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Today, this morning, right now, it feels as if I live in a lighthouse. The howling – almost screaming – of the wind hitting the corrugated iron of the roof and passing through, the clank-clank-clank of the neighbour’s back gate, windows rattling, the Old Lady of the House putting her paws over her ears (she’s not good when the weather’s like this). In the old parlour room that’s now my library there’s an airy rush coming down the chimney as though it’s a connection to a very wild other world. The day’s overcast, but it’s not raining, though it might rain soon, when the wind has blown itself out. I can admit to you that, in a perverse kind of way, I like the house on days like this – it’s as if the place is alive, it’s as though the paddocks that begin half a kilometre away have reached in to my back door.
Somehow it seems right for it to be like this, because today, so I’ve been told, Blemish Books sends my second novella, I’m Ready Now, to the printer. I’m nervous, I’m nerve-wracked, I’m excited, I’m frightened. What’s there to be frightened about? Isn’t this a good thing? Yes, it’s a good thing, a great thing – it is, in fact, quite miraculous. They say that only 1% of writing in Australia gets published, and that without an agent only one in a thousand manuscripts is turned into a book. These are horrible statistics, there’s no dancing around that. So I’m lucky, very lucky. But still this time I’m both excited and frightened.
There’s something about turning yourself inside out when writing words for others to read, any kind of writing really, even this blog post. But with fiction it’s different. All the questions and judgements: does this guy know what he’s doing? Will readers engage with the work, will they be moved? I operate within the context of small-press independent publishing, so being a ‘top-seller’ isn’t a consideration (or even a dream), nor is winning the big awards. One small fish; an endless, endless ocean. But still you want the words, the characters, the story – the predicament, the end result – to mean something to someone. Eminent Australian novelist Roger McDonald said not long ago that he dreaded the silence; a novelist works on a story for years, maybe even decades, and then…the silence. McDonald also said that he loved nothing more than a reader coming up to him and saying, I loved your novel, I immersed myself in the characters and what was happening to them, and I lost myself in that world, so thank you. That’s what Roger McDonald writes for – that response. After everything he’s achieved, all the accolades.
Obviously, I’m not in McDonald’s league, but my motivation to write is the same: to tell a story, to be heard, to get a response. One reader of Fall On Me, the first of the Blemish novellas (2011; yes, two novellas in two years – I could never imagine that this is how it would turn out), said that she cried at the end, that she then visited her parents and found herself re-telling the story and her parents asking, ‘What happened next?’ So a story goes out into the universe and it does its thing, or it doesn’t, and sometimes you hear about it and sometimes you don’t. In essence, it’s no different to when, over thirty years ago, in primary school in the posh northern suburbs of Sydney, a teacher scolded me for demanding – very loudly and persistently – that I be the one to read my story to class. My hand’s still up, it appears.
Hobart’s Narryna House: it plays a central role – actually, two central roles – in a little book called ‘I’m Ready Now’
Let me tell you a little about I’m Ready Now. The first draft of the story was written in the first half of 2010 during a mad month of writing while an artist-in-residence at Cataract Gorge, Launceston. I found it difficult to engage with the gorge and the city – winter wasn’t far away and there was a palpable sense of darkness and doom. So I retreated into a story about Lynne Gleeson, a mother who, after the sudden death of her wealthy husband, leaves her grand ancestral home in Hobart to spend a fortnight with her son Gordon who is reaching the peak of what he calls his Year of Living Ridiculously. I’d had the idea for years: a mother who comes to stay but won’t stop cleaning and a son who is on the verge of losing control. As had happened with Fall On Me, I thought that the idea was nothing more than a short story. I was wrong.
