For a New York Times bestselling author, Jonathan Evison has remained remarkably true to his origins. Those who are familiar with the literary scene in the Pacific Northwest – and particularly in Seattle and nearby Bainbridge Island, where Evison has made his home – will undoubtedly have crossed paths with him at some point. At times he seems to be the connective tissue that holds Seattle’s growing literary culture together, and it’s not unusual for Evison to appear unannounced at readings and events around the city. Speak to any author in the region, and you’ll almost certainly find that they know ‘Johnny’.

When it came to selling his novel West of Here overseas, however, Evison has encountered more resistance. The market for a sweeping, widescreen novel about the Pacific Northwest wasn’t immediately apparent, and publishers repeatedly shied away from committing to such a locally-rooted epic. Luckily Evison’s bold, energetic style of storytelling was enough to win them over, and West of Here is now – finally – heading east across the Atlantic.

You’ve just had a pretty incredible year, including the release of West of Here in the US and your first appearance on the New York Times bestseller lists. Has this brought any major changes with it, or is life pretty much the same as before?

This year was a dream come true. Life is the same but even better. In spite of all the touring and other public stuff, I’m dealing with less financial anxiety, so I have more time and energy to focus on my art, which is bliss. Also more time to chase my boy around. And a cabin in the mountains to inspire me.

But really, I’ve been living the dream all along. I’m simply grateful to have the work, the focus, the sense of purpose writing provides me. As odd as it sounds, I get a little wistful when I think of all those late nights in Kinko’s collating stories and packing them in envelopes, and sending them off like little packages of hope – even though they invariably came back as form rejections. I was perfectly happy living off pot pies and cheap beer. I just like being in the game, you know? Not that I wouldn’t be stoked to be so rich that I could finally buy that thirty foot inflatable duck in sunglasses I’ve always wanted. That would look badass in my yard.

You’ve been in a variety of ‘games’ over the years… radio host, comedian, punk rocker. Do you consider these to all be part of the same progression? Or is your career as a novelist totally different to what came before?

I’ll be honest, all the other stuff, besides the punk bands, was just stuff I did because nobody was publishing my novels. All I ever wanted to do was write novels. I wrote my first novel when I was 18 years old. Nobody published me until I was 40. And I’m still considered a “young” writer – ha! I learned a lot writing screenplays, writing comedy, doing talk radio – stuff that has informed and instructed my writing in various ways, but it was all vaguely dissatisfying. If it weren’t for my career in radio, I’d probably have a couple more unpublished novels sitting around.

West of Here has been a huge success in the US, but it’s taken a while for it to be accepted overseas. Why do you think this is? Did you always intend to write such a region-specific novel?

I’m perversely proud of the fact that every single non-English speaking European country dismissed West of Here as “too big and too American.” After all, I did set out to write a big American novel. If I would have written a big Chinese novel, I doubt this would be the case. America literature just isn’t considered as relevant as it used to be. Fine. Whatever. Neither is Bordeaux wine or German engineering. Or clogs. That said, the themes in West of Here are universal – personal destiny, national identity, reinvention. I’m a believer that if the themes are universal and the characters live and breathe, nationality shouldn’t get in the way.

Do you think American literature will have to change to remain relevant? Or is this, in fact, the time to turn back to the classics?

America is in the throes of a massive re-invention, and I think it will make for fascinating literature, and if the rest of the world is smart, they’ll pay attention. What is our national identity now that we’re no longer the world’s producer, that we’re no longer at the head of the world order? What is our new idealism? How will we adjust to a new standard of living? Politically, how will we restructure and reform from within? These are huge questions!

Whitman and Emerson used to talk about the “American Experiment” – and guess what? It’s still a big experiment! I think American Literature is poised for a big comeback, and I think the west, particularly the northwest, is going to be the nerve center. Between myself and Patrick DeWitt and Vanessa Veselka and Benjamin Percy and Jess Walter and Jim Lynch and Joshua Mohr and Jenny Shank, etc, etc, I think over the next decade the world is going to see an incredibly rich and dynamic body of work coming from the American west.

Did you purposefully set out to write a big Pacific Northwestern novel with West of Here? What was the original inspiration?

Oh yeah, I totally set out to write a northwest epic. The Olympic peninsula is a fascinating and rugged place. I wanted to write a story about how the land shaped the people, and how the people shaped the land. My goal was to write a sprawling egalitarian novel which would subvert many of our accepted notions about history, and to frustrate readers expectations about what we expect from “historical” fiction. I didn’t want to write historical fiction – I wanted to write a story about history and how it works.

And do you feel that you succeeded in achieving that? I know that I loved the book, and it dealt with many of those ideas – but I also know that the writing process is a complex one, and the end result isn’t always what you originally set out to achieve.

To be honest, I feel like I accomplished more than I set out achieve. That said, not everybody gets it – including some critics. Readers who lose sight of the big picture run the risk of getting lost in this novel. The first 175 pages might feel like one character introduction after another. But if you keep your eye on the big picture, you’ll begin to see all these characters and story lines converge and coalesce. In order to create the effect I was going for, I had to have 70 characters and 40-odd points-of-view – that was the whole point! History is not some linear progression peopled by a few great men, history is the sum of all the small vividly realized moments in each of our lives, and how they interact and relate to one another. History is connections and convergences and shared themes.

Can you talk us through your writing routine? Where do you write, when, how many drafts… and has this changed much as you’ve progressed and changed as a writer?

For me, discipline is the key. I approach writing like an athlete. Some mornings I don’t feel up to the task, but I strap on my trainers nonetheless and do my workout rain or shine. My optimum writing day begins at about 5am., that quiet hour when most of the world is still asleep and I don’t have any distractions. I’ll write until about noon. That time literally seems to pass in an instant. If I can write a page a day I’m feeling pretty good. I like to spend an hour in the evening going over the day’s work with a red pen – making notes in the margins and whatnot. I begin the next day by addressing these notes. That way I’m never stuck, I always have a starting point. I’m an obsessive revisionist. I must write 20 drafts of stuff. It’s never finished. At some point somebody just has to pry the manuscript out of my hands.

I know you’ve been working on edits of your next novel over the past few weeks. Has that process changed for you at all, now that you’re with a bigger publisher? Have you found that your approach towards edits and rewrites has changed over the years?

Nah, my approach is pretty much the same as always. I’ve been lucky to work with amazing editors, and also with an agent who gives great editorial. The key is to work with people who want to help you make the book that you want to write the best book it can be. I’ve heard horror stories from writers whose editors try to make the novel their own. I was fortunate enough with West of Here and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving to work with the editor of my choice, Chuck Adams. When I was entertaining offers, I talked with each of the editors at great length about WoH, and Chuck was the guy who best understood my vision for the novel and how to make it better.

You’ve used the places you’ve lived in as the settings for your two novels to date: the Pacific Northwest (West of Here) and California (All About Lulu). How important do you think it is for authors to draw upon the environments that have influenced them? Do you think you’ll stick with these settings, or do you have plans to write further afield?

I’m going to Alaska for research on my next novel, but part of the novel will still be set here in Washington. I’ve got a bunch of notes for a novel that takes place in Montana, too. I also want to write a novel that takes place in Baja. Mostly because I want to live down there for a year and get fat on fish and tequila.

Is it too early to ask about The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving? What was the inspiration for it, and when can we expect to see it on shelves?

Galleys for The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving are going to print any day, and the novel will be released in October 2012 in the States – not sure about UK. It’s a very different book than West of Here. While West of Here represented a huge technical challenge for me, TRFoCG was a huge emotional challenge. It’s a coming-of-middle-age about a male nurse in crisis. Without talking too much about the subject matter, I’ll just say that the novel really took a lot out of me emotionally. In the end, it’s probably my funniest book because it had to be. I’m really excited to get the novel in people’s hands because I feel like it’s one of those novels that’s going to be cathartic for a lot of readers.

Not that you asked, but I’m almost finished with another novel now called The Dreamlife of Huntington Sales, which is another departure in that it actually employs something of a thriller apparatus to frame 16 different limited points of view. I’m really excited about this one, too. I thrive on pushing myself into new and uncomfortable places as a artist.

Do you think it’s necessary for a writer (or any artist) to keep pushing the boundaries of their craft in that way? Or is that more of a personal decision to keep things fresh and interesting?

I don’t think it’s fair to make it some kind of general edict, but as an artist, that’s certainly what I’m after. I want to be developing tools as I go along, surprising myself, frustrating my own intentions, learning, facing new problems all the time. Otherwise I feel like I’m just going through the motions. Sometimes this can make novel-writing an excruciating exercise that leaves me totally exhausted, but I feel like it’s always worth the effort in the end. Especially for the reader. They say hard writing makes for easy reading and I believe that on every level. I do think there is a danger of alienating your readership at times, or at least those readers who have certain expectations for a specific artist. But I can’t worry about that. I just need to keep pushing myself.

I know that you’re constantly reading new writers, and you’re noticeably active in the writing community. Whose books have you particularly enjoyed over the last year?

I read two Ron Rash books this year which really impressed me: Serena, and the forthcoming The Cove. I also read two by Stewart O’Nan this year: Emily Alone, and the forthcoming The Odds. These two guys are among the best American novelists working in my mind. I’m also a big fan of Dan Chaon, along with Adam Ross.

And finally… you’ve interviewed a lot of authors yourself over the years, so what’s your favorite question to ask? And what would be your own answer?

Hmmm. I guess I don’t have a favorite question. I suppose if there was one question I’d ask every writer it would be: Why do you do it? Why do you endure all the heartache and frustration and financial duress and existential discomfort that comprises devoting your life to writing novels (which people may or may not ever read)? And I guess my answer would be that it makes me a bigger person – a more expansive person, a more understanding, thoughtful, empathetic person. A better problem solver, a better husband, a better dad, a better son, and a better friend.

Dr David Stephen Calonne is an Eastern Michigan University professor specialising in Beat Literature. He has is the author of William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being, The Colossus of Armenia: G.I. Gurdjieff and Henry Miller, and most recently Bebop Buddhist Ecstasy: Saroyan’s Influence on Kerouac and the Beats (with an Introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti). He has lectured in Paris and elsewhere, including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Berkeley, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of London, Harvard and Oxford. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. During Spring Term 2009 he taught a seminar on William Saroyan at the University of Chicago and he presently teaches at Eastern Michigan University. He has edited three Charles Bukowski books for City Lights, including Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays 1944-1990 (2008), Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2, 1946-1992 (2010) and most recently More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns (2011). He also wrote Introductions to the first two volumes and an afterword for the latter. He has recently completed his own book on Charles Bukowski, which will be published sometime next year. Here he talks about his forthcoming work and the writer who continues to fascinate him.

I know you have just finished a book on Charles Bukowski, could you tell me a little bit about it?

Yes, I just completed writing Charles Bukowski for Reaktion Books based in London. It’s part of their Critical Lives series, which so far has included major cultural figures such as Wittgenstein, Bataille, Picasso, Foucault, Borges, Genet, Neruda, Burroughs, Beckett, Nabokov, et al. I was very happy to do it because I have long believed that Bukowski is, in fact, a great writer and belongs among the Olympians. The book is a literary biography – that is I write about both Bukowski’s life as well as interpret his prolific production of poetry, short stories, novels, essays and letters. Most of the books written about him have concentrated on his colorful life at the expense of treating his work in the manner it deserves. I have tried to set his achievements within the context of the writers he admired – Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Artaud, Nietzsche, Saroyan, Fante, Hemingway, Celine, Li Po – in order to show his originality in both poetry and prose.

There’s been quite a lot written about him in the last few years. Why do you think there has been such an upsurge of interest?

There has been a steady stream of his posthumous books from Black Sparrow and then Ecco/HarperCollins so I think his name is still very much in the public domain. I’m not sure there has been a particular upsurge; I think rather that there has been a steady show of interest since his death in 1994. But there have been recent events – such as the Levi-Strauss jeans advertisement in which his poetry is recited against the backdrop of various incendiary activities – that perhaps caught the eyes and ears of people in the past year or so.

As you say, there have been several posthumous books. Can we expect any more?

The last Ecco book of poetry, The Continual Condition, came out in 2009. I have edited three books for City Lights… I wrote Introductions to the first two and an afterword for More Notes in which I provide background information concerning Bukowski’s life during the time he was writing the works included in the aforementioned. If More Notes does well, I plan to do another volume of uncollected Notes of Aa Dirty Old Man. Bukowski composed hundreds of these and many are very good indeed, although only 40 were published in the original volume back in 1969. In the new volume I’d like to include some of his art work too – he was a very fine and humorous cartoonist – as well as his poetry.

You said you think Bukowski is a great writer. What to your mind makes him great?

