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Five Questions for Kristel Thornell

JA October 14

In 2009, Kristel Thornell was announced as the co-winner of the prestigious Australian/Vogel Award for Night Street which led to a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin. Her novel, inspired by the life of Melbourne artist Clarice Beckett (1887-1935), was released in September. Spike sat down with her over the digital divide to chat about chaotic post-it notes, getting used to the editing process, and research through impersonation.

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What’s a typical day spent writing like for you? Can you describe your routine?

In the morning, I take my first dose of caffeine to my desk—a kind of bribe that gets me started. I have a repetitive strain injury in my arms (from computer use), which I manage by working in half-hour stints, with breaks for stretching and making countless cups of tea. Also, if I fit in a walk or a swim before lunch, I’m in better shape at the desk during the afternoon and can stay there longer. The breaks have come to seem like a form of work, a different way of thinking about the writing.

Describe your writing tools – what do you prefer? Parchment or pen, Olivetti or iPad?

I’ve always been fond of felt tips. And I was given a lovely fountain pen this year, which is addictive. I take chaotic notes on post-its or whatever scraps I come across and there tend to be floating piles of these on either side of my computer. Ideas, images, lines, dialogue, whole scenes go into notebooks, especially early on in a project or if I’m working in a café or on the road. Mostly, though, I write directly onto my laptop. When something finally starts to come together, then I’ll print it out to edit, because this gives me the sense that I’m looking at something external, real.

Did you do much research for Night Street? If so, how did you go about it?

Research is tricky to define for me, a fluid idea. After I became obsessed with Clarice Beckett’s art, I began to learn about her life from the work of Rosalind Hollinrake. Rosalind is the expert on Beckett, and her publications, along with several wonderful conversations we had, were my most important sources of information.

From the start, though, I had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the facts of the artist’s life. No doubt because, rather than a biographical novel, I wanted to write an alternative, invented, very internal kind of history. My aim was that ‘Night Street’ would feed on the moods that Beckett’s art suggested to me, that the fiction would in some way echo her landscapes. These are built with subtle variations in light and shade and offer a soft-edged, enigmatic impression of reality. Dreaming my way into the art, allowing it to prompt characterisation, scenes and narrative, was the key element of my preparation.

I also read accounts of Beckett’s historical period and especially fiction and non-fiction written by authors—some of them artists—who lived around the same time as Beckett. My research occasionally resembled an impersonation or a possession. I sketched and painted. I wore vintage clothes and cooked from vintage recipes. I wandered the streets of Melbourne, rode trams and trains, spent many hours on Port Phillip Bay beaches, feeling quite haunted. I tried to see as a visual artist would. I thought a lot about what creative work—of any kind—might involve or mean.

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You won the prestigious Australian/Vogel Award for Night Street in 2009, which led to a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin – as a first-time novelist, how did you find the editing process?

It was fascinating and challenging. Receiving feedback from an editor is a little like suddenly having an intimate companion with you on a journey that has been largely solitary. It’s enormously valuable to have the perspective of such a skilful, careful reader, of one who is determined for your manuscript to be as effective as possible. It helps you to see the material with fresh eyes. There’s such an interesting balance that you need to maintain between being open to the input and trusting your own sense of what the work should be. I expected to find the editing process frightening. But despite the inevitable anxieties, there was something liberating about it.

Finally, what’s the last book you loved, and why?

Other works by Virginia Woolf have kept me company over the last years, but I hadn’t read ‘To the Lighthouse’ since I was a teenager. I reread it recently and was awed, again, by Woolf’s extraordinary sharpness and dexterity, her rhythms, her lyrical instinct, the ambition and radicalness in her rendering and probing of consciousness—the sliding movements, the rich inconsistencies of perception, thought and feeling. The novel gets magnificently into the troubling gap between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reality. But it’s as celebratory as it is tragic.


 

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