Over the past two years I’ve edited and polished and edited some more; it’s been looked at by others – professional others and simply generous and honest others – and I’ve edited and polished some more. Perhaps like any writer, I’ve gone through stages thinking ‘this is kind of okay’ but then ‘this is absolute rubbish – where’s the delete button?’ before ‘maybe, just maybe, it works, but what would I know’. Have I put everything I’ve got into I’m Ready Now? Yes, I have, and perhaps even the title alludes to that. But I’m not Gordon Gleeson in the book, I know no one like Lynne Gleeson (maybe, at the most, she’s a composite of some people I know, but I’m related to none of them), and I’ve never been in the precarious situation they’re in. What am I writing about? The complexities of modern Australian families. Why is this so fascinating? Because we all have a family of some sort, and we all know – though not everyone can admit it – that they’re endlessly complex and intriguing and bewildering and destructive and hopeless, and in the end we’re nothing without them.
So, as the wind barges its way over and around and just a bit into my little old house, I think of an idea that became a hand-written first draft that became a manuscript – a series of manuscripts, too many to count – that today, perhaps right in this very minute, is in the process of being turned into a book. The official launch is still two months away (here’s me claiming the date, as they say: Thursday evening, 22 November 2012 at Electric Shadows Bookshop in Canberra, the capital city of my increasingly infuriating nation), but in many ways I can’t wait to have this thing in my hands. Is this how first-time parents feel when they hold a new-born baby in their arms: what is it that we’ve done? The analogy has been done before, because it’s apt.
Maybe it’s fitting that I can report to you that it’s raining now, the sound of the pummelling on the corrugated iron, the thrumming on the window panes, all of it a great big roar as though there’s a wild ocean outside.
‘The view is amazing,’ says Andrew Croome as he rearranges the furniture. We’re in the upstairs studio where he worked on his most recent novel, Midnight Empire. The view is indeed amazing: from the studio’s place at the base of Mount Majura there’s the stillness and quiet of Canberra’s well-heeled northern suburbs, the low-lying landscape border of O’Connor Ridge, and the Brindabella ranges beyond, which this afternoon are dusted in snow. Driving here to interview Croome I couldn’t help realising – yet again – how peaceful this part of the world actually is, and beautiful, despite the fact that it’s been raining and sleeting for much of the day. On this dear old Earth of ours could there be a more serene city? It’s hard to imagine.
Furniture now rearranged – Croome is adamant that I should have the comfortable bucket-style armchair – and voice-recorder set to play, we get to talking. In publicity photos, this young Australian novelist looks like a character from the nerdy TV show The Big Bang Theory, but in person he is handsome, albeit in a boyish way, and has a thick and expansive 5 o’clock shadow that looks as if it’s been transplanted from a much older man. And his clear and thoughtful way of speaking seems to come from a much older man too, as though he’s been around the world a few times, and by the sounds of it he has, in his fiction at least.
It is one of those extraordinary qualities of Canberra that we have in our midst a writer of Andrew Croome’s calibre. Described by publisher Allen & Unwin as a ‘Cold War historical novel’, Croome’s first book was Document Z which examined the Petrov affair, something else peculiar to the ACT. For Croome the book won the Australia/Vogel’s Literary Award in 2008 and the University of Technology Sydney Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. In 2010 Andrew Croome was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year. If all this isn’t enough, Croome has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, which examined the relationship between fiction and history (perhaps our federal politicians should have a read and learn a few things). Somewhat surprisingly, Croome’s way of speaking isn’t overly academic or highfalutin, just concise and logical and appealing, a lot like the way he writes.
The main character in Midnight Empire is Daniel Carter, an Australian computer programmer whose Canberra-based software company sends him to work at the drone program run out of the Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas. There he spends his days observing pilots flying unmanned but very definitely armed airplanes over Pakistan and his nights playing poker in the casinos, all the while forming a relationship with a woman without a history. It is an elegantly structured and chiselled narrative that follows Carter as he makes a series of mistakes that will have dire consequences for more than himself.
How would Croome describe Midnight Empire? ‘It’s an espionage thriller,’ he says, ‘but it didn’t necessarily start out as one. It became one because of the subject material and the drones and the CIA involvement. The novel is about the nature of modern warfare and globalisation and technology and how that’s changing our experiences of geography, how it’s raising moral questions. It used to be that, unless you were conscripted, you made a conscious decision to go to war. My character just ends up at war through his job. His workplace becomes a theatre of war, and in a sense the whole of Las Vegas becomes a theatre of war. That’s what drones tend to do. It’s meant to be about remoteness but if anything it brings the war into the city and into the home territory and into the home society.’