My grandfather Vagharshak Galoostian was an Armenian poet who lived in a small town called Sanger, near Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley. When I was an adolescent and was first discovering great literature and music, I remember talking to him about art and recollect him saying: “David, de gustibus non est disputandum – you cannot argue about taste.” That has stuck with me. I think either you get Bukowski or you don’t. For me he’s great because he speaks to me, the way Saroyan, Salinger, Thoreau, Miller, Dostoyevsky, e.e. cummings, Hart Crane spoke to me in my teens and still continue to. He speaks to the heart, to the yearning for love and meaning, to the suffering of being human, to the existential choices we face every day. I think he does all these things in an utterly fresh and original way. He achieved Ezra Pound’s counsel and “made it new.” He learned from Hemingway – the short, pared-down, fat-free, muscled sentences with subject-verb-object syntax; from Saroyan a loose, easy, casual humorous style (compare Bukowski’s long, funny titles with Saroyan’s); from Fante a lyrical, direct “carving on the page” (as Bukowski put it). Saroyan was Armenian-American, Fante Italian-American and Bukowski as a German-American identified with their sense of immigrant grief and the feeling of being an outsider. Bukowski is included in several cult writers encyclopaedias, and inspires the same kind of loyalty as some of the greats (Tolkien, Salinger, Burroughs, Kerouac) seem to: a fanatic devotion, in some cases. I’ve seen several examples of tattoos of Bukowski’s poetry etched on the bodies of both male and female fans. So, I guess a great writer is someone who speaks to you.

I think you’re right his work does seem “fresh” not only that it also seems effortless. Do you think he revised much?

He did revise. You can see some examples if you visit Bukowski.net. There are many of his manuscripts on display there. His revisionary tendencies have caused some issues concerning the “authenticity” of his work, in particular his published poems. But the posthumous texts have also often been heavily edited by John Martin, sometimes with several lines removed and others added. This is an ongoing controversy, which is just now being aired. I think the poetry was more heavily revised than the prose. I do think his work was largely “effortless”, as you say, but he also often laboured very hard over it. He was very disciplined, very Germanic about sitting down and hitting the “typer” (as he called it). But in interviews he claimed he drank and wrote simultaneously and often spoke of his creativity as a gift bestowed upon him without all the sturm und drang we expect to hear about – the “agony and ecstasy” of being an “artist”. He seemed much more down to earth about it all, and I believe we can trust his testimony on that. Thinking about it in another way, I think he was closer to J.S. Bach than to Beethoven: my sense is that Bach pretty well just wrote it all out in a continual stream of unfathomable genius and Beethoven sort of struggled away at it measure by measure.

He was very talented indeed but like Henry Miller and a few others, achieved success in his 40s, which is quite late. Do you think a certain amount of maturity and life experience helped make him a better/more worldly/ insightful writer?

Bukowski often said that he was fortunate that he did not become known when he was younger. He said that often writers would burn themselves out, and it is true that in American literature, there are “no second acts” in some cases. He probably had in mind figures like Hemingway and Saroyan, whose work Bukowski felt in later life did not match that written at the beginning of their careers. So Bukowski felt glad he wasn’t known earlier. And he did say that he had not known enough yet. As for “maturity”, I do think that Bukowski’s work shows a clear “progression” – that his “late work” shows a philosophical depth which is obviously the result of much hard experience. Although it is also the case that one could argue that Bukowski’s psychological orientation had been set by adolescence: he knew at age 18 what he knew at 68. And I think Henry Miller would have said something similar: that he was an “old soul” in a young body, and that experience in some way simply confirmed what he had felt from the beginning. Perhaps I am not expressing this very clearly, but you raise an interesting question when you use words like “worldly” and “insightful”. Perhaps with essentially “Romantic” writers – their vision is their youth – they constantly go back to childhood to either the primal sense of wonder or the primal wound of their early years and examine and reexamine their experience – a bit as is the method of psychoanalysis – to find what is there. One thinks of Wordsworth and the role of memory of “something far more deeply interfused” which he struggles throughout his life to express.

Speaking of Miller, I know the two were passing acquaintances and the former disapproved of Bukowski’s drinking. Do you happen to know the exact nature of their relationship?

Bukowski had published a story ‘20 Tanks From Kasseldown’ in 1946 in Portfolio, edited by Caresse Crosby. Henry Miller was listed as a co-editor of the magazine at that time. Bukowski was also published by Loujon Press which was the creation of Jon Webb and his wife Gypsy Lou. The Webbs also began to publish Miller in the mid-60s, producing Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel and later Insomnia. Bukowski and Miller had crossed literary paths over the years and corresponded during the 60s. Miller praised Bukowski’s poetry but also cautioned him about his drinking. Bukowski was apparently rankled by this because he wrote a humorous poem about it published in Kauri 11, November/December 1965. It was humorously entitled: ‘I Am Afraid That I Will Continue to Drink Myself to Death For These Small Reasons Mentioned Here and for Other Reasons That Neither of Us Has Time for Because I Have Need to Get Drunk Now’ – another of those Saroyan-inspired long titles! He also refers to the incident in several interviews and letters. The poem begins: “I am mad like a dead angel/a great man of artistic renown writes me from Beverly Hills:/’don’t drink yourself to death. especially, don’t drink while/you are writing – it’ll ruin your inspiration’/my nights would be hell and my days unbearable without/drink./the streetwalkers, the whores, the one-night stands the/one-week stands the/one-month stands the/winos the mothers…” (Miller actually lived in Pacific Palisades, not Beverly Hills). Bukowski was often asked about Miller as an influence. He claimed he liked his sexual writing, but was irritated when Miller went off onto metaphysical flights. He mentions this in an essay I included in Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook entitled ‘Henry Miller Lives in Pacific Palisades and I Live on Skid Row, Still Writing About Sex’. Miller had a deep interest in esoteric and Eastern philosophy, reading Madame Blavatsky, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda whereas Bukowski had no interest in these matters, although he deeply appreciated Li Po and himself had, I think, a basically Zen Buddhist aspect to his personality and work. He is very much about paring life down to its barest essentials, rather like Henry David Thoreau. Bukowski and Miller were both German-Americans, Miller suffering with an unloving mother and Bukowski with an abusive father. And they both loved Dostoyevsky, Céline, Saroyan. Miller admired a French writer no one reads anymore but whom my 91-year-old father Pierre Calonne adores: Jean Giono.

Do you personally think the two were actually influenced by one another even if somewhat unwittingly?

I don’t think there was any influence of Bukowski on Miller at all. And stylistically, I don’t think Bukowski took much from Miller. Bukowski wrote a much more muscular, simple, Anglo-Saxon, subject-verb-object, Hemingwayesque prose. But there is a surreal element in Bukowski as in Miller. And you quoted a passage from one of the columns I included in More Notes of A Dirty Old Man in which Bukowski’s character has a sexual encounter with a red-head which he closes as follows: “And then BANG the walls shook, a man on the street stepped on a grease spot, fell and broke his ankle and we slid apart like worms going in different directions, and she stood there and said, “ooooh oooooh oooooh I liked it, I liked it I liked it, you filthy greasy pig…” This reminded me a bit of Miller’s Sexus: the odd shift to the man stepping “on a grease spot” (which obviously echoes the sexual action which is simultaneously occurring”, the seemingly absurd and unrelated fact of broken ankle, and then the typical Millersque “slid apart like worms”.

Another influence on Bukowski was alcohol as he once confessed never having written a poem sober. Do you think that’s true and if so you could perhaps tell me a little bit about how alcohol affected his writing/shaped his work?

One never knows how much is mythic or real in Bukowski, but I would guess that this is true. He would joke about whether he was a drinker who wrote or a writer who drank. Since he did both throughout his life, it is likely the two activities constantly overlapped. He was incredibly prolific. I think his output accounts for over 60 books so far, and there are more to come. We should also take him seriously when he says he wrote to avoid total madness. It was indeed his salvation. There are many books on alcohol and writers, so this probably somewhat of a pedestrian subject by now. There are many abstemious writers: Nabokov and Borges come to mind. I myself don’t believe it has anything to do with making you more or less “creative”. But the inner psychological pressures some humans labor under make alcohol a pleasant way to overcome the anguish for a while, to stretch time, to reach Dionysian ecstasy. The ancient Greeks called it “ex-stasis” meaning to “stand outside the self”. Bukowski frequently invokes the ancient Greek idea of wine as “the blood of the gods”. I think he was really a kind of pagan, elemental, pre-Western-logical-Aristotlian. He was a kind of mystic gnostic, finding meaning in the self, finding many “gods”, not one punishing, furious, judgmental Big Daddy with a Long Beard on a Throne God. I also find similarities in his work – particularly in the mid-60s when he drank but also experimented with various drugs – with the shamanistic idea of shape-shifting spiritual voyaging. Linda Lee Bukowski, his widow, has written about the long talks they had about spiritual matters and I think it is clear that although he “seemed” from the outside to be “just” a “dirty old man” to those who have not read all of his work (i.e. not just the more “sensational” works but also the essays and particularly the wonderful letters which I think are on the same level as those of D.H. Lawrence’s) that he was in fact always deeply trying to answer the fundamental existential questions. Alcohol was another facet of his quest, and I do think that he couldn’t have borne his suffering without it. Long answer. But it’s a difficult question really. Anything can be either an “escape” or an “entrance.”

You mention some of Bukowski’s love affairs, his wife, which brings me to the subject of women. He wrote about them extensively, sometimes in a positive, more often in a negative, light. This has caused many to accuse him of being a misogynist, any truth in that?

If one reads the complete works, it is clear that Bukowski was equally as rough on females, males and on himself. He constantly undercuts the “macho” pose by portraying his male anti-heroes as extremely comic personages. Bukowski’s obsession is with love, actually. His anguish and disappointments are due to the failure of romantic love – he says in an interview something like “love is like the fog which burns away from the sun of reality.” He read the great Roman love poet Catullus very deeply and Catullus’ influence can be seen in Bukowski’s poetry (he composed several homages to Catullus) especially in Love is a Dog From Hell. And he loved Boccaccio’s Decameron and intentionally sought to portray the “battle of the sexes” as a comedy. Remember too that he admired the American writer and artist James Thurber who wrote the funny illustrated book Is Sex Really Necessary? Bukowski admired D.H. Lawrence, but he often poked fun at him for being too serious and too cosmic about sex. In fact in my research I found a comic drawing Bukowski created of D.H. Lawrence urinating and I discovered recently that this is a parody of a water color Lawrence painted in 1928 called Dandelions depicting a naked man in nature relieving himself. So you have to read between the lines with Bukowski. He is always playing with expectations and conventions, and he is no “misogynist.” If anything, he is like his favorite French writer L.F. Céline a (sometimes) misanthrope, but in the Greek sense of “anthropos” being all of humanity, not just the male half. But even here, I think this derives from his disappointment in humanity, his hurt, his anguish. He cares a lot, and if you care, you get hurt.

While on the subject of hurt and romantic love, Bukowski was never more distraught than by the death of Jane Cooney Baker, his one true love. The two had a very destructive relationship, but when she died it almost broke him. Do you think that his attitude towards women was shaped by the overall experience?

Jane obsessed him, quite clearly. In his poem ‘my first affair with that older woman’, he wrote: “she was ten years older/and mortally hurt by the past/and the present;/she treated me badly: desertion, other/men;/she brought me immense/pain/continually.” I think that sums it up. And as you say, upon her death he composed some of his greatest poems. We enter again here psychoanalytic territory, but I suppose that when a person experiences severe trauma in childhood – as Bukowski did – that this then sets the pattern for later life. So that when such a person experiences great loss later, this reactivates the primary loss and the pain is experienced with extreme force. I don’t think it was the relationship with Jane that set the pattern, but the relationship with his parents. His father was insanely abusive and his mother neither defended him from this abuse nor gave him love. In his early poetry and stories of the 40s Bukowski begins to refer repeatedly to the spider who makes the web to catch the fly. This becomes his metaphor for love, for the totentanz of love, which can end in madness or death. He says this also in an interview, that Woman becomes for him Father often: the force that can destroy. But I think this vulnerability is not atypical with many American Romantics such as Hart Crane or Tennessee Williams.

Do you think then that writing about love is when Bukowski truly came into his own? Lawrence Durrell often talked of the writer’s need to make a breakthrough in his writing, to hear the sound of his own voice, is that how Bukowski acquired his?

