Counter Culture
March 12, 2020 posted by Unity Wellington

Interview | Damien Wilkins

Interview | Damien Wilkins
Please note:
We are very sorry to announce that the launch event for Aspiring by Damien Wilkins, planned for Tues 17 March, has been cancelled due to concerns around the Covid-19 virus.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Aspiring is on sale now at Unity Books.

 

Read on for all manner of excellent author and book recommendations including a book new to Unity staff involving stir fried dildo. You are warmly invited to celebrate the launch of Aspiring, Damien Wilkin’s first foray into YA fiction, to be launched by award-winning New Zealand author Carl Shuker. 6-7:30pm Tuesday 17th March. All welcome.


ABOUT THE BOOK

An engaging, funny and moving novel about a boy trying to make sense of it all.

Fifteen-year-old Ricky lives in Aspiring, a town that’s growing at an alarming rate. Ricky’s growing, too — 6’7”, and taller every day. But he’s stuck in a loop: student, uncommitted basketballer, and puzzled son, burdened by his family’s sadness. And who’s the weird guy in town with a chauffeur and half a Cadillac? What about the bits of story that invade his head? Uncertain what’s real — and who he is — Ricky can’t stop sifting for clues. He has no idea how things will end up . . .

With sunlight, verve and humour, award-winning writer Damien Wilkins brings us a beguiling boy who’s trying to make sense of it all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Damien Wilkins has published novels, collections of short stories and a book of poems.


WHY DO YOU WRITE?

Help, I need another writer to answer this one. There’s a Seamus Heaney poem called ‘Found Prose’ in which thinks back to his childhood and the arrival of travellers, or tinkers or gypsies—he doesn’t quite know what to call them— strangers anyway moving through rural Ireland in the 1950s. And he’s puzzled by their presence, can’t really understand it. But after they leave, he feels something has shifted in his world – ‘a gate has been left open in the usual life – for something to get in or get out.’ Beautiful! I don’t know if this is the WHY of writing but it’s tied up in it. I think we want, as writers and readers, a gate left open in the usual life – and for something to get in or get out.

WHERE AND HOW DO YOU WRITE?

I’m not very superstitious about locations and tools. However, the south of France in 2008 was quite good. Mostly I write at home. I don’t write by hand. It’s all straight onto the computer. As Amy Hempel once wrote, quoting Tom Waits, ‘Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been.’ Writing this latest book, I had a couple of stints in Wanaka for ‘research’, which for me is trying to find ways to catch a place off-guard. To achieve this, I went out for pizza with some friends of friends who are Wanaka residents and they told me a couple of amazing things, which you will have to read the book to learn about. Still, after a while I saw that the town in my novel couldn’t be called Wanaka since I wanted to shift the geography around a bit, say unfair things, and not be trapped with the real.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING AND HOW DID YOU DISCOVER THE BOOK(S)?

I recently read The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett. I hope people read this wonderful, risk-taking book which did not appear on a certain longlist. Lawrence is insistent in interviews about ‘gripping narratives’ and not letting the tension flag etc. I get this. Yet for me the true dramatic energy of the story comes from the simple-sounding but extremely complicated scenario of a man who has to make a speech using a language which is not his own. I’m also reading the profoundly odd, violent and filthy 18th Century work Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling (translated by John Minford). In the final tale, a wife accidentally chops up a dildo and serves it stir-fried to her guests.

WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE WRITERS AND WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THEM?

If I retain my marbles sufficiently to read a George Eliot novel in my dotage, I’ll be very happy. Because you do need your marbles with Eliot. Even better, it’s all miraculously connected to the emotions. Or her work is about that connection between the brain and the heart – and how to make a viable life through failure and setback. I quickly fell in love with writers who could show characters thinking two things at once. Henry James didn’t stop at two, so I really loved him! And Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Joseph Roth, Penelope Fitzgerald, Christa Wolf, Herta Müller, Gerald Murnane. I used to think that big contemporary novels designed to overwhelm the reader were the province of American males but Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City leave the blokes in the dust.

WHAT BOOKS ARE ON YOUR BEDSIDE TABLE?

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence

The Perfect Wave – essays by Dave Hickey

Complete Poems of Cavafy

Specimen – Madison Hamill

Bicycle Kingdom and other Stories – a Mandarin Graded Reader

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE BOOK-TO-FILM ADAPTATION?

I can’t think of one. I always think of screwball comedies when asked about favourite movies. And I had to look this up because I’m not a film expert: Bringing Up Baby (1938, directed by Howard Hawks) is based on a short story by someone called Hagar Wilde, who then adapted it with Dudley Nichols. His Girl Friday, another great Hawks film, was adapted from a play. In a way, screwball comedies don’t need us. They don’t feel ingratiating. You just keep up with the pace and the wisecracks or you don’t. Until I looked it up I didn’t know that Bringing Up Baby’s reputation took more than 20 years to build and it was a commercial flop. Katharine Hepburn, for whom the film was written, became known as ‘box office poison’ for her ebullient performance. We first meet her on the golf course, and unless it’s a stunt double, Hepburn has a really nice swing. (I read a lot about golf, sorry.) I also like books that aren’t ingratiating and don’t go ‘Do you like me? How about now, do you like me? Huh?’

WHAT BOOK HAVE YOU RE-READ THE MOST AND WHY?

I don’t usually re-read books, even the ones I love. But when I was tutoring in the VUW English Dept in the mid-80s I had to read A Portrait of the Young Artist as a Young Man a few times. This often made me the only person in the room who had read the book one time. The Irish Catholic world was pretty impenetrable to students. As Prof Stuart Johnston used to say to me, ‘They don’t even know what the Holy Eucharist is!’ But it’s probably a very useful book for new fiction writers in that Joyce, the precocious weirdo, tries on various prose styles across the novel – plus it’s a lot shorter than what came next. A few years ago I re-read The Bone People. It’s still a great and free book. I suppose there are bad bits though somehow they make it more vivid.

WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE LITERARY CHARACTER?

Dorothea from Middlemarch. Boa-yu from The Story of the Stone. Both of them are sort of idiots. Marrying Casaubon?! Failing to care adequately for Dai-yu!? Fiction, just like the stories we tell each other, is often about people doing the wrong thing. With George Eliot, as Philip Davis has pointed out, there’s no sense that SHE would do any better than her poor characters. That’s why she’s not the boring moralist she’s sometimes thought to be. Aligning yourself creatively with your inner idiot is a healthy move.

WHAT BOOK HAVE YOU ALWAYS BEEN MEANING TO READ BUT STILL HAVEN’T GOTTEN AROUND TO?

The Makioka Sisters by Junichuro Tanizaki. I’ve owned a copy for years. I remember talking to US novelist Kathryn Kramer about our shared affection to The Man Who Loved Children. Kathryn told me The Makioka Sisters was in the same sphere as Christina Stead’s masterpiece.

WHICH THREE WRITERS WOULD YOU HAVE OVER FOR DINNER?

Angela Carter, Etgar Keret, and Gertrude Stein.

WHAT WOULD YOU COOK THEM?

Something from Meera Sodha’s book East (which you can buy at Unity). I would like to see Gertrude Stein eat tempeh because it’s an interesting sentence. Probably not chicken, about which Stein wrote: ‘Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird.’

HOW ARE YOUR BOOKS SHELVED AND ORGANISED AT HOME?

Chaotically. Or chronologically according to date of purchase.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE LITERARY QUOTE?

Stanley Elkin, exasperated, to his editor: ‘Less is less, more is more and enough is enough.’

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