Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

interview by Tasmin Waby

Image by Daniel New

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Cardigan Press is a small press operating out of Melbourne. Founded in 2001, Cardigan aims to promote experiments in short-story writing as an antidote to mainstream publishing constraints. The collective made big waves with the release of their first anthology, Machines Will Not Give Change, in 2002, and have just unleashed their follow up, Normal Service Will Resume. This again follows their popular “Fast Fiction for Any Trip” template, with a range of story lengths, supposedly to suit all attention spans. Tasmin Waby spoke to George Dunford and Katie Falkiner in an attempt to determine exactly why we should care about short-form writing – and new, unheralded writers.
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What are the origins of Cardigan Press?

George: The main reason why we started this thing up was due to a short-story class we were in at RMIT (which is on Cardigan St; hence the name “Cardigan Press”). We were thinking, “There’s this great pool of talent in this class, but it isn’t really going anywhere”, because there’s nowhere in Australia that publishes short fiction – just for short fiction’s sake. So from that class came the initial core group of Cardigan Press.

Has the group spread beyond that core?

G: We still write and workshop together, and we’re all quite supportive of each other, but for the anthologies we do ask for outside submissions – just because we want to keep it fresh and new. A similar model to us is Vandal Press. They’re a great group of writers and have done about four or five books, but last year was the first time they got any external influence. We’re excited about opening it up and getting more people in. Hopefully, it will put people in the group under more of a creative challenge, because it may lift the bar slightly.

What was the idea behind your first anthology, Machines Will Not Give Change?

G: We were kind of inspired by the arrival of MX, that free paper you find on trams and trains. We were thinking we could do something more “literary” with the form, so the book was designed around four journey lengths. We think short fiction is something people will enjoy on public transport. I like the idea that someone can pick up the book and read a little story before they go to work, or read half a story on their way in and the other half on their way home. I really like that people can have this complete creative experience in a very short amount of time.

Is that the function of short story?

G: It’s not the only function. Short story can be a really exciting, experimental form. Take Peter Carey, who I think is better at short stories than longer novels – he went into all sorts of crazy ideas and concepts in his short stories. As a reader, I enjoy a brief reading experience; sometimes I just want to read just a couple of thousand words to put me off to sleep. What boggles my mind is that mainstream publishing doesn’t see it as a viable form.

Why are publishers neglecting the short story?

G: It’s so much about number crunching. It’s so much about making a business case for a book. Mainstream publishing doesn’t think there are returns in short story. A lot of it is about marketing and the publishers don’t quite know how to market a book of short stories. If you’re marketing a novel you can say, for example, it’s “a rollicking good tale that takes in the dynasty of Australian wine-making”. If you have a book of short stories you then have to ask, “Which story are we going to emphasise?”

How has Cardy’s philosophy changed since Machines?

Katie: It hasn’t really. Although we’re better at using the media to get into people’s living rooms. I want pashmina women trying to be cool by buying our books for their nephews – that’s where the big money is. With Normal Service Will Resume, we hope there aren’t any copies of the book under our beds in a year’s time and that it gets published overseas. Personally, I hope my Mum never reads it and that it gets banned in a high-profile, Catholic girls’ school.

Outside of launches, where would you find Cardigan books? In mainstream bookstores?

G: Well, I suppose booksellers don’t know where we fit in. Readings have actually created a shelf for small independent publishers and we were one of the first titles on that shelf – along with Vandal Press. I think in some places, at the end of fiction, there’s an anthologies section – so we might end up there. A lot of bookstores were kind to us, and that’s a real tribute to the skills of our distribution person, Jane Ormond, who really pushed the book and got some really good positions in stores. We did do a launch last year at the Newcastle Young Writers Festival which was good: we moved a few copies, getting them into the hands of people with influence, as well as the general public.

The bookstore issue is one I do think about. A lot of non-publishing people seem to think that it’s just about readership, but in fact for us it’s a bookstore battle; it’s a big publishing-company battle; it’s a readership battle. And it’s also a funding battle. It would be great to be able to get an Australia Council arts grant, to convince those guys that what we’re doing is important. Unfortunately, they have quite narrow structures for their grants.

What about the “grass-roots” creative scene in Melbourne? Is that as strong as it ever has been, or do you feel it needs life breathed into it?

G: These things go in phases. Something that was fringe becomes mainstream; things that are “fringe” lose their freshness if they become too heavily patronised and popular. They lose some of their experimental, creative value. In some ways, that’s a downside of becoming popular: you become chained to your readership or market. It’s getting tough now in Melbourne, because it’s becoming much more of an “arts industry”. Which in some ways is great, because it means there are people taking things seriously, and there are things like arts management: people saying, “Go off and be more of an artist and I’ll go off and be more of an agent or a facilitator”. I guess when something does become an industry, there will be people who will come in and play the numbers and so on. In a way, it’s heartening for us to see these things popping up. Giants provide a lot of shade on a sunny day.

