Roaring Forties Press

PM: Tasmanian author Geoff Dean had his first short story published more than 50 years ago, or thereabouts. He thinks it was 1956 but he’s not entirely sure. Without his knowledge, an elder brother entered his story in a competition ran by the Hobart Mercury and of course it won a prize. Half a century later Geoff Dean is still producing short stories. His seventh collection Under the Mountain has just been published by Esperance Press. The mountain in the title is Mount Wellington and the stories are about growing up in its shadow in Geoff Dean’s home city of Hobart.

Geoff Dean, welcome to The Book Show.

GD: Thank you

PM: Before we talk about Under the Mountain can you give us a little taste with a reading from the first story, the story of the same name Under the Mountain.

GD: [Reads excerpt]

PM: Geoff Dean reading from Under the Mountain the first story and the name of his collection Under the Mountain. Geoff the stories in this collection are more or less chronological, beginning with that small boy being frightened by his brothers and working through adolescence to adulthood, and it says in the book that these stories are based on your childhood and youth spent “under the mountain”. So are they autobiographical?

GD: [Laughs] No, they’re not. I read that first story out one time when my brother was in the room and after it was finished he looked so doleful. I said “didn’t you like the story” and he said “no it made me feel so guilty”.

PM: Did he really treat you like that?

GD: No he didn’t at all. He was a very benign brother. So I had to shout him a cup of coffee and talk him out of it. I said “no it’s just the universal fears of a child and my imagination, that’s all.”

PM: So they’re not autobiographical because they’re not things that happened to you, but they do reflect your own childhood and your own experience of growing up in Hobart?

GD: Oh they certainly do reflect on it. I mean you can’t get away from the experience. My experience is in there all the way through, but the way the stories are told are not necessarily the way it happened. I work on a bit of a principle that, I think it was Mark Twain once said, “I remember everything in the past, even if it didn’t happen.”

PM: [Laughs] Well one of your characters comes back to confront you at the end of the collection in fact and blames you for saying terrible things about to his family, to which you reply in the story “but I created you, you’re an invention, you can’t get upset about that”.

GD: [Laughs] That’s right. Anyway I can’t be a four year old boy at one stage and then.. in other stories I have written.. I was a macrocephalic dwarf with a big head so, you know, I just go into the world of ‘what if’. I dive into the stories and I make up the characters, I get them to say a few things and then I sort of trace their lives and sometimes I even feel I become one of the characters.

PM: Your other most recent collection of stories is an anthology called The Literary Lunch and that draws on stories published throughout your life. In the author’s note in that you say a couple of very interesting things about short stories and about your work. Firstly you say the stories were selected because of their strict adherence to the classic short story form: beginnings, middles and conclusions. They’re all character and plot driven. Now, are these rules you stick to with your writing?

GD: Yes. I made up my mind long ago that the stories I want to tell were ’stories’. There’s a lot of different writings now that are called ’short stories’ but they aren’t short stories at all. They have to have the dramatic form in them, and that is the history of the short story that goes back hundreds of years and I believe that this is the type of story that people want to read.

PM: So there has to be some element of narrative, some art, some, as you say, beginning and conclusion.

GD: Yes, yes they’ve got to have some sort of narrative shock in there, so that it’s not just nicely put words and well-written sentences. The fact is that I can remember stories I read from the Americans, and the Russians and the Europeans, 40–50 years ago; but it’s the ’story’ I remember, it’s not the exact way they are written, it’s not the words I remember, it’s the ’story’ and the ’story’; it’s part of the human psyche.

PM: Well that’s the other thing you say in that author’s note I mentioned in The Literary Lunch. You say “the difference between a story that fades from memory and one that remains is not so much the quality of the writing as the emotional engagement between writer and reader – a story that engages at an emotional level fixes in the brain whereas phraseology (a good sentence) can soon be lost.”

But where does that emotional engagement come from? Does it come from the plot – is that what you’re saying?

GD: Yes.. It’s probably hard to describe where it comes from. I think it’s my emotion put on to the pages. Sometimes I think of myself in comparison to a musician, especially when a musician is playing the ‘blues’ and having the lyrics to the ‘blues’ there and it does sort of hit you more than in your brain, it sort of quite often hits you in the guts and I feel that sometimes I just pour out my emotions on to the pages and it is that emotion that other people pick up on.

I’ve never had a bad review in my life, I think that was one thing, and the other thing is that so many people just come out of the crowds, people I don’t know, and congratulate me on the short story and say how it made them laugh or made them cry and that’s really what keeps me going.

