A Conversation With John Birmingham, Brisbane-based author, journalist and blogger

I met with Brisbane-based author, journalist and blogger John Birmingham in late June 2010, to discuss his newest book, After America, for a story in The Big Issue. You can read that story here.

Full transcript of our conversation is below. It begins in the middle of discussing the book - which I’d only finished half an hour before we met - and ranges from discussing the characters and writing process to the merits of genre fiction, time management, and his social media usage.

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

Andrew: I’m sure it was no coincidence that much of the descriptions [in the book] are quite cinematic. [note: John's publisher, Pan Macmillan, also commissioned a teaser trailer for After America ahead of the book's release]

John: Yeah. I mean partly, yeah – I’d like it to be a movie. There are guys in the U.S. at the moment arguing with each other over the rights to do the previous series [Axis Of Time] as a movie, but this one would be so much easier to do. Partly because I’m writing it easier, but also the more I get into the thriller headspace… It’s a cinematic form of storytelling. It’s got lots of colour, lots of movement, you’ve got that whole Bruckheimer accelerated narrative thing going - every seven minutes something has to happen! Yeah, so I guess it’s not surprising that people start seeing it in terms of movies.

One of the things I like doing when a book comes out, any book comes out like this, is I wait a couple of weeks and then I put a blog up and run a discussion on who everybody would cast in the various roles. It’s always interesting, because I have very strong ideas about who should be there. The problem is no one agrees with me.

I must admit I haven’t read any of your other fiction work. This is the first one.

That’s actually not a bad thing, because the books are all so are fucking different. It doesn’t strike me as an odd thing but it does put the zap on some peoples’ head that I’m writing something like Leviathan one year, and then I turn around and do Weapons Of Choice the next year. You’re not necessarily coming with a disadvantage for not having seen the other books.

I found myself more drawn to Miguel and Sofia’s side of the story, instead of the military stuff.

I really like Miguel’s character. I really liked his relationship with Sophia. It almost didn’t happen. In the first draft of the book, he’s alone. The deal with Miguel was to be almost a biblical burden that he had to carry, and his family… [spoilers]. In the first draft, his family wasn’t killed. They were just kicked off the farm and driven away. He decides he’s got to get to Kansas City to tell Kipper because he has this naïve faith in Kipper to save him.

I wrote the entire book where he was just travelling with his two dogs; the dogs were basically to give him something to talk to, and emote to. But it just didn’t fucking work. We just kept asking ourselves, “why is this guy off on his own when his family are travelling on their own through the badlands that he himself says are fucking badlands?” And also it didn’t emotionally justify how fucked up he was in the story.

So having sort of gone through it, we agreed in the end that the family had to die. But then of course to kill them all off, he was just going to ride down there and go out guns blazing, and so that’s why he has Sophia with him, to give him one last thing to live for.

And as a storyline, I loved this Caitlin storyline. I love just inverting all of the old action thriller tropes; you know, how the two most dangerous characters in the book are both chicks. One is not pregnant, but breastfeeding, and just recovering from pregnancy.

But I gotta say, writing the book, the most satisfying story to dwell on – and you do dwell on it, it’s so fucking long you live inside the story after a while – was the Miguel story. I’ve always liked cowboy movies, and again the nice thing about his was it’s a very traditional, a really fucking traditional cowboy story. It could be any of the Steve McQueen or John Wayne movies, you could easily lay that template over and it would match, millimetre perfect. It’s not because, of course, Miguel is a Mexican; it’s actually his ethnic background which gets him into trouble and kicks the story off.

You really did heap it upon him though, even at the end. He didn’t get a break.

No, he doesn’t. I’m not a religious person at all but I do like the idea of the story of Job where some poor average prick just gets pounded and pounded and pounded to see whether or not he’s going to break. That is Miguel’s role, to just see how much one person can take. In the third and final installation of the series, there will be the whole idea of biblical vengeance that I’m going to work through as well. I’m with you; as a storyline, it’s probably my fave, despite the fact that as a character, I think Caitlin’s my actual favourite.

This was always going to be a three book series. I wonder if your feelings toward the arc of the series have changed as you’ve been writing it.

Yeah, the first one for me worked just as a standalone book. I was very much aware and remained aware that a lot of people like the idea of a series. They like the idea of being able to go back in another book with the same characters. If they enjoyed the first one, they’ll enjoy the second one. They also hate fucking series because you have to wait a long time for the big questions to be resolved.

I agree with them. I’m a huge fan of Peter F. Hamilton’s work: he writes these huge arcing space operas that just go on and on and on. I love them, I’m addicted to them, but it just drove me nuts to have to wait 18 months to two years between each of them.

I wrote Without Warning so that you could read it, close it, and if you wanted to, you could walk away from it. 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 really. I haven’t written any others that I’ve been as happy as I was with that.

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. That is actually where I did most of the work, in editing the first draft. I busted this arm in a training accident in Jujitsu and I had a plate inserted here [he shows me]. Although I was in plaster and then in a splint for only about seven or eight weeks, I didn’t get range of movement back in the arm for months. It threw everything out by about a year, which compounded the initial difficulties I had coming at this story because it was a perfect excuse not to engage with it. “Sorry, I have a broken arm – I’m not doing anything on this fucking book for a while now.”

