Vale Andrew McMillan, Darwin-based journalist and author: 1957-2012

Darwin-based journalist and author Andrew McMillan [pictured below] died yesterday, January 28 2012, aged 54. I received word via a text message from Andrew Stafford just after I went to bed, around midnight. I wrote back, “Holy shit. Thanks.” Then I lay awake for the next hour, cursing myself. I was to meet him in Darwin, six days later.

I first became aware of the eerie reality that I was following in the footsteps of my near-namesake soon after my work was nationally published. Looking at my email history, the first mention of his name is in a note from Australian writer Clinton Walker on August 12, 2009.

andrew,
this is so funny because only lately been in touch w my old friend from bris old rock writer andrew mcmillan, you must be aware of your precedence, and a fine one it is too [...] i had a look ata bit of your stuff and really enjoyed it and wanted to say goodonya and keepitup. clinton walker

In February 2010, I was emailed by the international label manager/A&R at Shock Records, David Laing.

hey Andrew,
I assume you’re the same AM who used to write for RAM? If yes, first of all, thanks for all the great writing that was hugely influential on me in my teenage years fromthe 100th issue of RAM (my first) onwards… also, I’m responsible for a few releases that you may have an interest in if you care at all for the styles of music you used to write about – including a couple of compilations called Do The Pop! that trace the incluence of the Saints and primarily Radio Birdman into the local real rock’n'roll scene in ’80s, and also some reissued from the Hitmen – and I’d love to send you copies if you’re interested in seeing them…
Thanks and regards
dave

Then in May 2010, in an email conversation with Brisbane writer Andrew Stafford:

By the way, are you aware of yet another rock-writing Andrew, your namesake in fact, Andrew McMillan? Slightly different spelling – but Andrew, along with Clint Walker, was one of the original rock journos in this town, and arguably the most original. Started Suicide Alley (later Pulp) fanzine with Clint – the first rock fanzine in the country – and later wrote Strict Rules, his fantastic account of Midnight Oil’s tour through Aboriginal communities in 1986, leading to the Diesel and Dust album. A fascinating man and a great writer, well worth your checking out. – AS

Then in November 2010, in an email conversation with Australian singer Carol Lloyd of the band Railroad Gin:

It may freak you out to know that in the 70’s, Railroad Gin were often reported on by a guy who wrote for Rolling Stone, Juke etc. who was called Andrew McMillan….! He’s now a novelist based in Darwin..saw him when I did a panel thing with Noel Mengel at last year’s Brisbane Writers Festival.

I wrote back, “By the way, I am aware of Andrew McMillan! We’ve not met yet, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.”

The sad reality is that this will never happen, now.

In recent months – having reached a point in my writing career where I felt up to the challenge – I became more interested in exploring the concept of meeting this man, this well-known writer with whom I share more than a few parallels. I knew that he was ill, first with bowel cancer, and now with liver cancer. On November 25, 2011, I emailed him for the first time:

Hi Andrew,

I don’t believe we’ve ever emailed, but I’ve certainly been aware of you for a few years now as we have almost exactly the same name. I’ve been mistaken for you many times! More on me at the web address in my signature..

How are you? Last I heard was that you were in a poor state following the removal of a bowel tumor – I think this is the last thing I read about you, just over a year ago. Judging by your Facebook page, seems you’re doing much better now. I caught your recent interview on the MusicNT website, too. Good stuff.

I wanted to ask a favour. I’d like to visit you at your home in the new year, and interview you extensively. I think it’d be an interesting idea for a young journalist like myself to talk about writing and life with an older bloke who almost shares the same name with me.

Is this a possibility? Is this something you’d be interested in? Or should I bugger off?

Happy to chat anytime mate. My number below.

He replied the next day:

Hi Andrew,

Tickled to hear from you. The first I heard of you was via a flurry of emails from fans who read a piece in the The Australian and wondered what the fuck had happened to my style. I was bewildered. Then in 2009 when I was due to appear at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival I found myself on the bill of a Queensland music festival with old mate Christie Eliezer etc talking about music journalism. A strange call, given I’d rarely concentrated on music writing since about 1985. I accepted the invitation but got no response. Obviously they had the ‘en’ in mind.

I get emails occasionally congratulating me on reviews of records I’ve never heard. And calls from people seeking contact details for band managers I’m supposed to be best mates with. I plead ignorance; they, no doubt, hold my ignorance against you.

That said, I’m intrigued by the concept of a music journo called Andrew McMillen coming out of Brisbane. I was first published in 1975 and got out of there in 1977. Never looked back.

I’m now dealing with liver cancer and all kinds of shit, so my time appears to be short, hence forming a band The Rattling Mudguards and having much fun on the way out.

I trust your transcriptions are accurate so I’d be happy to entertain you in Darwin in January.

Cheers,

Andrew McMillan.

* Patron, Life Member: Northern Territory Writers’ Centre
* Acting Chief Of Staff (1991-2011): DARWIN’S 4^TH ESTATE
www.myspace.com/darwins4thestate
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ryZ36Ts0Gg&feature=email
* President For Life: Darwin Foreign Correspondents’ Association
* Founder: John Jenkins Society (est. Hotel Darwin, 1989)
www.andrewmcmillan.com.au

The Christmas period passed. I finished reading Andrew Stafford’s copy of Strict Rules: The Blackfella-Whitefella Tour, Andrew’s account of the 1986 tour of remote Aboriginal communities shared by the Australian rock groups Midnight Oil and Warumpi Band.

(To further confuse matters, a handwritten note on the book’s first page reads, “To Andrew – welcome to Strict Rules. Best wishes, Andrew McMillan.” It’s for Stafford, not me, but plenty of people thought otherwise when I showed them.)

It’s an excellent read; profound, beautiful, and heartbreaking, by turns. You can read an excerpt on Midnight Oil’s website. Drummer Rob Hirst wrote the foreword for a re-released version of the book in 2008; it was first published in 1988, the year I was born.

McMillan captures the feel of the Australian desert better than any writer I’ve read. For the first half of the book, he refers to himself in the third person, as “the hitch-hiker”. (The book is dedicated to Andrew’s mother, father, and “the people who pick up hitch-hikers.”) It’s a cracking read, and the pace never wavers as he explores the logistics behind the tour, the nightly performances to mostly-bewildered locals, the history of the land, and the people who live there. After I finished, all I could think was: I wish I read this sooner.

On January 2, I emailed Andrew to arrange my Darwin visit.

Hi Andrew – happy new year. How are you?

I want to check with you re timing for my planned excursion to Darwin. Are there any particular days or weeks that we should avoid? My January is filling up pretty fast so it might be best to look at early-mid Feb. What do you think?

He replied the same day:

At this stage my diary is free for 2012, apart from putting the finishing touches to an anthology (selected works 1976-2011) and the live album my new band The Rattling Mudguards recorded in October with Don Walker on piano and the Loose Screws on backing vocals.

Apart from that, everything else is dictated by my health. I’m fairly confident, despite the prognosis, that I’ll still be around in February and look forward to meeting you then.

I asked him whether I could stay at his home, and about the exact nature of his prognosis. On January 3, he told me:

You’re welcome to camp here unless I’m in need of a full-time carer by then. Hopefully that won’t be the case.

The prognosis? They got it wrong last year when they said I wouldn’t make through the footy season. The latest, a month ago, gave me three months max. I aim to beat that. I’ve got a few things to finish off yet.

On January 16, after getting caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of freelance journalism for a couple of weeks, I emailed Andrew after working out my ideal travel dates.

Hey Andrew,

How are you? A quick note to let you know that I’m intending to fly to Darwin on Thursday February 2. Not sure how long I intend to stay yet; up to a week is my best estimate at the moment. I just wanted to check that this date is OK before booking flights.

The next day, Andrew said:

Feb 2 sounds good. If we run into problems, friends within the neighbourhood and without have offered to put you up for a few nights.

I’ve attached an old RAM story from 1981 I’ve dug up for my anthology. I transcribed it a few nights ago. Would you mind proof-reading it for words that are obviously out of place? I figure it’ll be a neat exercise for you, giving you a clean sense of how I was writing 30 years ago and how we move on.

I was honoured to proof-read his old work, about an Australian band named Matt Finish. The same day, January 17, I replied:

Flights are booked for Friday Feb 3, returning Wed Feb 8. Arriving around midday on the Friday. I’m seeing (and reviewing) Roger Waters do The Wall on Feb 1 and didn’t fancy the early flight on the 2nd. So 3rd it is.

A good read on Matt Finish. Had never heard of them. I’ve attached a doc with a couple of comments down the right side, but no changes to the main text. Just a few small things that I noticed.

I was chatting to Jim White of Dirty Three today for a story I’m writing. He asked whether I was you. He remembers your writing from RAM.

Do keep sending through some stuff to read ahead of my visit. I finished Strict Rules a couple weeks back (borrowed Andrew Stafford’s copy) and loved it.

That was the last I heard from Andrew. On January 24, I followed up my last email and asked, “Is everything OK – or as OK can be, given your situation?” Four days later, he died.

I feel foolish for having not ventured north earlier, for not having appreciated the urgency of his situation. Upon receiving that text message last night, I felt immediately that this mistake will be one of my biggest regrets.

I have no idea how our meeting would have unfolded. I was looking for inspiration, for insight; I wanted to learn about writing from a man who has written his whole life. It saddens me that we only ever exchanged a few casual emails. I was looking forward to days of conversation, of introspection, of self-analysis, of advice, of inspiration.

Vale Andrew McMillan. I hardly knew you. I wish I did.

Written by Brisbane-based journalist Andrew McMillen, January 29 2012.

Above photo credits, respectively: Bob Gosford, Glenn Campbell, Bob Gosford.

Update, January 30: ABC News NT have uploaded a fine video tribute to Andrew on their YouTube channel. It runs for two and a half minutes and can be viewed below.

The Courier-Mail author profile: Melissa Gregg and ‘Work’s Intimacy’, October 2011

A short author profile for The Courier-Mail’s new Life section, which is included in the Saturday paper. Click the below image to view the version that appeared in print.

The text I’ve supplied underneath is the full article, which was slightly edited in print due to space restrictions.

How to leave work at home: Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg

If the office exists in your phone, how is it possible to claim the right to be away from it for any length of time?

This question is central to Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. Gregg’s book is the result of a three-year study of information workers – including broadcast journalists, librarians and academics – which took place in Brisbane between 2007 and 2009.

“That question captures the twin tensions in the book’s title: the idea of work being something that we’re invested in, in a way that’s pleasurable, and the way that technology allows that relationship to be available wherever we are,” she says. “Mobile devices are increasingly marketed as this desirable object because it gives us access to every pleasure we could possibly imagine,” she laughs. “The more portable the device, the more intimate the device, right?”

If we’re to believe the companies that market these devices, that’s absolutely correct. Yet Gregg’s book contains dozens of examples of salaried professionals struggling to draw barriers between their work and leisure. This behaviour extends to checking and replying to emails outside of the workplace, in preparation for the actual workday.

“That was extremely common,” Gregg says. “It seemed to point to a sense of unpredictability in people’s work days. We once thought of the office as a mind-numbing routine of 9-5, of always knowing what’s coming, and that being part of the problem. This tendency to check email outside of the office seemed to suggest that, individually, people did not know how to cope with the pace and the unpredictability of the workplace today.”

For Gregg [pictured below], being based in Brisbane for the duration of her study was a blessing. “As someone who’s always been a bit of an outsider to any city I’ve lived in, I saw this as a great chance to look, from an outsider’s point of view, at changes that were happening in Brisbane at that time”; namely, the way in which the city was positioning itself within a creative economy.

This confusing transitional period was reflected in the workers Gregg interviewed. She met a 61 year-old university professor, Clive, who said “I worry that I’m going to miss something” if he doesn’t check his email constantly. “I’m a bit addicted,” he said. “Partly because I don’t want email to swamp me. If I had a weekend off the Internet, then on Monday, I just have a huge inbox.”

Similar anxieties were expressed by Patrick, a 24-year old part-time radio producer who barely sees his partner, Adam, since their schedules rarely align. Yet Patrick admitted “I do get a pang of sadness” when the pair were home at the same time, but both absorbed in their individual computer screens. The author dubs this being ‘together alone’.

Gregg says that maintaining an emotional distance in these scenarios is “one of the challenges of this kind of research, because you’re always needing to retain objectivity in the moment of the interview, and to say as little as possible to affect them telling you what’s really going on.”

She says that “a number of the interviews were quite shocking to me, and did make me feel that there was merit in having people talking about these issues, because they could at least become prominent in their minds for a while, to see just how much they could recognise their relationships had changed within the family structure.”

Though Gregg says she’s “no shining example” in contrast to the work/life issues raised by her interviewees, she hopes that people “take a little more independent action to refuse the pace of their workplace. Teamwork culture is very coercive because of the rhetoric of collegiality and friendship, so it does make it very difficult for people to resist. But that’s not going to stop me recommending that people do it.”

Work’s Intimacy can be ordered via Polity Books’ website.

The Weekend Australian book review: Marieke Hardy – ‘You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead’, September 2011

A book review for The Weekend Australian’s Review. Excerpt below.

No bottom to the naked truth

You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead
By Marieke Hardy
Allen & Unwin, 304pp, $29.99

Life in modern Australia as a hedonistic young woman is vividly portrayed in Marieke Hardy’s You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead.

Hardy, 35, charts her life so far via a series of short stories built around particular themes or events – a friend being diagnosed with breast cancer, her adolescent love of the Fitzroy Football Club, the shame of holidaying with her parents as a single adult – which allow for digressions to help assemble a fuller picture.

We learn Hardy, the granddaughter of author Frank Hardy, is an only child raised by a pair of “theatre folk” whose open attitude toward nudity rubbed off on their daughter. Hardy writes gleefully of informing programming staff at radio station Triple J during a job interview that there are naked photographs of her “all over the internet”. She was married once, in her late 20s, to a man with a young child from a previous relationship. This relationship is mentioned on page 101, then glossed over until their acrimonious break-up is detailed near the end of the book.

In between Hardy, a Melbourne-based broadcaster and scriptwriter for shows such as Packed to the Rafters and most recently the ABC series Laid, depicts what seems like her entire romantic history.

From scampering around naked men in the Fitzroy changerooms as a wide-eyed, sexless child to attending her first swingers’ night, her stories leave little on the cutting room floor when it comes to sex. At the swingers’ night, after describing an excruciating series of pre-coitus conversations where both author and participants coyly refuse to reveal much about themselves, Hardy is confronted with the beginnings of an orgy:

In the corner, just out of view, somebody was already making a spectacular amount of noise on the round bed. We edged our way towards it, stepping over the anarchy of flesh. “I do believe,” I said in hushed, reverent tones to my boyfriend when our eyes adjusted, “that nice lady in the trench coat over there is being fisted.”

Your reaction to that particular image will determine whether or not Hardy’s eye for graphic detail is for you. It’s clear that little shocks the author, and this self-aware, detached manner of approaching her role as narrator heightens the appeal of these stories.

Curiously, Hardy allows some of the people she writes about to respond, with revealing results. At the end of a chapter where Hardy and her then-boyfriend engage the services of a male prostitute, her ex writes, via email: “My only criticism, as a writer, would be, if you’re going to share then don’t hold back. Because it seems you want to share Marieke the caricature, when the soul of the Marieke that I knew, in dark, hard times, well, she was a real person. And a lovely one at that.”

For the full review, visit The Australian’s website. For more on the book, visit Allen & Unwin.

NYWM 2011: A conversation about freelance journalism with John Birmingham and Benjamin Law, May 2011

Embedded below is footage of my first live Q+A event as Queensland ambassador for National Young Writers’ Month 2011: a conversation about freelance journalism with John Birmingham and Benjamin Law.

The 90 minute conversation took place on May 17, 2011 before around 100 young writers at the Metro Arts studio in Brisbane City. I’ve included some background information about the event below. Scroll down to watch the conversation via the embedded Vimeo clip, or read the transcript underneath. All photos taken by Christopher Wright. Visit Facebook to see the full set of photos.

From left to right: Andrew McMillen, Benjamin Law, and John Birmingham.

May 17: Talking freelance journalism with John Birmingham and Benjamin Law

Under 25 and interested in a career in freelance journalism? Ahead of National Young Writers’ Month (NYWM) 2011 – which runs from June 1-30 – two of Brisbane’s best-known (and best-regarded) freelance journalists will discuss how they’ve built their lives and careers around writing and publishing words. Given the focus of NYWM, this free 90 minute session will be targeted toward aspiring (and current) writers and journalists under the age of 25.

John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham) is the author of the cult classic He Died With a Felafel in His Hand and, more recently, thrillers such as Without Warning, After America, and the Axis Of Time trilogy. He also wrote the award-winning history of Sydney, Leviathan. He began his writing career as a freelancer for national magazines like Rolling Stone and Australian Penthouse. He currently freelances for The Monthly and The Weekend Australian, among others. He also maintains several weekly columns for Fairfax Media and his own blog, Cheeseburger Gothic, where he has a built-in audience of Birmingham-fanatics affectionately nicknamed ‘Burgers’.

Benjamin Law (@MrBenjaminLaw) is a Brisbane-based freelance writer. He is a senior contributor to frankie magazine and has also written for The Monthly, The Courier Mail, Qweekend, Sunday Life, Cleo, Crikey, The Big Issue, New Matilda, Kill Your Darlings, ABC Unleashed and the Australian Associated Press. His debut book, The Family Law, was released in 2010 via Black Inc. Books. He’s currently working on his second book, a collection of non-fiction looking at queer people and communities throughout Asia. It has the working title of Gaysia. For more on Benjamin, visit his website.

Andrew McMillen (@NiteShok) – the Queensland ambassador for NYWM 2011 – will facilitate the session. He’s a freelance journalist whose work has been published in Rolling Stone, The Weekend Australian, The Courier-Mail, triple j mag, Mess+Noise, TheVine.com.au and IGN Australia. He has been a fan of both Birmingham and Law for quite a long time, and was thrilled to interview them both in 2010 for The Big Issue and The Courier-Mail, respectively. For more on Andrew – who will do his best to contain his excitement at being seated on the same stage as these towering literary giants of Brisbane – visit his website.

Embedded footage below. Please note that the vision does drop out a few times throughout the video due to battery changes and camera file size restrictions. Besides one small section (1-2 minutes long), the audio from the sound desk remains consistent throughout, however.

Q+A transcript as follows. Andrew + audience questions and comments are bolded; John and Ben’s comments as labelled.

Thank you for coming. My name’s Andrew. This, as you know, is the first Queensland National Young Writer’s Month event. And the purpose is to get young people writing throughout the month of June. These events are to get people thinking about writing, maybe to think about start setting goals, and registering in the National Young Writer’s website. And then throughout June, start writing and talking about writing with the people who have joined that community.

Tonight, we’ve got two guests. To my left is Ben and to my far left is John. The median age for this room tonight is about 20 years; 20.38 I think is the actual figure. I wanted to begin by asking these two gentlemen: what were you doing when you were 20?

Ben: It’s a good question. My math is pretty munted, or at least my capacity to do math is pretty messed up. So I actually did the math and I figured out that I was between 20 and 21 from the years 2003 to 2004. I hope most of you were born back then. At that stage I was freelancing. Frankie Magazine didn’t exist at that stage. I was doing an honours project, the funding for the honours project actually fell through so it was a good year. The honours project was supposed to develop the magazine in conjunction with QUT, and that didn’t happen. So I had to come up with another honours project very quickly.

I was balancing Centrelink, tutoring work at QUT. I was doing some freelance articles for The Courier-Mail, and I was doing graphic design work for the street press Scene Magazine, and I just started working at a bookstore as well. So I was doing a few odd things.

John, what were you doing at 20?

