Canterbury University, having taken up the 2004 Ursula Bethell Residence in Creative Writing. Mr. Lindsay has published seven volumes of poetry (his latest the 2003 Lazy Wind Poems) and he is currently working on a novel. He was interviewed by Michael Bycroft.

What exactly do you do as a Writer in Residence?

It's pretty straightforward; I come into the university each week day and work on my novel in a room in the English department.

Does it work like that, though? – ie. do you find yourself writing, finding material for, and thinking about your novel in your “spare time”?

Yes, it works like that, and I also get ideas for story details and structural organisation when I’m not at my desk.

Presumably being a writer in residence means you are obliged to produce a certain amount of material. Does this kind of pressure effect your approach to writing? Ie. do you find yourself forcing ideas when they might not necessarily be there?

There are no obligations to produce, and because I'm rewriting I'm not sweating over a first draft. It’s not a matter of forcing ideas, so much as trying them out, seeing if they work, and if they don't trying something else.

Are writers themselves good judges of “what works”? ie. working on something frequently, do you find yourself losing your objectivity a bit, and viewing things as a writer, rather than a reader? Is that a problem?

It’s a big problem. A writer is a reader too of course (I know you mean a reader who has little understanding of how writing is made). I think you’ve got to trust your own judgement, and work on developing its acuity, because very few readers are going to read your manuscript as closely as you have to. Getting distance on it helps you see what works and what doesn’t, and there are all sorts of ways of getting distance. For instance, you can work on a folder of poems, do what you can on one poem and then move onto the next, go round and round. All the usual breaks help: meals, sleep, weekends, holidays, movies, parties. Emptying your mind helps, regularly practising some form of meditation. Different moods: if you can write when you’re feeling tired or a bit despondent about your ability, you can sometimes produce better writing than when you’re feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It’s all about getting lots of different angles on your work.

You were a student once, I think. What was your attitude to University at the time? Were you a studious/ambitious/reluctant/rebellious student?

All of the above. I put in lots of hours in my first year (a lot of them not very effective). By my third year I’d started smoking and was more active politically.

Was that due to disillusionment about putting “lots of hours in”, or due to excitement at the possibilities of “smoking and protesting.”? Which part was more fruitful, from an artistic point of view – the hard study or the hard living?

Part of growing up. I was never attracted to ‘hard living’ per se, though I’m sure like anyone I’ve made life hard for myself at times. I think ‘hard living’ can be a kind of procrastination, like travel.

Do you think your Uni experience shaped you poetry at all? ie. would you be writing in much the same way, about much the same things, if you hadn't gone there at all?

One of the options I considered instead of the 7^th Form was the Forest Service, but you had to have a science degree to get anywhere with that, and I wasn't very interested in science. I was already thinking I might like to be a writer and continuing to study literature turned out to be the right thing to do. Writers like James K. Baxter and John A. Lee and Denis Glover and Vincent O'Sullivan came to the university to read and talk. Baxter had a big impact.

So you were aware of your will and ability before you got to uni – how long had you had this ambition to be a writer, and what stimulated it originally?

What started me thinking about writing was when we had to read two poems by Dylan Thomas for homework. It was a mammoth struggle trying to follow the syntax of one of them (‘Poem in October’), I pored over it for hours. At about 11.00pm or something it opened up, and I peered into this magic world. The syntax wasn’t resolved; I think the poem had an effect on me a bit like what Zen koans are supposed to.

Do you think the academic study of literature is worthwhile? Ie. it’s easy to say that "such study is a dry, passionless task that produces only dry, passionless analyses, and that this smothers the real spirit of literature." Any opinions on that?

Academic study is close reading. Close reading is a one-to-one relationship with a text that requires concentration. It can be hard work putting aside other thoughts and homing in on the meaning before you. If you're excited by something, however, getting to know it better is hardly going to be a dry, passionless task. So I'd say academic study can uncover the real spirit of literature, and allow that the complex pressures of being a student can be unsettling and misleading.

