Speaker 1: Hello again. It's Ruby Jones here. I'm back to introduce
Speaker 1: another episode from our sister podcast, Read This. It's a
Speaker 1: show about the books we love and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1: Each week, host and self confessed book nerd Michael Williams
Speaker 1: is joined by one of Australia's best authors, who takes
Speaker 1: listeners behind the scenes of the writing process. Today, we're
Speaker 1: going to hear from Australian writer Charlotte Wood. Before we do,
Speaker 1: Michael is here to share a bit about the episode.
Speaker 1: Hi Michael, how are you book nerd?
Speaker 2: That's pretty offensive, Ruby Jones. I'm well, how are you?
Speaker 1: It's meant in an affectionate way.
Speaker 2: That's what they always say in the school.
Speaker 1: Yet I am good.
Speaker 3: Thanks.
Speaker 1: So this episode of Read This it's a little bit
Speaker 1: special because you interviewed Charlotte Wood about her latest novels
Speaker 1: Donia Devotional, and since then it's actually gone on to
Speaker 1: be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which is a very
Speaker 1: big deal. It's the most important with Tree Awards in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: Look, the book is kind of the gold standard. It's
Speaker 2: certainly the one that has the biggest discernible impact on
Speaker 2: sales in the English language world, and it is the
Speaker 2: one that kind of dictates. It's kind of an active,
Speaker 2: instant canonization. A book that wins the booker becomes one
Speaker 2: of the books that has to be read for the year.
Speaker 2: It's a decade since an Australian was last on the
Speaker 2: book a shortlist, and it's particularly thrilling that to break
Speaker 2: that decade long drought, we have Charlotte Wood, whose book
Speaker 2: is singular and beautiful.
Speaker 1: So before it was nominated, before it became decorated, what
Speaker 1: was it like to pick it up and read it
Speaker 1: for the very first time.
Speaker 2: Stoneyard Devotional is a gorgeous book. It's a very quiet
Speaker 2: book in many ways. I read years ago this review
Speaker 2: of Marilyn Robinson's Gilead in The Guardian that had this
Speaker 2: line that said, it's a novel that forces you to
Speaker 2: read at its pace, slowly and increasingly appreciatively. And that's
Speaker 2: an idea that's really stuck with me. I love the
Speaker 2: idea of a book that teaches you how to read it,
Speaker 2: and Charlotte Wood's Stonyard Devotional is one of those books.
Speaker 2: It defires a kind of easy skim It's not like
Speaker 2: rollicking along on a level of plot from the outset.
Speaker 2: It is a mood piece early on, but it really
Speaker 2: digs into some profound, deeply kind of moving meditations and
Speaker 2: illustrates this world in the Monaro plane in southern New
Speaker 2: South Wales and brings it to life in this old
Speaker 2: convent with a woman who's trying to escape so many.
Speaker 1: Things coming up in just a moment. Charlotte Wood thinks
Speaker 1: restraint is underrated.
Speaker 2: Stoneyard Devotional is a beautiful book about grief, about solitude,
Speaker 2: about what it means to live a good life, and
Speaker 2: what we owe one another. Long Standing fans of Charlotte
Speaker 2: Wood will be thrilled. It's her ninth book, but it
Speaker 2: was her twenty sixteen novel The Natural Way of Things
Speaker 2: which broke her out in a massive way. She won
Speaker 2: the Prime Minister's Award that year and the Stellar Prize
Speaker 2: and was an international best seller. A stage adaptation of
Speaker 2: her follow up, The Weekend, has just finished an acclaimed
Speaker 2: run at Sydney's Belvoir Theater. And her last book before
Speaker 2: Stoneyard Devotional was a work of nonfiction called The Luminous Solution.
Speaker 2: It was all about creativity and the inner life, but
Speaker 2: it was also about the idea of resilience of how
Speaker 2: we might marshal our strength to get through difficult times.