Surely researching what is undoubtedly a strictly controlled operation must have posed challenges. ‘I tried to get onto the airbase,’ he tells me, ‘but they weren’t taking journalists or writers. It was around the time of the Afghan war-logs [a collection of internal US military logs of the war in Afghanistan, also called the Afghan War Diary] being released by Wikileaks, so that might have contributed to them not wanting to give me a tour. Or perhaps it was because I wasn’t a big enough name from The Guardian.’ Croome laughs, but it’s slightly pained. ‘I’ve noticed that they’re trying to do more and more positive stories about drone warfare, so they’re certainly not trying to hide it. You know, there are predictions that by 2040 the entire air force will be drones.’
What was the original inspiration? Croome says it was the remarkable fact that the United States military would choose to pilot their unmanned aerial drones from a city like Las Vegas, which is already unreal and in many ways simulated as well as geographically confused. ‘So it comes down to questions of morals,’ he says, ‘and questions of chance. I was considering a novel about poker at the same time and when the two connected I said to myself, this is the next book.’
From a writing technical point of view the main character is not physically in the thick of war, instead he watches it happen on computer screens. ‘That’s why I didn’t start with the idea of an espionage thriller,’ Croome explains. ‘I started with a question: what is the experience of drones? It’s almost an aesthetic question. They’re very interesting and evocative objects – they have a presence. So half the novel came out of Las Vegas and the other half in Pakistan, and some in Europe. But a lot of it is mediated through screens and geography. There’s this breakdown of the idea of geography and the question of how much does geography matter in a world of drones, and in a world of poker as well.’
In Midnight Empire poker forms a strong contrasting narrative thread.
Andrew Croome teases this out. ‘One of the things poker is about for the players who are very successful is a detachment from geography, because they’re very mobile in the world – they’re constantly on tour, they have cash, they can disappear off the grid. It was fertile ground for me to go in and put some concepts in play and see where it all ended up.’
Croome says that his task as a novelist is to mediate the arguments and to present them in different ways and to work through them. ‘In the writing about these questions you’re not only considering them but you follow them and you end up in places that you didn’t expect when you started. That’s always something that I’m trying to do with my writing: not consciously plan it too much. Mainstream spy thrillers are heavily planned, whereas my writing begins with a question and works through it and it doesn’t mind too much where it ends up.’
Wanting to know more about Andrew Croome the human being, I put forward something Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once said: ‘Heartland is the part of the writer that the reader gets to know well.’ At first, Croome appears flummoxed. ‘What’s that mean?’ he says, before – thankfully – settling into a smile. I reword the question: What part of him should the reader connect with?
‘A fascination with that question: where is the world heading? What is technology doing to or for humanity? How is it impacting on what it means to be in the world? I don’t consider myself an autobiographical writer, so the concerns of this book are what I’m thinking about. I wouldn’t say that I have a burning political imperative. It’s about the question of being human, that question of being comfortable or uncomfortable. That question of bending to other people’s will all the time. Daniel in Midnight Empire is constantly following the path set to him by others. That’s a question I face continually, which is deciding for oneself and not just doing things because other people would like you to. That’s courage.’
Our interview finished, Andrew Croome leads me downstairs to the front door. He asks about my own writing – like many novelists it’s possible that he’s more comfortable asking the questions. We shake hands and he wishes me well. A minute later I’m driving out of Canberra’s Inner North suburbs. Even though it’s only 7pm, the streets are dark and largely deserted. I drive past the Australian War Memorial and the turnoff to the defence complex tucked behind the back of Campbell, and past the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and, a little later, past the turnoff to the Joint Operations Headquarters south of the pretty rural village of Bungendore.
