On keeping faith in the project

Audition opens with a conversation between three giants on a spaceship. If they stop speaking, they grow, and since they’re already pressed up against the walls, it’s critical they maintain constant, aimless conversation. The rhythm of the dialogue and the dark absurdity of the situation made me think Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and I wondered if that was there for you too.

Yes, I absolutely worship at the feet of Samuel Beckett. I was in my twenties before I went to university, and Samuel Beckett was this revelation. His writing sounded like the inside of my mind. I’m quite interested in small talk, and I was thinking about conversation as noise. Beckett’s language becomes opaque sometimes, which leads to a higher understanding. That was definitely there throughout the book.

Do you tend to read while you write, or do you prefer to keep other voices away?

I read because it gives me a sense that things are possible. It’s common to lose hope in a book when I’m writing it. I’m working on a new novel right now, and yesterday was terrible. I was in a lot of physical pain, and the book deals with upsetting stuff. But at the end of the day, I read some poems from a new collection by Erik Kennedy, a poet from Ōtautahi/Christchurch, and it lifted me out. The worst space for me to be in is to think my work’s urgent or important. When I read something and think, Look, Erik’s already done it. If my book never sees the light of day, Erik’s done it, I feel better. The feeling I often get from reading is that I never want to write again, but I want to write immediately. I’ve got a friend who says our only job is to keep faith in the project, and that’s the toughest thing. It’s such a strange and solitary process—although it doesn’t need to be solitary. Thank goodness for reading. I need my communities around me, and reading is one of them.

What goes into producing that first draft?

It’s incredibly difficult. Years ago, someone introduced me to the idea of draft zero: all I’m doing is telling myself the story. I go where I want to go. I don’t worry too much about point of view or voice. It’s like chopping down the tree I’m later going to carve into something.

I’m kind stuck right now in my own work because I’ve been so focused on voice—worried that if the voice isn’t there, then the novel can’t be there. It’s freeing to hear that voice comes out for you in the editorial process.

I’m in a similar position. I’ve built this entire project on voice, and I can’t hear it anymore. But what I’ve realized—and it’s always embarrassing because a lot of people talk about things coming naturally, hearing a voice or this or that—I work very much in systems. I’m like, okay, this voice speaks in this tense and uses these words. I make banks of vocabulary. When the natural creativity dies in me, I am really surprised how I can backward engineer it. A long time ago, I was told by a poetry teacher that I have no natural talent, and I agree with that. I’m not a born storyteller, a language person. It’s the craft of it—and when I say craft, I mean like building a house or cutting hair. As a hairdresser, you learn the rules and then you expand on the rules and move things around.

Editing as craft, a kind of practiced creativity.

Yes. And trying escape my own brain. I’ll set myself a list of ways I’m going to read the book. I might read it through once for pace, once for voice, once for clarity. I’ll read it aloud and record it and listen to it. Or I’ll change the font, the background color. I might even read it while I’m listening to loud music. These are not new things. Writing is a form of communication. I’m starting a conversation and I want people to understand it. This is why trusted friends are so freaking important. Friends who will say, what the heck is this? What are you thinking? Another thing is not being afraid of the expository. Often, I’m going through a draft just putting in expository sentences, trying to give something to the reader, invite the reader in. When I started, I think I wanted to be one of those writers who pushes everybody out. But going back to Beckett—there’s something incredibly soulful and heartfelt in his writing, an invitation into the work.

Many of your books take part in the tradition of science fiction as social critique. Audition looks at the violence of the carceral system, the way those considered problematic by society can be indoctrinated to the point where they’re benefiting “those in charge” instead of threatening their power. Why did you choose to tell this story in outer space? What draws you to the otherworldly?

When I first started writing, I was obsessed with realism. I thought it was my job to reflect realities. Then I found out that the way I wrote reality people read as strange. I wasn’t Raymond Carver like I thought! But the main appeal is that it’s hard to critique a system from within, where the structures of power are so secure. Non-realism gives me the opportunity to say, Let’s see what happens if we imagine a different set of power structures. When I can control the physics, the sociological stuff, the psychological stuff, other things become possible.

The world you create in Audition—especially the place “beyond the event horizon”—is so expansive and bizarre. How do you open yourself up to that kind of invention?

I have to thank a writer friend called Kerry Donovan Brown. I was trying to create this world from top principles, based on what worked for the story. They helped me with this idea of going back. There’s a point in evolution where we went from one-celled amoeba that kind of just floated around doing our own thing to growing a mouth and becoming predatory. What Kerry helped me do was go right back to that moment and imagine a world where a species never became predatory. I needed to find all these solutions to invasion, to eating. I needed to find solutions that weren’t hunting or soldiering or defending physically.

Your books are all quite formally experimental. At what point does the shape of piece of work become clear to you?

I did a workshop with Jordy Rosenberg maybe five years ago, and he was talking about this idea that a work of fiction can have a thesis statement, just like an essay, but it isn’t necessarily interested in answering that thesis statement. That helped me heaps. I write to try to understand things that confuse me. The form emerges as I try to answer questions. The shape of a book also comes from problem solving and constraint. You make one decision and that cuts off twenty decisions and you’re stuck with two decisions, that kind of thing. And life too. The body that I’m in and the life that I’ve lived lead me to write this particular book in this particular way. That’s why it’s so important to live around the writing. I need to be in political action, I need to be in family action. These things lead to structure. And sometimes it comes really late. With Audition, it was drafts and drafts and drafts.

