interview by Simon Sellars

‘Arnold Zable: Hazards of the Game’: originally published in Subterrain magazine #1, December 2005.

Arnold Zable is a Melbourne storyteller who writes about memory and history, displacement and community, the experience of the Jewish diaspora, Aboriginal issues and Indigenous education, and the multiplicity of cultures within Australia. In 2002, in conjunction with the Big Issue, he ran a writing workshop for homeless people as part of the Fringe Festival. I spoke to Arnold about the role that writing plays in constructing identity and self-esteem.

Did you find your Big Issue participants a bit reluctant to open up, considering their life history?

Not really. The fact that they’d turned up meant that they were interested in writing. My job was to confirm that their experiences and stories were as valuable as the next person’s.

How important is technique, as opposed to empathy, in this kind of workshop?

Extremely important. What I’ve got to offer is technique on the art of story telling, on the art of writing about place and character – the art of reliving and re-imagining things that have happened to you. You can turn your experiences into memoir or autobiography or into fiction. But the most valuable thing a writer can have is their own voice – there’s no doubt about it. The beauty lies in coaxing from people a self-belief and a unique way of telling a story. We had some incredibly original approaches to the art of writing: humorous, dark, grotesque; almost psychotic in some instances. It didn’t matter what, exactly – the writers’ own particular take on the world was what I was really looking for and hoping to encourage.

How have your participants fared since then?

Well, I got a call just a couple of months ago from one of my students who has just completed a book of short stories, and now he’s trying to find a publisher for it. This particular student is very interesting because he showed real talent for writing, and for drawing on his own experiences in such a way that it created short stories that read like fiction. And so he persisted and he’s got his first book together and he’s working on his next one.

Tell me about the spinoffs from your workshops.

We did a spoken-word evening for the Fringe Festival where the group read their own work, and that was received really well. From there, some of the participants gained enough confidence to work on the play Sweet Dreams. And, of course, just about all of them were published in the Big Issue; others wrote for Roomers magazine.

When I interviewed the Sweet Dreams cast, some of them said, ‘Well, is that it? What happens now?’ After all the hype of performing on stage to appreciative audiences, they felt a little deflated going back to their previous lives.

That’s a hazard of the game, especially with writing, because you reveal a lot of yourself and ultimately you’re no closer to answering the eternal question: how do you live your life? A lot of these projects are given a certain amount of funding and they run for a certain amount of time and then it finishes. I also find it distressing because you make these friendships and then it’s all over, although from time to time I’ve re-connected with the people from the workshops. I wonder if there’s a way to sustain these projects beyond the standard six-month time frame? There does come a point where you can take your own initiative and form your own writing circles, your own writing groups. Actually, the writers I worked with went on to form their own group, which met in the basement of a Baptist church.

In our interview with the directors of Sweet Dreams, we agreed that it’s too much of a burden for artists to take on the role of counsellor.

Yes. I always make sure that I don’t make promises I can’t keep. You’ve got to be very honest and very straight and not create false expectations. The bottom line is that it’s not only homeless people that might feel let down after a project like that. The facilitator might say, ‘How am I going to keep my own thing going, too?’

Is the teaching of artistic skills, like writing, more valuable than throwing directionless wads of cash at the homelessness problem?

Yeah. It’s a bit like the old adage: if you can teach someone how to catch fish, then that’s much better than giving them fish.

Governments at every level need to realise that the arts is an extremely important area for funding – for the exceptional therapeutic benefits that art can provide.

Oh, absolutely – it’s not just funding that’s the key, but ongoing funding, because in the long run your hard work could come to nothing if it’s not sustained. People will then feel that sense of being let down, because they’ve had a glimpse that there’s another way forward. They’ve tasted the joys as well as the frustrations of creativity; they’ve tasted what creativity can do in terms of developing more self understanding. This can help people kick whatever habit it is they’ve got or whatever mindset they’re stuck in – whatever it is that’s been holding them up. But for it to work it has to be long term.

What further initiatives would you like to see?

There should be a permanent centre, a centre where people can come. The Big Issue was kind of an umbrella for what we did – a place to meet – although like every other organisation it was full of its own conflicts and occasional upheavals. But it would be great to see a centralised agency. Wouldn’t it be terrific if there was something like the Victorian Writers’ Centre – a place where writers can meet and share resources, but specifically for people like those that were in the Big Issue project. And you’d have teachers there and each other’s company, and the funding to put out regular publications.