Bec Stafford Interviews Alison Croggon (Pt 1):
Saturday, 4th September, 2010, Midday.
Hilton Hotel, South Wharf, Melbourne.
Alison Croggon is a Melbourne writer. She has published several collections of poetry, for which she won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes, and was shortlisted for the Victorian (twice) and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her most recent collection is Theatre (Salt Publishing, 2008). She is the author of the Books of Pellinor quartet, a fantasy series that has been published worldwide to critical and popular acclaim, to date selling half a million copies in the UK and the US alone. She runs the influential review blog Theatre Notes and is Melbourne theatre critic for The Australian, for which last year she won the Geraldine Pascall Prize for criticism. She has written several works for theatre, including the operas The Burrow and Gauguin with the composer Michael Smetanin. They are currently working on their fourth opera together, Mayakovsky, which will be produced by Victoria Opera in 2013. This year she co-wrote Night Songs, a music theatre work for young people commissioned by Bell Shakespeare, with playwright Daniel Keene, and finished her sixth novel, Black Spring. She has three children and is married to the playwright Daniel Keene.
The line-up at AussieCon4 was nothing short of spectacular. Writers from a vast array of disciplines converged on the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre in the first week of September to talk science fiction and fantasy. I had the great privilege of speaking with Alison Croggon: poet, author, playwright, opera creator, and esteemed critic. A couple of hours with Alison will leave you feeling greatly inspired (and incredibly lazy!). Despite her many achievements and awards, she’s not one to rest on her laurels: for Alison, every week brings with it new opportunities for absorbing, engaging with, and creating art. Pretty remarkable, don’t you think?
B: So Alison, you came to Spec Fiction around 2000? Is that right?
A: Yeah–about then.
B: How did that come about?
A: Well actually, my first ambition as a kid was to write an epic fantasy novel.
B: How old were you?
A: About 10. I’d read The Lord of the Rings. I loved it. *Loved* it. I was obviously a precocious reader. And I did, in fact, write about 100 pages of a fantasy that was almost exactly the same as The Lord of the Rings, which I later threw away. At the lofty height of 14, all my juvenilia was thrown away, which I’ve regretted ever since. I’d actually done maps, poems, stories, and things to do with this world I’d invented. Then I sort of grew up and was writing poetry and doing other things. It was when my son started reading fantasy–and these books that I’d loved as a kid–that I read them again and remembered how much I loved that stuff. And I remembered that thing I’d always wanted to write.
B: Do you feel that, for writers, the creative instinct is always there?
A: Yes. I think it is. I mean, apparently, the first thing with me was poetry. Always. I was a well-known poet before I did anything else. I’ve written poetry for as long as I’ve been able to write. Apparently, but I don’t remember this, I wrote a poem on my first day of school. Some little rhyme. Oh, I loved school at that point. Yeah, so, it’s just there. For a long time, it felt like a kind of deformity. You have this itch, or this desire, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Quite often, there are times that I don’t write for a while. Well, actually, I’m writing all the time because I do all of these different kinds of critical writing…but when I don’t do the creative writing, which is the kind that demands the most of you emotionally, often it feels like this huge relief.
So, I wrote the four Pellinor books. I finished the last one in about 2008 and I’d started them in 1999. That’s a long time. They’re long books!