Maybe we’re growing out of this as a culture, but I think a lot of us have been taught that good art shouldn’t be overtly political or attached to a rigid value system. Fiction writers might fear being too moralistic or academic. I appreciate the way your work argues against this instinct.

My first book came out fifteen years ago, and it was a very different world. In those days, I felt I had to be cool and calm and detached. (And when I say cool, I mean in temperament, not in, eh, Fonzie.) I read mainly detached, kind of cool writers. The opposite of who I am. You can probably tell, I talk too much, I’m angry, I’m messy as far as emotions go. But I was trying to be that calm person when I wrote. I still feel that pressure now. But the thing is that, while I spend my time writing, no one’s waiting for it. It takes a lot of sacrifice from my family. I need a lot of support from my friends. So I want it to count. Not that purely escapist work isn’t important because I think it is, but there are issues I’m interested in. We have a terrible government here in New Zealand at the moment, lots of unemployment, high levels of unhoused people, incredible poverty. And they keep telling us not to get upset. There’s pressure from all directions to be “reasonable.” At events where people might’ve spoken out, everyone’s being a little bit calmer. It worries me a lot.

You’ve always lived in New Zealand. Is home critical to a writer’s work?

I live in Aotearoa/New Zealand as Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, which means I’m part of the colonizing group. A massive part of living here is working out how to be the best guest, and how to be aware of the harm that I do just by being here. In Audition, tied into questions about the carceral system are questions of land back. We’re pretty much all living on stolen land in New Zealand and that makes a major difference to me as a writer. If I write, how much space do I take up or how little space should I take up? But the amazing thing about living in New Zealand is that if I can widen my understanding to Te Ao Māori, the indigenous world of this country, this is a place where land is a relative of the people. Rivers are citizens. There is a way of thinking about relationships outside of the transactional, imagining work as relational. A writer’s relationship to the land that they’re on is huge. The places that we walk make up a kind of psychic map in our heads. It’s absolutely inseparable from the work.

You’ve been employed as a hairdresser, a librarian, and you’ve also taught writing in prisons. Has moving through multiple careers benefited you as a writer?

Work is the most interesting thing to me. I’m the first person in my family to go to university, and work was always the way you showed your worth. My dad, until recently, asked why I don’t go back to hairdressing. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. It was a way to be with people, to hear conversation, to see things. This is what I love about work: we’re suddenly put in relation to people that we wouldn’t seek out. We have these personas that we put on. It’s such a rich space. I feel a bit self-conscious that I’ve cycled through so many jobs, but it’s the nature of being an artist and working. It’s difficult to find a job you can put everything into and still have time and energy for writing. There always comes a point in the day job where they’re saying, don’t you want to do more? and I’m like, No, not really. When I first started working, which is a hell of a long time ago, there wasn’t this thing about passion. You didn’t have to be enthusiastic about doing your job, you were just there to do it. And that’s why I love the trades; I feel a sense of accomplishment. You do a haircut and there’s a haircut.

How do you build writing time into a life with daily work?

One of my friends, the writer Laurence Fearnley, got me in the habit of writing 500 words a day, which works for a first draft. I’ve also done things like book myself cheap motel room down the road so I have 24 hours to write. Another friend, the writer and photographer Anna Sanderson, says everything is art, and I really like that. Whether I’m washing the dishes or yelling at a protest—it all feeds the work. There are different ways of composing. When my son was young, I would put on a character and go for a walk with him and be like, Oh, what would the character think of that tree? But I don’t want to make out like balancing work and writing is easy. It’s the hardest thing. And as work becomes more precarious and funding becomes less, we’ll end up with this weird class thing where the only people who can write are the people who can afford to write.

In your acknowledgements, you had this sweet line thanking a friend for conversations about “writing what is real into what is imagined.” What did you mean by that?

My writing is always autobiographical. I live in a body that I don’t understand. I have a lot of trouble moving through the world for all sorts of reasons that are inside my skin and inside my brain. But I’m not a life writer. I can’t write essays; I’m not good at them. I also spent a lot of years in the wilderness of alcoholism and drug addiction and hurt a lot of people. Part of my amends is to not hurt them further by glorifying my life, saying, “Yeah, I was a tough, hard bitch, and I did this.” So I really want to write the imagined, but I can’t do that without having some link to lived experience. Damien Wilkins, one of my teachers, once asked someone, “What do you have to do to a real experience to make it fiction?” I hope I never find an answer, but I’m reaching for it every day. Audition got started because I got stuck in a cupboard.

No way.

I was on my hands and knees, trying to reach a wok or a pot. And because I had this misunderstanding of my body and no cat’s whiskers, I went in and got stuck. I couldn’t back out. I couldn’t turn around. I was like, how is it that I’ve lived with this body for 50 years, and I still don’t know where its boundaries are. I wasn’t in there long. I got out fine. Obviously—I’m here. But while I was in there, I got this visceral feeling that was the basis for Audition. It never left the whole time I was writing.