Bernard Cohen Interview a Feature by loud7@enternet.com.a (Craig Garrett) Vogel award winner Bernard Cohen talks about writing in a shed and the other trials and tribulations of being a writer. Ogle at the Vogel winner. (submitted by Phip.) 'Hi Craig, are you there?' These were the first words Bernard Cohen, author of the 1996 Australian Vogel Literary Award winning novel The Blindman's Hat, uttered to me (well, emailed me). We had arranged a time to meet 'virtually' over the internet: me at my house and Bernard in his 'studio' (which he tells me is a shed out the back of his house in The Blue Mountains). This was my first interview for noise!, my first interview via the internet and my first interview with someone I had never met before (my only other interviews were with my dad in year seven for an English assignment and with Matthew Thompson, whom I had met before because he is friends with one of my housemates). I had no idea about what I was doing and really didn't know if my questions were any good. Nervously, I typed back: 'Yes, I'm here. How are you?'. That's how Bernard and I began a very disjointed 'virtual' interview. My first ever question went like this: Did you have an idea mapped out about the novel and where you were going with it, or did you simply begin writing and see where your characters lead you? I'd written a first draft of a first chapter in 1990. It included the three main characters in the final novel, but had a few extraneous elements - such as Ancient Egyptians risen up from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I put the chapter in a bottom drawer for a few years and pulled it out in 1994, when one of the glossies advertised a competition: send them a chapter and a plot outline. 'I can do this' I thought, and sat at the word processor. But I had no idea how to write a plot. My first book, Tourism was in the form of a tourist guidebook. (One reviewer wrote: 'The back cover blurb calls it a novel, but you might as well call it a gazebo or a stirrup pump'. This is funnier in retrospect than it was at the time.) My girlfriend suggested I try to make it a detective story. The magazine never wrote back. In 1996, I was lucky enough to get an Australia Council grant. I was writing another novel at the time, one that required a lot of emotional energy (Snowdome will be published in March, but I'll come back to that). Anyway, I pulled out the first chapter and the plot summary of The Blindman's Hat and thought, 'this would be really fun to write'. I decided to aim for the Vogel Award deadline and calculated backwards from that: about 50,000 words means 8 chapters of 6000 words, which means 500 words a day from mid-February till early June (I believe the Vogel now closes in May) and three weeks for a second draft. I've never been so well-organised in my life before or since. I had a really good time writing it - I never had to worry about what happens next, I simply followed the plot summary along, thinking 'half a line equals 500 words' - and tried to put in as many jokes as possible. Do you have any other people you take advice from? When I finished The Blindman's Hat, I'd written it in a major rush and hadn't had any time to reflect on it. I showed it to Peter Bishop, Director of Varuna Writers' Centre (a local residential writers' centre), and asked him to answer the single question: Is this a book? If he had judged it too embarrassing to send out, I probably wouldn't have. I would've waited until I was more confident about it. With Snowdome, which I've been writing for about ten or eleven years and which has had 764 drafts, I've shown it to dozens of people, actively seeking their criticisms. Do you know any other authors and 'hang out with them'? If so, which people? Do you trust each other enough (and I don't mean trust that they won't steal your ideas, but that you trust their opinions and views) to talk about what you're doing and where you're going or is the 'author business' a cut throat one? I hang out with writers all the time and have just been down to the Melbourne Writers' Festival which was full o'them. Because of events like writers' festivals, launches, readings etc, writers have this kind of public professional space, so I've probably met most of the younger writers who have been publishing recently. There's a strong literary community in Katoomba (where I live). Among my friends here are writers Tom Flood, Beth Yahp (who just moved away), Margaret Simons, Mark O'Flynn, Stephen Measday (children's writer) and Trevor Shearston. Also, many writers come to live in Katoomba for six months or so before moving on (Judy Horacek, Fotini Epanomitis). Who are your influences? What authors do you like (Australian and otherwise) and what books are important to you (ie important to you personally, to your career and to your life? I like American metafictionists like Walter Abish and Donald Barthelmew. I was deeply disturbed in my early 20s by Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Recently, I've read and enjoyed or been shaken up by Luke Davies' Candy, Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds and, like many writers of my generation, have been delighted that Mark Davis's gangland exists. Another really good recent book is Mackenzie Wark's The Virtual Republic. Do you think The Blindman's Hat is an 'Australian book' (if there is such a thing)? Kind of. Perhaps it's an unAustralian book. The main character, Vernon Collins, is an expatriate Australian journalist in New York City (where the entire novel is set), who leaves work when he falls in love with freelance mobile telephone technician, Dida. The newspaper Vernon's been working for goes to extraordinary lengths to get him to return. Vernon believes they're so desperate because his sub-editing work provides them with a quantum of Australianness, that hint of exoticism which brings in a few percent more readers. I'm satirising the idea that Australianness is a containable and marketable quality. Why set it in America? My post factum rationale is that