Playing with the Stuff of Dreams:

An Interview with Trent Jamieson

Interview by Geoffrey Maloney

One of the wonderful things about single author collections is that often the stories reinforce each other and themes begin to emerge for the reader, which makes the reading experience all that more rewarding.  I found Reserved for Travelling Shows to be a richly themed collection, even though each story is set in its own fictional universe.  Are there certain themes that you actively seek to explore in your writing or is this something that emerges more subconsciously?

I rarely ever approach a story from a thematic perspective, but there are things that I keep coming back to, certain neuroses that emerge in a lot of what I write. Someone once said to me, that all I wrote about were clocks and death. They may have a point, but I'd like to think I wrote about more than that.  Relationships are important to me, how they work, how they unravel, I find myself writing a lot of love stories, and if you're trying to be truthful about love, then you have to explore the unsaid, how words tend to fail on an emotional level. We experience things in such a rich way, viscerally, emotionally, intellectually. Some days it feels as though it's raining epiphanies, but language let's us down; we're only ever capable of expressing such a small sliver of our inner life. I think Patrick White managed to convey this very powerfully in "The Tree of Man" a beautifully written book that is as much about silences, and the clumsiness of talk. I'm sure, well, I hope, that there are other themes running through these stories. Quite often the author is the last to know.

Certainly, I found a strong current of love and loss in your stories - a strong sense of the fragility of life and people desperately trying to hang onto what is important for them in worlds that seem to be largely hostile to the existence of humans.  Is this another way of dealing with those classic of themes of Good versus Evil and Man versus Nature or is it something far more subtle that you're trying to capture?

It seems to me that the moment you find love, is the moment you fear it being lost. All things are finite, all things are eventually lost. If it were any other way the world would be a terribly cluttered place, more crowded and fat on itself than it already is, but, regardless, it is still a bittersweet thing. The clock's always ticking.

The story “Endure” is about this, a world that keeps remembering itself and its people. Only, in order to remember one thing, it must tear everything else down. I don't believe in Good versus Evil or Human versus Nature. We contain both good and evil and it is in our nature to struggle, but it's also in our nature to let go - or at least come to terms with the necessity of this. Most of my characters let go of something: Sal in "Threnody" of her hope for a companion; Michael in "Clockwork" of his fear of losing his family, and the finite span he has between happiness and grief; even Mr Collins in "Persuasion" gives up his magical eloquence so that the woman he loves will trust him. Of course, his letting go will have rather dramatic consequences for the society in which he lives.

All of which may make me come across as being particularly gloomy, but I would like to think of myself as a happy melancholic.

But your writing's not gloomy at all.  There is something about it that is triumphant, as though all of us can capture something that is important in our lives if we only look in the right places. I'm glad that you mentioned “Clockwork" and "Persuasion”. Both those stories resonated with me on a very personal level.  Let's talk about “Clockwork” first.  The clockwork tower that appears in your story - it's magnificent.  Where did the idea for that come from? When I read your story I was convinced that it was real.  I wanted to jump in the car and go there.  And the comic strip characters that are interlaced with the narrative - sheer brilliance - where did they come from?

The clockwork citadel came to me slowly, as did everything else in that story. It took me a very long time to write. I think I was exorcising demons. This story has so many personal elements in it that I find it very hard to talk about it.  I basically started in the middle, with the boy and his father travelling alone. I had no idea where they were travelling, just that they were moving from something terrible to something even worse. Part of the story had its genesis in a dream I had one New Year's eve. In the dream, I started vomiting blood. It was pouring out of me, rushing over the floor of this rather shabby toilet and I knew I was going to die. I woke with a start, my heart pounding, quite surprised that I was still alive. It was rather dreadful, except the very next day I wrote it into the story and suddenly I had a much better idea about what I was trying to say. But that's getting away from the clockwork tower. I can picture it quite vividly and I know roughly where it should be - on the Northern NSW hinterland, round Tenterfield. In fact, one day I expect to be driving down there and come across it in all its rusted noisy glory.

