Letter of Intro

When my publishers were first sending out advance copies of Cherrywood to booksellers, they asked me to write a letter that they could include by way of explanation of the novel. That letter disappeared from the published version, but I've been asked about it here and there. And so, here it is:

Photo courtesy of the Australian Museum

Dear reader,

Welcome to the Cherrywood, where someone may or may not be along shortly to take your order.

The novel in your hands grew from a dream I had a long time ago, about needing a bottle of wine for a dinner party, stopping a cab and getting out to walk into a pub where everything was…slightly askew.

Dreams are often unhelpful for writers because of their tendency to promise inspiration, then befuddle with their lack of narrative sense. This one refused to heel, and over time it grafted itself onto other ideas: about work, and time, love and obsession, and about escaping from expectations. As I began to take the ideas more seriously, I realised how completely my fiction writing had come to depend upon rationality and research. I resolved to let both go, and to allow the story to have its way with me.

Every page of this novel contains traces of my life: plundered and burnished, disconnected and re-configured. The countless hidden stories that old streets contain, written faintly in the architecture. Certain readers are likely to recognise themselves: others (through sweetness or humility or even arrogance) may not. Ximenon is both a sherry and a favourite writer. Thomas Wrenfether is named for the birds on the wire outside my writing-room window on Flinders Island: Joey and Lucy for the Concrete Blonde and Nick Cave ballads of the same names. Once upon a time I had jobs like Joey’s and Martha’s; both in Fitzroy pubs and in Melbourne’s glass towers.   

There is the pressing concern, in an increasingly brutal and erratic world, to write into the controversies, whether to offer the perspective that fiction can bring, or simply to vent a dismay that has no other outlet. I feel I’ve written in that way in the past, and I’m likely to do it again. But just this once, I wanted to write the kind of story that my mum would have read to me as a child: a story that closes the door on the world and conjures another one entirely. Escape. Or comfort. Or the possibility of something else.

I hope you enjoy Cherrywood.

 

Jock.