Breton
Dukes’ first book, Bird North (Victoria University Press), is a
collection of seventeen short stories. The blurb on the back cover isn't shy
about promoting the maleness of the collection: “Breton Dukes stands in the
great tradition of New Zealand writers—Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Owen
Marshall—who have looked at men’s lives.” There are several other interesting
things going on in these stories, so I thought it was about time to add to my
series of published email conversations with Kiwi short story writers (click these links
for interviews with Pip Adam, Tina
Makereti, Sue Orr and Anna
Taylor).
But now,
time to talk to Breton...
—
CC: There are a few common strands I
see running through your collection, one of them being a preponderance of male
leads, but there’s also a starkness to the stories, one that is perfectly
matched by their stripped down style. All but three stories are narrated in the
third person, readers are granted little access to the thoughts of characters
and small things like the repeated use of a character’s names instead of a
pronoun create a distancing effect. Was this a style that came naturally to
you, or did it evolve out of the stories you were trying to tell?
BD:
I've always written in a stripped down style. I started reading Hemingway and
Carver pretty early on, so I guess that's where it comes from. I try and make
my descriptions as clear as possible. Same with dialogue. And as you say I
think that style fits with the tone of my stories, and with the way my
characters would think and speak. There are a lot of action scenes in the book
and I think they benefit from being stripped down. The stories I wrote a bit
later on (and what I am writing now) contain a little more poetic stuff, but it
doesn't come easily to me.
During
my MA I experimented with a few different points of view and always seemed to
find that my stories worked best in the third person. I like having that
distance from character and events and then being able to dip in and out of a
character's mind. I never feel comfortable writing in the first person. I get
squeamish and claustrophobic - I always doubt what it is I am saying.
CC: In his Listener review,
Sam Finnemore described Bird North as, “Confident, nuanced and
unselfconsciously local”. Was it a conscious decision to set stories in
recognizable New Zealand places like Te Anau, the Coromandel, the East Coast,
Dunedin and Johnsonville, or was this more a case of writing what you know? How
important is place in your writing?
BD:
When I write a story I have a very clear picture of where the events are taking
place. I can't write without that picture. I have to have a house or a beach,
or a street in my head. A place I have been and know well. The characters can
be pliable and the events too, but not place. So yeah, it's definitely a case
of writing what I know.
I
figure if I am using a place like Tunnel Beach or Johnsonville as the setting,
why not name it? It would seem strange to me not too. And I've always got a
real kick out of seeing 'New Zealand' in movies and on telly. Maybe that has
something to do with all the local stuff too.
CC: I know what you’re saying about
seeing ‘New Zealand’ in movies and TV. Even if it’s just an episode of America’s
Next Top Model or The Amazing Race, it’s hard to resist seeing what these unreal
reality TV people think of our country. But it’s nice afterwards to watch
something made locally, or dive into a book by a Kiwi author, and get something
that breaks through the surface.
I’m interested in your endings. A story
will often have a concluding chunk that jumps ahead in time, switches
perspective or voice. Characters suddenly have children, cows fall from
clifftop paddocks, pods of dolphins strand on beaches. ‘Maniatoto’, a
story set in the present day, concludes with a paragraph about the miners in
that region one hundred and forty years earlier. The reviewer in North and South said something to the effect that there’s a fine
line between illumination and non-sequitur, but even if some endings are more
inscrutable than others, I think they all succeed in prompting the reader to
reconsider what has come before it. Was this type of ending inspired by a
particular writer or story you’ve read, or was it something you arrived at
organically?
BD: I can't be
exactly sure where those endings come from. I read a book of stories by Edward
P Jones (All Aunt Hagar's Children)
when I was doing the MA. It had a big effect on me. There were often great
shifts in time and in place. Alice Munro goes for that sort of thing too and I
have read a fair bit of her stuff. Sometimes, like with the falling cow, I
started writing the story having that as something that would happen, and in
the writing of it, it seemed to fit best at the end. Regards the dolphin thing:
I was thinking about working in the big city and the big city being so close to
the harbour and the dolphins I had once seen in Wellington harbour... I don't
know really. I like endings that really open things up. It's that freedom about
writing that keeps me going though.