Speaker 2: It was a concept that was to have unfortunate, far
Speaker 2: reaching resonances in Wood's own life in the months following
Speaker 2: its publication.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had a big bomb go off in our
Speaker 3: family last year, which was that my older sister was
Speaker 3: diagnosed with breast cancer. She was the same age my
Speaker 3: mother was when she died of cancer. Then she, as
Speaker 3: big sisters do, said right, oh, everyone go off and
Speaker 3: have scans, which we did just to kind of please her. Really,
Speaker 3: So six weeks after she was diagnosed and I was
Speaker 3: found to have breast cancer, and then a week later
Speaker 3: my younger sister was also abound to have it where
Speaker 3: everyone's fine, I need to say that quite immediately. So
Speaker 3: I'd written a draft of the book, a very sparse
Speaker 3: first draft, and I got to the sort of penultimate scenes,
Speaker 3: the scenes that really in terms of the story, end
Speaker 3: the book. And then I got up to go and
Speaker 3: do some grocery shopping and while I was in the shops,
Speaker 3: the phone rang and it was the breast screen people
Speaker 3: saying you've got to come back and have more TETs.
Speaker 3: So that was like what, And you know, I think
Speaker 3: about that timing. I think if that hadn't I don't
Speaker 3: know what would have happened to the book if I
Speaker 3: hadn't just done that that that morning. But anyway, the
Speaker 3: relevance of this to the novel is it was a
Speaker 3: psychic catastrophe more than physical catastrophe, because we had the
Speaker 3: best kind of cancer you can have and all of that,
Speaker 3: but the shock of it was so deep and so
Speaker 3: powerful for me anyway. And so then when I went
Speaker 3: back to revise the book, I'd already wanted to try
Speaker 3: and write a book that wasn't going to explain things
Speaker 3: and wasn't going to hold the reader's hand very tightly.
Speaker 3: And also, you know, it was about grief and about
Speaker 3: my mother. And so then when I went back to
Speaker 3: it with his new experience, a shedding had taken place
Speaker 3: of trivial themes of unimportant things. And so I went
Speaker 3: almost like a kind of skeleton going back into writing,
Speaker 3: But in a good way. It was with more of
Speaker 3: a commitment to a book where nothing extraneous was to
Speaker 3: remain in the book, and I think it really helped
Speaker 3: give the book a depth that it might have started
Speaker 3: to have. But when I went back to it. It
Speaker 3: was with an understanding that we are mortal. Now that
Speaker 3: sounds so silly because we all know that, but we
Speaker 3: also all walk around pretending we don't know that. And
Speaker 3: I understood from my experience that that was a rehearsal
Speaker 3: for me, and that it's going to come, you know,
Speaker 3: hopefully when I'm one hundred and seven. But how do
Speaker 3: you live a good life, a full life, while not
Speaker 3: turning away from the knowledge that we're going to die.
Speaker 3: That's what I wanted the book to sort of grapple with.
Speaker 2: You mentioned that the main character's mother is in no
Speaker 2: small part your own manner on the page, and you know,
Speaker 2: I'm always reluctant when chatting to an author to ascribe
Speaker 2: autobiographical things to.
Speaker 3: It, but I've been quite open about that. I mean,
Speaker 3: it is the most personal book that I've written, and
Speaker 3: I found myself wanted to write about my mother, who
Speaker 3: was quite an unusual person. She was very, very self contained,
Speaker 3: as the words I always used to describe her. She
Speaker 3: had a deep kind of reserve and a need for privacy.
Speaker 3: And when I say privacy, it's a sort of emotional privacy,
Speaker 3: I guess, and the narrator respects that you know, there's
Speaker 3: no sense that she thinks so I wish she'd opened
Speaker 3: up to me or anything like that, But she's preoccupied
Speaker 3: with her mother and not her father, because she says,
Speaker 3: I knew my father from the moment I was born.
Speaker 3: I knew my father, and I would never if he'd
Speaker 3: lived a long time, I would never have known him
Speaker 3: better than I knew him, you know, by the time
Speaker 3: he died. Whereas she said, I just could never know
Speaker 3: my mother in the same way. Although there was no
Speaker 3: question that they loved each other, they trusted each other.
Speaker 3: But you know, when you're relatively young, when the parent dies,
Speaker 3: all of your grief initially is for yourself. Of course,
Speaker 3: I'm now the age my mother was when she died.
