Charlotte Wood on the difference between hope and courage

ASTRID: Charlotte, welcome back to The Garret. Your latest work Stone Yard Devotional is a work of fiction. It follows on from The Luminous Solution, which came out in 2021, and before that, a work of fiction, The Weekend. What was it like for you to return to fiction?

CHARLOTTE: Well, it was sort of an uninterrupted return, I guess. I'd started it before I wrote The Luminous Solution, although The Luminous Solution, as you know, was drawn from lots of things I'd written over many years. I rewrote most of that, but it was more a matter of compilation than new writing. I guess I had started as the pandemic began, and I went crazy along with everybody else. And then, you know, it seemed the time was right for The Luminous Solution, which was just the right book for the time and the right book for my headspace at the time. So, then it was a matter of going back to this novel. But it had a very strange beginning.

I can't really recall, to be honest, how it started. I knew I wanted to write about the landscape of the place that I grew up, which is called the Monaro in southern New South Wales. I knew I wanted to write about nuns, because I found the idea that a contemporary woman might become a nun so strange that I wanted to figure out why someone might do that. But I had nothing else really. I felt that I started the book about ten times over the beginning of the pandemic, and then various other interruptions. And it was just very strange. I kept writing into it, coming to the end of its theme, drying up. So then starting again, writing away, starting again, and it for a couple of years, I felt I hadn't even started this book. Every time I sat down, I was like, ‘I've got to start this thing’, even though I had been working out for so long. It was a very slow, accreting sort of process. Eventually it came together in in a bit of a rush at the end things… Obviously, my unconscious had been working away. Although there weren't a lot of words on the page, when I finally got to the end of that first draft things fell into place in a bit of a rush. It was a very weird process compared to my other novels. I mean, every book is a new process. It turns out for me anyway, unfortunately. You never know what you're doing. But we got there in the end.

ASTRID: You did. I don't know what I was expecting when I picked up Stone Yard Devotional, but you delivered a beautiful reading experience for me, Charlotte. It felt meditative and contemplative, but somehow fresh and different. It asked me to think about things that maybe I was aware of on the edge of my own consciousness, but I'd never given space or time to think about.

Before we go further, would you mind Charlotte introducing Stone Yard Devotional to us. And I think spoilers for this conversation are completely fine, because this is a novel of thoughts and feelings rather than a hugely plotted thing with a big surprise at the end.

CHARLOTTE: Thank you, Astrid, for that response. That means a lot to me. That's exactly what I was aiming for, so thank you for reading it so understandingly. It is a very interior, austere kind of book and the story. As you've said, it's a book that's about something other than a story in a way. I've been really looking at an article about the psychologist Jerome Bruner – I don't know if you've ever heard of him – and he talks about stories in terms of the landscape of action and the landscape of consciousness, which I loved. I take that to mean the landscape of action is the plot so called, and then the landscape of consciousness is everything else in the book. But on the surface of the book, the story is about a woman who leaves her life and her marriage and her work, burned out in some way from a professional crisis in her work as an environmental activist. When she goes to the place where she grew up, not quite to her hometown but to hole up in a closed order of nuns stuck out in the middle of this isolated place on the Monaro Plain, which is a very barren landscape. It's very sort of elemental. I think it was Judith Wright who described it as a lunar landscape, a treeless plain. I think it's utterly beautiful landscape, but it's very clear, the word bedrock comes up quite a bit in the book. It's that sort of harshness of the land itself, seemingly, especially visually, but it is also incredibly beautiful. There's a lot of space. The skies are enormous. And that set the tone for the book, really, that spaciousness and austerity. And so, this woman goes there to this place. She ends up living there almost by accident. She doesn't believe in God, she doesn't know what prayer is, she's never understood that. She's quite ambivalent about being in this place. And yet, there's something about the rituals and the very ordered existence there, the very simple existence that allows her to feel uncomfortably at home.

So firstly, at the opening of the book, she goes there for a visit. Lots of these places have guest houses or guest rooms, they offer refuge to people as part of their mission, I guess. And she goes there initially, sort of stumbles in there in a way and hangs out there for a few days. Things are very weird. And then there's a narrative and she describes what she'd seen there, which she thinks is quite bizarre. And then there's a narrative gap of some time, we're not sure how much, and then we find that she's living there. She hasn't ever joined up in inverted commas, but she's staying there with these people living this very ordered life.

