Q11. When you were a child did you: (a) Have very vivid dreams? (b) Relish the
time you had alone to yourself? (c) Day dream quite often? (d) Feel especially
fond of reading or listening to fairy tales? (e) Have a very vivid imagination? (f)
Often find yourself “off” in your own world? (g) Enjoy reading books about other
times and other countries? (h) Spend a lot of your time in a world of self-created
fantasy?
I n response to all of these questions David Malouf simply ticked each item,
indicating a positive response.
Q13. What relationship, if any, do you think exists between the act of creative
writing and an awareness that comes from beyond the writer’s personal knowledge
base or consciousness?
We seem to me to have access to experiences, overheard or heard through
the telling from our parents and other close members of the family, that we feel as
personal because they come to us encapsulated in feeling. We pick them up in such
a way that the experiences related seem to be our own. We have experienced
them as emotion, and if we can get access to this emotion in writing we can also
convincingly recreate the experience itself. So our personal experience goes back a
good thirty years before our actual birth. Then writing may itself produce
experiences that we have only in the writing, though they are, I ’d want to say, real
ones, as so many of the experiences we get through reading are also real.
Q16. When you are in the act of writing, are your imagined or potential readers a
part of your fantasy?
Not at all.
Q18. Has the activity of writing (or reading) ever induced in you a state or feeling
of ecstasy (ecstasy meaning hyperawareness, almost like or including a trance-
state, a feeling of detachment from your physical body or locality, and into the
imagined scene of the fiction you were writing (or reading)?
This is the state I have been calling open it deepens as you move into any
session of writing. Loss of sense of place, even more of time. Certainly of body.
Q19. Do you ever consider that the reader of your work may read a sub-text,
which has significant personal relevance to them, into your work?
Yes, inevitably.
Q20. Do you ever read a subtext into a work of fiction that you may be reading?
I nevitably, again.
ron
(Ron)
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