In Conversation with Ben Blackwell

I’m in the RAM again. It seems like it’s a haunt for me, and I apologise internally to my interlocutor, Ben, for having to sit amidst the din. I’ve heard Ben read his work out before, and knew him from when we worked together as editors last year, but I’m excited to have read some of his new pieces leading up to this. His work has a way of sneaking up on you, unfolding exponentially, and I think it belies his character. Every time I’ve talked to him, he’s had a very unassuming air, under which protrudes an incredibly affable and enthusiastic character. As our small talk begins to die down, I find myself eager to see this side in his discussion of his work. And then I press record.

M: I wanted to start by getting a perspective on your work overall. From the stories that you sent me, I noticed a lot of family tension, some playing around with perspective and a general way your stories unfold from something very mundane and put together to this sudden eruption of understanding. Are these themes and structures something that you have noticed in your own work and do you think that they are characteristic of you as a writer?

B: I think I’ve always been drawn to mundane stories just because I think there’s so much that happens in the everyday that goes unnoticed. But I can only explore so much. When you go on the bus, everyone in there has got their own lives, their own stories, their own perspectives, their own thoughts, but you just don’t know it. So I think, a lot of what I’ve read is in that same kind of vein, so, particularly the stories of Raymond Carver- I’ve always quite enjoyed. Digging by Seamus Heaney is a poem that I read probably when I was about 14, and that covers quite similar themes, ideas about kind of, family and the idea of home as well is something I think that I quite like writing about.

M: Those are really interesting influences! I feel like a lot of the stuff I’m interested in, like magical realism quite often starts entrenched in the mundane and it’s all about picking out those little moments that we forget about. To dig into that a little bit more- what sort of things appeal to you personally about those close family conflicts?

B: So this is something I’ve noticed a little bit more since going to uni- writing more about family. Just because you have that separation, so, when you live at home your entire life and then you go away for the first time, quite ironically you do end up thinking about them a bit more, I find. And then, a similar type of thing with friends as well, because- even like- a year, two years being at uni, you see some people stay exactly the same like they were in school, and then other people will just turn completely different. And it’s interesting how separation, I think, affects different people.

M: Yeah no that’s really cool. I hadn’t picked up that sort of element, but I guess as a writer it’s easier to examine all those kinds of things when you’re not entrenched in it. And I feel like a lot of the characters that you had in those stories felt very entrenched in that atmosphere.

B: Yeah, it’s very hard to be objective when you’re too close to anything to step back sometimes, to just have one look.

M: Yeah no, for sure. So the next thing I wanted to ask about was more about how you construct these stories. So short stories have to be very tightly constructed and can offer a lot of constraints. But I noticed that you were able to create a world that made sense and worked without seeming to sacrifice any of the character building or things like that, and I thought that was super impressive, so I’d love to, like, know where you start when constructing these stories…

B: Just on the first thing you said- I think that that kind of constriction- the tightness -of a short story is the main thing that separates a very good short story to an average one. Because quite often I think you can leave quite a lot unsaid in a short story, but still say so much. So even with setting and place you don’t even need to see a place or describe it always, but just have a character react to certain stuff, or even just circumstances. So, I know, in A Collection of Cards, Dealings and Advice, I think you can imagine in your head- you might agree with this you might not- but, it’s a bit more of a smaller city, or town in the suburbs. Walking to your primary school, getting everywhere on bikes, chatting round in parks... That’s never explicitly said, but you get the idea just from the details within the story, I think. And- sorry what was the second part of the question?

M: [Laugh] I guess, like, where do you start when you go about constructing that?

B: So I feel at the core of every story, I want to include an element of truth. This might be warped massively, and hidden under a lot of layers by the time I actually finish it. But quite often something starts with something that I think is true. So, I know that I’ve thought about this and as I’ve got older and experienced more of life, but I think, what you think is true changes so much from person to person.

M: Mmm!

B: So that’s why I get, sometimes, quite caught up in the idea of perception and what people think, what’s going on in their heads. So I really like reading Virginia Woolf, for example, because she does this quite a lot. She does differ in her approach though because she goes into multiple characters' heads describing how they see the world. I tend to do it a bit differently- I tend to pick one central character and then close off their heads from everyone else, leaving the reader to speculate: “what are they thinking?” Because quite often that is the source of conflict in the story.

M: Yeah, no, it’s a really interesting stance to take as a writer, and I think the way that you’ve done it in your stories is really good for drawing out the sense of dramatic irony. And, I guess, speaking of that I’d love to dig into your stories individually. So, I’m going to start with the one that I know you’re going to be submitting to ENIGMA, The Cats Are Fine. This story concerns the breakdown of a relationship that all takes place within these beautiful little snippets of dialogue where, like, nothing and everything is said at the same time. Could you tell us a bit about how you went about choosing that scenario? You talked about truths- what kind of truth were you trying to capture there?