And then into this order come three disruptions. The first is in the form of a mouse plague, which reaches that part of the state for the first time. And that is very disturbing, obviously. It becomes a moral question for these women whose, you know, their first mission is to do no harm, to live a harmless life of contemplation. So, the action required to deal with his mouse plague is quite disturbing to everyone. And, you know, a mouse plague. I don't know if you've ever experienced anything of a mouse plague, but they're horrible. They're dealing with this infestation every day.

Also, suddenly returning to this place is a visitor called Helen Parry, she comes to the place, she is a radical activist nun. There are lots of these women around the world, who are quite amazing women who stand up to dictatorships and work with poor people and work with vulnerable people in all kinds of ways, doing dangerous activist work all over the place. Helen Parry is one of these sorts of people. The reason she comes there is to bring back the bones of another nun called Sister Jenny, who had been in this community decades before, left to go and work with poor women in Thailand, and then disappeared and has been presumed murdered. In the opening stages of my novel her skeleton has been found and it's been repatriated, brought back to the community to be buried there on their land. Helen Perry is the way they've got these bones back because outside them on the street, the Pandemic is going on, there border closures and travel restrictions. It's hard to get these bones into the country, and Helen Parry is the way that happened.

Once she's there, she's stuck there. And she doesn't want to be there. They don't really like her being there because she's, she's a very forceful presence, she is. She also kind of brings into the quiet space that is away from the pandemic, and the pandemic doesn't really exist where they are because they never go anywhere, and no one comes in. But she brings in the outside world with all that sort of catastrophes and politics. Her approach to her life as a nun is the complete opposite to theirs, so there is this cultural clash between them. At the same time, Helen Parry is known to my narrator from her own past, and I won't go into that, probably the only possible spoiler of the book is that relationship, but it's a very uncomfortable one. And she sort of brings a threat to the place in all kinds of way.

ASTRID: That was a beautiful description, Charlotte. All of that happens, as you know, through the point of view of the narrator. We see all of this, we feel this, through her experience. Technically speaking, as a writer – and you've published many works of fiction before Charlotte – what was this novel that is so interior didn't require different technical skills? Like how did you get it on the page for the reader?

CHARLOTTE: It was an interesting technical challenge for a few reasons. The first one being that I was writing in first person for the first time since my first novel, many, many years ago. I wanted to try that again, it's quite confronting to work in the first person of discovery. It automatically feels more personal. This book is probably my most personal book, because one of the other things that happens with this narrator is that while she's at this place, she is ruminating on her childhood and adolescence in the nearby town, and particularly on thoughts of her mother who died when she was in her 20s, as my mother died when I was in my 20s in that place. So, she thinks a lot about her mother and her relationship with her mother. So that was one issue. And I mean, the thing about first person is that, of course, it's completely limited to only that person's point of view. You can't say what's going on in someone else's head, so it can be quite a claustrophobic form that, for this novel, I think that was appropriate. You know, it is a very interior book, but it's also an enclosed book in lots of ways. The place is enclosed. The point of her being there is to go within, I guess, rather than look at the outside world.

But there's another technical challenge, which is similar to the one I had in The Natural Way of Things in a way. Once you've got people trapped in a place, it can become very static very easily. You know, they can't go anywhere. There's only a movement within a very small, contained physical space. So that's where, technically, Helen Parry and the mouse plague and Sister Jenny coming into the place hopefully energizes this otherwise quite static narrative.

