Lice-ridden, I stand
before class. The teacher says:
You will play with him.
***
Hungover, I stand
before class. I say:
You’re lousy students.
New Paths & Old
In June, I married Tara Horner. A white wedding sounded as appealing as shock therapy, so instead we opted for exchanging rings in a quiet civil ceremony with a grand total of two guests. Life is good. We designed the wooden rings ourselves, and cannot speak highly enough of the craft and service of Touch Wood Rings, who produced them.
Since then, we’ve both been reading the large pile of submissions for The Tangled Bank anthology, the first release for Tangled Bank Press. I was initially concerned I wouldn’t get enough submissions, but we’re closing in on 250 submissions, and there’s still another few weeks left before submissions close. If you write fiction or poetry, or create visual art, and are interested in evolution, then I’d love to see a submission from you. The number of submissions has meant I’ve already had to make a few tough decisions about stories and poetry that I liked but for whatever reason felt weren’t suitable for the anthology, and I’ve got plenty more ahead of me. I’m looking forward to sharing my discoveries at the end of the year.
With all the reading and editing, my writing has been on the backburner the last couple of months, but I’ve mapped out my Japan book and have made a solid start on several chapters. (Thanks to the dogged persistence of a friend keen to see them, I’ve also finally got round to uploading my photos from Japan to the computer and begun the daunting task of sorting through them.) I’m also studying poetry at the moment, and coincidentally have just had my first poem published, in a rather curious place: the world’s first anthology of zombie poems. The anthology is Vicious Rhymes and Reanimated Verses and the poem is ‘Natural Succession’, an ecological take on the ever-popular undead. I’ve never really thought of myself as a zombie connoisseur, but I’m looking forward to seeing what the other 90-odd poets have done. Should get my copy in the mail soon.
I’ll post more photos on the walk site soon, but in the meantime here’s one of my favourite spots on the entire walk, on a country road in northern Honshu at the foot of Gas-san.
Wet fern forest and a gravel road
plunging on.
Interview With A Writer
January 2009 finds me enjoying the subtropical heat of Brisbane and slowly returning to my regularly scheduled program of writing, reading, teaching, and repotting — though with the addition of a girlfriend named Tara, and a three-legged kitten currently known as Dali (a kitten who blithely ignored Wendy, 99, Yo-yo, String Theory, Tassels, Gingersnap, Catapult, Spandex, Plummet, and a host of other names). We’re hopeful she’ll answer to Dali eventually, won’t get tangled in another tassel, and won’t tumble off the top-floor balcony when we’re not looking…
But on to the interview…
The Rules:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me!”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on…
The interview below is thanks to Ben Francisco, my co-writer on last year’s This is My Blood, in the Dreaming Again anthology, and a wonderful writer in his own right.
1. The “So what?” factor in the stuff you write (both fiction and nonfiction) is pretty high, and you often explore big philosophical questions. Is there a particular philosopher(s) or school of philosophy that you’re drawn to, and how does that influence your life and work?
I’ve been influenced a lot by philosophical Taoism, and to a much lesser extent Buddhism. Zhuangzi, one of the two foundational Taoists, expressed his philosophy through (knowingly) fantastical vignettes. I’m pretty sure he’d be writing spec-fic if he were alive today — he was the one who wondered whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Zhuangzi is the playful side of Taoism, and the mysterious Laozi (credited with writing the Tao Te Ching) is the monastic side. Both are present in my writing; polarities like yin/yang and east/west are central to my understanding of my life and my writing. My introduction to Taoism was through Raymond Smullyan’s The Tao is Silent, and it’s still one of my favourite books, both whimsical and wise.
When it comes to Western philosophy, I enjoy the menagerie that is the ancient Greek philosophers. Much of my writing explores questions of knowledge and reality and truth, so Descartes is a useful springboard, even if he has a lot to answer for. For similar reasons, gnosticism also fascinates me, as a playground rather than something I subscribe to personally. But if I had to choose one western philosopher, I’d choose Spinoza. I once listed myself as a ‘Spinozan’ on the religion question of a census form, though I may have been drunk at the time. Spinoza has been described as an atheist and a mystic, and so have I.
2. You write not only in many genres, but in many forms: short stories, longer fictions, dramatic plays, haikus, blog posts, and nonfiction. Some of these modes (e.g., the haiku and the drama) have tight structural constraints. Do you feel you learn something from writing in these modes that you can then carry over to the more free-for-all forms?
