When I was in Melbourne for EWF I stayed with my friend Pat, who makes amazing comics and thinks amazing things, and we had an unexpected formative conversation about copyright when we were eating cheap Japanese under a speaker in the corner that may or may not have been playing Kanye West. Somehow we got to talking about whether we illegally download content for free.

I said I try not to, unless I know the artist isn’t going to miss the proceeds from my purchase, which is dumb reasoning, because I also have this kind-of Buddhist inkling that stealing shit will bring the bad karma, but also I sympathise with artists because I’d be pissed if someone stole my shit, but this kind of of thinking is waning, after this conversation.

(I also download things I’ve paid for in the past and then lost, such as all the AC/DC albums I had as a teenager. I also have less qualms about downloading from multi-national corporations, but I know this is also stupid: yeah, the companies might not miss the proceeds from my purchase, but the bottom-rung artists will certainly miss the royalties.)

This sort of quasi-ethical consumerism leaves me in a shitty position, because I generally can’t afford to buy all the cool literature and art and entertainment I’d like to, because I work in a poorly paid sector of the publishing economy and I live on my own, so a quarter of my salary goes immediately to rent each week, plus I have expensive habits that I still prioritise because I’m still a recovering bogan.

These are lifestyle choices though, right, and I could quit the drugs and alcohol and the takeaways that come with those, to save money and actually be sober for a while, and I could actually start spending my scant disposable income on things that actually enrich my life, not damage my liver, fuck my short-term memory or leave my neural receptors so coated in gunk they no longer emit endorphins.

Another lifestyle choice I’m on the verge of making is whether I want to make money from my art, or whether I just want it to reach and affect people, because Lawd knows I’m never going to make a living out of the esoteric shit that I write, so why not give it away for free so more people can enjoy it. [Insert Cory Doctorow quote about obscurity here.]

So all of this opens up the question for me of whether I believe in copyright or not, because copyrighting something asserts your ownership of it, and asserting your ownership of something implies that if someone wants to have it, they should pay for that privilege.

But: ‘privilege’. Why should I, or anyone, be the keeper of privilege? I’ve got plenty of privilege. More than enough to share around. My salary sucks, but there’s no denying I’m privileged.

This was the thrust of the conversation I had with Pat. A long time ago stories were told orally, so they couldn’t be owned. You’d hear a story and then pass it on. Maybe you would slap a via @ mention on it, maybe not. Since then, capitalism (I guess) has stipulated that sharing things comes with a price tag, which is a principle I wasn’t told about as a kid: sharing is caring, more like it.

When sharing a story requires a financial transaction you enter troubled territory first alluded to by Thomas Carlyle: if any individual accrues enough of that which is to be shared, they can charge a buttload for it and those who can’t afford it have to do without, especially those who wish to share it: ‘it’ being the privilege to share. Howard’s media-ownership laws illustrate this well enough, but imagine if the same concentration ocurred in the literary-arts economy.

Oh, wait, it already has, which is why we can talk of The Big Five (or Six, depending on who you ask), and why we see shit like the REDgroup fail go down: concentration of media ownership is a bane for cultural diversity, no matter which way you splice it, which is why I’m starting to come round to thinking of a new way of thinking about intellectual-property rights.

Actually it’s not new.

ENTER: CC and the Copyleft movement.

The Creative Commons and Copyleft mobs are two groups I’ve never really understood. I’ve always looked at them with the same sort of wariness I have for self-righteous and indignant vegans: their radical egos seem engorged by principle, devoid of reason – like misguided techno-utopians, perhaps, or like those hippies you’ve lived with who want to go set up a commune in the desert and bask in the glory of their own enlightenment without … well, without sharing that with others.

By that I mean they’ve always seemed like a sort-of enlightened crew, with a progressive mindset they wouldn’t deign to share with the ignorant masses, yours truly included, because I guess I never presented to them as being willing to be receptive to their ideas, because I have this engrained belief that copyright is a virtue, and that we should all be paid for our work.

Felice and Connor spat chips when I mentioned this to them on Twitter. They made disparaging comments about my ‘crazyleft’ ways and used ironic hashtags like #copysorightbilloreillywouldapprove. I had to google that hashtag to figure out what he was on about and, shit Connor, I respect you, but don’t throw me this politically dichotomous bullshit like it’s a case in point. Rush Limbaugh’s an arsehole too, and Andrew Bolt’s deluded, but wah wah wah, don’t come at me with this as though it’s a political matter. It’s ideology we’re talking about here, and I know you’re bigger than politics, so quit the bigotry and let’s talk.

You too, Felice. I know you love DRM and everything, but why? Is it possible you’re clinging to a conservative view of publishing and you don’t want to let go of it because you think Cory Doctorow’s a douchbag? That’s a shitty reason to hold onto an opinion.

Keep in mind here, Dear Readers, that one of my biggest beefs is the insufficient remuneration of authors in this economy of ours, which is all we’ve got to work with right now, which is why doing away with copyright is not the immediate answer, but what devealuing copyright affords us is the opportunity to think about distributing content for reasons other than to make money. Who really thinks they’re going to make money out of this game anyway? So there must be another value currency we can think of.

ENTER: the ideas market.

