I recently had the great pleasure of sitting down with Ben Lindner for a wide-ranging discussion on his podcast, Beyond the Zero. You can listen to the full discussion below, but I’ve broken the transcript into three parts focusing on my publishing activities, my writing, and my reading habits respectively. In this second part of the transcript, I discuss the writing of Blood and Bone, Unspeakable, and At the Edge of the Solid World, as well as a work-in-progress about the nineteenth century Australian painter John Peter Russell.
BTZ
In addition to being an amazing publisher, you’ve written two novellas, Blood and Bone and Unspeakable, and the brilliant novel At the End of the Solid World. Could you tell us a bit more about your journey into writing?
Daniel Davis Wood
It’s a very unexpected one. I started off, in my late teens and early twenties, wanting to write science fiction and fantasy. And I did: I wrote a lot of it and I published a bunch of stuff under pen names, probably enough to fill like a book of short stories, but every time I published something like that, even though it had been published, I walked away from it feeling completely empty—feeling no connection to what I’d done. I was writing stuff in bad faith. It wasn’t the best I could do and it wasn’t what I wanted to do. It was just what I could do and I thought it was good enough—and it was good enough to get into different places, but it didn’t feel like it was the best I could do. I didn’t feel worthwhile in the end. So I wrote some stories like that and I just wanted to keep writing, so I wrote a bunch of book reviews, sometimes for online journals, sometimes for print journals—this is back in the early 2000s—and I wrote some novels that didn’t go anywhere. And every time, I had this incredible dissatisfaction with what I’d done, even when I thought it was the best I could do. I guess there was just an urge to write something, I didn’t know what, and all I had to guide me was that I liked reading sci-fi and fantasy [back then] and so that’s what I did… but it was like, I don’t know, like spinning [my] wheels, so I left it for a while and tried to broaden what I was reading.
This was [happening to me] at the height of the literary blogosphere, [so] I really got into blogs by people like Stephen Mitchelmore, Dan Green, a guy called Wyatt Mason who used to write for Harper’s Magazine. [Mason] wrote a blog called ‘Sentences’ and I think that was an important thing for me, because I’d never really considered something like what he was doing on that blog. He would take a book—and sometimes it was a book I knew well, a sci-fi book; I remember he did A Canticle for Leibowitz and things like that—and he took one sentence from the book and he wrote an entire blog post on just that sentence, treating the sentence itself as a work of art. I thought [it was] interesting. Up until that point, I’d thought of sentences as just a vehicle for a story: [a sentence] wasn’t a thing in its own right, it was there to like serve a story that I might’ve had in mind.
So [Mason] was doing that blog, and then it wasn’t long after he wrapped it up that Garielle Lutz published her essay ‘The Sentence is a Lonely Place.’ I don’t know if you know that essay. Probably.
BTZ
It’s fucking brilliant. I’ve mentioned it several times on the show.
Daniel Davis Wood
It’s one of the best essays out there. I think it’s just incredible, and also the follow-up, ‘The Poetry of the Paragraph.’ Reading those two off the back of Wyatt Mason and Mitchelmore and Green, guys who are talking about “Where does writing come from?” and “What is form for? What does it serve?”—it really made me pay attention to words on a micro level and how they’re interacting. There’s this sort of alchemy that goes on, and if you’re [a writer who is] attentive to it, you can control the flow of energy through a sentence and on into the next.
