Whenever I update my website, specifically the ABOUT ME page, I put the content I am replacing here for... posterity, I guess. What conversation did I have with myself in 2019? Oh, here it is.
Anyway, here's what I've had on my website for the last two years (written shortly after I had a three week residency at the Michael King Writers Centre and will still riding the high of a productivity burst) and will replace shortly...
Bonus Q&A with myself (from 2024)
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm finishing two manuscripts. One is a new novel (contemporary, with
elements of crime fiction) and the other is a short story collection (stories
written over the last 15 years). I'm also writing more book reviews and essays
than I have in a good while.
Do you write full-time?
No. I work full-time in the climate action/sustainability
space, which means I currently write around work and family commitments.
In this context, writing residencies, even short ones like
the three weeks I spent at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2024, are
invaluable. They let me focus in a way that is not possible to when writing is
measured in hours rather than days. But having a life is a critical part of my
creative process, too. Three weeks of solid writing would be fruitless if I
wasn't full to the brim with ideas (and frustrations) that have accreted over
months and years.
Is it your dream to be a full-time writer?
I've made the choice to live in New Zealand, have a family
and a mortgage and be a writer. I can have it all, just not
all at once or all the time.
But not having to work for money for an extended period...
that does sound nice.
What do you prefer: short stories or novels?
As a reader, I'm consuming more novels at the moment.
As a writer, perfection is unattainable regardless of the
form. Even so, I enjoy grasping for perfection in short stories. Arranging a
few thousand words, a limited cast of characters and a handful of settings in
just the right way seems like something a human brain could achieve.
But writing a novel? That requires an even greater sense of
self-delusion. Perhaps it's no coincidence my protagonists gravitate towards
madness in these longer works.
Your first two novels both had elements of historical
fiction. Is that a genre that has always appealed to you?
Actually, no. I fell into historical fiction with The
Mannequin Makers. After finishing the stories in A Man Melting,
I started working on a novel that took a character from one of these stories
and spent more time with him. I plugged away at this project for quite a while,
but always seemed to get bogged down. The novel was set in the present and
focused on a dude about my age at the time, with experiences not dissimilar to
mine.
When I finally gave up on this novel, I decided that the
next thing I worked on would either be set in the past or the future. The
future seemed too easy - I could just make things up - and I thought doing
research would help me feel like a proper writer. I was also piqued by the kind
of historical fiction that was being published in New Zealand at the time,
which played up the sense of Aotearoa as a predominantly rural backwater,
disconnected from the rest of the world. But that's not how most Pākehā saw themselves
before the advent of World War One. It was an age of newspapers and burgeoning
towns and department stores. It didn't matter it took the latest fashions from
Paris six months to get here by boat, because our seasons are six months
out.
So I chose to focus on two ideas that I'd been kicking
around for a while that needed to take place in the past, but reflected this
more cosmopolitan, connected vision of Aotearoa and devoted the next two or
three years to them.
It was rewarding, but also really hard.
My next novel, NAILING DOWN THE SAINT, wasn't
meant to be so hard. It's mostly contemporary, but does draw a lot on the life
of San Guiseppe da Copertino (1603-1663). It was really interesting to write
about a sleazy Hollywood director before, during and after the first eruption
of #MeToo in 2017. I guess that's one reason some writers prefer to stick to
the past: the illusion of immutability.
That, and no cellphones.
I can see how cellphones make a lot of mystery plots
improbable or impossible now, but they also open up new ways of communication
and connection for characters. Some of my favourite books in recent years have
been extremely online, like Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About
This, or phone-y (the opposite of phony, perhaps) like Big
Swiss by Jean Beagin or Wellness by Nathan Hill.
You attended the International Institute of Modern
Letters MA programme back in 2006. Is that when you wrote the stories in A
Man Melting?
No. I actually tried to write a novel that year — a great
experience but I think it was a mistake to try and write a novel from go to
whoa in eight months. Too many decisions were made for the sake of expedience
that then became so integral to the fabric of the novel that it was beyond
fixing (though I spent another year trying!). The manuscript now sits in my
bottom drawer along with the novel I tried to write when I was twenty-one.
When did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the
shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly
read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck
Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of
course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still
love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing,
but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I
returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since
been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the
novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something just
clicked.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366
days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very
successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was
written or revised during that year. There's also at least one story from this
year that I hope to include in my second collection, whenever that may be
published.
Fatherhood is a recurring topic in your work. Whether
it's Colton Kemp being a very bad parent in The Mannequin Makers,
or Duncan Blake trying to juggle Hollywood aspirations and a neuro-divergent
son in Nailing Down the Saint. To what extent is this a
reflection of your own experience as a son and father?
My father died when I was sixteen, which may be why the parent-child dynamic is
endlessly fascinating to me. That mix of nature and nurture imprinting upon the
child, but also the randomness of how these factors are expressed. The futility
of trying to shape a child too completely. The slow realisation that parents
are flawed and often fickle, and much later (too late?) their noble and tender
aspects.
I finished writing The Mannequin Makers before
I became a father, though my daughter did attend the book launch as a
six-month-old. Looking back, I was imaginatively projecting myself forward into
a state of fatherhood. Before that, my stories had been more interested in the
child's perspective ('Copies', 'The Skeptic's Kid').
These days, while parent-child relationships might not
feature in the high-concept pitch-line for the things I'm writing, these
dynamics will be there, idling beneath the hood and occasionally driving the
action.
Please name ten authors who people should be reading.
I don't like to single out writers with no context. People
should read widely. Read for enjoyment and to be challenged, though doing so
separately is fine. Read local. Read foreign. Read contemporary. Read beyond
the now. Read Meg Mason, Kirsten McDougall, Sayaka Murata, Cesar Aira,
Jack Butler, Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane, Steven Millhauser,
Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, Tyson Yunkaporta, Robin Wall
Kimmerer, Eleanor Catton, Curtis Sittenfeld, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal
Stephenson, Andy Weir, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Henry, Beth
O'Leary, Jim Shephard, Owen Marshall... How many is that?
Twenty-four.
Patricia Grace, Janet Frame, Iris Murdoch...
Okay, thank you.
David Vann, Sue Orr, Elmore Leonard....
Links
The
Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like
stink.
This
Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing,
reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
Craig Cliff on The Academy of New Zealand Literature's website
