My SF Influences and Hopes: Part Two

Hi Everyone

Given that the Speculate Festival is on this Saturday (28 April 2018), here is the next instalment of the current series of blog posts on my interview questions. This post explains the background to the questions, while my previous post explores the first question asked during my interview:

What science fiction/fantasy first made an impression on you?

Below is the second question I was asked:

Why do you continue to write science fiction/fantasy?

An interesting question with a complicated answer that starts with a little personal history.

Image from here

As is evident from my previous post, I was an avid reader from an early age. Adventure and War stories. Science Fiction. Fantasy. Some Historical Fiction. Etc. I didn’t read much poetry, though I do remember memorising Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ for a school assignment. I didn’t, however, hanker to be a writer when I was young, unlike many of my later heroes such as W B Yeats, Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, J R R Tolkien, Alan Garner, Roger Zelazny, amongst many others. I suppose I didn’t even realise such an occupation existed. Somehow I thought writers were magical beings ‘out there’ somewhere and books appeared from nowhere.

Image from a Melbourne TV Guide

Still, in my early teens, I started to write an SF spy story about aliens under Ayers Rock. The hero was prompted by a local TV show (Hunter). He rode a motorcycle called Black Bess (inspired by the Disney show The Legend of Young Dick Turpin and my father’s riding when a youth) and lived on a sailing boat (as did a favourite aunt and uncle). After four action-packed pages, during which the boat was blown up and the hero swam to shore to jump on his motorbike and chase the villain, I stopped. Not sure why, though I think it had to do with a sense of shame in doing something that would be seen as self-indulgent.

Image from here

Over the next few years, I developed an interest in music, taught myself the guitar, and tried writing song lyrics. I also started writing love poems to girlfriends, bad ones (in retrospect) based on half-remembered structures learned at school.

Image from here

After finishing a science degree, I found myself working in the research department of Telecom Australia. One day, surrounded by banks of magnetic tapes and electronic gear, I began writing, on a teleprinter, a report on some computer networking research I had completed. I suddenly had the eyes-wide, nostrils-flaring, bolt-upright epiphany that I could communicate what was inside my head to other people. That I could be a writer. Soon after, I started to write short stories, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and I have been writing in those genres, to a greater or lesser degree, ever since. Yet, this is when things became complicated.

Several years after that moment at Telecom, I went to a workshop on putting fantasy in your writing and discovered it was being run by one of Australia’s top poets and wasn’t about fantasy writing at all. I ended up attempting to write poetry, though all I could come up with was a chant to Lovecraft’s Old Ones and something else that I don’t remember. Yet, because of that workshop, I was invited, along with other attendees, to form a critique group at the Council of Adult Education (CAE). And here I met a real-life poet and suddenly I began to develop an interest in writing poetry.

Over the next decade or so, I moved into the poetry world more and more. I wrote poetry. Studied it at university. Edited it. Published it. Read at poetry readings. Developed a profile as a poet. Yet, the narrative urge wouldn’t leave me. I wrote literary fiction along with the odd speculative story. Eventually, I did a PhD in Creative Writing, the creative component being a fantasy verse novel called The Silence Inside the World, which featured the main character from one of those early fantasy novel drafts. Full circle.

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All of the above is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t only write science fiction and fantasy, but also speculative poetry, literary fiction, and literary/mainstream poetry. And I continue to write in these areas because they enable me to cover different aspects of my life experience, especially personal relationships, science, nature, myths and the sacred, using the best option available to me. As Ted Hughes once remarked after he was made Poet Laureate and a reporter asked him what he would write during his tenure, ‘I write what the muse tells me to write’.

Image from here

So, to finally answer the second interview question, I still write science fiction and fantasy because, unlike the literary mode, I am able to explore deep imagination and different worlds from our own, and also evoke the wonder that lies within and beneath life. And because of these concerns, more and more I am looking to mythopoeic literature as the home for my own work.

If you are interested in attending Speculate, which is being held at the Gasworks Arts Park, 21 Graham St, Albert Park, Victoria, this Saturday, there are still tickets available. For further information, visit the website (www.SpecFic.com.au).

I hope you enjoyed this post. As always, I welcome your comments. 

Best Wishes

Earl

What to Expect

You might be wondering about the shift in focus of this blog, which is exemplified by the change of name. As I mentioned in my previous post, I took a redundancy package from my teaching job at Box Hill Institute and am now a full-time writer and part-time freelance teacher, editor, manuscript assessor and mentor. The previous blog reflected my teaching emphasis, even if it didn’t quite fulfil the promise I made to discuss how I used The Writing Cycle in my teaching and my own writing. While I still want to discuss that topic, I also want to include other creative areas, so that the blog will become a forum for what interests me, things like Celtic myths and symbols, myths in general, poetry, speculative and literary fiction, Welsh language and history, the Dark Ages, the Matter of Britain, and what is commonly termed the sacred.

There seems to be an agreed perception that in order to make a living from writing (at least initially), one should specialise in one form of fiction, say, whether it be paranormal romance or military SF, and present oneself in social media as a principle exponent of that speciality. For example, one’s blog posts should be about facets of the speciality, or reviews of others in the field, or interesting research titbits, or the actual writing process. I can see the sense in this approach, but I don’t think it is the only one. My own range of research interests is wide and all of them feed into my writing at one time or the other, which itself can be of different forms (poetry, fiction, non-fiction), so I see no reason in narrowing my focus to only one of these interests or one of the writing fields.

My choice of title for this rebooted blog reflects this decision. The word ‘awen’ is Welsh for inspiration, for the muse, and I see my work as responding to whatever the ‘muse’ (however you define this) gives me. I remember reading an interview with Ted Hughes at the time he was made Poet Laureate, and when he was asked what he would write his answer was something along the lines of ‘being faithful to the muse’. I happen to agree with this approach, though, like Hughes and many other writers, I don’t believe in waiting for the muse to give me something. As William Faulkner is reputed to have said: ‘I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes at nine every morning’.

Basically, then, this blog will feature those elements that contribute to my ‘awen project’, my attempt to follow what the muse has given me. I may discuss these ‘givens’, or the research involved in turning a given into a poem or story, or the writing techniques I feel may be useful for myself or for others. I may discuss other interests that are tangential to my experience, exploration and expression of ‘awen’, yet still somehow connected to these. I hope you will enjoy what I have to offer.

Happy reading, musing, writing

Earl