Well, I’d had some material that I wanted to put into what would become Blood and Bone, but I just did not know how to write it. I’d started four, five, six different drafts, none of which went anywhere because they all just seemed so authoritative and so assured, [as if] I knew what I was writing. [But] in fact I had no idea what I was writing, except that there was this itch that needed scratching and I didn’t know how to scratch it… So I went back to Lutz and Mason and slowed down a lot and went sentence by sentence, [asking myself questions like:] “Can I make each sentence of this book do something? Can I make it flow or sound in a particular way?” That’s when things clicked with me a little bit and I looked at what I was writing and I thought, “Wow, this is—I don’t know if it’s good, I don’t know if anyone’s ever going to want it to publish it,” but it felt fulfilling in a way that nothing I’d done before felt fulfilling. It felt true, and it was true, because it felt authentic, because I’d taken a step back and—[I had this sensation:] “There is something beyond me that is coming through now, and I don’t know what it is, and I’m not even going to try to find out, just let yourself be possessed by it and it will present questions that have no answer and that’s okay. Be content with not knowing everything…”
That was where I got to with Blood and Bone. In a bookshop, [Blood and Bone] goes under historical fiction, but actually it’s a book about never knowing, never being able to get into the mindset of somebody from an era other than our own—it’s about accumulating [historical] facts but never accumulating a real understanding of people from other times. So, that [not-knowing] was both the subject and also my way into the style of the book. It was kind of to say [to myself,] “I will never know; all I can do is feel that something is working or something is not, like sensing a presence or a justness to what is on the page.” So I finished that book and I sent it into Seizure, which had started in Sydney under Alice Grundy and David Henley a few years earlier. They had received some funding for a novella competition. [Blood and Bone] won the Viva La Novella Prize in 2014 and it was published.
Then, after that, I didn’t really know if I would write anything else. I had some ideas of what I might write, just some very basic stuff, and then… I mentioned Douglas Glover earlier; Douglas Glover had founded an online journal called Numero Cinq, which published some amazing writing. It’s still online and everybody should read it if they have a spare moment; it has a vast archive of incredible stuff. So I put my hand up and volunteered with Numero Cinq and sent Douglas what became Unspeakable, and he gave me some feedback on that, and it was published in Numero Cinq. Then he decided not to do Numero Cinq anymore and that was when I started Splice and poached a few Numero Cinq people. And then, at the same time, I was writing At the Edge of the Solid World. That took a few years, but that [publication] story is a bit more straightforward. [The novel] just took a few years because it was hard to write [but] off it went.
BTZ
I want to talk about At the End of the Solid World quickly. I think it’s a really great novel, because I think some Australian novels get stuck in Australia, but in this novel you start overseas—it’s quite a dramatic start, it’s quite confronting in parts—and it really does stretch the legs of the book. Your writing in this book goes a long way, the narrative goes a long way. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about that particular book?
Daniel Davis Wood
Thanks. I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear the phrase stretching the legs. In summary, the book is about an Australian couple who are married and they’re living, as I did, in Switzerland. They have a child who dies at birth, dies after one day of birth, and it’s about the repercussions of that event and ultimately the end of their marriage. I wanted to take a certain kind of novel that I see a lot, or a couple of different kinds of novels that I see a lot, and try to blow them up. One is the novel of realist domesticity. There are a lot of novels about marriages that don’t work, a lot of novels about parents in difficulties with their children, and then, later in my novel, there are events that connect to global [affairs], to war, to terrorism and [more] contemporary issues—and the “issues novel” is another kind of novel that I wanted to take on. But I wanted to, first of all, keep it really mundane. So there’s actually not a lot of action in At the End of the Solar World, even though it’s 500 pages long. It’s literally like the beginning and then [a narrative that] takes place over a couple of days and it’s—it’s people who are in their kitchens, and by the end they’re not even exchanging words, they’re just standing [or] sitting down and [the novel is] about what they [each] think the other people are thinking, and so on. If you were to film it, it would be very, very grindingly slow.
So I wanted a book where, like, nothing happened in that timeline, but a lot was going on elsewhere. And also [I wanted a book] where it didn’t have the pleasures of the conventional novel of domesticity, where you’re wondering “Will they break up? Will they not?” It wasn’t about that—that’s not what interests me at all—so the entire story arc of the main characters is given away within the first fifty pages. And I also wanted whatever issues the book was dealing with, to be almost tangential to what the book is really trying to do. I don’t like those books, the kind of books that take up an issue. This one takes up the issue of refugees—the treatment of refugees in Australia—but there’s nobody who’s ever going to pick up At the Edge of the Solid World, who doesn’t already agree with whatever position the narrator is going to take. I don’t think [this novel is] out to convince anybody or to educate anybody—I didn’t want to do that—so you’re not going to learn anything about the treatment of refugees, you’re not going to come away persuaded that there’s another way. [By design, the novel] is kind of satisfying the preconceptions of its audience and the point of that was to use these genres of domesticity and “issues” as, like, a Trojan horse for something else—so that it looks like a contemporary realist novel on the surface, but there’s a lot more, as you know, when you get into the guts of it. It goes into many other places, it has a time span that goes back to the Iron Age and ends up terminating in Hiroshima, and it gets into so many other areas because that’s what I wanted to do—to take something that is confined to domesticity or “issues” and then [ask] “How big can it be? How big can it get? How far afield can it go before it starts to break and break down? How much can it become not a realist novel even though it wears that skin to begin with?”
BTZ
I feel like it’s a masquerading novel, masquerading to people who would read your contemporary novel. It’s got this massive like sinkhole within it—like, I feel like it’s a book you can plunge into and I can tell you that it didn’t go anywhere that I thought it would when I picked it up. I picked it up apropos of nothing and, yeah, it just went places that I didn’t think it would go—went for a long walk in Sydney as well, which I was very familiar with— and I have to congratulate you because it’s a fantastic piece of work and I really hope people go out and read it. But I also want to ask you what you’re up to next.
Daniel Davis Wood
Thanks. I’m really glad to hear all that. I should add, also, I’m glad to hear that it didn’t go anywhere you expected, because I wanted to write a book kind of like the books that I like getting for Splice—the kind of things that are willing to risk not satisfying people’s expectations. And because the book was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin [Literary Award], it ended up going to a lot of readers who probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, and a lot of the ones I’ve heard from are very affronted that their expectations are not met. I’ve had a lot of angry mail coming to me, like: “You should have kept it to the couple,” “It should’ve been one person’s story.” I just think, “Yeah, that’s everything I didn’t want to do with this book; it’s what you want to do with it, and you don’t like having your expectations not met.” So, okay, fine: but if you’re willing to not have your expectations met, then I think it’s probably a book for you. It’s okay to have your expectations [and] it’s okay if you get something else instead. That’s all right. Roll with it!
But what I’m working on now is really different. I’m working on something which—if it ends up being published; there’s never a guarantee—would probably land in historical fiction again, but it would land in historical fiction the way that Mason & Dixon is historical fiction. So it’s about John Peter Russell and his involvement with the impressionists and post-impressionists in France. He was a guy from Sydney who went to France at the end of the nineteenth century with Tom Roberts, who would eventually come back to Australia and become Australia’s national painter. [Unlike Roberts], Russell stayed in France and befriended Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, and Cézanne and Rodin, and got really involved in those painters’ lives. It’s about how they all interacted, in the way that Mason & Dixon is ultimately about a friendship, or a strange relationship, or an offbeat relationship between two guys. It’s in that vein and also in a kind of hyperbolic style; it’s not a realist take on this situation at all. And what interests me about Russell is that the art that we have [from him], which is not very much, is not very good. He’s not particularly well-known because he didn’t produce a real masterpiece, but the reason he didn’t do that is because he apparently burned a lot of his art—and there were pieces that he didn’t consider to be finished until they were destroyed, [as if that act of destruction] was the culmination of what he was trying to do. So [the novel is] about an artistic mindset that sees destruction as part of the creative process, and how that inflects these friendships between guys who are all embarked on a on a creative process that has very destructive elements.
BTZ
Sounds amazing. Can’t wait to read it.
Daniel Davis Wood
Thanks. It’s a few years away yet, though.
BTZ
Are you ready to get on to your gateway books?