It was late autumn when I met Peter Fogarty for the interview. The sky was shot through with brilliant hues from the ash cloud high overhead that competed with the color of the oak leaves falling in drifts along Franklin Road in Ponsonby, Auckland. We walked up the hill to Prego for our interview. A magnitude 6 earthquake had just hit Christchurch, hours after a 5.5 rattled Heathcote Valley. His mother, Nan, was gardening at the time of the first earthquake. The aftershock epicenters were too close to Casterton for Peter’s comfort. He knew that his mother had been going inside the house. On this sunny afternoon, Peter ordered his third coffee of the day.

I met Peter Fogarty to talk about writing for Auckland University’s Master of Creative Writing degree, run by Lisa Samuels, Michele Leggott, Emily Perkins, and Stuart Hoar. He had just completed the first half of the year and was facing a month of writing to hand in a draft of 40,000 words of short stories. We sat at a table outside under the tree and ordered a funghi pizza to be chased by a bottle of French pinot gris, Metz’ Anne-Laure.

Peter, could you give me a little bit of background. What were you doing before the course?

I’ve been working as a biosciences editor for the past six years for Dove Medical Press and freelance for OnLine English, and Vikatan Publishing. Before that I was painting houses, making pizza, and working for the local community cinema on Waiheke and I did my first MA English (1^st class) at the turn of the century. I’m profoundly Deaf and I’ve been involved with the Deaf community in NZ for several years. You could probably argue I’ve been involved my whole life. I’m currently on the executive board of Deaf Aotearoa and chairperson of the board for iSign, an interpreter-booking agency. I still work freelance as a science editor for OnLine English and was promoted recently.

In what ways do you think your editorial background has affected your writing?

After graduating from Auckland University in 2001, I had had enough of the academic environment and my reading shifted away from literary theory and philosophy to more esoteric topics, such as Nikola Tesla, Advaita Vedanta. I wanted to work in publishing. I had work experience at Reed, which largely entailed indexing a book about early whalers in New Zealand, and that had put me off the publishing industry somewhat. I wasn’t quite ready for a head‑>desk job.

In working for Dove Press as a production manager and editor I developed a very quick eye to assess the relative worth of a work and in working for OnLine English, I developed a certain precision in editing other people’s work. I learned to be careful not to change the intentions of someone else’s creative work and trying to figure out what they’re trying to say and then saying it more cleanly or directly than they did in the work submitted to me.

Did you find it difficult to reverse the roles?

Yes. When it comes to generating my own creative work content instead of checking other peoples’, I struggled. It’s not like a usual university paper where one can critically respond to an already published text in the context of several other secondary resources. One has to write the primary text.

As such, switching to being a content generator instead of a content checker, takes some getting used to. One has to think and generate the content. My stories have been somewhat varied. Squid Me, Baby is probably the most directly related to the science as it contains a bit of science itself.

I think I’ve picked up a certain boring flow of words due to the editing work, but at the same time, I think this brings clarity to the work.

I’ve said previously that I don’t really see myself as being a writer. This year has served in some ways to underline this conceit. It’s easy to put together words when you know what to say. Therein is the key, knowing what to say. That isn’t easy. And it’s even harder when you’re making things up.

People say, write what you know, but writing what I know doesn’t interest me. I can’t imagine anything more boring than reading a novel about the drama in everyday lives.

Whose work has most inspired your writing, and why?

The first name that comes to mind is Gene Wolfe. His writing is eloquent, and his narrators are unreliable. The words spin out images filtered by the understanding of the characters, and we, the readers, use scraps and clues to see what he is really seeing. So a downed spaceship becomes a mansion half buried in the dirt, it is so old. An immense world becomes a hollowed asteroid orbiting three planets. And a little boy becomes a wizard knight. Just mentioning those pitches gives me goosebumps. The narrative complexity and ornate simplicity of Wolfe’s work is aspirational for me.

