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Bec Stafford Interviews Alison Croggon (Pt 2):

Saturday, 4th September, 2010, Midday.

Hilton Hotel, South Wharf, Melbourne.

Alison Croggon is a Melbourne writer. She has published several collections of poetry, for which she won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes, and was shortlisted for the Victorian (twice) and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her most recent collection is Theatre (Salt Publishing, 2008). She is the author of the Books of Pellinor quartet, a fantasy series that has been published worldwide to critical and popular acclaim, to date selling half a million copies in the UK and the US alone. She runs the influential review blog Theatre Notes and is Melbourne theatre critic for The Australian, for which last year she won the Geraldine Pascall Prize for criticism. She has written several works for theatre, including the operas The Burrow and Gauguin with the composer Michael Smetanin. They are currently working on their fourth opera together, Mayakovsky, which will be produced by Victoria Opera in 2013. This year she co-wrote Night Songs, a music theatre work for young people commissioned by Bell Shakespeare, with playwright Daniel Keene, and finished her sixth novel, Black Spring. She has three children and is married to the playwright Daniel Keene.

The line-up at AussieCon4 was nothing short of spectacular. Writers from a vast array of disciplines converged on the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre in the first week of September to talk science fiction and fantasy. I had the great privilege of speaking with Alison Croggon: poet, author, playwright, opera creator, and esteemed critic. A couple of hours with Alison will leave you feeling greatly inspired (and incredibly lazy!). Despite her many achievements and awards, she’s not one to rest on her laurels: for Alison, every week brings with it new opportunities for absorbing, engaging with, and creating art. Pretty remarkable, don’t you think?

B: Do you feel that young adult authors have a responsibility to educate, or to moralise, when they write?

A: Not moralise, no. I think moralising is… Uh, I never like it in books. I never did as a kid, I hated being patronised. But I think that education, in a broad sense, is absolutely important.  I mean, it was a big driving thing behind my books, which sort of emerged. I mean, I started writing for young people after the Serbian bombing in 1999…uh…so, sort of before 9/11. But I was doing a lot of reading–a lot of in-depth reading–and when 9/11 did happen, I wasn’t at all surprised. Oh, shocked, but you know, not surprised. If you’re at all politically aware of the world, and if you’re at all concerned about the environmental catastrophe that’s happening right now, and have any kind of public engagement at all, you can end up feeling very despairing about the adults in this world. And one of the things behind the books was just that–oh, it sounds a bit vainglorious–but I just wanted to talk to young people about things that I thought were of value, or about values and ethics. Things that I thought mattered. And one way of speaking to them was by writing stories. But I did not want to moralise. I mean, the things I wanted to explore in the books were ‘what does it mean to be Human?’ … ‘What is not Human?’. You know? ‘What is the natural world?’ ‘What is love? What does love mean?’ ‘What are our responsibilities to each other?’ So, I wanted to look at those things, and dramatise them, I suppose.

B: Going back to your poetry… Do you feel that a poet has to have a certain sense of melancholia about them to ‘get’ it?

A: Hmm. No. Some poets are funny. Um, but I mean I’ve become better at being funny as I’ve got older. (Laughs loudly). Oh, I’ve always been a bit melancholy. I think it’s just me. And I suppose there is that sense that you can’t be joyful unless you understand what’s painful.

B: No, they’re not mutually exclusive.

A: No! No! Of course not! Oh, how can one mean anything without the other?

B: Your books have been described as ‘narratives of beauty and terror’. Do you agree with that description, and are you generally drawn to art that’s at once beautiful and terrible?

A: Yes. I like tragedies, for instance. I suppose the beautiful thing about writing fantasy is that you can do that. You can talk about the marvellous, which is terrible and beautiful, in a really unembarrassed, straightforward way. But it’s difficult to find in other kinds of literature sometimes. In a way, it’s not for me to say. I can only read it as the writer, not as the reader.

B: And what are some of the things that fascinate you?

A: Golly. Well, one of my favourite books of all time is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. I’ve read it a few times. You must read it. It is *so* beautiful. It is *so* funny.

B: What most struck you about it?

A: Oh, it’s so many books in one. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking, HEARTBREAKING love story! It’s a political satire about Stalinist Russia. It’s absolutely hilarious. The Devil comes to Moscow and causes all sorts of terrible problems. And there are these hilarious episodes in it that satirise Stalinist bureaucracy. It’s this amazing fantasy about witches. There’s a witches’ Sabbath…and oh… It’s a drama and a tragedy and a comedy. I mean, it’s all these things at once–all in one book– which I think is amazing! It’s the kind of book I would love to be able to write myself.

B: What’s your favourite Shakespearean play?

A: It varies between Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, which is, I think, beautiful.

B: *Almost all tragedies*. Okay. Your three favourite poems?

A: Three favourite poems of all time? Okay… Rilke’s Duino Elegies… Oh, when someone asks you this, your mind goes blank because you don’t know where to begin! Oh, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by Blake is one of my favourite poems. And Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.

B: I couldn’t help but notice that there are two Hells in that selection.

A: (Laughs). I know.  But they’re different Hells.

B: So, what about Dante?

A: Oh, I love Dante. I actually love Milton’s Paradise Lost, too. I think it’s incredible.

B: Do you and your husband collaborate much?

A: We’ve co-written a play. Just recently. It was bizarre. It’s the first time we’ve ever done it. It was a commission from Bell Shakespeare. It was for a piece of music theatre for young people and it was enormous fun. I was thinking that we should do it more often because we basically talked a lot about the structure and then uh… ‘played tennis’. He started it… and then sent it to me… and then I added the next bit… and we e-mailed back and forth. It became… It was a game. It was ‘well you’ve sent me this and now what do I do?’

B: And was there rivalry?

A: Oh, it was part of it, I think. He’d write something and I’d think ‘that was pretty good’… and …

B: ‘Oh, I can’t better that’?

A: Oh, no. I *will* better that!

(Both laugh loudly).

B: And did you?

A: Oh well, not really. No. I think what’s really interesting is that we’re quite different writers. But in this thing, you can’t tell who wrote what.

B: You found a common voice?

A: We both feel we wrote something that we couldn’t have done on our own. Well, we knew what we were both doing. And we know each other, obviously, very well. So collaborating was a breeze. And it was fantastic, because neither of us felt that we were writing it. It was like we weren’t responsible for it. It was like the other person was writing it.

B: Oh, cooperation and lack of accountability. Excellent. Going from there for a minute, if you could collaborate with anyone–living or dead–who would you choose? What if Blake came back today…?

A: See, probably not, because I’m too different. There’s a great line by Gerard Manley Hopkins where he was asked who he admired. And he said ‘I admire and do otherwise’. And I’m a bit like that. There are so many people I admire passionately, but that’s what they do. And I’ll learn from what they do. But I don’t want to do that. I want to do what I can do that nobody else can do. It seems to be the point really. Don’t you reckon?

B: I do. Have you noticed the rivalry between the genre fiction and lit fiction worlds?

A: All the time. And it goes both ways. And it drives me mad, because I obviously inhabit all these different worlds. One thing was… When I started writing these books, I was fascinated by the fact that so many of the most serious avant-garde poets I knew were all closet SFFP readers.

B: Really?!

A: And in the theatre world, there are obviously a lot of very serious young artists, and the more serious they are, the more keen they tend to be on genre fiction.

B: So who are the literary snobs?

A: Oh, the critics. And maybe the less serious ones are the ones who are concerned about their status or something. It really takes me aback. Once, I was giving a reading for a Melbourne poetry institution, and I told them what I was writing, and it was… It was sort of embarrassing, like ‘well, what are you doing that for?’ Like I was grubbing about in the slums.

B: I hear this so often. I was reading something recently where they said lit fiction is where the characters stand around doing a lot of thinking and much nothing happens. And I felt such shame because that probably sums up most of my favourite books!

A: Yeah. Well, there’s no either or. You can enjoy all these things.

B: Do you personally prefer to read plot-driven books, or books that focus more on interiors and philosophies and thoughts, say?

A: I don’t have a preference, except for good writing. I think really good writing does it all. I mean, one thing people forget is that what we call great literature has picked up on all kinds of popular culture. Like Dante. He actually stole the structure of The Divine Comedy from this really popular format: what was the equivalent of the pulp novel of the day. They had these lurid books about Saint Paul going through Hell and he stole that idea and made that poem. And these things are forgotten. I think if things become too abstruse, they don’t touch people’s lives. I think Bulgakov did both. I just love him. I think he’s incredible.

B: And what are you working on at the moment?

A: At the moment, I’m writing a libretto for an opera about a famous Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, with a Sydney composer called Michael Smetanin. It’s commissioned by Opera Victoria and will go on in 2013.

B: A libretto now? Alison Croggon, you do too much and must be stopped.

A: *Laughs*.

B:  How do you keep this pace up?

A: It’s actually not that much.

B: What? Come on!

A: Well, I don’t have a full-time job or anything. So this is what I do.

B: Well, surely being a Mum’s a full-time job in itself!

A: Oh, yeah. *Laughs*. But everyone balances their own life. I think women tend to dismiss what they do. But I do that full-time, and this is also what I do. Otherwise, I’d get really bored.

B: Well, thank you for finding time in your busy schedule to talk to me!

A: My pleasure.

Keep up with Alison Croggon on the www:
The Theatre Notes blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Alison’s Home Page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com

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