Charlotte Wood became a mainstay in Australia’s literary firmament in 2016 following the release of her award-winning novel, The Natural Way of Things. Her latest book, Stone Yard Devotional, is a meditation on grief, solitude, what it means to live a good life, and what we owe one another. It has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. On this episode of Read This, Michael sits down with Charlotte to discuss her new book, and she shares the psychic catastrophe that informed its final form.
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Read This: Charlotte Wood Thinks Restraint Is Underrated
Charlotte Wood became a mainstay in Australia’s literary firmament in 2016 following the release of her award-winning novel, The Natural Way of Things. Her latest book, Stone Yard Devotional, is a meditation on grief, solitude, what it means to live a good life, and what we owe one another. It has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. On this episode of Read This, Michael sits down with Charlotte to discuss her new book, and she shares the psychic catastrophe that informed its final form.
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Oct 2024
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- other
Hello again, it's Ruby Jones here, and back to introduce another episode from our sister podcast, Read This. It's a show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Each week, host and self-confessed book nerd, Michael Williams, is joined by one of Australia's best authors, who takes listeners behind the scenes of the writing process. Today, we're going to hear from Australian writer Charlotte Wood. Before we do, Michael is here to share a bit about the episode. Hi, Michael. How are you? Book nerd. That's pretty offensive, Ruby Jones. And well, how are you? It's, um, it's meant in an affectionate way. That's what I always say in the school yard. I am good. Thanks. So this episode of Read This, it's a little bit special because you interviewed Charlotte Wood about her latest novel, Stonyard Devotional. And since then, it's actually gone on to be shortlisted for the Book of Prize, which is a very big deal. It's the most important tree awards in the world. Look, the booker is kind of the gold standard. It's certainly the one that has the biggest discernible impact on sales in the English language world. And it is the one that kind of dictates. It's kind of an act of instant canonization, a book that wins the book. It becomes one of the books that has to be read for the year. It's a decade since when Australia was last on the Book of Shortlist. And it's particularly thrilling that to break that decade-long drought, we have Charlotte Wood, whose book is singular and beautiful. So before it was nominated, before it became decorated, what was it like to pick it up and read it for the very first time? Stonyard Devotional is a gorgeous book. It's a very quiet book in many ways. I read years ago this review of Marilyn Robinson's Gilead in The Guardian that had this line that said, "It's a novel that forces you to read at its pace, slowly and increasingly appreciatively." And that's an idea that's really stuck with me. I love the idea of a book that teaches you how to read it. And Charlotte Wood's Stonyard Devotional is one of those books. It defies a kind of easy skim. It's not like rocketing along on a level of plot from the outset. It is a mood piece early on, but it really digs into some profound, deeply kind of moving meditations and illustrates this world in the Monaro Plain in Southern New South Wales and brings it to life, in this old convent with a woman who's trying to escape so many things. Coming up in just a moment, Charlotte Wood thinks restraint is underrated. Stonyard Devotional is a beautiful book about grief, about solitude, about what it means to live a good life and what we owe one another. Long-standing fans of Charlotte Wood will be thrilled. It's her ninth book, but it was her 2016 novel The Natural Way of Things which broke her out in a massive way. She won the Prime Minister's Award that year and the Stellar Prize, and was an international bestseller. A stage adaptation of her follow-up, The Weeknd, has just finished an acclaimed rum at Sydney's Belvoir Theatre, and her last book before Stonyard Devotional was a work of non-fiction called The Luminous Solution. It was all about creativity and the inner life, but it was also about the idea of resilience, of how we might marshal our strength to get through difficult times. It was a concept that was to have an unfortunate, far-reaching resonances in Wood's own life in the months following its publication. Yeah, we had a big bomb go-off in our family last year, which was that my older sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was the same age my mother was when she died of cancer. Then she, as big sisters, said, "Right, or everyone go-off and have scans," which we did just to kind of please her, really. So six weeks after she was diagnosed, then I was found to have breast cancer, and then a week later, my younger sister was also found to have it. Where everyone's fine, I need to say that quite immediately. So I'd written a draft of the book, a very sparse first draft, and I got to the penultimate scenes, the scenes that really in terms of the story ends the book. And then I got up to go and do some grocery shopping, and while I was in the shops, the phone rang, and it was the breast screen people saying, "You've got to come back and have more tests." So that was like, "What?" And I think about that timing. I think if that hadn't, I don't know what would have happened to the book, if I hadn't just done that that morning. But anyway, the relevance of this to the novel is it was a psychic catastrophe, more than physical catastrophe, because we had the best kind of cancer you can have and all of