Wolfe has said that first drafts are like fighting. I agree wholeheartedly. It’s harder than I thought it would be, to flesh out an idea, to discover characters, and explore their motives in scenes that best illuminate them, without losing your reader with endless monologues or too obscure references. I often feel paralyzed, and unable to put a word down simply because I cannot “see” what anyone is doing. It’s as if I am peering through a bucket with a glass bottom into an undersea world, but some days the tide has churned up the silt and I cannot see a thing, and other days I see everything so clearly, as if the scene is magical and my words turn to ashes in their failure to describe what I see.

Does Wolfe inspire you to write? Who does, if not he?

I’m usually inspired to write for a particular reader. Around 2006, I was writing for a friend in Los Angeles who really “got” me and wrote poetic responses to my work, and I’d riff off them and create something new. I love that sense of play. I haven’t really been able to recapture that feeling this year, though. It’s not something anyone can force. I imagine my ideal reader to be someone like Samuel R. Delany. Actually, I’d be very embarrassed to show my work to Delany, as inadequate as it is when I look at the prodigious output of his twenties. But, as a great fan of his book About Writing, which I’ve read cover to cover twice, and browsed more often than that, I’d love to have one of my stories workshopped with him, perhaps at one of the Clarion workshops, and grow as a writer from the experience. Whenever I reread one of Delany’s works, or his recent interview in The Paris Review, it inspires and excites me to write. I had similar feelings when I read Neil Gaiman’s Vampire Sestina, which you can find in his anthology, Smoke & Mirrors. I wanted to write one! And indeed, I did note down a vocabulary of words that I wanted to use, but as I soon discovered, it’s difficult to choose the right six words for the sestina format.

I see you’re interested in a variety of genres and people, so that probably goes to why you have chosen a mismatched array of short pieces for your projects this year.

Going into this year, I didn’t have a coherent project. I still want to try to write the stories that I pitched from the outsider’s point of view, but so far, something else has happened. Pomegranate was my first attempt to do so. This year, I’m trying to find myself as a writer. I’ve always been able to put words together, and as a child, I was always telling stories. We visited a warship, the Deustchland, in harbor in Wellington when I was about four years old. I didn’t have a lot of language then, but I was able to keep up. My father and uncle drank a lot of wine at the function after our visit and my parents’ advisor for deaf children, Barry Newcombe, asked me a few days later how the trip went, and so I’m told, I mimed them walking drunkenly and laughing by way of my answer. I’ve always enjoyed playing with words. I’m just not sure where my strengths and weaknesses are. I want to find what I truly enjoy and what I’m good at doing. The range of pieces for this year is my exploration of where I should focus my abilities and where I should recognize areas of improvement or weaknesses in my work.

You said writing is like fighting, can we go back to that?

Most of my written work has come in a rushing flow of inspiration. But before that flow comes, I have to think and read and incubate the ideas. It doesn’t serve or feel right to force the work, but this is why I enrolled into the Master of Creative Writing course, to learn to force the creative work, to break the shackles of my procrastinating nature.

Perhaps the problem is that I’m afraid of releasing my imagination, of allowing myself to have fun with the writing. I’m struggling against easy writing. My writing heroes are also people who’ve struggled with something, if it be Delany’s dyslexia or Bauby blinking one eyelid to write The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Everyone has something that informs his or her work. The words carry a payload to be unpacked into the imagination of readers. 

In the beginning, I’ve the idea, then the idea sets its burrs into me, and usually I can’t figure out where to begin until I’ve worked out the overall story arcs and plots.

Do you think that this is restrictive? That if you plot out the story so thoroughly then you feel compelled to stick to it?

Not really. I know what you’re saying, but I think it’s more about setting out the moments, the beats, and then putting the characters into them. Writing after plotting is more about how the characters respond to events. My issue is working out exactly what events would best illuminate the characters. It’s somewhat of a chicken‑egg dichotomy. Which necessarily needs to come first? I see people doing things. Maybe a blur of movement, the wind blowing on someone’s face, or the St. Elmo’s fire is the image that comes into my head. I assemble moments like these, and then hopefully the story suggests itself. If the characters want to do something different then that’s what they do. In writing, sometimes things need to be moved around, or perhaps something needs to happen earlier in the story to give the reader some more empathy with the characters.

