Creative Lives. Группа авторов

Can we talk about the stories in Letter to Pessoa? In their concerns, settings and the way they play against a range of other writers, they could find an enthusiastic audience anywhere in the world. I know you might be wary of categories like “world literature”, but do you find that notion inspiring at all? Or are you happy to leave that kind of assessment to others?

      MC: I probably do have a global voice. I spent my formative years living in three countries which is not very typical. But like many Australians my family background was aware of the world, through our communities, through coloniality, through trade, art, different cultures and languages. The mobility of people across borders, religions and caste was not foreign though it posed difficulties that we didn’t anticipate. Now, when I travel overseas, it’s primarily for my writing, and somehow, place, travel and writing are connected for me.

      I’m glad that Letter to Pessoa can be read as “world lit.” or “global lit”, even though its publication has been limited to Australia. I hope in time it will be published overseas. I am very fond of the opening story because an early draft was written whilst I was traveling in Spain; at that time, it seemed like a failure, a fragment, a futile exercise. But the act of imagining and believing in our fragments holds much promise. The uncertain proximity to meaning is where rich stories can have humble beginnings. When I read the opening story “Letter to Pessoa” I’m reminded of how I wrote it in a hotel, alone, during transitions and how a writer often needs to be stripped of a great deal of routine and security to embark on fictional journeys. That multiplicity matters to me. I did take risks engaging poetic tropes but I was pleased the language was able to cross gaps in migrant time and colonial history, providing structural cohesion and literary complexity for the book as a collection of stories. I was inventing and developing my own structural devices. The book also feels like a progression from my previous work, which is validating for me as a writer. Alexis Wright, in conversation with Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott at the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) symposium last week, spoke, inspiringly, about always learning and challenging oneself as writer. So yes, I am pleased on a personal level with the book, because it was the product of self-learning and thinking about themes like exile, belonging, difference and the writing process.

      CR: I love the way that in Letter to Pessoa you take the work of other writers—sometimes particular works, like Lolita in “Chasing Nabokov” or “Aubade” in “Aubade for Larkin”, and at other times the spirit of a whole oeuvre—and use them to create stories which can both stand alone and be read at an angle to the originals. (I’d say they riff on the originals, but I’m not sure that’s the right word—though I see you use it in the notes to the collection, in terms of particular phrases and sentences.) How do those stories grow in your imagination?

      MC: The epistolary stories started with an early draft in third person prose which appeared on my blog. It was titled “Derrida’s Reinscriptions”. This was a few years before “Letter to Derrida” was developed and appeared in the journal, TEXT. I had also written a theoretical paper on Derrida’s deconstructionism and Buddhism and I am interested in the idea of the fragmentation of the self; and how writing is postponement. (When the book manuscript was edited, I was asked to revise the Derrida story further, which led to allusions to Derrida’s life and his work being included.) But the blog post is proof that strong stories can have humble beginnings. Letter to Pessoa is a book of stories, but also a book about reading and writing, the writing process.

      I began to write more letters to authors which was rather enjoyable. It required me to read their work and to think about my writing as a departure, a variation and a conversation. One of the challenges of poetic language is to make different things seem similar so that we apprehend the world in a new way; we see things with fresh eyes. My technique was to texture the language as a medium, using it like paint or fabric, and to manipulate the layers. I enjoy that aspect of language and how it carries meaning; so that was how the letters in the book were crafted. Another aspect was being able and willing to go deeply into my story so that it wasn’t simply a variation. Each has to have its own existential validity, its characters and tensions.

      I enjoy reading these stories to an audience because they work best when read with an inner voice trusting of the music, or to an audience. There is a performatory aspect to them because of how they use voice.

      CR: Virginia Woolf clearly has a special place in that set of creative talents. I’m thinking of the story “Letter to Virginia Woolf”, which strikes one as deeply personal as well as a poignant tribute to her, as in “maybe I cannot live without words. Each one maddening as a stone thrown into the river, heavy as death …”. Elsewhere you cite Woolf’s words: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say”. Do you see her (and Larkin, Pessoa, Coetzee and others) as allies and companions in your creative journey? Or sometimes as adversaries or counterpoint?

      MC: I see them as companions. Some of the stories are homage pieces. I read Tadeusz Rózewicz (2013) at a time in my life when my mother was very ill. His book, Mother Departs, helped me understand and cope with the alienation a writer feels and the sacrifices, the losses; also, the indifference of history towards minorities. Who is going to teach us the way forward with compassion and understanding? Not society. Society, after all, does not really value our work as writers. Writing is rewarded in our world based on whether it can be consumed and traded. So, these writers have helped me enormously to model a pathway; I don’t mean a career pathway. I mean I’ve learned how to live as a fragment, and how to decolonize. The Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, made me think radically about authorship, about the canon and history; about how we are innovators as much as we are imitators. What Coetzee does with Robinson Crusoe in Foe can be traced back to what Jean Rhys did with Jane Eyre in Wild Sargasso Sea; and in Waiting for the Barbarians there is a trace of Cavafy. We share in a repository of dreams; we receive the language and the visions of these writers, as other writers in time will receive ours; that’s what I mean. That is very real for me.

      But you’re right. I do feel in a special sense connected to Woolf, no less than many women writers have done, I expect. My novel, Woolf, engages more deeply with her work. But also, with her life and her essays. She was extremely privileged and charmingly sociable; an English woman with aristocratic Anglo-Indian forebears. Certainly, she lived in a different world, but she suffered childhood trauma, she was poetic and inventive in her language and she worked as an editor and independent publisher with Hogarth Press. She was somewhat to the side of the canon as a modernist and a feminist; she was an essayist in her own right with strong opinions and a formidable critic; a photographer, a Londoner; she was openly bisexual. As a couple Leonard and Virginia Woolf were anti-imperialists, Leonard having served for seven years in Ceylon. So, there are several aspects of her life which I can relate to. I find her exploration of class distinctions fascinating and almost callously observed. I think what I relate to most, however, is her intensity; the overwhelming way that language absorbed her and was inseparable from her life, determining her destiny. I understand that gravity; it can be harrowing and exhausting but also exhilarating.

      CR: “A Year of Smoking Menthol” from Letter to Pessoa is a brief story suffused with tenderness and friendship. Plus some great metaphors (such as “you were my litmus strip”). You end it with powerful abstractions: “decency, morals and society”. In its quiet way, does that story throw down a kind of challenge to the reader?

      MC: It’s the story of a friendship between two young women who aren’t content to use their minds in the way society expects because they see the hypocrisy and fakeness and misogyny of the world and they long for something more; Lulu is becoming unhinged, suffering