Sunny Garden

Headgames - the stories behind the stories

Nick Earls writes...

"Matt Condon commissioned GREEN for Smashed. He called me and said he wanted me to be part of it, but he must have called me about 20th, since most of the obvious drinks were long gone and the list already extended as far as absinthe. I said I'd call him back if I could think of a drink. Then I remembered something to do with Creme de Menthe.

GREEN was also definitely written to be done live, and it's probably the best example of where I think short stories can go. I've actually got letters from people about both the written and performed versions of it. Of course, they often think it's autobiographical, but what I've also found is that the thing now referred to at Penguin as the 'Coloured Drink Experience' is probably universal.

I still can't order a beer, of course. I'm never quite sure of the regional variations in the names of glasses of different sizes and I end up handling it as though for a moment English has slipped back to second-language status. Still thinking midi, schooner, pot, and ending up pointing. But they're quite used to this at the local pub now, and happy enough treating me like some beer savant.

My creme de menthe blunder actually extends back to the time when my father worked at the Spastic Centre (when I was at school) and Miss Australia quest entrants used to come over to dinner. I'd usually go for a creme de menthe afterwards, in the hope that it was a sophisticated kind of drink. Of course, I never said a word to them, so it's not as if I was likely to have a terrific impact anyway.

In mid-98 I was approached to speak at the UQ Med School graduation dinner, and I agreed if I could do a small amount of speaking, and a reading. I thought GREEN would be a good story to do, and then I thought, maybe I could come up with something new, some short kind of sequel relevant to the audience. And I remembered the time at the end of fourth year, when it seemed almost impossible to study any more, and I figured they'd probably had some moment like that, so I wrote another story with the GREEN characters (Green Four: LOSING IT LEAST OF ALL).

Co-incidentally, that was about a week before my publisher Clare Forster suggested doing more with them, so they were on my mind at the time as well. Strangely, the night before we spoke I'd been at a film premiere and at about 2am someone had brought out trays of green vodka jelly, and I'd handled it rather ineptly. From that came the idea for Green Five: BACK SOON WITH FISH, and Green Two: SAUSAGE SIZZLE came about when Clare asked if I had anything for Penguin Australian Summer Stories, at that time going by the working title of Sizzle.

THE HAIRCUT OF A MORE SUCCESSFUL MAN was commissioned for the Men Love Sex anthology, but rejected because the editor said he wanted 'blood on the page'. Not a thing I usually do, but he only told me after. So for a couple of years I did it live a few times, but held back from publishing it, waiting for the right kind of opportunity.

The first time I did it live I was in the middle of not winning the Vogel for the third time and realising I'd have to hope for something else to happen for my manuscript to become a novel. I was programmed to do a night-time reading as part of the Brisbane Writers Festival and I'd heard that Laura Paterson (who was in the process of setting up a new fiction list at Transworld) would probably be there. Whoever was there, I figured I had to give it my best shot, so I chose this story, my boldest story in terms of content, and rehearsed it pretty thoroughly.

The next day Laura came up to me and said she'd heard I had a novel manuscript, so when Zigzag Street wasn't taken up by Allen and Unwin, it had somewhere to go.

Then, in about May 1998, I was asked to put something in for the A Sea Change Olympic Arts Festival anthology, and told that it could be about anything I wanted, as long as there was some transformational element to it. I didn't have time to write anything new (I was about to go overseas for six weeks) and this was the best unpublished thing I had sitting around.

Since it's a story about a very hairy man with a hairdresser fetish and there are more than occasional references to masturbation, I wasn't too sure how it would go down. But it did have a transformational element, and I figured it would be the only story where the transformational element involved a foot-long flesh-coloured bottle of Decore.

The editor read it and said he loved the story, but he'd have to go up the line to see if it could go in. And it went up the line, and I think it kept going up the line for a while, and people kept going 'Yeah, love the story, but this is about a hairy guy who masturbates a lot and has a weird thing for his hairdresser'. And I can imagine Adam (the editor) going in to bat for and saying, 'Yes, but it does have a transformational element to it.' And they went with it. So the most dubious story I'd ever written ended up in an Olympic anthology. And the idea of Juan Antonio Samaranch dipping into it for a bit of Australian culture and finding this story is pretty appealing.

'Medical' stories

Several of the stories are, in one way or another, obviously affected by my medical background. Some (for example, THERE MUST BE LIONS) are attempts to explore a psychotic view of the world from the insightless inside. This kind of alternative reality then acts as a bridge to the stories where the world itself changes (for example, PLAZA and PROBLEMS WITH A GIRL AND A UNICORN, where the worlds are quite surreal, or MOVING, where circumstances have thrown the characters into a world that is fluid and threatening and run by different rules, but which actually exists).

One of the things I wanted to do with this book was try out some other ways of story-telling, some ways other than realism, but I wanted to do this in a way that allowed me to develop some kind of continuum (across the book) that reached from the completely realistic to the completely absurd. I didn't want there to be a clear boundary, and sometimes I wanted some of the more apparently outlandish elements to actually come from the real world.

ALL THOSE WAYS OF LEAVING came about because of an article I was editing on trichotillomania (hair pulling). Many hair-pullers suck their hair, and some swallow it, set up a range of genuine but unlikely consequences. I wanted to do something with this, and came up with a role for it to play in a story. What surprised me though, was that on about the fifth page, it suddenly started to write itself as a love story, and became a much better story than I'd had in mind.

DOG 1, DOG 2 came from a drug-company brochure I once saw in general practice. It was for an anti-inflammatory I already prescribed pretty regularly, and it was pushing a new angle involving a cartilage-sparing effect (I think). They'd demonstrated this on large dogs, and I only realised when I looked at the graph (featuring Dog 1 and Dog 2) that they'd killed them and examined their knee joints to prove the point. While I don't think humans should be put at risk by being the first subjects in experiments involving new drugs, something felt strange about the idea of this experiment being conducted when the drug was already widely prescribed, and the company just seemed to be looking for a new marketing angle.

'Rehearsal' stories

Some of these stories were deliberately written to try something out before trying it in a novel, and the connections between the stories and my novels are sometimes quite apparent, depending on what I was testing. Of course, the links are also sometimes less than obvious as, each time, I planned to get the most out of both the short story and the novel, so whatever it is I've been working with has developed in different directions with the different projects.

HEAD GAMES and THE HAIRCUT OF A MORE SUCCESSFUL MAN were experiments with a particular kind of twenty-something male perspective, and they were the only two stories I wrote in the few months preceding the writing of Zigzag Street.

PROBLEMS WITH A GIRL AND A UNICORN was written in August 98, but began a few years before as an idea for writing a share-house short story prior to writing Bachelor Kisses. Of course, featuring the unicorn meant that the idea was a little too far from realism to work as a rehearsal, so I didn't end up writing it then. When I saw the notes more recently, and realised what a pig the unicorn might be (paradoxically), it suddenly had its own reasons for coming into existence.

TWENTY-MINUTE HERO was written for a four-minute live performance at the Victorian Youth Literature Project Christmas event in November 97. With it, I was trying out both a voice and a story idea for a young-adult novel that I was about to work on. The story idea has (quite transparently) made it into the novel, but the voice changed in the telling, so the central characters of the story and the novel now seem like different people."

Disclaimer:
Sunny Garden is designed, written and maintained by Liz Perkins, in cooperation with Nick Earls and Penguin Books. Any questions about Sunny Garden should be directed to Liz

All original contents are © Liz Perkins.