Another way I dealt with the static nature of the setup, I guess, was by talking to a painter who I absolutely love. Her name is Jude Rae. She is a Sydney painter. I mean, she's well known outside Sydney, but she paints portraits and interiors and all kinds of things, but the words of hers that I most love… Her still life is incredible, glowing, vivid still very serene looking pictures in various sort of classical setups. She'll have a vase with a palm leaf or some kind of fern leaf in it, but next to that she will have a fire extinguisher or a milk crate, so almost bringing up some – I wouldn't say ugliness because actually what she sees is the beauty in these things – but you know, something that you don't expect to see in a still life. I did an interview with her on my abandoned podcast called The Writer’s Room, which you can still hear and I want to get back to, actually. I wanted to ask her about how she got energy into these still life pictures, because I felt like I was writing still life. I wanted to know how her pictures were so energized, because they do sort of shimmer, when you look at them it feels like they're almost, that the substance of the of the work is moving all the time. She said, ‘Well, the first thing I do is break up the surface to create energy in the picture’. I wasn't quite sure what she meant. But she went on to say that the form of the picture itself is fraying at the edges, she doesn't the paint doesn't go all the way to the edge of the canvas. You can see the layers of paint sticking out the side of the image, and also, she often has a false bottom edge of the picture, a very straight line within paint dripping down the next set. It immediately creates a bit of a disturbance in your visual field, that's the right word. And energizes some creative, surprising elements. So she breaks up the surface, and I thought, ‘Okay, that's great. How can I break up the surface?’ And that's when the idea of this fragmented diary form came to me.

Initially, the book starts as a diary, a day book, hence the title devotional, which is a Christian day book or journal which offers sort of prayers for each day. My narrator's day book does not offer prayers but it takes the shape of that, offering observations and doubts and memories in a fragmented form. I found that very useful breaking up because hopefully that also energizes, I mean, even looking at it on the page, it will have glimpses that move, hopefully, rather than a big slab of static text about a static experience in a static place.

ASTRID: It did not feel static when I read it, Charlotte. You are correct, on every page there might be three lines on a page, and then you go into more a traditional chapter and it continually changes like that for the reader. Before speaking to you today, I jotted down some of the themes that came out of this work for me as a reader, and that was mortality and death, and something on the edge of human experience, a spirituality, and I'm not referring to organized religion here, even though this is located in a monastery, it's more of the spiritual part of life. It is very much the relationships between women, the women who choose to live there, most of whom are nuns, but also in their previous lives, you know, girls at school, adult female relationships, the relationships between mothers and daughters. And then there's also the natural world around them, most notably through the mouse plague and Charlotte, I live in regional Victoria now, and I literally spent half an hour thinking what I would do if there was a mouse plague.

CHARLOTE: Well, I've got all the tips for you.

ASTRID: But there are also chickens and sheep and a goanna, and quite violent imagery around what the goanna does. I guess with all of that when I put it together in my mind, I wanted to ask you, Charlotte, do you see any resonances between Stone Yard Devotional and any of your previous novels?

CHARLOTTE: Well, of course, I never seen relationships between my books until it's published. And then other people say, ‘Oh, look, this is exactly like…’  It is, yes, I see that. I mean, look, I was asked about this last night in an event and I don't know how to answer it. Why am I so interested in relationships between the women? Groups of women and not pairs of women so much, although, of course, the mother daughter thing is very potent in this book. And I'm really not sure. Except, first of all, I grew up in a big family. I have three sisters and a brother. So, I am concerned with how do we live together? How do we live with each other? Not singly, but as a society, as you know, a little the little society? How do we live harmoniously with people? How do we live rich lives with people who get on your nerves? People are annoying and sometimes awful. So how are we supposed to live with that? And forgiveness is quite a theme of this book. I think every day we have a whole lot of micro forgivenesses to do, but also some of us have enormous things that we either need to atone for, or we need to forgive some trespasses against us. I don't have anything like that. But I've always been interested in the idea of forgiveness.

Having grown up in a very Catholic household, going to Catholic schools, going to Mass every week, I think those sorts of ethical questions were… I was absorbing them from birth really, even though I have no relationship with the Catholic Church, and I have no not the remotest desire to defend Catholicism about anything, because I think there's so many ways the Catholic Church has obviously committed some of the greatest atrocities on vulnerable people. And yet, I am grateful that I grew up in a world that had those questions in daily life. My parents were very social justice Catholics…

I'm completely moving away from the question, I realize. Groups of women… you know, The Natural Way of Things was about that. The Weekend was about friendship between women. And I was thinking last night, I suppose one of the things that interests me about the dynamics between groups of women is that we – certainly women of my age and older – have been raised to pretend that we don't do conflict, and we don't do competition, and we don't do ambition, and we all just very sweet and loving towards each other. Anyone who's lived in a share house or been to school knows that that's not true. But I think that women, again of my generation and probably of younger women, too, are taught to bury all those feelings, so the difficult feelings come out in unspoken ways and in unconscious ways. And so that is going on between these women in the in the monastery or the convent. They’re trying to live together, the reason for being there is this idea of prayer and dedication to God. Even though, you know, I think the head nun, she's very intelligent woman, and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't believe in God. I think there are probably quite a lot of people living these kinds of lives, living in religious organizations who don't believe in God, but they believe in love. They believe in the work that they're doing, and they've found a home there. And now I've completely abandoned your question. I'm sorry, gone right off track.