Before ideas were a commodity they existed in the public domain, free to be enjoyed by all. The public domain is being brought back into vogue in the software industry, with your GNU and and your WordPress getting all up in yer  proprietary software and changing the world, and even the Gutenberg name has been reappropriated to give access to (classic) literature to anyone who can afford at least a shitty PC and a free wi-fi connection.

Yeah, most of their authors are dead and their works out of copyright, but why wait until you’re dead seventy years only to find out no one gives a shit anyway? Deal with it, you’re never going to be Shakespeare, because manuscript ideas are like arseholes these days – you’re nothing special, so why not give it away for free and hope that maybe you contribute to the unofficial economy at least, where people might actually just fork out their time to read your shit.

You’re reading this, after all: buy me a beer when we meet IRL if you like, but it’s equally likely I’ll buy you a beer, so really, what are we trying to get out of this if it’s not a royalty cheque or a free beer or maybe a root?

Communion, of course. Secular communion. It should be free, but it’s not, because we’re used to paying for shit, unless it’s on the internet, in which case we jump through all sorts of ethico-logistical steps to justify our stealing from HBO. Well, fuck that. Steal this blog, because it is (un)officially licensed under a [blah blah blah licence] whether Felice or Connor like it or not.

And the reason for that is there seems to be two ways we can set up this economy of ideas: we can allow individuals to accrue buttloads of content and then bundle it with hardware and fuck on the creators; we can do away with the concept of ownership and allow people to share freely and work shitty jobs to fund that activity. Or get grants. Or sugar daddies. Or trust funds. Any sort of benefactor will do.

I happen to have an arts job that pays me a salary, so you’d think I’d be all for the former, but yeah, nah. People will always create, regardless of whether you or I get a salary out of it, and if distribution is unencumbered by capitalist principles then maybe myriad others will share the privilege of consuming that content. Or we can let Walt Disney and the Murdoch/Packer sons control the dissemination. It’s up to us.

We need to think anew about this, because the current system is pissing a lot of people off, even the privileged few. And there’s nothing worse than hearing the privileged few crap on about how fucking hard it is. Why is it hard? Because we want to make a living out of this, which is a stupid idea.

I just got home from a day helping to select successful applicants to the Write in your Face (WIYF) round of grants offered by Australia Council (OzCo) and administered by Express Media (EM). Those links will tell you more about this whole shebang, but I’ll copy/paste the juicy bit for all our Canadian readers:

WIYF grants are offered to young and emerging writers who use language in innovative ways. This may involve writing in the digital space, blogs, graphic novels, comics, multimedia, multi-artform or cross-media works.

Basically it’s a really exciting grant, because all sorts of weird shit gets thrown at it in applications. It’s especially exciting for me at the moment because this is my first opportunity to sit on a selection panel and be directly involved in delivering necessary funding to literary-arts projects that otherwise might never see the light of your computer screens.

I made some notes today, but it’s too late to type them up and I have to work in the morning.

I want to write here soon about: how WIYF has been (de)devolved from EM to one of OzCo’s more general digital funds (that ‘evolved’ is now bearing the suffix ‘ded’ makes my squidgy little progressive heart want to curl up and vomit out my arse); how something Lefa (EM’s Program Manager) said reminded me of the importance of thinking of the literary-arts as contributing in ‘not immeasurable economic value’ to society; and how reacquainting with the dreadful process of ‘scraping the barrel’ made me consider the importance of not awarding grant money, following on from feelings I’ve had for sometime about not awarding prizes to literature that you otherwise wouldn’t publish, just because you said you’d award a prize.

These are all subjects near and dear to my heart, and ones that have been bouncing around for a while, but some other things came up that I’d like to explore some more if I get the time: how to set up systems to allow people to tell stories without telling stories to them; and how to avoid writing to markets by creating markets for your own writing instead, and how to use digital technology to do this.

To cap this off in the spirit of Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I’m going to quote from the editorial of Chalk, one of the magazines I had the fortune to read as part of the WIYF process:

…

edition1

a co-composition _ _ a communicating collaboration _ _ these are a series of conversations and interconnecting threads _ _ alive in the informal economy of the culture industry

 

First off: it is impossible to typecast someone entirely accurately, because contradicting character traits and values are inherent in the human condition, as each passing second, each new experience, keeps our minds in a constant state of flux. At least they should, which is an idea I’ll get to by the end of this talk.

I have an aversion to generalisations about demographics or generations because they are, after all, comprised of minds that are in a constant state of flux. There is no way I could make some sort of all encompassing claim about any sort of trait that characterises all young writers.

Nonetheless I’ll get on with the job of talking about the most prevalent and corrosive exercise in typecasting I could think of: the ludicrous claim that a writer needs to have accrued a certain quota of life experience before they can hope to communicate anything of value to a readership. Hands up if you’ve heard this claim before. Leave your hands up if you think it’s bullshit.

Our class was actually told this during the short time I spent at creative-writing school, and was perhaps one of the reasons I dropped out. In the decade since then I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to edit Voiceworks for two years, during which time we published hundreds of writers and artists, and read the work of hundreds and hundreds more. Either side of that experience, at Wakefield Press, I have had the fortune to work with a wide range of older authors.

The resounding impression I can draw from this experience is that it’s much harder to edit older writers than it is to edit young writers. (I think it’s worth mentioning that most of the authors I currently work with don’t find out how young I am until they meet me at the launch, and they are invariably surprised. I guess they don’t know about Facebook stalking.)