Also what I think
I was aiming to do with some of those endings, 'Maniatoto' especially, was
suggest the vastness of the world. Sounds grand eh?! But I remember a Denis
Johnson story, it had three guys in a car, one dying in the back seat, and they
were driving this road and then there is this line which refers to their
geographic location and how thousands of years earlier the valley they are driving was formed by glaciers receding. Or
something like that. It lifts you out of the tightness of the short story world
and makes a great sweep. In a few short pages you feel like you are really
seeing something.
CC: Have you always been drawn to short stories?
Were there any writers in the early days that, when you look back now, got you
hooked into fiction?
Always.
Hemingway got me going I think. I liked the content of his stories. When I was
very young I used to like Wilbur Smith books and the Willard Price series –
South Seas Adventure, Antarctic Adventure. Roger and Hal I think the chaps
names were. Ray Carver was very important too. I liked the suburban aspect of
his writing.
CC: One of my favourite stories in Bird North, ‘Racquet’, starts
off discussing the alterations a couple has made to their backyard. I’ll admit
when I started the story I thought, I hope this gets more interesting. I only
really appreciated the relevance of the opening when I reached the final scene,
where the drunk husband is hiding from his wife in the backyard. I finished the
story and went right back to the beginning and read it again. Do you think
readers need to take a second pass with these stories to get their full effect?
BD:
I guess some of the vagueness in my writing does often necessitate a
second reading. I frequently have no idea where a story is going when I start. ‘Racquet’
was a good example. It initially ended with the prostitute going down on
Leighton, but people told me that didn't quite cut it, so I kept writing.
I
often read a story twice. I think that is okay, even desirable. A good one
should have plenty going on, plenty for the reader to think through.
CC: Yeah, I agree. As a reader, I like
that sense that the writer is trusting you to work some things out. As a
writer, it’s about finding that balance between giving the reader work
to do and shirking work you should be doing, eh?
BD: Yeah,
and I have been guilty of shirking in the past. That criticism in North and
South got to me a little – because I agreed with some of what the reviewer
said. I do worry my work is too bleak and that the stories have no purpose. But
then, even if I don’t always get it right, I feel I am on the right track, that
my method of storytelling is valid and interesting.
CC: You’ve spoken about your desire to
avoid clichés and male stereotypes in these stories (like in this Radio NZ interview). When the reviewer,
Nicholas Reid, wrote about your collection on his blog, Reid’s Reader, you posted a comment listing the nine
inaccuracies in his review. In subsequent comments it seems you and
Nicholas agree to disagree on the importance of these smaller details. Why is
it important that you to steer clear of ‘grotty student flats’ and ‘cheap
motels’ in your stories?
BD: Ha! My first ever review. I couldn't stop
myself from replying to that one. I actually really liked the review - he was
complimentary about my writing, but hated the content. I didn't mind that at
all. It's my first book and what I feared most was people pointing and laughing
and saying, "You write like a child!" Anyway, I think in the mistakes
he made and in his language, 'grotty flats' etc I felt my writing was
being pigeon holed as a certain
kind of fiction: bleak crap that trades in shock and testosterone. I don't like stories where characters fit into the
stereotype of drug user or whatever. What I like most about my stories is the
humour, unpredictability and their openness. What he wrote seemed to be
squashing that stuff, so I had to speak out!
CC: Good on you. I know of a few writers who got a
vicarious thrill from that wee exchange (me included). How’ve you found the
rest of the post-publication world?
BD: Very
strange. A friend sent me this by AL Kennedy: it sums it up for me.
CC: What next for Breton Dukes the
writer?
BD: At the moment, thanks to Creative
NZ, I am working on a second collection of stories. Fairly similar to Bird North, but I am hoping to write some
stories that are longer and have stronger plot lines.
CC: I look forward to reading them. Thanks for the chat, Breton.
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