that. But the shock of it was so deep and so powerful for me anyway. And so then when I went back to revise the book, I'd already wanted to try and write a book that wasn't going to explain things and wasn't going to hold the reader's hand very tightly. And also, it was about grief and about my mother. And so then when I went back to it with his new experience, a shedding had taken place of trivial things, of unimportant things. And so I went almost like a kind of skeleton going back into writing, but in a good way, it was with more of a commitment to a book where nothing extraneous was to remain in the book. And I think it really helped give the book a depth that it might have started to have. But when I went back to it, it was with an understanding that we are mortal. Now that sounds so silly, because we all know that. But we also all walk around pretending we don't know that. And I understood from my experience that that was a rehearsal for me, and that it's going to come, hopefully when I'm 107. But how do you live a good life, a full life, while not turning away from the knowledge that we're going to die? That's what I wanted the book to sort of grapple with. You mentioned that the main character's mother is in no small part your own mother on the page, and I'm always reluctant when chatting to an author to ascribe autobiographical things to it. No, but I've been quite open about that. I mean, it is the most personal book that I've written, and I found myself wanting to write about my mother. He was quite an unusual person. She was very, very self-contained, as the words I always used to describe her. She had a deep kind of reserve and a need for privacy. And when I say privacy, it's a sort of emotional privacy, I guess. And the narrator respects her. You know, there's no sense that she thinks, "Oh, I wish she'd opened up to me," or anything like that. But she's preoccupied with her mother and not her father, because she says, "I knew my father. From the moment I was born, I knew my father, and if he'd lived a long time, I would never have known him better than I knew him." You know, by the time he died. Whereas she said, "I just could never know my mother in the same way." Although there was no question that they loved each other, they trusted each other. But, you know, when you're relatively young, when the parent dies, all of your grief initially is for yourself, of course. I'm now the age my mother was when she died. I'm 58. She died at 58. And now my grief is for her, for what she lost, you know, what she never got to do, or the grandchildren she never got to meet. How old were you when she died? I was 29. So not a child by any means, but sort of still just undone by it, you know. Your grief, well, speaking only for myself, it subsides. It lessens over time, but it doesn't go away. And it changes texture, and it kind of surges at certain times. You know, there are things that you think, "Oh God, I wish they were here for this." But also, sometimes you just overcome by it, for no reason at all. One of the things the narrator talks about is this shame of still carrying this grief that she thinks she should be over. You know, it's embarrassing to be stumbling around as a middle-aged woman, still wanting your mummy. Do you think you'll like her? No, I don't think I am. I think I'm a lot like my dad. I guess one of the propellers for the work is that sort of, that difference is a preoccupation. Because I'm not as private as she was, and I'm not as, you know, she was a very kind woman, and who did do good acts in the world, like genuinely, practically. I think especially when you're young, people don't believe in genuinely kind people, you know. And the narrator says, "It's always confused me that people seem to think that habitual kindness is some kind of mask or disguise or a lie." And she says, "But, but it was true." She was, and my mother was. And in some ways, maybe she could only do those sorts of kind things for people because she had a sort of separateness from people at the same time. One of the wonderfully evocative things in this is you're writing about country that is where you came from and the place of your childhood. I'm so interested in what that process was of creative and imaginative pilgrimage back home. Yeah, it's funny because it didn't involve a physical pilgrimage back home for quite some time, but I knew I wanted to write about that landscape of the Monero in southern New South Wales, where I grew up. And it is a very austere landscape. I can't remember which poet it was, a quarter, the lunar landscape, but it is treeless plain with these patches of enormous stony boulders and the light on those very shallow sort of planes at certain times of the day is just unbelievably beautiful. And it's something very physical for me about that landscape. Whenever I talk about it, I start gesturing at my gut on my solar plexus. It does feel like an umbilical connection to that place. And of course, a lot of the book is about the narrator's mother, which is about my mother. So when the narrator goes back to this place, it's almost like she goes there out of an animal instinct, not out of any kind of rational decision-making process. And I guess my feelings about that landscape are quite sort of primitive and animal, well instinctive rather than intellectual. That instinctive thing comes through with your narrator, but there is also the magic of the place holds for her imaginatively. There's a sequence where she's driving and she's rattling off the names of towns like a half-remembered mantra. I think we've all done that, went on a road trip that we've done many times is that place names and the names of things take us immediately back to that space. Yeah, they're beautifully rhythmic names. And she says they come back into her body, not just into her mind. And they're kind of like, I