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Six Questions for Maggie Mackellar

JA September 21

Maggie Mackellar is the author of three books – Core of My Heart My Country, Strangers in a Foreign Land and, more recently, When It Rains, a memoir of grief and redemption, an extract of which was featured in Meanjin Vol 68:3. She lives on a farm in central New South Wales with her two children, and blogs here and here. Spike sat down with her over the digital divide to chat about writing between the country and the coast, getting up before the sun, and exchanges of truth between the writer and their audience.

We also have two copies of Maggie’s book to give away to Spike readers, courtesy of the good folk at Random House. Simple send your name and address to jjmau@unimelb.edu.au with ‘When It Rains’ as the subject by 5pm Thursday (Sept 23) to win!

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

A typical writing day. Just those words send shivers across my skin. At some stage in my life I’m sure I’ll have lots of them, but not at the moment. So the short answer is – I don’t have one. I’ve found that the different cycles of the manuscript require different routines and different work places. There are some general rules though.

1) I must start work before the kids wake up. This used to just about kill me when my smallest child would wake relentlessly at 5am in the morning. He’s much easier now and doesn’t usually wake till 6.30am. So, alarm at 4.30am, quick trawl through online papers and twitter while coffee machine is warming up. Then coffee and work. I try to dive straight in and get something on the screen in these precious early hours. I find if I can just start, then it doesn’t matter what the rest of the day throws at me – I can manage to come back to it spasmodically if I’ve got two hours of uninterrupted time. This intense time often happens in bed. (True) I have never written from bed before – but this manuscript, which turned into ‘When it Rains’ felt so raw at times that I needed to crawl back under the covers, perch my computer on my knees and write from the security of bed.

2) I must try for 6 hours in front of my computer screen, even if those 6 hours happen something like this:

4.30 to 6.30am: WRITE.

6.30 to 8.30am: kids/breakfast/school lunches/bus.

8.30 to 9.30am: what I refer to as outside jobs – horses out to paddocks, muck out stalls, get wood etc.

9.30 to 10.30am: run/exercise of some sort (crucial).

10.30 to 11.30am: house jobs (washing, order re-established etc).

12pm(ish): start writing again and try for a couple of hours before kids home at 3.30pm.

On deck with kid stuff 3.30 to 8.00pm(ish) – you know the drill, sport practice or riding, homework, dinner … and then the hard bit – I have to make myself sit down again and finish what I started at 4.30am in the morning. On a good night I might really get going and do another 4 hours, on a bad night maybe only an hour or so. When I sat down and worked out how many days there were before my ms was due and how many hrs I had in each day once I took out all the time it takes to run a household, I realised I had to be terribly regimented in getting a minimum of six hours writing done a day. I think it helps to be slightly obsessive.

3) The third rule – which I’ve found enables the other two rules to work – at certain points in the life of the manuscript, I must call a wonderful friend who loves coming to play in my country house and ask her to move up here for a week and look after the kids. When we find a week that works for us both, I pack my laptop, my notebooks, my dog and hop in the car and drive to the coast where I work obsessively. Because my time in front of the screen is so restricted at home, these retreats become even more important. I love the feeling of being able to work deep into the night and know that I can sleep in the next morning, I love not having to think about dinner, or excursions or anyone else’s emotions. I become completely, selfishly absorbed. Of course I never come back having done what I thought I would do – but the week gives me the chance to concentrate for large chunks of time and the ability to see the manuscript as a whole. Without these retreats I don’t think I could write in such a fragmented way.

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

Hmmm, well if you managed to catch me while I was on the coast it would look something like this!

But more ordinarily it looks like this. Though I suspect I swept away the wine glasses when I took that shot.

Writers’ block – does it happen and how do you get over it?

It does, and this is often how I get over it…

Or I run. It’s the repetitive and physical, which allows me to think around what’s stopping me from getting at what I need to say. Often it’s a structural problem. I have something in the wrong place. For example, the beginning is not the really the beginning, or, as happened with this book, the really hard bits, the bits I actually wasn’t ready to write had a stultifying effect on the rest of the manuscript. On a few occasions I had to put the manuscript in the drawer (once for over a year) and then come back to it when I was in a different place and ready to solve the problem that was warping the writing before I put it away. By the way, I think it’s very hard to determine the difference between genuine writers’ block and plain old procrastination.

Do you write for yourself, or do you keep an audience in mind?

