“It’s not your ability that matters; it’s what you do with it,” Michelle Cahill

Michelle Cahill, a poet, a short fiction writer and a proud recipient of Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize speaks to Indus Age about her debut collection of short stories, Letter to Pessoa, its cover page, the section she enjoyed writing the most, what poetry and writing mean to her and much more. Read on:

By Nidhi Kumari

Poetry is an art and writing is a skill. How far do you agree with the statement?
I would say it’s an opinion rather than a defining statement; poetry can be a skill, and writing an art. Whatever the genre, there is a sacredness about writing that takes us away from the quotidian; writing gives us permission, endorsing us to exercise thoughts, imagination and language  in ways that go beyond what society requires, so that we might challenge boredom, injustice, fear, complacency with humour, grace and invention— or simply to captivate.

One can develop the skills of writing but do you think one can also become a poet?

I think that all writing can be a learned skill and that includes the practice of poetry. I’m not an elitist who believes it is a special gift one is born with. I think for some of us, writing is more innate. But what we do with our lives makes a difference as well; writing is a way of living that we go deeper and deeper into.

Your debut collection of short stories Letter to Pessoa has recently been published. Tell us about your book.
It is a collection of stories, some written as letters indirectly, or directly to writers whose work is inspiring to me. I’m a #fangirl in these literary dialogues, but they are also double narratives as the real reader becomes drawn into the implied reader (Pessoa, Coetzee, Woolf, Genet, Derrida etc). It’s a book that asks the question of who a writer is; of who we are as complex and sentient individuals; indeed how we read and how reading and writing can assign social and moral values. Some of the stories are about a younger female narrator, a refugee lawyer in Sydney, a journalist travelling through Myanmar and Nepal, visiting her Maoist uncle, a young woman staying in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. I’ve been interested in how our lives are fragments, coming from a mixed-ancestry minority and as a migrant who lived in three countries, but I didn’t want the prose to be polemic or confessional; I wanted to explore the themes in vibrant, immersed language.

The cover page of your book, looks classic and quite literary. Would you like to say something about it?

The cover artwork is a reproduction of a painting by Madeleine Kelly, a German born, and Australian based artist. It’s called ‘Treatment for Hysteria, 2’ and it speaks to the intensity and surreal, dream-like spaces the book explores. There is also the suggestion that writing is ecstasy.

You belong to the Anglo-Indian Goan ancestry; that make up about 4% of Australian Indians (as per 2011 census). So, do we also have traces of that in your book?

Yes, the story ‘Biscuit’is told through the voice of a cat, who comes from Nairobi and who is cared for by a Goan doctor, Xavier Baptista. Civil war breaks out and the cat travels by coincidences on a plane finding herself in London, adopted by a South Asian family. This suggests the diasporic journeys of Goans and Anglo-Indians. At the time of Independence 1947, there were about 300,000 Anglo-Indians in India, a third of whom migrated by the 1970s to Commonwealth countries such as Australia, UK, Canada and New Zealand. Their story is one of fragments and erasures which have slipped through legal records and historical time. Such experience might be best recovered imaginatively.

‘The Lucid Krishna’ is about an Australian therapist who has a dream about Krishna, a blue-skinned, vegetarian playboy from the Darling Downs in Queensland. It’s erotic and playful but it’s really a story about my relationship with India and its cultural mythology. It’s a way of writing myself into a mythological territory as someone who did not grow up as a Hindu and who has lived in the West. My female narrators Sarita, Nabina, Hemani take on different identities in different countries. I found it extremely challenging to write the Anglo-Indian or Eurasian story into the mainstream both in Indian and in Australian publishing.

Which section of the book you enjoyed writing the most?

I loved them in different ways; the more conventional narratives required me to write  with attention to craft. Narrative plot, which has a structured pace  brings a deep enjoyment. In the experimental stories where voice and poetic image carry intense representations of contingent experience, the process of exploring lyrical possibilities for story telling was exhilarating.

Was there any section/part which was challenging for you to pen down?

The final story was very challenging because complex ideas were being expressed through voiced narrative. Also some of the theoretical stories were tricky; the ‘Letter to Derrida’, for instance. ‘Borges and I’ almost killed me.

Who are the writers/ poets you look up to for inspiration?

Jhumpa Lahiri, Annie Proulx, Hanif Kuresihi, Michelle de Kretser, Marilynne Robinson are some contemporary favourites.
ABC Radio National Poetica will be running a program on your book Vishvarupa on 6^th September, 2016 as part of the Indian-Australian Confluence festival. How does that feel?

I’m absolutely thrilled! Vishvarupa is my small contribution to Australian poetry. I’m very pleased if Australian Indians enjoy it, and I hope it inspires budding poets to write back to their own culture and history.

How do you think technology has affected writing?

Technology means we don’t stop writing now: we Tweet, we post, we text we email, we translate. We might be overwhelmed by technology; but writing can afford to be experimental and hybridized, thanks to the internet. Also, minority stories are enabled by technology to recover information.

Your advice to aspiring writers.

It’s not your ability that matters; it’s what you do with it.

How can our readers access your book?

The book is available through Giramondo publishing, New South Books are distributors and it is available in Readings and Gleebooks.