We asked author Arnold Zable how he approaches writing about people and places.
FWA: You have written novels, short stories, essays, columns, opinion pieces, newspaper features, online blogs, songs and plays. How did you get started writing in the first place?
AZ: There are many answers to this question. As a child, due to challenging circumstances, I discovered writing as a means of ‘expression’ — which essentially means, ‘getting it out.’ So writing began as a means of making sense of the world around me. As many writers know, once you begin to ‘get it out’, you start to ‘work it out.’ Each story, each novel, each memoir, song, poem, or whatever genre you work in, is a process of working something out, taking an incident in your life, a thought, an encounter, a dream, or whatever, and working it out. It comes in the doing.
I have also been an avid traveller, and as I travelled, I began keeping journals. These have served me well over the years, and I draw on them a lot, especially on the specific details of the places I have travelled in, the landscapes, and the stories that have come my way. Keeping the journals also meant that I was learning the craft in the doing, through practice, through refining the art of being alert, observing, listening. In other words, as in all crafts and artforms, you learn on the job.
FWA: What do you find most challenging or rewarding when writing about the lives and experiences of others?
AZ: I face the same challenges each time I embark on a story — how do I do justice to a person’s life, including my own? The biggest question is to resolve whether to write a particular story as fiction or non-fiction, short story or novel. Fiction can paradoxically free the writer to explore a deeper truth, without the inhibitions of non-fiction. But sometimes narrative non-fiction can be more appropriate. So the first question is, what is the best way to tell the story? The most rewarding part may actually come in the initial phase, in the listening. I have had the privilege of people entrusting me with their stories. Many of my encounters have come to me as a grassroots traveller, living and working in far-flung places.
There is an art to listening — not only to the story, but also to how it is being told, and where it is being told. I love in particular the challenges of writing about place — whether it be the streets of childhood postwar immigrant Melbourne, which resulted in the novels Scraps of Heaven and Café Scheherazade, and the biography, The Fighter, or the remote rural township of Huaxi in the province of Guizhou, China, where I lived for upwards of a year, an experience that was central to my recent book The Watermill, or of the extensive periods of time I spent in my partner’s ancestral villages on the island of Ithaca, which formed the basis of the novel Sea of Many Returns.
The challenge in writing about place is, once again, being alert to the landscape, immersed in it, and noting it. Each project, especially involving life writing, also brings up ethical questions, issues of permission, of giving characters their agency, their full humanity, and of doing justice to characters across cultures. These are all matters that we will be exploring in the workshops.
FWA: Who are the life writing authors you enjoy reading and what is it about their work that appeals?
AZ: It often depends on the project I am engaged in at any specific time. For instance, when writing Sea of Many Returns, I was inspired by Nobel prize-winning Greek poets, Odysseus Elytes, and George Seferis, and their wonderful depictions of landscape. I love the great variety of approaches to life writing — many names come to mind. Janet Malcolm, for instance, her searing honesty, and the way she integrates photos in her series of stories that make up her final memoir, Still Pictures; Drusilla Modjewska’s interweaving of fiction and non-fiction in her memoir Poppy; and Anne Manne’s beautiful memoir, So this is Life: Scenes from a country childhood, built around a series of moments, and characters.
I also draw on novels as triggers for innovative approaches to life writing, for instance, As I lay Dying, by William Faulkner, which pioneered the use of multiple first person points of view. Writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Bruno Schultz, have inspired me to be daring, to cross into fabulism, and to trust in the imagination. These are just a few among many writers who have influenced me, in all genres, including life writing.
FWA: How do you choose the subject of your next project?
AZ: It remains a sort of mystery to me. Perhaps it chooses me. I am for instance currently writing tales set in Venice — which came my way when I was invited there on a project several years ago. This project, which had me wandering Venice for weeks on end, several years running, forms the basis of my most recently published work, a picture book called The Glass Horse of Venice. But my first book, Jewels and Ashes, was something I was compelled to write. It was driven first and foremost by a deep need to restore the missing link in the ancestral chain, the absences and ghosts of my childhood, the source of family trauma. First came the journey, to ancestral territory, trans-Siberian, the length of the Soviet Union, to Poland, and months spent in the borderlands. Since then, my stories have come from two major sources in a way — from my travels, and from the inner-city neighbourhoods I grew up in, and places I live in now.
I think the answer to this question is to remain alert to, and respond to, what is going on around you. Barely a day goes by when something does not come my way. Most recently, a series of blogs called ‘What we do in the time of the plague’, and stories which emerged from my daily walks, which have segued into the series I call ‘Zen Lake en plein air.’ This is the privilege of the writers’ life — it cannot happen without taking note of the world about you, being alert.
FWA: What is the main thing you hope participants in ‘Writing a Life’ will take away from working with you?
AZ: A love and appreciation of the craft, a deeper understanding of the art of listening, and of the many ways to tell a story. How to write character and place. The beauty of narrative rhythms. How to engage the reader. Perhaps, above all, the freedom that comes from following a story, allowing it to evolve in the doing, rather than being bound by a story. Writing as both exploration and as an integral part of life.
Bookings are currently open for our Writing a Life course with Arnold Zable.
Writing a Life
with Arnold Zable
ONLINE
Tuesdays, 6.30 – 8.30 pm AEST
1 October – 29 October 2024