Sundancers is an example of this. I’ve always wanted to rework this story but I could never get a critical response from anyone about this story. It was workshopped in a small group with Joe Farry, Sonja Yelich, and Emily Perkins. They correctly indicated that the story moved too quickly for the characters to win their empathy. Emily noted that the characters seemed idealized and superhuman; could they be dirtied up? Made more human, flawed? In redrafting the story, I doubled its length with events preceding the race itself to show who the characters were and their relationships to one another. I’m still not happy with the story and hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to workshop it again with the larger group at some point.

I’m trying to discover where I’m strong as a writer. I’ve tried many different forms and I think I tend to prefer the shorter forms. I don’t know if that’s because I don’t have a lot of patience these days for the longer forms. My reading and work over recent years has largely been in the shorter form like comic books, short stories, and köans. I love mediums like Twitter, which encourages one to think in terms of statements less than 140 characters. So far, I am finding myself still comfortable with thinking and writing in very dense, compact narratives where the reader has to use perhaps a smidgen more of their imagination to evoke the scene.

In terms of the köan narratives, I enjoy them because they illuminate one idea through the location and the dialogue between the master and disciple. I read köans by people like Dogen, Kabir, Confucius, for relaxation. There’s something about reading the inspired words of Paramahansa Yogananda as he riffs on the gospels in The Second Coming of Christ, or Koichi Tohei in Ki in Daily Life, that injects me with a sense of life, and I want to convey or evoke a similar feeling of serenity in the reader with my köans. I think some of them do succeed in that effect, if the reader isn’t stopped by their unfamiliarity with the genre.

Why do you like writing work not based in the everyday?

I most often read for escapism. It doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction, biography, or spirituality, reading is escapism, and to escape, one must be immersed in a reality not their own. So I might go through every cave diving book I could find, from novels like Poyer’s Down to a Sunless Sea or nonfiction accounts like Stone et al’s Beyond the Deep. The appeal is that these are stories of humans doing extreme things in extreme environments. I can project my imagination and recreate these feelings and experiences. In my writing, I always want to transport myself, and thus transport the reader into these experiences that they may not have otherwise. There needs to be a seemingly magical or transcendental experience, like Simpson’s survival against the odds in Touching the Void. Now, I realize the stories I’ve produced so far this year aren’t real-life adventures and derring-do, yet the reader does get a sense of transcendence of their experiences as a human.

I’ve a great love for aphorisms. My grandmother gave me a little booklet of quotes from Lao Tzu and Confucius when I was little. It has my initial drawn into it, a long line with little curls at the top and bottom, with a half circle bisecting it in the middle as if I couldn’t make up my mind whether to write a b or a p. Perhaps I didn’t know which one was right, as b or p look exactly the same when they’re speechread without any sound or context. So perhaps I was just covering my bases. The köans are my way of capturing this childhood love.

I’ve never seen köans before. Could you tell me a little about this genre?

Köans are a very old training tool for the mind. They have been around in one form or another for a few thousand years. The way I’ve composed them are longer than traditional köans, and are more like micro-stories than köans. The form I am imitating is primarily a Zen Buddhist form. Zen meditation is a form of sitting meditation, with your eyes open and unfocussed on a wall. But köans aren’t an exclusive practice. Even Christ taught köans in the form of his parables.

Early writers of aphorisms such as Confucius’s Analects are early köans. Arguably, the most famous collector of köans is Dogen. The True Dharma Eye is probably the best current collection of Dogen’s köans.

The form is designed to awaken the student or bring the contemplator to a state of enlightenment that Japanese Zen Buddhists call satori. They often take the form of a paradox, and the idea is to cause a breakthrough in awareness when one holds both sides of the paradox in mind. The answer is generally nonverbal or evident in the environment, or simply does not exist. The teacher poses paradoxes, riddles, or questions to the student, and the student’s response illustrates the degree of enlightenment or understanding of the student. They poke holes in everyday reality. They’re designed to break habitual responses or perceptions. Dogen said that we must drop mind and body to apperceive. He flings the student over a mental precipice.

