News & Blog by Gregory Day
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As well as the glints and grassy strands in the landscape that we pick up to use in our fictions we also, invariably, have voices in our head: voices of our characters and also voices of other writers and birds, nest-builders, their phrases and warbles and cadences guiding and providing the aerial standards by which we measure our success or failure. Roberto Calasso, the incredibly brainy and poetic...
There’s a great line from a Mickey Newbury song, which was recently covered by Bonnie Prince Billy: Did God make time to keep it all from happening at once? We can only cope with so much illumination. Each generation thinks of itself as newly minted but we will never transcend the individual vulnerabilities and foibles that make us human and that drive our history. The Grand Hotel is a place...
So characters fill the riverflat, fill The Grand Hotel. I’m forever talking to people about the characters in the book, and whether they could possibly still exist in contemporary Australia. Well, there are many contemporary Australias and the divide between rural, or country culture, and life in our urbane metropoli, is as wide as ever. If you wander out of the cities, not for a smart...
The riverflat where The Grand Hotel sits is about 45 hectares in extent, with ridges running either side of it to the sea. In the beginning the whole sky was down upon it, down upon it flat, like a powerful seal between the heavens & earth. Think of it as a clasp, an oyster shell, a mussel, a whole world living inside, a pulsing heart, in a closed womb of the utterly local, here and forever...
Even this late in the day, birds must build their nests, often enough on pine boughs overarching water. And so too it seems that some of us must write, sing, tell stories, or whatever you want to call the confounded but all-consuming task that is writing a novel. A book often does feel like a nest to me, a place to be, a nook in which to gather strength, food for the mind and spirit, as the wild...