John: At 20 I had made the decision to write for a living, so I started doing that. I wasn’t making a lot. My first year as a freelancer I raked in… I think it was $134. Second year, $235, but I had decided I was going to do it and I would stick with it. I gave myself five years to make enough to feed myself, and keep a roof over my head.

And 20-21 was about the first year that I just blew everything else off and said ‘I’m going to sit down and write my way to a meal’. So my very first year of doing that, I worked out at UQ at Semper [student magazine]. I don’t know whether, with VSU, Semper is still out there, or whether it still pays.

Can a UQ student confirm if it’s still out?

[Audience] It’s still there, but no one reads it.

John: It’s a pity. It used to be really cool. And they paid $15, $20 a story; and occasionally drugs. So it was great. It was a really good way to start because it taught me how to make a deadline, usually with drugs.

Do you remember the first time you saw your name in print?

John: Yeah, it was really cool. It was supposed to be the first issue of that year’s Semper. I had tried to be a cartoonist and hit the brick wall of not knowing how to draw stuff but I did know how to do jokes. So I went into the mag and told the editors in early January or something, when they’d just taken over; ‘I’ll write you funny stories’. And the first story I pitched to them was about late night greasy-eating joints in Brisbane. This is in the days before the internet. That’s how long ago it was. There were three late night greasy spoons in Brissy at that point; late night being after 9pm. And these were the only places that were open.

There was Kadoo’s Belly Button up on George Street, which tasted as though everything had been lightly broiled within Kadoo’s belly button. Lady Di’s, which was a taxi joint, and which, like Lady Di, is sadly no longer with us. And the Windmill [Café], which I think still is. I went to the Windmill to try their wares, and got a big hot squirt of grease in my mouth from a veal and cheese. But I wrote that up, and I put it in.

In fact, it was… I didn’t write up the exact story that they wanted, because the night I was supposed to go out and do it, we had a party and one of my flatmates ended up spending six grand on hookers and blow. So I wrote that up instead. I got paid $15 for it, so I came out ahead. I thought, “Geez mate, that’s money for jam. I’m doing this the rest of my life”.

Do you remember the first time you saw your name in print, Ben?

Ben: There’s probably two stories to tell. The first story I was 16 years old and I had a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine and I thought it was just the best publication out there. It was either that or Juice, which doesn’t exist anymore. And there was an article about the upcoming referendum for Australian Republic and being a very, very earnest 16 year old, I wrote this impassioned letter to the editors of Rolling Stone about how unfair it was that I wasn’t able to vote about this issue that was very dear to my heart. And they took this letter and maybe out of charity, they made it letter of the month. So I saw my name in print and it was the very first time I’d written to a magazine. And I won a stereo. So it was my first byline, and it was a paid one as well. And it’s still the stereo I’ve got now. It actually works quite well.

The second story, when I actually wanted my byline out there, was for street press. It was for Rave Magazine, a music review. And I still remember that. That was so long ago now but I can still remember that jubilation of walking down the street and seeing my name.

John: It’s a big deal. The first time you see your byline, you might have been paid $10 for it, but it stays with you forever.

Ben: Totally, yeah.

Mine was in Rave, too. To backtrack a bit; when I was 20, which was three years ago, the only places I was writing for were Rave Magazine, and FasterLouder, the national music website. The first time I was published was in Rave. It was an indie [CD] review, probably for a local band who probably don’t exist anymore. I can’t remember their name.

My next question; how do people react when you say you’re a freelance writer, Ben?

Ben: It’s funny. I actually had this experience recently at my 10 year reunion. So I went to my 10 year high school reunion and the reactions were quite interesting, because you had to walk around with your name and your job underneath your name. I had ‘Benjamin – freelancer’. The opinion was basically split. Half the people asked me what I actually did, and were excited. “A freelance writer; you get to make your own hours, you get to chase stories that you want!” And the other half just looked at me with abject pity. They were like, “that’s not a job!” They didn’t say it, but their eyes totally did. And to be honest, I oscillate between those reactions myself.

John: Just let me say, Benjamin Freelancer is an awesome name.

Ben: Thanks, John! [laughs]

John: I’ve had the same thing. My writing, particularly the freelance work divides up into two eras: before Falafel, and afterwards. And afterwards my name, my byline became a commodity, and that was what people ended up buying rather than the copy. Before then, I was just a freelancer like anybody else.

And it actually shits me that that is the case, but it was just a commercial reality and I used to find exactly the same thing as you. Because I moved pretty quickly from the fringe of the street press towards the mainstream… you probably had this too. [I] ran up hard into the brick wall of this real belief within mainstream media that freelancers are the bottom of the food chain. They’re all fucking dilettantes. They can’t hold down a proper job. They can’t file. They’re really not good for much other than providing spack filler copy to fill up the holes in whatever publication the hardworking mainstream journalist is there for.

I used to resent that, and I still resent it. Even though now the situation is reversed. I’m still a freelancer but rather than be contemptuous, the mainstream writers that I know tend to be envious because they’ve now been there for 30 years. Their spirits are completely broken, and you know, they’ve got mortgages and kids and would rather actually have the freedom of freelancing, but with the ability to pay for those mortgages and children.

You both have the distinction of being published authors as well as freelance journalists. Do you identify with one more than the other?

Ben: I think they’re all part of the same thing for me. I see writing books… I wrote a memoir [The Family Law] and I’m currently working on a book of journalism at the moment. I see all of that as my job and certainly when I look at my schedule from day-to-day which is all colour coded so I know what I’m doing at any given moment. I’ve got ‘book’ in one colour. I’ve got ‘magazine work’ in another. I’ve got ‘planning for this upcoming chapter in my book’ in another colour. It all bleeds into each other for me. It’s all work.

John: Socially, the worlds are very different. When I mix with journalists – which I don’t do very often because they’ve got cooties – it’s a very different experience from mixing with people in publishing, which you tend to do at literary festivals and after contract signings and so on. That’s a very old-world way of doing business. It tends to involve long lunches and cocktail parties and late drinks, whereas journalists not so much. They are two very different worlds and yet in the course of a day, you might move between either one of them.

One of the things I mentioned is true of both these guys [gestures at Ben and Andrew], is that as a freelancer you need to be an absolutely ruthless time management freak. You need to divide your days up into little ice cube trays of time into which you pop one project or another. You might pop five cubes onto a book and four onto a feature article and two on a blog; save one for tweeting away, or something like that.

Within the course of the day it’s easy to move between those. There’s no real gear changes psychologically between writing a novel, writing a magazine piece or writing a column, because often the techniques are very similar. But once you actually engage with those guys on the coalface of the industry, they are quite different. Publishing is very social. It’s more like a cottage industry than anything else, even though it’s huge.

I should point out that if, at any point, you have a question, just put your hand in the air and I’ll try to notice. We have a mic hanging from the ceiling, but this is a very small room so that will also help your voice get projected.

Can I get a show of hands how many people here are studying journalism? [the majority of the audience raises their hands] Did either of you study journalism?

John: I stalked a girl into a journalism class once for a couple of lectures, and then they called security. But no, I didn’t. I did just the plain old classical arts degree. And I wouldn’t write off a journalism degree, because in my early years as a freelancer – particularly working for Rolling Stone, about whom I will tell you some stories downstairs when the microphones are off – I made some terrible mistakes because I hadn’t been trained properly. One of which ended up with us being sued successfully by neo-Nazis for defamation. How do you defame a neo-Nazi? Let me tell you all about it downstairs.

So I sort of wish I had had some instruction in a degree. But on the other hand; as a writer, a classical arts degree – a bit of ancient history, a bit of literature, bit a politics in my case – it was a great degree.

Ben, you did creative writing, I believe?

Ben: I did creative writing, or as a lot of my peers call it, creative shiting. And it’s funny; when I started doing creative writing over at QUT I think I was the third generation through. It was still a very new course. Creative writing courses in general were very new then. And I had the choice then in my mind between creative writing and a pure journalism degree. I just didn’t think I had the discipline to be a daily news journalist, so I backed off from that path.

The great thing about the course at the time for creative writing – which isn’t in place nowadays – is that because it was a course that was still embryonic and they needed to fill some gaps in terms of what it actually was, it borrowed a lot of units from journalism. So we had this really great balance between reading a lot of novels, learning about poetry, reading books, looking at narratives — long form, non-fiction – and also having to do incredibly rough news writing subjects that a lot of my fellow creative writing students hated.

“Here, write a novel; here, write a collection of poems”. Learning skills like newsworthiness, learning grammar… one of the best ways of learning spelling, grammar and syntax is through a journalism degree because they will not tolerate anything; just not tolerate sloppiness or bullshit, which is really great. And that really put us through the ringer and I’ve always appreciated those subjects that they don’t study anymore.

John: That’s a pity. I’ve done a few graduation nights at QUT and a lot of old-school writers are quite dismissive of those courses. “How do you teach this stuff in a classroom, it comes from the soul.” That’s bullshit. I was really impressed by the quality of the graduates coming out of those things, a little scary actually to an old dinosaur like me.

Ben: Even journalism degrees themselves; you talk to people [who grew up] in the mid-fifties onwards, and that was the time when journalism degrees didn’t even exist. So even a lot of them are sceptical of those degrees, but of course a lot of them end up becoming those journalism academics teaching anyway. So they buy into it too.

I studied Communication at UQ. I graduated in 2009. While it didn’t specifically help me with what I do now [freelance journalism] I guess it was more about writing on a regular basis. Writing assignments – and, like John said earlier, deadlines – are the lifeblood of what we do. Deadlines are really helpful.

Of those people who put their hands in the air before, could I get a show of how many are happy with what they’re learning so far in their course? [about half of those students raise their hands] About half, is that right?

Ben: You’re all going to the same university? Is there one university that isn’t represented by those hands? We’ll know later.

Were you setting goals when you were 20? John, you mentioned that you gave yourself five years with writing.

John: That was my main goal. It was a very long-term one and as a freelancer you need long-term to concentrate on because in the short-term, you’re very hungry and uncomfortable. I just thought if I gave myself five years to be able to pay my rent and my groceries from writing, that would be a reasonable timeframe. In the end it took only three years, which is still a fair amount of time to go hungry, but one of the things that you will find is that there’s a huge attrition rate.

I think there’s 120 of you here tonight. Three years from now, maybe 30 of you will actually be freelancing and five years after that, it’ll be less, because it’s a tough gig in the first couple of years. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do. People who tell you it’s impossible and don’t do it should be ignored, if it’s really what you want to do.

But you need to go into it knowing that it’s going to be tough and you are going to have to survive the attrition. At times, that is going to mean going hungry or skipping out on rent, or sitting up until three in the morning to file copy that you really don’t feel like filing.

[Audience] Not doing a course in journalism or anything like that, how did you find your way? Particularly as a freelancer, not having an employer to guide you, not having a professor to guide you, or any guidance whatsoever?

John: I read a lot, which you all should do. There are fantastic long-form journalism sites now. I think givemesomethingtoread.com and there’s another one I came across today, Longreads. They’re actually worth checking those sites out and obsessively reading them because by reading and studying the stuff that’s published on that site, Longreads, and givemesomethingtoread.com, you can see how it’s done.

I spent a lot of time studying — when I started out there weren’t that many texts. There was Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism. He’s got like an 80-90 page essay at the start about how feature journalism should be done, and about how it evolved. I read that again and again, and in fact years later on when I started working for Inside Sport, when you signed on with them the first thing they did was give you a copy of that essay and said, ‘read it. Make sure you know what’s happening’.

[Audience] Sorry, who was that?

John: Tom Wolfe, it’s an essay collection called The New Journalism.

Ben: Which I think is out of print now, last time I checked.

John: That’s a pity, but you’ll get it out of a library. The essay at the front is the thing you should be reading. It basically tells you how to do it. When you are a freelancer, you are working for these people, you are filing for them; you can ring them up and ask some questions. They’re busy but they will… if they have taken you on, if they trusted you enough to put your copy inside the mag, they will give you a hand. There was a mag called the Independent Monthly which is very similar, or was similar to The Monthly, which was run by a very crusty old guy called Max Suich. The old school journalists there were fantastic. They would take you aside and give you any kind of instruction that they thought you needed, or you thought that you needed. So you shouldn’t be afraid to ask people for help or for guidance. Most journos are pretty friendly and pretty approachable, particularly after a few drinks.

How did you go about making those first connections – in reference to that question – when you didn’t know anybody? How did you start writing for people?

John: You’ve actually just got to front them. Not actually having done a degree, I’m not going to come up through a cadetship. I was kind of naïve, which helped in a way, because as an example… again, another collapsed magazine. You’ll notice this theme recurring again and again; a great mag in the 80s and early 90s called HQ, which really put a lot of effort into its features.

A friend of mine who was also a freelancer – who’s now not – said, ‘look at these guys. They’re great’. And a friend, Pete McAllister and I said, ‘we’re going to write for these guys’. That meant road trips. [Pete’s now an anthropologist, and writes occasional op-ed pieces.]

We were living in Brisbane at that point. We borrowed Pete’s mum’s car. We drove to the coast and turned right, and we just kept the ocean on that side of the car [gestures to his left]. Eventually we hit Sydney, found ACP [Magazines], which was where HQ was being published at that point. Somehow we got past the security guards. We went up and saw Shayna Martin, who was the editor. We said, “we’re Pete and JB. We’d like to write for you.” And she was pretty cool. She didn’t have us thrown out or beaten, and she said, “okay, send us your stories”, as she edged towards the door…

And I actually wouldn’t send whole stories. As a tidbit; if you want to do something for a mag, don’t bother writing the whole story first, because maybe it’s not going to work out for them. Just send the ideas. Send a 100 word pitch to the editor, or if they have a deputy editor, even better, because the deputies tend to be people who do the grunt work of commissioning and seeing all copy. But you should not be afraid to approach people with your ideas.

The thing that you need to understand – about mags in particular, but most publications – is that most of the stuff is turned out by outsiders. It’s either bought in from other services, or it’s bought off freelancers. Most magazines, I’m sorry to say, have a staff of about three or four people. They don’t employ a lot of fulltime writers. Even places like the weekend glossies, Good Weekend or the thing that comes out with The Australian [The Weekend Australian Magazine]; they’ve been cutting back on their fulltime staff and taking more and more freelancers. Why wouldn’t you? A fulltime staffer will cost you $160,000 a year. Maybe they turn out four stories. You’re going to be a lot better off as a business paying someone like Ben or I to turn in those four bits of copy.

Ben: And they’re hungry as well, because [those magazines] come out every week, and have got a blank slate of pages. You talk to those editors. They want quality writers.

John: And they want the ideas too. It’s really hard coming up with ideas as an editor week after week after week.

Ben: Especially if you’re surrounded by the same staff writers. You generate very similar ideas over and over, so they do look for freelancers to generate a lot of that content. They’re looking for it.

You mentioned earlier, Ben, that one of the first places you were published was The Courier Mail. How did that come about?

Ben: How did that come about? It’s funny. It takes me a while to figure out how stuff like that came about. I started writing for Rosemary Sorensen, who I think was the Books editor at the time. And she moved to The Australian, and she was sort of feared in a lot of quarters as well.

John: I have a long-running, very famous feud with Rosemary.

Ben: A tempestuous relationship?

John: It’s good fun, but it gets violent at times.

Ben: [laughs] You learn about these peoples’ reputations. If you don’t know them personally, you hear about them from afar, and they scare you. I did know Stuart Glover – one of the people I was very close to in university, one of my mentors and lecturers – he knew Rosemary and then she came in for a guest lecture. I’m like, “I’d really like to write for that Books column”.

Then what I realised was that she actually moved across the road from me, so we had this sort of relationship where we’d wave to each other, having seen each other at the lecture. It’s like, “I know who you are!” Then Stuart had some words and gave me her contact details with her consent, and I just passed some ideas by her. That’s how I started writing for the Courier Mail. It’s a little nice ‘in’ to my opposite-road neighbour.

I think that every single place that I’ve started writing for the last couple of years has been because I’ve asked someone who I know knows an editor, to email-intro me to that person so that I’m not just some random guy pitching a story. It’s kind of that social proof, where someone else says, “this guy’s okay, listen to him”.

John: It is true. You can find someone – not necessarily me – who will contact an editor for you and say, “this Ben prick, he’s not bad. Have a look at his stuff”. It means that they will go straight through to the top of the pile.

Every new editor… you’re essentially applying for a new job every time. They don’t know you from a bucket of shit. You could be anyone off the street and to be honest you are literally anyone off the street. Any sort of help you can get into convincing them that you’re okay; that’s almost enough just to convince them that you’re not nuts. Because they deal enough with those people. They do.

Were you setting goals when you were 20 or 21, Ben?

Ben: I don’t think it was goals as such. I knew what I wanted the next step to be. I didn’t have sort of a long-term plan. I didn’t think I wanted to write for ‘this particular magazine’ or have a book published by a certain date but I just knew that I wanted to get better, as a writer. To get better as a writer, I think a lot of proof of that is what publications you’re writing for, or what skills you’re extending.

Once I’d written for one publication for a while, I’d say, “okay I’ve got the hang of this. What haven’t I got the hang of?” And try to do the next thing that sort of scared me a little. That was going maybe from street press to writing for a metro; going from a metro newspaper to writing for the glossy magazine that commissioned 4,000 word pieces. Just doing the next logical thing, that’s sort of how I worked.

John: That is the beauty of freelancing: you shouldn’t get bored. You should have a constant buffet of interesting gear to hop into in front of you, whereas people who are on staff, they’re dead in the eyes.

Ben: That’s the thing. It’s good if you are the type of person who gets bored easily as well. If you come from a certain generation like mine that is slightly ADHD and you’re like, “oh well, this idea’s great! Okay, I’m really bored of it now. What’s the next idea I need?” You hold up this ideas reservoir and you can’t wait to go through them, and it keeps replenishing itself. If you’re that type of person… I know there’s this backlog of stories that I’ll probably never write, but they’re ideas that I’m really intrigued by, often fuelled by drunken conversations. Like those sort of Seinfeld moments; ‘why is that?’ or ‘what’s up with that?’ You’re like, ‘that’s actually a story idea’, and you file it away.

I’m going to ask a question that’s on most peoples’ minds in this room; how did you start writing for Frankie, Ben?

Ben: I do know this story, because it’s been asked before. Frankie was a magazine that didn’t exist. I was doing stuff with the Courier and Scene, and still studying at university. I ran into an old friend at a Belle and Sebastian concert; very Frankie when you think about it, a lot of pigeon toes and spectacles and cardigans there. Over the din… there isn’t much din at a Belle and Sebastian concert, but I was like, “what are you up to nowadays?” She was working for a publishing house called Morrison Media, that specialised in youth titles out of the Gold Coast, like surfing and skating magazines, and a new competitor to Dolly called Chick, which doesn’t exist anymore. She’s like, “Oh, you know, and they publish Chick,” and I’m like, “Oh I love chick! I could write for Chick! I’ve basically got the mind of a teenage girl!” She was like, “Actually we’re starting up a new magazine,” and then when she started raising some names involved in the magazine. I said, “I know that person” or “I know of that person”; she said “well, you should come into the Gold Coast and have a meeting with the editor”.

They’d already wrapped up issue one, and I didn’t have my license then so I caught various trains and buses to this obscure location in the Gold Coast, and had a meeting. I realised the editor – Louse Bannister, the founding editor – she wasn’t too much older than me. She was maybe five years older than me. She had a lot of ideas about magazines that we liked or had liked that had expired. HQ was actually one of the titles that came up as well. I was really excited by the idea. I took it home and pitched between 10 to 20 ideas for the next issue. We just took it from there, so I’ve been with them since issue two and it all started with a concert.

You started in issue two; how soon did it become apparent that… I’m sure that soon, the editors were getting letters saying “I love Benjamin Law, he’s the best!”. How soon did you become a ‘brand name’, as a senior contributor?

