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Six questions for Chris Womersley

JA September 07

Chris Womersley’s debut novel, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book in 2008. His latest, Bereft has just been released by Scribe and will be launched at Readings on September 15. Spike sat down with him across the digital divide to talk about ghost stories, Tom Waits and what it would be like to have an army of trained typing monkeys. Chris’s essay on the role of place in fiction, ‘No Place Like Home’, appears in the current Spring edition of Meanjin.

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

Routine? God, I wish… My wife and I share work and parenting responsibilities; at the moment I only have one whole day when I am not working my day job or parenting our three-year-old son, in which I am free to write. The rest of the time I write at night for a few hours after work or after my son has gone to bed. While writing ‘Bereft’, I was getting up at 4am to get a few hours done before the tyke woke up, but that craziness has since fallen by the wayside. Lucky I have my trained monkeys who can type some things up for me.

I haven’t yet started a new novel, but have instead a few short stories that I am trying to get up and running, with limited success. Although I can’t write with music on, I like to put some on while I’m booting up my computer and settling down, just to get me in the mood. I often think of a story in terms of a style of music or a particular song; I was intrigued by Christopher Hitchens’ recent observation in an interview with Jennifer Byrne that those who write fiction are often also music lovers.

The short story I am working on at the moment (currently called ‘A lovely and terrible thing’) is about a strange, floating girl. I have been listening a bit to Coco Rosie, who have that frail and ramshackle beauty I am striving for in this particular story.

Tell us about your writing tools – what do you prefer? Parchment or pen, Olivetti or iPad?

These days I tend to make notes about things – words, phrases, story ideas – in a notebook or on a scrap of paper, then type directly into the computer. Failing that, I speak into a dictaphone and hand that over to my army of trained monkeys who type it all up for me in the dead of night. Then I go through that again and try to make sense of it all.

Just kidding. I don’t really have an army of trained monkeys. It’s probably just a battalion. A division? Anyway, I guess there’s 20 of them, working on a rotating basis so they don’t get tired and screw up and mistype things. ‘Bereft’ was, for some time, known as ‘Berft’, which is not even a word! Stupid creatures.

How did the idea for Bereft begin?

The basic premise for ‘Bereft’ — of a man who meets a young girl he comes to believe is the ghost of his murdered sister — was always very strong. It was a matter of finding a setting for the novel and the period of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919 — in which tens of millions of people around the world died — snagged my attention. I decided to use the pandemic and the post-WWI setting as the background — the ‘Triumph of Death’ meets ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the Australian bush, with a soundtrack by Tom Waits, if you can imagine such a thing. And if you can’t imagine such a thing, then read ‘Bereft’, for I have done the imagining for you.

Did you do much research for the novel? How did you go about it?

Initially, I intended ‘Bereft’ to be set in a real place and envisaged myself hanging around in the historical societies of small country towns digging through musty archives and maps and old newspapers and things. I find, however, that I work far better when my imagination is allowed to break free from reality, and attempting to cleave to historical realism bored me. I like character and story. Added to which, I have to work for a living and can’t really spare the time researching.

Having said that, I read a fair bit about the period. Obviously I had to get my facts straight in regards to WWI and the battles in which my main character Quinn in which might have fought. Les Carlyon’s ‘The Great War’ was the prime material for that. But ‘Bereft’ is, in part, a ghost story and one of the interesting things about the period was the rise in Spiritualism, so I read a fair bit in that area: Marina Warner’s ‘Phantasmagoria’ and Martyn Jolly’s ‘Faces of the Living Dead’ (on the rise of spirit photography) were both important sources of inspiration. I also read old newspapers online in order to get the flavour of how people might have spoken, or for little details like the types of cold remedies advertised and so on.

Do you keep a writer’s notebook (or equivalent)? If so, can we take a peek – what’s something you jotted down recently?

I have a large notebook, which is my main notebook that stays at home on the kitchen table/desk and a small one I carry around, when I remember. Even the best ideas get lost pretty quickly, so I need to jot things down as they occur to me, if I possibly can. Sometimes I draw in there, as well, or paste in pictures that pique my interest, or quotes from people much wiser than me. I also have a small notebook of interesting words I stumble across and figure I might need somewhere down the track. Rebarbative, anyone? Trauerarbeit? Obligato? Perhaps not.

Here is a page from my large notebook. God only knows what I have written there. Clifton Hill med Centre. Something something something. GIRL. The man with the stretchiest skin, the girl with dragon hair. Blah blah blah Lovely and troubling thing. Hmmm. Genius…

notebook

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

The last novel I really enjoyed was ‘Wolf Hall’. Fantastic characters and an absorbing study of both a person and a period that I knew very little about. It’s a novel that sacrifices neither its period detail nor its modern appeal, something extremely hard to achieve. I’ve also been dipping into ‘Landscape and Memory’, by Simon Schama, which is a cultural history of Europe as revealed through various nations’ and cultures’ relationships with the landscape. Apart from the wonderful prose and great ideas, there’s a fair bit about fairy tales and myths, which I am very interested in.


 

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