Quite suddenly I’m struck by the thought that, as Midnight Empire points out so frighteningly, this neck of the woods in the future might not be as peaceful and tranquil and serene as it is now. It may well become a place where people get up in the morning and kiss their partners and children goodbye and spend the next twelve hours destroying targets and killing people on the other side of the globe via robots in the sky. As Andrew Croome says, we will cross paths with these people in our supermarket queues and in the neighbourhood pub. For parts of the United States of America, this is happening right now as you read these words. We should thank our lucky stars that a novelist like Croome is living amongst us and asking the hard questions. And entertaining thousands as he does so.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 1 September 2012. Thanks to Gia Metherell and Alan and Unwin. Gratitude to Andrew Croome.)
I knew something was wrong when I lost my temper while trying to do up my shoelaces – it all just seemed too much. ‘God, I’m over it, over everything.’ As I eventually got my act together and managed to leave the house to walk down the street to do the grocery shopping, I did an urgent scan of my life. It wasn’t only the shoelaces that were doing my head in. I was horrified to realise that my morning coffee, a routine that I’d previously adored, the three-stage process, the smell, the taste, had also become a source of tension and anger. Even the simple act of trying to open the back door so I could sit in the sun and watch the chooks for a few minutes had become a chore – the door was in my way and I hated it.
Why on earth was I so anxious and uptight? Sure I’ve had a lot on my plate this year: a new novella, I’m Ready Now, will be published by Blemish Books in November, so there has been polish after polish after polish (and worry after worry after worry); and I’m always working on new stories; and I do freelance writing for The Canberra Times; and I edit Verity La; and I’m an active member of an arts advocacy body called The Childers Group; and I maintain this blog. But I live mortgage-free in a house I love, and home is an easy-going regional town. And this year I’ve said no to things, over half a dozen, and all were good and exciting, but back in January, as a core New Year’s resolution, I promised that I’d say no more often to make sure things stay well-juggled, and I’ve held myself to that promise. But the fact remained: tightening my shoelaces and making coffee and trying to open the back door made me lose my head.
Clearly needing to chill-out I decided to ease back on social media for a week – it seemed to be one thing that I could control. I’m a late-bloomer in terms of Facebook, signing up only last year; I joined because a project in which I’m involved was communicating through Facebook. Soon I was using the thing for my own writing and life – the word missing there is ‘marketing’ – as well as spreading news about Verity La and The Childers Group. I run a Twitter account each for VL and Childers; I’m not much of a participant in the Twitterverse, preferring to simply put out a couple of tweets each week – to me it feels as though I’m sending up a flare to see if anyone notices (they rarely do). In total, across both platforms, I’d probably knock out as few as six posts per week, most non-personal and the majority about people other than myself. But I did check my Facebook ‘news-feed’ two to three times a day – first thing in the morning, at lunch, and before dinner. After I read the newspapers on-line I’d sign in and scroll through, click the Like button every so often, make the odd comment, scroll through some more.
Amazingly, within twenty-four hours of giving up the scrolling side of my social-media life, I felt more relaxed. Much more. My head seemed clearer. Actually it felt as if my head was my own again, as well as my mind, my heart too, perhaps even my soul. I felt more myself, more whole; my natural shape was returning.
*
I should make it clear that I’m a person who does get anxious at a drop of a hat. You should see me trying to pack up to go away for a couple of days – now that really is too much! And when I’m in the city and have to drive in traffic, well, that’s no good for anyone. Anxiety is in my genes; it’s etched onto my DNA. I can keep everything in check by daily exercise, especially walking and lap-swimming, and listening to certain types of music, and gardening, and being alone – too much socialising knocks me for a six. Exercise has to be a daily thing otherwise I unravel very quickly. If I don’t write for a week (which is a very, very rare event) I start going all wobbly at the knees. So my life is a fine balance. Whose isn’t? But what I realised was I’d upset this fine balance by plugging myself into a – let’s not sugar-coat this – stream of random crap.
