(b) David Malouf’s Responses:
David Malouf responded to my questionnaire on 14.02.2000 in the following
manner, retyping some of the questions or integrating them into his responses. He
began: Some questions that don’t interest me or which I can’t answer I ’ve ignored.
The answers themselves are suggestive rather than analytical, therefore short.
Some of them can be explained or illustrated from the books, especially 12
Edmonstone Street.
Q4. How important is setting, locale or place in your work? (Please note that I
am interested in how you imagine these settings or places rather than their
appropriateness to the structure of what you are reading.)
Very. A lot of my writing is set in places I knew in childhood or youth and I
find it useful in imagining and seeing characters, in catching the way they feel, to
locate them in places I have a strong feeling for and know in the right season or at
the right times of the day. Light seems especially important here and I often use it
as the key I need for visualising a place, or as a key to calling up actual memories
the writing may need.
Q5. Do you feel that your state of consciousness changes when you become
absorbed in writing a poem or novel, and if so, can you describe how do you feel or
the effect it has on you?
I t seems to me that as you write you fall into a state where the mind is open
that is, where it empties itself of ideas and opinions already held and you are ready
to let in other ideas (sometimes ones that are quite contrary to your conscious
opinions); ready too to let memories of other, till then lost experiences re-surface,
that are called up by the needs of the particular piece of writing you are engaged in
and which you have to be in this special state to recall.
Q8. How would you describe the act of writing? In other words, what do you
experience when you write, in contrast to reading, watching television or attending
the theatre or cinema?
Writing seems to me to precipitate this open but active state. Reading is
also open but to what the book offers and film going-is what the images and events
of the film lead you through. This open-ness is a suspension of normal
consciousness in that it empties the mind, shuts out what is going on in the world
around you at the moment, but also shuts off other lines of thinking, that is, ones
that are not relevant to the writing, or reading, or watching.