Do you go back and read your own volumes at all, and do you see yourself improving over time?

Usually only to select things for readings, though I might go back as a result of a review or a remark or an anthologist's choice – it can be a curious experience seeing your work through someone else's eyes. I think I'm getting better, not that that makes writing any easier, I think it just means there are more bases to cover. Maybe it’s a matter of having a bigger bag of tricks to dip into?

Have you written anything that makes you cringe when you go back to it?

Sure, I’ve written things that have made me cringe, and I’ve gotten past this by ignoring those pieces, or becoming more forgiving of them. On the other hand, occasionally someone says something nice about them.

And what tends to be cringe-inducing – the naiveté of ideas or the clumsiness of expression?

Yes – naivete, clumsiness. Getting the music of poetry to work can be hugely time-consuming. Adding and subtracting material can throw the music into disarray, so that you have to start all over again. Going back and forth between prose and poem formats can speed this process up; it’s much easier with prose to add and subtract, I find, and also to get the syntax and logic sorted (if you want these things sorted, of course).

As for your successful poems, do you find yourself seeing things in them that you had missed before, or hadn’t intended when you wrote them?

It is gratifying to reread something and find yourself thinking, ‘that’s bloody brilliant!’ But I won’t be reading it with a view to improving it by then, I won’t be reading it as critically. It’s not often I see things I missed, or which were unintended, which might be for the same reason, or it might be because I hang onto work for an unconscionably long time so this won’t happen. If it does, I have a chuckle. Not getting readily published can be a great opportunity.

You write in a fairly free-looking verse. Have you experimented with other, more structured forms, and can you say why you prefer the ones you do?

My attempts at more structured forms have been disheartening, so I haven’t persisted. If there hadn’t been an alternative, I might’ve gone straight to prose. The few sonnets and haiku I’ve published have mostly been accidental. I appreciate that they make writing easier for some people, I also admire and enjoy reading them sometimes, but they're not for me.

You cite George Oppen as an influence on you. What particular bits of Oppen appeal to you/do you try to imitate? Who else are you influenced by? Which poets do you dislike/object to/abhor?

For a decade from the mid-eighties I read and reread everything by and about George Oppen I could get my hands on. What appealed to me about it was a sense of what I'll call the imminent present, a feeling similar to what I get listening to some music. Now there's a whole lot of new stuff on the internet on George Oppen, which I haven't kept up with. I didn’t try to imitate him, but I didn’t mind if my work looked like his either. Usually I’ve got to reread something to realise what I've been influenced by. So I’ve discovered that other influences have been Baxter, Curnow, Wedde, and Manhire. I won't say whose work appals me because in the past when I've done this and then gone back to see if I was justified, I’ve found that I wasn't or that I've changed my mind.

This phrase “imminent present”: what does it mean, (is it something to do with the “act of listening to the world”, or the “feel of nothing…knowing what it’s like to be human”, as you have written?) and do you try to bring it into your own poetry (or does the act of writing itself give you a sense of the “imminent present”)?

It’s hard to get a handle on this, to know if the present is something we fall in with or is something that has lately happened, because the idea of its currency is in a precise sense after the event it refers to. It’s certainly in the same territory as what I mean by ‘the feel of nothing’ etc. It’s the idea of being on the brink or lip or crest of the wave of time moment after moment. I find the business of time endlessly fascinating, and sometimes wonder if that's fundamentally what art is about. I especially love notions such as that time is this gaping void (sort of like a hole, if you like, that threads the universe, ((the gulf in the cave in, is it Passage to India?)) which you can sort of get an understanding of through practises such as meditation, or otherwise, less stably, more riskily, through drugs. But the point is to stay in touch with such a feeling, 'the void eternally regenerative', because it's a little like a seam or a vein, it produces thought artefacts which themselves may be interesting, inasmuch as they may give us hints as to our nature, as to purpose, and so on.

set the writing free/

tie the writing down/