The young writers I’ve worked with are generally far more liberal-minded, far more interested in learning new things (including how to behave in an author–editor relationship), perhaps because they’re still painting on a relatively blank slate. We also have an unprecedented level of access to information these days, which helps to combate our inherent tendency to embrace confirmation bias to support our fragile intellectual egos.

Older writers, especially those who have been published a lot before and received any sort of critical acclaim, are generally less open to having their work tampered with.

Of course this is not a one-size-fits-all cast. I’m going to hazard a generalisation for the sake of talking about this, and say about a quarter of the young writers I’ve worked with are as precious as three quarters of the older writers I’ve worked with.

But it’s not a matter of age that I’m talking about here, it’s a matter of attitude, of personality. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are aware of their own limitations as authors – they covet criticism because they still want to learn. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are those who are inherently interested in others, and therefore far more interested in actually communicating with them, rather than talking to them from above. That this inherent interest extends to me, their editor, renders them far more amenable to the idea of actually collaborating on their work.

Invariably it is the oldest, least talented writers who have had to bolster their own egos from within. As far as I can tell, the best way to do this is by sticking your head up your arse and shouting. [This is where the woman guffawed and I looked up, sheepishly, wanting to join in, forgetting I was supposed to presenting a speech, not having a chat at the pub.]

This has all gotten very specific to my exerience as an editor, but my experience as a general reader illuminates something else, I think.

Maybe 95% of the books on my shelves (by young writers, and old) are characterised by pinko-lefty themes. When I realised this I started soliciting recommendations of right-wing authors – novelists, in particular. My inquiries were often met with either the scornful suggestion that, ‘Dude, neo-cons don’t have imaginations, that’s why they’re neo-cons’, or, ‘Just read anything by Ayn Rand.’

The former reminded me of the t-shirt that Quadrant used to sell, which bore the slogan: ‘I’ve never read Quadrant because I don’t like it’. The latter leaves me quite concerned that the only suggestion I could find among my networks was for a novelist who was writing maybe seventy years ago, in America.

Look at me, though: I’m wearing a fucking costume. I wear skinny black jeans, and a self-referential, pop-culture t-shirt. I have a stupid ironic haircut, a question-mark knuckle tattoo, I ride a single-speed roadbike around the city wearing a messenger bag. I’ve become a fucking hipster. I like to think of myself as liberal-minded, but this doesn’t mean I’m a lefty.

[At this point Dan tapped his glass, which was the signal for five minutes: we had seven minutes; I wasn't going to make it. I skipped the italics below and got straight to the point. Meanwhile, consider this picture as an illustration of my last point.]

…

…

But neither am I a righty, because, to bastardise one of my favourite high-school sayings, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than the frontal lobotomy required to hold conservative views.

The friends who know me would consider it laughable to suggest that I make any sort of daily style choices, but I certainly have gathered about me an image based on those who share similar values, and this act of personal typecasting has been necessary for me to escape another image I had created for myself when I was in high school and thought gate crashing parties, listening to heavy metal, getting fuck eyed and ending fights was a cool thing to do.

We need to typecast ourselves in order to feel that we fit in somewhere, and making fashion statements facilitates our movement between social groups. Sometimes we need to do this to operate within and move between schools of thought, if that’s what we want to do. We need labels to understand who we are, and to express ourselves to others.

Young people, I think, are especially susceptible to typecasting because they are still forming their ideas about themselves, mingling with subcultures where their parentals don’t hang out. It is important that we take control of this process though, and as the foothold of mainstream media on public opinion continues to slip, we are increasingly able to grasp the power to do this.

Old people I know – friends and authors alike, as well as authors who have become friends – tend to have ‘grown out’ of subcultures. Perhaps as their sense of individual identity strengthens they feel they can happily exist among mainstream society without compromising their values.

This is doubtful, and as we age and develop as humans and writers and thinkers, I think one of the trickiest balances we need to affect is between how much of this sub-communal identity we should retain, and how much we should forgo in the interests of ‘growing up’, of assimilating with mainstream society.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if we spent our youthful creative years bemoaning that patronising claim that we need to grow up before we can write well, only to finally grow up and write and think just like our forebears?

It’s one thing to challenge our mainstream ancestors. It’s a whole other tricky task to challenge the prevailing mindset among our own subcultures.

I think the reason we don’t already find it easy to do this is that young creative types are usually typecast as lefties, and lefties are generally typecast as adherents of political correctness.

[Okay, the next bit in italics is what I ham-fisted on the day, and the roman text is where I resumed reading.]

Considering how my image reflects the company I keep, it’s not surprising I’ve found it difficult to squeeze right-wing fiction out of my networks, which is frustrating because I like to question beliefs, but it is politically incorrect to question certain beliefs held by the intellectual left: the human causes of climate change and the viability of representative democracy being the two most important that I could think of.

But it is essential that we do, lest we find ourselves cloistered in a niche of unquestioning adherence to political correctness that infuses so much of our stifled debate in this country.