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 Relaxo 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. Miguel was actually part of that because I had changed his story completely. I really liked the idea of working in a very old fashioned western narrative under the guise of what’s virtually a military techno thriller. It changed a lot. Doubtless, the third one will be the same.

Did you do much storyboarding for this one?

No. I knew there were certain things I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to have a cattle drive, which is afflicted by a giant flood. Originally it was just an image I had. I saw these guys driving a big herd of cattle through a dead city and a flood comes through. So again, it was a cinematic vision - how fucking cool would that be?

When I was doing my very rough outline I just had this note, “Must have cattle drive and flood together. It will be awesome.” I also knew that, with Caitlin, I wanted her to parachute into New York at night with a battle going on. Again, I just thought that would be a great scene for her as a character, because the essence of Caitlin is isolation, and you don’t get any more isolated than freefalling through sub-freezing air into a dead city. So I knew that was coming, but in terms of structuring the entire narrative, as you do with a movie, I didn’t. I learned that lesson with Designated Targets; I did storyboard that out scene by scene.

I could tell you before I’d written the first word what this chapter would be about and what that character would be doing in that scene, hundreds of pages before they were written. And although it was a really efficient way to turn a book out, I wrote that book much more quickly than the other books I’ve done. It was also incredibly frustrating because the thing about characters is once they take off, once a character comes alive, which takes about 30 or 40 pages, they start doing their own thing and talking and speaking their own dialog. You actually don’t need to think stuff up.

Someone tweeted [at me] earlier today, they had a review copy and they said their favourite line in the book was on page 453, where Caitlin talks about the definition of disingenuous. I thought “What the fuck are you talking about?” I went and got the book, and it was really good. I had no memory of writing that at all because I really didn’t write it. That was just Caitlin speaking.

What you lose with really rigid storyboarding is that spark where the characters just do what they want to do. So although I block out the story and I know where I effectively want people to go, I don’t do it in the minute detail that I had in the past.

I follow you on Twitter, and I’ve subscribed to your blog [Cheeseburger Gothic] for a couple of years. I’m intrigued by how often you call upon your followers and your fanbase for motivation, for inspiration, for the little facts that crop up. I wonder; do you know of many other authors that are doing that? It seems really obvious.

It works for me, but I’m a bit unusual because I worked in journalism for 10 years before I wrote Felafel, for instance. I like people. I love literary festivals. I love going on tour. I just love this [gestures between us]; sitting in these bizarre, shitty little cafes in back streets, talking to people who I’ve never fucking met. I love all that stuff. Twitter is almost the perfection of that way of dealing with people. So it works for me. Other people would just die of horror.

I know publishers - all publishers, but mine in particular - are trying to get their authors to take up social media in the same way, for exactly the same reasons; to reach out and talk to their readership, to create bonds. They’re all coming at it from a commercial point of view: you create that bond and the next time you put a book out they run out and buy it. That is the core of their thinking; it’s quite cynical.

And yet, I’ve got great friendships out of Twitter. As you can see from reading the blog - when I travel now, I say I’m going to be in Melbourne next week and they all sort of gather in one spot, and we go out drinking and we have a good time. So there is a real personal bonus to doing it.

Other writers? I know Nancy Kress, who is an American sci-fi author, runs a blog. Peter Temple runs one, I think. Who else? There’s half a dozen or so, usually mid-list authors. If Stephen King or, God forbid, J.K. Rowling, was on Twitter, it simply wouldn’t work. You know exactly why it wouldn’t work.

I follow Eliza Dushku [pictured right]; me and 100,000 people follow Eliza Dushku [on Twitter], and we’re all firing our little tweets off. She was in Sydney the other week, and I just said she was shopping and I sent this tweet off to her. I said “You’re shopping around QVB, you should go to Pendalino for lunch,” because I went the other day and it was beautiful. That would have been one of maybe 600 tweets that came in the previous minute. There is no fucking way that somebody like that can afford to pay any attention at all to what’s happening in the tweet stream.

But for someone like me, who’s much more of a microcelebrity, it works really well. Having said that, most authors I know are social cripples, and they just would not have the wherewithal to pull it off.

It’s funny that you made these realisations yourself because you are a people person, whereas the publishers are looking at it from a commercial perspective. I’m not sure that Twitter would work if you had to hit them with a stick, saying “You must do this.”

No, a lot of [authors] don’t even like touring. I can think of some very big names who won’t sign books. If you’re getting that close to a reader, it’s such a horror to them that they just refuse to do it. It’s madness, but a lot of them are the same way.

I wonder if you have any thoughts on the divide between literary fiction and popular fiction.

I do. There was a very funny piece by Tony Martin on Scrivener’s Fancy. There was a panel discussion on Jennifer Byrne’s TV show with Matt Reilly, Di Morrissey, Bryce Courtney, and Lee Child, and the interviewer was asking this very question.