Ben: It’s funny, if you look at Frankie now, there are no ‘senior contributors’ because we decided to do away with the myth that any of us actually work in an office. Like John was saying before, Frankie is a magazine that runs on skeleton staff. In terms of the editorial department, there are two people. The publishing house provides some sub-editors and stuff but it’s really quite small.

Your question was also “when did people start saying ‘I like you Benjamin Law’, ‘I like you Daniel Evans’, or ‘Marieke Hardy, you’re like my dreamboat’” – which we all think. It’s funny, our editor, what she explicitly encouraged all of us to do was write from our personalities and to write with a very distinct voice. She brought out an American men’s magazine called Details magazine, which is a great magazine. It’s got writers like Michael Chabon and Augusten Burroughs writing for Details. It’s a really well-crafted men’s mag. And she said “Augusten Burroughs in this piece has a very strong voice”, and “Michael Chabon in this piece has a very strong voice. I don’t feel like that comes up much in magazines targeted towards certain age-readership. I want you to start writing about yourself and your experiences”.

And you’ll find throughout Frankie… I was asked the other day “who do you write for?” and Frankie came up. They’re like, “Oh, are you Daniel Evans?” “No I’m not Daniel Evans…” but everyone has the different writer that they attach themselves to, because all the voices are so distinct. I think that’s something that Frankie’s really fostered that’s quite unique out there. You don’t find that much with other mags.

It’s really worked for them, because they’re rare in publishing. Their readership is growing, whereas most are falling apart.

Ben: That’s right; they were on The 7:30 Report about that very phenomenon.

It’s interesting because they’re publishing against the flow. How much of it do you think comes down to nurturing each writer’s individual voice, as opposed to – like John said earlier – how most freelancers could be anyone off the street; anyone who can just ‘fill in the gaps’?

Ben: I think I agree with a lot of what my current editor talked about in that 7:30 Report segment, which is Frankie’s an unusual magazine in that it’s not intimidating. I used to read The Face magazine when I was younger. This magazine that came out of the U.K., very edgy. I thought that was so awesome but I could never ever be a contributor to Face magazine because they sort of scare the shit out of you.

John: I always wanted to do a cover, with just plain type, “Are You Cool Enough to Buy Our Magazine?” “Step Away from the Stand!”

Ben: Totally. I find a lot of magazines I like, I am a little bit afraid of. Like Vice magazine is really cool but I’m not really sure I could cut it with the cool people of Vice. I think with Frankie, it does have models, it does have fashion, but at the same time they’re short-sighted or they’re implied to be myopic. They’re wearing glasses, and they’re wearing cardies, and we’ve got knitting patterns. We’ve got knitting patterns! It’s not that intimidating. There’s this sense of community that’s banded around the magazine that’s made it strong because people feel like they know me, or they feel like they know Rowena Grant-Frost or Marieke or Justin Heazlewood. And I think it’s that intimacy that’s built up the strength of the magazine.

[Audience] I know you talked about self branding. How important do you think social media is in self branding? I know that it shits you how your byline is a commodity, but how important do you think it is?

John: It doesn’t shit me knowing my byline is a commodity. What shits me is before Falafel came out, I was getting probably 25-30 cents a word, which was the Rolling Stone standard. I hope it’s not anymore; it could well be, though. After Falafel came out I was writing exactly the same stories but I was getting $1.00 a word, or $1.50 a word. The only thing that had changed is that I’d sold a lot of copies of Falafel, so they wanted to see if they could access that readership.

I don’t object to it because it pays my Playboy Bunnies and gold-plated hovercraft, but it sort of shits me on your behalf because there’s nothing fair about it. As to go to your question, how important is it, It’s actually more complex than you’d imagine. There’s a lot of journalists in particular who do social media really poorly, who see it as either a broadcast medium, particularly those who work in broadcast media, or just a sort of celebrity channel they can sort of dip into and read Warney’s tweets and see that he and Liz are back on. They see it as a one-way thing, or just something they can dip into and pull out of, not something to be contributed to, which is really the heart of social media. You have to contribute, and you’ve got to do it properly.

With all those caveats however, if you do it properly and if you have built up an audience it’s a fantastic way of staying in contact with them. I do a couple of blogs and columns each week ,and Facebook and Twitter are a great way of telling people that they’re up, and keeping interest going through the day, but also it sets up more conversations outside of the structure of Fairfax where these things get published. The conversations outside are often more interesting than the ones inside. Fairfax doesn’t get that traffic, so they can’t then sell ads on the page impressions. But over time, it does draw more traffic to their site, I think, because people who were interested in having those conversations again do get drawn back the next time I write something they’re interested in.

But there are a lot of traps. I quite like a drink and a tweet, as people who follow me will know. [laughs] I haven’t yet disgraced myself and I don’t think I will because I think I’m across it, but a lot of people would have got themselves into deep trouble drunk tweeting. It can feel so intimate. You can forget that you’re not just talking to the people who are your followers. You’re talking to the entire world.

The Australian at the moment is running an absolutely disgraceful campaign against an Aboriginal activist based on some tweet she put out about [the TV Show] Deadwood. And her account is locked but you have to actually be one of her followers to have seen that bloody tweet in the first place. Actually, not just hers, but the person she was following. In the whole world, there’s probably 200 people who saw the tweet. Is it Marcia Langton that they’re kicking at the moment?

Ben: Larissa Behrendt.

John: Larissa Behrendt, yeah. You’d have to be following both Larissa and the person that sent the message to, to have seen the tweet in question. It is just an abysmal thing that they’re doing. They have just been pounding her about it for some political agenda for weeks now.

Ben: The Australian has a terrible relationship with Twitter in general. I mean, Chris Mitchell, the editor, he’s currently suing a journalism academic –

John: Julie Posetti, yeah.

Ben: Exactly, about a tweet that she put out there. And I think they’ve got a very… not the writers. I think a lot of their writers have been exceptionally great understanding how the medium works and use it really well, but I think there is this guard of certain journalists who resent it deeply, and are outraged that people can broadcast such reprehensible things so quickly.

John: And also I think… Actually, you touched on it there. One of the things they really hate in the old school media is this sort of idea that an actual new media has arisen which is drawing power away from them. It worries them deeply.

To address your question in practical terms though: it can be great. An example: I got a very late stage commission from The Monthly 18 months ago; maybe two years ago.  They lost one editor, which was bad luck. They lost another editor which was bad management… And they needed a cover story so they wanted to do something about the recession which at that stage the GFC was looming like the 1930s. And they needed it really quickly.

The quickest way to deal with that was for me to just go onto Twitter and say, “if someone has been arse-fucked by this recession and feels like talking about it, could you get in contact with me?”. I got about a half dozen people who said, “I wouldn’t mind telling you my story”. They were following me, but I didn’t know them from the next person. Some of these stories were heartbreaking, but in narrative terms they were fantastic. [Note: you can read John’s piece ‘The Coming Storm’ here]

[Twitter] can be very, very useful for that [kind of crowdsourcing], and I would encourage you to think of it more in those terms of being able to reach out with people, rather than to bombard them with links to your latest blog.

[Audience] Talking about The Australian, have you ever dealt with any sort of media bias? Journalists are meant to be impartial…

John: I’ve never been directed to write anything, although I was doing very regular book reviews for The Australian up until I wrote a review recently about some global warming books and somewhere in the middle of it, I managed to sneak the line past their subs, “global warming is real”. Never again have I been commissioned.

Ben: Someone is live-tweeting you right now. You’re going to get sued!

John: The facts stack up that, up until that point, I was getting commissioned. After that – nothin’. But I’ve never actually been told, “please write in this fashion”.

Ben: I’m more of a ‘colour’ writer, which is a nice way of saying that I write stories about weird things. I don’t really have that problem.

That’s not true. You did a political piece on Pauline Hanson recently.

Ben: Yeah, I said weird things…

John: Having said that, though… and because there is a bit of live tweeting – and I can see we’re being recorded here – I’m obviously not going to give any identifying details, but I do know of instances… not so much in politics but in cultural coverage where review sections get framed in particular ways and reviews are commissioned in such a fashion that someone’s going to get their arses kicked in print because for whatever reason the commissioning editor decides that they would prefer to see that arse kicked rather than kissed, which I think is disgraceful. It does happen.

The alternative is, for example in music journalism, when a band isn’t reviewed as well as the record label had hoped. The label’s response is to pull ads.

Ben: Or you can just get someone involved in the label to write the review, as recently happened.

Yeah. Have you come across anything of that nature, John, where something you’ve written caused advertisers of a particular publication to get upset?

John: No, the closest one would be years ago. And this is years ago… I wrote a story about the Institute of Sport in Canberra. It was a puff piece, a colour piece. But it did mention the problems they had with drugs in the 90s. We all had problems with drugs, those of us who were born in the eighties or before then; but the editor, Greg Hunter, who was a fantastic editor, he had the AIS on the phone absolutely monstering him about the fact that he published the thing and saying, “you’re never getting access to our people again”. Greg had been around for a while and he knew that was all bullshit, that eventually the people who had been pissed off would move on and other people would come in and he’d get access. You will find people will try and muscle you out of stories and stop you from writing them.

Ben: The opposite happens as well, I find, when you think you’ve written something quite vicious and strange about someone and they call you up later congratulating you and thanking you for the lovely portrait that you wrote about them. I have that experience a lot.

John: I do that to people actually, when they give me really shocking reviews of my books. I will call them and just say sweet nothings to them. It freaks them out.

You mentioned earlier that the freedom is the part that you really enjoy, being a freelancer not tied down to having a staff role and being ‘dead behind the eyes’. What else do you like about freelancing, John? Why have you pursued it for so long?

John: The hovercraft and the Playboy Bunnies are good. The freedom is actually worth… even before Falafel came out, I wasn’t making that much money, but I think the freedom of being in the role that I was in was worth about $40-50,000 a year, just in terms of mental health. You get up, you want to go for a surf that day; you just go do it. You might even get a surf story out of it.

The constant change is one of the great things about freelancing. You can end up almost anywhere, doing almost anything as a freelancer, as long as you’re willing to push yourself into that. It’s nice actually, once you get a bunch of outlets in your stable, it’s actually just nice working two different people, because Frankie will have a different house style from sort of the Chechnyan brothel chaos of Rolling Stone, for instance. It’s never the same and you do not get bored.

The downsides to it are chasing invoices. I hate it, but you’re constantly doing it. Some of the biggest publishers are some of the worst in terms of the way that they run their finance sections. There was a publisher in Sydney; very large, huge marquee mastheads, and they had a policy in house of not paying freelancers until they brought into their lawyers into it, which of course they couldn’t afford, being freelancers. Or the HAA has it was in those days – the Media Alliance as it is now – which is a pro tip to you, even though it seems to be a lot of money. You might want to think about joining the Media Alliance, because at some stage you will be seeing them after an unpaid invoice.

Do you want to pick up on those questions, Ben? Best and worst bits about being a freelancer?

Ben: Yeah, I agree with the freedom and I think it depends for all of you how you define freedom as well. I mean when you look at if I showed you my iCal, I think my sister screamed when I first started using iCal because it looked like a deformed ice cube tray from hell.

If I average it out, I’m working seven days a week. At least I am in some way or another. Freedom for me is being able to roll out of bed and start work. That also means I start work at 7am every morning and I probably finish around 7pm every evening, but on top of that – like John talking about being able to go for a surf – I can do laps in the pool whenever I want, when there’s no people there. I really enjoy that. Having a pool to yourself is great.

It’s hard. The chasing invoices stuff keeps coming up. At any given time, you’re probably owed thousands and thousands of dollars. I’m not even kidding.

John: At this very moment in time I’m owed eleven thousand dollars by probably four or five different outlets.

Ben: I’m [owed] close to seven thousand. But at the same time, it also means you have a very warped sense of time after a while with freelancing, but you have to adapt to it. You might be working super hard in one week and you’re churning out stories, and the weekend arrives and you’re actually quite poor. Then a week where you’re actually quite relaxed, not doing much work, you just get flushed with cash from all these invoices that you’re chasing. You don’t really have that sort of luxury of knowing when you’re going to get paid and hard work being rewarded immediately.

Andrew: Just on that cash flow bit, for the first two years of my freelance career, I was regularly borrowing money from my parents and my brother. You have awesome weeks or months, and then hit rock bottom, where you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[Audience] With the Fairfax changes with outsourcing subs at the moment, do you think there will be a time where really great freelancers will literally pack up and leave because they can’t survive on the wages they’re being paid to them? Or do you think that won’t happen, where freelancers are not being paid adequately because they’re saying they can’t afford to pay them?

John: No. As I said, there are certain costs involved in having full-time staff on [a magazine or publication]. From the commercial point of view, it’s cheaper to take copy in from freelancers than it is to have a staff writer who might turn out half a dozen pieces a year. They’ll be great pieces, because you don’t get those jobs just by turning up. But in terms of the bean counters running the business, they look at this as: “we’re paying this person $20,000 a story, why are we doing that?”

At the moment, a lot of the doom and fear surrounding the collapse of the mainstream media model actually doesn’t apply here. They’re still making profits and they’re still doing okay. Brisbane Times, who I file, for turned profitable three years ahead of schedule and still are, as far as I know. They will pay you eventually, but their systems are a bit ramshackle. The ones you have to watch out for are the smaller magazine companies.

[Audience] Do you think freelancing is more keyed to feature and magazine-type writing as opposed to something like The Courier-Mail, where obviously they do use freelancers but having staff who turn ten stories a day…

John: I’m not sure what their staffing level, is but they have a lot of journalists there turning out a lot of stuff which never ever gets published, never sees the light of day, and the same problem exists at Fairfax. They have hundreds of journalists filing copy, never published. The chance of a freelancer making it through that is pretty slim. The stuff that they’re going to commission from outside is going to tend to be specialist. I very rarely write for The Courier Mail. I don’t have a great relationship with them. The only occasions I’ve ever really written for them is… for some inexplicable reason, they come and ask me to do something and it has always been a specialist feature. Never any kind of generalist writing.

[Audience] Do you think that if you could do it again, you’d still become a freelancer, or you would go into the paid profession?

John: I wouldn’t go into paid profession. It would be nice to not have had those weeks where I had to go eat the two dollar Hare Krishna meal again and again, but even though the structure of the industry has changed so much and media itself has been wrenched apart by its business model being eaten by Google, I would still work as a freelancer, because that freedom… ‘Free’ is the most important part of that word. It’s fantastic. It becomes your life, rather than just your job.

[Audience] Do you think that online bylines are becoming less credible, and do you think that there’s still a career opportunity for online freelancers?

John: How do you mean, online bylines?

There are so many ways to get your work published online now. Do you think –

Ben: Personally speaking, I would see that as a part of the portfolio for what you should be writing for. I do a lot of online writing for stuff like Crikey, or ABC’s The Drum. But I don’t see myself as just being that online writer. It’s a part of all the whole suite of things that I write for at the moment. I don’t think it diminishes the other work I do, and I don’t necessarily think that people see it as less than. I think they read it and understand that it was probably written in a day because you’re writing about something that’s just happened, and they understand what the medium is, that it’s online. It’s supposed to be more snappy and immediate.

John: It’s an interesting question. It comes down to there’s different types of online. Wall Street Journal publishes online. Your byline there is going to count more with editors than the byline at your personal blog.

But then again, if your personal blog builds up a huge following, like Mama Mia for instance, or some of the food bloggers… about two years ago I got invited as a Fairfax writer to Sydney to the food festival down there, to do a few features. It was a significant year because it was the first time that the festival had ever invited food bloggers. These were people who do not write reviews for the mainstream press. They just have their personal blogs, but they built up their own audiences – and, more importantly, their credibility – to a point where they had to be brought inside the tent. In that sense, the fact that they were independently publishing blogs counted for nothing. What counted was the traffic rushing through.

Ben: Can I say quickly if you are going to start a blog – and I’m not a great blogger myself at all – but you can’t start it in a vacuum. I know so many people have tried starting a blog and are like, “why is no one reading my work?”. The answer I provide for that it’s because you’re not reading other blogs. You have to connect with people to say “that was a great post” and for them to start reading your stuff, or to link back to work. Blogging is a community. It’s not the same model as: you write, and expect the readers to come.

Certainly one of the biggest bloggers over the last few years – who’s stopped for the moment – but Marieke Hardy when she was doing her blog, ‘Reasons You’ll Hate Me’, one of the ways she got so many readers is because she was this voracious blog reader herself. It is a community. If you do start a blog tonight or next week – a cooking blog, because you might get invited to a food festival – make sure that you’re reading a lot of others as well.

[Audience] Talking about building your audience, do you think it would be better to work at Rolling Stone or something, would it be better to come with a big portfolio or a big audience? If you rock and say, “I’ve got this many people who follow my blog, but I’ve only ever written on one blog and never been published anywhere else…”

Andrew: I would tend to say the idea is almost more important than your history. If you come at them with a story idea that no one’s ever pitched to them, and that you can deliver… that’s the hard part. They have to know that you can deliver it, but if the idea is good enough, theoretically at least, they’ll give you a reply and say ‘look into that for us’.

John: The audience, not so much. The idea is almost all-important. When I started out in the Jurassic area of the media, the mission I gave myself was to do stuff other people wouldn’t do. An example of that was going and living in the streets for about a month to live with street kids, because back in the early 90s, street kids were flavour of the month. For about a week.

I went and lived under bridges and on the footpath at King’s Cross and wrote it up for Rolling Stone. The reason I did that was because I knew no one else would do it, [something] that crazy. Some prick from The Courier Mail, I hope it wasn’t you [gestures to Ben]. He got like a baby Walkley once for spending the night in the [Brunswick Street] mall. How dangerous was that? The mall dude, all night! I couldn’t believe that because I’d done the month out there, but the fact… committing yourself to doing stuff that other people will not do means you’ve got that field clear to yourself.

If you have an idea, then you hit them up with an idea. If you have previously published stuff that looks cool, take it in. A colour photocopy of it is always good. They’re not necessarily going to read it. What they want to see is the masthead that it came from because they go, “oh I know the guy that runs that magazine, that’s cool. If you got in there then you must be okay”.

[Audience] Do you have any advice on the business side of things, like once you start earning money it gets a bit technical. When you first make it, you really don’t know what you should be doing. You really need to know in advance….

Ben: Get an accountant, get an accountant, get an accountant. I thought I didn’t need an accountant because I’m in my 20s; who needs an accountant? You need an accountant. You really learn the hard way, and you need an arts accountant. One of the things about joining the Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance, the union is that they do provide you with a very comprehensive list of arts accountants that you can access. The reason you need an arts accountant is because a lot of regular accountants who are not used to the bizarre ways in which you earn money, which is completely multi-stream and weird.

John: One of the beautiful things about being a freelancer is your entire life is deductible. Everything you do can be written about, and should be written about, and therefore can be deducted. You need somebody who works in that field who understands that because it will freak most accountants out.

Ben: A lot of accountants don’t know about tax ruling 2005/1, which is great.

John: I love 2005/1!

Ben: What it means is that you do not even have needed to have earned money in that financial year for those expenses to count towards being tax deductible items. Most accountants don’t know that, but arts accountants do and especially in the case where you’re a screenwriter, you might be working on a screenplay that takes three years, not earning any money off that screenplay in those three years, and in the third year it gets sold to Hollywood and you get douched with cash. That provides tax problems.

John: Let me just talk a bit about tax problems. You will at some point need an ABN, so just go get it.

Ben: You can get it now; tonight.

John: You need it. Once you have your ABN, every time you invoice, you invoice as the entity that has that ABN. Once you’ve done that though, you also need to get yourself a bank account that has net banking. This is really hard, but you totally need to do it. You need to set up a regular transfer from that account to your tax account. The ATO will give you a number for being paid transfers. It doesn’t need to be that much when you kick off. It might only be $20 a week, or $50 a week. Figure out how much you think you’re going to earn in that first year and put a bit aside a month, because I’ve had tax bills that would turn your shit white. The only way to do it is the way that an average punter does it, which is bit by bit, week by week. Do not let these things build up. It’s the curse of our industry.