ASTRID: That is when podcasts are the most interesting, Charlotte. That is completely fine. You have mentioned the Catholic Church. You've referred to your parents as social justice Catholics, and you've used the word ethics. I guess I wanted to interrogate that a little bit, because within the monastery they are all to differing extents… Helen Perry, most obviously a part of the world, the narrator, aware of the world that she has chosen to leave and worked for an environmental organization. And I found a really painful paragraph, Charlotte, where she remembers clicking unsubscribe on all of the email lists that she signed up to. You know, Indigenous literacy Foundation, Greenpeace, and everything, and she just unsubscribes. She essentially withdraws to contemplate the world but no longer try to save it, if I can be brutally basic about it. There is no judgement, and maybe we will need to do that at various points. I suspect we do. But I guess I wanted to ask you about the almost the grief that is wound up in the ethics of the novel.

CHARLOTTE: Yeah, she has experienced a profound ethical crisis, I guess, in in her work, which then infects her whole life. And that crisis is a loss of hope. In her work she feels that she is only going to cause more damage if she stays and infects the other people in this organization. Her husband also works in this area and has not lost hope for the planet. She feels that everything she has – and this is in the background, it's not explicitly gone into very much – but she does ruminates on whether the loss of hope is a moral failing. And I have that question a lot, you know, about all kinds of things. Certainly to do with climate change, certainly to do with social justice. I think optimism is a moral choice. And that to give up on working to save the planet, to help people who are vulnerable, to bring about justice for all kinds of people, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in this country, I think to give up on that is immoral. I know we don't really use the word moral very much anymore. It seems that old fashioned. And yet, it is hard to not give up on that. There's a line in the book somewhere where she said, ‘I read that Catholics think despair is the only unforgivable sin’. And, you know, that's the whole debate. Anyway, that is only one but and she said, ‘But I understand why they think that’, because there's a moment that she recalls a young woman working with her at this environmental center, and she confesses her despair to this young woman, and she sees what a terrible thing that was to do, to say to this young woman who's just starting out in his work, that there is no hope. She realized that then that she has to go because she has just slapped this girl in the face with a horrible thing. And she says despair is its malign, it bleeds, and it infects other people, if you have that kind of despair you have to take it away from other people. So that's a kind of major question through the book. It's a reflection of the tension in the book, and in me, I think.

I’ve always believed that action is the antidote to despair. You know that quote that is attributed to lots of people, ‘If you feel despair, do something for other people’. That brings you out of your despair. My narrator has always believed that but has gotten to a point where that does not work anymore because she feels that everything, that even getting out of bed in the morning, is an act of destruction on the planet. I think during COVID lockdowns we saw some of the glimpses of – and they were false glimpses, I guess – of the regeneration that can happen if we stop. If we stop acting, you know, if everyone lived like these women in this book there will be no climate destruction, no flying around the world to go to climate change conferences to express our despair, if you stay in one place and don't go anywhere and make your own food.

Anyway, the two points of tension for her is whether it is better first to do no harm or actually be the antidote to despair. And there's this constant movement back and forth between these. First, do no harm is, just to be fair, a cop out, because then you don't have to do anything. So, I really don't have an answer. I'm constantly plagued by those questions in my own life, and also by that tension of the need to withdraw and to go silent and still and have solitude and unsubscribe from everything. You know, your inbox every day is filled with calls to action. After a few decades of doing as much as you can to take this action and feeling that we have got nowhere, it's… I remember reading some years ago a very well-known environmental activist and scientist saying with, it seemed to me, a great deal of grief, ‘everything I have done has been a failure’. And I just felt devastated for that person. What do you do then? Once you have that realization? I mean, one of the questions of the book is if you have lost hope, can you get it back? And I don't know. I don't know.