As each day went by in my new non-news-feed world I felt more and more at ease. I could go through the back door without wanting to smash it down. I could get together the coffee and enjoy the process. Yes, I can even do up my shoelaces and have a smile on my face. Why was social media having such a negative impact? It is, after all, social, albeit in a vacuous kind of way, and I’m not someone who can be social 24/7 – a good week is one in which I’m able to spend 30% of the time in my own company, not that I prefer my own company, it’s just that I don’t need constant connection and engagement. I also like a single source of stimulus, a book, a film, a piece of music, but not all at once. Facebook is as if life has been shoved into a blender and the slops injected into your veins. At the risk of mixing up too many metaphors, it’s also like the staff-room in an office or the student refectory at university or the common-room at school – I don’t mind ducking in and ducking out, but I loath lingering there for hours. So social media may not be the best for non-social people like me.
But it’s also about the type of socialising that happens on Facebook. The vast majority – 99% – is, of course, banal. Someone saying that they had a good cappuccino, or a bad cappuccino, or an average cappuccino. A picture of a cat with a vaguely funny caption. A link to a video of a song from thirty years ago, a song that we’ve all forgotten and there are good reasons why we’ve all forgotten it. Or those manipulatively demanding status updates where someone writes ‘Wow, that upset me’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t said what I did’ so we’re forced to ask ‘What upset you?’ or ‘What did you say that you shouldn’t have?’ And then there are those who use it as though it’s a counsellor: ‘I’m realising that I’m an okay person’. Good for you. That sounds bitchy, I know, but can anything truly good and long-lasting come from someone who is seriously down in the dumps trying to seek comfort in a machine? Is crowd-sourcing psychoanalysis actually healthy?
However, even thoughtful posts from my more erudite ‘friends’ (those inverted commas are necessary because I haven’t met these people) become annoying after a while – it’s like being stuck in a world where the only program on offer is the ABC’s Q&A. Or posts from very worthy organisations pleading for me to send an email to a politician, or to take action against some kind of abuse. It all adds up to a bombardment. It feels like I’m forcing myself to scavenge in the tip. Worse: it feels like I’m allowing myself to have the tip poured over me on a daily basis. (These metaphors keep coming.) It’s not just about feeling dirty; it’s about feeling as though I’m being buried alive. And then there’s the sense that the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ are being eroded, so much so that identity is deformed before lost altogether. Some commentators like to say that social media is a great aggregator, but really we’re just being mashed up into oblivion.
And then there’s the addiction. You know you’re in trouble when you’re in a mad rush, you have to be out of the house RIGHT NOW, in fact five minutes ago, but still you check Facebook to make sure there’s not something there that you really need to know about, even though you know that there isn’t going to be something there that you really need to know about, so now you’re even more late, but – hang on – one last check. Or you find yourself simply scrolling through, not reading, not engaging, just scrolling, like the smoker who simply needs something to do with his hands. (That’s it: I’m done with the metaphors.)
Sure, there are good things to be found in the social-media world. One morning a radio-producer friend put up a post saying that he was going to cover for a presenter who’d come down sick so was looking for news items to fill the program. My first novella, Fall on Me, had recently been published, so I sent him the publisher’s media release and that afternoon I was on-air talking about the book. Another example: a page I ‘liked’ which highlights publishing opportunities in North American put up a post saying that a particular literary journal was looking for a certain type of story; I submitted a piece and months later had a story published overseas. And it’s true that sometimes someone will post a comment or a photo or a video that is genuinely poignant and memorable, but I can count these experiences on one hand.
It’s also true that social media can be worthwhile for a project like Verity La – if a well-crafted post about a new story or poem or review can draw a couple of hundred people to the work and the writer then I’m more than happy to do it. Similarly with The Childers Group. Recently I was astonished to receive from Facebook a statistics update on Childers page which claimed that the potential reach was 18,000 people, even though only 50 people have actually formally connected with the thing. For a voluntary body that’s trying to increase discussion about the value of the arts it’s hard to ignore the possibilities of these figures.
*
As I write I’m in the second week of my Approach Facebook With Caution way of getting through the week, and I continue to feel more relaxed and clearer in the head. I’m still posting things about Verity La and The Childers Group but am no longer posting personal status updates, you know the ones, those that are put there simply to fill the void. When I bring up the Facebook login screen and see that there are no little red marks in the left-hand corner indicating activity I simply don’t enter – like the alcoholic outside the pub, I’m learning to walk away. (Damnit, another metaphor.) I know that this isn’t really in the spirit of Facebook: if I want people to engage with my posts I should engage in posts by others. It’s also hypocritical: I don’t want to be polluted by my news-feed but I’m more than happy to pollute other people’s news-feeds. Rather frighteningly, Facebook seems to have noticed that I’m no longer accessing the site on a daily basis so it has given me login-free access, meaning I’m taken into the site as soon as I click on the Facebook icon in my list of favourites. Perhaps this is a coincidence, but it does make you wonder if the machine is becoming too intelligent for our own good.
A quick Google search of ‘Facebook’ and ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’ and ‘mental health’ reveals a potentially endless list of articles quoting peer-reviewed research into the negative impacts of social media on quality of life. No doubt the worthwhile mantra in this context is everything in moderation. But what I’m suggesting is that for some people social media – which can be defined as a perpetual and invasive onslaught of random and mostly meaningless ‘thoughts’ and ‘observations’ and links and images – is as potentially harmful as trying to walk across a six-lane freeway at peak-hour. Clearly I’m not done with these metaphors: they’re starting to feel a lot like a Facebook news-feed…and I’m getting the jitters.
So why don’t I just quit? While I’m writing books and editing a literary journal and being active in an arts advocacy body, I will continue to use social media to communicate (although I doubt that communicate is the right word to use in this context) things that might be of interest to others. It’s reported that up to 10 million Australians are on Facebook – 45% of the population – and 6.6 million people check the site daily. And we’re just one tiny country; it’s probably impossible to know how many people there are around the world who are regular Facebook users. It can only be assumed that many enjoy it. So that’s a massive audience who are willing to be engaged through this medium. Writing and literature – any kind of creative practice – is a tough game, and all tools have to be seriously considered if we want to cut through to the general populace.
However, I do wonder if for many, including myself, the personal cost of being immersed in this environment could reach the point where it’s fatal. I’d certainly like to be able to keep doing up my shoelaces without wanting to ram by head through a brick wall.
So far, so good.
*
Update: here’s a very interesting article from The Sydney Morning Herald about how some high-profile novelists are dealing with social media and its impact on their writing.
I have a thing for light, quite a thing. Sometimes days go by and it’s all I’ve thought about. Light. It’s such a simple word, and it sounds exactly as it should – it sounds light, as in light to carry, but also as though it would be possible to turn the word on and off, that it glimmers and glows, that it shows us the way, and indeed it does. In the early evening, after I’ve poured myself a glass of wine and struck a match to the fire, I close the west-facing curtains over the French doors only when it’s well and truly black outside, because I like to see the final blue hue as the day darkens.
I’ve written short stories about hurricane lanterns, because I love the idea of a light – at least a carrier of light, or a protector of light – that’s designed to withstand the worst of storms, the worst of seas.
One of my all-time favourite songs is ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths, which is such a jaunty tune about young people going for a night-time drive: “And if a double-decker bus/crashes into us/to die by your side/ is such a heavenly way to die”. But it’s the lyric to fade that’s the real killer: “There is a light that never goes out”, repeat, repeat, repeat until – irony of ironies – you feel more alive than ever.
Recently I bought a light-shade for my hallway, a simple Art Deco design found in a second-hand store up the road. I’d been looking for it for weeks, months, my whole life perhaps, and there it was in all its frosted green-glass glory. For an entire evening I turned the light on and off, on and off, as if electricity had just been invented and there I was amazed, gob-smacked. Each time I walk down the hallway I look up and see the light-shade; it makes me feel as though I’m in love for the first time. I’ve found myself thinking, I feel so happy at the moment, I wonder why, oh yes, a new light in the hallway – best go and have another look.
Light may be, as my Oxford Dictionary claims, an electromagnetic radiation whose wavelengths fall within the range to which the human retina responds, but really it’s the opposite of hopelessness.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 1 September 2012.)
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 