Speaker 3: I'm fifty eight. She died of fifty eight, and now
Speaker 3: my grief is for her, for what she lost, you know,
Speaker 3: what she never got to do, or the grandchildren she
Speaker 3: never got to meet. I was twenty nine, so not
Speaker 3: not a child by any means, but sort of still
Speaker 3: just undone by it. You know, your grief, well, speaking
Speaker 3: only for myself, it's subside. It lessens over time, but
Speaker 3: it doesn't go away, and it changes texture and it
Speaker 3: kind of surges. At certain times, you know, there are
Speaker 3: things that you think, oh God, wish they were here
Speaker 3: for this, But also sometimes you just overcome by it
Speaker 3: for no reason at all. One of the things the
Speaker 3: narrator talks about is this shame of still carrying this
Speaker 3: grief that she thinks she should be over. You know,
Speaker 3: it's embarrassing to be stumbling around as a middle aged
Speaker 3: woman still wanting your mummy.
Speaker 2: Do you think you'll like her?
Speaker 3: No, I don't think I am. I think I'm a
Speaker 3: lot like my dad. I guess one of the propellers
Speaker 3: for the work is that sort of that difference is
Speaker 3: a preoccupation because I'm not as private as she was,
Speaker 3: and I'm not as you know. She was a very
Speaker 3: kind woman and who did do good acts in the world,
Speaker 3: like genuinely practically, I think, especially when you're young, people
Speaker 3: don't believe in genuinely kind people, you know. And the
Speaker 3: narrative says, it's always confused me that people seem to
Speaker 3: think that habitual kindness is some kind of mask or
Speaker 3: disguise or a lie. And she says, but it was true.
Speaker 3: She was, and my mother was, and in some ways
Speaker 3: maybe she could only do those sorts of kind things
Speaker 3: for people, because she had a sort of separateness from
Speaker 3: people at the same time.
Speaker 2: One of the wonderfully evocative things in this is you're
Speaker 2: writing about country that is where you came from and
Speaker 2: the place of your childhood. I'm so interested in what
Speaker 2: that process was of creative and imaginative pilgrimage back home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny because it didn't involve a physical pilgrimage
Speaker 3: back home for quite some time. But I knew I
Speaker 3: wanted to write about that landscape of the minero in
Speaker 3: southern New South Wales where I grew up, and it
Speaker 3: is a very austere landscape. Currently which poet it was
Speaker 3: called it the lunar landscape, but it is, you know,
Speaker 3: treeless plane with these patches of enormous stony boulders, and
Speaker 3: the light on those very shallow sort of planes at
Speaker 3: certain times of the day is just unbelievably beautiful. And
Speaker 3: it's something very physical for me about that landscape. It's
Speaker 3: whenever I talk about it, I start gesturing my gut
Speaker 3: on my solar plexus. It does feel like an umbilical
Speaker 3: connection to that place. And you know, of course, a
Speaker 3: lot of the book is about the narrator's mother, which
Speaker 3: is about my mother. So when the narrator goes back
Speaker 3: to this place, it's almost like she goes there out
Speaker 3: of an animal instinct, not out of any kind of
Speaker 3: rational decision making process. And I guess my feelings about
Speaker 3: that landscape, I've quite sort of primitive and animal, well,
Speaker 3: instinctive rather than intellectual.
Speaker 2: That instinctive thing comes through with your narrator, but there
Speaker 2: is also the magic of the place holds for her imaginatively.
Speaker 2: There's a sequence where she's driving and she's rattling off
Speaker 2: the names of towns like a half remembered mantra. I
Speaker 2: think we've all done that when on a road trip
Speaker 2: that we've done many times. Is that place names and
Speaker 2: the names of things take us immediately back to that space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, their beautifully rhythmic name, and she says they come
Speaker 3: back into her body, you know, not just into her mind,
Speaker 3: and they're kind of like I think she says, like
Speaker 3: beads and a rosary, or like naming the parts of
Speaker 3: my own body. And certainly I had that experience going back.
Speaker 3: I think it's about the place where you were a
Speaker 3: small child just has a whole of you with a
Speaker 3: kind of cellular level in some way that other places don't.