Does that make you guys the mushrooms?

G: Ah – I guess so.

Does Cardigan Press celebrate Melbourne culture?

K: Only unwittingly. Now that we’ve gone national I suppose we celebrate Australian culture – but not “gumtree culture”. We eschew dusty gumtree writing in all its forms.

Is Melbourne a hotbed of small press, as opposed to other cities?

K: I think Adelaide is also a hotbed. Still, for the purposes of the interview, let’s compare Melbourne to another city – say, London. One thing that really makes me shirty is the cringe we have here, where the general public are severly adverse to reading new authors until they can be assured that they really are the next Peter Carey. In London, the general public tend to want to be the first to read the next bright young thing and so the publishers like to publish new writers. I know there’s a bigger market there, but it’s still very frustrating. In Melbourne, the smaller presses are championing the bright young things and hopefully one day the masses will catch on.

So, do small presses matter?

G: I think they matter quite a bit. For some of the people involved, Cardigan Press is the first time they’ve been published. Giving them that chance is really important. If we can keep rolling over, then we could be in a similar position to Going Down Swinging, which is a wonderful annual book – complete with CD and comics, now.

What do you offer that mainstream publishers don’t?

G: We can take chances because we’re not doing it for the accountants. In the first book, we had a story that uses a McDonald’s restaurant as a device, and we got really nervous about that. But one of the great things about having a small print run, perhaps, is that we haven’t been sued – yet. If we were a bigger publisher, we would have said, “Send it to Legal”, and Legal would have said, “Nope. We’re not publishing that. You don’t touch McDonalds.”

We can take more risks and do more interesting things – and we can vainly hope that big publishers will see there’s all this short-fiction stuff happening, with people writing it and reading it. It’s rather like what’s happening at the moment, with everyone saying, “The essay is the most exciting, racy form in writing”. This stuff comes in and out of fashion. That’ll die, and then there will be some other undercurrent, say haiku: “Everyone is reading haiku now.” And then: “Ah, I’m sick of haiku.”

Are you trying to make short story ‘cool’ again?

G: I’ve never known too much about ‘cool’. The last time I thought about cool was in Year 10, when I wore a Miami Vice V-neck to school. We want to sell ourselves as fresh, young voices. There are people in the group who deserve a wider audience. But is the short story – as a form – cool? I think it’s always going to be there. Just like poetry will survive its current market woes. There’s a great small press called Modern Works that publishes poetry because the guy who started it thinks no one else is. He was saying that bookstores tell him, “Yeah, yeah. We support poetry, we just don’t sell any”. They’ll have the books in their stores and hopefully one day they’ll creep out. I think that might be the same for short story.

You say what you’re doing is fresh and young. I assume you’re all young, but is what you’re doing really “fresh”? Is it new and different, or is it just traditional story-telling, written by new people?

G: Some of the New Puritans – Alex Garland and Toby Litt, for example – set out a manifesto for their writing, which had as its final point, ‘We reserve the right to break all of these rules if we want to’. So I’d probably like to state that before anything else.

We like to think our books cut across genres: if someone wants to include science fiction and it’s good, then we’ll run it. We steer away from things that are only descriptive and poetic. We’re all storytellers rather than pastoralists or painters. We are talking about fiction, not bush ballads. We want to establish a new kind of Australian fiction which isn’t necessarily about bush poets and kangaroos. It’s about our voices, our time. If you pick up an anthology of Australian fiction, you usually get Henry Lawson – he’s great, but that’s a study in history.

How did Toby Litt come to write the intro for Normal Service?

K: When Toby came to the Melbourne Writers Festival last year, I met him and gave him a copy of Machines, as well as a spiel about it being inspired by him and his ilk (and about how talented and attractive all our authors are). Toby read some of it, liked it, and the next day advertised it at his gig. He’s very supportive of small press and short story. We’ve kept up via email and when I asked if he would write the intro, he was more than happy to oblige.

What are some points of differences, and some similarities, between Machines and Normal Service?

K: Once again, we have a whole bunch of new writers – this time from around the country – which is very exciting. But there are also 27 more instances of the word “fuck” and a handy Broadmeadows-line timetable for readers who use the book on public transport.

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…:: LINKS
Cardigan Press
Excerpt from Machines Will Not Give Change
Toby Litt