think she says like beads on a rosary or like naming the parts of my own body. And certainly I had that experience going back. I think it's about the place where you were a small child just has a hold of you at a kind of cellular level in some way that other places died I think. One of the tensions of the book is that your character goes back there as you say instinctively to escape and for solitude, for isolation as escape. But she does so to a place where she's crowded in on all sides by association. It seems to me someone who genuinely wants to escape and go somewhere solitary, goes away from the places where they have history. Yes. And she says somewhere that maybe in another language there's a word for the particular kind of despair that I had at that time. It was a need to go somewhere that I had never been, but that was nevertheless my home in some way. So she goes to this really just community of nuns where she's never been. And it's not her home as in, not even in the town where she grew up, but sort of nearby. So it was some sort of homing instinct I think. And I've only thought about this since the book was finished, but there's a sense that that kind of bare bedrock landscape understands her. And that's what takes her back there. It's like her kind of psychic state is in a similarly stripped back. It sort of aligns tonally with the actual physical world. It's so important to stony out devotional. Your main character like you is not a person of faith, but like you draw some solace from being around some of those rituals and finds it respite from the modern life that she's trying to escape. Yeah, she sort of comes to this place after some deep psychic crisis that is to do partly with her work as an environmental activist and other kind of unexplained things really, but she sort of comforted a little, but also always ambivalent about being there. She doesn't get to a point where she thinks, "Oh, this is where I belong." Mainly she's thinking, "I can't believe I'm still here, you know, because of all these reasons why I should not be here. I don't believe in God. I don't even know what prayer is. I will never understand what that means." And also, what am I doing being a part of this organization, which is so appalling in so many ways? And yet there are moments of deep peace that she has only had there, really. And there is something about the rhythm of the day. And, you know, for someone in a deep sort of crisis, just going somewhere where you don't have to make any decisions. But at the same time, she's always grappling with this tension between two sort of mantras that she keeps coming back to. The first one is, "Action is the antidote to despair." And the other one is, "First, do no harm." And she's always believed, as I have always believed, that action is the antidote to despair. And then, after a certain time, you look at all that action that you've tried to take and think, "What has it done?" I think that sense of futility is really overwhelming. And then she comes across these women who are, you know, they may be seen to not be doing any good in the world, but they're not doing any harm. They're not proselytizing. They're not trying to convert anyone. They're not harassing anyone. They're not going anywhere. They're not using any resources really. And it's sort of a hubris come up and to think, you know, "I've always kind of despised people like this." And yet, now here I am, because the other alternatives have failed. We'll be back in a minute. Nightingale Housing, famous for its sustainable homes, has just finished something special in Brunswick. Introducing Nightingale Wura-Wura-Bik, the latest project in the heart of the neighborhood. At the base of the building, you'll find fresh, new commercial spaces, known as Nightingale Studios. Available now for sale and lease, these studios are the perfect spot to grow your business in a sustainable, creative, and thriving community. Learn more at Nightingalehousing.org/studios. The idea of action being the antidote to despair, you know, for you, for your career, that action has taken the form of creation. You know, it's taken the form of making and leaving the world palpably, discernibly better for the thing that you've made. That creative practice seems to me to be at the heart for you. You don't give that same comfort to your character in this book. No. I mean, I feel like my creative practice has a palpable benefit for me. I would never presume to think it had any benefit for anyone else beyond that. I mean, of course, I love it when people are affected by my work or whatever, but I'm not. I don't see that as helping make the world a better place, to be honest. I do feel that art is a place to turn when everything is in such dire states. Then sometimes the stillness of art, actually, is what can sort of calm me. And I guess I'm talking about visual art as well as literature. There is something enduring about art. I mean, I would turn to art over a church any day. But as for contributing to the greater good, I would never suggest that my art has contributed. That's what the podcast interviewers role is, is to, you don't have to claim that. Zoom away, then. I'll presume. But no, I'm glad you make that distinction that you can receive that benefit from art. I really believe this in an almost religious way, that making something delivers serious benefit to the maker. And it might be making a cake, it might be making a garden. But the act of making, it does good. And I don't know about in some sort of metaphysical way of whether putting something good into the world has any benefit beyond the actual thing itself. The question that Stoneyard Devotional asks, I think, in really interesting ways, is what we owe to one another. And I think if we're not having that conversation, then we're the poorer for it. Again, not trying to make great claims