Blog

The Josephine Ulrick Literature and Poetry prizes offer an eye-popping $20,000 to the winner in each category. Now in its tenth year, this is the first time the twenty grand prize pool has been awa...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
2 Comments

Six questions for Fiona McGregor

JA June 30

Fiona McGregor is a writer and performance artist. She is the author of four books: Au Pair, Suck My Toes, chemical palace and Strange Museums, and her new novel Indelible Ink has just hit the shelves to rave reviews (Christos Tsiolkas himself named it ‘f**king gold’). Spike sat down with her over the digital divide to find out about writing without a workspace, Czelsaw Milosz and how to ban the internet.



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

I get up any time between 6.30 and 11, depending on what else I’m doing. I go straight to the desk with my breakfast. I’ll read a book with breakfast, then I’ll start on my own writing. I stay at the desk for as long as I can. Sometimes only two or three hours at the beginning of a book; at the end up to ten. I usually eat about three breakfasts … procrastinate with household tasks … or emails like I am right now. When I’m working well I won’t go online till the afternoon. I write on a computer that doesn’t have internet, so it’s like a typewriter. Internet is banned from my study when I’m in the middle of a novel. When I lived in Bondi I used to surf some dawns before writing. Those were lucky days.

If we made a surprise visit to your workspace, what would we see?

Sadly, I don’t have a study at the moment and haven’t had a proper one for a year. In storage I have an old L-shaped desk I bought second-hand from a friend years ago. A swivel chair, a bookcase, and a hideous old filing cabinet that is baby-poo brown/yellow. My study used to be tiny, just big enough for me to stand between the furniture listed above. My dream is to have a study big enough to fit a couch. That will be very hard in Sydney.

Where did the idea for Indelible Ink begin?

With the question of why an older, divorced Mosman woman would go on a tattooing spree, then the questions of how it would affect her relationships with her family and friends, and so on, and so on, the questions kept coming.

Did you do much research for the novel, for example on the Sydney real estate market? How did you go about it?

Not much, no. I tend to throw things down and work by instinct. I went to an auction of a flat down the road. And I read Domain a few times. And I just listened when people talked about real estate – as they so often do – instead of zoning out – as I so often do.

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

Not really. Unfortunately. But I did just start Czelsaw Milosz’s ‘Native Realm' this morning, and I felt like jotting down a paragraph from the introduction. About how impossible it is to tell the truth, even when you intend to write bald autobiography.

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

I’m currently enjoying Transit Lounge’s anthology of writing by Vicki Viidikas, a Sydney writer who lived 1948-1998. She has a very free, open and wise voice. Wrote poems, prose and stories. I’m in a lost world of Sydney 70s bohemia, and loving it.


 

Our Friends

Comments

by SimonT
30 Jun 10 at 10:53

A minor typo on the second line: “Suck”, not “Such”, My Toes.

...
by Jess
30 Jun 10 at 10:56

Argh, thanks Simon. Duly fixed.

...

 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.