Standard author bio
written in the third person
Bonus Q&A with myself (from 2024)
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm finishing two manuscripts. One is a new novel (contemporary, with elements of crime fiction) and the other is a short story collection (stories written over the last 15 years). I'm also writing more book reviews and essays than I have in a good while.
Do you write full-time?
No. I work full-time in the climate action/sustainability space, which means I currently write around work and family commitments.
In this context, writing residencies, even short ones like the three weeks I spent at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2024, are invaluable. They let me focus in a way that is not possible to when writing is measured in hours rather than days. But having a life is a critical part of my creative process, too. Three weeks of solid writing would be fruitless if I wasn't full to the brim with ideas (and frustrations) that have accreted over months and years.
Is it your dream to be a full-time writer?
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| The writer in simpler times |
But not having to work for money for an extended period... that does sound nice.
What do you prefer: short stories or novels?
As a reader, I'm consuming more novels at the moment.
As a writer, perfection is unattainable regardless of the form. Even so, I enjoy grasping for perfection in short stories. Arranging a few thousand words, a limited cast of characters and a handful of settings in just the right way seems like something a human brain could achieve.
But writing a novel? That requires an even greater sense of self-delusion. Perhaps it's no coincidence my protagonists gravitate towards madness in these longer works.
Your first two novels both had elements of historical fiction. Is that a genre that has always appealed to you?
Actually, no. I fell into historical fiction with The Mannequin Makers. After finishing the stories in A Man Melting, I started working on a novel that took a character from one of these stories and spent more time with him. I plugged away at this project for quite a while, but always seemed to get bogged down. The novel was set in the present and focused on a dude about my age at the time, with experiences not dissimilar to mine.
When I finally gave up on this novel, I decided that the next thing I worked on would either be set in the past or the future. The future seemed too easy - I could just make things up - and I thought doing research would help me feel like a proper writer. I was also piqued by the kind of historical fiction that was being published in New Zealand at the time, which played up the sense of Aotearoa as a predominantly rural backwater, disconnected from the rest of the world. But that's not how most Pākehā saw themselves before the advent of World War One. It was an age of newspapers and burgeoning towns and department stores. It didn't matter it took the latest fashions from Paris six months to get here by boat, because our seasons are six months out.
So I chose to focus on two ideas that I'd been kicking around for a while that needed to take place in the past, but reflected this more cosmopolitan, connected vision of Aotearoa and devoted the next two or three years to them.
It was rewarding, but also really hard.
It was rewarding, but also really hard.
My next novel, NAILING DOWN THE SAINT, wasn't meant to be so hard. It's mostly contemporary, but does draw a lot on the life of San Guiseppe da Copertino (1603-1663). It was really interesting to write about a sleazy Hollywood director before, during and after the first eruption of #metoo in 2017. I guess that's one reason some writers prefer to stick to the past: the illusion of immutability.
That, and no cellphones.
I can see how cellphones make a lot of mystery plots improbable or impossible now, but they also open up new ways of communication and connection for characters. Some of my favourite books in recent years have been extremely online, like Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This, or phone-y (the opposite of phony, perhaps) like Big Swiss by Jean Beagin or Wellness by Nathan Hill.
You attended the International Institute of Modern Letters MA programme back
in 2006. Is that when you wrote the stories in A Man Melting?
No. I actually tried to write a novel that year — a great experience but I
think it was a mistake to try and write a novel from go to whoa in eight
months. Too many decisions were made for the sake of expedience that then
became so integral to the fabric of the novel that it was beyond fixing (though
I spent another year trying!). The manuscript now sits in my bottom drawer
along with the novel I tried to write when I was twenty-one.
When did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing, but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something just clicked.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366 days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was written or revised during that year. There's also at least one story from this year that I hope to include in my second collection, whenever that may be published.
When did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing, but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something just clicked.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366 days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was written or revised during that year. There's also at least one story from this year that I hope to include in my second collection, whenever that may be published.
Fatherhood is a recurring topic in your work. Whether it's Colton Kemp being a very bad parent in The Mannequin Makers, or Duncan Blake trying to juggle Hollywood aspirations and a neuro-divergent son in Nailing Down the Saint. To what extent is this a reflection of your own experience as a son and father?
My father died when I was sixteen, which may be why the parent-child dynamic is endlessly fascinating to me. That mix of nature and nurture imprinting upon the child, but also the randomness of how these factors are expressed. The futility of trying to shape a child too completely. The slow realisation that parents are flawed and often fickle, and much later (too late?) their noble and tender aspects.
My father died when I was sixteen, which may be why the parent-child dynamic is endlessly fascinating to me. That mix of nature and nurture imprinting upon the child, but also the randomness of how these factors are expressed. The futility of trying to shape a child too completely. The slow realisation that parents are flawed and often fickle, and much later (too late?) their noble and tender aspects.
I finished writing The Mannequin Makers before I became a father, though my daughter did attend the book launch as a six-month-old. Looking back, I was imaginatively projecting myself forward into a state of fatherhood. Before that, my stories had been more interested in the child's perspective ('Copies', 'The Skeptic's Kid').
These days, while parent-child relationships might not feature in the high-concept pitch-line for the things I'm writing, these dynamics will be there, idling beneath the hood and occasionally driving the action.
Please name ten authors who people should be reading.
I don't like to single out writers with no context. People should read widely. Read for enjoyment and to be challenged, though doing so separately is fine. Read local. Read foreign. Read contemporary. Read beyond the now. Read Meg Mason, Kirsten McDougall, Sayaka Murata, Cesar Aira, Jack Butler, Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane, Steven Millhauser, Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, Tyson Yunkaporta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Eleanor Catton, Curtis Sittenfeld, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Andy Weir, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Henry, Beth O'Leary, Jim Shephard, Owen Marshall... How many is that?
Twenty-four.
Patricia Grace, Janet Frame, Iris Murdoch...
Okay, thank you.
David Vann, Sue Orr, Elmore Leonard....
Links
The Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like stink.
This Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing, reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
Craig Cliff on The Academy of New Zealand Literature's website