PM: Well I have to say I haven’t read any of your short stories before I took on this job this week presenting The Book Show and I read Under the Mountain in its entirety yesterday and I found it thoroughly engaging; all the stories very engaging. But I wanted to come back to this idea you talked about: the importance of plot. Do you begin with a plot when you begin writing a story? Do you know what the plot is going to be and then you fill it out? Where do you start?

GD: No. I think that there are two things going there. I think there is a differentiation between a ‘yarn’. I’ve written ‘yarns’, Tasmanian yarns, which have been very popular and they are going to their third edition now. But when we talk about ’stories’ – ’stories’ evolve. I sometimes have a very fanciful view that they are there and I just go looking for them. But I have to be aware that you start off at a pacing that gradually builds up to some sort of climactic point somewhere, and I think this is where you have the narrative shock at the end of it. And it’s really a dramatic form.

PM: So it unfolds as you write – you don’t actually know where the dramatic shock is going to be necessarily when you start. It unfolds as you develop the characters and the situation?

GD: Yes. If I invent the right characters, I mean, in The Literary Lunch there is a story about five people who are sharing a house and the characters are such that once you find out what the characters are…there was one in the share house who is a bit of a sleaze and everybody accepts him, but they know he’s a bit of a sleaze. And there’s somebody there that’s a musician but not very attractive and she’s very romantic and looking for romance (and there’s always a bit of poetry you might write). And somebody else, who is more responsible.

PM: Who actually makes sure the rent gets paid!

GD: Well that’s right! And who actually knows the landlord. And I think it says in the story itself it actually says that “she’s our protection against getting busted”. Because she’s on speaking terms with the landlord and her father is a gynaecologist in the city. So that all these people, once their lives start emerging in the story, they all get their ‘just deserts’, as it were. And I don’t know how they evolve. It seems to be over a long long, long period – in my mind I know when to put the foot on the pedal and I know when to put the foot on the brake – and it’s just a matter of pacing, and I don’t know how you teach this sort of thing. It’s innate I suppose. I’ve been telling stories since I was six years old. My family was a little bit worried about some of the stories I told about them to other people.

PM: Geoff I mentioned earlier that some of your stories I think are very very funny and I’m thinking particularly in this latest collection Under the Mountain, of ‘Gelly Times’ – a story that involves two boys with a plan to go fishing, some gelignite, a bathtub, overhead telegraph wires and a father’s unexpected career change. Now I laughed out loud as I read this story and it put me in mind of one my favourite short stories from when I was a kid, which was Henry Lawson’s The loaded dog’, which also involves fishing and explosives. Do you see yourself as part of an Australian tradition which stretches back to Lawson?

GD: When you come to think about Lawson, in a way I sort of put him down as a ‘yarn-spinner’ more than a short story writer, but at the same time I think that the Australian short story has always been a rather poor cousin in the literary field. I mean I can think of many novelists and many poets, but it is very hard to find somebody who is known for their short stories after Lawson, perhaps John Morrison – but that’s about the only one I can think of – and me of course!

PM: Indeed! Look I might just ask you to read another excerpt. I think you’ve chosen another excerpt from a story called ‘Messages’. Is that right?

GD: Yes. This is a longer story, from The Literary Lunch. [Reads excerpt]

PM: Geoff Dean, that piece and some of your other work puts me in mind of another great short story writer, Raymond Carver, with whom you seem to share a sort of intense interest in the human condition – the disappointments of life, the faded aspirations of youth, the miscommunications that we have with those closest to us.

GD: Yes. I’m afraid that’s probably part of me in a way. I’ve moved around the world and I’ve moved around Australia a lot. I’ve had lots and lots of jobs. I think I once counted over 50 different sorts of jobs I’ve had. And with that experience I’ve ’seen’ and I’ve ‘heard’. I’m just writing the way I see life. There’s both humour and sadness in there and it’s always mixed. It is very rare to get either one or the other and I suppose sometimes I find that when I see a happy person I hope that things will keep going well for them, because lets face it, shit happens!

PM: [Laughs] Indeed it does. Your stories are less bleak, I would say, than Raymond Carver’s are and, as I said before, some of them are very funny. In one story in Under the Mountain, a story called The typist’, the narrator talks about “trying to write a novel that will come from memory and experience – about ordinary people and the strange choreography of their lives.” That phrase struck me. The strange choreography of their lives’. Does that express something about the way in which you write? About the strange choreography of people’s lives?