A very good question. Firstly, we need to distinguish between Bukowski the poet and Bukowski the prose writer. He was always doing both poems and fiction. His early stories are both lyrical and sometimes very dark (like ‘20 Tanks From Kasseldown’ whose anti-hero is Dostoyevskian in his intense, mad, solitariness) and also light, deft and humorous like ‘Aftermath’. He would continue throughout his career to compose in these seemingly opposite styles: tragic and comic. As for “originality” or “finding his own voice”, these things can get complicated. Back to Beethoven: when did he become “Beethoven”? I suppose by the Third Symphony? Before he is still Haydnesque and Mozartian? People will debate these things. I think in some ways it was there from the beginning, but by the mid-60s, Bukowski really started to roar. I think that the Beats (though he often inveighed against them, he had much in common with them) and the hippies and the California counterculture of the 60s allowed him the freedom to become much more open. Censorship restrictions began to lessen, and he was able to combine the lyricism and sensitivity of his original vision with a more hip, direct, vivid style. He also became very fluent in combining these various elements – the absurd comic vision with the deep existential questioning. The fact is that he has several periods, perhaps again like Beethoven: early, middle and late. The early poems in particular are often densely metaphorical, allusive, condensed, intricate. We should remember that Bukowski often read the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, which were the bastions of the “New Critics” like John Crowe Ranson, Allan Tate, Cleanth Brooks who prized precisely this kind of poetry. Bukowski avidly read the essays in these journals but said he disliked the poetry. Another missing piece of the puzzle of his early influences is Conrad Aiken, who also had an intellectually dense style. So from 1944-1965 you get one Bukowski. Then as I have said, the 60s kick in and you get Bukowski 1966-1986 and then Barfly and the “Late Style” 1987-1994. These are very approximate dates, but in the middle period you get Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), and then the first novels – Post Office (1970) and Factotum (1974) – a very rich period when he had quit work at the post office and was writing full-time. His life was also very chaotic during this time. He had several mind-wrenching, life-giving, ecstatic love affairs (he was also re-reading Catullus during this period which left its mark) which brought Love is a Dog From Hell (1977) and Women (1978). Then a magnificent book of poetry Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981) and his bildungsroman Ham on Rye (1982). He was consolidating his early achievements during this middle period and also finishing his autobiographical exploration of his whole life, again rather like Henry Miller did in Tropic of Cancer, Capricorn, and the “Rosy Crucifixion” – Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. Then we get Barfly, which I think is the final summation of this period, in the final phase, 1987-1994. Theodor Adorno wrote about Beethoven’s “late style” and here with Bukowski we also get a final summary of his life’s themes. Again, rather like D.H. Lawrence in his late poems, Bukowski becomes more and more preoccupied with building his “ship of death” and the poems become profoundly metaphysical. His cats, listening to classical music on the radio, drinking fine German wine, invoking Li Po, constantly speaking of the quest for authentic selfhood – the late poems are way ahead of anything he had achieved before. And then we also get an experimentation with form – he writes a mystery novel Pulp (1994) and a splendid journal, published posthumously as The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over Ship (1998). So we have a relentless creativity as he tries out new forms as well as returns to earlier themes in a new manner.

Taking his experimentation into account, would you describe Bukowski as a daring writer?

Yes. He absorbed many influences yet succeed in doing what Ezra Pound advised: he “made it new.” I think he is original in fusing the elements of “low-brow” and “high-brow” culture in a vital and often funny way. In creating “Hank Chinaski” – his alter ego who listens to Mahler and Stravinsky, reads Li Po, Pound, Jeffers, and yet can speak in the most colloquial and “vulgar” manner, he brings a new energy and panache to literature. Bukowski learned from Whitman, Hemingway, cumin’s, Saroyan and Fante, and he succeeded in creating his own literary universe in which he fused the existential, dark themes of European literature (Céline, Hamsun, Dostyoevsky) with this particular American tradition of direct speech. He also often added a riotous, absurd humor anchored in the realities of the body. He said he was really a “Puritan”, and therefore went a good distance in the opposite direction to balance his yin and yang. Opinions are divided about Pulp: some really like it and others think it shouldn’t have been published. I myself am fond of it – it demonstrates Bukowski’s interest in crime fiction. He wrote a poem back in 1946 which bears the influence of James M. Cain’s The Postman Only Rings Twice. And he sends up this American tradition. He does this often – refers to a predecessor either in tribute or parody. The opening of Post Office is “It began as a mistake” and the opening of Céline’s Voyage au Bout de La Nuit is “Ça a débuté comme ça”. So Bukowski is always working in a tradition, alluding to other writers, but then going in his own direction. His late poetry is marked by the deepening of his Gnostic vision of life – humans struggling in an indifferent cosmos where each of us must “save ourselves.” This is a recurring theme, as well as a heartbreaking openness in poems such as ‘The Bluebird’. The parallel with late Beethoven I think is apt. If you listen to the Grosse Fuge, the Bagatelles and late sonatas for piano, the Ninth Symphony you can see that Beethoven is pushing way into new territory, pushing the limits of what you can do harmonically, polyphonically, what the instruments are capable of producing. The Germans as usual got this right because in one of the televised interviews they did of Bukowski late in life they played the ‘Scherzo’ from the Ninth Symphony as the opening music. I think that gets it just right.

You reference Germany quite frequently, would you say Bukowski is better appreciated in Europe?

He is immensely popular in Germany, and also in Spain, Italy and France. He is translated into Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Finnish, Russian, Swedish and others. His sales during his life were greater in Europe than the US. I’m not sure now what the situation is. He often said that the US was behind Europe in its appreciation of good art. In some ways, one recalls someone like Edgar Allan Poe who was appreciated by Baudelaire and Mallarmé before he was considered of any consequence here. Something similar happened I think with William Faulkner whom Sartre took up with great passion long before Faulkner achieved anything like acceptance in America. And the Russians have always appreciated writers like Steinbeck and Saroyan from a different angle than Americans. In writing my book for Reaktion, I did quite a bit of research into Bukowski and Germany and my feeling is that he fits into a long German literary tradition: he is really a German writer who was actually born in Andernach, Germany and came to Los Angeles at the age of three. He writes in the 60s of his pleasure in being translated into German, as if he is now returning to his original tongue. And when he went to Hamburg in 1978 to give a poetry reading at the Martkhalle, his first words were: “It’s good to be back.” He adored Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven. He has that sehnsucht of the German Romantics: that desire for what lies beyond. And he has the German hard, trenchant, ironic, side to balance the tenderness. I think too he often writes in very simple English, which translates well into other languages, rather like Hemingway. And he is firmly in the American Romantic tradition. As Hart Crane hymned in The Broken Tower: “And so it was I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)/But not for long to hold each desperate choice.” And there are lines in Bukowski straight out of Walt Whitman. And he loved Voyage au Bout de la Nuit and Catullus and Rabelais and Li Po, Tu Fu and even has a poem about Vallejo. So one might say he is a figure of Weltliteratur, beyond national classification. He writes with verve, compassion and comedy about our common human plight. You know, like that English chap… what was his name?… (Matthew Arnold) something about how “we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Dolly Delightly reviews More Notes From a Dirty Old Man at her literary blog Book Me…

For a debut novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch has already earned a startling number of accolades, including nominations for the Giller Prize and the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Awards. These nominations are less surprising, however, once you open the pages of Touch. Zentner has managed to craft one of the most compelling stories of hardship and loss to hit bookshelves in recent years, coloured with mythical encounters that might have been lifted straight from the pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The combination of his characters’ bleak, hand-to-mouth existence and the fantastical events that underline their lives is both refreshingly new and shockingly traditional, and has led to the coining of an entire literary subgenre – mythical realism. Canadian by birth, but currently living in Ithaca, NY, Alexi Zentner has handcrafted a new literary landscape for the frosty wildernesses of the North.

How (and why) did you settle on the title Touch? The connection to the narrative isn’t immediately obvious, but it suits it so perfectly!

I usually know the titles of stories or books I’m working on early in the process, and the same was true of Touch. The impetus of the book was an image of a girl trapped under the ice. I was fascinated – terrified might be a better word – by the idea of having somebody you loved so close to you and yet to be unable to help them, unable to even touch them.

When I first started writing Touch, my daughters were younger, and though I think, as a father, the feeling never quite leaves you, I was acutely aware of just how dangerous the world can be, and how little, ultimately, I can do to keep my daughters safe. You never want your kids to get hurt in any way, but it’s almost worse when you can see it happening and can’t quite get there in time to stop it, and that is part of why that image stuck with me.

It’s interesting, because I have been asked about the title, and it was never something that I questioned. I had that title before I was more than a page into it. Almost everybody reacted positively to the title, although my French editors had to change the title to The Woods of Sawgamet, since Touch didn’t really translate well. I do think the title fits well, though. Aside from the image of the girl trapped under the ice – something that almost every reader has said stays with them – there are all of the different ways in which characters touch or fail to touch each other. Obviously, that’s in a physical sense, but also in the way that stories are passed down and changed from generation to generation, and the way that somebody who is long dead and gone can reach out and touch somebody else through myth and memory.

Do you find that your fiction tends to develop from single images in this way? Or do your stories generally spring from a different impetus?

My fiction always comes from an image, a first sentence, or a situation. Very, very quickly, that impetus is surrounded and shaped by characters and settings, but I’ve always had to have that spark to build the fire. I was given an assignment for the Canadian magazine The Walrus to write a story that had to follow five rules selected by another author, and it wasn’t until I had the first sentence that I had the rest of the story. I know that other writers can do it, can pick a theme or a character or even a place and just build a world, but I need something to hang it on to avoid ending up with a character study.

Weather and physical conditions affect a large aspect of what happens in Touch, from the first chapter onwards. Do you spend a lot of time outdoors? Is this an important theme for you?

I don’t spend as much time outdoors as I’d like. Part of it is a simple laziness. As much as I love hiking and camping and being outside of the city, I’m not particularly good at getting myself to do it in the first place. It’s usually my wife who suggests we take the dog and the kids for a hike, and after I grumble about it, I end up asking why we don’t do it more often.

Before I had kids, I used to spend a lot more time in outdoor pursuits. I actually met my wife because we both rock climbed, and there was a period of years where I lived in the American Midwest, and going rock climbing outside of a gym meant driving anywhere from three to seven hours. After work on a Friday we would pile into a car and drive to Kentucky. We’d set up camp at three in the morning, grab a couple of hours sleep, and then climb until we could barely lift our arms.

Now, we live in a smaller university town, and part of what I like about it is the ability to find spaces where I can still feel like I might be alone. I try to take trips to parts of North America where there is still wilderness – or, at least, the feeling of wilderness – but the city I live in has pockets that feel more untrammelled. As a writer, the appeal of locations that are more removed from big cities is that they strip things down for the characters. In Touch, and in the novel I just finished, The Lobster Kings, which is set in a lobster fishing village on a small island, the decisions that the characters make have real ramifications. If you are underdressed in a snowstorm in the city, you get cold. If you are underdressed in a snowstorm in the woods outside of Sawgamet, where Touch is set, you can die.

I would never argue that weather or landscape serve as characters in and of themselves, but they can have profound impacts on the decisions that characters make. In a story, setting is simply the stage upon which the characters play their lives, but if that stage is a place where the natural world has a certain dominion, it can amplify the actions of characters. In Touch, in particular, this is true, and I found that the world I created in Touch was one that I was very drawn to.

I should add that, as a writer, I find the natural world is where I prefer to be. I’m not particularly precious in my writing habits – give me a laptop and a pair of headphones and I can write anywhere – but I envy the idea of having some sort of a cottage on the ocean or in the mountains, somewhere hard pressed against the natural world where I could write for part of the year.

A lot has already been made of your use of myth and fantasy in the book, and you’ve coined the term ‘mythical realism’. Can you explain what mythical realism means to you, and why it attracts you?

On a base level, when people hear magical realism, they think Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I admire Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera is still one of my favourite books – but I’m not trying to ape him, and I use the term mythical realism at least partially to distinguish what I’m trying to do from his work. Magical realism is very strongly associated with the landscapes and traditions of central and South America and Europe, and I think that when you take those frameworks of magical realism and just map them over a different culture and landscape you end up with a work that is a palimpsest; the ghostly images of those other cultures and landscapes show through your own work.

There are plenty of writers who have created interesting work this way, but I’m trying to do something new. I’m trying to wrestle with the questions of myth and storytelling, trying to figure out how it is that in my cultures and landscapes – Canada and the USA – stories become myths, how the vastness of the North American landscape and immigrant experience shapes who we were, who we are, and who we will become. I actually think that in the past year there have been a number of books that are experimenting with mythical realism, fumbling with trying to figure out the role of myth in our cultures. I’d argue that as far as literary trends go, we went through a painful period of detached irony as the main driving force for writers, and that one of the things that I want to do is to try to reclaim the sense of wonder that I think all readers strive for.

Look, what I really want to do is to try to tell good stories, to give readers the chance to lose themselves in a book, to remember what it was like as a kid to hear a story and to believe in something greater than ourselves. Mythical realism is something that should be woven throughout a book, in the same way that myth and story are woven through our lives, not just dropped in like a parlour trick. I don’t want a reader to think, “oh, that’s beautiful.” I want them to feel it. And if that means that, as a writer, I need to risk being overly sentimental, I’d rather risk that than risk nothing at all.

Which books stood out to you as being in this vein? Are there any particular writers you admire right now?

I hesitate to speak for other writers, because I think that not all of them would agree with my assessment of their work as mythical realism, but there is a new generation of writers who are including myth and magic in their work in an unapologetic way that is completely different from the way it has been used in magical realism. As for writers who I admire right now, it’s kind of an endless list. One of the great things about writing a book is that it gives you a chance to meet other writers. Both Peter Mountford (A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism) and Alan Heathcock (Volt) had books come out around the same time as Touch, and I both admire their work and was glad to have brothers-in-arms to talk with as the publication process moved forward.