Lee Child [pictured left] is an interesting guy. He’s really fucking smart. But he writes thrillers. He’s not writing literature and I suspect that he decided he was going to play with this interview and so he just acted like a pompous git saying his books were every bit as good as literature. And anyway, Tony Martin wrote this fucking hilarious tear down of the interview. It’s totally worth going and Googling it up this afternoon, if only for your own benefit. Your life will improve having read it. [note: it's here]

He just pointed out there’s no way what Child’s does is literature, with this brutal demonstration. He took apart a couple of pages from one of Child’s books. I would never ever be so fucking foolish as to make that claim. I do entertainment. That’s it. Not completely low-brow, but upper middle-brow… not even that, lower middle-brow entertainment with a lot of explosions is what I do in the thrillers. 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 a lot of point trying to compare and contrast because it’s like trying to compare and contrast first person shooters 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. They’re just very different things. I’ve had a lot of fun over the years making fun of literature, but I read it and at times I love it. I think the best writer working in Australia at the moment is Matthew Condon. Everything he’s written since The Pillow Fight has been absolutely fucking stunning, and it’s all ‘big L’ literature. Matt doesn’t do mere entertainment. He’s a really great fucking writer.

But he doesn’t sell a lot of copies at Woolworths and Kmart, and I guess the thing that energises this debate is that people, particularly literary critics and some literary authors, get 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 and their craft is honed to a much finer point than ours is. And yet they’re selling 1,500 and 2,000 copies of their books sometimes. Their writing is usually their second job. And their first job, if they’re lucky, is in something like journalism where it’s at least a related field. If not, some are in advertising, which is slowly losing their fucking soul from being sold day in and day out. It upsets people. There was a great review of After America in The Australian by their chief literary critic (Geordie Wilkinson) a couple of weeks ago who –

I didn’t read the review, as I didn’t want to spoil the book.

Well, you’ve read the book. Go read the review now. It’s fucking fascinating because this guy, he hates doing it but he admits the book is well written “for a thriller” - and you have to capitalise FOR A THRILLER. But he finds the politics of it, and the business of thrillers so fucking poisonous that it just fills him with hate.

I emailed one of the eds at The Oz and said “Everyone thinks I hate that review. Could you just pass on the word to Geordie, that I actually really liked it.” I enjoyed reading it as a review, and as a piece of advertising for the book… it worked. But I did enjoy it. And then the reviewer sent me an email back and said “Thank you very much”. I can’t publish it because it’s private correspondence, but one thing I can reveal is that for most of the time he was reading that book, he was seething, absolutely seething because he thinks I’m writing beneath myself. Which in one sense, I guess you could say I am. In the other sense he’s talking through his fucking arse, because thrillers are really fucking difficult to get right.

There are so many things that can go wrong and you do need to actually bring some skill and consideration for your audience to the business of putting them together.

I read an article in The Australian that was written when Without Warning came out. At the time, you said that you feel your primary audience is “security guys, military, ex-military and gun bunnies”. Do you think that’s still true?

I’m constantly surprised by my audience. Before I wrote thrillers I was surprised to discover I even had a geek audience. I was doing research for Dopeland [pictured right], where I travel around the country smoking dope and writing about it, and I ended up at a science fiction convention in Perth with these utter fucking freaks. And every one of them had read my books, every fucking one of them and most of them could quote slabs at me. It was a disturbing revelation, but a revelation nonetheless.

I try not to make suppositions about people who read my books, and it’s a good thing because I’m constantly surprised. A lot of chicks read them. They’re certainly not in the majority and they’re not half of my readers, but they’re probably about 35-40% of the readership, and they’re not the sort of chick you’d necessarily expect to read the explodey thrillers.

You do have strong female characters.

Exactly. My publisher Kate explains it that way. She says, “You write great female characters.” My old agent, Annette, who was a fiery, fiery fucking woman, emailed me about an hour or so ago to curse me because she’s supposed to be putting together a festival up in Noosa or something and she hasn’t been able to get to it because she’s been stuck in After America. And the reason is she loves the female characters; they’re tough.

I guess the sort of gun bunny thing comes from the fact that my blog regulars, there’s a preponderance of ex-military, ex-serving cops and security guys who hang out at Cheeseburger [Gothic, JB's blog]. So they set the tone of the place. Having said that, they’re a fraction of the people who pull through. I have lots and lots of lurkers… like you. You don’t strike me as a gun bunny. But they’re happy just to drop in. And some of those guys are very fucking funny. Boylan is just a comedic genius. I will scan my own blog looking for a Paul Boylan comment because I know there’s always going to be a big payoff.

I couldn’t tell you who reads them now. I know it’s 60% male, mostly over the ages of 18 which is reasonable enough. I don’t think they’re appropriate books for school kids. They’re incredibly violent. Beyond that, I couldn’t say. As an example, my friend, my blog buddy MonsterYuppie, who lives down the road here - he’s a monster yuppie. He owns his own medical technology company, he’s someone that flies all over the world first class, spends 200 days a year running it.

When Without Warning came out, I actually ran into him on his way to the airport. I had a box of Warning on me and said, “Here, take this for your flight.” “Thanks,” he said. He popped on the flight and texted me later on. He was in first class. There were five businessmen in there and three of them were reading Without Warning. [laughs] I would never have imagined that.

I’m interested to know how you balance fiction writing for this book with your regular journalistic work. I know you have two blogs [for Brisbane Times: Blunt Instrument, and The Geek].

Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I fuck up. Sometimes I take too much on and I fuck it up. Particularly with feature writing, because to do features properly, they’re hard work. And I get paid well for them, but I get paid much better for the books, and it’s always tempting to go where the money is and to just – because I’ve written so many features, it’s really tempting to me to just go “I’ll throw this together at the last moment.” Of course, you fucking can’t. So you know, I could point to half a dozen stories, cover stories for big magazines I’ve written that… they’re not shit, because I’ve had enough experience that I know how to put a feature together, but they could have been a lot fucking better than the published version, because I just wasn’t very good at juggling my time.

I try and assign different parts of the work day and the work week to different things. Blogs for instance take nothing to write. I did a blog about ninjas last week. Twelve minutes, I think it took to write. Hugely popular.

The thing with blogs, however, is the work is all at the backend. It’s in the comments, managing the comments. A lot of gallery journos, for instance: they’re not writing blogs, they’re still writing their own columns but they’ve been opened up for comments. Those guys never, ever reply. Probably a good idea, because unless you’re willing to get down to the same level as your nutty fucking blog followers, you’re on a hiding to nothing.

I got hired as a blogger by Fairfax and I work as a blogger, which means I read every comment and I reply to as many to them as I can. That can chew up a lot of fucking time. I did one, which I knew was going to go off the other day, about the World Cup. I did it purely to piss off soccer fans. It’s one of my shameful joys in life. And it did; it went off. Like, 400 comments in an afternoon or something, and I’m fuckin’ sitting there reading every one. Which would have an ego cost if I didn’t have such a massive ego, because these guys just were fucking hammering me, from one end of the day to the other.

That sort of thing can be really addictive and distracting because although it is work, I’m sort of doing my job, even though my contract at Fairfax doesn’t actually require me to do anything other than file cop, I’m compelled to. Also, I think blogs suck if you don’t get in there and engage. But it can be incredibly distracting. So once I’ve written the thing [a blog], I tend to have set times a day when I’ll go in to read comments and answer them, because otherwise I’ll sit there waiting for them to pop up, responding to each one.

With books, I try and have one book that I’m working on full-time, which means it gets four hours a day, and then I’ll have another one which I’m bringing up to speed that gets maybe an hour or so a day. And then once that one is done, it gets shunted off into production and the other one comes up. It’s a very unromantic, production line way of putting out the words, but it means I can work as a writer.

It also means you get the day-to-day interaction with people rather than being lost in your own mind.

That’s exactly right. My friend Peter Robb, who I fucking haven’t spoken to in years – he wrote Midnight in Sicily, a great book, one of the great books of the 1990s. Peter is a funny dude. He loves the fine life, he loves a meal, he loves wine, and he likes going out to lunch with friends, but he is prone to locking himself away in his apartment for years at a time. He told me once that when he was writing his biography of Caravaggio, he went so long without human contact of any kind, that the first time he stepped outside of the apartment he had a moment of panic, that he had forgotten how to speak. It’s not good.

I avoid that. [laughs] Facebook is my friend.

Even if it’s typing, it’s still interaction.

That’s right.

I’ll leave it there. Thanks, John.

After America is available now via Pan Macmillan. Follow John Birmingham on Twitter, and/or subscribe to his personal blog, Cheeseburger Gothic.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: after-america, blogging, Brisbane, conversation, dopeland, felafel, Interview, john-birmingham, Journalism, q-and-a, Social Media, the-big-issue, twitter, Writing | Comment (0)

Rolling Stone story: The Go-Betweens Get Their Own Bridge

A short story for the September 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, about The Go-Between Bridge opening in Brisbane.

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

The Go-Betweens Get Their Own Bridge

by Andrew McMillen

In the tradition of Melbourne’s ACDC Lane, Queensland now has Go Between Bridge. In 2009, Brisbane residents voted to name the city’s newest river crossing after The Go-Betweens, who formed at the University of Queensland in 1977 and went on to achieve international acclaim. On June 25 this year, Robert Forster marked the structure’s completion with a concert on the bridge itself. Ahead of the event, Forster described the naming as “heart-warming, and a bit surreal”. Forster opened with “Steets Of Your Town” from 1988’s 16 Lovers Lane. The song was written by band co-founder Grant McLennan, who died from a heart attack in 2006, aged 48. Beforehand, a crowd of 5,000 witnessed Yves Klein Blue, The John Steel Singers, Bob Evans and Josh Pyke perform adjacent to the silent Brisbane skyline.

The above photo was taken by Brisbane-based music photographer Matt Palmer.

Elsewhere: I reported on this show at length for Mess+Noise. I also interviewed Robert Forster for M+N’s ‘Icons’ series a few weeks before The Go Between Bridge opened.

Filed under Published Writing | Tags: bridge, Brisbane, go-between, Journalism, mess-and-noise, Published Writing, robert-forster, rolling stone, Writing | Comment (0)

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.)

Filed under Published Writing | Tags: after-america, australia, author, Brisbane, Interview, john-birmingham, Journalism, profile, the-big-issue, thriller, twitter, writer, Writing | Comments (2)

The Weekend Australian story: ‘Tales Of The City’

A story for The Weekend Australian’s Review: a profile of Brisbane author and journalist Matthew Condon [pictured below], framed around his latest book, Brisbane. An excerpt from the published story is below.

Tales of the City

by Andrew McMillen

Matthew Condon’s literary ‘love letter’ to Brisbane is set to reignite debate about the Queensland capital’s historical origins.

