An Interview with K. J. Bishop
Mike Simanoff: No teenage love poetry? Straight to decadent urban fantasy?
K. J. Bishop: I wrote one poem to one guy. Not exactly a love poem, though. It was called “Dear Scumbag.” The rest of the time I just drew pictures of David Bowie. I got married at 21, wrote one love poem to my husband, Stu, then got down to the d.u.f. As distinct from getting up the duff.
Mike Simanoff: What’s life like for a speculative fiction writer in Melbourne? Are you involved in any sort of writerly community?
K. J. Bishop: I don’t hang out with other writers much. There’s an SF community here, but for some reason I mostly like to socialise in other circles. Melbourne’s a challenging place for a spec fic writer—maybe I should restrict that to fantasy writer—because of the lack of mythology here. As a kid I lived in England for six months, and was blown away by the feeling of the world of myths and stories in my head connecting with the places I was actually standing on. Ditto when I went to Rome. But there isn’t much of that here; there hasn’t been time for it. And there’s also—at least for me—the guilty feeling that we’re squatting on someone else’s land. There are Aboriginal myths connected with this place, but I’ve got a certain trepidation about trying to use anything of the Aboriginal mythos or metaphysics in stories, because I feel I only understand it superficially, and don’t own it in any way. But you can address that sense of disconnection and precariousness, and you can get quite a lot out of the weirdness of suburbia. There’s also quite an interesting sense of being in a city on the edge of this arid continent that you hardly inhabit, but that somehow inhabits you. It’s a feeling that all these skyscrapers and suburban mansions aren’t quite real, and the sand’s going to win out in the end.
Mike Simanoff: As a writer, do you view the Internet as a useful friend or a time-sucking foe? Or both? How do you use it?
K. J. Bishop: Vastly more friend than foe. I use it for research, for hunting out books, movies and music, and, having said that I don’t hang out much with other writers, I talk with writers online. The Internet’s a great tool for exchanging feedback on works in progress. Without the Net, The Etched City would still be looking for a publisher. I hadn’t had any luck with selling the manuscript, until Geoff Maloney met me on a mailing list and put me in email contact with Prime Books. Nearly all of the business after that, including a lot of the editing, was done over the Net. I haven’t actually met any of the people involved in making the book, other than by email. My editor Trent Jamieson and I eventually exchanged photos, so that we wouldn’t just be these two disembodied voices.
The Net closes the distance from Australia to the rest of the world down to nothing. It’s really a godsend. The Maldoror story only got into Album Zutique because of the speed of electronic communication. Sometimes I spend too much time in online conversations, but there are worse vices.
Mike Simanoff: What’s your background as an artist, and how do you think it affects the form and content of your writing?
K. J. Bishop: I was one of those kids who constantly drew pictures. Weird beasties, mostly. I went to art school, planning to be a graphic designer, but it all went pear-shaped and I dropped out. I ended up going into web design, and finally fell into teaching 3D computer graphics. I love the things you can do on the computer, but as a physical process—moving the mouse around and clicking—I don’t find it terribly enjoyable, and there’s very little room for the happy accident, so I’ve gone back to scribbling on paper. An appreciation for art certainly influences my writing. Pictures inspire scenes, or I’ll get a mood from an image and try to evoke that mood through words. One thing I really try not to do is think of a fabulous image and then describe it in pedestrian language. I try to engage with the verbal medium on its own terms.
I think that having an interest in art is possibly helpful in enabling you to appreciate experiments in writing. We’re used to abstract art and installation art; we expect art to mystify us, be elusive, hold something back from us. We love the fact that we can’t understand Mona Lisa’s smile. Speaking generally, I don’t think we’re quite as open-minded about writing, maybe because we process words with the pedantic left side of the brain. I find that when, as a reader, I can’t find my way into a strange piece of writing, making analogies with art can help. Some writing, I think, asks to be taken in as an experience, a climate, something like an installation, rather than to be made sense of in a completely rational way.