You’ve recently returned from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and while I know that many American writers rate it highly, I’m sure that readers elsewhere have no idea what it is. Can you explain Bread Loaf for us briefly, and give us some insight into what it’s done for you?

I love Bread Loaf. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a conference for writers that takes place near Middlebury, Vermont. The campus – and outpost of Middlebury College – is within sight of Bread Loaf Mountain, hence the name. The conference is about ten days, and consists of workshops in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as readings, craft lectures, and other activities. The entire conference revolves around the written word. It’s a bucolic setting that’s in a part of the USA that I love, and it’s an incredibly intense period of focus on writing. I think, because the campus is sort of isolated, it’s a heightened experience.

I’ve been twice. The first time was as a work-study scholar. The work part of it is that you work as a waiter during the conference, which is pretty demanding on top of the packed schedule, but you become very close with your fellow waiters, all of whom are picked for their “promise” as writers. This past summer I went as a “fellow,” which meant that I assisted the faculty member in workshop, taught a craft lecture, and gave individual consultations. More than anything, what it’s done for me is help me to become close with other writers, so that no matter where I travel or what festivals I attend, there is usually somebody there that I know. It’s a way of making the writing world smaller and friendlier.

Do you think writers are naturally driven to seek each other out? Or are we more private, solitary creatures?

Reading teaches you how to be alone, and any successful writer is also a reader. I need a certain amount of time to myself, and find that when I have house guests or am staying with somebody else for an extended period that I end up hiding out in my room so that I can read or write.

That being said, I also love hanging out with friends and enjoy doing literary festivals. I like doing panels and am comfortable on stage, and I love teaching and being in front of a room. I need a balance of both. I love meeting other writers, because it’s such an odd profession and it’s nice to have other people who understand what it means to be alone at a desk. Part of it is that other writers are also readers, and I love talking about books and literature. I’m not sure that I necessarily seek out the company of other writers – because I have kids and don’t teach right now, I have a large group of friends who aren’t writers – but I do enjoy the company of fellow writers.

Still, after every trip, every conference, every festival, no matter how much I enjoy it, I’m always happy to get home again. To get to the point where people want you to come and talk about your book you have to spend a lot of time in a room by yourself.

You strike me as someone who loves telling a story. What’s the attraction to storytelling for you? Do you think the nature of storytelling is changing at all as we move further and further into the digital age?

I don’t think the digital age changes storytelling. That’s the short answer. That makes for boring columns, however, and it’s a lot easier to freak out and write about how the internet is changing everything, how storytelling is dying – but we are hardwired to respond to stories. I realise that the way that stories are conveyed is changing, but the human need for stories isn’t. Stories are how we figure out who we are as humans, both individually and in the aggregate. We seek out information so that we can know things, but we seek out stories so that we can feel things.

I love telling stories, but honestly, what I like even more than telling them is being told them. I think that most writers – most storytellers of whatever ilk – follow that path because at some point in their development they came across some sort of a book or a movie or even a piece of music that captured them, that made everything fall away. I’d argue that reading in particular is important. Aside from the idea that stories help us figure out who we are, reading teaches us how to be alone, how to be comfortable with ourselves.

For publishers, there are business model concerns. I can’t even pretend to understand the business model of publishing and making films. Speaking specifically about movies, it’s frustrating to me to see the amount of absolute shit that is produced, the number of films where the budget for fake blood has to be triple whatever they spent on writers. I’m personally quite happy to go see an action movie, but I’d say that about half of what I see could have been made a lot better if I’d been given the script and a weekend to rewrite it. Story comes first. Story comes last. True for books, true for movies. The movies and books that stay with us do so because they tap something inside of us. I don’t care how it’s delivered – though an e-reader, a real book, on a movie screen, on your phone – what matters is that there’s something that captures the reader/audience.

I know you’ve just finished writing The Lobster Kings… is it too early to ask for a preview? Will readers see similar themes to Touch, or is it a departure from your first book?

It’s set off the east coast of North America on an island that is actually contested territory, neither Canadian nor American. It’s told from the point of view of Cordelia Kings, a lobster fisherman (though she’s a woman), who is one of three daughters in a line that can trace itself back to the first white settler on the island, Brumfitt Kings, who was both a fisherman and a painter. There are Shakespearian undertones – which is probably evident from the name Cordelia, though this is certainly not a retelling of King Lear – and mythical realism: the Kings carry both a curse and a blessing through the generations. I think that The Lobster Kings is very different from Touch, and yet it will still feel familiar to readers. So it’s both a departure and similar.

What is it you strive for in your shows?

Mainly to make people laugh, but along with that I suppose my main goal is doing so in an original way and hopefully also producing something that will make people think and maybe challenge their world view. But it’s different for each show.

Is there some kind of ideology behind your routines, something that you’re consciously trying to get across?

Sometimes. Other times not. Each show and routine tries to do different things. But I guess if there is a common theme it is challenging preconceptions and making people think about what they believe. If something is true I think you can question it and it will still hold up. If it’s not true then questioning it can help you realise that. By making people laugh you can get their guard down a little bit and discuss things that you might not be able to do or tackle subjects that might otherwise make people clam up.

What do you think of the whole interview procedure, is it worthwhile to ask someone to discuss his/her work?

It’s good to be questioned about what you do and to think about it yourself. Often interviews and the self-analysis that they entail can help one get to grips with something you’re doing or indeed make you question your own motives.

Would you consider your comedy ‘alternative’?

I don’t think that term really has any meaning in the 21st century. It’s a bit of an 80s term. I am not doing mainstream stuff on the whole, I suppose. But comedy loses some power if it becomes too mainstream anyway. I think my audience will always probably be smallish in comparison to those big TV names, but I would prefer to be creating interesting and original work. Though I am not opposed to doing TV or indeed some more mainstream work – you just have to be careful to get the balance right and I’ve realised from observation and my own experience that “success” can sometimes affect the quality of one’s work in a negative sense. I am lucky in fact to be in the position where I am an acquired taste and I am not the face of BBC prime time or crisps or something as it means I can cover the subjects I want to without being beholden to anyone else.

Does ‘alternative’ comedy have a relationship with truth and honesty?

I think most good comedy is about truth and honesty. But some of it is about lies. There are no rules. For me my honesty about myself allows me to be honest about other subjects. But sometimes I will take a contrary or dishonest approach to a subject in order to explore it thoroughly. There is a freedom in honesty though and it is good to express oneself.

You’re mentioned that you’re a fan of Bukowski. What is it about his work that you enjoy?

I like the fact that he’s not bothered about revealing himself to be an unpleasant or unscrupulous person. There is an honesty there that is endearing. We’re all fuck ups and it’s refreshing to read people who admit it with a sense of perspective. But he’s also a brilliant writer with an interesting life that has some parallels with mine, but is mainly entirely different. It’s good to see the world from another point of view.

Of course I am not saying that you have but what do you think of some literary figures’ move further to the right, in terms of politics, as they got older (i.e. Hamsun, Céline and Pound)? Does the same thing happen to comedians?

The same happens with a sizeable proportion of the population of all backgrounds. Realism and idealism are things that one has to attempt to keep balanced in life and I am not surprised that people become more cynical and selfish as they grow older. But there’s no need for it to happen and in fact, probably amongst comedians most of the older ones have stuck to their guns or get more left wing if anything. Personally i think it’s good to keep an open mind throughout your life and there is no shame in changing your mind as long as you do it for the right reasons. I have always been fairly central left and don’t see myself changing too much. But it’s easier to be left wing when you’re poor and young then when you’re rich and old so I can see why people do change their mind. And don’t forget that a good proportion of people are left wing when they are young out of a pose or because they think that’s what they should do or cos they think it might get them somewhere. Time usually flushes these people out. But life has some difficult choices for us all.

Do you consciously try to evolve through each of your performances?

I keep working in all aspects of my job, writing, performing and the vagaries of delivery. I want to keep improving and fortunately find the craft so interesting that I can do a show 100 times and not get bored with it, because I am discovering new avenues in the routines or new ways of doing them. It’s more perfecting than evolving in that sense. But I also don’t want to turn into a bitter old man saying things were different and better in my day. I love comedy and exploring the way it changes, but I also want to stay relevant. But these things tend to come organically rather than as the result of planning. By staying original and pushing oneself hopefully one can help to shape the way comedy is going, as well as being shaped by the work of others. You have to stay interested, which so far i have.

Are there any comedians, or styles, that you particularly respect? And any that you don’t?

I like any comedian who can surprise me. Originality is again the key. I tend to like the ones who have thought of something that I haven’t thought of, or expressed it more clearly, than the ones who tell me stuff I already know. But sometimes an observational comedian using the more basic comedic formulas can still be skilful enough to surprise me and in some ways I find that more impressive than some of the more avant garde comics. A comedian has to keep moving and not get too predictable. Not many achieve that over a whole career.

Who would you say your influences are (comedic, literary, political or otherwise)? Or does the idea of listing them seem arbitrary and tedious?

I think you get influenced by everything, good and bad and the list would be too long and complex to have any kind of meaning. As a child I was very impressed with Monty Python and Pete and Dud and The Young Ones. But if the influence was anything it was about the importance of being your own person and creating stuff that was yours. But throughout life you meet people, read books, see shows which shape you as a person.

What do you think of the brand of comedy that usually fills stadiums and sells millions of DVDs?

I am impressed by any comedian who does their job competently, even if it’s not my sense of humour. It’s a tough job and it’s not easy to get that many people to like you. It’s not my cup of tea generally speaking, but it’s only lazy comedians who coast on a wave of success and don’t put the work in that annoy me. And there are plenty of those at all levels. And it is possible to do something that is populist and also worthy. Tim Minchin and Morecambe and Wise spring to mind. I don’t have a problem if an act becomes popular. That is not what they should be judged by and there is no shame in success if achieved on the right terms

Are you at your happiest when on stage, or when writing your material, or neither?

I prefer performing because it’s more of an immediate thrill and just writing can be lonely and hard to cope with, whilst there is nothing that compares with making a crowd of people laugh. But after working very hard and going through pain and tears to write, it is also very satisfying to get something finished that you are proud of. I am lucky to be able to do both. If I had to do just one I think I would be unhappy

Has performing ever felt futile and fruitless? Any moments of despair? If so, What has kept you going?

All the time, at regular intervals. It is quite futile in many ways and as a performer your mood is very much affected by your last gig, or how things are going right now. You just have to push on through it and luckily (and kind of sadly) a good gig can banish the blues immediately. It’s a tough job in many ways and there is little security to it and one is always fearful that there might be better ways to fill one’s time or that one might have lost it. But the same is true of any job and life in general. You just have to keep on pushing on or lie down and die! Nothing we do has any real meaning in the long term and we’re just specks of dust on a rock hurtling through space. What keeps us going?

Has there ever been a moment when you’re felt contempt for your audience? How about hecklers?

Again these moments come along every now and again and sometimes an audience or a member of it deserves contempt. The danger is that you start to hate all audiences and forget that you are there to entertain them, they’re not there to pander to your ego. If a crowd is dull or misses the nuances you sometimes feel like slacking off and not giving them the best show, but there’s a chance that the dullness is something to do with you, or they’re just quiet and don’t show their enjoyment as much, so a big part of the job I think is to have the grace and ability to keep performing as if it’s the best gig ever. You can’t let your head drop – though sometimes it gets hard. Hecklers are generally just a pain in the arse. They’re easier to deal with than people realise and it’s an annoyance usually if they throw you off your stride. But again you have to embrace the changes and the unpredictability of live performance and try to make a positive out of it. If you have too much contempt for your audience or comedy in general then (unless you harness it and make it the act, which is hard, but possible) you’re heading in a bad direction. No one is forcing a comedian to be a comedian. If you hate it all of the time then you can stop.

Do you think a comedian or an artist has any other purpose than expression/creation?

It’s fine to be just entertaining and to give people something to laugh about. Life can be bleak for us all and if a comedian telling a cock joke makes someone forget their problems for half an hour or banish the blues then that is something to be happy about. There’s a danger that comedy can become all about subversion or expression and I think you have to keep the funny in there. I am lucky to be able to use my work to create and express myself, but there is nothing wrong in making people laugh until their sides hurt.

What do you think of the current state of comedy?

I think it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been. Lots of good stuff, plenty of bad stuff. Lots of the good stuff doesn’t get the credit it deserves, but some does. The stand up circuit is much more inventive and interesting than when I started out. TV is producing similar amounts of great and terrible stuff, but now with the internet there are a lot more outlets for people to do interesting stuff. The people at the high end doing stadium tours and making loads of money might seem a bit mercenary and weird, but there were always these types of comedian and if anything there is more opportunity for invention and self-expression.

Dave Stordy is a comedian. So is Richard Herring, but we’ll get to him in a bit. Right now, Stordy is writing a bit revolving around our quite casual and uneventful meeting, as I sit there watching him. He suggests I use it, I tell him: yeah. So I use it:

Stordy: ‘So I was talking to this journalist the other day, right… true story, true story.’