B: Yeah, so. I can’t remember exactly how I decided on the setting of it, but I was kind of thinking about truths… Within the past kind of year or two, I’ve had a few of my close mates been cheated on. So a bit of real life inspiration, but also I wanted to get across the idea of so much being communicated with nothing explicitly said. Because on the surface that story is that a couple on their anniversary go for dinner, they chat about her work, he points out a waiter, they eat, she takes a bottle of wine, they go home and that’s pretty much the plot. But the story is so much more than that, just through suggestion and subtext within dialogue. Choosing a dinner scene, for quite a lot of people, dinner is a very everyday thing- we know what’s going to happen: we sit and we chat and we ask about people’s days, so it’s very obvious in a dinner scene when something goes wrong, because it’s so mundane. That was quite a purposeful choice just to frame the turmoil within the story.

M: Yeah, that’s really interesting, I hadn’t considered the implication of like how easy it is to see how awkward things are-

B: Yeah!

M: Or, like, when there’s a breakdown over, like, a meal, because it is such an everyday act. But you’re so right! Usually I guess you’d have more vibrant conversation and you could see where the silences are!

B: Yeah, I think that’s also why I chose it to be a fairly public scene as well, because it has that constraint of what we can say and what we can’t, because who we are in public is very different to who we are in private.

M: Yeah and I did really like, actually, the fact that I could tell that things were very rocky early on just from how they entered the restaurant. And with Marie being like “Why did you mention our anniversary?” And at the time I thought it wasn’t their anniversary, but then Ryan was like, “because it is our anniversary.” And then I was like, oh, so she doesn’t want people to know or- something’s going on there…

B: I don’t think either of those characters are particularly likeable.

M: [Laughs] Yeah, I wasn’t a huge fan of Ryan to be fair…

B: Yeah! People reading have very different opinions on what they like and what they don’t like. Cause I know some people when they read a story they need to like the main character or the protagonist. But for me, at least, I don’t need to particularly like them, I just need them to be interesting- that’s more important to me.

M: Yeah, and they definitely were interesting. I really liked the fact that I didn’t like them, necessarily, but I still saw moments of sympathy in both of them. Like Ryan is obviously going through this very sudden change, but Marie, you can see, has clearly had these tensions building for a while.

B: Yeah, none of them have unfounded reasons for acting the way they’re acting.

M: But you’re still like…oh no… 

Both: [Laughs]

B: Yeah it’s not how you’d want them to act…

M: So, like, just talking about that escalation- that sudden action that’s taken that you don’t agree with. In a lot of your stories you have that similar slow build up to something big. The piece I thought showed this the most was your story Shop Worker. So in this story it’s a lot about class divides and how they push this worker to extremes but only in the last few paragraphs which I really liked. So, despite the sudden escalation nothing changes in that story which I found interesting, like, in terms of their status. Could you tell me a bit more about that?

B: So, in my mind at least, I kind of wrote it as the story of escapism. So the story begins with the shop worker, Joel, looking out the window making up stories. Like, with Ivan being a spy, and the woman waiting for her mates to show up… It’s kind of like an active distraction, not only from boredom but also from his own life. So I built it up in the structure of having these quite little tensions that build up over time. Like with the mother and the son, and then he’s trying to keep focused instead of distracting himself but he falls into his own mind by the end. So in terms of status he doesn’t change in the end, but I think by the end Joel kind of recognises his own coping that’s what he's doing, so I think the very last line of the story is: “For now, Joel would be content to see the two customers off and look at people he could pretend were without worries from the window”. I think that’s probably the most similar character to me in terms of having something on your mind trapping you a bit but making up a story to release it. Because for some people writing is just enjoyment. Which, yeah, you can do that- go for it!

Both: [Laughs]

B: But just in terms of when I started writing it’s more of a thing of if there’s something on my mind, I want to write a story about it. Obviously, not everything is based on real life, because they’re all stories and all very different but within them that element of truth I was talking about earlier is drawn from my life or people that I know and things that they’ve experienced.

M: Yeah, no. I love that. And I love having that perspective I guess. In my head it was definitely more about class tensions, but evidently that was something I’ve brought to the piece. I really love that you’re describing more of an internal conflict that’s going on. And I love that it really neatly relates to the idea of writing for that sort of release and daydreaming for that sort of release. And I mean, not to be biased, but I feel like all the best writers are people who do it to get something out there, to get a message out there, and I love that. So next I wanted to bring up My Collection of Cards, Dealings and Advice, which is a bit of a longer piece in ten…?

B: Yeah, ten or eleven…

M: Short snippets. And it’s about a young lad desperate to complete his Match Attax collection- which I adore as a framing device! But there’s a lot more going on under the surface, and in this piece I loved the character relations specifically. I think that was mostly because they had a little more space to breathe, but I guess in relation to that, I guess I’d like to ask about your inspirations for them?