HOW does one write a book that captures a whole city? This is the question that confronted Queensland writer Matthew Condon, who describes the opportunity to write Brisbane, the second book in publisher NewSouth’s series devoted to Australian capital cities, as the “singular most simplistic, liberating brief that I’ve ever received”.

Commissioning editor Philippa McGuinness told Condon to approach the book any way he wished, “which on the one hand is brilliant”, says the author, “but on the other, when you come down to writing [it], trying to put your arms around an entire city, it was very difficult. I deliberated for months and months: how do you go about it? Then I decided that 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 give myself limitations.”

Eventually, Condon decided to ground his book in an examination of the location where explorer John Oxley first landed on the Brisbane River in 1824. “I 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’.” Notebook and camera in hand, the author visited the granite monument. Located at North Quay, which was erected to celebrate the centenary of Oxley’s landing, he says “it’s possibly the most unimaginative foundation stone of any city in the Western world . . . I stood there with the traffic roaring on both sides, and something about it struck me as wrong.”

Full story available on The Australian’s website.

If you have any interest in the story behind the Queensland capital, I highly recommend checking out Condon’s Brisbane.

This was a particularly enjoyable feature to write, as Matthew is one of my favourite feature writers - I hold his work for The Courier-Mail’s QWeekend magazine in high regard.

Filed under Published Writing | Tags: Brisbane, Journalism, matthew-condon, newsouth, Published Writing, publishing, queensland, qweekend, Review, the-weekend-australian, Writing | Comment (0)

A Conversation With Benjamin Law, author and freelance journalist

Benjamin Law [pictured right] is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist (for Frankie, QWeekend, and The Monthly, among others) who recently had his first book, The Family Law, published via Black Inc. I interviewed him for The Courier-Mail about its genesis and release; you can read that story here.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, which took place in late April in a New Farm coffee shop.

Andrew: So I read the book, and found it pretty damn enthralling. The way you tell stories is quite engaging. I like how you switch between first person-like dialogue and stuff and switch away to tell a story, and the way you keep switching between those two.

Benjamin: Thank you very much.

I saw you had your first review.

Yeah, in Bookseller & Publisher, so that’s mainly an industry magazine, but that’s important and a relief because I know from working at a bookstore, Avid Reader, that magazine’s important to know how to sell things and whether to sell things. So yeah, pretty chuffed.

How does your family feel about the book?

It’s always the first question, isn’t it? [laughs] Well, I’ve written about my family a lot because I write for a magazine called Frankie, a lot of those first person sort of stuff, a lot of it is personal anecdotes, funny stories from your life, and pretty short funny essays that a lot of other writers write for Frankie as well, so not just me. I’ve been writing for them for quite a while now, so my family is quite used to me writing about them.

They’ve gotten accustomed to it, and to be honest; we’re a pretty open family when it comes to most things. You’ll read the book and you’ll hear the stuff that my family says. It’s pretty outrageous. If you’re a friend of mine and you’ve met my mother for the first time, most of my friends have a story of when they met my mother for the first time. They can usually pinpoint the exact moment where she started talking about all of our births, in graphic detail. It’s not a very closed family. There is not much that’s too sacred, really.

When I was writing this book, it was funny; I got a book contract, and I said, “Hey guys, I’ve got news for you all.” They were like “What?” I’m like “I’m going to write this book,” and they were all like “that’s amazing, what’s it about?” “It’s about you guys.” They were like “That’s … really good.” You can sort of see it’s really great because whenever my family, especially between the siblings as well, are completely different but everyone does really well in their field and we really celebrate everybody’s wins, so when I said I’m writing a book and I’ve got a contract for it, everyone was over the moon, thrilled.

I think when I said, “Guess what it’s about,” they were like “cool,” but when I finished the draft, all 6 of my immediate family members – I sent a draft to all 6 immediate family members and they liked what they saw. I think because I’ve been writing about them for a while now, I’ve got an internal gauge of what I can and can’t… To be honest, the stuff that I wouldn’t be able to get away with wouldn’t be that interesting anyway.

When they read through the drafts, it was mainly stuff like “Change some of your spelling, your grammar is wrong here, your syntax is a bit awkward here”. They were just like “You know what, this is totally fine.” There were some disputes as to how things happened. There were some discrepancies in memories as well, in terms of whether this happened, how it happened, what people said, and that’s because it’s so long ago. These are stories going back through the ‘80s and ‘90s, which is when I grew up. Beyond that there wasn’t too much of a problem. Everyone is pretty happy.

So you weren’t taking too much creative license with these stories; you tried to faithfully recreate them as they happened.

As faithfully as possible, totally. Names have been changed and I think there are some pretty obvious reasons why some names have been changed. All my family have been pretty happy to stand by their names and their dialogue. I’ve tried to make sure they sound as natural as they can; I obviously didn’t go back in time and record their dialogue. I didn’t take too much creative license and everything that happened in the book pretty much happened.

It’s interesting to me that you didn’t actually talk about the act of writing about the family at any stage during the book, so it was all from a distance. You recounted a story instead of saying “I was thinking at the time I’m going to write about this afterwards.” At what stage did you start writing about the family in Frankie?

I think I started doing a creative writing degree and I think I reached a point where I realised my family’s material was pretty good material. When I was doing my creative writing degree, everyone was writing fiction. I realized I’m rubbish at fiction. All of my fictional works were thinly disguised memoirs. I think that’s what a lot of people do for their first novel; they write a thinly disguised memoir.