I've always loved graphic novels and I just thought it was an interesting way to reinforce the main narrative, and it was fun. When I was growing up in Gunnedah, a smallish country town in rural NSW, if I wasn't writing stories I was trying to write comic books. One day I'd love to see "Clockwork" with the comic book and kid's book sections illustrated.

In a recent interview at Infinity Plus , the Serbian writer, Zoran Zivkovic, suggested that writing was a dialogue with the subconscious, and that dreams could play an important part in the writing process.  Does this happen often with your writing, or is the creative nightmare you just mentioned a rare event?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, that sort of creative nightmare is extremely rare for me. Interestingly enough, I rarely dream when I'm writing heavily. Well, not dreams I remember. It's as though the writing purges that part of my brain. I did dream an entire Jeff Vandermeer story last year, though all I could remember on waking was that it involved a bookseller burying a dying librarian with his favourite books and a torch designed to run out once the man had died. I'm actually quite envious of people whose dreams inform their writing. Mostly, my dreams tend to involve me being late for work - hardly exciting narrative wise.

If I were you I'd be trying to remember every inch of that Jeff Vandermeer novel and get it written down.   To my mind "Persuasion", which is the story that you chose to finish your collection, stands in stark contrast to a more subconscious story like  "Clockwork".   "Persuasion" is an incredibly clever story about language and the power of words - with a doff of the hat to Jane Austen.   It's quite immaculate. Ted Chiang, whose short stories I love, would have killed to write story like that, I'm sure.  I would have killed to write a story like that too. How did you get the idea and how did you make it live?

I'd write the dream story, except a dream Vandermeer would come after me, and that would be nasty. I'm glad you liked "Persuasion", though I doubt you or Ted Chiang would have to kill or even break out in a sweat to match it. It's one of the first stories I've ever written where I thought I might know what I'm doing. To me words are so muddy and I wanted to write a story about a place where words weren't. Jane Austen is such a wonderfully precise writer and, while I can't even begin to come close to imitating her style, I did want to "tip my hat" in that direction. The idea came to me on a holiday I had with my wife last year. We were both terribly sick with the flu. I just wished that I could talk it all away, that I could be possessed of such eloquence that reality would shift, then I wondered how anyone could love or even trust someone with that power.

And Vandermeer would have one of those fearsome meerkats and a couple of squid to back him up too! Reserved for Travelling Shows will be coming out through Prime Books in the US. You first linked up with Prime through Garry Nurrish when you became editor of the fabulously outré and groovy Redsine . What was it like editing Redsine and working with Garry? How much of the content, for example, reflected your own editorial decisions?

It was a pleasure. Garry was always easy to work with, and he let me have my head, as far as fiction was concerned. Redsine actually had three incarnations: firstly, as a staple-bound magazine, then as an ezine and finally, when Prime came on board, a print magazine. I edited every issue from two on, and from issue three the story selection and fiction editing was left up to me. We'd decided to go for dark, which suited me as an editor, anything as long as it had some sort of dark centre. I was always surprised, and pleased, by the quality of submissions and I think a lot of that came from us publishing a magazine that not only looked good, thanks to Garry's elegant sense of design, but was open to stories that other magazines seemed to be shying away from.  And what I loved about the magazine was that it exposed a lot of Australian writers to US and UK readers. Redsine was printed out of the US and it got more exposure than I could have believed. Geez, we were even reviewed, and very positively, in the Washington Post . It was a lot of work, but something that I am very proud of.

I remember that Washington Post review - by Paul Di Filippo wasn't it? But there were also a host of other good reviews too. Redsine did seem to be doing something very different to the magazines in Australia at the time. The work overall was certainly darker and more mysterious, but it wasn't necessarily more serious. After all, there was the brilliant “Robin Hood's New Mother” by Rhys Hughes in Redsine #8, which may have been considered post-modern or even existential at some level, but at the same time was simply joyful and hilarious. How hard was it to get such good quality dark centred work? And was it harder to get it from Australian writers than those from the UK or the US?