As he types onto his laptop, he tells me that he is trying to be funny because, he says, “there is a massive difference between trying to be funny and actually being it”. As we sit on his faded 80s two-piece sofa suite, over hot teas and pink wafers, he says these words with undue stress, force-feeding non-existent wisdom into the cliché. His wild lisp helps him none.

“The last time I was on stage I had to take out my notes from my inside pocket. I just lost myself. For some performers, being on stage is a sort of transcendence from all the bullshit, you know, losing your ‘self’. But I just simply lost my place.” He has these bullets of eyebrows and shifts them up and down as he speaks, like air quotes that have landed on his head, somehow rendering his very face an irony.

“For some comics that might be an exciting innovation, to do that, you know, pull a small piece of paper from your inside pocket and start reading it, like Stewart Lee or someone. But for me it was kind of a nightmare. I forgot what I wanted to say and just panicked. That was five months ago, the night of Halloween. I’ve performed since, but that night has haunted me.”

Stordy: ‘So this journalist calls me up one day and comes round to my flat a few days later for an interview. He thought it might be a good idea… he saw me do a show at Halloween. Nightmare, it was.’

Stordy was right. I had called him up after tracking him down through an ‘open mic’ night based in Leytonstone, looking for a struggling comic that I might be able to speak with, someone who might help me get to grips with the bleaker side of a stand-up comedy career. And Leytonstone was indeed bleak. Especially for Stordy who, five months previous, had died at the hands of 40-odd fancy-dressed revellers, and unforgiving hecklers, in a pumpkin-lit pub just down the High Road.

I went to meet him at his flat in east London. During our chat his lisp occasionally faltered, making me think he was merely in character. It would be a committed stunt for a minor performer, but perhaps telling of his delusion. It was hard to decide on its authenticity. Anyway, we sat down for a talk during which he would occasionally hand me scraps of paper with his latest routine scribbled upon them, bits that his typing fingers were too slow to document.

Stordy: ‘So this journo comes round, drinking my tea, eating my biscuits, “objectively” documenting the gradual obliteration of modern civilised society whilst simultaneously and unwittingly enabling the rampant, murderous spread of Western imperialism and the eventual enslavement of all creatures via its coded language of even parts propaganda, fear and Public Relations misinformation, before begging me for more pink wafers…”

Dave Stordy embarked on his comedy career, he tells me, after having once been caught impersonating his headmaster behind his back, à la Bobby Davro, a man renowned for starting his career in much the same manner. But he detests the comparison; Davro happens to be his unsuspecting arch-nemesis.

Maybe getting detention wasn’t a good enough reason to go into stand-up comedy, I suggest to him, as he momentarily lowers the voice recorder I have introduced to the table. He looks wistfully out of the window, perhaps imagining Monsieur Davro’s uneasy smile reflected back at him.

“He got six beltings for what he done. Maybe that’s what made him take it further. Now, I don’t condone corporal punishment or even like being compared to Davro. In fact I hate him. Yeah, he’s an easy target. That’s why I hate him. Though I admit to feeling a certain affinity to him just because of our shared profession.”

Profession, I ask. So you’re paid for your work? I ask because we’re in an above-ground hole.

“Well, often not,” Dave tells me, turning away from the spectre of Davro, “I wasn’t paid for my last gig because I left the stage when they started throwing their plastic cups. I always told myself, I’d never leave the stage unless they threw glass. Like Malcolm Tracey said. In fact I’m not sure if they qualified but the cups seemed a close enough representation. Anyway, I have been paid before, I don’t like to discuss money. An artist shouldn’t have to. But yeah I make a bit of money off of it.”

And what of your influences, your inspirations?

Stordy: (Pause)

I had angled a similar question at Richard Herring who I’d contacted after that first call to Stordy, as a relief from the grim failings of East End open mic performers. As a success of the business, Herring requires little introduction to connoisseurs of comedy, especially those lucky enough to have caught the Lee and Herring double act during its TV and radio prime in the 90s. Since then both Lee and Herring have fashioned formidable solo careers, producing original and innovative work alternately achieving cult and mainstream success in the 00s.

With a quietly considered response, Herring says: “I think you get influenced by everything, good and bad, and the list would be too long and complex to have any kind of meaning. As a child I was very impressed with Monty Python and Pete and Dud and The Young Ones. But if the influence was anything it was about the importance of being your own person and creating stuff that was yours. But throughout life you meet people, read books, see shows which shape you as a person.”

How about acts you respect, I asked: “I like any comedian who can surprise me. Originality is again the key. I tend to like the ones who have thought of something that I haven’t thought of, or expressed it more clearly, than the ones who tell me stuff I already know. But sometimes an observational comedian using the more basic comedic formulas can still be skilful enough to surprise me and in some ways I find that more impressive than some of the more avant-garde comics. A comedian has to keep moving and not get too predictable. Not many achieve that over a whole career.”

Not many achieve that at all, I think, as I return to Stordy and ask him the same question. He is still typing. He thinks about it.

Stordy: (Continue) ‘… not realizing as he picks at them from a cracked plate, that his pink wafers are a sickly metaphor for the present condition of his racket, the news media and journalism at large: pretty, yes, but effectively soiled, saturated by artificial flavours and colourings, unsuitable for those with nut allergies, layered meager layer upon meager layer, both wafer and cream being largely devoid of nutrition and unaware of their vain arrogance… yet he sups them up one by one, dipping them into his warm brew… yum yum yum yum yum…’

Stordy stops typing a moment and answers: “I read Michael McIntyre’s autobiography. I thought it was good. How the ghostwriter got his voice into the words and everything. I learnt a lot from that book. Mostly that ghostwriting for Michael McIntyre could hold a future for me. I’ve studied all of the comedian’s autobiographies, marking the comparisons with them and myself, with a blue pen in the margins. But when I’m not reading I’m usually writing. I’m preparing a website at the moment as well. D’ya wanna see?”

As I contain dubious excitement, I ask if he’s ever thought about quitting. As soon as I ask the question I feel as if I shouldn’t have, as if somehow I had accused him of being shit without having seen all the available evidence. The question interrupts his tapping of the laptop keys. He looks back for Davro.

“Yeah I did once or twice. I quit for about a year in 2005. That was a bad year. I felt like a dog with three legs.”

Ah, I say to myself, Herring may have some sonorous advice for you, Dave. I read him the transcript from my conversation with Herring, specifically the question: Has performing ever felt futile and fruitless?

“All the time, at regular intervals. It is quite futile in many ways and as a performer your mood is very much affected by your last gig, or how things are going right now.” Stordy certainly fell into this category.

Herring’s words may offer Dave some hope, I think quietly, so I continue to read them: “You just have to push on through it and luckily (and kind of sadly) a good gig can banish the blues immediately.”
I look at Dave, who looks at Davro. I go on, feeling like Stordy’s personal coach: “It’s a tough job in many ways and there is little security to it and one is always fearful that there might be better ways to fill one’s time or that one might have lost it. But the same is true of any job and life in general. You just have to keep on pushing on or lie down and die! Nothing we do has any real meaning in the long term and we’re just specks of dust on a rock hurtling through space. What keeps us going?”

“Specks of dust,” Dave repeats. “Cheers for that!”

Stordy: ‘…the wafers jettisoning useless pink specks of dried cream and wafery dust to the floor, castoff, useless and forgotten… I know what you’re thinking: a dick with Chomsky jokes…’’

Effectively disregarding the previous five minutes of conversation and enlightened advice, save for that last sentence, Dave swivels his laptop around and gives me a virtual tour of the website he is designing. It is self-consciously rubbish, filled with hand-drawn scribbles that make no sense and lead the visitor through a pointless labyrinth of links, displaying either doodles of oversized heads on jelly-like bodies, with speech bubbles coming out of them saying things like ‘I am a man’s head’, or crudely sketched pieces of toast saying: ‘Someone buttered my crust.’ An unintentional farce?

“Comedians’ websites are usually intolerable and sycophantic in their attempts to make you chuckle or buy their DVDs or go watch their shows or whatever. I try and take the piss out of that. Like making observations about observational comedy, which actually is a trick ‘cause it’s kinda the same deal but makes you feel superior.”

So, what made you go back to comedy after quitting?

“The inner voice. The one telling me that I had no other prospects. Just the idea of getting back on stage, writing, all of it, filled me with hope all over again. And when I got back up there I didn’t feel like that three-legged dog anymore, if anything I felt like a three-legged man. A maverick, an outsider, though perhaps over-equipped and possibly useless.”

What do you mean by over-equipped?

He has been clicking excitedly through the gallery of doodles and copyright images of Dixy chicken burgers. “I mean that most audiences only want to go to a show to laugh and drink and have a good time, to get away from the horrible shit in their lives. I want them to think. To question their values and their morals. To hold up a mirror to them and our decaying society, to analyse its workings. And then maybe during that, to laugh.” He makes one last click: “Have a look at this one.”

He points to a finely detailed drawing of a lone Griffin fighting a flock of Boobries. The caption reads: “Get your paws off my Boobries.”

It was all a little depressing. I felt like Mickey to Stordy’s Rocky. Trying to get to the core of it, if even just to understand Dave and his near masochistic self-sacrificing to his uninterested audience, I’d asked Herring what it was that he strived for in his shows.

“Mainly to make people laugh,” he says, “But along with that I suppose my main goal is doing so in an original way and hopefully also producing something that will make people think and maybe challenge their world view.”

So there’s some kind of ideology behind your routines, something that you’re consciously trying to get across?

“Sometimes. Other times not.  Each show and routine tries to do different things. But I guess if there is a common theme it is challenging preconceptions and making people think about what they believe. If something is true I think you can question it and it will still hold up. If it’s not true then questioning it can help you realise that. By making people laugh you can get their guard down a little bit and discuss things that you might not be able to do or tackle subjects that might otherwise make people clam up.”

Dave had similar reasons, albeit from his cave of delusion where nationwide fame and critical acclaim were just around the corner, adding: “I find it interesting to explore whether the audience are laughing at a joke just because they get it, or because it’s actually funny.”

His principal jokes, he tells me, come to him when he is: a) lowering onto the toilet; or b) smoking a cigarette out of his window. “I get my inspiration mostly during the moments that I am pulling down my trousers to sit on the bog, or when I’ve just started a cigarette and can’t reach a pen, as I smoke by the window, so as not to offend my girlfriend’s health. These seem to be the moments where neither a pen nor a bit of paper are in sight. It is quite annoying. Since the time I hastily ran from the toilet midway through a poo, I have kept a notebook and a pen cellotaped to a piece of string dangling from the bathroom tiles. Since then I haven’t had any good ideas.”

“It’s a tough job and it’s not easy to get that many people to like you,” says Herring, having unquestionably taken the role of sage for the current conversation with Stordy, “It’s only lazy comedians who coast on a wave of success and don’t put the work in that annoy me. And there are plenty of those at all levels. And it is possible to do something that is populist and also worthy. Tim Minchin and Morecambe and Wise spring to mind. I don’t have a problem if an act becomes popular. That is not what they should be judged by and there is no shame in success if achieved on the right terms.” It felt that this was Stordy’s central conflict. He seemed desperate for fame and seemed to merely use comedy as a vehicle on the road to it, without showing any respect for the medium or its followers.

Stordy: (Introduce segue into final bit)

A natural conclusion to any interview, discussion of the future usually seems a befitting end point and possibly one offering hope. So Dave, any plans for the future?

“I’m looking to invest in a Segway to help smooth out my act. The rhythm’s a bit jarring and staccato at the moment. It might be able to help me refine the sudden shifts from one topic to the next. At the end of one bit I’d get the Segway and ride it across the stage, maybe through the audience, venue permitting, and jump off to start the next bit. It’s an expensive joke though. About £4000 expensive. But you can’t put a price on innovation. I am worried about the health and safety repercussions though. You can’t do nuffin’ no more. It’s political correctness gone mad.”

Despite the price, I tell him, it seems like a cheap joke. So if it isn’t elaborate visual gags, what is it that makes good comedy?

Stordy: (Ride Segway in)

“I used to think comedy was like blowing smoke into a long stream of speed-walkers’ faces,” Stordy tells me, “You know, annoying and confrontational. But the more I look at it, it seems more like blowing smoke into the faces of an oncoming pack of cyclists. Pretty futile, if not incidentally mildly amusing.”

Not the strongest point to end our time together. Richard, we’ll leave it to you:

“I think most good comedy is about truth and honesty,” says Herring, “But some of it is about lies. There are no rules.”

Stordy: (Ride Segway out)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbeAQhc42rw

The animated-puppet worlds of the Brothers Quay have entranced art cinephiles since 1979. Seemingly made by miniature shadow-fairies rather than the actual tall humans the Quays are, their films – Nocturna Artificialia, 1979, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, 1984, Street of Crocodiles, 1986, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 1987 – and music videos, including the award-winning ‘Sledgehammer’ for Peter Gabriel, take us eyeball and eardrum through fantastically handcrafted architecturally impossible visions of lost modernity. Deeply intellectual, their work is suffused with moodiness, patterned after the writers who inspire them: Franz Kafka, Bruno Schultz, and the Swiss novelist Robert Walser, whose Jakob von Gunten, 1908, served as the armature for their first live-action and full-length feature film, Institute Benjamenta, which premiered at New York’s Film Forum in March.