I thought I would instead write it straight because especially after you read this book and a lot of other memoirs, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. I think with my family at least, that’s often the case. You’ll come across stories that defy belief a little; my dad meeting his dad for the first time after a decade and his dad dying that very day. That seems beyond anything any fiction – if you wrote that as fiction it would seem contrived.

I think there is something cool about writing it straight. At what point did I decide to write about them? I think I’ve been writing about them in one say, shape, or another throughout the years, but I think Frankie sort of gave me the opportunity to write about the stuff that’s happened but also through a humorous lens as well. There is some stuff in the book that’s quite heavy but I think unless it’s coupled by humour, it doesn’t really work. I think that’s one thing my family is quite good at, all of us, we like laughing at horror, at least after a while. Everyone has a pretty black sense of comedy.

What was it, that Minnie Mouse rape story…. “I was raaaaped!”

[laughs] That comes early [in the book]. That’s dark. We weren’t sure whether to include that or not, but I just left it in after a while. If I wouldn’t have left that in I don’t think you would have gotten a very true sense of how inappropriate my family can become.

Have you ever kept a diary?

No, I’m really undisciplined. I’m incredibly undisciplined. You would talk to a lot of other writers who would say, “I’ve kept a diary since I was a child, and then I kept a lock on it under the bed.” I went back to my family house recently and I found an old diary and like all of my diaries from childhood, all of January is filled, and then the entries become bullet points, and by February I’ve given up.

I don’t know about other people but I never thought as a kid that when this stuff was happening that it was incredibly interesting. I was born into a big migrant family, into a pretty odd family in a lot of ways, but I never thought it was that unusual or interesting to write about. I think you build up that self awareness later in life. I’m not a disciplined enough writer to write every day. It’s interesting; writing these stories has been – it’s not until you start writing them that you start remembering some of the details that come through.

And your family’s feedback would have assisted along the way.

That’s right, after the first draft.

Speaking about heavy topics, the chapter about how parts of your mother’s family were deported to Hong Kong, that was heavy and to get that kind of perspective, for me as an Australian, I think that’s one of the most important takeaway aspects of the book.

Absolutely, the family is really interesting because they’re supposed to be the family, the people you know most about but in so many ways, and I think this is the case for a lot of people, but you never really get the opportunity to get a full account of some of those stories until you start writing about them, or until you start asking certain questions, like exactly what did happen. I’d grown up in a house that was really full of stuff, and it wasn’t until I was a bit older as a child that I thought, “None of this stuff is ours. How did it actually get here?” That turned into me writing this story about my extended family being deported, this incredibly traumatic time for my family in the mid ‘80s and I only would have been 4 years old and pretty oblivious to what happened.

I think writing that story was really important because it gave me a sense that I do come from pretty amazing stock, really resilient people who were really willing to take a bet on this country. My parents were lucky they got to stay, that they became citizens. I think that’s the case for a lot of children with migrant parents, as well. You really want to try hard because you constantly, whether you’re aware of it or not, you are constantly reminded of how much they went through just to come here and what they had to give up to come here. I think that story is probably an illustration of that.

Is there a story in the book that you’re most proud of, or a chapter in the book that you favor?

I really like the story about my dad, and his dad. It starts off with me not knowing how to buy my dad presents because he works 24/7 and he doesn’t have any pastimes because he works so hard. That of course leads into the story of his dad as well and he’s not someone I grew up with. He died way before I was born. He died when my dad was a kid, so finding out that story was really important to me, getting a sense of who my dad was when he was young, as well, was really important to me. That’s probably one story I’m proud of because it’s the kind of story that none of my siblings had unearthed either, and I hadn’t really investigated it until I started writing this book.

This really interesting process of “Dad, tell me what happened”; sometimes those stories aren’t told until you ask those questions. I’m not sure if it’s pride but I’m really glad and relieved that I got that story out of dad. He’s not the biggest storyteller. He’s not about to tell you stories for the sake of it. He’s a very practical guy but when you ask him questions, all these stories come out and that story wasn’t even half of it. It gave me a much clearer sense of who dad was, and what drove him to the guy he is now. All these interesting processes of finding out what were you parents like when they were your age; you sort of forget that your parents were your age. That was a really good, fun process.

Another topic I found interesting was how you didn’t gloss over the divorce. You told time and time how unhappy your parents were. It was obviously a very frightening thing as a child but you kind of accepted it. We can see our parents aren’t happy, what’s happening here.

Divorce is interesting. One of the things about this book is I think I’ve written it from a point of pride. I’m proud my family went through this incredibly difficult time of my parents splitting up and came out of it relatively okay. For all intents and purposes, we still like each other, probably not my parents, but everyone else likes each other. I think divorce is one of those things that, especially in the Chinese community, it’s not really talked about.

You mentioned that in the dialogue, that the Asian community came and spoke to the kids.

They totally feel it’s their right to come in and give their opinions. I always thought that was a bit strange. It’s not until you grow up that you realise how hard it would’ve been for your parents, like you always feel like “this is such a miserable time for me” when you’re a child who comes from divorced parents and the broken family. But, it’s only when you become an adult that you start to realise how difficult it would’ve been for them.

My mom is a tiny woman. She had 5 kids, all school aged at that stage and she decided to say no to my dad, break off the marriage, and raise his children on her own. I don’t even know where that impulse would have come from. I don’t know how she could’ve brought yourself to that point to say, “I’m brave enough to do this”.

I think writing the book has given me an opportunity to look back on that as well. I think writing the book has also given me the opportunity to see some of the humour in it, as well. When you’re in that situation it’s pretty grim. But in hindsight it’s sort of hilarious as well.

There is this one story that I really like and it’s all about my dad taking us on his weekends, during the divorce. On paper, shared custody is supposed to be a pretty clean thing. Maybe the mother gets you Monday through Friday and the dad gets you every weekend or second weekend. It’s quite quarantined how everything works.

The reality of it is completely different and it’s wild. We grew up in the Sunshine Coast, and of course the Sunshine Coast has these terrible theme parks, totally completely opposite to the Gold Coast, so Sunshine Coast – we went to things like the deer sanctuary and Superbee for my dad’s weekends, and Nostalgia Town as well.

I went to Nostalgia Town as a child, too. I thought it was kind of cool at the time, but in retrospect, maybe it wasn’t…

It was quite strange wasn’t it? You can’t help but laugh. My dad tried to take us to these places to show us a good time, but they were sort of lame. He wanted to have time with the kids but my mum insisted on going with him. We went to these places that were supposed to be fun, but smelled like urine. It’s sort of this tragic comedy, really. But at the time it just seems tragic. With retrospect you realise it’s actually a really funny piece. I guess that’s where most of the book comes from, black humour. I dig tragic comedy.

I know the press release mentioned David Sedaris, so he’s obviously one of your influences. You did mention that when we first met. You described it as a ‘David Sedaris kind of book’. Are there any other kind of humour writers you enjoy?

Sedaris is probably the main one. I remember reading him for the first time and thinking “this guy is pretty awesome,” and I identified with him because similarly he came from a big, sprawling family, had a migrant parent, gay, and had that perspective on grim humour that I quite liked.

Augustine Burroughs probably does that, as well, Running with Scissors. I also like people who write good, straight personal essays, who aren’t necessarily in it for laughs as well, like Joan Didion and Zadie Smith. Michael Chabon’s essays, as well. I’ve read a lot of fiction, but I really like when people just write about themselves and I get to know them, probably, as people as well. I like that sense of intimacy. Those are probably the big guys for me.

You’ve been tagged as a comedy writer, or a humour writer. There is some kind of danger associated with that because comedy is subjective. As soon as I started reading… for starters, I could picture your voice as I read it because I’ve met you, obviously. I could picture your deep, baritone voice. That made it funny to me but obviously, your humour appeals to me.

It’s not going to appeal to everyone.

Maybe it’s a generational thing.

I’ve already heard from various people that they really like the book but they also couple it with “It’s not going to be for everyone, is it Benjamin?” It’s a bit vulgar and crass but to be honest, that’s how my family is as well. My family often claims that I corrupted them with how disgusting I am, but when I look back into the family archives, and memories of what people were saying at the time, that’s the family. That’s actually the family dynamic, to be quite crass.

The comedy writer tag is dangerous because I think anything that’s considered as comedy is dangerous as inherent failure associated with comedy because not everyone has the same sense of humour. The task of comedy is to make people laugh. You’re not going to make everyone laugh so I think this book is for a very specific audience. That audience probably has some familiarity with dysfunction, to some extent, with their own family. Maybe our younger audience don’t mind a bit of vulgarity and crassness as well. If you get all that you’ll probably like my family. You’ll probably like the book because it’s about my family.

I really liked the chapter about how you met Scott at the end. That was really touching.

Yeah, I wasn’t sure if I was going to write that because you don’t want to write too earnestly about love. Of course, throughout that story, because that’s one story of a few stories in that section, of course I throw in some fart jokes as well. I think that story is sort of important to be in there because growing up gay, it’s still sort of a big deal, and no one was open about it when we went to school, as well. There is always this arrested development involved, especially if you’re someone of my age. I’m in my late 20’s now. You only start finding love a little bit after everyone else, as well.

It’s funny, I interviewed the former Justice of the High Court, Michael Kirby, the other day for Frankie and he was talking about how he didn’t find love or even start looking for it until he was in his late 20’s, early 30’s. There was this whole gap in his life where he didn’t look for love. I hope that a story like that, some young homo might read it and think, “That’s cool, and I might find my own partner one day.” You aren’t particularly vocal about how you are at that young age because you’re vulnerable. That really cuts off your chances in finding someone you might want to be with as well.

Certainly in the book, there is that whole section where I’m 12 years old and already wondering whether I’m going to die alone, that whole fear, crazy things for a 12-year old to be thinking about but that’s the type of kid that I was, completely neurotic. If I was a young teen and I read this book at that young age, and nothing like that existed for me at that age, I think I would get something positive out of it. At least as the writer, I hope young people would.

You mentioned in the book how your fellow high school students didn’t suspect that you were gay. To then, there was no way that you could be both a minority and gay.

It scrambled their radar. It scrambled up everyone’s sonar.

You were invisible to them.

Totally, but I think a lot of the people who read my work, like Frankie readers especially, they’re probably in their late teens and their generation sort of has its shit together. I don’t think we necessarily did.

The book kind of goes through the full range of emotions. I just realised at the end, when you were speaking about how it was despair that you might be alone for your whole life, to finding someone; to being unhappy with the family situation, to that breakup happening and people being happier; you kind of nailed the full range of emotions, I think.

I like that. I never really thought about it that way but it probably makes sense, as well. My parents’ divorce started when I graduated from primary school, and only really ended when I graduated from high school. I had my whole teen years just smothered by these feelings of tension and not wanting to belong to this family at all. I don’t think everything is solved, necessarily, at all, but I do feel like it’s only at this stage of my life that I’m quite happy to be a part of my family. I’m quite happy, proud to be a part of this shambolic, odd family.

And when other people read my work, one of the loveliest things that people say is “Your family is so awesome, I wish I could have been raised in that family.” The 17-year old side of me thinks “What the hell are you talking about? You would not have wanted to belong to my family at all” but I can sort of see in another sense that my family is sort of strong and funny people and nowadays, especially, I enjoy their company immensely. It takes a while. It’s taken a while at least, but I like how you sort of described it as starts in one place and ends in another. That’s probably the chronology of the book, as well; starting in one part of my childhood and ends in a more positive time.

The book ends with the destruction of the house.

Which hasn’t happened yet.

Oh, that was the one creative license that you took?

It hasn’t happened yet. I speculate on what’s going to happen. That’s in the process of happening now. I think it’s going to be incredibly traumatic. I never moved as a kid. I have a lot of friends who say their whole childhood was defined by moving from house to house, from school to school, and they never got that sense of security. I was sort of the opposite. We never moved.

I was born into a house and when I go visit my mum that’s still the house that I go back to. It is the “childhood home”. I certainly don’t want to destroy it. If I dream about a house, it will be that house. It’s a really old house now. It’s sort of falling apart by the seams and I think there’s going to be some total sense of devastation when it’s gone because I’m coming up to my late 20’s, 30’s now and to know that’s been the one house, your family house. Those are where your roots are; I think it’s going to be sad to see it go. It’s a long process to make it all happen.

I like how in the end you acknowledged your editors for encouraging you to write along the way. I wonder how much your journalistic tendencies from your freelance work informs how you wrote the book itself.

Journalism skills came in handy for some of the stories. Interviewing is an obvious one, but also stuff like It could have been one of those montages from a detective film: microfilm blurring over your face, zooming in and printing out copies.

That was really interesting and that’s not just from journalism but because I’ve studied for so long, as well, that I know how to use all that stuff, and get into the archives. It wasn’t until I did that that I realised how big news that was. Obviously, my family being deported was big news in my family and it’s a pretty defining era in our history, but it was sort of defining to the whole community, the whole Sunshine Coast community at that stage. It was front-page news for probably a few weeks, and continued to be news for two months, broadcast news, and newspapers. It was really interesting and it was interesting knowing – listening how the tone of reporting those issues changed as well.

This was in the mid ‘80s where my extended family got deported and most of the coverage was incredibly supportive of my family, whereas I think now if that story happened, I’m not sure it would be that supportive of a migrant family who had stayed here illegally and were now being deported; most of the editorials that were written were in favour of them staying. Most of the headlines were in favour of them staying, as well. My baby cousin was born and she was born a citizen but her parents were illegal immigrants. Everyone really rallied for that loophole to be taken advantage of where hopefully her parents could stay because of her. It was really fascinating reading my family story as news. I’m trying to think if there are any other ways journalism came into it. Probably those are the main things, skills wise, at least.

I hear you’re going to South-east Asia for your next book project.

That’s right. A completely different book project, the first book is all about myself and my family. The second book is a travelogue. In another way, the second book will sort of be about myself. I’ll tell you what the concept is.

The concept is traveling throughout Southeast Asia and profiling different gay, lesbian, transsexual, queer communities. One of the fundamental questions at the heart of the book is; here I am as a young, gay Asian dude in a relatively tolerant society of queer rights, when it comes to the world at large; we’re relatively good here in Australia. I’m going to be traveling throughout China, Thailand, Japan, India, Nepal, Singapore, some regions where homosexual conduct is illegal, and asking what would have happened if I’d been born anywhere close to where my folks are actually from; who would my life be different.

In one sense, the second book is going to be quite different in tone and subject matter, but in another way it’s still asking some fundamental questions about what would life have been like for me in a different place. I guess that’s what a lot of children of migrants ask of themselves as well; what would my life have been like if I’d been raised as my parents had been raised. I’m looking forward to researching that.

Are you keeping a diary on that trip?

I will be. I’ll be more disciplined this time. I think there are reasons to, as well. I’m about to attend the world’s biggest transsexual beauty pageant in Thailand. I think keeping a diary for that would be a good idea. I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks for your time, Benjamin.

++

More Benjamin Law on his website and Twitter. Go buy The Family Law via independent retailers like Avid Reader [Bris], Readings [Melb] or Glee Books [Syd].

Filed under Conversations | Tags: avid-reader, benjamin-law, black-inc-publishing, Books, Brisbane, conversation, david-sedaris, glee-books, Interview, Journalism, qweekend, readings, storytelling, the-courier-mail, the-family-law, the-monthly, Writing | Comment (0)