Player FM 앱으로 오프라인으로 전환하세요!
54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)
Manage episode 290595313 series 2538127
Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher.
Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”
Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”
Mentioned in the Episode
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home,
- The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…)
- Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection)
- Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor)
- Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room)
- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
- Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
- George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch
Listen to and read the Episode
68 에피소드
Manage episode 290595313 series 2538127
Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher.
Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”
Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”
Mentioned in the Episode
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home,
- The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…)
- Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection)
- Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor)
- Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room)
- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
- Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
- George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch
Listen to and read the Episode
68 에피소드
Toate episoadele
×플레이어 FM에 오신것을 환영합니다!
플레이어 FM은 웹에서 고품질 팟캐스트를 검색하여 지금 바로 즐길 수 있도록 합니다. 최고의 팟캐스트 앱이며 Android, iPhone 및 웹에서도 작동합니다. 장치 간 구독 동기화를 위해 가입하세요.