Speaker 2: I think one of the tensions of the book is
Speaker 2: that your character goes back there, as you say, instinctively
Speaker 2: to escape and for solitude, for isolation, as escape, but
Speaker 2: she does so to a place where she's crowded in
Speaker 2: on all sides. By association, it seems to me someone
Speaker 2: who genuinely wants to escape and goes somewhere SOLDI goes
Speaker 2: away from the places where they have history.
Speaker 3: Yes, she says somewhere that maybe in another language, there's
Speaker 3: a word for the particular kind of despair that I had.
Speaker 3: It that time. It was a need to go somewhere
Speaker 3: that I had never been, but that was nevertheless my
Speaker 3: home in some way. So she goes to this religious
Speaker 3: community of nuns where she's never been, and it's not
Speaker 3: her home as not even in the town where she
Speaker 3: grew up, but sort of nearby. So it was some
Speaker 3: sort of homing instinct, I think, and I've only thought
Speaker 3: about this since the book was finished, but there's a
Speaker 3: sense that that kind of bare bedrock landscape understands her
Speaker 3: and that's what takes her back there. It's like her
Speaker 3: kind of psychic state is in a similarly stripped back
Speaker 3: It sort of aligns tonally with the actual physical world.
Speaker 2: It's so important to Estonia devotional. Your main character, like you,
Speaker 2: is not a person of faith, but like you, draw
Speaker 2: some solace from being around some of those rituals and
Speaker 2: finds it a respite from the modern life that she's
Speaker 2: trying to escape.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she sort of comes to this place after some
Speaker 3: deep psychic crisis that is to do partly with her
Speaker 3: work as an environmental activist and other kind of unexplained things. Really,
Speaker 3: but she sort of comforted a little, but also always
Speaker 3: ambivalent about being there. She doesn't get to a point
Speaker 3: where she thinks, oh, this is where I belong. Mainly
Speaker 3: she's thinking, God, I can't believe I'm still here, you know,
Speaker 3: because of all these reasons why I should not be here.
Speaker 3: I don't believe in God. I don't even know what
Speaker 3: prayer is. I will never understand what that means. And
Speaker 3: also what am I doing being a part of this
Speaker 3: organization which is so appalling in so many ways? And
Speaker 3: yet there are moments of deep peace that she has
Speaker 3: only had there, really, and there is something about the
Speaker 3: rhythm of the day, and you know, for someone in
Speaker 3: a deeps of crisis, just going somewhere where you don't
Speaker 3: have to make any decisions. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: she's always grappling with this tension between two sort of
Speaker 3: mantras that she keeps coming back to. The first one
Speaker 3: is action is the antidote to despair, and the other
Speaker 3: one is first, do no harm. And she's always believed,
Speaker 3: as I have always believed, that action is the antidote
Speaker 3: to despair. And then after a certain time, you look
Speaker 3: at all that action that you've tried to take and think,
Speaker 3: what is it done. I think that sense of futility
Speaker 3: is really overwhelming. And then she comes across these women
Speaker 3: who are you know, they may be seen to not
Speaker 3: be doing any good in the world, but they're not
Speaker 3: doing any harm. They're not proselytizing, they're not trying to
Speaker 3: convert anyone, they're not harassing anyone, they're not going anywhere,
Speaker 3: they're not using any resources really, and it's sort of
Speaker 3: a Hubris come up and for her to think, you know,
Speaker 3: I've always kind of despised people like this, and yet
Speaker 3: now here I am because the other alternatives have failed.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a minute. The idea of action
Speaker 2: being the antidote to despair. You know, for you, for
Speaker 2: your career, that action has taken the form of creation.
Speaker 2: You know, it's taken the form of making and leaving
Speaker 2: the world palpably, discernibly better for the thing that you've made.
Speaker 2: That creative practice seems to me to be at the
Speaker 2: heart for you. You don't give that same comfort to your.