So, if you asked the mirror, “Mirror mirror, on the wall, which is the worst typecast of them all?” it might say it is the self-perpetuating identity of the leftist elite who overpopulate Australia’s literary community. [This was where the silence increased.] By pedalling the same opinions to one another because we’re too timid to question our friends we are actually inhibiting the very progress of human thought we claim to advocate. [This was where I thought I heard the gasp.]

It is the young writers of Australia who are most well equipped to do this, for the same reason their detractors would say their writing has no value: they haven’t been around long enough to have become brow-beaten and bigoted; there is still hope they can turn their critical faculties on themselves and resolve to start thinking anew.

In the interests of publicly demonstrating my commitment to this new liberalism I was going to strip myself of my middle-class pinko-lefty costume and do the rest of this panel in my underwear. Instead I’m going to read this stanza from a Bukowski poem called ‘unemployed’:

…

dear reader,
do you know something?
those who keep asking the same question
really don’t want to hear the answer.

Last weekend I attended Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne because: it’s an awesome, craft-based festiva bringing readers, writers and everyone in between together; they invited me to talk on a panel; I jump at any chance to revisit Melbourne.

The difference between EWF and most other writers’ festivals in Australia is that it’s more like a readers’ and writers’ festival, where readers and writers interact, compared to most of the major festivals, which are structured so that readers sit in crowds and stare in awe at writers, as though they are some sort of sacrosanct being.

Speaking of sweeping generalisations, our panel was called Typecast, which was presented in the program with the blurb:

…

The gay writer, the Indigenous writer, the young writer… what are the joys and frustrations of being typecast? Does writing for niche audiences create or hinder opportunities to publish in a more mainstream way? And once set is it ever possible to escape your typecasting?

I was the ‘young writer’, but as I said on the day, really I was speaking as a young editor who has worked with both young and old authors. Anita Heiss was the ‘indigenous writer’. Julian Leyre was the ‘gay writer’. Karen Pickering was the ‘feminist writer’. And the panel was hosted by Dan Ducrou, who has been dubbed the ‘young-adult fiction writer’, which he said was odd considering how much explicit sex and drugs are featured in his book, The Byron Journals.

That’s just it, and this was the premise of the talk I presented: these sorts of typecasts (otherwise known by the more discernibly unacceptable term, ’stereotypes’) are inherently flawed, because every writer’s work is characterised by myriad themes, which flutter about and alight in readers’ minds in all sorts of unqualifiable ways.

But we need to apply these labels to start somewhere in talking about these subjects, and a theme of the session was how each of the speakers has had to push against being arbitrarily categorised by others.

The conclusion of the speech I made solicited a sort-of barely audible gasp in the audience, and at one point an audience member laughed with such gusto that I was momentarily distracted. I didn’t read all that I wrote because I tend to pursue tangents with unbridled enthusiasm when I talk, and I can’t refrain from this even when I’m public speaking.

Angela Meyer, of LiteraryMinded, was in the audience, and I was chuffed that she said, in her write up of the session, that my speech “was a nice, challenging thing to hear at a writers’ festival – a place where one can wander in and out of panels in a bubble of ‘confirmation’”.

That was prexactly my intention, so it’s nice to have that … ah … confirmed.

I’m going to publish my speech after this post, because: I wrote it and may as well use it here; I quite like it; you might quite like it too. If you don’t, well, I don’t really mind, but I’d appreciate any critiques.

It may be worth noting, if you read the speech, that Dan introduced each of us before our talks, an exercise designed to establish the authority of the speaker, but the concept of an authority or expert is as dubious to me as the act of typecasting someone. Nonetheless, this is what I wrote for Dan to read out:
…

Ryan Paine is an editor at Wakefield Press, where he works with a lot of old writers. Before that he was editor of Voiceworks, where he worked with a lot of young writers. Before that he was a typesetter at Wakefield Press. Before that he was a labourer, before that he was an outer-suburban high-school stoner, before that he was a chubby little mummy’s boy grubbing for friends in primary school, before that he was a grumpy little shit, before that he was an ill-conceived idea.

Now that I’ve finally published the final part of my Wet Ink interview with Ronnie Scott, I’ll be republishing one of his short stories soon. It’s called ‘Together Now, Very Minor’, and is remarkable in the way eating an icecream on a bouncey castle is remarkable.

This idea of the ‘anthology dream’ – of publishing new writers alongside emerging writers in a coherent context – is more what I’m talking about when I ask about the Brow. Wet Ink does it too, and I understand at the Brow you avoid government funding because you want to publish smaller Australian writers alongside bigger international writers. Why do you think such a policy is important for a magazine and its community of contributors and readers?
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No, the reason I’ve never applied to get a grant for the Brow is just that we’re able to do without one. Grants are a great thing for plenty of arts projects that are just starting out, but my fear was that if you start out with that money built into your structure, it’s probably going to be difficult to imagine living without it. Wet Ink, Phillip Edmonds told me, aims to get itself independent of grants at some point, but most magazines that are grant-dependent, which means most magazines could potentially just fall apart if the grants ever went away, and they seem not to have any backups thought through at all.