Ben: You need to talk to your accountant about stuff like super, because you don’t get superannuation as a freelancer. You have to contribute to it yourself and it’s not something you want to think about in your 20s, but I’ve met a lot of older bastards who say “this is exactly the time you need to think about it,” and it’s true.

[Audience] Is the Media Alliance a good place to go advice on those sorts of things?

John: Yeah they’re great, but they do charge you a fee to join, which is fair enough because being great costs money. When I was a young freelancer I used to find it difficult to justify the $180 a year or something, because you might have a year that goes by where nothing happens and you don’t need them. But when you need them, you need them.

[Audience] Just on more technical stuff, how do you pitch and query? No one uses the stamped, self-addressed envelope anymore. Do you still structure it in the traditional kind of way of laying out a query? Or do you just email them an idea?

Ben: Well in my experience, I’ve worked alongside editors in different magazines and I’ve seen the way that they deal with pitches and all editors are different. I think the one thing they have in common is that they’re all time-strapped. They immediately know whether a pitch is for them or not. My advice to my students is: don’t pitch one thing at a time, pitch five to seven things at a time.

In terms of how you structure it or how long they should be, I think one pitch is a ‘par’ [paragraph]; maybe 70-100 words. Within that par, they might suspect that they like that idea or story. The others they’ll discard pretty quickly. They know how to discard quickly, but the other ones, they’ll have suspicions it might be a good story. If they do then what you should be doing within that link is highlighting the text, turning it into a link with some background information so they can do their own sniffing around themselves. You can have a short bullet point list of links after that, see also this, this, and this for background.  Everyone’s got a different technique, but that’s what I do.

John: When you think about magazines in particular, you open the masthead, open the mag; three or four pages in, the masthead’s there. Who are the actual full timers working in the office? Get the name of the editor, or the deputy editor. If they have a chief of staff, take that name down as well. You’ll find a phone number, which is a general number. It almost always sends you to a switchboard for the publishing company, not for the magazine. It doesn’t matter. You’ve got the name, and say “can I speak to so-and-so?”. You’ll probably go through to a secretary and say “I’ve got an idea I want to pitch; have you got a fax number or email I can send it to?”

If nothing’s happening, if they’ve actually filed for that month and are sitting around pulling their puds for a day, they might even talk to you right then. Pitch it then and there, but if you can get the whole thing down to one or two lines for the initial hit on them, that’s what you want. Then if they’re interested, you can possibly parlay into an email or fax that will run for 100-150 words, but no more.

I want to go back to something Ben said. He was referring to ‘one idea per par’ – that’s short for ‘paragraph’. And you mentioned your students. You should point out that you tutor.

Ben: I sometimes tutor over at QUT as well, so I delivered some of these tips in an end-of-semester ‘bonus tute.’ It’s very exciting. And I talk about the tax thing as well.

In terms of pitching, what I do is in direct conflict to what you said. I generally have one idea per email, and I tend to flesh it out into a few paragraphs to show that I actually know what the fuck I’m talking about. That’s worked for me pretty well.

Ben: It depends on the magazine as well. If it’s a magazine that publishes a lot of shorter pieces, like Frankie does, then that sort of rapid fire idea, list of ideas, every issue I probably pitch about 25 ideas to my editor. Some of them will be saved for the next issue, some will go ahead, but she needs that much going on for each issue.

John: It’s always tougher at the start because you don’t know the editor. Once you have a working relationship and you’ve got their phone number, then as the idea pops into your head you ring them up. What you all want to do is get yourself a stable of about eight or nine income streams that you’re drawing on. Half of them are going to collapse in two or three years. You’re going to have to replenish them with other sources.

Once you have that eight or nine, it’s [a matter of] doing the rounds. Once a month, when I lived in Sydney, I would physically walk around from magazine to magazine, have a cup of coffee with the editor and say “this is what I want to do”. Once they know you and they trust you, it’s like easy money for them. “I don’t need to think about that issue anymore, I’ve got that feature”. The hard part is building that trust originally and getting them to look at your stuff.

Ben: One more tip about trust as well, which is a big thing. You are a stranger coming off the street asking these people for work. You need to know the magazine as well, and one of the easiest ways of doing this – and this is a great cheating tip – is that most magazines will have sections, and they’ll have names for those sections. It’ll basically say “culture and style section” [for example] and what the editors have in their room is the layout of the magazine, and four pages for each issue will be that section.

They want those pages filled, and if you can refer to those sections by name, and even sort of know the rough size of it, it demonstrates to them that you know their magazine really well and you know why it’s a Frankie piece and not a Yen piece. Or you know why it’s a Marie Claire piece and not a Cleo piece. Those sorts of things help gain trust, too.

Just on pitching quickly; John, how do you pitch these days? Are you in a position where the editors come to you?

John: They pitch to me. I don’t [pitch]. I’m in the happy position of being too busy. I try and work on two books a year. I may not publish two books in a year but I try to be working on them. I have three columns a week and then two a month for the ABC, and maybe one feature a month after that. I actually don’t have time to think about pitches and sell.

But sometimes if an idea really appeals to me… for instance, [the video game] L.A. Noire is out this week. I love video games. So I rang Rockstar the other day and said “please send me a disc”… That’s the other great thing about freelancing – freebies. They sent me that disc, because I’ve written about games over the years and we’ve had some drinks. They know me. Knowing people is really important in this gig.

At some stage, I’ve got to send a [book] manuscript off. I should be at home working at it right now. I hope you appreciate me being here! Once I send this fucker off on Friday, next week it’s all about the Xbox and I’m going to play my way through L.A. Noire. When I finish it, I’m going to write an essay. When I’ve finished writing the essay I’ll sell it, which means I’ll actually have to pitch it to someone. But I’ve already figured out how to do that.

Ben: I think the great thing that John does – and I think all of you should think about as freelancers or budding potential freelancers – is identifying what you’re really interested in, because everything becomes a story. Every trip you make, or hunches you have, or things you want to explore can be things that are written about. If you’re already interested in it, you’re halfway towards becoming an expert anyway; if you’re already obsessed with a particular game on Xbox, you already have that bank of knowledge.

You’re essentially getting paid to learn. That’s what I think of this job sometimes.

Ben: We’re all in nerds!

In a way, yeah. You figure out something you want to learn more about. You sell the idea and then you work it out. You learn all about it. It’s amazing.

[Audience] Does it pay to be annoying when pitching? [in terms with contacting editors]

Ben: I don’t think it ever pays to be annoying.

John: Niceness is its own reward. I do know what you mean. To be persistent is what you’re asking. Yes, up to the point where you’re annoying, and then no.

Ben: How do you know when you’re annoying, John?

John: When they start avoiding your calls. One of the things you probably need to find out if you have a particular publication outlet you want to pitch to, their publishing schedule. At what point in the month do they just refuse to talk to anybody because they are on deadline and they’re not fucking around anymore. If they’re sitting at the desk for 18 hours today peeing into a Coke bottle or this thing is not going to hit the stand, you don’t call them that week. You don’t call them the day after. The day after that, however, is the sweet spot. That’s where they’re vulnerable. That’s when you get them, so find that out. You’re not going to need to be persistent or annoying on the vulnerability day. You just have to turn up.

Ben: John’s right. Schedules are really invaluable. I’m about to start writing for a new magazine and one of the editors there, one of the section editors sent me these incredibly detailed submission guidelines. I’ve never seen a document so detailed for its contributors, but it’s really great because it shows me the lead time of the magazine so from when they file all the stories, they don’t release those stories until three months later. That’s a sort of rough lead time that Frankie has as well, so stuff we’re writing three months before will show up three months later.

They also have times and dates of when to pitch as well, so again, a monthly magazine will have that one week in the month where they do not want to hear from anyone. Your pitch will be buried because they’re stressed. The week after it comes out, that’s when they’re open to ideas. You need to know that information so you’re not getting them at a weird time and if they do have submission guidelines, read them thoroughly.

I have a horror story from a friend who used to be an editor of a youth writing magazine and they did make an effort to have a very comprehensive contributors’ guidelines. There was this one girl who rang up and was very upset because she had submitted a pitch for a story, or perhaps the story itself, and a week later she still had not heard from the editor and she’s like “I’m going to take you to Media Watch. I’m so upset.” On the contributors’ guidelines it was very clearly stated – and not a lot of magazines do this – but it was stated that “we will contact you within a month of you submitting your work and get in touch with you to tell you whether we accept it or reject it”. Most magazines don’t even pay you that courtesy of telling you that they have rejected an idea. If that’s available, get it; and if it’s not available, see if you can get it.

Picking up on that question again, following up is hugely important. I mentioned my tactic earlier of being introduced to an editor. Even so, as we’ve discussed, editors are super busy and they’re not going to get back to you straight away. There’s nothing wrong with sending a polite follow up saying, “Hey, just following up on this. Can you get back to me? Let me know if you’ll accept freelance submissions, or pitches.” Once a week, every week.

Ben: I’ll follow up and I realise one of my editor’s daughters ended up in hospital and she’s been away from the job the entire week. That’s why she hasn’t responded.

John: That can happen when you file copy. You can write a 2,000 or 3,000 word story, stick it in, and then hear nothing. “What happened to that? It must be bad. I killed you with a story it was so bad!” It’s just they’re busy. Something else has happened.

[Audience] Do you think it’s necessarily a danger to have a niche, or write specifically one thing and to that a lot, or do you think it’s better to cover a few different areas…?

John: It depends on how good you are at your niche. A friend of mine, Simon Thomsen’s a food writer. It’s what Simon does, writes about food. But he’s great. People from all over the world want him to write about food. So for him the niche thing works. For me, I’m not that good at anything really, so I’ve got to spread myself a bit thinner. It’s really if you have something that you’re really good at and you actually have some expertise in it, then you could seriously think about making it your niche, as long as you think there’s enough of a market there to keep a turnover going.

Ben: I agree. Just identify what your strengths are, what your interests are. Like John, I’m not too great at anything. I’m interested in politics, but I’m not like a political animal. I’m not Latika Bourke. But I am interested enough to write some things about it, but not in-depth analysis. I’m interested in music, but I’m not completely obsessed by it, so I’ll write some stuff that I am interested in. If you’re completely obsessed by horses… I had one student who knew so much about trucks. Write about trucks!

John: I worked at the Independent Monthly, the magazine across the hall from us was Truck and Bus Monthly. I so wanted to file for them, but I don’t know shit about trucks.

[Audience] Some staff reporter jobs allow you to freelance on the side.

John: It’s pretty rare.

Do you think it’s possible to even do it?

Ben: I don’t know. I’m thinking of my friends who work full time for The Courier Mail. They come home buggered. They don’t have the energy for it, and the last thing they want to think about on the weekend is what else they can write about. They want to chill out.

John: Even having another job that’s not connected at all with the media drains it out of you. One of the reasons that I, at the age of 20 or something, decided I was going to suck up the poverty and write, was because I previously tried to work and write in the evenings. It was just too hard. You get home and you just wanted to destroy yourself with a couple of cones and some shitty TV, not sit down and have a second bite of the cherry that day. You might well be a machine, and you can pull that act off, but most people can’t.

Ben: It’s hard. I know some writers who were writing a play towards a competition deadline and one of them that I know is a mum of two kids. They’re at the age where the kids need a lot of attention and she looked at her schedule. She’s a working mum as well, and she looked at her schedule and she’s like “you know what? When I take the kids to school, that’s when I go to work. That’s when I do x, y, and z. Where do I find time to write?” What she did for half a year leading up to the competition deadline was simply sleep two hours less and get up two hours earlier and write.

I know another friend who had a full-time job for a law firm, but she also had a book contract. She looked at her schedule and she didn’t see any time that she could write. She needed to retain a day off for her mental health; Sunday was off-limits. She did exactly the same. She woke up two hours earlier, and she wrote the book.

[Audience] On that, how did you make the switch into freelancing?

Ben: I was constantly studying, so I’ve been freelancing in some way, shape, or form since I was 17. I started off with some street press work or rags that were lying around, but I was studying at the same time. The thing is, especially when you’re an undergrad — oh God, I miss undergrad — I just felt like I had a lot of time. I was working but I also got whatever you call it now, youth allowance, and I identified a window I could devote to freelance work, or work experience.

I finished my degree, did honours, and I was still getting youth allowance. I was picking up some more freelance work and then I picked up tutoring. Then I started doing a doctorate and that gives you a scholarship, so I could pay my rent. I was doing my doctorate with some more freelance work, and I got to a stage where I realised my scholarship was about to run out and “I think I can actually hop over to freelancing full-time”.

I did something called the NEIS scheme. The NEIS scheme is for when small businesses start out. Because I was working [under] my own ABN, I’m technically a business. I’d never done freelance writing full-time, so when I was about to make that change, suddenly that actually technically qualified as a new small business. ‘Benjamin Law’ is my business, and writing is my small business. They give you the equivalent of the dole over a year, with which I’m intimately acquainted; they give you that exact amount and they give you business training as well. That’s good because at least your rent and food is covered. I gradually made the change. I don’t think I would have survived just doing it your way [gestures at John]. I don’t think I’ve got the chutzpah.

John: I rorted the dole somethin’ fierce for a couple of years. I didn’t go onto the NEIS scheme. I’m very familiar with it, because the guys who did the Falafel play in Sydney for five years were doing it originally on NEIS. I don’t know that the dole would be an option now because the work tests they impose are really fierce and it was the tightening up of that system that forced me into… working harder.

Ben: Yeah, wow! It worked.

John: When I started out I did have some part-time jobs and what I tried to do was choose work that would either not clash intellectually, like office jobs for instance, you are using your head so the last thing you want to do is come back and think about work at the end of the day. I tended to take manual labour jobs, which I loved. One of my first ones was throwing boxes on the back of a truck in the basement of Rolling Stone. I loved that job. It was just great. Another one I had was at a press clipping agency, in the days before the internet. They used to pay people to sit around reading the newspapers, putting little x’s next to them, and maybe cut it out and put it into files. I was ‘the guy who read the paper’. That was complementary work to freelancing because it was constantly building up your knowledge. As far as possible – and it may not be very far possible – you want to find work that either doesn’t clash with what you want to write, or complements. It’s tough.

I want to talk about the writing itself. When did it first become apparent that you had some talent at this; that what you were submitting was making editors happy, and they were asking you to write more? When was that point?

John: You should actually know that before you start submitting. A couple of years ago, I did a tour with writers, rather than freelance journalists; actual writers, Nick Earl, Sue Gough, young Sam Watson, the poet. We did a tour through western Queensland. A lot of small country towns with audiences of half a dozen people turning up. We would tell our stories. Because we did this tour together, we told our stories to each other. One of the things that was really interesting was that every single one of the writers on this tour had had the experience at some point; somebody had told them, “that’s not going to work for you. That’s not going to happen.”

The reaction to that, in every case, was “fuck you; I’m going to make it happen”. That’s not the reaction that naturally comes to people. Most people being told that they can’t write, they’re not going to make it; they actually fold up like a cheap Chinese umbrella, and give up.

Kate Forsythe, who is a great fantasy writer now, went to a writing seminar with some crazy Canadian author…

Ben: Margaret Attwood?

John: Yep. Anyway they had to submit pieces to this and Atwood reads them, and in a very Atwood fashion, tears them up in front of the class and says “you’re all fucked!” Kate just bristles with fury and thinks, “fuckin’ crazy Canadian…slag!” Years later on, she’s a successful fantasy author. The girlfriend she went with: cheap Chinese umbrella. Collapsed. Put her manuscript in the bottom drawer and never took it out again, never wrote again.

You need to have some confidence in yourself before you start, and you’re really going to fucking need it once you start, because you are going to get rejected. You are going to get knocked back and you’re constantly going to have people telling you that you can’t do it. You need to actually, before you put your fingers on the keyboard or your pen to paper, you need to think “I’m good enough to do this”. You will either have that knowledge now, or you won’t.

Ben: And you will write some pretty shithouse things that you’re not proud of either, but I think the difference is you need to be able to identify that it was bad and to move on from it, as well.

John: ‘Rent payers’, I call them.

Ben: That’s right. You can’t completely collapse. You have to remind yourself that you are capable of good writing and if you do have some pieces that you’re very pleased with and people have told you it is good writing. Put that aside as a reminder that you can keep doing it. This is the literary equivalent of being an actor and constantly auditioning and constantly getting knock-backs as well. You do have to have some sort of internal fortitude about this.

John: Do not listen to people who tell you it’s not going to work.

Ben: They’re all fucked.

John: They are. They’re dead behind the eyes.

[Audience] Ben, if you don’t mind me asking, would you say your ethnicity, or your sexuality actually enriches your writing?

Ben: Totally. It makes it so sellable as well. Everyone’s after an ethnic or gay perspective and I’m happy to give it to them. I mean, the thing about heterosexual white male perspective is that people –

John: Let me tell you how tough that is… White, middle-class male…

Ben: That is a very unique perspective, but so are all these other perspectives, and you do sort of package yourself in that way, to an extent. That lends you something that informs your work. I know that a lot of my stories are based around that stuff because no one else can write certain things and no one can… there are fewer gay people and there are fewer gay writers, and there are fewer gay perspectives, so I can provide that and I’m happy to. It’s one of many, many out there. The same goes for the Asian thing. ‘The Asian thing’; I should put that on my business car. That is a unique and valid perspective, just as all of you have a very particular background and focus in terms of what you can bring into your work as well.

I feel almost lucky that I’ve got that ammo, or background, or a background that’s a little bit different, just as all of you have, by the way. All of you are a bit different [laughs] And I think you all know deep inside yourselves what that is. You can actually use that, especially if you write first-person stories.

[Audience] What’s something that appeals to you in articles or stories that you read?

Ben: I like things that surprise me; things that upend your expectations. It’s why I like Malcolm Gladwell, for instance. You read something like his book Outliers; it’s a book about the story of success. It looks actually like this hideous business book you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, but it’s all about how people get successful. When you look at it from an American perspective, you think about ‘the myth of the self-made man’ and stuff like that. Bill Gates got successful because he’s super smart, and he’s very savvy. No; [the book] looks at Bill Gates and interviews Bill Gates and talks about the fact that he came into high school at a very particular time in history and this particular high school had access to this particular technology, and Bill Gates had this amount of time to access that technology. All these things conspired towards him becoming the Microsoft founder. Those sorts of things interest me. Stories about people that I’d never meet in my lifetime interest me, as well. I’m very people-interested; people-focused.

John: I like people who do interesting things with language. I like to see the English language made new again. One of the first books that I picked up and read again and again was a bunch of magazine stories by a Vietnam war correspondent called Michael Herr, collected in a book called Dispatches and you read this book and it felt like your brain was being turned inside out like a sock because he did such weird stuff to the language that, viewed in isolation, would almost be incomprehensible but viewed in the flow of what Herr was saying it made perfect sense. I’ve always loved that.

Occasionally, you don’t need to do complete gymnastics with the language. Sometimes you just see people present things in really interesting ways. A line from an Esquire piece about professional gamblers stood out to me once. They gave their staff writers $100,000 and said, “go find me some card counters and do good with them”. He said, “I stood there in the lobby of the magazine with a hundred thousand dollars in a briefcase. That’s a lot of money. It had heft. It had possibilities.” That was just a beautiful line, because everything just unfolded from that. So a well-turned line is a thing of beauty.