This is such a pertinent question as my very personal memoir has just been released. Except it’s not personal. Or I didn’t think of it as such when I was writing. This may sound odd given the slightly sensational subject matter – husband died while I pregnant with our 2nd child (suicide because you want to know), then my mother died very quickly (cancer). So personal, yes, conflicted as to why write, yes. But here’s the thing. Yes I wrote for me, I wrote to order what had happened to me. But then I edited, read, rewrote, rewrote again, edited, read more, thought more, rewrote again, spent every spare moment working on it not for me, but for an audience. But, as I did this, what I aimed for was a universal expression of what happens when we suffer loss, experience grief, or try and reclaim our lives from the innumerable large and small tragedies that afflict all of us. If I thought of an audience, if I thought of how the ‘I’ narrator I had created upon the page would be perceived, then I would stop.

Having published two books previously to small audiences, I was more than aware of how hard it is to break through to any sort of larger audience beyond university courses and expert readers. I think there was a large part of me that thought this book (‘When it Rains’) would be the same. I now think this was just self-protection. For there is another part of me that worked incredibly hard to establish the sort of connection that makes my reader feel they have engaged with me, to feel that they ‘know’ me.

My brother, who is a musician, talks about that moment of connection – of recognition when the listener of music, the viewer of photography, or the reader of books recognises their lives in the expression of art. When I thought about an audience, I thought about this exchange. Though this moment feels unmediated, authentic, natural even, it’s most definitely not. It’s an exchange of ‘truth’, and this, when I allowed myself to think about audience, was what I strived toward.

What I have been unprepared for has been how this moment has been read by my already far larger than I could have imagined audience. ‘When it Rains’ is three weeks old. Since it has come out I have not gone through a day without being contacted by someone who has read it and who responds as if I have beared my soul. And I guess on the one hand I have. But what I thought I was revealing was every grieving mother, wife, daughter’s soul, not just mine.

I write because I can. I write because I want to say something that hasn’t been said before, or at least not how I want to say it. I write to know, not so much to be known. But in all of those aims I now ask if I thought of the audience – and I have to say I didn’t – if I had, I probably would never have published.

Do you write full time or do you have a ‘day job’? If so, how do you balance this, and your work on the farm, with writing?

I am so lucky (in lots of ways). One of the major reason I left my academic job at Sydney University was because my kids were living this awful life of being shuffled from care provider to care provider and I was becoming both physically and emotionally absent from them. Without my husband or my mother to help raise them, their lives had shifted a long way from the childhood that I wanted for them. So we came up here and I’ve managed to write full time. My second book was a commission from the State Library of Victoria and it allowed me to consolidate this writing life. I would love to continue writing full time and the Peter Blazey Fellowship and a small advance has starved off the inevitable reality of needing a day job and enabled me to write ‘When it Rains’. But those are both long since spent. Because of this I did force myself to write an Australian Research Council fellowship application, which truly was the most tortuous writing exercise I have ever undertaken, and which may yet prove pointless.

The other reason I am lucky is though I live right smack in the middle of a working farm, I really don’t have to do very much farm work. My uncle runs the farm and I help out when needed. I do love looking after the chooks and ducks and will help out in the yards when we are lamb marking, shearing or lambing. I also look after the kids’ ponies. But all of this is kind of wonderful and balances the time I spend in my head.

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

Oh I like these questions and I can’t believe I get to answer them and bore people with all the books I love. Though I guess I have to confine myself to the last book I loved. I know if I answered these questions next week I would say ‘Wolf Hall’ – but I haven’t finished it yet, so it’s not going to count. The last book I loved was Jane Smiley’s ‘Private Life’. My voracious book reading friend, who sends me packages of books that she doesn’t have time to read cause she’s a crazy, busy academic, introduced me to Jane Smiley eons ago. But she is not convinced that she should read ‘Private Life’ because of some less than glowing reviews. But I loved it, loved it, loved it. I loved it because it’s restrained and so clever because of this restraint. Its quietness speaks to the loneliness of living with someone, a deeper loneliness perhaps, than living on your own. So the book is small and still and yet it tells of the biggest emotions, the most desperate, unshared grief and it tracks a woman’s gradual growth toward a sort of power. I read it after finishing Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘The Lacuna’ and the two were such a contrast in styles but both dealing with big moments in American history. For me, ‘Private Life’ was the more complete, polished novel.

 

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