I like the way they work in terms of triggering an ‘a ha!’ moment in the reader when they figure out the point of it. There’s usually a point, whether it be the sound of one hand clapping, where the head is, if the head is half full or half empty, where are the faces of your ancestors, or other things like that.

Mmmhmm. This pizza is amazing! Could you say a little bit about each type of story you’ve been doing? What attracts you to each genre?

I’m not sure if I can pin most of my stories down to a specific genre. Sundancers is obviously science fiction, but I’ve mashed it up with a variety of other genres, specifically the Vedic literatures and spirituality. I have a lifelong addiction to science fiction and spiritual literature. My other addictions to graphic novels, comics, and crime fiction come secondary to this first love. Sundancers was a story born out of thinking about the word ‘sundancers’, and in redrafting it this year, I think it has been improved substantially. I’ve had a good response from people whose work I respect. I like science fiction because it’s exciting, it takes me to alien places, and I can forget my life and disappear into the work.

I love disappearing into a good book, but I have to say that science fiction isn’t really my thing. One of the science fiction stories you’ve presented was a script, some people have read it as for a comic book, but you’ve said it’s really a graphic story for children?

Yeah, I did present a script for a children’s book. It was the third draft of the story, which initially was too mature for children. I see this story as falling in between the young reader who has books read to them, and the reader who reads for themselves. I’ve had criticisms that it’s too violent and mature for young children, such as my nephew, Gus, who is two and half years old, and I’d agree with that, but at the same time I remember the thrills I had in reading Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm when I started reading on my own. The initial stories I read were abridged and illustrated, and as you no doubt know, have scenes of violence. The artist that I showed this project to was excited and read it to his four-year-old child, along with some sketches that he whipped up in a fit of inspiration. I think that this book could have legs, but I’m still exploring how it could work. I don’t have children, so I don’t have the ready access to what age groups are into. Some people have said that I am not clear about who my target reader is, but I think if the work is good, the readership will find itself. As a child, I was always reading forbidden books. I like how the FuMan stories use unfamiliar words that are rooted in historical concepts and the play of Nature against the Machine. I don’t think that difficult words are an obstacle to reading, but instead it encourages the reader to go out and explore. I do think a short story should be like an iceberg; most of it is underwater and spreads out immensely in an unseen way.

You also handed in a dialogue between two shop attendants. I wasn’t sure where you were going with this one. Could you explain why you wrote this?

I was experimenting with a more conventional riff set in an ordinary situation, with two bored shop guys standing around with nothing to do but serve customers and talk shit. There’ve been some great projects based on this leitmotif, such as Kevin Smith’s early film Clerks and his Silent Bob series. Initially I was imagining two writers arguing with each other in a university setting, but I didn’t find that very interesting. I’m not very interested in setting stories in a familiar location as such stories usually bore me out of my mind when I read them. As a rule, I don’t really read mundane fiction, because it’s, well, mundane. I think it’s because daily life is so grim, but I do want to write a story about being deaf along the lines of the “family dog” conceit, where the deaf person is among hearing people and largely treated like the family dog, present, but not really participating in the family life. I’m trying to think of an arc that would best illuminate that conceit, because it’s a story that could fit into the genre of mundane fiction.

Did you say “mundane” fiction?

Yes, it generally originated as a response to the criticism of science fiction, that it is genre writing, and the challenge is that normative fiction is a genre in itself, that is, mundane fiction. In terms of science fiction, my story Sundancers is an example of the mundane science fiction genre where the “science” is more fantasy than actual. Could humans fall into stars and survive? Of course not! There is no science today to enable humans to sun dance, but why can’t we imagine that there is? That’s mundane science fiction. Mundane fiction tries to show the world as it is, whereas science fiction, as Delany said in Starboard Wine, is “a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now”. I find mundane fiction to be drearily boring, and Retail Existentialism largely exists as a dialogue because to describe the clothes on the racks, the shelving on the walls, the way a UV tube flickers on and off and annoys the staff, or the snooty customers that come in, that level of detail doesn’t really interest me. Perhaps it should. The more concrete the setting, the more the reader can buy into the story, right?