We are pretty successful for a literary journal, but that’s still not very successful, and I just don’t see how a grant would change that. There’s lots of complex economic theory I don’t understand around protectionism policies, but for me, if I want more people to read the work that I publish, it’s tough to see how pumping money into the form I’ve already established is going to do that. I’m more interested in trialling some substantive changes, which I can do on the money we already make; and if that leads naturally to earning more money for the magazine, then I’ll know that people actually want the product. The Brow is switching to a bimonthly magazine format for 2011, as a six-issue experiment. Since the Brow’s accounts happen in a tiny book on my desk that I make stupid notes in, it’s a very easy decision to make, and just as easy to put into effect. And if it turns out to be less fun to make than a literary journal—which is a form I do love—and doesn’t impact sales, then there isn’t any obstacle to just… switching back.

Lots of very good and interesting literary journals, ones that are under good editorship, are at least partly dependent on grants, and I wonder what would happen if you took the grants away: would you see those magazines disappearing, or would you see them figuring out better ways to get people to read interesting work? It won’t ever happen, and it might be terrible. But nobody knows.
…
You’re online presence is not huge: you’re hard to Google. But I’ve heard about your RSS feed. Who’s you’re favourite blogger? Hey, why don’t you blog?
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My favourite blogger is this guy named Sean T Collins, who writes a blog called All Too Flat. It’s hard to recommend to anybody, though, for the exact reason that I love it so much: it seems custom-built to satisfy all my most particular interests, which I never thought a good and regular and thorough writer would ever be around to just indulge. Like, bad 90s superhero comics from the speculator boom, and torture law, and analysis of Stephen King books. And tonnes of really good links to new alternative minicomics; I’d have never found lots of the artists I publish in the Brow without him. I like this guy’s writing, and his tastes, so much that I committed to watching all of Battlestar Galactica—and have now committed to reading all of George R.R. Martin—just so I can skip fewer of his posts. People are really not lying when they say the internet is good for satisfying niches.

I used to blog, when I was about nineteen, and all my friends had Livejournals. A couple of them now have “ransom editions” of my blog saved on their computer, since it was dubbed Honesty Hour, meaning it was a public forum for me to passively shit-talk people who pissed me off when I was nineteen. I am recently having to read over this for a project I’m working on, and it’s totally excruciating and horrible. The friends who have my blog archived on their computers are going to have to be friends for life. I will probably blog one day if it becomes clear that I have to blog to sell more magazines or sell a book.
…
What’s the project you’re working on? From what I can deduce from your Facebook profile, you’re answering these questions from a self-made writer’s retreat in the archipelagos somewhere. This must be serious – is there a full-length manuscript in the future?
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Yeah! I’m working on a book of nonfiction that asks the question, ‘How do people learn to be adults?’ It’s equal parts research into serious stuff; research into stupid stuff, like America’s Next Top Model; profiles, sometimes of people who don’t know they’re being profiled; and, since I happen to have done a lot of gross and regrettable things in my life, a pretty exhaustive catalogue of those.

It’s in a weird phase right now because I’m starting to write fewer chapters that can easily be taken as essays by themselves—which is what the book started out as, before I realised I was writing a book—and I’m starting to write more chapters that are kind of unwieldy and only work well as parts of a bigger project. Which is I guess why it’s a book. But I’ve never written a long thing of nonfiction before, so it feels very strange to slowly commit to it.

I know this one amazing writer who has been collected in Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, and Best Australian Poetry, a trifecta, and I once asked her how she managed to write in all three genres. She looked at me like she was confused by the question, and said, “Well, they all just work from the same muscle, don’t they?” It’s probably true that they do, but I didn’t know I could even write decent nonfiction until a few months ago.

The reporting voice, especially, is fun as hell. Like I’m writing a fucktonne of sentences that start with “Recently,” for example. “Recently, my friends and I were ‘summering’ in Barcelona.” The reporting voice is full of these wonderful tricks that smooth out and make everything feel objective. It’s relaxing.
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And where could readers keep in touch to find out more about your writing and any projects you get involved with?
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www.theliftedbrow.com
…

By ‘up the ante’ do you mean ‘increase the tension’ or ‘make it seem more plausible’? Because divulging gross details for the sake of tension usually comes off as gratuitously shocking, but your details make your characters seem more real.
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I probably do mean gratuitously shocking though, in that case, since the tension I’m talking about wouldn’t have been broken if the character hadn’t said something more gross than he had previously. The pooing in the shower detail probably makes that character feel realer because he’s already been built up as a gross character.

Although, hang on, maybe I’m not using ‘gratuitous’ correctly. In this case we’re talking about, I’ve tried to attach the shock to a narrative effect, rather than making “gross and shocking” the whole effect on its own, even though it’s important to a fuller effect. Right? If you look at Benjamin Law, he’s a pretty gutter-minded writer, but the effect is how that modulates with an understated sweetness.
…
I have to touch on your publishing, briefly – it’s vaguely related, as what you publish inevitably reflects on, illuminates, and influences what you write. You’ve published The Lifted Brow for four years now, and have been described by Chris Flynn, fellow indie publisher, as, ‘quite possibly the man who will save Australian literature from the wattle-tree lined doldrums in which it currently wallows’. Was it your intention, when you started The Brow, to revolutionise the industry? If not, do you feel a duty to this responsibility now?
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My intention when I started the Brow is totally irrelevant today, because the magazine has changed so much in those four years. I’ve proselytised a seriously embarrassing number of “very important ideas”, considering that I’ve only spent a very short time editing a very small magazine. The truth is, I’ve stopped searching for an interesting motivation for publishing the Brow. I publish the Brow because it’s fun to publish writing I like, and enough people buy it that I can keep doing that a couple of times each year.
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Is that true – that you publish the Brow because it’s fun? As you said above, taking acid is fun. Investing your limited time and resources in publishing to a niche market in an ailing Australian sector of a flailing international economy can feel like torture. There must be another reason you expend so much energy on this pursuit.
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Not really, although if I’m honest, I just can’t imagine my career without the Brow. Almost all of the writing, editing, research, teaching, and festival work I’ve ever gotten—that is, any bits of work I’ve been able to pick up across the industry—have been a direct result of The Lifted Brow. I wonder what I’d do if the Brow suddenly became impossible to make, for any reason, but I bet it would be some other kind of start-up enterprise that led to new and different ancillary work. It’s a viable way to make a career in the industry.