ASTRID: Charlotte, I don't know either. I deeply appreciate on a personal level you asking that question in Australian literature. We're recording this at the end of 2023, and at the end of 2022 I did an event with Bri Lee and Danielle Celermajer at the Opera House and I said on stage, ‘I'm really offended by the calls for us to have hope. I don't think we should have hope or encourage people to have hope. I think we should encourage people to have courage. I think courage is the word that gets me out of bed’. And the effect that had on the audience is not something I want to ever do again. That did not go down well, Charlotte, and I have not been able to forget my unforgivable sin in public. And yet I still kind of feel that way. I appreciate you grappling.

CHARLOTTE: It's interesting, isn't it, how we cling on to that notion of hope? Because what does it mean? I do think optimism is maybe different from hope. I'm not sure, maybe optimism is more aligned with courage. I think that's a beautiful, beautiful thing to say. I mean, hope is the passive state, right? I mean, it might be slightly just semantics, but that optimism and courage certainly has a more, impels you to do something. You know, and yet, it's so hard, isn't it?

I mean, I'm not advocating that we all just throw up our hands. But I understand the appeal of that, I deeply understand the appeal of that.

ASTRID: We go forth with optimism and courage. Charlotte, I have one final question for you. As I was preparing for this interview I did my homework, and I read a feature article about you published in 2023 in The Guardian. In that article you said that you feel that you've changed as a writer, and you were referring to Stone Yard Devotional. Can you elaborate on that? How do you feel you've changed as a writer?

CHARLOTTE: I feel I've changed because I don't want the same. I think I have less anxiety as a writer, and I trust my instinct more. With this book, I really wanted to write a different kind of book than I had written, even though we've talked about how there are preoccupations of mine that seem to be recurring. But tonally, I think it's a very different book. It's much more spacious, it leaves a lot more space for a reader to work a bit harder, I guess. I used to feel as a writer I had to make sure the reader understood exactly what I was trying to say. I never wanted the reader to feel confused or uncomfortable – I mean uncomfortable, fine, but only in the way that I wanted them to feel uncomfortable. This book is much more open. It's a cooler tone, I suppose. I had an experience last year, I'd written the first draft of this book, and straight after, bizarrely, I've finished, I'd written the very crucial end scenes of the book and I felt this enormous relief that I've got a book now, that sense of once I have a full draft, which is still got loads of holes in it, I know, I have a book, whereas before that it's like whether it is going to exist or not.

I was writing at the coast, a place that I rented on the Central Coast, I stepped away from the desk, I went into town to buy some groceries, and while I was there I had a phone call from the breast screen people asking me to come back for more tests. I had just recently heard that my oldest sister had breast cancer, which was really devastating for our family. Then in the next few weeks, it transpired that I also had breast cancer and my younger sister had breast cancer. The three of us had this happen within the space of six weeks, and then we had this year of just being thrown out of our lives. And everyone, we're all fine. We're all extremely lucky to have a very treatable cancer. But it was it was a harrowing year, during which I did no work on the book. Well, I suppose it was about six months, that I didn't look at the book because, you know, treatment and trying to help my sisters.

Anyway, when I returned to the book, I was a different person. I was I was changed, that experience changes everyone. It was almost like my life caught up with what the book was already trying to do, which was very stripped back, elemental. I keep using the word austere, it's the only word that seems to really fit. And when I went back to rewrite the book I had even more of that ambition to take everything in essential away. I think when a great crisis happens, you will know, everyone listening to this will have had some major crisis in their life, when that happens trivial thing just fall away or your interest in small problems, or even small nice things. You make it quite hard to be around, I think, because, you know, someone complains about there being a long line at the post office, that is not important. I went back into this book feeling like only the most crucial, urgent questions and experiences were to stay in this book. I'm not going to reassure a reader about anything. I think if that experience hadn't happened to me and my sisters I might have been tempted to be a bit softer or be a bit more reassuring or do a bit more hand holding. But when I came back to the book, I was even more committed to this sort of thing.

Can I just read this quote from Yeats that always grounded me as I wrote the book. ‘Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible’. That became very dear to me that sentence. I went back into more of a commitment to that. I don't want to teach. I don't want to cry out. I don't want to condescend. And I don’t want to explain.

ASTRID: What a quote Charlotte. And yes, I think that's what you did.