Definitely. Dialogue has always been one of my weaknesses, and I was originally drawn to plays as a way of forcing myself to tell a story completely through dialogue. My characters have a tendency to monologue (an actor once told me I was the only playwright he knew who wrote in paragraphs), but I have learnt a lot about dialogue in the process. I also find the tight constraints of plays and haiku and even genre useful because they limit my natural inclination to make things insanely complicated, and help subsume my grand themes and ideas into a conversation or an image, where they belong. I’m fascinated by form and style, but I’m not a post-modernist, so I’m slowly learning to give priority to substance, which I often (incorrectly) assumed was out of my head and on the page.
3. You’re working on a book about your experience walking across the entire length of Japan. Are you looking for a narrative arc in your journey, or a philosophical framework, or some other way to bring your experiences together in a cohesive way?
I’ll be tying it together in a narrative arc with a central theme, for the very practical reason of getting published. Life is a series of random events which we tie together into a story with ourselves as the hero, and I’m interested in exploring the fiction of non-fiction and the non-fiction of fiction. My friend Ian, who began walking Japan in the opposite direction but had to pull out due to injury, is also writing about his journey, and we hope to combine our narratives into a single work of alternating chapters. We had very different experiences, and very different interpretations of the experiences we shared, so that should keep things interesting.
4. Among the many kernels of wisdom you shared during your hike across Japan, you said, “I should be spending most of my time doing the things that are most important to me.” Being back in Australia, going through the process of reacculturation, do you feel you’re able to integrate that advice to yourself, and other learnings, into your day-to-day life?
It’s challenging. I’m still in the process of renegotiating and integrating many things, and I don’t feel like I’m there yet. But being on the path is enough — as Laozi wrote, and I painfully learnt several times over, the journey of a thousand miles really does start with a single step. As a good friend pointed out to me recently, if returning was easy then you’d have to wonder if the experience changed me at all. Reacculturation is definitely going to be something I explore in my fiction; in what form I don’t yet know.
5. Please share a haiku that incorporates at least one spec fic trope and at least one line of dialogue.
“As you wish, my friend.”
And with that the wanderer
passed out of the tale.
Spring cleaning
The marsh frogs have moved back into my courtyard, and an obstreperous cricket into the plant next to my bed; spring is well and truly here. It even rained today.
Unlike the cricket, I’ve been quiet this year. Integrating, evaluating, working, writing a novella. I’ve been accepted into Clarion South, a 6-week boot camp for speculative fiction writers, which I’m really looking forward to. Six stories in six weeks! In other encouraging news, my story The Pluripotentiary made it onto the 2005 recommended reading list in The Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy.
I’m aiming to complete my novella, On the So-Called Nightwings, by the end of the year. Clarion will take me through to the end of February, 2007. A couple of months more saving, then I’m finally bidding Brisbane farewell and returning to Papua New Guinea, the land of my birth — and probably my muse. I’m walking the Kokoda Track, climbing Mt Wilhelm, canoeing up the Sepik River, and generally exploring the sun-drenched memories of my tropical childhood.
From PNG, Asia beckons. Lots to write about!
***
If you’re reading this as an email, it’s because you’re subscribed to my Yahoo group, which I’ve been posting to — intermittently — for the past five years. Yahoo’s getting rather decrepit, so I’ve transferred the whole lot over to a blog. Fear not — I’m not about to start emoting about my breakfast cereal. I just prefer the new layout, and it allows me to do a few more things.
The new site does mean, though, that if you’d like to keep getting my occasional musings on life and travel in your inbox, you’ll need to resubscribe. To do so, just go to hydrolith.wordpress.com, click on the link under my eyeball which says ‘Subscribe by email’, and enter your address. If you’d prefer not to get any more [hydrolith] emails, simply do nothing, and this is the last one you’ll get. Either way, drop me a line and let me know what’s new.
***
The cricket has mercifully fallen silent. It’s been weeks now — I didn’t think they lived that long…
Tired but chirpy,
~C
the definition of ignorant bigotry
Dec 4, 2004 6:05pm
a group of young white males, on a balcony, drinking;
a turbaned sikh walking along a suburban street;
youth, loudly: “hey, muslim! come up here if ya wanna war.”
~Chris
