2007 Self-Reflexivity

I just found something I had written about writing from 3 years ago. Must have been for an interview that never got published and it is pre-publication of Girl on a Stick. I find it hard to believe I wrote it just for myself, but I found it in longhand. It was a little bizarre to read because to my memory I have never written about my artistic process before (I kinda hate to).

I think it's like taking photographs and stealing your soul when you dissect your OWN art too much (and possibly other people's, too).

It's like overanalysing GREAT SEX.

It's like living your life FULL-TIME on the Devil Facebook. It's like...

Well, it's like this. Kathleen on Art, specifically Writing, circa 2007:

I had my first novel published in 2001. It was called Mush. I got some nice reviews for it. Most reviews and personal feedback used the word "haunting". That's flattering, the idea that something born from my brain and life affects other people, like some movies like The Wicker Man, Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation, Event Horizon, Strange Days have affected me the day after. But I'm not trying to haunt anybody. Although I am doing paintings of ghosts. Some dreams do this haunting too; everyone knows this.

I think I like this "haunting" feeling.

But it's not a very pure emotion; it feels complex and perverse.

Many of my favourite authors (Atwood, Murakami, Ryman), painters (Kiefer, Chagall), singers/bands (Pulp, Tricky, Cadallaca), filmmakers (Maddin, Lynch) could be described as complex and perverse.

So at the end of the day I like the idea that Mush has haunted people.

What I've written since Mush is less "decaying" and more in the present, like second novel Girl on a Stick (which is a grab-you-by-the-neck-and-shake-you kind of present) and third novel He's Lucid, which is also "in the moment" (a phrase from acting class that troubles me but is apt when it needs to be), and is also calm, crazy and playful, though still also complex and perverse (I have had the most fun writing He's Lucid, and it feel it is written in my "truest voice", another writerly phrase that troubles me).

I think whatever I'm reading at the time colours what I'm writing.

When I was writing Mush in 1997 and 1998, I was also writing an MA dissertation on essentialist qualities of male (hard, dry, structured) and female (soft, wet, free) and how our society forces these dichotomies/assumptions on us when actually it's a bunch of bullshit. So the characters of Nicky and Carol (and Ellen as a mutable third way) were my way of labelling and then rejecting both masculinity and femininity. I was reading a lot of Foucault at the time and it probably shows. And I think I was re-reading Keri Hulme's The Bone People several times too, with its love of green, green nature and power dynamics mixed with dark sex and violence, and that probably shows too.

Halfway through my first draft of the feature film The Viva Voce Virus, I saw Mullholland Drive. That probably shows.

I was introduced to and then devoured Angela Carter all the way through the writing of Girl on a Stick. I think there was a little bit of Bulgakov reading going on, too. I was purposefully writing in a Tama Janowitz anti-chick lit style that I remembered from the early books of Bret Easton Ellis (I haven't read any recently).

Some of my recently published short stories like "The Werfox" and "Sister Six" were influenced by a freedom I felt after reading Frances Gapper's Absent Kisses short story collection. I realised that she was breaking all the rules and that I wanted to do that, too. Other short story influences would have to be the open-ended humanity of Ali Smith's work - and the wry freedom of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, which I was translating at the time.

HOWEVER. I am very careful not to read anything too similar in plot or theme WHILE I'm writing something. So, surprisingly, I did not read Surfacing by Maragret Atwood for the first time until after Mush had been published, and heard the details of Oryx & Crake only after I'd precisely plotted out the scope of He's Lucid. I was worried about crossover or subconscious plagiarism because Atwood is from a place very similar to my home and also I think I like to write lyrically (to be clear: I am not comparing myself to a Booker Prize winner in terms of quality). Likewise, I could see a lot of whimsy in my writing BEFORE I read Carter and Gapper, but reading them made me feel that I was allowed to be playful - and better yet, not care if it was right or wrong.

I think I have at least 4 separate writing styles: the Mush style (Mush, the short story "Winterland"); the open elliptical style (the short stories "Ring Us" and "Worms"; the verbose, Carteresque style (the short story "Scratch", parts of Girl on a Stick), the rambunctious, playful anarchic style (He's Lucid, "Sister Six"). Oh yes, and "genre" writing. Writing erotica for money and publication allowed me to work through these different styles and now I write using just what style I feel like at the time.

Usually there's an image in my head and I work towards that. I don't want to think too much about how I write (as opposed to what comes of what I write), because I don't want to over-analyse or pin it down. Right now it's flying free.

In just an interesting aside, my university is currently occupied at the moment (I let the students go a few minutes early from their tutorial so they could go to the protest). The anthropology department does not seem to be occupied, however... (security guard at the entrance, though, and all major buildings locked this morning).

I am reporting from the heart of Trotskyite resistance, the second-floor paleoanthropology lab of UCL, otherwise known as the bone room! People keep soldiering on here with their baboon craniometry.

Courage, comrades!

others, click once to isolate, then click again to enlarge

Last night I dreamt of whales, many of them. It felt kind of Jungian or something, I can't explain. I woke up in the middle of the night. It was such a gorgeous dream. At first I only saw one, but they were passing under a bridge I was near. Initially it seemed like a beach, but then it was a bridge like an aqueduct and they were going to survive. I went down to their level and got up close and saw one of them and its huge eye. It was gentle, beautiful, and it wasn't going to hurt me. I took a picture of all their grace in the water because I wasn't sure anyone was going to believe me. So fucking beautiful. I think I will do a painting of their tails.

The image feels rooted really deep inside me; I have seen it before.

I think I must have seen it somewhere before in real life as a kid.