Speaker 3: Character in this book, no, I mean, I feel like
Speaker 3: my creative practice has a palpable benefit for me. I
Speaker 3: would never presume to think it had any benefit for
Speaker 3: anyone else beyond that. I mean, of course I love
Speaker 3: it when people are affected by my work or whatever,
Speaker 3: but I'm not I don't see that as helping make
Speaker 3: the world a better place to be honest, I do
Speaker 3: feel that art is a place to turn when everything
Speaker 3: is in such dire states. Then sometimes the stillness of
Speaker 3: art actually is what can sort of calm me. And
Speaker 3: I guess I'm talking about visual art as well as literature.
Speaker 3: There is something enduring about art. I mean, I would
Speaker 3: turn to art over a church any day. But as
Speaker 3: for you contributing to the greater good, I would never
Speaker 3: suggest that my heart has contributed.
Speaker 2: That's what the podcast interviewers roll, Well, you don't have
Speaker 2: to claim it in a way then I'll presume. But no,
Speaker 2: I'm glad you make that distinction that you can receive
Speaker 2: that benefit from art.
Speaker 3: I really believe this in an almost religious way, that
Speaker 3: making something delivers serious benefit to the maker. And it
Speaker 3: might be making a cake, it might be making a garden,
Speaker 3: but the act of making it does good, you know,
Speaker 3: And I don't you know, I don't know about in
Speaker 3: some sort of metaphysical way of whether putting something good
Speaker 3: into the world has any benefit beyond the actual thing itself.
Speaker 2: The question that stone our devotional asks, I think in
Speaker 2: really interesting ways, is what we owe to one another.
Speaker 2: And I think if we're not having that conversation, then
Speaker 2: we're the poorer for it, you know. Again, not trying
Speaker 2: to make great claims for the outcome of it, but
Speaker 2: we have to have these things we make that allow
Speaker 2: us to ask those questions.
Speaker 3: Well, writing is asking questions. I mean, when I write fiction,
Speaker 3: it's usually to do with some question that I have
Speaker 3: about how to be, you know, and clearly an obsession
Speaker 3: of mine that I never kind of realized until it's done.
Speaker 3: It say, oh, there it is again, this idea of
Speaker 3: how to live with other people that you haven't chosen
Speaker 3: to live with, you know, the natural way of things.
Speaker 3: Girls were all incarcerated together. The women in the Weekend
Speaker 3: did choose to be together, but they sort of almost
Speaker 3: were there by duty more than anything else. And this one,
Speaker 3: you know, she's there having to live a life that
Speaker 3: is quite restrictive. But the thing that really drives the
Speaker 3: nazis the other people.
Speaker 2: It's very relatable. That's the main crisis.
Speaker 3: Ever, there's other people, it always, but we have to
Speaker 3: figure out ways to live with each other with some
Speaker 3: kind of I mean, I don't want to sound like
Speaker 3: I have any answers to this, because I we don't,
Speaker 3: and the book doesn't. But it's an exploration of forgiveness
Speaker 3: and what it means and who gets to forgive and
Speaker 3: when is it too late to forgive or be forgiven.
Speaker 3: I'm really interested in thinking about those things myself, you know,
Speaker 3: and I don't usually come to any conclusions, but that
Speaker 3: propels the making of the book.
Speaker 2: I guess one of the questions in the book is,
Speaker 2: you know, on the one hand, choosing not to engage,
Speaker 2: choosing solitude and choosing to escape is an utterly valid
Speaker 2: set of choices, but against a backdrop of climate catastrophe,
Speaker 2: of society going to hell in a handbasket at a
Speaker 2: disturbingly rapid rate, opting out suddenly seems counter to the
Speaker 2: idea of being good. Back to that question of what
Speaker 2: we owe one another? Do we owe one another engagement?
Speaker 3: Yes, I think we do. But I suppose the struggle
Speaker 3: is always engagement of what kind? You know, Like someone
Speaker 3: asked me yesterday, do I how much I engage with
Speaker 3: the news, you know, with current affairs? And I said
Speaker 3: not very much by choice because it sends me crazy,
Speaker 3: and you know, you're go into that kind of paralysis.
Speaker 3: If I watched for news bulletins a day about what's
Speaker 3: happening in the world right now, would that lead me
Speaker 3: to take any more action to do something? No, it
Speaker 3: would not. But so I mean, I think a certain
Speaker 3: level of awareness is essential for a kind of moral life.