And yes, it genuinely is fun. It’s fun to find one submission out of a hundred that really grabs you, and if you don’t feel like reading more than a couple of pages of the others, there is no gun to your head saying that you should. (Voiceworks, which you used to edit, has a specific function, which is providing space and development for young writers. The Brow has no such function, so rejecting or considering work is not time-consuming.) Layout is really fun, since it’s the only thing I do that involves the half of my brain that is about manipulating objects and shapes; it’s relaxing and I get to listen to music while I do it. Watching people buy the thing I’ve worked very hard on is fun, and that happens twice a year over a few solid weeks. And commissioning work is fun, since I’m a big reader, and getting a Word document in your inbox, typos and all, from a writer whose work seems untouchably wonderful is for me an incomparable feeling. (That includes people who’ve published lots of books, and people who’ve mostly just been in the Brow. By now, we’ve got a really good set of writers I’ve published three or four times but who don’t have anything approaching a book deal, and it’s become really rewarding seeing how their work will help in shaping a new issue.) I’ve done seven Brows, so I’ve now got it located in a manageable space in my life—one day a week, usually—and the workflow is pretty organised and efficient, so the magazine is rarely a source of stress.
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Who do you take your lead from in publishing? Don’t say Dave Eggers. Are your favourite publishers publishing the same writing that inspires your own fiction?
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My favourite publishers are Sammy Harkham, the editor of the comics anthology Kramers Ergot, and Alvin Buenaventura, the former publisher of Buenaventura Press, who published a few issues of that anthology, as well as lots of individual titles by the artists it contained. (Buenaventura Press seems currently to either be shut down or in a transitional phase, so I don’t know what will happen to Kramers Ergot, though it had a different publisher before Buenaventura.)

Kramers Ergot is the closest I’ve seen any anthology series come to being really, really, really aesthetically unified, and so the effect of seeing all the pieces it commissions running into each other, sequenced so well, is just plain mindblowing. It really lives the anthology dream: one, presenting a batch of newer artists in a hard-to-ignore context; two, getting innovative stuff out of a bunch of better-known artists who make the best contextual sense with the newer ones; and three, doing so in a form that makes insanely good sense for the work that it’s actually presenting. My favourite issues, 5 and 6, are these slabby turtleback art volumes, huge definitive-feeling bricks of colour, oddness, and beauty. Time Magazine, I think, called it “a jawbreaker for your eye”. And inside, the volumes basically have “opening credits”, where a number of the artists have presented wordless pages that introduce the book as a whole. And the bios are presented as parts of a mosaic of iconicky excerpts from the comics themselves, which is such a good way to immediately and clearly reference the works the artists you’re talking about produced. It’s killer.

Anyway, when I try to write fiction currently, I’m trying to make it somehow like the mechanics you’ll find in many of these comics, which have what my friend Anthony calls a “dirty surrealism”. The internal narrative logic is so absolutely firm that the stories can get away with anything and still feel sensible and cohesive. That firmness is encouraged by the visual form, since a great-to-look-at, distinctive visual style helps even the most cognitively dissonant information go down very smoothly. But I’d love to find a way to make that work in text. I think Nick Modrzewski, a guy I publish in the Brow, does this superbly.

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So, I flat-out failed to publish the rest of my interview with Ronnie Scott over Easter. Frankly: I was indulging in too much pot all weekend, so I pretty much hybernated in my flat and tried to finish reading Power Without Glory, which I also failed at.

Power Without Glory is really long, and dense, and written in this painfully stuttering style, like listening to Grandpa Simpson. I have all sorts of theories about this, but for now it’s enough to say it is nonetheless an interesting snapshot into an era, and I’m eager to finish the bastard so I can start reading about the controversy it stirred up – a libel case, no less.

The other (subliminal) reason I failed is that I’m just, frankly, over blogging. As I just wrote to a friend:

I’m going quiet on SIB, and have all but ceased my Facebook and Twitter activity, because I want to go back to the headspace where, as a teenager, I used to sit in the backshed smoking bongs and reading books until the sun came up. I just don’t seem to be able to immerse myself in literature anymore, and I’m sure it has to do with the easy-grab information I can access online.

This was in response to an essay draft he sent me about why online communication needn’t, necessarily, be about all-inclusive commenting, the democratisation of commentary, yada yada yada, and, well, flinging the essay my way came at a time (the same day, in fact) I changed my Twitter by to, simply, ‘internet apostate’. That’s right, I’m forsaking my church: the internet will not set us free, because the internet does not have free will. (If I say that enough times someone might read it.)

