Of Wars and Words - Interview with writer Clinton Caward, recipient of ASA (Australian Society of Authors) Mentorship
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After a barrel of odd jobs and successes in writing, Clinton Caward is revisiting an 'engine room' from the past by using his former experience of working in an adult book shop as the context for exploring sexuality, religion and secularity in Australia. Currently undertaking a Masters of Arts in Writing (Research), Clint says that delving into the fertile ground of 'Kings Cross mythologies' is both inspiring and a sort of writing he likes to do.
Writer Clinton Caward,
ASA Mentorship recipient
HSS : You say that after reading Henry Miller, especially his Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Plexus and Nexus), you wanted to become a writer. What was it about Miller's writing that made you want to use words to tell stories?
Clint : I guess it's just that I found his writing incredibly alive, volatile and it actually just generated a real energy and excitement within me which made me want to try and do that myself, rather than specifically having sort of burning stories within me that I wanted to tell and I guess I was just inspired to try and recreate that kind of internal vigour or something. Because it made me feel alive.
I think I was also a bit isolated when I read him and in a bad relationship and when you find an author that really speaks to you, it's like finding a good friend and you prefer to spend time with them over other people. His world was much more exciting than mine and I guess he also validated my feelings that being a bit of a nomad wasn't all that bad and that the world of work was something best to be avoided if possible.
HSS : And was that sort of energy something that you might have felt while working at the adult book shop which made you want to write a novel based on your observations while you were there or did your ideas on this subject come about later on?
Clint : My reasons for working at the adult book shop were twofold. One being a part-time job while I was studying and two, working in a place like that in Kings Cross was writers' gold in a way and I am interested in people. You would just be inside the engine room of where those sorts of Kings Cross mythologies come from...It'd be an inspiring place for a lot of people I think... I just thought there'd be really gritty urban anecdotal things that I wouldn't find anywhere else and it was also writing that kind of gritty urban tale, real working class people, it's writing that I enjoy as well and like to do. But it wasn't working class people, it was every type of person you could imagine, except maybe George Pell. He never came in.
I think, in a way, the more you can strip the world down to its sexual and violent impulses the more something truthful about human nature comes into focus. I also really enjoyed Bataille's work on Eroticism and was very curious to see what would happen in my thoughts and in my body when I was in that environment. When all of my hard wired Christian morality was assaulted on a daily basis. I wanted to purge it from my brain. And anyway, a sex shop is just a perfect setting to explore the amorality of the business world.
HSS : You also won an ASA (Australian Society of Authors) Mentorship to develop a different manuscript for a novel. What is that story about?
Clint : There are two characters - one was the gardener, who lived with Muslim neighbours and the other character was Barry, a kind of renowned, retired psychotherapist. The idea behind it was that terrorism, or the initial stages of, were part of a linguistic virus, that certain words were being disseminated kind of memetically through the population and that certain words, such as 'Muslim' for example, came to have negative emotional attachments so that when the words spread by newspaper, email, radio, television, they had these extra parasitic attachments that were causing emotional problems and hatred and intolerance throughout the society.
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