Institute Benjamenta – the Institute is a school for servants – is smart and beautiful. Each shot is its own still; each edit, a dazzling transformation of narrative space. As such, Institute Benjamenta is as much a foray into the memory of film itself, a sensuous evocation of the cinema of the miraculous (Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren, Sergei Paradjanov), as it is a fairy tale of spirits crushed by the soul-killing monotony of rules, repetition, and subordination.

In reputation the Brothers Quay are wrapped in mystery, including whispers about their dense and dark London atelier (Koninck studios, which they founded in 1980 with their producer, Keith Griffiths), rumored to be crammed with such things as antique dolls in bell jars and stacks of crumbling insect wings. I half expected to find them a pair of wizened gnomes with rusty screws, butterfly dust, and cobwebs dangling from their hair. Nothing so exorbitant – only two disarmingly friendly, whirling personas of elegantly rumpled charisma, who just happen to have turned their accidental birthright as identical twins (born outside Philadelphia in 1947) into one of art’s most ingenious and visionary collaborations. The following conversation took place amidst New York’s blizzard of ‘96, as though the environment were duplicating the atmospheric wonder that the brothers’ films so effortlessly provoke.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve: A beautiful quotation opens Institute Benjamenta:

Who dares it – has no courage To whom it is missing – feels well Who owns it – is bitterly poor Who is successful – is damaged Who gives it – is as hard as stone Who loves it – stays alone

What is “it”?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCrxjk0ULR0

The Brothers Quay: “It” is the riddle, the enigma. The quote isn’t from Robert Walser’s novella but from an anonymous folktale, a conundrum, that Carl Orff set to music and that we’ve had a cassette of for 19 years. Our initial ravishment was the music; we’d never had the text translated. Yet it utterly intrigued us and so we began corresponding with the Orff foundation to trace the text’s origin – which of course remains unsolved.

TNG: Music seems almost as primary as the visual for you. You once described it as “just the darkest blood imaginable.”

BQ: Actually, we’re failed composers. What we try to do is create a visualization of a musical space – we want you to hear with your eyes and see with your ears. It’s like saying, What kind of decor, in what parallel world, would evoke that music? So Lech [Jankowski, composer for many of the Quays’ films including Institute Benjamenta] wrote the music before the film was shot. He read the book and wrote suites, which he gave mysterious titles – not ‘Jakob’s Theme’, or ‘Lisa’s Theme’, but ‘Chorale’, and ‘Waltz Z.K. Minor’. He made no direct reference to the book whatsoever, at least to our knowledge.

TNG: Filmmakers are often interested in character, but what’s most alive for you is the depth or “animation” of sets and objects. Humans seem like an afterthought.

BQ: Not exactly. It’s just that they’re no more important than anything else. In Institute Benjamenta, what is most magnetized is the space itself. The Institute is the main actor, or the main character, and as a character it exerts a dominion and sway. We wanted it to carry the essential mysterium of the tale, as though it had its own inner life and former existences, which seemed to dream upon its inhabitants and exert its conspiratorial spells and undertows on them. We were looking for that Walserian notion of a world half awake, half asleep, in between.

TNG: Could you map the Institute for me? I mean, does it really exist as phenomenal space, or is it more a miraculous space?

BQ: With the puppet films, we came to terms with conceiving of space: whether it was to be stylized (the great privilege of animation) or realistic, a metaphysical space or a fantastic, nongeographical space, a mental configuration. There could also be analogic spaces, created in the editing process, or abstract spaces, created by massive close-ups and deficient depths of focus – by violations of scale. Whatever form the space took, it was always firstly a poetic vessel through which the fiction would course.

We’ve tried to explore different aspects of space in all our films. In Institute Benjamenta, we searched particularly for mental spaces. Since our location – a dilapidated old mansion – had to be a “found” space (unlike in our puppet films), we had to free it of its own geographics. The Institute seems to be positioned in a city traversed by trams. It’s also beside a port, and it’s also encroached upon from behind by a forest. In fact the forest is slowly invading it, like the tides.

To every space is allied its own quality of light, and this too should be a poetic conception. Light creates the essential Stimmung, the metaphysical climate, those “thicknesses” in the space itself. For Lisa [Alice Krige], the Institute’s instructress, the building is a realm of light. Light swells, advances, becomes like liquid myrrh, glows and invades her. At other times it may be a trapped, fetid, dead light, or an annihilating, corrosive light. What happens in the shadow, in the gray regions, also interests us – all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can only be said in those beautiful half-tones, or in whispers, in deep shade.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xxy8N9eR2E

TNG:In the puppet films, you controlled every aspect of production; you can’t do that in live action. Yet you’ve managed to translate your miraculous space, and your whole point of view. To be honest, I was surprised at the effortless transition you made.

BQ: Though the puppet films hadn’t prepared us for the social aspect of ensemble work, we’d worked in theater and opera before [the Quays have designed stage productions in England and Europe], so we knew the value of collaboration, and we realized that we’d have to stop mumbling between ourselves and make ourselves intelligible to our team. We seemed to have earned everyone’s loyalty – that, or they all felt sorry for us.

For the mise-en-scene, we worked with our friend Alan Passes, a writer. We approached the novella with a free hand, trying to conceive it from an imagistic point of view – almost like a silent film. Camera, quality of light, decor, objects, sound and music, dialogue, voice-overs: we tried to create a synthesis of all these metiers. And that’s exactly how we’ve worked all these years in our puppet films.

TNG: I have a personal question about you guys as identical twins.

BQ: Oh, that one.

TNG: I know there’s frustration with the question, but it’s also a logical one: you do experience an entirely different metaphysical existence from the rest of us. This struck me because Lisa’s isolation is a big theme in the film. So I want to know – do you ever experience loneliness? Could you? Or is that outside your experience?

BQ: It would take one of us dying to know what that would be. Until then it’s a mystery.

TNG: Do you know how profound that is in terms of us “singulars”? We go through the world –

BQ: – always alone, searching for some possible other…

TNG: For most of us, encouplement only comes through the lover.

BQ: Yes, in some way our relationship is a reproach or challenge to marriage in the sense that you have to find your soul mate, whereas we had –

TNG: Your soul mate from the very beginning?

BQ: From the very beginning. It was just something that was natural. We always went around together; we couldn’t even help it. I guess the proper thing would be to get a life, get married, break up, but film has actually brought us closer, because of the collaboration. We did each do our own drawings when we were in art school, though.

TNG: Did you draw similarly?

BQ: We both drew with our right hands.

TNG: Okay … but did you have different interests in what you drew?

BQ: We always had a similar, literary interest. We constantly absorbed the same material. There was no way one of us could discover something the other one hadn’t already seen or read or heard about.

TNG: So you really are a unit; more one than two.

BQ: Yes.

TNG: And that’s why it’s frustrating when people want to –

BQ: – search for the dissonance. They want to say, Which one’s who? We always say it’s just the twins, just the Quays. The films aren’t made by Timothy or by Stephen, or by Stephen or Timothy.

TNG: You seem born to make your puppet films, as though you were making puppets and environments as children. But you apparently got into puppets almost as a kind of eccentric dare.

BQ: The British Film Institute said they would give us money for something experimental. We said, We’ve never done puppets, so why not – it was the most experimental thing we could think of. We’d only been illustrators at that point. And we figured if we failed, it would at least be a beautifully slow suicide.

TNG: Suicide?

BQ: Because there were no great expectations. Also, in our huge ignorance at that time (1979), puppet films not for children seemed virtually extinct. But then we saw quite a few puppet films made for adults, and they intrigued us. It was just an intuition that this was something we wanted to explore.

TNG: How do you conceptualize what you’re going to shoot?

BQ: We can bluff a storyboard, but we know from experience that when you’re confronted with the physical space itself (whether it’s puppet space or live action), the space blossoms. You might say, Let’s use a 50-millimeter lens here, but by mistake the camera has a 105-millimeter lens on, and you say, That’s it! We have a great belief in accidents. We sort of nurture them and trap them and build upon them. We’re appallingly open to the chance encounter. We always have a drift, an arc, for a project, we know where we’re going – but it’s a thread, a shimmering web. Things happen as we go along. We’ll discover things.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Mp-xyqQRo

TNG: As oblique as your work can be, I do see a theme. It has to do with meaningful versus alienated labor. You seem to revel in artisanal craft-like puppet animation, where the hand is utterly involved and you’re immersed in the material process. For you, work in a modern or postindustrial capitalist society is soul-killing.

BQ: Our work is so close to us it isn’t work – it’s a way of rendering life at its fullest. And in puppetry your hands do a lot of thinking. As for Institute Benjamenta, it’s a metaphor at zero degree, of course, in which millions are already enrolled. An image of Kafka’s comes to mind: he spoke of chewing on the sawdust already chewed on by thousands of others. But suspended over the story of a school for servants there’s also a fairy tale – essentially Sleeping Beauty. Walser himself talked about his book as a “senseless but meaningful fairy tale.” There’s a ward with a deer-hoofed wand (Lisa); an ogre (Lisa’s brother Herr Benjamenta [Gottfried John]); seven dwarfs (the students); and the princeling, Jakob [Mark Rylance], who arrives with a kiss.

TNG: What’s the significance of all the antlers and stag imagery in the Institute?

BQ: They’re not in the book. But we thought, the Institute had an existence before it trained servants. So we imagined it had been a factory for making perfume. Musk comes from the male deer – actually from a deer without antlers, but we took a little poetic license.

We also imagined that the man who had run this factory had had a Wunderkammer room where he collected somewhat pathological deer imagery. This is the museum that Jakob discovers. Like the Institute, it’s a maze. On one side of it there’s a hell jar of ejaculate of stag, from when they’re rutting. We got the idea when we were sawing antlers one day and as the horn fell onto the paper it smelled of sperm. Did you know that when an antler deroutes, they presume – it’s not really known – that it’s because the deer’s been shot in the testicle? When a deer is hunted, it turns its behind to the gunshot to run away. If the bullet hits the testicle, that – possibly – deroutes the antler.

TNG: Which means what – that it falls out?

BQ: No, that it becomes aberrational. We have collections of antlers with these extraordinary detours and florescences – a flowering of the testicles in the opposite direction.

All of that was a subtext. We were interested in this contamination of the Institute by the dead perfume factory. Herr Benjamenta closes himself down into this world of deer memorabilia – almost as though it was he who’d been wounded in the testicle. Then the Institute itself, in that it’s for teaching servants, is like a reservation of young bucks – eunuchs. These guys are learning the art of demeaning repetitive labor. They’re being taught an abstraction, an ideal code or system: “Work more, wish less.” And all those elements come together with the animal kingdom in the film’s layer of fairy tale.

TNG: Walser himself attended a school for servants, didn’t he?

BQ: Yes, though not for long. For us, Jakob is a quiet portrait of Walser. He spent the last 26 years of his life in an asylum. At the beginning he still wrote; then he stopped. He said, “I’m here to be mad, not to write.” He died on a walk in the snow on Christmas day. That’s why Mark Rylance does that gesture at the end with his hat – because Walser was found facedown in the snow with his hat falling off, one hand on his heart. It’s the most fairy tale-ish ending. In one of his earliest novels he talks about coming across a poet dead in the snow.

TNG: Is that landscape of death the same landscape that ends Institute Benjamenta?

BQ: Oh yes – in a sense we just tried to create that final realm. We actually took that last walk of Walser’s when we were in Switzerland – we had this photograph of him dead, and we were wandering around trying to position it in the landscape. We never asked Mark to make that gesture; he just did it, and it was only when we were looking at the rushes that we went “@?!@?!!,” because we had shown him the photograph.

TNG: Your description of walking, looking for Walser, suggests how you inhabit the world as flâneurs – wandering around, looking not for something specific but just for what the world will give you. That’s how you build your esthetic.

BQ: Absolutely – walking in the street, we’re always taking photographs of strange still-lifes, the conjunctions and little epiphanies that life supplies. You can miss them but you shouldn’t. We want to uncover those quiet, elusive moments, those drifts that just go off.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Uaww0yon4

TNG: There’s an impression of you as these hermetic souls, like watchmakers laboring at your fantastic miniature constructions. Actually, though, the phenomenal world is as much your laboratory as the music or literature that inspires you.

BQ: Exactly. In a way, Street of Crocodiles was just us documenting Poland, the Krakow and Warsaw of 1974 to ‘86. We’d walk around and photograph, say, a little shop window, empty except for a high-heeled stiletto with little cleats going around it. We generate material just by walking about. An event happens and we tuck it away.

TNG: So though people often bring up the “s” word with you, you’re really materialists, not surrealists.

BQ: Yes, because the material is generated, not invented. We just see it. People do sort of want to stick the label “surrealist” on us, but the world gives these things up to us – they really happen. Mostly, we want things to remain true to themselves. The object can speak in whispers if you let it.

TNG: Which reminds me of the forks in Institute Benjamenta – in the opening scene, the actors make them “sing” by tapping them before using them to eat. Though those moments are live action, they’re actually about animation in the deepest sense: endowing the inanimate with life. You make it seem as if using a fork just to eat is like making people into zeros in their job. In fact your work is furious at how not just humans have been made inanimate, but objects as well: they’ve been stripped of their magic, their “soul,” which you give back to them.

BQ: We knew the fork was part of the enigma. It’s a fantastic thing! We adore forks – part of a ritual, yet so practical.

TNG: And the fork is potent thematically, because so much of the Institute’s teaching is the kind of empty social forms typified by those codes about using a fork properly. So what a wonderful subversion when Jakob “plays” the fork – one of those quiet, sly moments that the worker develops within a space bound by rules. The same with that lesson on how to present a napkin, which you choreograph into a beautiful somnambulistic ritual.

BQ: That scene was conceived to Lech’s music. We worked it visually like a musical cadenza.

Walser was attracted by all that was hard, gray, and lowly. He liked to take the circumference of something small and insignificant – a button, an apple, trouser cuffs, things that were a kind of degree zero – and to show that by passing through the zero, as Jakob does, one could be liberated. That’s why Kraus [Daniel Smith], the servant, who is the perfect zero, is also the pearl in the oyster – the pearl permanently secreted by the Institute.

TNG: At the end of the film, when Jakob and Herr Benjamenta leave the Institute, is it supposed to look like they’re in one of those snow-filled glass-ball paperweights?

BQ: Yes. At that point we wanted it to appear almost as though Kraus were telling the tale. He’s feeding the fish, and the food falls into the fishbowl; so it’s as though he’s making snow for the fish. Having Jacob and Herr Benjamenta in the snow, which looks as though they were in a glass bowl, gave it that slightly fairy-tale ending.

TNG: Herr Benjamenta tells Jakob, “I’ve pronounced the Institute dead. We are free… Follow me out of this world forever.” Yet Kraus remains. Lisa is dead – killed by the Institute, or, better, by her evolving inability to enact its rules.

BQ: These people course through the film in strange trajectories: Lisa is slowly arcing down, Herr Benjamenta is rising euphorically, and Kraus will be the pearl secreted by the Institute. He’ll be there for all time, with the fish in the goldfish bowl, just turning these endless circles. And Jakob is the princeling who should have woken Sleeping Beauty with a kiss of life, but he’s brought the kiss of death.

TNG: Jakob says at one point, “As long as I obey her, she will live.” But he has instigated in Lisa the desire not to be obeyed, the desire to move beyond this world in which, a sign reads, “Rules have already thought of everything.” But why is it Herr Benjamenta who gets to leave with Jakob at the end?

BQ: In his final speech, he says, “Once I was crowned with success, the world smiled on me. But I hated the world. Hated existing. Hated those I taught to take orders… But no longer, now that I am not a king…”

TNG: “… Now I want to live…”

BQ: Yes, “Now I want to live.” But the film in fact ends unexpectedly, with Kraus – the genuine work of God, the nothing, the servant. Earlier, Lisa has told Jakob that God gives a Kraus to the world in order to entrust it with an insoluble riddle. This line is an echo of that fiddling opening quotation from Orff. And so, ending with Kraus, the film ends as it begins, with a riddle; the circle is reformed. And maybe we’re no wiser, because, as Lisa’s voice from the heavens says in the film, “Things unfathomed still occur. And this fairy tale will tell you last.”

At Spike, we’re big fans of the 33 1/3 series of music books. You’ll be familiar with them if you’ve browsed a record or book shop over the last half-decade. Each of these pocket-sized editions focuses on a single album, drilling down to explore various elements of it. Each volume is different, some telling the story of the record, others analysing the songs themselves. It’s this flexibility that keeps the format invigorated. Furthermore, the slimness of each book is a definite advantage (each being roughly 130 pages long), forcing a salient brevity on the writers. Hugo Wilcken’s book on Low and Mike McGonigal on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless are personal favourites. Both are genuinely informative and entertaining, packing a lot of insight into a small space. Both are also very good at demythologising some apocryphal tales. I’d also recommend Mark Polizzotti’s Highway 61 Revisited, but most of them a extremely readable. The latest instalment is Bryan Waterman’s volume on Television’s Marquee Moon, carefully researched with the aid of Richard Hell’s archives.

There’s something both classic and infinitely flexible about the series. Where did the idea come from?

The 33 1/3 series was my idea, way back in 2002. I’ve been working at Continuum since 1996, first in London, then in New York. Initially I drew up a list of 50 or so albums that I thought people would enjoy writing about, and then started contacting some writers, musicians and broadcasters to see if anybody actually wanted to do such a thing. It turned out that a lot of people were really into the idea so I pitched it to the board at Continuum and we were up and running pretty quickly.

How do you decide which titles to go with? It seems to be love rather than demographics?

When I was first putting the series together, there was a list of possible albums for people to write about–from Nation of Millions to Bat Out of Hell, from Murmur to Thriller, and from Piper at the Gates of Dawn to Exile on Main St. But very quickly it became apparent that most people I contacted were more interested in writing about an album that wasn’t on my original list, so it rather snowballed from there. You could certainly argue that the series started out with a larger focus on “classic rock”–Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Bowie, Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and Dylan were all in the first 20 titles–but as it became more established we felt more confident about publishing volumes in different genres and about artists who were perhaps less well-known. So we’ve ended up, I hope, with an interesting range that covers some obvious stuff but also people like Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, Celine Dion, Guided by Voices, Van Dyke Parks, and Slint. For info about the best-selling titles, best place to look is here.

I love too many of the books to be able to identify one as a personal favourite, but right now I’d say I have the fondest memories of the books about Dusty Springfield, James Brown, Led Zeppelin, The Band, Beastie Boys and The Pixies. If I was to write one of these? I’d probably go for Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, but it wouldn’t sell!

There’s a good blog post from the last time we had an open call for proposals. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to read through that number of proposals, and have learned so much about music–and about writing–in the process. Although, honestly, sending out rejection letters to approximately 580 people is nobody’s idea of fun…

I know Geeta Dayal was approached by Brian Eno. Do you get much feedback from the artists themselves? Any angry faxes from Morrissey?

Somewhat inevitably, we’re more likely to hear from, or be in touch with, the less famous of the artists covered by the series. People like The Flaming Lips, Guided by Voices and Van Dyke Parks have all been extremely helpful. We never heard anything from Celine Dion, which was a shame. And I’d love to know if Dylan likes our Highway 61 book, as I’m sure it’s one of the very best of the many, many Dylan books published so far. Thurston Moore was kind enough to inform us, on the series blog, that our book about Daydream Nation had a couple of lyrics transcribed incorrectly. That was a little awkward. But it was really gratifying to learn that Eno was so fond of Geeta Dayal’s book about Another Green World.

Any plans to branch out into films or novels? Greil Marcus managed a whole book just on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’!

No plans to branch out, although I should point out that Soft Skull Press launched a great series of small books about films, which is often being compared to the 33 1/3 series.

In Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds talks about a moment in the 80s when post-punk started looking back. Has pop reached its ‘classical’ phase where we endlessly debate the canon?

I believe the canon will keep evolving. And while it was never the intention of the series to claim these as the best albums ever made, I do hope that we’ve managed to open some new debates about what can be considered a great album and that we’ve managed to turn people on to some great music that they’ve perhaps not tried before. And perhaps most importantly of all (to my mind at least) that the series has explored and encouraged different ways of writing about music. There are so many stories still to be told, and so many ways of telling them.

Best known as the mohawk-sporting outsider who won America’s Next Top Model, Naima Mora prefers being the vocalist for the prog-inclined Galaxy of Tar. Jeanette Hewitt tracked her down

First brought to my attention as the softly spoken and serene multi-cultural young lady whose silky smooth voice contrasted deeply with her punk-rock exterior, Naima Mora, the winner of season four of America’s Next Top Model, is now the vocalist in rock bank Galaxy of Tar. After following her career over the last six years, from the catwalk via the television studio to what seems to be her real passion of music, I discovered her band through Twitter. Through our email communication Naima was as courteous and lovely as her previous interviews suggest and she enthusiastically agreed to answer some questions for Spike Magazine.

Naima, you come from a very talented family: your father is a jazz percussionist, your grandparents are painters/sculptors, your sister is a vocalist for rock group livemas and your twin sister is a photographer. Was it inevitable that you would end up in the arts and entertainment industry?

I definitely think that it was inevitable that I ended up in the arts. Growing up in my household, my sisters and I were always encouraged to explore our creativity. Nia actually picked up her camera when we were 13 and I remember Ife had an all girls band that would practice in the basement when my parents weren’t down there with their own Latin-jazz group. Not sure if it’s in the blood or familial influence, but all the right ingredients were in play to create who I have become.

You’ve done it all: actress, ballet, model and musician. What has been/is your favourite and, although you are still modelling, would you ever consider a return to dance or acting?

I can say that living as a musician and playing with my group Galaxy of Tar is the most fun for me. It’s probably unfair to separate everything though, because it all contributes to who I am today. I pull a lot of influence from ballet and classical theatre into my rock shows, the drama of it. I also draw a lot aesthetically from modelling. Everything I’ve done in my life I have done with love, thus it’s all been rewarding! All in all, I’m a performer and a storyteller that has been granted magnificent tools from many talented people in several beautiful mediums of expression.

Would you say that you use your modelling to finance your greater passion of music?

Modelling has definitely helped me to finance many other creative projects I am currently involved with, music being one of them. The thing though is that I really love and enjoy my day job and while music is my main focus in my life right now, I am still passionate about modelling.

At the last count, you had five tattoos. In the modelling world it seems the majority of clients want a blank canvas. Do you feel that you can be more ‘yourself’ in the world of rock, and do you have any plans for further body art?

Ha ha, that’s a good question that people actually ask me quite often. I now have six tattoos and yes, I do feel that I can express myself more truly as a musician. It’s completely different, as when I model I am working to express myself through someone else’s vision. For a lot of models just starting off, it’s a little difficult to book more work with tattoos, because that doesn’t always fit into a client’s vision. It also depends on how you brand yourself within the industry. I, for example, have a particular androgynous quality and what they call “edge”, so my tattoos work quite well with what clients want to hire me for. I do plan on getting more ink… I really love my tattoos and I want to get more someday. Also, you can’t model forever, so why live my life based on something so temporary? I just have to maintain true to who I am.

You’ve won numerous awards, including the Spirit of Detroit, the California Legislature Assembly Certificate of Recognition and the prestigious Key to the City of Cincinnati. How does this make you feel and which award has meant the most to you personally?

Wow, yeah, it makes me feel proud of myself. I have always just striven to inspire people towards observing and creating beauty and feeling beautiful within themselves. So to be awarded was a bit strange at first, because I’m just being me. But I’m proud of it now. Really it doesn’t matter whether we are awarded or not, because the biggest reward is and always will be what stays with us forever. That feeling you get when you’re helping out a close friend who’s sick in bed with the flu and who really needs you. Everyone knows the feeling, its whether we decided to extend ourselves this way to strangers that makes the biggest difference within.

Which musicians inspire the sound for your rock band Galaxy of Tar and what genre of music would you file your sound under?

Well, I guess the closest genre that Galaxy of Tar would fit into is the current definition of prog-rock. We do a lot of experimenting with time signatures and strange sounds. We want to create something new and interesting to listen to. Of course all creation is a continuum of and has been influenced by what came before. Our strongest influences go from prog bands like Yes, Rush, King Crimson to Latin music (as Elias and I are both of Latin origin) to electronic/trip-hop music with the likes of Björk, Carl Craig, Lamb. Elias and I write and both contribute, so it really depends on how the music expresses itself organically after we have a basic idea. It always maintains true to our style and the types of music that has moved our lives and consciousness.

How long have you known your musical partner, Elias Diaz and how did you meet? Are you in sync or do you often have conflicting musical ideas?

We met a few years ago and Elias was actually playing with my sister’s band livemas. That project didn’t however continue as all things do at a certain point. Ife has moved on and actually just released her first solo project titled In Love Story. Elias and I went on to work with our previous group. We had a lot of creative conflicts in our first band with the other members, so we all thought it best to move on. Elias and I share a lot of same work ethic, passion for the music we write, and an understanding of each other’s perspectives. We do clash at times, but we both try to remember to put our egos aside, open our opinions, and go with what works best for the music.

You’ve been touring throughout New York, do you have plans to take the band nationwide and maybe further afield?

With our first album, Pneuma, we have been touring Galaxy of Tar a lot in New York and New England. We do plan on doing a national tour soon and definitely the west coast in a few month’s time. Now we are taking a few months just to write a new album. It’s really quite amazing to find out the possibilities of what we can create when we open ourselves up creatively and work there consciously and unconsciously.