Ben: One more thing, if you want some reading homework – which I’m sure you all do – one of my favourite pieces of narrative journalism from the last few years is a piece that was published in GQ magazine and is available online for free. It’s called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” What I love about that is what I love about a lot of other pieces as well, is it does have a great premise. It follows on from it. It was this piece that was written just before Barack Obama got in. It looked at why in America, which is supposedly this great melting pot of different ethnicities, why so many of us keep to our own. The writing is so punchy. When you were talking about language; the way [the writer] plays with language and jokes is quite astonishing. That’s good homework. The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe is really great homework. If you want more modern update on The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe there’s a great anthology called The New Kings of Non-Fiction. It’s edited by Ira Glass, who hosts a radio show called This American Life. It’s got people like Susan Orlean, and Chuck Klosterman in it, and it’s sublime writing. It’s really a great anthology.

[Audience] What does it take to be a great freelancer?

Andrew: What kinds of talents or traits are required?

Ben: A lack of hygiene.

John: Obviously the very first thing, you do have to be able to put words in a row, one after the other, in a way that makes people want to keep reading it. That’s number one. You’ve got to make your deadlines. You can’t blow deadlines. Once you’ve been around for a while you can blow one or two, like I have, because you’ve got the momentum of the previously published work to carry you through that embarrassment. It’s very embarrassing, but you must make your deadlines.

You’ve got to be a bit tough about stuff. You might have to actually sit up until three or four o’clock in the morning watching this weird thing that happens at about 1am, as everybody in the Australian Twitter feed goes to bed. All of a sudden your American followers come online. The screen fills up with avatars you’ve never ever seen before. Who the fuck are these people? You’ve got to find out, because you’re going to sit up until that fucking story is finished. You’re not going to be. You’re not knocking off, but you’re sitting there arse to chair, fingers on the keyboard and you are not fucking moving until it’s done. That’s what it takes to be a freelancer.

Ben: Total tenacity and endurance, and a lack of desire for conventional hours. You need to be a really great time manager. If you can’t manage your time you’re fucked. You really do need to segment your life in very disciplined chunks and in those chunks you need to know what you have needed to achieve by that time.

Today I’m writing a story that’s going to be a large story; it’s about nudists, actually. I’ve done so many interviews, but I really needed to have those interviews and all those notes down on the page and ready for me to structure into a story by the end of today so that tomorrow I can actually block out the structure of the story and draft it over the next two days, and then file it. I need to know that story’s filed by then because if it’s not, all that carryover work will bleed into my next assignment and really screw me up. You have to be super disciplined.

John: On that I will give you some take-away. Google up the Pomodoro Technique. It’s a time management technique. It breaks your day up into 25 minute blocks, divided by five minute segments where you can get up, do some exercise, take a break. It’s Italian for ‘tomato’, based on the tomato timers you see in peoples’ kitchen. It’s a time management technique I use, and it is brutally effective. [Andrew’s note: there’s also an iPhone app, which I use.]

Long story short: you set your 25 minute timer, you’re working. You’re not answering phones, you’re not checking emails. An email comes in, “you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize!” – the fucker can wait for 25 minutes because you’re in your Pomodoro. You set how many of these things you’re going to assign to a project in the course of a day. You’ve got eight Pomodoro on that book, you knock them over one after the other.

The other thing you might want to think about: I was forced, about two years ago, to use dictation software. I broke my arm when I was in the middle of a book and the only way I could get copy down was by a program called Dragon Dictate based on the Nuance engine, which you will see a lot of in IOS 5. It’s brilliant. It’s got an incredibly steep learning curve, but I have found combined with the Pomodoro Technique, a standing desk… I don’t sit down when I work anymore. I actually stand, Star Trek-style in front of my computer and I talk to it with my dictation software.

Ben: That is bizarre.

John: It sounds bizarre. Before I did this, I would average about 2,000 words a day, which sounds pretty Conan-like. My average now since I have taken these three things – standing up, dictation, Pomodoro, and combine then – I now do four and a half to 5,000 words a day. I invoice at a buck a word. So, think about it.

Ben: That’s really good.

If you have any final questions, these guys will be going downstairs where John will tell you some stories that he referred to earlier… maybe. There are a couple of things I wanted to mention. In this room next Tuesday night at the same time, I have staff from the Courier Mail’s Q Weekend magazine here to talk about feature journalism. That’s Matthew Condon, Trent Dalton, and Amanda Watt.

Let’s not forget this is part of National Young Writers’ Month. If you want to pick up a postcard on the way out, my girlfriend will be handing them out from up the back. It would be great if you could join the website, start talking about writing, and start setting some goals for next month. Could you please thank my guests, John Birmingham and Benjamin Law.

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For more on National Young Writers’ Month 2011, visit the website. For more on Andrew’s involvement as Queensland ambassador, click here. For the full set of photos taken on the night by Christopher Wright, click here.

For more John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham), visit his website, Cheeseburger Gothic. For the transcript of a conversation between John and Andrew in June 2010 about John’s most recent book, After America, click here.

For more Benjamin Law (@MrBenjaminLaw), visit his website. For the transcript of a conversation between Benjamin and Andrew in April 2010 about Ben’s first novel, The Family Law, click here.

A Conversation With Dave Graney, Australian musician, performer, and author of ’1001 Australian Nights’, 2011

I recently profiled Australian musician, performer and author Dave Graney [pictured right] for The Courier-Mail. His first book, 1001 Australian Nights, was released via Affirm Press in April 2011. You can read my 1,000 word profile of Graney here.

Or if you’d prefer to cast your eyes across the text of our full, 40 minute-long conversation, you may do so by reading the following words. This conversation took place on 11 March, 2011.

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We’re here to talk about the book. I really enjoyed reading it, Dave.

Thank you.

The thing that probably most intrigued me was how you’ve always positioned yourself as the outcast; the underdog. Is that a fair observation?

I’ve been thinking that. I’ve surprised myself. It’s juvenile. I must change that.

Why is it juvenile?

I don’t know whether it’s juvenile or not, but it’s been my kind of reality, coming from a regional area. Often people in music I find have come from out-of-central things; say, in English music, there’s very few acts from London. Say The Rolling Stones in the 60s, they’re often from outer places; say, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield. From other places that have informed their perspective, because they’re outside of the biggest city and they’re also in a place that informs their own perspective. David Bowie’s urban; kind of London. I guess that was the reality for me coming from regional South Australia. And I never got over it. [laughs] You can’t fight City Hall.

Not too many artists come from Mount Gambier, do they?

Robert Helpmann… Max Harris, the poet, had something to do with it. Maybe he drove past one day.

So, you’re following in the footsteps of a long line of Mount Gambier artists?

Freaks. [laughs]

At what point did you begin writing this memoir, Dave? Because your observations and memories from your earlier life seem quite well-formed, like you wrote them down almost at the time or soon after.

No, I’ve got a shocking memory, and I always run into people and they think I’m quite rude because they say “You don’t remember me do you?” And I don’t, and I wish I did have a bit of memory, but I’m told in later life that comes back to you in a terrible way; you can’t remember what you did five minutes ago, but memories of childhood are very vivid. I started to write it down in a book when I was in Brisbane, doing a gig at the Old Museum in late 2009, or something.

Some people have that feeling you have to get out of your normal routine of something to provoke good writing. I tried that. The book’s kind of in two parts; you’re talking about this kind of reflection on my earlier life [in the first part], and then the second part, “There’ll be no coming home,” has a more recent focus. It’s kind of “what I thought I was doing, and what I think I’m doing” type of aspect. I started to write it long hand in a book that I got from my parents’ home; a big old 1950s-like ledger. It sounds very prosaic, but it’s like a dramatic kind of book to be scratching in. I started doing it in that, because I spoke to Mick Molloy, the comic, and he said he never writes anything on a computer. He said “everything looks good, and then you go and edit it”. He always writes on a notebook.

Was there a benefit to doing that for you?

I think you kind of think things out a bit more, and then of course you have to type it in eventually, and do the editing like that, but initially you’re thinking probably in a different way in the old-school, the way people have written things for centuries.

Going back to what you said about having a bad memory, does that mean that the first half of the book is made-up?

[laughs] That’s very evil of you Andrew, twisting my words. No, I focused on that trip I took when I finished school and worked in a factory and then drove up eastern Australia, because that sort of thing was a very intense, solitary experience and that’s always been with me. But at other times when I’ve been in the social world, I’ve maybe been a bit less.. they’re the sort of things I’ve found hard to remember. Sort of intense experiences I guess, and in the first band I was in [The Moodists], I guess a lot of that part of the book is how I couldn’t engage with the world, like many people.

Many of the things I’m writing about, I’m conscious and was conscious that they’re not particularly special. They’re common things, and so I tried to write it in a mythological, mythic kind of way, especially my first band. I’m not trying to be, and I hope I’m not being rude to anybody. I’m just… it was an intense, interior experience, and dealing with forces that are kind of uncontrollable, as you are when you’re a teenager, or in your twenties. You can’t articulate things, but you’re doing things in the heat of action. That’s the way I wrote, in that style.

I remember those things and that’s what I was writing about, mythic things in my life that my life has turned around. And also, I’m not really a huge household name, so I don’t think the book I wanted to write is really a linear kind of – “I did this, I did that, I got drunk with this very impressive person. I thought this, I thought that”. I wanted to write it in a different way.

Had you found that approach when you were reading other music biographies, and therefore you wanted to avoid that sort of thing?

Well, I love to read books written by musician. Wreckless Eric, a British musician wrote a really great one. His name is Eric Goulden. Zodiac Mindwarp has written a couple of great ones. His book I liked is called Fucked By Rock. He’s a great writer. One by a guy called Mezz Mezzrow,  who is a white jazz guy who was a dope dealer for Louis Armstrong. He wrote a really great book called Really The Blues. Charles Mingus’ Beneath The Underdog I really love and Miles Davis of course, with Miles.

I love the autobiographies and I’ve read some books by writers but often they don’t have empathy for the players, and especially nowadays because in every aspect of culture it’s about the audience nowadays, and I’m not happy with that. I think the audience is up itself. The audience needs to lift its game. [laughs] It needs to reinvent itself. Anyway, I’m just being stupid, but I love the writing of Nick Tosches, a New York writer about country music. I love the way he writes, especially about Jerry Lee Lewis. He wrote one about Sonny Liston that I love. There’s a writer – I just read a book about Howlin’ Wolf, which is quite academic, but I fucking loved it because he deserves that really academic, “he did this, he did that with that person” type [writing]. He’s a towering figure.

You mentioned you want to avoid that kind of chronological account of what happened. Were there other stylistic things you wanted to avoid with your book?

No, I wasn’t trying to avoid anything. It has these outlandish kinds of chapter or headings for different pieces, and that’s kind of just my style. A lot of the book is about my style and tone. My music is all about style and content, and the content of style. It’s high-fallutin’ stuff, and it’s loaded, seething with ideas and references. My music’s always been like that, and I just wanted to write in a way, that the flow of my music as well and that came from my life.  I’m talking about the flow in a hip-hop style, because I’ve been writing and talking about things in a non-stop way, and all my songs are quite real and alive to me.

It has these kind of headings that are very much in a declamatory way, they’re kind of silly sometimes and other times not, but I love that kind of talk from 19^th Century newspapers that William Randolph Hurst taught his writers. They always have those little headings, just the old newspapers. So I wasn’t really thinking in a negative way about “not doing this, not doing that”. I just wanted to have the flow, and I found it quite exciting. My book is like a lot of my music, kind of the way I operate, generally it’s quite positive in a way. I’m not, like Father Ted when he won that best priest award, out to settle the scores with anybody. [laughs] It’s more of like invincible, artistic kind of inner juice. That’s what I wanted.

One of the things that I love about your writing is how self-assured you are. One of my favourite quotes is “I think of how consistently great I have been for such a long time and am warmed by my own regard.” It’s fucking great.

[laughs] That’s just making myself laugh, really.

But even if you are taking the piss…

I was being kind of funny at the beginning of the book, where I said that Australians don’t know how to talk about serious things, and I’ve always enjoyed transgressing and saying the wrong things. I think that’s just a case of me doing that again. Because I know that upsets people.

Yeah, and also because it is so rare to hear artists say they believe in what they’re doing, and that they think they’re good. They’re always downplaying their achievements, and what they sound like, and “oh, this happened by accident”. Yet here you are saying “fuck that, I’ve actually worked at this for a long time, and I believe in what I’m doing”.

[laughs] Well I enjoy creativity and playing music. I’ve worked with Clare Moore. I’m very lucky we’ve had a real tight unit playing music. I love playing with my band. [laughs] Playing music is quite enjoyable.

That’s good to hear. Moving on; what do you think Dave Graney means to people? What do you think people think when they see or hear your name?

I don’t know. I don’t know really. There’s a small number of people that really like my music, and that communicate with me. I’m glad they find my stuff and they get a kick out of different aspects of what I’m doing. Sometimes I see… I was just doing video for a song, we’re putting out an album called Rock and Roll is Where I Hide at the same time too. It’s on Liberation and I was looking at myself singing this song and I do do terrible mugging, acting out and being stupid. My vocal style is full of little cries and gasps, and weird noises and yelps and screams. I guess some people must think it’s kind of fucking weird or something, because most indie rock is so – I don’t know – and I do like some indie rock, but a lot of it’s so uptight that there’s no physicality in a lot of it. We just do it. That’s what’s missing in a lot of… so I’ve got an idea what people think, yeah.

If I was to go on, I’d probably hear pretty negative things [laughs] but not much I can do about that.

Okay, we’ll give that a rest. Getting this book published, was that a hard sell?

I sent the book to a few people. Affirm Press publisher Martin Hughes responded pretty immediately. I’ve liked some of the books he’s put out, like an American writer who lives in Melbourne called Emmett Stinson who did this short story, Ground Zero. And also the comedian Bob Franklin put out a book of almost horror [themed] short stories, which are quite fantastic. It’s a small publisher and very keen in what they’re doing, like a small indie publisher. They’ve been great to work with. I was pretty lucky to find them. I don’t know, I wouldn’t have known who else to approach after them.

What made Martin say yes, do you think?

I don’t know. Maybe he thinks I’m more well-known than I am. I don’t know. [laughs]

Maybe he saw “ARIA Award-winning” and was like “yes, I’ve got to get in on that!”

That could have been it. [laughs] No; a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Had you always planned to intercut your stories with your song lyrics?

Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do that, to have that flow there. I’ve always wanted to because they both come out of the same thing. I’m glad I had that opportunity.

Those lyrical bits, do they cover the same kind of chronological period?

Yeah, pretty much. I’ve been writing about the same kind of experience [for a long time], and like you were asking, ‘what do people think of me?’; people probably don’t think of me as a songwriter or anything, more than anything else, and in a way that’s been my way I present myself. I’ve always been interested in being a performer, not just being a writer, but you can’t really… I think you’ve got to be one or the other. You have to hold the pose of being a serious songwriter. Like Paul Kelly or Bernard Fanning… [laughs] Those kinds of serious-looking dudes. I’ve never been that sort of person, so I guess to answer your previous question, most people probably think I’m dodgy and that’s something that I prefer, actually. I’d rather be dodgy than worthy. [laughs]

That’s a fucking great quote, Dave! [laughs] I’m intrigued to know why you always call Clare by her full name?

Sometimes when we do things and increasingly people always refer to Clare as my wife. You’ll find, say, Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth is never referred to as “Thurston Moore’s wife”, or Poison Ivy from The Cramps is never referred to as “Lux Interior’s wife”. It’s giving Clare her formal address.

Cool. Does she call you Dave Graney?

[laughs] If she writes a book, she might well do that. [laughs]

I saw your interview with Australian Bookseller where you said “A lot of the book is about where I copped my tone. Tone is everything in music and writing.” I’m interested to know when you had that realisation.

Pretty early on. I loved the tone, but I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t get the remove that a lot of my favourite American artists had, like Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, George Jones, Hank Willams, Alan Vega and all of them; they just had this easy tone. I discovered that, like anything, it takes a bit of living to get perspective, to find your own voice and that kind of thing, which is annoying to a teen or twenty-something; your gaze at the world is intense and narrow. You want to say things, but it just comes out in a squeaky kind of way, which makes you even more uptight. But I love that kind of thing.

Rappers, I love. I love different kinds of feel that rappers have, the things they can talk about, and I guess that’s the setting of the music. I love rap music when they just disrespect each other and that, but it never happens in rock music. I wish it did but – it’d probably make rock music go a bit faster if the guy from Jet would come out and call the guy from Wolfmother a dick, in their songs, and they’d have to answer each other. It’d make it go a bit faster. Rock music has pretty much been dead for years, but it’s fuckin’ slow. I mean, they’re still going on about Eric Clapton, and Leonard Fucking Cohen. Christ.

I’m probably not the first to admit surprise at the fact that you are a big hip-hop fan. That really comes across in the book, which I think is cool.

Oh, good. Most really good rock music is informed by hip-hop. When The Black Keys programmed rage, it was all hip-hop.

In that same interview with Australian Bookseller, I saw you say that the upcoming greatest hits re-recorded is your “third debut album”. What did you mean by that; third time lucky?

No, when you do your first record of songs, playing for a long time, you know it inside out, you just go in, they turn on the tapes, and you just yell it onto there. That’s it. There’s no second guessing or worrying, or anything. This record for Liberation is songs that we’ve been playing in our live set because we had the idea for years, the idea that people wanted to hear them, or that come, or ‘we haven’t been to this place for a while – we should play this. People expect us to do this’. Other songs that we just enjoy playing, and songs that we’ve only started playing recently.

So in a way they’re remixes inside a different band, and over time, and so we just talked with Liberation. They do albums for artists’ back catalogue material. We’ve always had a band. I’ve never done many… I do some acoustic guitar gigs, but I don’t enjoy them as much as playing with my band. We said, ‘we’ll record with our band but we’ll just make a rock and roll record’, and we go in and record it all together and it was just like doing a first record. I did one with The Moodists, and one with The Coral Snakes. This is the third one.

I’m looking at the book’s cover [pictured right]. Who did the cover art?

Tony Mahoney, who’s done all of our record covers going back to 1989.

It’s an interesting style. It looks like it’s cut and pasted it all together.

He doesn’t do it in Photoshop. It’s all hand-done.

I found it interesting in the book, how there are very few mentions of you in solitude writing lyrics or practicing guitar – the activities which are fundamentals for any working musician. Did you leave that out on purpose?

Yeah, it would have been pretty boring. If I talk about writing lyrics or whatever, yeah. I did do it pretty quickly. I’m always just sitting around goofing around on a guitar anyway, so that’s what I do most of the time. Writing lyrics or putting songs together is pretty quick for me and generally I don’t sweat over it too much, not like… who were the worthy types who wrote for days? [laughs]. I’m not like that. I like to have a bit of an immediate flash, it’s what I go for.

It sounds stupid, like if it sounds familiar it must be good, if somebody else has done it. [laughs] I had to do this thing about clothes here in Melbourne. I was involved in this art exhibition of men’s clothes for some reason, and I had to get my picture taken. I said, “I only wear shit that other people have already worn.” [laughs] And they’ve taken the flak for it. I realised in a way my approach to music’s been a bit like that too. I know people can’t hear things that they aren’t already aware of, and they can’t see things that they don’t know they’re looking for, if you know what I mean. So you have to work in forms or words that people are familiar with in a way. That’s my great revelation of recent weeks. [laughs] My approach to music is the way I dress.

There’s a quote in the book where you say you’re talking about the present, you say it’s “a time where the most successful musical acts have no individual definition or focus or personality. People want what they know.” Is that tied to the same kind of thing you’re just talking about?

Yeah, people will try to disappear into generic forms, so they have no individuality. I’m dealing with the same thing like any musician. You have to be recognisably something as well as recognisably yourself. One or the other perhaps, I don’t know, but yeah. Say if I do a gig with an acoustic guitar, acoustic guitar means you’re going to tell the truth. If you wear an electric guitar, it means you’re a liar. [laughs]

Really? Did you just come up with that on the spot?

No, I generally think that. And I do like to play electric guitar [laughs].

