close_game
close_game

Charlotte Wood – “Art is a place to turn to in times of trouble”

BySimar Bhasin
Jan 24, 2025 10:33 PM IST

On experimenting in Stone Yard Devotional with how far she could go in making a story that depends on stillness and silence and yet shimmers with energetic force

How did the idea for Stone Yard Devotional take shape?

Author Charlotte Wood (Carly Earl)
Author Charlotte Wood (Carly Earl)

Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community. Writing it during pandemic lockdowns, followed by a period of time out owing to a serious illness – and the way these twin upheavals demolished so many of our consoling certainties – gave me an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in my work. I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book. And I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’, risking a tonal restraint and depth that at the same time, I hope, pulses with energy.

I see now it explores some recurrent preoccupations of mine, particularly friendships and rivalries between women (albeit quite different in texture from those in The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things), and the question of how to live with others despite prickly relations. It also touches on forgiveness and atonement, on the moral challenge of despair, and on the way we as societies decide some people deserve to be outcasts.

You have called this your ‘most personal book’ even as it is a contemplative meditation on questions which have a universal resonance. What were the challenges you encountered while giving shape to it?

I had to make a decision about how much of myself and my own life and experiences to reveal, in combination with the entirely invented material of the ‘present-day’ time zone of the book. I decided, in the end, to write what felt to me the truth of my mother’s and my relationship, and my grief over the loss of my parents. This has resulted in a necessarily skewed and narrow portrait of my mother, because I wanted to avoid treading on my four siblings’ relationship with her, so this by definition pushes it into the realm of fiction. But I think the ‘true’ material of the childhood and parent-child relationship helped to create the voice, the tone of the whole book. The seriousness of our global experience of the pandemic (preceded in Australia by our worst-ever bush fires in 2019), then followed by my family’s experience of life-threatening illness, recalls the Emily Dickinson poem ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’. This sense of formality, of nothing trivial being allowed to stay, came out of those experiences for me.

You mentioned how you wished to execute ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’. Could you elaborate a bit on this?

Authors are quickly taught by the publishing industry to be wary of ‘quiet’ books – those not driven necessarily by plot and drama, but by deeper concerns and questions. I wanted to experiment with how far I could go in making a story that depends on stillness and silence and yet shimmers with energetic force. I turned to painting for inspiration at times, particularly the still life pictures of an Australian painter called Jude Rae, which I have always found very beautiful and surprising. I was also, frankly, worn out by the noisy contemporary world, by its shallow politics and churning rage. I wanted to retreat psychologically and consider what really matters to me as a person, and to offer the resulting observations to a reader. I think art is a place to turn for so many of us in times of trouble. It offers a sense of timelessness and, especially in painting, the hope that some precious things endure, in stillness, despite the chaos and fear with which we are so bombarded by contemporary life.

A lot of reviews have described the book as a meditation on grief, loss and forgiveness. At the same time, it is also a contemplation on late stage capitalism, the recent global pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis. What are your thoughts on how the book has been received?

I’ve been deeply moved by reader and reviewer responses to this book. It has provoked by far the most intense emotional response of any of my 10 books to date. I’ve been delighted that trusting my instincts and my sense that I’m not the only person who has been sickened by our contemporary excesses – excesses of consumption, of speed, of loud and shallow emotion, of brashness and money and violence, of planetary destruction. Something that has surprised me is how many readers have told me they felt immensely calmed and soothed by the book, despite the sadness of much of its story. This response is very precious to me.

The dangers of human apathy and existence in a world, to quote from your novel, where people ‘find the idea of habitual kindness to be somehow suspect: a mask or a lie’ seems to be a recurrent thread. There is a constant examination of what we consider to be natural, unnatural and that which has become naturalized. Did you wish to draw attention to this?

I wasn’t conscious of doing this. But I was conscious that the narrative could in part be driven by the tension between two worthy ethical mantras: first, do no harm versus action is the antidote to despair. This tension has played out in the previous life of my narrator in her work as an environmental activist, and in the life of Helen Parry, the radical activist nun who comes to intrude on the peace of the monastery in the book. My narrator has been driven to despair by the contemporary failure – and her own specific failure – to protect the natural world.

How has your consumption of literature and the way you approach writing changed over the years?

I’m much less attracted to complicated action, plots and showy narratives, and much more drawn to simplicity, but only accompanied by depth and what I might call moral complexity. I’m interested in what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called ‘the landscape of consciousness’ these days more than ‘the landscape of action’.

You had posted recently about how you have made a vow with yourself to read only according to what you desire as opposed to reading for festivals, prizes etc. What are some of the books that are on your list for the coming months? Any particular writers who have caught your attention?

I’ve been having a bit of a Yiyun Li festival, with Wednesday’s Child and Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and then recently reread some William Maxwell, specifically So Long, See You Tomorrow and some of his short stories. These are writers who understand, to their marrow, the import of the Dickinson poem I mentioned above. There is nothing trivial or shallow in the work of these artists and I have found it a privilege and an inspiration to read them.

What are you working on?

I have an embryonic new novel on the go but am far too superstitious to say anything about it. But I need to stay home as much as possible this year – after Jaipur! – to discover what it holds for me.

Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.

See More
SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
SHARE
Story Saved
Live Score
Saved Articles
Following
My Reads
Sign out
New Delhi 0C
Monday, February 10, 2025
Start 14 Days Free Trial Subscribe Now
Follow Us On