Speaker 3: But then what do you do with that? How do
Speaker 3: you engage? That's the thorny question. And you know, getting
Speaker 3: online and screaming at other people on social media is
Speaker 3: not I think, no it isn't. But sometimes that feels
Speaker 3: like action, you know, sometimes the greatest act of support
Speaker 3: you can offer is to shut up. And you know,
Speaker 3: restraint is not something we think about very much as
Speaker 3: a way of being an ethical person behaving ethically. But
Speaker 3: I think it's kind of underrated.
Speaker 2: You say. In many ways, it's your most personal book,
Speaker 2: which is hardly surprising given the year you've had. Is
Speaker 2: this the new way of things for you for the
Speaker 2: foreseeable future. Is your relationship with your own creativity, your
Speaker 2: own storytelling irreparably changed?
Speaker 3: I hope, so, look, every book changes you. I feel
Speaker 3: like I have matured as a writer with this book.
Speaker 3: Particularly The Natural Way Things did teach me a lot.
Speaker 3: And the big thing it taught me was that a
Speaker 3: book will show you how to write it if you
Speaker 3: pay attention and if you don't fight it, you know,
Speaker 3: And I fought it for a long time, and then
Speaker 3: I find with that book I had to surrender to
Speaker 3: the fact that it was this dark and harrowing story.
Speaker 3: And I think I've gradually seen then become more interested
Speaker 3: in writing much more instinctively. One of the people I
Speaker 3: thought about as I was writing Stoneyard Devotional was Joan London,
Speaker 3: a writer absolutely adore and admire, and I interviewed her
Speaker 3: years ago and she talked about allowing a book to
Speaker 3: come rather than forcing it, which is what I'd always done.
Speaker 3: And I was so kind of inspired by this. And
Speaker 3: she would write little notes to herself, as writers do
Speaker 3: all the time, and then she would purposely lose them
Speaker 3: in her writing room or wherever it, maybe even in
Speaker 3: the house, and then later she would sort of come
Speaker 3: across them as these little gifts, you know, and she said,
Speaker 3: and I would just catch them as lightly as possible,
Speaker 3: and she said, I've got lighter and lighter. And I
Speaker 3: found that so beautiful and inspiring. And the other thing
Speaker 3: she said she had spoken to one of her kids,
Speaker 3: I think, who told her this quote from Andre Gide,
Speaker 3: who said art is a collaboration between God and the artist,
Speaker 3: and the more God has to do with it, the better,
Speaker 3: by which I took to me, you know, God as
Speaker 3: the spirit of art, as the unconscious, as the unknown
Speaker 3: force of art. And that's what I'm interested in doing now,
Speaker 3: just giving that a lot more rain and more and
Speaker 3: not questioning it. And my brother said a beautiful thing
Speaker 3: to me about the book. He said, I felt like
Speaker 3: I was in a river. I felt it was a
Speaker 3: river carrying me. I don't know why I'm suddenly it
Speaker 3: makes me really emotional. But I loved that that it
Speaker 3: was sort of he was carried by the book. If
Speaker 3: anybody else feels that way, it's because of trusting that
Speaker 3: your art instinct is doing the work for you. And
Speaker 3: you have that instinct to put two quite strange things
Speaker 3: next to each other, to put a mouse plague in
Speaker 3: the middle of a nunnery, or to you know, put
Speaker 3: these strange things together, and that it makes sense without
Speaker 3: you having to make sense of it.
Speaker 2: If that makes sense, it does. I think you've once again, John,
Speaker 2: is there every reason to trust your instincts. It is
Speaker 2: a privilege to read it and a privilege to chat
Speaker 2: to you today.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Michael, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Charlotte Wood's latest book, Stonia Devotional, is available at your
Speaker 2: local independent bookstore.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite
Speaker 1: interviews from the show, Listen out for upcoming conversations with
Speaker 1: Robbie Arnott and Malcolm Knox, And if you don't want
Speaker 1: to wait until next Sunday to dive in to read this,
Speaker 1: you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts,