Writing the quiet

John Clanchy: might he be a modern-day Checkhov? (Image source: Canberra Times/Fairfax Media)

Tall, grey-haired and eminently graceful, the first thing John Clanchy does is lead me through his 1960s-era inner Canberra home and out to the backyard, which offers a red-brick garage, a humble collection of small trees and shrubs, a patch of wintered grass, and plants clinging to pots here and there. But we’re not about to witness some kind of gardening act. ‘I’m just so lucky,’ says Clanchy in his soft and thoughtfully articulate voice. It’s as though we’re looking over an endless ocean, but really it’s just a humble rise of bushland. ‘Every day I spend an hour – often two – walking the mountain with the dogs. Where else can you live so close to the city and be able to do that?’

It sounds like he can’t believe his good fortune.

Back inside we sit in a small room adjacent a sunroom. There’s a gas fire, a pair of well-worn sandals on the hearth. On the low table between us is a collection of cheese and crackers and nuts. And a very good bottle of red. Behind us a full wall of books. This is, quite obviously, a writer’s house: it looks it, it feels it, it even smells it – all those pages in all those books packed into their floor-to-ceiling shelves. It’s easy to imagine Clanchy sitting in this space reading, reading deeply, every so often looking up and through the sunroom window into the front garden that is wild with native plants, gazing freely at a gala or rosella or cockatoo, his mind drifting off, dreaming up a new story to write and bring to the world.

And that’s exactly why I’m here: John Clanchy has a new collection of short stories, or ‘tales’ as they’re identified on the title page. The book is called Six (a reference to the number of pieces in the collection) and it’s been published by Finlay Lloyd, a small press operating out of Braidwood – that just so happens to get their publications in seventy bookshops around Australia. It’s a not-for-profit enterprise and the mission is to produce high-quality works of literature in hardcopy only. A fan of e-books and digital publishing? Not Finlay Lloyd.

But this story, the one you’re reading, isn’t about the small press – it’s about the author. And what an author John Clanchy is. His career spans decades: he is the author of five novels and four previous collections of short stories. His work has won major awards in Europe, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, including the Queensland Premier’s Award for short fiction and, on two occasions, the ACT Book of the Year. Clanchy is widely acknowledged as a master of the short literary form. And I’m in his house, armed with questions.

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Keep reading over at the Canberra Times, which published this piece on Monday 19 July 2014. Doing this interview has certainly been one of the highlights of my writing life. Thanks to Sally Pryor.

Reading uninterrupted

Devastating

A good thing about being down and out with a bad case of winter ’flu, apart from the distinct possibility of a deep, sexy (maybe) radio-esque voice, is being able to read uninterrupted.

This week I finished Richard Flanagan’s epic The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Vintage, 2013), which was the winner of the 2014 Independent Booksellers Award and has been shortlisted for other highly regarded literary gongs. I’m not going to review the novel – I wouldn’t know where to begin – but I do want to say that it’s extraordinary. Unflinching, devastating, multi-faceted, and ultimately very moving indeed. It focuses on an Australian doctor who was a POW on the Thai-Burma ‘death railway’ during the Second World War, but it also explores many other points of view, including the lovers of the men as well as those who found themselves guards and committed almost unspeakable atrocities. It’s sprawling, filmic, at times meandering, but it’s impossible not to be affected. Amazing that on the day I finished reading the work, Prime Minister Shinzo, Japan’s current head honcho, gave a presentation to a rare joint sitting of the Australian parliament; the associated speech by Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, is a different story.

2014 Independant Booksellers Award

2014 Independant Booksellers Award

2014 Independant Booksellers Award

2014 Independant Booksellers

Chekhovian

Another book that’s been a part of my sick-bed (sick-couch, really) reading is The Wild Goose, a novella by Mori Ogai and translated by Meredith McKinney, the daughter of revered Australian poet Judith Wright. Ogai is considered one of the most notable writers of the Meiji era (1868-1912), during which Japan experienced significant changes in social and economic structures and foreign relations. McKinney has translated a work written by a man who was born in 1862 ‘in a Japan that had been officially closed to the rest of the world for centuries,’ as stated in the introduction. But Ogai went on to spend time in Germany where he immersed himself in western literature and although he was always convinced that Japan had to embrace modernity he also came to understand how much would be lost in the process. The Wild Goose, which has been beautifully produced by Finlay Lloyd, it’s a truly gorgeous object, is a story of love, entrapment, and the power of commerce. It is remarkably unformulaic, and it’s intriguingly Chekhovian in both spirit and scope. I’ll review it for Verity La soon, but I can tell you that it’s a novella that has got beneath my skin.

In the meantime, I really should hack up my other lung.

Love, friendship and respect

To own the sky

‘The hawk flies above the earth, hormoniously flapping its broad wings: suddenly, it stops as though it were meditating on the sadness of life, then shakes its wings and is off like an arrow above the steppe, and does not know why he flies, nor what he seeks.

Then, on the summit of a hillock, a solitary poplar appears.  Is it happy, this beautiful being?  In the summer the torrid heat, in winter, the cold and the blizzards, in autumn the dreadful nights, when it sees nothing but darkness and hears nothing but the angry howling of the wind.  And worst of all, it remains alone, completely alone throughout its life.’

-from The Steppe by Anton Chekhov

Brave beyond belief

The last time I was on a residency, a year ago at Bundanon in New South Wales, I put up an A4-sized sign above my desk – BE BRAVE.  A high-end publisher had given me that advice a week before and I made sure to take it with me down to the Shoalhaven.  Whenever I struggled, I looked up, saw the sign, and then I was brave.  At least, I tried to be.  I have the same sign with me here at Cataract Gorge: it’s just there, on the wall, a metre away from where I’m writing this post (still by hand, would you believe; I’m sticking to my guns).

Bravery seems to be the theme of the week.

Most days in this place young boys or men strap themselves high up to the Gorge cliffs and abseil their lives away.  Sometimes they stop mid-fall, steady themselves, put out their arms and have a photo taken by their friends back up the cliff – should the rope break, or the equipment fail, they’d smash their bodies open on the rocks below.

Every evening, Launceston joggers – men and women – plug themselves into their i-Pods and send their bodies up one side of the Gorge and down the other, across and through and around and over the duckboards, boardwalks, catwalks, even along a suspension bridge that makes you feel drunk just by looking at it.  I scared the living crap out of one of these folk last night, when, wearing my black jeans and black hoodie and black jacket, I rounded a corner and almost ran into a guy.  He stopped, put his hand to his heart, and said, ‘Bloody hell, it’s a bit dark here, eh?’  He meant, of course, I’m sure you were about to stab me with a flick-knife, you bastard.

In summer, apparently, Lonnie boys throw themselves off the Kings Bridge (pictured above, at dawn) and dive or drop or flop or crash into the liquid, silty mud that makes for water at this the Gorge end of the river.

I think I’d rather listen to The Smiths.

As hoity and literary and – quite frankly – wanky as it may sound, I’m having a Grim As Buggery Short Fiction Festival while I’m here in Launceston.  The head-lining acts are the Grand Reapers of Grim-ness, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Australia’s own Nam Le (who can actually be very funny, but that’s beside the point).

In Tolstoy’s short story ‘The Raid’, his main character, a civilian who’s curious about war, says, ‘I remembered that Plato had defined bravery as the knowledge of what should and what should not be feared ‘ [and] wanted to explain my idea to the captain.  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it seems to me that to every danger there is a choice, and the choice that springs from a sense of duty, for example, is courage, while a choice made under the influence of base feelings is cowardice.  Henceforth, the man who risks his life from vanity, curiosity or greed cannot be called brave.  Conversely, the man who avoids danger from an honest sense of responsibility to his family, or simply out of conviction, cannot be called a coward.’’

Today, am I brave or cowardly?

Would I dive off the Kings Bridge?  No.

Would I run around Cataract Gorge at night?  No, I wouldn’t.

Would I abseil down the rocks and stop to pose for a photo?  No, is the answer to that as well.

But good characters must do all these things, and more.