Your myspace page reports Galaxy of Tar as being unsigned. Are you actively seeking a label or do you find you have more freedom in releasing your own material?

As Galaxy of Tar, we are just working right now a lot on creating good music and playing it for people who are willing to listen and who are open to new things.

Further Resources:

• Both albums from Galaxy of Tar, *The Covers EP and Pneuma, are available from the website galaxyoftar.com

In 2006, my hometown of Ipswich was catapulted into the global media by a serial killer preying on the working girls of the red light district. In 2011, Ipswich Zero 6 was published, a personal and factual mix of real-life documentation, poetry, filmscape and scintillating records of conversations with the police, the media and the girls themselves.

Ipswich Zero 6 was born out of Ray Hollingsworth’s original idea for a screenplay–part fact, part fiction–set in the Ipswich underworld. For accuracy, Ray spoke with the women and, from the excerpts in his book, they were honest and willing to talk, and didn’t seem to mind that Ray was basing his writings on them.

I read Ipswich Zero 6, along with Ray’s previous book of poetry (Dirty Blonde at the Cash Machine) and although I’d followed the tragedy on the news when it was happening, I discovered a lot more from the book and my subsequent conversations with Ray. It portrays these women as human beings, not simply prostitutes. The book goes straight to the heart of the story, beginning with the realisation that girls were going missing, some of whom Ray had gotten to know on a personal level. It narrates how Ray, at one point a low-key suspect, offered his help to the police as, from his research and subsequent friendship with them, he now knew these people and the area very well, and becoming almost a regular on Sky News as an on-the-scene correspondent.

Interestingly, the book is broken up into 6 parts. ‘Mediascape’, a general background as to what was happening in and around Ipswich in December 2006, Ray’s interviews and correspondence with the media, the arrests that were made and the subsequent charges brought against Steve Wright. The second part, ‘Voices’, includes conversations with the girls, mostly between the summer of 2005 and spring 2006; a collection of interviews which are sometimes humorous, some frightening, some touching but each brutally honest about the lifestyle these girls have chosen. The ‘Soundscape’ section is an eclectic mix of thoughts and poetry set against a backdrop of audio, which one must imagine and embrace when reading this part of the book. For example, the sounds range from an amusement arcade and police sirens to heart monitors in a hospital. ‘Poetics’ was written between the summer of 2005 through to 2007–a collection of poetry, again, very honest and beautifully written.

‘Soundscape’ is probably the section that captured me most of all. At Ray’s own admission, the idea for the film was born out of a failed relationship that made him turn to the twilight underworld of Ipswich, a deliberate form of escapism on his part, and one that he described as becoming almost an addiction. It is very clear at this stage that the line between the film and reality blurred somewhat, and it is hard to tell at points which is real and which is the fantasy. This however, makes reading all the more compelling. The final instalment of the book, ‘Reflections’, is just that: reflecting. Ray’s ideas on how some of the lives of these women could have been saved are especially poignant.

I met with Ray a few weeks after reading the book. For authenticity and to set the scene, we arranged to meet outside the convicted killer’s former home. Steve Wright’s old house is in the heart of what was the Ipswich red light district. It is now, I’m assured, defunct. Ray’s interest in crime scenes was apparent immediately, as he asked me if I would like to look behind the house, the car park area, which had been cordoned off on his previous visits around the time of the murders. As we surveyed the area and discussed what Ipswich was like at that time, Ray talked animatedly about his involvement with the girls. He was very much a friend to them, at a point in his life where I deduced he also needed a friend. Some of them stayed at his home, although never for longer than about eight hours, he pointed out, as this was when their drugs would begin to wear off and they would need to hunt again. Sometimes he looked after them in an almost fatherly way, washing their hair, feeding them and sometimes there was sex. Although Ray freely admitted to having sexual relations with the women, I got the impression this was not first on his list of priorities. These women were people first in his eyes, prostitutes to him almost as an afterthought.

Ipswich Zero 6, like all of Ray’s previous five books, is self-published. Prior to our interview, I read that Ray received one rejection and never tried again. As somebody who kept battering at the publisher’s doors for almost ten years before my work was accepted, this difference of opinion interested me. I asked Ray why he had not pursued more publishing houses. His answer was that he “doesn’t like the publishing industry”. As Ray is more centred towards poetry, he confessed that he found the British poetry industry rather political and, as his work is quite edgy, he felt he wouldn’t stand a chance at getting his foot in the door and being accepted. Rather than waste time, he simply published his works himself, which I found refreshingly honest and true to oneself. I also asked Ray if he had to seek permission for the use of the content in Ipswich Zero 6 or whether he had a free reign on it. He didn’t know, and didn’t much care!

As we spoke, I discovered that Ray has a passion for crime scenes, in particular those that are unsolved, or where a miscarriage of justice has occurred. He told me of extensive research that he has done on the case of Madeleine McCann and Jeremy Bamber among others. We discussed theories and case points in great detail covering a lot of subjects, most of which Ray still has a hand in.

What impressed me most is Ray’s drive and determination. If he wants something, he goes after it with a vengeance. After completing Dirty Blonde at the Cash Machine, for example, he was in London with a friend, when he saw a woman walk past and knew instantly she was the model that he wanted to portray the ‘blonde’ in his book. He followed her, waiting whilst she went into MacDonald’s and when she emerged, he approached her, telling her that he had followed her and explaining his interest in her. Some young women would have run at this point, but Ray has a direct, honest way of speaking, getting straight to the point and posing no threat whatsoever. This lady, Julie Patterson, was the model featured in the photo shoots for Dirty Blonde. Another example of Ray’s persistence is his marketing of his book. By telephoning Waterstone’s himself and delivering stock, he succeeded in having the major book retailer stock Ipswich Zero 6.

There are many adjectives that one could use to describe Ray and his slightly off key-style of existing both in life and in his words: crazy fool, fearless, determined, passionate, admirable. Take your pick. My conclusion is that more of us might learn to live like him.

Further Resources:

• Interview with Ray Hollingsworth for the BBC

As a foreign news correspondent for the BBC you’ve travelled all over the world and must’ve seen horrifying and extraordinary things: can you give us examples of humanity at its best and at its worst?

I have witnessed first hand many instances of the horrific treatment of vulnerable people in my work as a correspondent: young girls being enslaved to work as prostitutes, babies being bought and sold, the mental ill being kept in chains and villagers murdering fellow families because they’re from a different caste or religion. And that is not counting the suffering and violence associated with armed conflict and, in a different way, with natural disasters.

It would be easy to have a cynical view of human nature. But what heartens me is the knowledge that I am not the only person who finds such stories distressing. In all these environments, I have come across many examples of people who are brave enough to take a stand against injustice and fight for other people’s rights and safety, often at great personal risk. I’ve also seen great acts of kindness – for example, families who are desperately poor themselves but who willingly take in a family of strangers and feed and shelter them, just because they are in need – or, during murderous riots, people who risked their own lives by intervening to try to defend those under attack. In a less direct way, it is also humbling when I have broadcast a report and afterwards “ordinary” people, who live thousands of miles away in a different culture, get in touch with me to ask how they can help or how they can send money to the people in need.

You’re currently based in London: do you prefer to be at home and travel on assignments, or do you prefer long-term postings abroad, such as those in Delhi and Washington, DC? Would you like to leave the UK again and, for that matter, do you consider the UK your home?

I definitely consider the UK to be home. I was born and brought up here and my family lives here – and has done for as far back as we can trace the family tree. I loved living overseas for almost all of my 20s and 30s. It was exciting and I learned so much about other cultures, about people, about news and, of course, about myself. But now I am very happy to have the best of both worlds: living in London but having the chance to travel often for work and pleasure.

To what extent are the characters, locations and situations described in your novels based on your experiences as a journalist?

I try to draw on elements of my own experiences to give my novels credibility and authenticity. My real life experiences help me, for example, to give a strong sense of place and describe what a particular environment feels, smells and looks like. It also feeds the books in terms of developing key themes and ideas.

My first novel, The Last Kestrel, is set in Helmand Province during the current conflict and it would have been really hard to describe a village in Helmand, give a sense of the local culture and reflect an experience of a journalist who is embedded with the British military if I hadn’t experienced these things for myself.

But it’s also extremely important that the actual events, the plot lines and characters are all fictional. It’s almost a case of knowing a place to start with – then taking a big step away from the real world, going into the imagination and only then starting to write. Also plot is very different from real life and needs to come to reasonably satisfying resolutions and conclusions.

Far from my Father’s House is a case in point. I’ve spent time in relief camps in North West Pakistan, interviewing people who have escaped from communities which had been taken over by the Taliban and some of the stories I heard and the women I met made me inspired, some time later, to sit down and imagine a set of fictional characters and the journeys they might take.

Do you write your fiction with an agenda? That is to say, are you trying to create a work of art or raise social issues? ‘Both’, of course, is an entirely reasonable answer.

I don’t want to pursue an agenda. That would imply for a start that I thought I had the answers – and a theme in the novels is that no-one really does. Agendas are too simple. The moral landscapes in all my novels are very grey. There are no good or bad characters. The characters are all people who are doing the best they can to survive and to pursue their dreams in very difficult situations and while they are coming under immense internal and external pressure. I’d like readers to have a sense of the humanity of these characters – with all the complexities and struggles that humanity involves. So they’re not intended to deliver simple social messages – that would be unrealistic and too convenient.

Who are the writers that you admire and enjoy?

I used to love Virginia Woolf when I was a teenager – especially To The Lighthouse. Her use of language was so lyrical and groundbreaking. More recently I’ve really enjoyed the novels of Sarah Waters – probably Fingersmith is my favourite – for their clever plotting and very clean but evocative use of language.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road blew me away when I first read it. It’s harrowing but also a very moving examination of a man’s love for his child.

One of my favourite recent books was Wolf Hall – a very worthy winner of the Booker Prize. She has such a gift for narrative and for character. I felt bereft when I finished it – and can’t wait for the sequel to come out.

Do you feel that any of them influence your style?

I suspect that all these years as a working journalist have influenced my style more than other writers. My writing used to be more lyrical when I was younger and I was interested in language for its own sake. Now I see language as a means to an end, not an end in itself. The narrative and the characters matter and the words only serve them. Journalism also taught me the discipline of sitting down and getting on with it.

Finally, as a journalist, do you think the recent phone hacking saga will make the public wary of the media as a whole, or reinforce trusted organisations like the BBC?

There’ve always been good and bad journalists, some who are very ethical and some who are less so. I think the public has the sense to realise that good journalism is valuable, in fact essential, and needs to be safeguarded. The current scandals are a terrible shock for the profession but hopefully it will lead to wider debate about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, what’s genuinely in the public interest and what is not.

As McGivering says, all her characters are fictions pulled together from strands of reality and this is most evident in the central character of Layla who is presented to us through the first person. The author gives Layla a very convincing voice which makes the relationship between the girl and her family so engaging, and equally evocative are the descriptions of Pakistan itself. Layla is educated as the son her father never had and sometimes wishes that she indeed been a boy so she could work and travel as the men of her people do. Gender inequalities are a central theme of the book but McGivering is able to avoid ever sounding like a preaching churl of Western values who thinks Muslims have everything wrong.

Layla’s father attempts to resist the Taliban but, despite his courage, his school is crushed by the oppressive agents of that glorified crime ring. There are more attacks on education later in the novel, highlighting that under all totalitarian regimes freedom of thought and expression must be crushed in order to protect the thugs who would seek to control every aspect of their supporters’ lives.

Ellen, a British journalist, and Jamelia, Layla’s father’s first wife, are the other two voices in the book – this time in third person. Sometimes it can be a distraction switching between first and third perspectives but one must ask oneself would anything be lost if it were written in one or the other? In this novel the answer is yes, if the novel were written all in third person then we would lose the keen insight into Layla’s thoughts and feelings; conversely, if it were written in first person from Ellen’s perspective this would be too easy for McGivering.

Throughout the book the author builds tension well and the opening chapters are an immediate hook for the reading – Layla’s fear of being seen by Taliban supporters, even on the first few pages, is especially well rendered. The events surrounding Ellen are narrated equally vividly, however, certain plot twists were somewhat too loudly signalled: the use of the character Adnan by the Taliban and the involvement of the sinister aid huckster Quentin Khan, for example. However, Jamelia was another credible character who lent her strength and wisdom to the men of her family and struggles to overwhelm their inertia in the face of the Taliban.

If there was an off-putting branch of the narrative it was the relationship between Ellen and Frank; this felt superfluous to the overall plot and was not required to keep the reader engaged. One might say that this novel was aimed towards a female audience but the lives of the women themselves are remarkable enough to stand without a love angle.

Perhaps the book could have probed further into issues such as equality for women and education for girls but, as she says above, McGivering does not write with an agenda and literature is not an engine for social change. It is enough to have written a satisfying book that encompasses mystery, adventure and suspense whilst making you think – and all set in a country which every Westerner thinks they know, but which might yet yield some surprises.