Mike’s Open Pages

A few months ago, I heard from Prof Michael Titlestad that he was planning to teach my novel The Ibis Tapestry as part of the SA literature course at Wits university. “It remains one of the novels that has preoccupied me for decades,” he said. The novel was published in 1998 and has long been out of print, although Knopf still hold a small stock. Michael wanted to source 15 hardbacks which he could loan to students each year.

It was with the publication of Martin Amis’s second novel, Dead Babies, that the blunt force of censorship really hit home. Before that it had been an irritation. When my father had overseas business trips I would give him a list of books and he’d buy them. The lists were ad hoc: Lady Chatterley’s Lover (of course), Portnoy’s Complaint, Fear of Flying, Black Skin, White Masks, Black Poets in South Africa (because Mandla Langa’s poems in the South African edition had been blacked out).

Blake Morrison on writing a memoir. (This from his recently published memoir, Two Sisters): “If you’re reading this, my sister is dead. I may be dead too, but that’s beside the point, for you if not for me. Many years ago I resolved not to write about her while she was alive, or rather not to publish anything that I had written. She – Gill – had walk-on parts, like a film extra, in two memoirs I published about our parents: And When Did You Last See Your Father?

The news editor was a ferocious man. A big ginger beard. A pipe. A huge gut. He was a no-nonsense New Zealander. I don’t know if being a New Zealander made him more fearsome than the beard and the gut and the pipe, but believe me I viewed him with trepidation. Actually, with considerable fear and trepidation. “Why do you want this job?” he asked. Suck, suck, suck on the pipe. “Because I want to write,” I replied. Suck, suck. Baleful, sceptical eyes. I was beginning to wish I’d turned down the interview.

NoViolet Bulawayo talking about her novel Glory: "I was brought up on stories – my grandmother was a storyteller and her stories were laced with humour, so that they were tolerable. [Glory is] a tense book but humour reminds us that all is not lost. I'm trying to celebrate humanity." Commenting on living in the United States: "Being in the US accorded the distance to look at things with more intimacy. Being away made me write from a place of pain.

‘I want to be a poet,’ was my answer to the career guidance counsellor’s question. He had asked what I wanted to do with my life and I’d answered perfectly truthfully. At age seventeen, poetry was the most important thing in my life and would remain top of the pops through to my mid-twenties. ‘Yes,’ he said, no doubt somewhat exasperated, ‘but what are you going to do to earn a living? You aren’t going to make any money from writing poetry.’ Why not? I wondered.

“There is no correct way to write a novel,” according to Ted Hughes, “or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting? Surely this is what all the thousands of writers all over the world are trying to find out, how they can make their writing interesting.The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you.

Way back when, after writing my first poem about pirates, I went in search of my mother so that I could read it to her. I can’t remember her reaction but she probably patted me on the head and said encouraging words. I didn’t realise it at the time, but for writers, readers – or listeners – are an essential part of writing. It seems so obvious now. But we need readers in the same way we need words. Because without the reader the work is only half finished.

“If you’re a fiction writer and you’re too intelligent, you cannot write. But if you’re stupid, you cannot write. You have to find a position in between.” - Haruki Murakami Love and breakfast:  “I love Bob, I love Richard, I love Rice Krispies … perhaps it is better in the end just to love Rice Krispies.” - Barbara Pym “I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner?

Recently a journalist asked me when I started writing and why? I replied that late in my teenage years I had written some poetry but had decided that I needed to live a little before I wrote a novel. The deadline in the “lived a little” was the age of thirty. After the interviewer had gone I thought about my response and realised the writing itch had actually started a lot earlier. Sometime round about the age of nine or ten. And it had to do with Wordsworth’s golden daffodils.