Patrick Holland is the author of the novels The Mary Smokes Boys, The Darkest Little Room, and The Long Road of the Junkmailer; the nonfiction work Riding the Trains in Japan; and the story collection The Source of the Sound. He is based in Brisbane, Australia.
Q: How did you come up with your main character, Grey, in
your novel The Mary Smokes Boys?
A: I'll have to be honest and say Grey is a kind of proxy “me.”
I think there are two kinds of writers, embodied by
Shakespeare and Dante: the former can and do write stories with hosts of
various characters and keep their presence in the story to a minimum, the
latter need to be present in some way in the story; their works are less
expositions than studies or re-vitalisations of themselves or particular
situations they imagine themselves inhabiting.
Jane Austen might be thought of as belonging to the former
tribe; Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway of the latter. I am certainly of the
latter. So, though it's impossible to transpose the true complexity of a human
being onto the page, Grey is me.
Q: How does the book's setting, the town of Mary Smokes,
affect the characters?
A: I've always been fascinated by plainlands. I grew up on
them. At times, I've found myself drawn to proper deserts too. The Gobi most
recently. I like the lack of distraction, the purifying effect emptiness has on
character. Like darkness that amplifies a candle you might not even see were it
in an electrically lit room.
I feel like a drunk (I'm thinking of Grey's father) is more
existentially motivated drinking by his window looking out on open plains than
he would be were he in a city at an office party. In a way, he's more sincere.
So too, Grey's actions are, to my mind anyway, amplified by the emptiness that
surrounds him ... there are so few “outside” influences.
Q: You've written fiction and nonfiction. Do you prefer one
form of writing to another, and if so, why?
A: Though I enjoy both, I certainly prefer fiction. It
allows a writer to give a reader a wider range of experiences. Of course, great
non-fiction can give wonderful experiences ... I'm thinking of Barry Lopez's
essays and Poe Ballantine's work, but, for me at least, I'm best able to
translate experience through fiction ... releasing myself from the compulsion
to have “ideas” and “arguments.”
Q: Which authors have particularly inspired you?
A: In my younger days I had three arch-influences ...
Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is the most gifted
writer I've every come across ... it's a shame he's shunned by a lot of readers
because of his politics, which are more complicated than his detractors (who
often haven't read him) would have people believe. His later stories are the
best examples of his genius.
Emily Bronte has had a tremendous effect on me, and that
effect is more evident in The Mary Smokes Boys than in any of my other works.
And of living writers, Barry Lopez has this superb, clear
style, reminiscent of Borges, Chatwin and Hemingway at once, but with an
element of something entirely unique. His short story collection Winter Count
and his essays About This Life have had as large an influence on me as any.
Kawabata is a tremendous influence. I've been reading a lot
of Poe Ballantine lately; his personal essays have an authenticity about them that's rare these days and are superb. Also a little known children's writer,
Juliana Horatia Ewing, who, again, I think for political reasons, has been
unfairly ignored. Her story “Dandelion Clocks” is a masterpiece of minimalism.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I've just finished working on my new novel Navigatio.
It's a meditative redux of the medieval work Navigatio Sancti Brendani, which
follows Brendan's journey's on an oxhide boat in the Atlantic.
I've been greatly
inspired throughout the writing process by Japanese minimalism. As such, the
book is coming out with beautiful sumie illustrations by Melbourne painter
Junko Azukawa ... so, at the very least, it will be a beautiful object.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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