for the outcome of it. But we have to have these things we make that allow us to ask those questions and things. Well, writing is asking questions. I mean, when I write fiction, it's usually to do with some question that I have about how to be. And clearly, an obsession of mine that I never kind of realized until it's done. It's like, oh, there it is again. This idea of how to live with other people that you haven't chosen to live with. The natural way of things, girls were all incarcerated together. The women in the weekend did choose to be together, but they sort of almost were there by duty more than anything else. And this one, she's there having to live a life that is quite restrictive. But the thing that really drives the nuts is the other people. It's very relatable. That's the main crisis ever. Yeah, it is other people, it always has to be. But we have to figure out ways to live with each other with some kind of, I mean, I don't want to sound like I have any answers to this because I absolutely don't. And the book doesn't, but it's an exploration of forgiveness and what it means and who gets to forgive and when is it too late to forgive or be forgiven. I'm really interested in thinking about those things myself, and I don't usually come to any conclusions, but that propels the making of the book, I guess. One of the questions in the book is, on the one hand, choosing not to engage, choosing solitude and choosing to escape is an utterly valid set of choices, but against a backdrop of climate catastrophe of society going to hell in a hand basket at a disturbingly rapid rate, opting out suddenly seems counter to the idea of being good. That's the question of what we owe one another. Do we owe one another engagement? Yes, I think we do, but I suppose the struggle is always engagement of what kind. You know, like someone asked me yesterday, do I, how much I engage with the news, you know, with current affairs? And I said, not very much, by choice, because it sends me crazy. And, you know, you're going to that kind of paralysis. If I watched four news bulletins a day about what's happening in the world right now, would that lead me to take any more action to do something? No, it would not. But so, I mean, I think a certain level of awareness is essential for a kind of moral life, but then what do you do with that? How do you engage? That's a thorny question. And, you know, getting online and screaming at other people on social media is not. It's no kind of answer. No, it isn't, but sometimes that feels like action, you know. Sometimes the greatest act of support you can offer is to shut up. And, you know, restraint is not something we think about very much as a way of being an ethical person, you know, behaving ethically. But I think it's kind of underrated. You say in many ways it's your most personal book, which is hardly surprising given the year you've had. Is this the new way of things for you for the foreseeable future? Is your relationship with your own creativity, your own storytelling, irreparably changed? I hope so. Look, every book changes you. I feel like I have matured as a writer with this book, particularly. The natural way things did teach me a lot. And the big thing it taught me was that a book will show you how to write it if you pay attention. And if you don't fight it, you know, and I fought it for a long time. And then with that book I had to surrender to the fact that it was this dark and harrowing story. And I think I've gradually since then become more interested in writing much more instinctively. One of the people I thought about as I was writing Stoneyard Devotional was Joan London, a writer, absolutely a door. And I interviewed her years ago. And she talked about allowing a book to come rather than forcing it, which is what I'd always done. And I was so kind of inspired by this and she would write little notes to herself as writers do all the time. And then she would purposely lose them in her writing room or wherever, maybe even in the house. And then later she would sort of come across them as these little gifts, you know. And she said, and I would just catch them as lightly as possible. And she said, I've got lighter and lighter. And I found that so beautiful and inspiring. And the other thing she said, she had spoken to one of her kids, I think, who told her this quote from Andre Jeed, who said, art is a collaboration between God and the artist. And the more God has to do with it, the better, by which I took to me, you know, God as the spirit of art, as the unconscious, as the unknown force of art. And that's what I'm interested in in doing that, just giving that a lot more rain and more and not questioning it. And my brother said a beautiful thing to me about the book. He said, I felt like I was in a river. I felt it was a river carrying me. I don't know why I'm suddenly that makes me really emotional. But I loved that, that it was sort of, he was carried by the book. If anybody else feels that way, it's because of trusting that your art instinct is doing the work for you. And you have that instinct to put two quite strange things next to each other, would have put a mouse plague in the middle of a nunnery or to, you know, put these strange things together. And that it makes sense without you having to make sense of it, if that makes sense. It does. I think you've once again, John, is every reason to trust your instincts. It is a privileged to read and a privileged to chat to you today. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks for having me. Charlotte Woods' latest book, Stoneyard Devotional, is available at your local independent bookstore. Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favourite interviews from the show, listen out for upcoming conversations with Robbie Anot and Malcolm Knox. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING]