Bookish-Dreaming

The Baggage Writers Carry: 

Interviewing Janeen Webb, Jack Dann and Yaritji Green

by

Gillian Polack

Every now and then, life gives us a special opportunity. Recently I edited an anthology and got to work closely with some exceptional writers. You’ve already met two of them: KJ Bishop and Tessa Kum. Today I'm taking vast advantage of three more Australian writers. My temporary position as their editor enabled this. Under the guise of power—my real life is so much more mundane!—I got to ask some of the questions I’ve wanted to ask all three for a fair while and to discover the similarities and differences in their approaches. So who are these three writers, and why was I so keen to bring them together here?

Janeen Webb is a successful scholar and an equally successful fiction writer. It’s a much more difficult path to follow than it looks, balancing precariously between the needs of two professions that are quite, quite different. She has published two novels (Sailing to Atlantis and The Silken Road to Samarkand) and a host of scholarly articles and reviews. One work of hers fascinates me more than all the rest combined, though. She explains it below, so I won’t tell you (I’m naturally cruel, in case you were wondering). The book she’s best known for is Dreaming Down-Under, an anthology of Australian speculative fiction that won the World Fantasy Award. Not just any anthology, either: it helped put Australian writers on the international science fiction and fantasy map. It changed the world for a host of Australian writers. She co-edited Dreaming Down-Under with her husband, Jack Dann. Which leads me to . . .

Jack Dann. Jack is a major force in the writing universe. In any universe, in fact. He's one of those larger than life souls whose presence makes reality seem just a bit more vibrant. My favourite novel of his is The Memory Cathedral, an alternate history of Leonardo da Vinci that’s full of flight and whimsy and more than a little drama. It’s one of about seventy books he has published, as writer and as editor.

The third writer is Yaritji Green. She’s a South Australian just starting out in her writing career. There are very few Indigenous Australian speculative fiction writers currently, so what she brings to her fiction is a cultural outlook that very few others can match. Politics is a part of her makeup—it’s important to who she is and what she has to say. I wanted Yaritji to join in this interview because her life experience and what she does to present writing that fits her cultural background is particularly interesting. It balances Jack’s work on self-discovery and Janeen’s interest in early explorers and their views. And of course she’s a wonderful writer.

GP: When you write fiction, do you think about the concerns and the issues and the themes that dominate the rest of your life? How do those concerns play into your fiction?

JW: This is always a complex issue: the text is not the author, yet the author necessarily informs the text.

For me, the physical process of writing fiction is a kind of meditative state in which everyday concerns are set aside. Once I enter the text that I am working on, my focus is on getting the story to function properly within its own self-contained world. I do a lot of background research to make the context feel as convincing as possible. If, as in my Baggage story, the setting is an historical one, I am careful that the characters’ vocabulary is limited to the language in use at that period, that such things as the sentence structure and syntax are appropriate, and that the issues that concern the characters are those of the time in which the story is set. Those are the issues that dictate the direction that the action will take. I concentrate on what the characters are doing, how they (not I) would react in a particular situation, what they can reasonably be expected to know and so on. And characters do take on a life of their own, sometimes doing things that the author does not expect: for example, in my Young Adult novel The Silken Road to Samarkand I started with two teenage girls who were best friends, expecting them to help each other through—but they didn’t. They wouldn’t stop fighting, and I ended up having to separate them into two parallel plot lines with separate adventures that only converged when the girls were ready to speak to each other again. So it goes. In writing science fiction, I have a more specific focus on the underlying theoretical concerns: for example, my quantum time travel story, “Red City”, deals with issues of indeterminacy, so every action (including the inaction of characters who balk for fear ending up in potentially parallel universes) has several possible outcomes and the story remains completely open-ended. In such fiction, the issues of the scientific knowledge (or lack of it) of the protagonists determine how the story will play out.

Having said all that, I am conscious that there are some recurring themes in my work that do reflect issues that concern me in my day to day life. I won’t say that I deliberately put them into my fiction, but nevertheless they are there: Issues of personal growth, of taking control (or not) of one’s life, of social responsibility. I find, in retrospect, that I am often dealing with the failure of ideology in the face of immediate reality. Characters who are blinded by belief systems are at greatest risk: for example, in the Baggage story “Manifest Destiny”, social Darwinism and basic Christianity can be equally fatal for protagonists who are unable to acknowledge the strength and power of the indigenous people that they encounter. In my other fiction, characters who do not understand that their survival depends on playing by the rules of whatever alternate reality they find themselves in are in peril: as, for example, the protagonists in my YA novels must navigate a world where mythology and magic are dangerously real and the “this can’t be happening” response can get them killed. In other stories the challenge comes from the introduction of mythical elements into mundane environments: Death offers a game of chess in her favourite café (“Death at the Blue Elephant”), the devil bankrolls a movie deal (“A Faust Films Production”), werewolves dine happily on steak tartare in a local restaurant (“Incident on Wolf Street”), and so on. But the issue remains essentially one of comprehension: for the ordinary protagonists who encounter avatars of mythology the danger is real and present—they ignore it at their peril. What constitutes reality is obviously different for different social groups at different times—the average patron of, say, a Jacobean coffee house would be more likely to have known what to say to Death or the Devil than the current café latte drinkers at the Blue Elephant Café—such things were part of the prevailing belief system, and context is everything. The ways in which I create alternate realities reflects my concern with our own everyday construction of social reality, particularly as we live in a time when we are increasingly aware of overt manipulation of public perception in the media. I am interested in the operation of the myth systems, both religious and secular, that drive societies: as, for example, belief in the mythology of economic rationalism has had as much social impact in recent years as any system of religious belief.

Gillian asks about the issues that dominate the rest of my life, and in that context I am prepared to concede that the focus on understanding what is genuine may have something to do with my ongoing battle with recurring cancer: my own survival depends on facing the grim realities of treatment options, on making my decisions in the knowledge that a wrong choice could be fatal. If that concern is operating at a background level in my fiction, it is there because I have had to face some very hard truths, to choose what is truly important and discard the rest. This issue of finding truth and choosing what is essential is often there for my characters: institutions fail, support systems fail, beliefs are not enough, and people must fend for themselves. It’s always easier to deal with such things in fiction.

JD: When I’m writing, my concern is for the work; and ‘the work’ always feels organic to me. I live in it, submerged, and these fictive ‘places’ become as familiar and real as any of my experiences of the world. I’ve explained this way of being, if you like, as feeling submerged up to my chest in a warm sea. The sea is the novel I’m imagining and writing. I experience the minute-by-minute real world as we all do, but I also simultaneously dwell in the sea-depths of the novel. Whatever I’m doing—shopping, tax, hanging out with friends at a party—a part of me is lost, submerged in this tactile sea of formed imagination, which is the particular universe of the particular novel I’m writing.

Like Janeen, I experience my characters as coming alive and directing the story line. There is a historically authentic exorcism scene in The Memory Cathedral, my novel about Leonardo da Vinci. I had made a decision not to write the scene because I didn’t think it would advance the plot. However, I found it impossible to continue writing the novel until I wrote the damned scene! It was as if the characters had gone on strike . . . and it turned out that the scene was indeed vital to the plot. Leonardo, Niccolo Machiavelli, Simonetta Vespucci, and Lorenzo de Medici knew that—it was only the author that seemed to be completely in the dark!

I always have an idea of the overarching shape of my novels-in-progress; but the day-to-day work—the day-to-day dream-shaping of each page, chapter, and section—is a collaboration between my conscious day-living mind and my dark flowing surprising frightening mystery-solving unconscious. It’s a question of trust, and every day when I face the grey-white screen on my laptop, it’s a bit like jumping off a cliff.

I’ve been told by critics that much of my work is concerned with the nature of time and consciousness, and novels such as Junction, The Man Who Melted, and The Memory Cathedral are usually given as examples. (The title The Memory Cathedral was suggested by the idea of the memory palace, an ancient mnemonic system.) But my conscious political, ethical, and moral concerns certainly enter my fiction. I have written quite a few short stories and a short novel (The Economy of Light) concerning the plight of Jews during the Holocaust and the dilemma of the concentration camp prisoners who could only survive by laboring under a system that had but one purpose: to exterminate their fellow Jews. Although I am not religious—I am in fact an atheist—I feel strongly that Jews, even those who did not experience the Holocaust or are not children of Holocaust survivors, must ‘testify’, must remember and communicate these cultural memories to others lest it all happen again. The late Isaac Asimov—who was not a believer, yet considered himself a cultural Jew—wrote an introduction to my first anthology Wandering Stars. He ended the introduction by claiming “I’m Jewish enough.”

I stand with Isaac.

A last thought: it occurs to me that when I look back on the novels and stories I’m currently writing, I will probably see a myriad of connections to my life; but then writing is a large part of my life, and for me, writing is a way of looking at my life, looking into my life, and giving flesh to those formless fears and numinal glimpses.

YJ: Being Indigenous in Australia is not easy. I was once told that as an Indigenous person, me getting up out of bed everyday is a political act—‘society’ expects us to fail. Sometimes you are just another statistic—lower literacy levels, lower life expectancy, unemployed, or employed so your workplace can have that Indigenous number to satisfy a Human Resources quota. Or sometimes you are just another label—drunkard, lazy, thief, and so on. How much negativity does a people have to live with before that’s how they start believing that’s who they are, what they can be in life, that’s all they can expect.

So what does that have to do with writing? I like to look at writing as an escape. It allows me to play in another world that is not my own. Yet in truth, I don’t really escape because often my writing is about an outsider, or about someone overcoming a problem within society, someone just trying to survive. I find that writing is easier if I don’t think too much about the political aspects of myself as an Indigenous writer (or is it writer who is Indigenous? All really depends on the day).

Writing a story for Baggage was not easy. My life had a part in it because I had to write with respect. If I write Indigenous characters into a story I am adding to the collective that is already written about Indigenous Australians. Putting in Yankunytjatjara characters into the story—I made sure I discussed it with family, so I didn’t write anything that could potentially be offensive. Does this kill creativity—not at all. It makes your imagination work harder, stops you from being a lazy writer who wants the shortcut to the quick buck. And what you get is something you are proud of and your family is proud of—and for me that’s all that really matters.

GP: How do you deal with the weight of what other people read into your work? Readers bring their own baggage to their reading and will carry quite different reading experiences out of the stories. How does this fit with your ownership of your writing? How does this fit with how comfortable you feel about a given piece once it’s let loose into the wilderness?

JW: It is a truth universally acknowledged that every reader reads a different text. Of course they do. My job as a writer is to create the story, give it the best upbringing I can, nurture it until it leaves home, and hope it remembers its manners when it is misunderstood by some of its readers, as of course it will be. So it goes.

It is equally axiomatic that the writer is not the text (unless the text is autobiography, and even then I regard that as a form of fiction, or at least the fictionalized re-working of a life). Gillian’s original question was a very personal one, asking about individual demons: the response was, in turn, a private and personal reflection. This does not mean that the private elements that inform my thinking are on show in the text—they are there at deep background levels, as part of the process, not the product. When I said that my fictional concerns about decision making in extreme circumstances may derive, in part, from the procedure of dealing with life-threatening illness I meant to emphasize the method, not the detail: the personal detail is simply not there in the text. My stories are not autobiographical. Despite the fashion for celebrity, the author is not a possession of the reader, to be read as the text is read.

We all carry our own baggage, but we do not usually open it up for inspection, as Gillian has asked us to do. Orwellian customs inspection for emotional baggage isn’t with us yet, though perhaps we should be rehearsing our blocking jingles with Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man against the eventuality of Thought Police.

JD: I write because I must. Every story, every novel is personal, of course; but art is a reaching-out, and fiction is a special way of reaching out. It is interactive in ways that other creative endeavors aren’t.

For instance, when you watch a film, you are the willing recipient of every image that flickers across the silvery screen. You see and hear exactly what the directors, scriptwriters, actors, designers, animators, etc. have created. You can react, but not interact.

Fiction, however, is very different. The author gives you the reader a very detailed and often complex structure, a structure which you reform, shape, and reconstruct in your imagination. You transform the novel or story into a sort of waking dream and create the book you read out of the author’s clues and directions.

For example, I can describe a character as follows: “Lucian is tall, skinny, frail, swarthy skinned, awkward, and delicately built. He looks much older than his seventeen years. He has a flattened nose, piercing eyes, and a white scar that encircles his throat like a necklace.” Now anyone who reads this will be able to describe Lucian, yet every reader will bring along his own baggage, if you like—his own sensorium of experience, personality, and emotions—and will imagine a different character than the one that I see in my mind’s eye. If we asked ten different artists to paint the character’s portrait, we would be looking at ten different faces. And that’s part of the joy of writing fiction: it’s not only personal for me, the author; but, by definition, it also becomes personal to you, the reader . . . providing you don’t throw the book against the wall or toss it out the window in despair, disgust, or—heaven forefend!—disinterest.

I want my readers to bring their own baggage to my stories, to make them their own, to change and shape them into their own deep experience. As to ownership, it’s mine, it’s me, I wrote it; but here, you can have it too!

Regarding your question about letting my work loose into the wilderness: Writers create, and their characters achieve a reality of their own. How could I let these people—these characters whom I know so intimately—go without grieving just a bit? But, alas, once I finish a novel, I have to let it go.

YJ: Once I've written something and it's gone through its editing process and it is gone to be published I let it go. If people want to talk to me about my writing I'm only too happy to talk to people if I have time; however I won't take on their ‘baggage’ about my writing.

That being said there are members in the Indigenous writing community I would be interested in hearing what they’ve got to say on my story. At the moment, Indigenous Australians are slowly getting into genre fiction. Most of Indigenous writing is autobiographies or biographies—rewriting some of the fictional aspects of Australian history. However if people are interested in Indigenous-authored fiction they should try Anita Heiss, Philip McLaren, Alexis Wright, or Melissa Lucashenko (who has won an Aurealis award for Killing Darcy, 1998). On another level, this same weight is a shared experience which I can sound out with other Indigenous writers, especially if what I’ve written is confronting to non-Indigenous readers.

If I publish something then that story is there to be shared with whoever wants to read it. If it isn’t published, then I don’t want to share it and there can be various reasons for this—one of which is to do with copyright, both the westernised concept and the Indigenous way (and well that’s an essay in itself). I don’t reread my work after it has been published. I believe it has to do with the editing process; working over the piece again and again so much that I get sick of it and I just don’t want to read it again. I don’t mind sharing, life is about learning from others with respect.

Once everything is done and it has been published then what's done is done. I let it go. If I don't let it go, I'll dwell on it, thinking about it again and again, and I'll miss out on other ideas for different stories.

GP: Can you tell us something more about the specific piece you wrote for Baggage?

JW: I am very aware that I was asked for this story because the editor of Baggage had read an earlier book, Aliens & Savages, which I co-authored with Andrew Enstice, and knew that I have a deep and abiding interest in the issue of cultural baggage. The book was a survey of white Australian settler attitudes to others: to the Aboriginal peoples they found living here, and later to Chinese immigrants. We researched popular fiction, newspapers and journals, diaries and memoirs, eyewitness accounts to give us an insight into what was in the popular consciousness at the time—in other words, the social construction of the reality of the period. So I had already done far more research than I needed for “Manifest Destiny”—my difficulty lay in choosing which cultural baggage to write about. In the end, I juxtaposed characters with two sets of beliefs, one religious, the other secular—basic Christianity and social Darwinism—to create dramatic tension against the observable reality of an unfamiliar landscape and a not unreasonably hostile tribe into whose territory the explorers trespass. The basic facts of the story are genuine, a collage of incidents that I have taken from a variety of explorer diaries and transposed into a Victorian setting, where I attributed them to wholly fictional characters. For these characters, the cultural baggage that they carry is too heavy for the situation in which they find themselves: their ultimate failure is implicit in their adherence to the beliefs they have brought with them in the face of an equally valid alternate reality that does not fit their preconceived social constructions, religious or scientific. So the elements that I have been talking about are all there for the protagonists of “Manifest Destiny”: the problem of responding openly to extreme circumstances, the need to assess honestly the truth of a challenging situation and respond appropriately, the failure of ideology, the socially reinforced blocking of the adaptability that would allow their survival, and above all, the catastrophic inability to see what is actually there in front of them until it is too late.

JD: The poem “Telescope” is part of a work in-progress called Songs from a White Heart. I spent a year with Native American Sioux people in the brilliant summer of my youth, and my involvement was quite personal and private. However, I’m a writer—I can’t help myself—so I’ve written about my experiences in my semi-autobiographical novel Counting Coup (published in Australia as Bad Medicine) and the SF novel High Steel, which I wrote with my dear friend the late Jack C. Haldeman II.

“Telescope” is a paean for ways of being and seeing that are becoming lost; and as we lose those ways of “being in the world,” so do we also lose part of ourselves. What’s left is distorted, distorting memories: our own baggage . . . my own baggage . . . the past . . .my past.

YJ: It is hard to say how my Baggage piece came about. It was a matter of sitting at the computer just tapping away at the keyboard till the idea materialised in my mind and I knew what I was writing. So at a superficial level it is just a story. And people can read it just like that—a story. If you want to read it at another level you will learn about some of the Yankunytjatjara customs for dealing with a death of a family member. Then at another level you will learn a little of Australia’s history and how Indigenous Australians were treated in the past. I have given the reader options on what comfort zone they want to read the story. After all it is their choice what they want to get out of the story.

Books mentioned in this column:
Sailing to Atlantis by Janeen Webb (Angus and Robertson, 2001)
The Silken Road to Samarkand by Janeen Webb (HarperCollins, 2003)
Dreaming Down-Under edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb (HarperCollins, 1998)
Baggage edited by Gillian Polack (Eneit Press, 2010)
The Memory Cathedral by Jack Dann (Bantam, 1995)
Junction by Jack Dann (Dell, 1981)
The Man Who Melted by Jack Dann (BlueJay Books, 1984)
The Economy of Light by Jack Dann (PS Publishing, 2008)
Wandering Stars by Jack Dann (Harper & Row, 1974)
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (serialised from 1952, Galaxy Science Fiction)
Killing Darcy by Melissa Lucashenko (University of Queensland Press, 1998)
Aliens & Savages: Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia, by Janeen Webb and Andrew Enstice (HarperCollins Australia, 1998)
Counting Coup (published in Australia as Bad Medicine) by Jack Dann (Flamingo/HarperCollins/Forge, 2000)
High Steel by Jack Dann and Jack C. Haldeman II. (Tor, 1993)

 

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.

 


 

 
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