we define concepts not in themselves, but by their difference from other concepts. Australianness only means something in differentiating it from, say, Americanness. Also, and more to do with the way I wrote the book, I spent a month in New York. It really grabbed me, how much madness there was around, how much happening on the streets. I took notes of overheard conversations - some of these appear in the book, but in the voice of Muffy, Vernon's little white dog. Muffy is the only sensible character in the book, and he interrupts the story to meditate on the meaning of urban existence and reintroduce a sense of perspective. Vernon has no perspective. He's as neurotic and paranoid as they come. Is there enough support in Australia for young writers? If not, then how can this situation be improved? Is the Howard Government committed to supporting writers either financially or otherwise? There is some support and I think the Australia Council has been moving towards more formalised support for newer writers. This is largely bipartisan (and supposedly at arms length from direct government intervention), but I don't have much faith in the current Government's commitment to the Arts. Support will continue as long as there is pressure and media presence. Writing to the Prime Minister or local members about how important literature is might help. The Government backed down from some of its' cuts to the Public Lending Rights scheme (which compensates writers for use of their books in public libraries) after a sustained campaign by the Australian Society of authors and other groups and individuals. Is it a good government to be trying to express views freely? No. Despite Howard's anti-PC rhetoric, he is constantly calling for his opponents to be silenced. He argued for the right of racists to express themselves, but demands that people who point out racism shut up (as in the current Wik debate). I think he's nasty, mean-spirited and small-minded. Really, the Liberal Party has got rid of its' liberals and merged into the National Party. (For my account of the race basis of Howard's poll win, see my Howard page at http://www.hermes.net.au/bernard/howard.html). How long have you been on the net? Not very long at all. I've spent a lot of time drifting around on the net since August, when I bought a modem and found a local server. Before that, I'd dropped in from time to time at university. Actually, I took most of August figuring out how to get a website together - it's at http://www.hermes.net.au/bernard.html). Were you born in the Blue mountains? I was born in the US, where my father was studying. Both my parents are Melbourne-born, and we moved there when I was seven months old. I moved to inner-Sydney in 1983 and hung around there until 1995, when my partner and I moved to Katoomba. What influence has your upbringing had on your writing? You think I'm going to give my parents the credit for all my hard work? Seriously, my upbringing must have played a large part, though it's impossible to tell which bits it affected (that's one for the psycho-critics). We had a lot of books around and went to the theatre, etc. I never intended to be a writer, not until I moved into share houses full of disreputable art students. Half of my next book, Snowdome (to be published in March 1998), is set in that milieu. (The other half is set in Sydney in the future, when the city's been emptied out by economic forces and re-opened as a museum.) Do you like living in the Blue Mountains? Yes, a lot. There's a really strong literary community up here, based around Varuna Writers' Centre - which, by the way, offers residencies for new writers as well as established ones and is implementing a mentorship program where new writers can spend intensive writing time with a well-established writer in sympathy with their work. There are heaps of good short walks, too. The last few days have been pretty full on, with fires a few kilometres away. We're about 50 metres from a small lake where helicopters have been filling their buckets to waterbomb the fires. Do you write at home or at a studio? I have a separate studio (everyone else calls it a 'shed') out the back of our house, with a view over a eucalypt-filled valley and the vegie patch (a major distractionand relaxation). How do you view the role of reviewers and critics? I think there's too much emphasis on strong opinions rather than discussion, and that that's because the field is dominated by journalists who, because of what newspapers value, believe stridency makes better reading. I'd like to see more cultural contextualisation, more discussion of the uses of books, rather than predictable judgment after judgment. My experience as a novelist has been varied, to say the least. When my first book, Tourism, was published in 1992, I got the full range of reviews, from 'postmodern tour deforce' to 'The back cover blurb calls it a novel, but you might as well call it a gazebo or a stirrup pump'. The Blindman's Hat has been positively reviewed by most reviewers. I think I've been lucky with the amount of coverage it's had, because there aren't a lot of comic/crime pastiches around. I haven't taken a very serious view of what it means to be Australian. I'm hoping to get a good run with Snowdome, which is more intense than The Blindman's Hat and more personal too. Apart from setting up his web pages Bernard is currently working on a number of projects both for himself and other parties. As well as finishing Snowdome there is a new story of his, Solving the Moon, in the December 1997 issue of Meanjin, set driving through bushfires in rural New South Wales, about the agonising after the end of a relationship; a review essay about pseudo-reverence for wilderness in the December issue of the Australian's Review of Books, and an interview and two stories in a small Melbourne litmag called Nocturnal Submissions. Look out for them. Related Web Site Created on Sun, 18 Jan 1998 and last modified on Thu, 22 Jan 1998.

LOUDonline - http://www.loud.net.au - Fri, 10 Apr 1998