That’s true, and I’ve found your stories difficult to read because you use words and concepts that I’m not entirely familiar with. I’m not sure if that is a failing of myself as a reader, or perhaps I am simply not the right reader for your work. I see people on Twitter like @rgyatso saying that Sundancers gave him the shivers. Clearly there’s a readership out there who’re comfortable with your lexicon.

I think I’ve always struggled with this. I do like the resonances of the words and situations that the characters find themselves in. The work has to transport me out of my own reality into another otherwise I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything.

Your octopus story Squid Me, Baby did give me a sense of transport. It did feel a bit heavy-handed with the science and it was over too quickly. Are you going to redraft this?

Yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I agree that it has a bit too much exposition, but I think if I develop the relationship between Chibuogwu and Michael to show that the way Chibuogwu is talking is actually just the way her character talks, then the reader would be more comfortable with the edutainment direction the story went at that point. I do want to expand the scenes with the male and female octopus in the same tank, and perhaps make it more dynamic with more of a sense of looking out of an alien’s eyes at a tableau that is familiar to our eyes. I think I largely want to write from that point of view because I am always “other” in my daily life and I want to represent that point of view to the best of my capability.

I found that Pomegranate story to be promising, but you hadn’t really fulfilled the promise inherent in that story. What is your vision for the story?

Pomegranate was the first entirely new piece written this year. I had the idea of telling the story of pomegranates across the ages, how it spread around the world, how it appears in religious iconography and in the earliest records of humanity as a symbol of fertility and fecundity. Obviously, I was hoping that some fecundity would spill back into my work! Initially I struggled with the fact that there was no coherent way to weave the various stories into one narrative. I do want to write in traditional immersive narratives to try to pull the reader into the story. Eventually all the various story arcs that I wanted to include were able to be collapsed into the framing device of an ancient pomegranate tree telling a child about its children, scattered across the world. Through the travelling seeds from the tree, it can vicariously experience all the historical events across the ages, and recount them to the child. I wanted each episode to be self-contained with a story arc, and the child is returned to reality for mundane reasons, but returns to the tree to hear the tree tell more stories as it speaks with the voice of the wind in its leaves. The current draft falls far short of this ambition and I hope to rectify this over the next few months.

You’re planning to work on the Zero-Point Love story over the next few months, aren’t you?

Yes, Zero-Point Love is the main project for the next half of the course. I think I should be able to generate scenes for it fairly easily as I can visualize the world readily. The difficulty is in thinking of moments that move the story forward. I need to learn to ask questions at every stage of the writing. What is Aarya seeing? What are David’s motives? What event changes David’s opinion about the world? Why did Malidoma go into the tree? What trauma could have hurt someone who calls himself a spiritual Master? Was there a fall? How did greed corrupt Malidoma’s friend Lachlan? I want to explore those things and write their story. It’s a story that has been on the slow burner for years. It’s the kind of story that people say that they’ve got in them at dinner parties when they declare their ambition to write the next great novel, and I hope that I don’t fall into the same hubris, because when I look at my own work I see the omissions, the failures, and the ways it falls short of describing what I see in my Cartesian theatre.

You don’t need to be so hard on yourself. You write well, and you certainly have an active imagination! I mean, you’re describing things that don’t exist! That’s the essence of creativity, to turn a blank page into something that fires up a reader’s imagination. It’s not quite like watching a movie, but creating that inner movie in the reader’s mind.

Yes, exactly, and I need to learn where my words intrude and create stumbling blocks in the reader’s imagination and throws them out of the story. If it’s the odd character names, then I must reluctantly change them, or make them more palatable by changing their context. I don’t know. That’s why I am doing the Master of Creative Writing this year!

Thank you for your time, Peter. Good luck for the rest of the year!

You’re welcome. I need Lady Luck to be on my side!

Williamson Ave, Grey Lynn

Friday, July 29, 2011