Interview with Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter's Deleted Scenes for Lovers is already gathering rave reviews at The Spinoff, 'note-perfect, plentiful', and in NZ Listener, 'self-assured, forceful'. Deleted Scenes for Lovers will be launched at Art Fusion Gallery, Waikato University on Thursday 26 May, 5.30pm.

Tracey Slaughter (photo: Catherine Chidgey)

Tracey, you’ve been publishing short fiction and winning prizes for many years – but you're only just publishing your book of short stories now – what took so long?

‘Tell me what ever happened to Tracey’? That’s the archetypal tough question. There’s the obvious struggle to reach book-length form in a market which dislikes the intense fix of short fiction, which craves the chunkier comforts of the novel. But the real answer is: I lost some years. In between writing these short stories life was teaching me how to live through long ones – a slow recovery from illness, a car crash, further damage, a harder walk back to health. What that meant was that every story I did manage to finish was oxygen – and when my work did win prizes it was a lifeline, adrenaline, hope. I don’t like looking back on the years I missed, when there should have been more output – but I was forced to spend time turning more human…which has got to help any writer in the long run.

 

The style that you’ve developed through these stories is very lyrical, sensual – sense-based. I think that your prize-winning Landfall essay last year, ‘Ashdown Place’ is an excellent example of how you explore experience and bring the past back through sensory detail. Can you talk about how you’ve developed this style?

I started as a poet, and poetry is still in my bloodstream, narrative can’t wash it out. So the challenge in moving to prose was always to find a style which could unfold a story but still let language be musical, be animal – those are the books I love to read, where the sentences are rhythmic, the sound atmospheric, the language not just delivering story but absorbing the senses, making skin contact. I like writers who use sound and image to make us taste the scene with our bodies. But I’m very aware that the fiction writer can’t afford to let their sentences just swim around after lush sound effects – they have to push ahead, into the concrete action, the forward momentum of the story. The dog has to run after the stick, as the writer Sarah Hall says, describing what she calls the ‘cat-dog’ hybrid of poetic prose. But the cat…well, the cat is a sensual creature, that does whatever feels good to its wayward fur...

Many of your characters are what we sometimes call ‘bogans’ in this country. Where do they come from?

Was I born in a black tee? I guess I grew up in coastal, smalltown New Zealand with its blend of bogan and surfie culture; my first jobs were in takeaways, service stations and pubs watching that waxhead/petrolhead world go by; I play in a covers band now which works the smalltown circuit (sometimes even the same old pubs!), so I still get to see the stories of that world spinning out, hear its voices. But the term bogan brings with it the taint of stereotype, a beer-chugging Holden-revving comedy which limits responses – it’s too easy to cartoon a group, stamp them ‘bogans’ and write their stories off. I think it’s the writer’s job to see past labels and hunt the pulse of the human story dwelling beneath, whatever social group a character might seem to fall into. 

I don’t set out to write self-consciously ‘bogan’ stories – it just happens that the drama of lower decile life often stands out in the sharpest relief to me, and I never turn those stories away because they’re not decent, representative or seemly. Short stories also, have always been a home for the ‘lonely voice’ – it’s a form with its roots in the underbelly, haunted by outsiders. As a writer you don’t chase the poor from your doorstep, I remember Flannery O’Connor saying, because the poor have nothing left to shield them from raw life – and that’s what should interest any compassionate writer.

Your stories often deal with sensitive topics such as domestic violence or sexual abuse; ones that we often struggle to talk about. What’s your approach towards the ethics and angles of writing trauma?

Does anyone still agree with Brasch that Frame’s ‘Gorse is not People’ was ‘too painful to print’? A writer’s job is to say the unsayable – it’s a travesty to call yourself a writer and then refuse to face the full range of human experience. Outcries that subjects are too dark, extreme, personal, risky make zero sense to me – those hard realities of life are what writing is for. And every writer knows their own ‘black block,’ that dark mass under your chest wall that holds your deep material, the stories you must speak of. If you don’t listen to that, your stories might stay clean, but the page will, in effect, be empty.

Deleted Scenes for Lovers is available in good bookshops and through our online bookstore now.
$30, p/b

Interview with Tusiata Avia

Tusiata Avia's new poetry collection Fale Aitu | Spirit House will be launched during the Auckland Writers Festival on Wednesday this week. Tusiata is taking part in a number of sessions at AWF, see their programme for details.

Tusiata Avia ((2016, Hayley Theyers Photography)

 You travel the world in your latest poems – Samoa, Christchurch, Gaza, New York – and your poems are not romanticised, ‘travel’ poems, they’re political and tough. Do you find your work getting drawn into the politics of wherever you travel?