That’s great. With the tour diary bits, was it the intention to give a glimpse inside the life of a touring musician?

With the Nick Cave ones?

And the Henry Wagons ones.

A little bit of that, I like the writing I did with Henry Wagons, because I could portray him as kind of my ‘straight man’ in a way, and I really get on well with Henry and I love his music and his ambition. I hope that Wagons really kick it with this album they’re putting out. The Bad Seeds are old friends in a way but in such a different… Nick Cave’s in such a different kind of universe to one I work in. I just thought it was interesting. We were opening for them in Europe and were playing a delicate kind of vibraphone-based, 12 string set to these fucking mad Spaniards. Spanish only like… they’re not very lyrical types, but they just love the flash and the loud noises and everything. Even Nick was breathing a sigh of relief when they got to an English-speaking country. So we have many different relations with people within Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, going back to the beginnings of our kind of work in music. I thought there might be some interesting parts to it, including the deluded bits of my own bullshit.

You’re right, it is interesting. It’s good stuff. I like Nick’s quote on the front cover of the book.

That was very generous of him.

Very generous, yes. “Pure genius,” he said. To which you replied, “thank you, Nick.”

[laughs] Yeah.

So what really surprised me was how the narrative accelerates in the last five pages. Everything up until then had been pretty slow; you talking about your life from an almost emotionally detached perspective, and then it all kind of fell out of you in the most gripping way. It really took me by surprise, and I liked that because I had you pinned down as this too-cool-for-school cat, always making sardonic remarks and dry observations, and then you collapsed that perception in a few hundred words.

Oh, thank you. Well, that was very real. [It was a] full stop to a couple of lines. Yes, it was a very difficult period.

Is that why you were so brief in your description of it, because you didn’t want to dwell on it?

Of my parents and that, do you mean?

Yes.

Yeah, well in a way they’re also intensely private people, too. They’re from that generation [where] if you got your name in the paper it meant you were in trouble with the law. Living in the country, too; country people fucking love their privacy. I would never write anything, would never write anything personal about them [laughs]. I could imagine if they were alive reading something like that, they would hate it.

You’re going to be in the paper with this interview and you’re not going to be in trouble with the law, so that’s positive.

[laughs] Good.

One of my favourite quotes about your early career is that “everything asked should be poor, dirty, and ugly.” Does that still ring true, Dave?

[laughs] Poor, dirty, and ugly – yeah, I’m getting uglier yeah. Poor, yeah. That was someone else [saying] that everything an artist should be – poor, dirty, and ugly.

Ah, that’s right. My apologies.

That’s alright. [laughs]

Do you relate to that concept?

That’s from the song Night Of The Wolverine, a character is talking to someone who thinks that’s what an artist should be, poor, dirty, and ugly. No, I think artists should be sometimes lucky, as well [laughs] You know, rewarded for the hell of it occasionally. I don’t like artists, rock and roll people going on about how miserable they are most of the time, and talking about how stoned they are, and how hungover they are. I find all that stuff pretty boring, and always have.

I mean, I used to be a big drinker. I was a great drinker. I was one of the best! [laughs] But it got a bit boring and I moved to a place where I had to do lots of driving so I just got out of the habit. But there’s some people who write about music are always cheering on rock and roll types. I call them rock and roll dopes really; rock and roll chumps. I’m not really interested. I love the company of musicians, but I don’t like those types that are very unfocused, the kind who need to be standing on the table, shouting, and dancing all the time. I’m not that type. I feel like they’re a bit boring to hang around.

What keeps you going, Dave?

What keeps me going? I’m very interested in… I really like to play music, and it’s quite simple. I’m very involved in different things. I used to be just a stand up singer, and I used to enjoy that gladiatorial type thing and then just standing there with the band behind me and singing and being a wise guy, then I started to play guitar as a performer and increasingly started to enjoy that. The two players we have, me and Clare, we play with Stu Thomas and Stu Perera. I love their company and playing with them. They’re really great musicians. I do enjoy that a lot.

I guess presenting things like records to the world; somebody described it as a leap into the void, that an artist is compelled to take. Eventually artists get tired of doing that. They get exhausted, but I’m still quite excited by doing that kind of thing. I must say putting a book out is quite a different thing because it’s much more of a static thing that people can approach, and that’s different to a recording. I don’t know whether… I think that’s a new thing for me, so this is a bit of a leaping into the void that I’ve never experienced before. It’ll probably be the only kind autobiographical thing I’ll ever be doing! [laughs]

I hope it’s a successful leap into the void, Dave.

Yeah. [laughs]

Based on what I’ve read, I can confirm it is good. Hopefully other people feel that way too.

Oh, thanks Andrew, I appreciate that.

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For more Dave Graney, follow him on Twitter or visit his website. The music video for his song ‘Knock Yourself Out‘ is embedded below.

A Conversation With Neil Strauss, New York Times bestselling author, 2011

Almost two years ago, I traveled from Brisbane to Sydney to meet Neil Strauss – my favourite writer [pictured right] – for a face-to-face interview. It was a life-changing experience, and that’s no exaggeration: being in his presence solidified my decision to seriously pursue journalism. (Up until that point, I’d only dabbled; the interview was ostensibly for FourThousand.com.au, a Brisbane-focused online publication). That meeting, and our resultant conversation, is documented in full here.

This time around, when Neil’s new book Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead – a collection of enlightening and revealing moments taken from his 3000+ interviews with cultural figures for Rolling Stone and The New York Times – appeared on Text Publishing’s Australian release schedule, I was in the position to get paid to interview my favourite writer, rather than spending a few hundred dollars on travel for the same opportunity. Which is nice.

I interviewed Neil over the phone from his home in California for The Courier-Mail in early March 2011, before the book was released. I published a 800 word article here, which summarised our 45 minute conversation.

Our full interview transcript is included below.

Beware: throughout our interview, there are many references to the content of …When You’re Dead, so if you haven’t read it yet, you might want to avoid reading this interview. Maybe not.

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Firstly, I want to talk about the final chapter of the book, and the epilogue. I thought it was a very touching note to end on; it wrapped everything up nicely. It made me wonder; was that section about [American rock and folk music critic] Paul Nelson always going to close the book? [Note: Nelson died in 2006 due to apparent starvation. Strauss wrote a feature for Rolling Stone about his death, called "The Man Who Disappeared"; in When You're Dead, he says it was the hardest article he's ever had to write.]

No. I don’t think any book is ever planned. It always sort of just happens. I guess I knew I wanted the last section to be about family and mortality, and I felt I put so much heart and time into the Paul Nelson piece, it seems like a fitting epilogue for the book. And it rolled so nicely into the actual epilogue. I knew that each section was going to have a theme, and the last section was really going to look at mortality around different angles, in a parallex way. That got more appropriate there. It just sort of landed there.

When I’m writing, I never think in advance. I just keep hammering and hammering. They’re like puzzles. You’re putting everything together and you keep rearranging until you feel that it’s right.

Something that Paul’s ex-wife said made me think of you, Neil. She said, “I found out more about him by reading what he wrote.” I wondered if you’d ever heard the same thing from those close to you.

[laughs] You know what? That’s such a good comment. I’ve never heard that, but I know it’s 100% true. One hundred per cent true.There are things that I can’t tell people face-to-face, whether they’re just friends of mine, or people I love who are close to my life, yet for some reason I’m not afraid to write about them, even though I know they’ll see ‘em.

Even the stuff in The Game, I’ve never told people because I was worried they would judge me. The stuff in Rules Of The Game, in that first story about that really, really old woman. My friends would have just ripped… it would have been publicly humiliating. But I guess I feel if I can write it I can really explain it fully, all the dimensions to it and I can make sure it’s said right, and comes out right.

That way I can say it the best way I can possibly say it. It’s so true. It’s interesting. It might be something… I just interviewed Howard Stern for Rolling Stone, and I realised what we have in common. It’s hard sometimes to communicate the truth, as a guy like me, because it’s hard to deal with peoples’ emotions. If you say something that affects someone you have to deal with their emotional reaction to it. And maybe in a book, as horrible as this sounds, no-one is talking back to you, to that idea. No-one is saying that it’s wrong or that it hurts them, or is an unhealthy way to think, or it’s a judgmental thing to say, or whatever. It’s a semi-one-way conversation. I’m speaking to a bunch of people, but they’re sort of a faceless, invisible mob.

I see what you mean. Most journalists I know admit to feeling guilty for drilling into peoples’ minds to make their stories public. I’d like to know your take on that.

I never feel guilty, because I never try to hurt anybody with a story. I’ve never been a gossip reporter. I’ve never sat outside somebody’s house chasing them. Everything I’ve ever written, at least in journalism, is in the context of, you know, “I’m here to write a story, and anything you say or do can end up in that story”. So they’re making the choices. I’ve never tried to assassinate anyone. I’m always trying to show them as they are.

Sometimes I feel guilty in the sense of after we did this interview; say I spent a long time with this musician, and I’m leaving with four hours of recordings of them spilling their soul to me, and all of a sudden it’s like, “thank you very much, good-bye”, and I’m just walking away with their soul on a tape, to some degree. They have nothing. That part always feels strange to me, like having sex with someone, then pulling out and running away.

The fact that you’re working with ‘household names’ most of the time, does that increase the guilt, knowing that you’re exposing them even further?

No. I would feel that with anyone. If I’d just interviewed a guy off the street for four hours, or for a day or a week, about their inner most thoughts and fears; their life, their insecurities, and their hopes and dreams and ambitions, and then I just walked away… I’d still feel horrible, because they have nothing. I’ve got this tape recorder that has everything. It’s a feeling of: I’ve taken something and I’ve walked away with it, and what do they have? Nothing.

Even though that’s not how it works – obviously they have the promotion and the press and whatever the article is [about] – but it’s still a way where they’re bereft, and here I am with everything. You try and shape it as honestly as you can, but there’s also a trust element, where you could shape it any way you want.

Speaking broadly, have you thought much about why people are so interested to read about the lives of famous people?

I don’t believe that. I didn’t put the most famous people I interviewed in the book. A lot of the people I interviewed, whose heart and fame I adore, whether it’s Stevie Wonder, Iggy Pop… who I didn’t put in the book, because the interviews weren’t revelatory. I think if anything, what makes it look unique is: there are a lot of people who spend their lives interviewing famous people, but just as interesting as Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake and Bruce Springsteen are Von Lmo, and Patrick Miller, and Lucia Pamela, who probably 99.9% of readers never heard of. And yet they’re going to find those just as interesting as the big stars.

I just think people are interesting if you get them at the right moment, you know? [laughs] I do think that on some level, celebrities are being used to sell the book, and that’s a lot of what I’ve written about, but to me the Ernie K-Doe experience – the 50s R&B star who tried to have me arrested, or again, Patrick Miller who’s smoking crack and doing heroin in his basement and fighting off hallucinations – they’re even more interesting than reading about… for example, Led Zeppelin just being assholes. [laughs]

To talk about the book in broader terms; this book is not directly about you, it’s about revealing other people. It’s been a while since you’ve done a project like that.

Right. But I think in a lot of ways the book is about me. I really made a conscious effort to keep myself out of it but I think between the lines, the book really is an element of my… I think each book is little elements of my autobiography. Whether it’s The Game, which covers a couple of years; Emergency covers a couple years. This, to me, is like the prequel in some ways, [laughs] because this is all I did for 20 years. This is my life for that time, and I think if you look at the pieces, you can see my own evolution as a person. Whether it’s Led Zeppelin making fun of me [for being inexperienced], to learning The Game and trying to seduce people into these interviews, to much later, meeting Lady Gaga and Chuck Berry and giving them life advice. I can see my own evolution in the book. It’s just not explicit.

When you began putting this book together, at what point did you decide to do that concept of the threaded narratives, or ‘open loops’?

I think what I did was, I broke down all those interviews to those little clips, and each clip was a standalone clip. Then I collected the most interesting [clips]. Some people were interesting for only one clip, for one little vignette. Other people maybe had three or four vignettes in which they were interesting. Then I sort of sequenced them together, so that everything matched together. The vignettes were really standalone stories about an idea, so I thought that it’d be nice where, “Hey, we get this idea, now here’s a couple ideas from someone else, now let’s return to a new idea for that person we just met”.

I kind of saw each piece as almost a standalone piece. Even when they continue from scene one to scene two to scene three, sometimes the story continues. Sometimes they’re just completely separate ideas. Other times, which I kind of like, you see artists at different times in their career. Maybe a couple years later, they feel bad about what they said earlier.

It’s interesting that a lot of the segues between the vignettes are artists mentioning other artists. That shows the breadth of the 20 years that you’ve spent doing this.

Yeah, it’s really funny. I’d probably say, with one or two notable exceptions, almost every artist someone mentions is interviewed elsewhere in the book, so it’s like the book itself; it’s kind of a closed loop. It is funny, there really were points where Trent Reznor mentions Beck, Gwen Stefani, Marilyn Manson and Oasis and I’ve got all four of those people interviewed elsewhere in the book. It’s like: which one do I put next?

I think there’s one section where all the artists are always talking about each other, Billy Corgan, Marilyn Manson, I think Courtney Love, Dave Navarro, And they’re all kind of referencing each other.

You state in the intro that “you can tell a lot about a person in a minute, if you pick the right minute”. Was that always the premise of the book?

No, the original idea was because Emergency – as you know from when we talked – Emergency was so much work. I basically had to learn how to rebuild the entirety of civilisation all by myself, you know? [laughs] It was so intense, so much work, I thought I’d give myself a break and do an anthology because anyone who’s been writing articles and features for 20 years feels like, “why not collect my favourite pieces and put them in a book?”

I started collecting [my] pieces and reading them, but… I like telling stories. There were no through lines. I bought a bunch of anthologies from writers I liked. Half of them I didn’t finish, because I got bored. With the other half, after I was done, I was bored of the writer, and bored of the voice, because it’s not a book if it’s just articles bound together.

Although it literally is my dream project, as for over 10 years I’d been collecting all my favourite articles in a file to put into an essay book. Then I realised it doesn’t work. Every book one does, or every film, or every record should be good enough that if anybody starts with any single one, they’ll then want to read the rest of what you’ve done. I felt if somebody read [a straight anthology] first, and it was the first book of mine [that they’d read], they might not be be intrigued enough to want to read the others.

I wrestled with it for a while. I thought I’d write a story about being a down-and-out writer in New York, and merge some of the articles that happened during that time, and tried a couple of other formats. Gradually I realised that essentially, these articles were moments when you saw the real person behind the mask.

I started collecting those. That two month quickie book became fuckin’ two years of intense work. Unlike Emergency, which was fun, I got to go live off in the wild and learn how to pick locks and go to junkyards and hotwire cars. The Game was fun because I got to run around the world and meet women. This time, I was stuck in a room with my own past, sorting through thousands of pages of transcriptions.

The way I think of it, this book is the journalistic opposite of taking the easy way out. Like you said, rather than putting together your best, or favourite published work, you’ve really gone through and mined your past for the best material.

Yeah, and it’s funny because I even had most of the interviews re-transcribed. I had somebody go back to the tapes. I said, “I want every time someone coughs, every time they paused, every time there’s an interruption, I want you to write it out like it’s a play and tell me everything going on”. Even though that’s time consuming and expensive and laborious, I was pretty adamant about getting everything from those tapes and looking for those little moments.

I was going to ask: how much of this book existed on your hard drive already?

I think only about 10% were on the hard drive as they were.  A lot were already transcribed, but just not well enough. Sometimes, for example, if it’s someone transcribing something, they might not take the part where the guy just asked me as an off-hand thing, “Hey, do you know now to make beans?” The truth is; the guy who’s talking about his album and why he wrote songs, it’s really more revealing to me that he asks the journalist “How do you make beans?,” because he’s trying to cook for his son. That tells me more about the person than some long story about his album. I tried to get most of them transcribed, and the only ones that didn’t were when I couldn’t find the original tapes. I literally called people who transcribed tapes 10 years ago, and had them find the tapes and bring them back to me.

Was this the first time in your career that you’d really sat down and gone through all your old stuff?

For sure. Absolutely.

What were some of the personal highlights when you were going through that material?

To me, the highlight for sure was finding all these all pitch letters I’d written to people, trying to write articles for different magazines, different newspapers; finding letters I’d written to my family about how excited I was that this article was out, because you forget how much you struggled sometimes. You forget how excited you are at those first-floor victories. That was kinda moving. It’s really easy to forget the past, because we get so caught up in the present. It was cool to see that. Everyone has a passion and a dream, and it was cool to see that I somehow was lucky enough to live that passionate dream, and even overshot, somewhat, my goal. My only goal was to write a weekly column for Village Voice. I did that by the time I was 22, so everything since then has been gravy.

That’s awesome. Let’s talk about interviewing. What is an interview to you, now? Has it changed since you started doing interviews back then?

No. I think I’m better at it. The interview’s still the same thing. An interview is still me trying to get as close to someone I can and write an article that somehow captures who they are, and that says something new about the person that hasn’t been written before. It’s always been the same thing, and I’ve always been really hard on myself about them. They’re never easy, and they need a lot of preparation.

What makes a good interview?

In the end, it’s about how you write it. I could say to me there are three kinds of good interviews. I’m just thinking of this out loud as we’re talking. One is where someone really examines themselves in a very honest way and is really emotionally vulnerable, and open, and honest with you. Another kind of good interview is where crazy shit happens, like the first time I’m going to interview Motley Crue, and the police are literally arresting Nikki and Tommy, and in the meantime Vince Neil is blow-drying his hair the whole time. That’s a great interview. They haven’t said a word, and it’s already the fucking best interview ever. The third kind is where the subject sucks, where they’ve got fucking nothing to say. They’re really closed off, not giving you anything, and then that’s an opportunity for me to be a creative writer. [laughs] One thing is the material. The other thing is what you make of it.

I saw a recent press interview for this book, with Cleveland.com, where you told them that when you do an interview you’re petrified with fear and you’re stressed out. I’m surprised that you still feel this way, after doing it for over 20 years.

For sure, man. My last interview was with Howard Stern… I’m definitely doing fewer and fewer [interviews] over time. I really only want to do one or two a year. But yeah, of course [I’m stressed], because you have to somehow go in, you have a limited amount of time with someone, and you have to walk away and leave with something they’ve never told to anyone else before, or at least any other writer before. That’s a lot of pressure. You’re not in control of it, they’re in control of it.

My last interview with Howard Stern, who spills his whole life on the radio every day. How do you get that guy to say something new? There’s a burden. I think the better you get at something, the more intimidating it gets. For example, the better I got at pickup during The Game, the harder the approach was because my expectations and everyone else’s expectations were so high of me. To make the parallel, when I approached a girl in the past, if I didn’t get slapped or laughed at, it was a success. In other words, if some crazy wild adventure didn’t happen with this woman, then I failed.

It’s the same with an interview. In the past, just to get the interview was enough. I succeeded by getting to be in the same room as this great artist who I looked up to. Now it’s not enough. I’ve got to get the best interview this person has ever given in their life. So the better you get at something, the harder and more intimidating it gets. I’m sure that’s true for you. When we had that interview before, I would say the success was fucking even getting it [in the first place].

Definitely. I know what you mean. You said when we first met that your goal was to get the best possible material out of someone, and like you said; if it’s someone who speaks for a living it’s hard to find some new truth in that. But it’s still the goal. It’s my goal every time, regardless whether it’s a 15 minute phoner or a couple of days with someone, you still want to get the best. You want to be the best. It’s your standards you’ve got to live up to and you want to put them as high as you can.

Yeah. And as an interviewer, you’re not in control of that. If you’re just writing an article you can make it the best if it’s all up to you, and how well you write, but in an interview you’re not in control of that. I agree.

Is it a matter of the bigger the star you interview the more nervous you are beforehand, or is it similar across the board?

