When writing's your happy place
Written by
When writing’s your happy place
After six years of part-time and full-time study, Tom du Chatenier’s enjoying the satisfaction of graduating with a degree in creative writing at Whitireia NZ this month. During his study he’s moved away from a career in basketball to focus more and more on his writing - in fact now that he’s finished his degree he’s already onto his Masters. He says, ‘For me what’s paramount is the creative process, and producing writing I’m proud of. I’m a lot happier in my writing place.’
Looking back over the last six years, what have you learnt? I started off with two online modules at Whitireia - poetry and short fiction – and they’re still my favourites. When I started I wasn’t reading as a writer, and I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of technique. It’s really interesting looking back at what I wrote then, and what I’m writing now. I can see that my writing’s grown a lot and that’s by becoming more well-read. Reading fuels my writing – it opens me up and stops me getting stuck in circular thought patterns. If I’m stuck with my writing, it’s because I’m not reading enough.
How did your basketball fit with your writing? In 2008 I was playing for the Junior Tall Blacks. I was also studying writing online at Whitireia. I felt out of place in both realms for a while. For my basketball teammates basketball was their whole life and focus, and for the students doing the course at Whitireia, sport was not on the radar. I managed to balance it for a while and then in 2009 moved to Auckland to train with The Breakers. When I did that, basketball became a whole lot more serious and hard to balance with other interests, and it began to lose its enjoyment. I got depressed, moved back to Wellington and tried to play casual basketball but found I couldn’t do it halfway – basketball wasn’t something I could do just for fun. I turned to writing to deal with it.
Are there any connection points for you between the disciplines of sport and writing? Making writing my total focus has a positive effect on my life, whereas making basketball the total focus didn’t work. There are lots of expectations with basketball at that level, and you get totally hauled over if you make a mistake. It’s not to say with writing you don’t have to have a thick skin, because in a writing workshop your work does get critiqued, but throughout the course at Whitireia the tutor and students are critiquing the writing, not the writer.
Can workshops still be a mixed experience? In every writing workshop I’ve been in over the last few years, there have been people who’ve inspired me. But it’s also worth recognising that you’re not going to connect with all writing, or all the feedback you receive. It’s good, because you then have to work out who the audience is for your kind of writing, and sift through the feedback accordingly.
What kind of writing do you like? I’m drawn to writing that experiments and I like trying to do something I’ve never done before. My tutor at Whitireia was Anna Taylor and she’s an amazing reader of people’s work. She could see what I was trying to achieve, and tap into that. She’s made me see that experimentation for its own sake often lacks depth. She’s helped me dig deeper so that any experimentation resonates with the work itself.
What have you written on the course? In the last two years of the degree students work on their own book-length project. I produced a book of connected short stories. The stories are set in a slightly skewed version of our world where strange things are happening: everyone’s going blind, all the birds are losing their feathers, someone poops a fish. The stories are inter-linked, and each story flows directly into the following one without a break. It runs the line between short stories and a novel. It doesn’t follow a strict narrative based on characters, but the collection as a whole follows the arc of the world itself.
Do you think you need to do a degree to learn how to write? I don’t think I’d ever say you needed to take a course or get a degree to be a writer, but it can be really useful. When you’re writing in isolation, you can think everything you produce will be clear to a reader, but when you’re workshopping in a class you can discover what you’ve written isn’t necessarily understandable/obvious to other people. In a workshop you also get to read other people’s writing and get to see how different techniques do or don’t work, and that helps you see any problems in your own writing more clearly.
Where to from here? Apart from a few edits, my collection Forest is ready for publication, but I’ve put it aside for 2015 while I concentrate on my Masters in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. My hope was that doing a Masters would make me step-up with my own writing, and it is.
In the long-term, is it possible to make your living as a writer? I’m not under any illusions that I’ll make a living from writing stories, but I know through some of the other work on the degree at Whitireia, that there are a lot of different kinds of writing gigs out there. I’ve helped organise poetry readings, written reviews for websites, am on the Wellington Zinefest committee, and as part of the Creative Enterprise module on the degree have been working on setting up a literary magazine called ‘LEFT’. In the long-term I’d be willing to work a day job while I’m writing too. For me it’s about the creative process and writing something I feel proud of. I’m a lot happier in my writing place.
Tom is one of twenty-nine Whitireia NZ students who graduated recently with diplomas or majors in creative writing.
Tom writes under the name Jackson Nieuwland. Here are some links to a selection of his shorter writing:
http://compoundpress.org/2015-catalogue
http://www.sweetmammalian.com/#!jackson-nieuwland--carolyn-decarlo/c1ds8 http://copingmechanisms.net/40-likely-to-die-before-40-an-introduction-to-alt-lit/
http://www.compoundpress.org/Minarets-Issue-Three-Jackson-Nieuwland
http://everythingisfantastic.com/
An interview by Tom
The blog for LEFT http://leftleftleft.tumblr.com