For me the personal and the political are intertwined: the politics of the places I’ve lived in or visited effect me on a personal level in some fundamental way. For instance, the friends I had/have on both sides of the Israel/Gaza wall; I have an emotional connection to them, even the ones I strongly disagree with. I still love them.

One of the things I’ve learned from all the years of travelling: for me, it is all fairly meaningless unless I am making real connections, heart-connections, with people. Some people expect me to be like my poems in that way – political and tough – I’m not. I often don’t and/or can’t express things (particularly things that upset me) immediately. I’m not quick on the uptake. But I feel things – emotionally and intuitively –  immediately. I often feel much more than is comfortable to feel, I have a very ‘porous’ skin. Writing is one of the ways I have to process and express how I feel about things and then send that out into the world.

Some of the poems in this book make for confrontational reading. I’m thinking of ‘Demonstration’, which I heard you perform in Dunedin. It was hard to listen to, but I also couldn’t help but be filled with joy at how commited you are to not flinching from difficult topics, in this case, rape. Can you talk about the process of writing such a poem and then deciding to perform and publish it?

I’ve only performed that poem twice. It requires the right audience, people who kind of know what they might be getting themselves into. And I have to do some preparation to perform a poem like that. That poem in particular is very confrontational but in an unexpected way – it sneaks its way in and then really slams you. Some times you have to break the wounds open.

I wrote that poem after attending an anti-rape protest rally, it made me think about my own experience of rape as a young woman, and what I’d done with it, how I’d buried it. I was questioning myself during the rally: was it REALLY rape. Then I went home and I had to write the poem pretty much straight away. Most importantly, I had to reclaim a position of strength. I had to find that strength for myself. I guess the invitation in that poem is to consider how we might be with our traumatic, buried experiences. They don’t have to stay that way.

I’ve always the need to bring the skeletons out of the closet (my own and ours collectively, as a society) and bring them in to the light so we can all examine them. As I see it, that’s part of my job as a writer.

There’s a voice in your poems that’s been there from day one – this Samoan/Palangi voice – for which you are rightly celebrated. Is this a voice from your family and neighbourhood growing up? How has this voice developed over your three collections?

I think it’s really hard to pin down your own voice. I think it’s like identity: not static, always fluid, sometimes has its feet on one side of the border, sometimes on the other, sometimes straddling both camps, sometimes in neither, in another place altogether.

I wrote much of my first book, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, in a number of Samoan voices. Sometimes they came from particular members of my extended family and sometimes they came from the voices in my head that (even though they expressed themselves using Samoan vernacular and accents) are universal to the kaliedescope of the human condition: bouncing from love to cruelty to rebellion to humour etc. 

I don’t use that specific ‘Samoan voice’ so much now, I don’t really know why. I’m not trying to consciously use any particular voice. I think I just write whatever is there inside me – it finds its own mode of transport out.  

The new collection is called Fale Aitu | Spirit House – and there are aitu all over the pages of the book. Can you talk about the role of aitu in your poems, are they a character, guiding principles?

Aitu are spirits. And I guess spirits can inhabit all kinds of things and take the form of all kinds of things. Sometime I feel them physically as actual presences. In modern Samoan culture aitu tend to be thought of as scary, dangerous things (like ghosts or demons) and best avoided, but they played an important and less negative role in our misty pre-Christian past. Whether we believe they’re there or not, whether we feel their presence, whether we’ve buried them, they still walk along just behind us.

Fale Aitu | Spirit House is a selection from a much larger number of poems written in bits and pieces over the last 6-8 years. I didn’t sit down with a project or a narrative (like my earlier books) and write a body of work. These are a distillation from poems I wrote when I had no time to write; I had become a single mother and then a full-time-working single mother. Believe me, there is no time to write, let alone write anything cohesive! That worried me when I finally put together a manuscript, it just seemed like a disparate bunch of stuff to me, until I gave it to Bernadette Hall ( a friend and mentor). She handed a bunch of the poems back to me, and said, “Look, there it is.” And then I could see that the book had been there all along. I think my subconscious knew what it was doing all those years;  the aitu knew what they were doing all along. Now I read it and am surprised to see how it works, the shapes it makes and the echos Some shapes are a bit clunky, but then I think I probably am too.

Fale Aitu |Spirit House by Tusiata Avia.

Released Thursday 14 May, in quality bookshops and at VUP's online bookshop

p/b, $25.

A launch for Fale Aitu will be held at Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, Level 1, 300 K-Rd, Auckland on Wednesday 11 May, 5.30pm–7pm. All welcome.