I think it all depends on the situation. I’m more nervous if the star has only given us one hour in a room together. Unless I’m going to be going on tour with them for a week because I know I’ll get time to get what I need. I guess it’s not how famous they are, it’s how short of a time I have to get to connect with them.

When we first met, I think the first thing you told me when you walked over and looked at my sheet of paper, was: “Ready for all 15 questions,” and then you said what you do to prepare for an interview is brainwash yourself with the person’s career and write down every single question that comes to mind. Now besides those two elements, researching and writing down questions, is there something more? Is there a routine to preparing for interviews beyond just research?

I think it’s kind of what I said before, that brainwashing which is reading all the books, reading every article about them, reading any books if they’ve written any, listening to every album, watching every movie they’re in, and then as I’m doing these things writing down every question that I can possibly ever thing of. Then studying those questions and arranging those questions in a sequence I kind of want to ask them, and then studying those questions like I’m preparing for an exam, where I don’t know what the questions are going to be on the test. [laughs] There’s a lot of big interviews I turned down, because I really didn’t want to get that deep. I wasn’t that interested enough in the artist to get that deep in their life, and their work.

When you’re meeting face-to-face with your subjects, do you pick clothes to make you appear a certain way?

No, in fact I’ll usually dress more down than I would if I was going out myself because I want them to know they’re they star, I’m not trying to say… I think if someone walked into the interview saying “hey, we’re equals! Hey, look at me, I’m one of you too!” the star’s already like “no you’re not.” [laughs] So if anything, I try to play myself down. Even the Howard Stern interview I did today ended up on the air and it’s on TV and you see it, I’m dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans. I really try to be like, “you’re the star. I’m not going to be so embarrassing you can’t be seen with me, but I’m not going to be dressed like I think I’m a star too”. I think that’s the wrong attitude to go into an interview with. In fact, going into any situation whether it’s pickup, survival, or an interview trying to impress someone is the exact wrong attitude to have.

The way you say that makes me think that you’ve made that mistake in the past and you learned not to act that way. Is that correct?

No, I never did because when I started out, I really was super, super humbled by these amazing people I got to be in the same room with. And I really was kind of young and innocent. I did it before, but it wasn’t a mistake, when I did that Ludicris interview. There was an idea that we had the ‘Ho’lympics’, a contest where it was me against Ludicris doing all these crazy things, like the one-hand bra unhooking contest. I brought one of my peacocking outfits from The Game, like this snakeskin suit. It was funny. He loved it. He thought it was fucking hilarious. It hasn’t been a mistake when I’ve done it in the past and I think it’s less about dress and more about attitude. But I know my place, I know the role. They’re the star and I’m the person who’s translating that message to the world.

Out of interest, Neil, do you have a musical background?

No, I can play a little bit of music and I’ve even been in bands and stuff, but my goal was never to be a musician. If anything, if I was to end up anywhere in the musical side of things it would have been as a producer, because I think in a way it’s similar to being a critic. There’s a sense of saying “what can we do?”. It’s being a critic, but earlier on in the process, where you can actually have some effect on the music.

True, I see that. The reason I asked is: that bit of musical knowledge that you have beyond being a critic – you actually know how to play some music – do you think that’s been advantageous for you to help relate to musicians?

Not always. Sometimes it’s been fun, because I did piece on this band Sebadoh, and we went and recorded a punk rock single together. There were a lot of cool things that didn’t make it in the book, but I had to select what was most interesting. But [musical knowledge] has helped in a couple of cases. I also find that musical dialogue won’t be interesting to the general audience of Rolling Stone or The New York Times. If I wrote for Musician or Guitar World it would, but I think that would have hurt the interviews. Because maybe [the interview subject and I] would have bonded over it, but it’s not going to create any kind of dialogue that’s going to be appropriate for that kind of article.

I think there might be an element, too, of if you cover musicians, then I think you need to come in as a journalist, and not as a fellow musician. To me, the best asset one has in an interview is curiosity. It’s better than an outfit; better than musical knowledge. And even having brushed up and having prepared, I think genuine, sincere curiosity is the best tool you have.

I find that simply listening and responding to a person is just as important as background research. A good example of that in the book – of you just listening and going with the flow – is when you tell Britney Spears that you know exactly what she’s talking about, even though you have no idea.

[laughs] Yeah, exactly. I think there are a lot of points in a lot of interviews where you’re saying ‘yes’. We’re agreeing just so you don’t stop the roll they’re on. I think there’s definitely some crazy things I’ve fucking agreed with in interviews. I think it’s important not to judge the person in an interview, and not to judge whether they’re right or wrong, or if it makes sense. The job is to let them speak. Often, some of them I don’t even know… it isn’t until I look at the transcripts that I know what someone was really saying, or trying to say, because I can slow it down.

To talk about some more specific sections of the book, my favourite band of all time is Led Zeppelin, so I thoroughly enjoyed that section. [Neil interviewed Jimmy Page and Robert Plant for The New York Times. It was their first interview together since Zeppelin broke up 14 years earlier.]

That’s awesome.

I want to know what was going through your mind when you discovered that you hadn’t recorded those first 40 minutes of your interview.

One, was that I was so fucking mad at myself. There are two interviews… I also love Ray Davies of The Kinks, and I missed that interview, too. I was just furious. After that, I started bringing two tape recorders to every interview and I’d have them recorded on two audio recorders just in case one failed, or goes wrong. I was thinking: “how do I re-ask these same questions and get those answers without them catching on?”

The other funny thing about that interview was that I was so young, and they were these icons. I think I’d read [Zeppelin biography] Hammer of the Gods and was obsessed about their… I was a guy who’d maybe slept with one or two women my whole life, so I think I was more obsessed with their sex life than their music. [laughs] And I wanted to know the story. I think at one point Jimmy Page asked me, “Do you have any questions that don’t involve sex?” [laughs] To me, they were legends not just for their music, but the lifestyle around it.

That bit about how you missed the first 40 minutes, it’s funny because it’s such a rookie error, and yet it was one of your first assignments for The New York Times.

Yeah! And that happens. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. There are so many things that could go wrong, especially with cassette decks. You can plug the microphone in the headphone jack, the batteries can die in the middle of the interview and you don’t notice it. The pause button can be on, and you’re recording. I think every one of these errors has happened to me, and that’s my biggest paranoia. I’m almost OCD about checking to make sure that it’s recording. Especially now, I get really paranoid with digital recorders because after you stop it, it has to store the information after you stop it, and what if it doesn’t store… I get so paranoid, man, because you can’t recreate what just happened.

That’s true. But you’ve got to have faith in technology, Neil.

You can have faith in technology, but if it goes wrong… like, you don’t know what’s left on your computer if it shuts down, and you lose your work.

I see where you’re coming from. I’ll remain blissfully naïve until that happens to me.

You can have faith in technology, and technology has things that are operated on electricity. Batteries can die. You can be working there and the power can go; anything can happen, especially when one has more faith in technology than one has in one’s self. One can rely on one’s self, you can’t rely on technology.

Some of my favourite parts in the book were when you revealed part of yourself, like right near the start when you’re talking with Madonna about drugs. You said that you didn’t like pills because “it’s a control thing”, and by making a statement and not asking a question, you encouraged her to go off on her little tangent about how she feels about that, which is an interesting tactic.

I do find that… I put those parts in this book less, but I’ll tell you something interesting, which is that as I was compiling the book, I was going back through a lot of parts in the book. You have to give a little to get something, so the parts of Madonna in the book – I saved these. I’ve got about 100 pages of it, I kind of collected my own personal biography through these interviews with these artists because at some point I’m telling them about my life. I’m telling Bruce Springsteen about how I got a job at The New York Times. I’m telling Lady Gaga about how I came to write The Game. I’m telling Tom Cruise about, I think about The Game also. I’m talking to Christine Aguilera about my childhood. I collected those parts of the interviews because I thought it would be fun if I ever do a straight-up biography, to mix in those interviews.

I was impressed by a few sections where you revealed your ability to form a bond with some of your subjects, like Shawn [Crahan] from Slipknot, and Chuck Berry.

Going back to what you were saying before, I do think I was very conscious to leave myself out of this as much as possible because I felt like you can see the book is showing who these other people are, and the less I’m in it, the better. In all my books, even though I might be a central character in The Game and Emergency, I still tried to put myself in as little, only in there as much as necessary to understand the subject being written about. I’m not in The Game and Emergency, I’m not giving my whole biography. I think I did the same thing in here, I just tried to give myself as little as possible, as was necessary to get to know the subject. But you like when those special bonds happen, you were saying?

Yeah, it’s cool, because the only time that most fans see these musicians is when they’re performing on stage, or in a music video, or they’re being interviewed on TV. But when you break outside of that… like how Shawn from Slipknot took the second cup from the top of a cup pyramid; this tiny little detail tells you a lot about a person.

Yeah, and I loved that. That’s one of my favourite things about this [book] is when you come back and check in with someone later and see how they’ve grown, how they’ve changed, how maybe they take back what they said then, whether they’re sober or whether they’re on drugs. Whether they’re talking rehab speak – it’s a really cool barometer of watching someone grow in these little snapshots. They tell you about your own life too, because you can see how you’ve changed in those interviews as well.

But my favourite time to talk to artists is when they’re in the creative process, versus when they’re in the promotional process. I love talking to them when they’re in the midst of creation because then they’re really wrestling, they’re really raw. When you get them in the promotion process, they’re closed.

I think an example in the book was Trent Reznor; you made that comment about how he was unpacking some games consoles; which would be upsetting to his listeners, because he’s obviously procrastinating, and not creating music.

Yeah. And I loved that interview, because it was so honest.

The idea of revealing a bit of yourself to the reader, there was a bit more of that when you asked Brian Wilson whether he’s a nervous person. Then you went on to state that having a very domineering, critical father can make people nervous and hesitant later in life, which I believe is a reflection of your own life.

It wasn’t that case, I think it was just from observation. I do have critical parents, probably more so on my mother’s side, but I think that was more like a general observation from a number of interviews, [as opposed to] saying that about myself. Though of course in interviews, I will often talk about myself. Again, I think if someone tries to suck all the information out, you’re kind of an asshole if you’re out to do that. There should be reciprocity. But I definitely wasn’t referring to myself in that case. Though now that you mention it, I definitely grew up in a household where nothing was ever good enough, and that definitely probably did contribute to the hesitancy and lack of confidence later in life, for sure.

After The Game came out and you started to get noticed, were there many instances during interviews of your reputation preceding you? Were some of your subjects were already aware of your work, even beyond music journalism?

Yeah, and it usually helped if they were aware of my work. I think it’s definitely true, versus some random name coming in to interview them, or a guy whose stories they’ve read in Rolling Stone. If they’ve sat there with a book, and read a book. It definitely helped.

Are you concerned that journalists like myself are going to read the book and steal your best material?

No, because that material is already out there. I mean, to me it’s like if somebody steals it… I’m scared until it’s out, like before I put the book out, I’m scared someone else is going to do an anthology like this, when it hasn’t been done before, and some other journalist is going to think about creating something like this. But once it’s out, I look forward to people… let’s not say stealing, but being inspired by it. [laughs] I think that’s the most awesome thing ever. If someone likes it enough to do something similar or use that material in their own way, that’s cool. Otherwise you’d never do anything, because otherwise you’d just be frozen.

There were two questions you asked in the book that totally blew me away, because I would never even considered asking them. Do you want to know what they are?

Yeah, go ahead. Wait, I know your first one’s going to be: “could you made the best album ever, then bury it and never listen to it, but still be content?”

Yeah, that’s one.

And is the other one about “what’s more important, music or children”?

No.

I liked that one. “What’s the thing you felt you’ve given to the world most, music or children? What’s benefitted the world more?”

The other one was what you asked [the rapper] The Game – “what was the first money you ever made?” It’s such a simple question, but his answer reveals so much about him.

Oh yeah, “the first money I made wasn’t made, it was stolen”. [laughs] I don’t have stock questions I ask everybody. I really should have a list of questions I ask everybody, but I don’t.  I usually ask that if I’m curious about it for that particular person. There are a couple that have been themes in my life because I’m always curious about family, and curious about artistic stuff.

So, my last question: have you sent this book out to any of the people who you interviewed?

Umm… no. [laughs]

Are you intending to?

No, I’m not planning to. I’ll just think I’ll let them find it. I don’t know why. It seems to me something where… for some reason, it seems boastful to send it to them. I don’t know why. I probably should. I think that would be a good idea to do. Even, like, Russell Brand, who I’m friends with, he told me I was in his book, and I didn’t tell him he was in my book. So I should probably do that.

Totally. Alright Neil, I’ll leave it there.

I look forward to catching up with you at a more calm point, and seeing you when I’m in Australia.

For sure man. Thanks for your time.

Thanks man. It’s been fun watching your evolution. Bye Andrew.

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For more Neil Strauss, visit his website or follow him or Twitter.

The Courier-Mail author profile: Neil Strauss – ‘Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead’, 2011

An author profile for The Courier-Mail. This isn’t available on their website (at time of publishing), so you can either click the below image to view a bigger version, or read the full article underneath.

Neil Strauss: Choosing the right minute

To American writer Neil Strauss, the traditional format of the cultural journalism anthology was tired and predictable.

After his 2009 book, Emergency – wherein Strauss switched into survivalist mode and learned a raft of new skills so he’d be prepared in the event of an apocalyptic catastrophe – the accomplished Rolling Stone and The New York Times writer thought he’d give himself a break.

“I thought I’d do an anthology,” he says, “because anyone who’s been writing articles and feature stories for 20 years feels like, ‘why not collect my favourite pieces and put them in a book?’”.

The problem with this formulaic approach became evident once Strauss started sifting through thousands of published interviews with some of the world’s most famous musicians and actors.

“I like telling stories,” he explains – as evidenced in Emergency, and in the 2005 bestselling exposé of the then-hidden pick-up artist community, The Game – but in this instance, “there were no through lines”.

He spent some time with anthologies by some of his favourite writers.

“Half of them I didn’t finish, because I got bored. With the other half, after I was done, I was bored of the writer, and bored of the voice, because it’s not a book if it’s just articles bound together, he says.

Eventually, Strauss realised that his best published work simply showed moments where readers were allowed to see “the real person behind the mask”.

So he began collecting those moments. The final product is a 500-plus-page tome named Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, which features 228 such moments.

In the book’s preamble, Strauss writes that you can learn a lot about a person or a situation in a minute – but only if you choose the right minute.

Strauss is known for his ability to get closer to his interview subjects than most writers.

Some of the book’s best moments are when he’s far from the regular interview locales, like hotel rooms or cafes.

Instead, far more revelatory material is gained when he’s lying in bed interviewing Jewel, or driving with Snoop Dogg to pick up diapers for his kid, or being flown in a private jet by licensed pilot and jazz saxophonist Kenny G, or riding motorcycles and going to the Church of Scientology with Tom Cruise and his mother.

Reporting from these extraordinary situations comes at a cost, though. For Strauss – who says he only does one or two interviews per year, now – these outlandish experiences have raised the journalistic bar considerably.

“In the past, I succeeded by getting to be in the same room as this great artist who I looked up to,” he says.

“Now it’s not enough. I’ve got to get the best interview this person has ever given in their life. You have to somehow go in, with a limited amount of time with someone, and you have to walk away and leave with something they’ve never told to any other writer before. That’s a lot of pressure. The better you get at something, the harder and more intimidating it gets.”

Does he ever feel guilty for relentlessly extracting information from his subjects? “Sometimes I feel guilty. Say I’m leaving with four hours of recordings of one person spilling their soul to me, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘thank you very much, goodbye’. I’m walking away with their soul on a tape, to some degree. They have nothing. That part always feels strange to me. It’s like having sex with someone, then running away.”

Aspiring and existing journalists will be pleased to learn that Strauss is human after all, though. He doesn’t shy away from including one of his most embarrassing moments in the book.

Forty minutes into an interview with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant – guitarist and singer for legendary British rockers Led Zeppelin – Strauss realised that he’d plugged his microphone into the headphone jack. The result: blank tape.

To make matters worse, it was the pair’s first in-depth interview together since Zeppelin broke up fourteen years earlier, and it was one of Strauss’ first assignments for The New York Times.

When he later attempted to surreptitiously backtrack over some of his questions, Page and Plant gleefully discovered his mistake.

Strauss can laugh about it now, but at the time, he was  ”so mad” at himself.

“After that, I started bringing two recorders to every interview, just in case one failed, or something went wrong.”

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead is out now in Australia via Text Publishing. For more Neil Strauss, visit his website or follow him or Twitter.

Bonus material: for the full transcript of my 45 minute interview with Neil Strauss in early March 2011, click here.

 

A Conversation With Matthew Condon, Brisbane-based author and journalist

I met with Brisbane-based author and journalist Matthew Condon [pictured right] in late June 2010, to discuss his newest book, Brisbane, for a profile in The Weekend Australian Review. You can read that story here.

Full transcript of our conversation is below. As mentioned elsewhere, this was a particularly enjoyable interview, as Matthew is one of my favourite feature writers – I hold his work for The Courier-Mail’s QWeekend magazine in high regard. Brisbane is a great read, too.

Beware: for those who haven’t read Brisbane, there are spoilers.

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Andrew: I read your book yesterday.

Matthew: Right.

To give you a bit of my background, I grew up in Bundaberg, then came to Brisbane for university in 2006. Although my father’s from Brisbane, I’ve not paid a lot of attention to Brisbane’s history, so I did find it quite an educational experience. I liked the way that you blended it alongside your stories from growing up in this city.

Obviously, I had to include the history, but I wanted the book to move back and forth in time to try and get that effect of – ‘is the past still in the present?’, and so I structured it in that way, no chapters, that it would just meander, and that the present and past would constantly chafe against each other. There were little thematic links; I tried to stitch it through and run a few parallel narratives so that at least rather than a dreary history of a city, that it would have at least a few narrative lines that would pull people through it.

It definitely had a narrative arc, from your experiences as a child through to you telling your children about the history of Brisbane, and them asking questions.

That was organic, really, as the book grew. It was interesting how that line of it sort of came to the surface. I didn’t have an intention to write a book about children; however, maybe writing about Brisbane and my childhood is looking for the child that I was, and then seeing it perhaps in my children.

So, in a way, that too is the shimmering of the past and the present, which I think is unique. Ironically, even though we have very little historical buildings, my point of the narrative line of F.W.S. Cumbrae-Stewart and the monument was this; what does it say generationally about the people of the city that really aren’t that fussed with historical accuracy? What does it mean, and does it flow through?

Even though we had very few historical monuments left in terms of buildings and treasuring our historical sites, it’s still weirdly a city where the past is always somehow present to me. This is just my view, but is that nostalgia? Maybe it is. I don’t know. It’s a city that I think most Brisbane people who go away and come back, it’s a city that puts its claws into your heart, funnily enough.

The recurring metaphor you use, a ‘book without an index’, seems quite apt.

Yeah, a lot of people will get upset with that but I think it’s very true. When I went to look for my relatives in Toowong Cemetery, I’ve since been in touch with them and they’ve said “you can always come to the office and we’ll guide you,” but the point is if you want to wander in and visit your antecedents, it’s a very difficult thing to do. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard.

So to me, the cemetery in the end of the book became a microcosm of this entire city. Funnily enough, topographically, it’s sort of a miniature – it’s the leaders on the hills, the rest of us are down in the valleys, which is very much as Brisbane is now. The ridges are either populated by the church, or the wealthy, and that’s a paradigm that replicates itself in cities across the world. It’s not just Brisbane.

So what was the brief you received for this book? How did Phillipa [McGuinness, New South books’ commissioning editor] bring it to you?

The brief was probably the singular most simplistic, liberating brief that I’ve ever received. She just said “Look, you do Brisbane and approach it the way you wish,” which on one hand is brilliant. On the other, when you come down to practically writing, when you come down to trying to put your arms around an entire city, it was very difficult. It sounded great.