B: Yeah, so, my very basic inspiration is- Match Attax are something I used to collect when I was in year five, year six, that sort of age that the protagonist in the story is. But, as you said, there’s obviously a lot more beneath the surface, a lot of it is to do with family relations which we’ve already touched upon. So, I think, from this perspective at least I wanted the readers to make their own minds up about the family. Because we have the brother and his girlfriend, so Sammy and Trish. And I mean for me at least, others might disagree, but I’d argue they seem like the most well meaning characters.

M: Yeah, for sure.

B: But, because the protagonist is so kind of encased within them, he ignores some of their other aspects. There’s implications of alcohol and drug abuse with them, which the protagonist doesn’t see, especially with Sammy, how he idolises him as this kind of ‘master dealer’. And with that as well, I’ve always been interested in psychology, particularly behavioural and coping mechanisms. So I had this idea in my head of this kind of kid who fancied himself as a bit of a wheeler dealer in trading, and I was kind of thinking about the environment that would create that. So, in a way the environment kind of sprouted out of the character.

M: Right, yeah!

B: So, from that came Sammy, and Trisha. But keeping in mind the behavioural, out of that system came the mother and father. Obviously, they have a fairly strange relationship. The father is this depressed alcoholic, who makes these attempts to kind of bond with his son, albeit unsuccessfully…

M: It is there, you can kind of sympathise.

B: And then I think the mother isn’t alcoholic or depressed or anything like that, but she is more detached, I would say, than the father, which you can argue which is worse. Yeah, but, because of that, in my head the protagonist is substituting a neat stable life with the idea of completing his set, because that’s something he has control over. So it’s the idea of putting energy into something you have control over when you don’t have control over your own life, and what comes out of it.

M: Oh, that definitely comes across! It’s such a brilliant example of the coping mechanisms that you would come up with. And I love that it ties in so neatly with this idolisation and mimicry of his older brother. And I love that relationship because, as a reader, on the one hand you’re like “oh, no maybe you shouldn’t be emulating this behaviour”, and on the other hand you know it’s all he has, and it’s really sweet in a lot of ways.

B: Yeah, there’s no bad intentions from Sammy.

M: But yeah I just wanted to ask about that because I love them. And I love that you started with this idea of this wheelin’ dealin’ kid. It totally reminds me of my days making really bad pokemon card trades. [Laughs]

B: Yeah, yeah!

M: And I liked what you said about the perspective as well and the fact that, because I know we’ve already brushed upon this, but the fact that you have that dimension of not picking up on all these things that are slightly wrong- only the reader knows. And you also use a child’s perspective in Blue Medicine. So, in this particular piece, that perspective put, a very tragic spin on everything that was happening. What made you choose that viewpoint?

B: So, I think with the perspective- obviously, it’s a child as you were saying- I kind of wanted to convey that idea of corrupted innocence that comes with age. Because when you’re a child- you don’t see your parents as people you see them as your parents, they’ve got everything under control- but you get to a certain age and you realise they’re just people same as anyone. That was the idea I wanted to convey first of all, and then it comes across quite dramatically just because of the stress within the story. Again it’s to do with the environment that the character’s in. And then it’s got quite a naive voice which is the idea of that kind of disparity between what is actually happening and what he thinks at the beginning.

M: Nice, really nice! Having had a look at your work, I mean I’m a fan already, definitely!

B: Thanks!

M: What I want to know is, what direction do you want to go in next? More of the same kind of things we’ve seen here or branching out?

B: I think I could experiment more with perspective, play around with that. Also time a little bit more. I think in terms of themes, ideas, that will just change as I experience more in life, because I think I do tend to write about stuff that is current to me at the time, so at the moment it will probably be similar type of things, but as I grow older and experience more and live a different type of life, that will inevitably change as well.

M: And what about form? Have you got a novel in the works?

B: [Laughs] I did. And then I realised that I didn’t start it with the correct plan or structure. So, I wrote it in a way that I wasn’t happy with. Twenty-five-thousand words in, I realised it was going nowhere because of lack of planning. So, I’ll probably put that on the backburner for now. At the moment, I’m more focussing on submitting to various magazines with short stories and trying to work on them at the moment.

M: I feel like that’s a very reasonable trajectory. I totally understand the novel thing- I have several projects that will not be seeing the light of day for a very long time, just because I’ve made it part way through and realised I needed to basically rewrite the entire thing. It’s a big undertaking. But no, it sounds like you’re in a very exciting part of your writing career. Best of luck with submitting and I know I can’t wait to see your work in ENIGMA!

B: Cheers, thanks!

M: Awesome! Well, I guess we’ll call it a day. Thank you for being interviewed!

B: Thanks for having me!