It was by Paul Di Filippo, and we did get good reviews in a lot of different venues, and getting reviews is half the battle sometimes, makes you feel as though people are taking notice. Dark doesn't have to be serious. Rhys' story was macabre, but in a laugh out loud kind of way. It wasn't that hard at all to get the work I was looking for, which seems to me to show that there just weren't enough venues for this kind of fiction.

The Australian stories were as strong as any of the UK or US pieces. I never picked a story because of the nationality of the author, and I never had to; there was good stuff coming from all directions. We've got some wonderful authors in this country, and I'm proud that I had the chance to give some of them a little more exposure overseas. But I didn't have to work too hard at it; great stories kept coming in.

Sadly, Redsine didn't get the exposure in Australia it deserved. The perennial distribution problems.  But I've been chatting to couple of other writers in the last few days and there's a bit of a feeling that Redsine really filled a gap in the market and no-one's quite doing that anymore in Australia.  Do you feel that's true and what's the chance of Redsine rising like a Phoenix from the ashes?

Hmm, I don't know. Distribution was a problem, as it is for everyone, but it did receive a lot of recognition. Kim Westwood's story "The Oracle" won an Aurealis award, and several other stories were short listed. My taste was rather peculiar, but I keep seeing stories that I think would have fitted quite comfortably in Redsine . There's quite a bit of variety in the market. And darker tales are being published. Look at all the wonderful Australian writers who've made the "Honourable Mentions" list in Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Horror and Fantasy , not to mention the stories that were picked up to be published. I think Redsine 's time has passed. It burned briefly and brightly, but I don't know if I have the energy to edit a magazine - and write and work and have a life - again. Garry Nurrish might have other ideas, but I've not heard anything to suggest otherwise.

Still, I guess, one of the achievements of Redsine is it drew Prime Books' attention to Australian writers. We both connected with Garry Nurrish and Sean Wallace at Prime Books through Redsine . Then we were able to connect Kirsten Bishop into Prime and it's been kind of a wild ride all the way. These things just seem to happen by chance, don't they? I mean even though Garry Nurrish has returned to the UK, the fact that he lived in Australia for a while, and brought his connections with him when he did, just seemed to open up a world of opportunity.  

Garry is fantastic. I've nothing but respect for him, and it's one of my big regrets that I never met him face to face. You're absolutely right, he quietly set a lot of this up, and it's a pity he's back in the UK. I owe him a huge debt (and my wife, Diana, who talked me into putting my hand up in the first place). Not only did Garry introduce me to the work of writers like Jeff Vandermeer and Stepan Chapman, but he let me get away with so much with Redsine . And thanks to Garry and Sean I got to work on The Etched City and to see your collection Tales from the Cryptosystem in print, and, believe me, if that hadn't been so well received - and Anna Tambour's collection as well - I don't know if any of this would have happened.  Working on Kirsten's novel was such an unadulterated pleasure and one that I can never expect to repeat.  Sometimes it all feels like a dream. But writing (and editing) is like that, we're playing with the stuff of dreams, melding our headspace with others. When you get a chance to play, it's one of the finest privileges of all.

Trent, thanks for the interview. It's been a pleasure.

Likewise. A writer rarely gets a chance to talk about the things that are important to them outside the body of the work - which is probably how it should be - thanks for giving me the opportunity.

Trent lives in Brisbane with his wife Diana. His first fiction sale was to Eidolon in 1994, since then he has sold over fifty stories. His most recent stories have appeared in Daikaiju , Encounters , Nemonymous 4 , and Aurealis , with new stories coming out in Aurealis , ASIM , and the Devil in Brisbane . His first collection of short stories, Reserved for Travelling Shows is due for release through Prime Books. Trent also edited the magazine Redsine , and the Prime Books' edition of Kirsten Bishop's World Fantasy Award nominated novel The Etched City . He is a member of ROR and the Thursday Critiquers.

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