The task was very difficult because I had deliberated for months and months, how does one write and capture a city? How do you go about it? Then I decided it’s impossible, it really is impossible to do it thoroughly. It would be endless. The city is organic. It’s constantly shifting and changing, so I had to not be afraid of giving myself limitations, that it would be my personal view, and after months and months of deliberating and thinking the usual; does one do it by the seasons, or to give yourself this sort of predictable structure?

And then I tossed all of them through my mind and one day I just decided “Look, I’m going to go to where X marks the spot, where Oxley came ashore. That’s the Caucasian history of the city. I’ll start there, and I’ll see where it takes me.” I did that.

One day I just put a notebook in a bag and a camera, and I went down to North Quay, to the dreary granite monument, and I’d never stood before it. I’d seen it a million times, all through my life, and as I wrote. So I stood there with the traffic roaring on both sides, and something about it [laughs] I don’t know what it was, something about it struck me as wrong. The wording was sort of hesitant. It didn’t feel right. So I thought, “Okay, this is where I start. I’ll investigate the monument.” And that kicked the journey off, really.

I liked how you brought your investigative journalism with Qweekend into the mix. That’s probably what influenced Phillipa in asking you to do it, in that you’d been writing in and around Brisbane since you returned.

That’s a really good point, because I only realised halfway through the book how important it had been to be doing that journalism for five years, and how in fact I’d touched on many, many things across the city – both contemporary and historical – and I wasn’t as removed from it as I actually thought that I was.

I looked at this book personally as a way of trying to write my way back into the city. When I came back, I felt I knew it was the city I’d been born in. In those first couple of years, I’d drive past my childhood house several times. It was me trying to reconnect with a city that I’d lost touch with for 18-odd years. And something deep inside of me told me to do this book, because perhaps it would embed me back into Brisbane. In many ways, it did that.

It required me to concentrate on the geography, the landscape, where I was living, and to open my eyes basically. So, it served a very important personal purpose for me. Doing the book made me feel more comfortable and relaxed here now, and at home, in a sense.

And along the way you did touch upon some personal experiences, like finding that film canister in your great grandfather’s darkroom.

Yeah; that’s a story from when I was about 12, and it just fitted into this book, in terms of me searching for evidence of myself and hopefully the wider populace of my generation in particular. You’re of a different generation, but as I’d mentioned in the book; when one leaves a city like Brisbane, the longer you’re away, the more the city that it was to you calcifies in your mind, and becomes fixed as ‘Brisbane the city’, your home city. But cities move on. People grow older, things happen, buildings get torn down, landscapes change, cultures change. Brisbane’s culture is phenomenally, vastly different from when I left.

When you come back you’re shocked. It’s not what you thought it was, because you’ve sort of fairytale’d it in your head. I realised only after I’d written it and read through it that the book is a partial examination of memory and the function of memory.

Indeed as you’ve noted, at the end of the book I test my memories against living contemporary people in my life. They say “No, that didn’t happen, that’s not here, no.” So it’s an examination of memory and how we fictionalise ourselves, so there’s that game playing in the book as well.

When that part came up, it was a real shock because it was almost like breaking the fourth wall, I suppose, to say “So this is what I’ve written, but these parts might be false. These might not have happened.”

Exactly, and it’s sort of a spring that unloads in the book, I think. And, when I wrote that little section, it’s not huge, I was trying to be as honest as I humanly could. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe all of that memory I have has altered, changed, mutated over 20 or 30 years. Maybe that’s what we do with memory, we fit it to suit ourselves, and we reinvent lines of family life and history. How do we do that? Why do we do that? Why does that happen?

Maybe it’s like the monument in that we ultimately end up believing that’s really where Oxley came ashore, even though in the back of our mind we know it’s wrong. So maybe that’s a sort of human trait that is obvious to most people, but it’s just something that grew as part of the investigation, and the journey through the book.

I wanted the book to represent a journey as well, because it was a journey for me. It was while I had young children and all of that was kicking in, and looking at my son; he stars in the book to some degree. There were moments when I’d look at him and go “That’s me. I’m time travelling here.” Some things that he would do, I did that, precisely.

And so there’s a way we can travel through time in that sense and I wanted to try, whether it’s even humanly possible to replicate that in literature I don’t know, but I was trying to do that, as best as I could to enunciate the passage of time, which has always been funnily enough a preoccupation with my work. Now that I’m older and have written several things, I see now, you see a recurrent theme. Now there’s a primary theme.

I like how you dwelled upon the issue of time in Brisbane, centuries ago, when there was no one clock that told the time, and it was driving people crazy.

[laughs] It’s always been a city that has an uncomfortable relationship with time I think. [laughs] I really do think that. To others, for decades, we were always seen as “behind the times” and you know; that’s a part of the fabric of this town, really.

I like the way that you segued into the city hall and the clock tower discussion, how you and your son were sitting in your home and you heard the bell chime from city hall.

Yeah, and that’s happened a few times since. I was just sitting there with my son. I remember my grandmother lives not far, around the corner from where I live now in Pennington, and I remember sitting on the back step of her tiny little old Queenslander and you could hear the clock. Then to hear it again through the business of a modern metropolis raised the hairs on my neck basically. That might seem uninteresting and minor to some people but it was like reaching your arm back in time 40 years. It was creepy.

And little things like that happened. When writers are doing a book they often go “Oh there was an incredible coincidence while I was writing the book, this happened.” I’ve had that for several books, that things – you go “That’s perfect for my book! I can’t believe that just happened.”

But I think when you’re working on a project, your antennae are so sensitised to what you’re doing that things come in and you notice things specific to your project. You’re more attentive to everything, and sensitive to everything. And they’re not coincidences; it’s just that you have a heightened sense of appreciation when you’re embedded in a project like that. That’s sort of what happened with this book when my son and I were down at the park opposite Suncorp [Stadium, Milton], as I wrote in the book.

I’d just been researching how that was the first major cemetery for the city, and that day after it had rained and he said “Daddy, it smells like skeletons,” and that’s a direct quote from him. I thought “Wow, I can use that.” [laughter]

I hope your son appreciates how much of a star he is in the book when he reads it.

At the moment he’s reading about dinosaurs and spiders, but he may. He narrated to me his first short story the other night. He’s almost five. It was called “The Mantis in the Plane by the Sea”. And so I transcribe it and read it out for him so that one day he might look at that and go “Wow, that’s interesting.” I guess I’m quite a sentimental person, human being as well. I’ll keep them; whether he addresses or not is not important but I’ll keep them for him.

Phillipa tells me that the series was pitched as “travel books when no one leaves home,” but you’re a bit of an anomaly to the book process because you did leave for the middle part of your life so far. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing because it allows you to step away and describe and outsider’s perspective of Brisbane and how you felt upon leaving and upon returning.

Exactly. I think I was in a unique position, having been born here, and left for important years of my life to come back and see this demonstrable change. On one level, yes, enormous change, but as I’ve tried to portray in the book, a constancy running underneath as well. The Brisbane light, the feel, the weather, the lushness, the vegetation – that’s the same as when I was a kid. Other things change around it and I think to get that perspective was unique in the sense that I did have that time lapse, came back to it with fresh eye,s I guess, and it may have been a very different book if it had been written by a writer who had stayed here.

I tried to give it justice and to give it fairness. If I’m a critic of the city, I’ve tried to balance it as I would my journalism, or whatever. But there may be some things in there that Brisbane people disagree with or are offended by. That’s great. That’s indicative of a grown up city. We should be debating, questioning ourselves, tilling the soil, and asking these things of each other because that’s what a civilised community is.

I do point out in the book that my supposition is that there are some traits that are in Brisbane people, have been from the start because of the nature of our birth, white birth; it was a very aggressive city, violent. There was death, crime and punishment just over the river there not far from the executive building that the current Premier sits. That’s where the convicts were flogged on the A-frame, the short walk to the Premier’s office 200 years later. Things change enormously but sometimes they don’t change that much at the same time.

So, our relationship with Sydney and the colony of New South Wales is always aggressive and we always felt we were poorly treated by them, and so a chip on our shoulder evolved from that. I think if you look and listen carefully enough, we still have some of that. The ghost of that is still around. While I think we’ve moved into the 21st Century to a large degree, there are those beautiful generational traits that only your place can give you and I think we still have them. I tried to examine that, but that may ruffle some peoples’ feathers and it may not. I just tried to be honest.

It wasn’t overwhelming, but there was I feel a recurring theme of romanticism that you brought to your experiences in Brisbane, how you said you “keep coming back to the light of Brisbane,” and you describe how that tends to bring people in. That’s the first thing they notice when they get off the tram, and so forth. Did you realise that before you started writing it?

I think I did because when I moved away, Brisbane was always my home. It was always where I was born, the place on the planet where I was born. It does have distinct, peculiar characteristics that delineate it from other cities in the world, let alone Australia. And [David] Malouf has written about this, Rodney Hall and others have written about this. They write about it because it’s very true.

The greatest, strongest memories of my childhood are the light, and the pitch blackness of the shadows, and that’s different when you live in other places in the world. It’s distinctively different. The smell, and in summer when a violent storm comes over the ranges, and the steam comes off the bitumen and the plants are breathing out, it’s unique to the city and it strikes you as something new every time. “Oh wow, that’s Brisbane.” And it’s something that you keep very deep inside of you, I think. I’m a lot older than you. The older you get these things sort of are like little drawers inside of your person and nothing will change them.

That may be romantic, that may be nostalgic, but as I said to you earlier; this is a city that from my own experience prompts sort of nostalgia and as a birth place, loss of heritage, mistreatment of the landscape and heritage; as a Brisbane person I feel that very keenly the way the Sydney people probably do about their own environment. This was where I came into the world. Nothing’s going to change that.

This is not so much a question as a comment; when I interviewed John Birmingham the other day, I asked him to comment on the divide between popular fiction and literary fiction. He brought up that he thinks you are one of the finest literary fiction writers in Australia.

God bless him. I’ll have him stuffed and mounted. [laughs]

This was without even mentioning that I was interviewing you for this book. He just came upon that. I thought that was a nice little turnaround.

I’ve known John for years and some of the old dudes are coming back home, artists, painters, writers, musicians, actors. It’s was a very different place when we left. It was very claustrophobic. I won’t say it was parochial, there was an element of parochialism to be honest with you, but the politics was suffocating, all of that. The assumption, right or wrong, was that if I’m going to make it I can’t make it here.

Twenty-five years later you can be in Brisbane and be making it [like you would] in London or New York or Berlin. Everything has changed, and the city has changed too as well, clearly, but the imperative to leave I don’t think any longer exists. We were sort of refugees for a reason that’s no longer here. Why do we come back? It’s a myriad of reasons for that. I just got tired of Sydney and it just became very hard to live daily. I was freelancing and doing all of that. Where do you go in that circumstance? You drift home and see what happens. Then my partner – now wife – fell pregnant, and now I’ve got two children, and it sort of becomes home again.

I wonder whether this project was more gratifying for you than your fiction work.

It’s very different. I found it exhilarating but very difficult in the respect that I’m not an historian. There are some brilliant historians in Brisbane that have combed the soil over, and over, and over; there virtually wasn’t a corner I could look into that hadn’t been effectively and interestingly covered by a gaggle of local historians. The city has been documented quite well, but I don’t know how they do it, historians.

The freedom of fiction, to me, is so much more pleasurable. That element is part of my journalistic work too. Obviously, I deal with fact every day and I wanted a book that was not mired in dreary history and it wasn’t a history book. But I would hope that someone visiting the city would pick it up and go “I didn’t know that about this place,” get a feel for the city, rather than a raft of facts.

I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but upon finishing the book; I thought it’d be great and very apt to see that book start appearing on high school recommended reading lists.

I’d be very happy for that to happen! [laughs].

Because as you said, it’s not a dry, factual, historical piece. It mires in your personal life as well, which I feel is more important than ever to put a next generation of Brisbane residents to come across.

That’s a really nice idea. Just to elaborate on what I was saying then; I hope the book gives people a sense of what the city has been like, and what it’s like to live here. I would hope that it gives them that deep connection to their heart, rather than just their head. That’s a huge ambition for a little book. That was underplaying everything that I was trying to do with this piece of work. Whether I achieved it or not, it’s a big question, but that was my aim to do that. The other important element, too, is that I was really loathe to actually write about my own life here, because in all honesty it was quite dreary, suburban, unremarkable.

Yet you made it sound remarkable.

I thought, “How am I going to do this?” I didn’t want to be self-indulgent or dull, and then I thought “I’ll employ a fictional technique, and just look at a boy in Brisbane.” That boy is largely based on me. The minute I stood back from that boy, all the details, fine details, the smells, the senses, everything came in. If I’d written just about myself, and I started to do it, it died on the page. When I stood back and looked at myself as a novelist and journalist, and looked back at this separate figure, everything unlocked. All these memories and things that I hadn’t thought about since I was five years old rushed in.

So that’s the liberation of using a fictional technique on fact. It was a really interesting process for me as a writer to do that. I’d played around with it. “Should I try it, should I not?” The minute I started doing it, bang. It just bloomed.

Many elements of this book were a journey for me, in writing, in memory, in trying to get back to what the city meant to me, what it is now. In many ways, when I finished it, I wasn’t quite sure what I actually had. There were so many new paths I was taking in this little book, so in that sense it was a very gratifying project that gave me more than I had imagined when I first agreed to do the commission.

I think [the City series] is a terrific idea, which has been done loosely in the northern hemisphere. Kerry’s book on Sydney, and there have been books on Paris and Evan White. I found it a really interesting and obvious idea. I was surprised no one has actually ever done it, but we would get writers to do the major cities of the country, so as a series project it was very attractive. But yeah, that was the trip.

Phillipa tells me that when she read the book, she was struck by your love for Brisbane. It really shone through, and I agree with her summary, the way it ends from the character as a child through to standing in the cemetery; it’s quite beautiful.

Thank you. It’s a recognition that one is mortal… [laughs] and the next wave [of children] is out there. I’ll always love Brisbane. There are things I hate about it, there are things that annoy me, that frustrate me but that’s like any resident I guess in any city. But since coming back, it’s given me a lot as well, I think. It’s been wonderful to come home with my own kids and I may move from the city; I don’t know. Who knows? I’m not saying I’ll be here forever, but yeah it’s been a very pleasurable reacquaintance.

As an extension of Philipa’s comment, do you think it’s fair to say that it’s a kind of love letter to Brisbane?

Yeah, in the way that some love letters are raw and honest, can be confusing and upsetting, but if it’s a love letter, its heart is in the right place. I agree. It’s a nice phrase. At the end of the book, I pay homage to many writers. Several of them aren’t quoted in the book but I felt it was important to say thank you to all of those others that have written beautiful stuff about this place.

Jared Lee, when I was young, when I read his novels, what I understood from that was I could write about Brisbane and it’s okay. That was a vital breakthrough for me. When I was at university in my late teens I read him and thought “We can do this.” When I read Thea Astley’s It’s Raining In Mango and all of those, I thought “I can write here. This is going to work. I can do it.” And so they were vitally important to me. The great Peter Porter, [David] Maluof… So I hope this adds another page to that homage to a place, and others will do it again. My son might do it!

That’d be nice.

That’d be interesting. God save him! [laughs]

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I highly recommend ordering Matthew Condon’s Brisbane through the publisher, NewSouth.

The Big Issue story: John Birmingham

A story for The Big Issue #360 (3-16 August 2010), wherein I profiled Brisbane-based author and journalist John Birmingham and his new book, After America.

Click the image below for a closer look at the scanned article, or read the text underneath.

Afterwords

The prolific, genre-hopping John Birmingham discusses some recent achievements, which include a new thriller, a martial-arts injury and way too much tweeting

On March 14, 2003, the United States Of America went to hell – in John Birmingham’s mind, at least. His latest novel, After America, is the second part in a speculative fiction trilogy based in a USA subject to an enormous energy wave that decimated the majority of the country’s population.

Two years ago, Birmingham wrote part one of the trilogy, Without Warning, as a potential stand-alone novel. ”You could read it, close it, and if you wanted to, you could walk away from it,” he says. ”It’s got a dénouement at the end where you obviously set up another story, but it didn’t have to go on. And I found After America really fucking difficult to kick off because I was really happy with the first book as a novel; as a book.”

“Having written what, to me, was the perfect book – although others would disagree vehemently – I just thought, “Fuck, how do I top that?” And I had about six months where I just sat around. I know what I have to do in this second book because I’d already plotted it out, but it was just really difficult firing up. And then when I finally did fire up, I broke my arm. I’d written the first draft and I was just about to sit down and edit that.” He shows me the plate inserted into his left arm, which was busted in a Jujuitsu training accident.

“The funny thing is I reckon it was, in a sense, a left-handed gift. The enforced break allowed me to sit back and actually spend about two months in my lounge chair thinking about the characters, thinking about the stories. When I could literally lay fingers on a keyboard, I came back much more charged up.”

This series of novels isn’t the author’s first dalliance in the thriller genre: his Axis Of Time series (released from 2004 to 2007) are alternate history adventures that begin in 2021, when a US-led task force off Indonesia is sent back to 1942.

Axis Of Time seemed an abrupt about-face for someone best known for his grungy 1994 share-house memoir, He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and, more recently, as an essayist and non-fiction author.

Before his breakthrough with Felafel, Birmingham was a freelance writer for Rolling Stone and Australian Penthouse magazines. Then, five years after his first book, came Leviathan, a comprehensive (if unauthorised) biography of Sydney – another stylistic right-turn. After that, Birmingham smoked his way through a hands-on exploration of Australia’s marijuana culture in Dopeland (2003). Now, judging by his book sales. readers are becoming comfortable with Birmingham’s incarnation as thriller writer.

His latest book examines a nation in conflict through the eyes of several very different characters, including the President of the United States, a vengeance-seeking Mexican cowboy, a pair of heavily-armed smugglers and an adolescent fighting in the name of Allah. The book’s central locale is a crumbling New York City so beset upon by pirates, looters and conflict-hungry freedom fighters that the military is forced to reconsider whether it should remain standing.

The result is a non-stop adrenaline rush threaded across multiple narratives. Birmingham – who became enamoured of thrillers after reading Matthew Reilly’s The Ice Station – doesn’t mince words when asked about the divide between popular fiction and literary fiction.

“I do entertainment,” he says. “That’s it. Lower middle-brow entertainment with a lot of explosions. And they’re great fun. They’re read by people who are not going to read literature and they’re read by people who like literature. But [the books] aren’t literature themselves. There’s not much point in trying to compare and contrast, because it’s like trying to compare and contrast first person shooters [video games] with traditional theatre. They’re both mediums for telling stories but they do very different things in very different ways; both are enjoyable and they both have validity.”

“One is not necessarily worth more than the other. The thing that energises this debate is literary critics getting themselves really worked up because they perceive, quite rightly, that literary authors are working really hard to not get the rewards they deserve. And they do deserve the rewards, because they do work every bit as hard as the rest of us. Their craft is honed to a much finer point than ours is.”

Outside of his recent successes with fiction, Birmingham is a widely read online columnist for Fairfax and a prolific user of Twitter, where he has amassed more than 5,500 followers.

“It works for me,” he says of the microblogging service, “But I’m a bit unusual because I worked in journalism for 10 years before I wrote Felafel. I like people. I love literary festivals. I love going on tour. I just love this. Sitting in these bizarre, shitty little cafes in back streets, talking to people I’ve never met. I love all that stuff. Twitter is almost the perfection of that way of dealing with people.”

by Andrew McMillen

After America is out now. Following John Birmingham on Twitter: twitter.com/johnbirmingham

Naturally, it was a blast to speak with one of my favourite writers for the first time. (It also helped that I’d finished reading an advance copy of After America half an hour before we met, so the story was fresh in my mind.)