Cirrus@Austlit

'This is how one becomes, through dreams, the perfect autodidactic. The dream itself might not be much chop, but then my fiction is so short that I can dine out on even the briefest, vaguest visions for an entire book. It might not be a particularly interesting dream either - but then the audience for Australian short fiction is so slim that getting to know the desires of readers is, for me at any rate, something of a waste of time. Besides, what kind of writer concerns themselves with what the reader wants? Not a very interesting one. For interesting writers, the relationship between reader and writer is pure sub and dom. The writer commands, the reader obeys. William S. Burroughs once said that teaching "writing" was like "trying to teach someone how to dream." I suspect he had it right in a sense: if you cannot dream, in one form or another, then don't bother writing at all. Perhaps those with pretensions of teaching fiction to the young and the restless should be more concerned with the ethereal realms than they seem to be at present. Politics and imagination are overlapping magisteria - the two realms need not be addressed in the absence of the other - but it appears to me that the literature most in production in this troubled country is a little too beholden to its own seriousness, and far too down to earth. The rabid effacement that commercialisation demands of our higher education institutions is one exterminator - a 'community arts' culture which seeks to trade on the commodification of every aspect of the 'writer life' and reduces literature to an economy of gossip is another. But there is plenty of blame to go around.' (Publication abstract)