GD: Yes. I think we all have strange choreographies, one way or another. I suppose I’m a bit of a fatalist in a way but I’m an opportunist fatalist as it were because, as I said, shit does happen. And when this does happen some people see the bad side of it and they can’t pull out of it. But fortunately I was born an optimist and if something happens I think well there’s got to be good in here somewhere so I’d better find it. And I’m afraid that a lot of people don’t do that and they go down.

I was trained as a social worker and spent some time in mental institutions and I suppose in a way that got a bit in to my psyche too, to see how many people there were that went down with these things. So, I think in a way, I suppose optimism is the only way to pull through, no matter how bad things are.

PM: And you are a short story specialist. I mean you don’t write novels. You’ve written seven collections of short stories. Why the ’short story’ rather than the ‘novel’?

GD: Ah well, I’m fascinated by the short story. I’m the sort of person that doesn’t take long hard looks at anything. I don’t want to concentrate too much. I think I put in one article once “it’s a matter of swift glances, like here and there, and you skid across the surface and you just pick up all that material that a novelist can’t. I did actually write a novel, I’ve written a novel now that I think is a very good novel, but I’ve found that because I’m a short story writer it’s very hard to get a name as a novelist.

PM: Well there is a tendency isn’t there to see the short story as somehow inferior, like a learning phase for the novel, or something like that.

GD: Yes. And it’s completely ridiculous and I’ve heard people who have got degrees in English say this. It just means that they don’t know anything about a short story. The two genres are completely different. The short story handles that material that a novel can’t. I’m in one of those positions where, being in Tasmania, I’m very involved in all the books that I do, or certainly the last four books. And I’m there during the production and I finish up by quite often selling them down at the Salamanca Market. And you’d be surprised at how many people are longing for a good short story. The publishers don’t publish them any more because they feel that people don’t like short stories. But that’s I’ve found that’s not the case. I’ve found that they’ve been reading the wrong short stories. There’s been so many published in the past, called ’short stories’, that weren’t ’short stories’, I think that has put the readers off. But when they finally get their ’short story’, believe me, they like it.

PM: Well … and also there are other difficulties… you’ve written a very funny article about how in writing a story, as you’ve got over 2,000 words you realise well that means I can’t enter it in all these competitions. And once you get over 3,000 words you realise, well, the literary magazines and the newspapers are completely out, and now it’s getting over 4 or 5,000 words, it’s… you know… in fact, the opportunities for publishing short stories are quite limited, aren’t they?

GD: That’s exactly right, I mean this is why a lot of stories that go into my books have never been published because of their length and if I didn’t write those stories, they wouldn’t be written. I mean, even the ABC I think is a little bit responsible for this. They’ve got a Short Story Competition out now which is 800 words. I actually admit I went in for that – I took a 1,300-word story and I pruned it down to exactly 800 words. There was a lot lost and now the story is now a rather pale replica of the original one.

PM: One of your stories, “The poet, the dentist and the man with the crooked finger” is, I imagine what, 10 or 12,000 words?

GD: No that was nearly 20,000 words – it was almost a novella I suppose.

PM: And it was a terrific short story and it needs to be the length it is. I think that’s what Raymond Carver said when he was asked how long a short story should be.

GD: That’s right, yes it should be as long as it should be. When I wrote that story I didn’t know how long it was going to be, it just kept coming and in the end yes I did need about 19 or 20,000 words to get it through and I don’t think it would have worked otherwise. I just thought when I’d finished “well this will be unpublishable unless I can get it in a book somewhere.”

PM: Well it is published in your own collection of stories called Under the Mountain. Geoffrey Dean, thank you very much for joining me here on The Book Show here on ABC Radio National.

GD: Thank you Peter. It has been a pleasure.

PM: Tasmanian short story writer Geoffrey Dean, whose two most recent collections are Under the Mountain, published by Esperance Press, and The Literary Lunch, published a couple of years ago by Roaring Forties Press. And, unless you live in Tasmania and can go down to Salamanca Market, then Geoff Dean’s books may not be easy to find. But hassle your local bookshop or your local library to get you a copy and your effort will be rewarded in the reading. And of course we will put the publication details on The Book Show website.

Roaring Forties Press published The Literary Lunch: Selected stories, in 2004.
http://www.roaring-40s-press.com

Esperance Press published Under the mountain in 2007.
http://www.esperancepress.com.au