Tell us about your entry ‘Blood Sports’. What drew you to write about this topic?
I don’t think our society has ever come to terms with the extent to which violence and sex played foundational roles in the representation of our culture. This is not meant in a metaphorical sense; we have embedded the structures of ancient pornographers and gladiators in our ways of writing and living in ways that still persist in 2015. If anything, this inheritance is only becoming more pronounced.
My entry, ‘Blood Sports’, uses the specific context of a highly personalised autobiographical narrative to try and draw broader conclusions about how these historical systems shape the nature of lived experience today.
I started thinking about this project after reading an article in The Monthly called ‘The Pencil and the Damage Done’, by Ceridwen Dovey. She wrote about the ‘perverse attraction’ that ‘autobiographical fiction’ holds for Australian readers and writers. More importantly, she challenged the privileged position of male Australian writers of that work. ‘Blood Sports’ is my attempt to live up to those provocations.
What do you think of writing that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction? Does the line matter?
Sometimes the real world is roadkill.
I spent most of the last 18 months writing an absurd script loosely based on the life of former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman. In telling that story I felt like there was nothing I could say about him or his family that would be worse than some of the things he had done to his opponents. Now that’s over I’m trying to recalibrate my sense of what’s right and fair. As a very privileged young white man from The Glorious Republic of Melbourne’s Inner North, I like believing that ‘your first responsibility is always to the story’, but often that can be a cop out. I just read John McPhee’s ‘Writing by Omission’, where he says that ‘creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have’, and that seems like a much healthier sensibility.
Something else I’m always interested in is how and why writers of such work foreground ‘the line’. For instance, reading something like Oliver Mol’s postscript to Lion Attack!, where he systematically laid out what was true and false (or what was constructed, or combined), was fascinating.
Which nonfiction writer would you most like to have a drink with, and why?
I want to have a beer with Gavin King, Campbell Newman’s official biographer, just so I can comprehensively destroy him in a contest of wits, strength, and ‘Can Do’ trivia.
In a more civilised world, I’d love to meet the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who spent years researching and writing a book called Blood Rites. It’s about the evolution of the ways that societies have prepared our minds, bodies, and souls for battle over the ages.
Something I’m wondering about is the emergence of our hybrid model of soldier-politicians, candidates such as Andrew Hastie, and their place within Western democracies. I’d love to ask her about them.
Who is guilty of greater crimes against literature: James Franco or James Frey?
Franco, for hoarding the film rights to Blood Meridian. Scalping seems like an era-appropriate punishment.
Do you agree with any of Jonathan Franzen’s opinions?
To be honest, I haven’t read any of his work. The first result when I tried to find some opinions to agree with was an article titled ‘The Literary Industrial Complex of Hating Jonathan Franzen’. Not wanting to miss out on such a lucrative opportunity, I went to his Wikiquote page, where the following stuck out:
‘What's your impression of the ship so far?’ she asked. ‘Is it really super authentic?’
‘Well, it does seem to be floating,’ Mr Söderblad said with a smile, ‘in spite of heavy seas.’
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)
As John Howard was fond of saying: ‘Context is everything.’
Which book would be least likely to gain a place on your bookshelf, and why? Diana Rajchel’s Divorcing a Real Witch: for pagans and the people that used to love them, John Howard’s Lazarus Rising, or Linda Sunshine’s Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons — a companion.
Definitely Lazarus Rising! If there are nine rungs of hell for political tragics, I would be burnt to a crisp in a toasted sandwich of Antony Green on rye. Once I’m finished parsing that sentence, I’d love nothing better than to join Johnny and his skeletal crew of battlers onboard The Mateship.
Lazarus Rising wins on the title alone — not since John Major’s The Autobiography or Alan Clark’s Diaries has a title inspired mankind to such giddy heights. It’s certainly much better than Can Do: Campbell Newman and the challenge of reform.