I have also spent my entire adult life working in publishing, and much of that time working as an editor (to the aspiring: working as an editor is 5% editing, 150% admin), so maybe I’ve succumbed to the old mechanics’ syndrome: I nearly dropped out of high school to start an apprenticeship as a mechanic, but decided not to because I was worried it would impinge on my hobbyist passion for restoring vintage cars. That passion has since been usurped by a passion for literature and, whattaya know, I’m working in literature and my work is impinging on my passion. Woe! #firstworldproblems

Anyway. I’m going to publish the rest of the interview today and tomorrow. After that I’ve got some guest content lined up, a post from Gram about the rhetoric of the eBook industry, and a post from myself about whether books are actually underpriced in Australia, and then I’m going to hang up my hat for awhile, spend some more time in the carport I have cunningly crafted into a semblance of my adolescent backshed. (If you’re interested in book pricing, Matthia Dempsey wrote about it for Kill Your Darlings. Felice and I are also debating with a neo-con about it here.)

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I hope somebody recognises your talent for abstract temporal-spatial theory, because I have no idea what you’re talking about. I heard recently that during experiments with the Large Hadron Collider they had discovered that particles inside atoms will occasionally disappear, inspiring speculation about parallel universes. Is this what you’re into – it’s interesting stuff, but difficult to render into interesting fiction unless you’re H G Wells or Phillip K Dick or someone. How do you prevent this sort of academic research from permeating and pervading your fiction and boring the shit out of everyone?
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Oh, but I can’t prevent it! I’m trying to explain how it does inform my fiction, not least because when you’re doing a critical-creative thesis, your creative work is considered a kind of methodology—“practice-led research”—and it’s meant to further the same arguments and ideas you’re putting forward in your academic work. (It’s even a snafu that I’ve just called one of them academic work and the other one creative.) But again, I don’t write about space and time in a very thorny LHC way; I pretty much just study how they operate in narrative, which usually means if not a concrete place, then a discrete unit of text, like a sentence or a paragraph. I read a lot of pop physics, Brian Greene and Sean Carroll and stuff, but it’s not really the sort of thing that’s part of my academics. I usually look at (very unfashionable) structural theorists like Gerard Genette, I guess because I like the idea of text having an identifiable mechanics. Sometimes it feels like a paragraph, a story, or a sentence is a puzzle to write—it’s so hard to get across what it is you want to say—and it’s attractive to have a truthful-feeling way of approaching that puzzle, though it also at times feels really basic, cheatery, and rigid. Also, lots and lots of my fiction has bored, does bore, or would bore the shit out of everyone and I’m so glad that a lot of it hasn’t been published.
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One of your Wet Ink stories (‘Together Now, Very Minor’) is about three people forming what seem like mostly inconsequential friendships during an acid trip where they, naturally, felt eternally connected. Stories about acid are like stories about dancing: they can often seem indulgent and embarrassing. Not yours. Do you dance as well as you write?
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You’re an editor too, and you used to work at a magazine that was overtly a market for young people. So I’m sure you’ve seen more fiction than I have that is obviously, awkwardly way-too-autobiographical. This other editor I know hates reading the slush pile because it’s horrible to reject people who’ve clearly put their whole lives on the table, but unfortunately in an unskilled way. I guess this builds on my answer to your previous question, about writing gay characters in fiction: the closer you and your character are, the harder it is to remove yourself. I love that David Mitchell wrote his coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, as book number four, because he recognised that he needed to master ventriloquism before he could do a coming-of-age novel properly. I did write ‘Together Now, Very Minor’ just after I’d tried acid for the first time, but I changed the setting and the characters completely, and I think only about 10% of the events in the story are the events that happened. Otherwise it would’ve belonged in my diary. The thing I hate about lots of drug writing is just the same thing I hate about lots of bad writing: that it lacks perspective—and perspective is probably the most immediate benefit of writing a character that is further from your own personality and experience—or that it feels boastful, or that it stinks of artist exceptionalism, whereas I think artists and writers try drugs for the same reasons anybody tries drugs: because it’s interesting and fun! I’m really glad you like ‘Together Now, Very Minor’ because I also think it’s more effective than the shy, gay stories I’ve tried to write.

You know how I said earlier that a story like ‘Blocking’ is just written in my most natural narrative voice? My most natural narrative voice is another thing that works best when the story itself is as different from reality as possible, and it works correspondingly poorly when the story takes place somewhere I’ve been, or where the character is male, my age, or younger. My brain-voice works really well, though, when I’m writing a woman in her 40s, who is performing different actions than I have, in an unfamiliar place. It’s a pretty easy trick for finding a way to naturally write another person’s life: the thing that is “you” is the writing.

I’m bad at dancing but I’m enthusiastic. I heard about this study a while ago that found that females are most attracted to men whose dance moves suggest an animalistic virility: big, broad movements of the arms, torso, and neck, and lots of swivelling, which indicates they’re agile. They’re much less interested in dexterity, facial expressions, or movements in the legs. Luckily I am equally bad at all dance movements, indiscriminately.

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Many of your narrators divulge extremely personal information about themselves to the reader, but not to the other characters: their habit of pooing in the shower; how the texture of their foreskin changes when they masturbate too much. Such overt breaches of privacy seem like offerings to the reader, reminding them that whatever they’ve done, your characters have done something similarly weird/gross/bad. This reminds me of how Kundera once described our lives as characterised by kitsch because we hide the unacceptable from others (his example was shitting behind cubicle walls). Is there a similarly philosophical motive behind these revelations, or are these just quirky character details and I’ve gone and overanalysed it?
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It’s not super-philosophical, but it’s true that everybody does weird, gross, and bad things, and it’s good to make them feel less bad about themselves by sharing examples in fiction. That first detail you mentioned, about pooing in the shower, was in ‘Sex Map’, and I threw that in because I’d already established the character as a pretty gross person in the story, and I kind of needed to up the ante if the character was going to break up a “serious moment” in the story by admitting to something eye-poppingly weird or funny or overly personal. The detail about foreskin texture was probably a mistake.…
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Your narrative stories are often about boys meeting boys: young homosexuals’ first awkward attempts at flirting with each other. You are otherwise not overt about your homosexuality in your public life. Is fiction a place where you can parse your sexuality?
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I am pretty freaking gay in public life. I am a red hot mess of man-poon. But the two stories you’re probably talking about—‘Deadly Diamond Bestiary’ and ‘Season of the Shark’—are the two I’m most embarrassed by, which is saying something when you consider how embarrassed I usually am by all my fiction. This guy once said to me that he can’t take stories seriously when they involve young shy homosexuals flirting with young shy homosexuals, because to him those stories tend to feel trashy, kind of like those direct-to-video gay remakes of “straight people films”, the gay version of Buffy, for example, as though Buffy isn’t already fairly gay, or as though gay people can’t comfortably watch things where not everybody has shaved balls. And as if Buffy doesn’t shave her balls. I took this as a longstanding challenge, though that dude will forget he ever said it, probably, and anyway, I feel like I’ve contributed to the genre of young, shy, gay fiction that is too close to experience and not very well-executed. If you’re going to write “heritage fiction”, like about being Asian in Australia, or like about being young and gay, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to prioritise story over experience, and fighting to prioritise believable character over unbelievable desire and memory. I think I didn’t succeed at that, and I feel like those stories are more jack-offy than some of the other stories I’ve written. I find it works better when I try to write fiction that is less like my own life.
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I’m intimately familiar with terrible ‘heritage fiction’ – a good way of putting it – and I would honestly say that yours is more well executed than most. When fictionalising from experience, the biggest pitfall is not revealing enough to the reader because it all makes sense in your head – as described by your ‘uphill battle’. Do you have conscious techniques for avoiding this evocation failure?
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I’m glad you like my own heritage fiction, but I think that in the cases where it’s worked out okay, the reasons are pretty accidental. When it’s happened to work writing a close-to-life story, it’s because it’s happened to work really early on in the piece, which means I’ve somehow got the mood and story together in the first couple of paragraphs; and from there, if that stuff’s working, it’s not tough to keep it going for another 2,000 words or something. For me, the real problem is fixing a story that started out wrong. I find it way easier to abandon something and try again, since I really haven’t figured out how to get that good stuff there in the first place, though again, once it’s there, it’s easy enough to build on. I don’t think this is a White Man’s Magic of the Creative Arts or anything, by the way; I know other people find beginnings easier, but endings or middles or revisions really tough.
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Many of your stories depict an ambiguous location, but quite often a strong sense of place, if that makes sense – the setting is vivid, but could be anywhere. Is this deliberate? Are you perhaps attempting to appeal to a broader, universal market? Stories about Melbourne aren’t appealing to a global readership in the same sense stories about London or NYC can be.
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Well, a lot of that is a holdover from the academic research I’ve done in Honours and now as part of a doctorate. My research is usually about space, time, and consecution: how time and space affect each other, especially in narrative, which is always about time—in that order, logic, association, all these basic narrative effects are predicated on a movement from one idea to another—but less obviously, they are just as much about space—because narrative is one of the most basic ways that we turn time into something spatial, or discrete, and hence apprehend it. I love how any idea of time is useless without a corresponding idea about space, and vice versa. It makes you think about whether time is really an unbroken thing, and whether space is really a static thing. It’s also an interesting research area because other people have had this idea, and employed it in great and super-intelligent ways, but also awful ones—sometimes they’ll use space when they mean time, and vice versa, and they’ll also use both space and time as inappropriate metaphors for other processes. Having said that, I’m lucky, or I’m chickenshit, depending on how generous you want to be, because when you look at how space and time work in a paragraph, it’s a lot easier to think about the simplest, least thorny mechanics and so it’s slightly easier to see how something works.

It’s not a cynical attempt to reach a broader, universal market; it’s just that I’m more interested in the mechanics of space in the abstract than I am in exploring any one particular place, and this translates to my fiction too. When I started my PhD, I thought I wanted to look at a less abstract idea of space, so I started working on a project about chaos in space. That was literally just because I was reading lots of fantastic place-based writing, like travel writing for example, and war reporting, and I thought I had the chops to do that. But I’m much more comfortable just thinking about how space and time work in a paragraph, rather than in a physical space, though this unfortunately happens to be a useless “talent” to anybody but myself.

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