A2: What experiential environment inspires you and fills your creative well? Do you ever find that too much of that environment can be overwhelming?

IN: A theme of my work is the confusion of being in the world, and this ongoing imperfect synthesis between short-term memory, such as the sense memories of recent experiential situations along with the more submersed long term memories which dictate my reactions to those situations. I’m deeply fascinated by people and social situations, and to be honest, I’m also interested in my own sense of unease and being overwhelmed by these situations, so a dinner party, a poetry reading night, or even a wilder event like a drunken night about town or a rave can provide much of the initial barrage of experiential material to write about.

I’m also fascinated by how people from different backgrounds relate to each other, and the misunderstandings that arise in these situations. One person’s idea of kindness, ingenuity, or delicacy can come across to someone else as cruelty, carelessness or even complete insanity.

A2: You have a notable variation in language and inflection, or linguistic morphology, but maintain tone. How do you use language to control the narrative and experience of the story? 

IN: I’m a cultural bastard, born trilingual to peripatetic parents, with very uneven formal schooling and formative life experiences, and therefore largely an autodidact. I want that uneven, highly malleable quality that reflects my experience of self to come out in my writing. There is an anxiety that comes from not having a stable identity and sense of identity, but there’s also strengths that come from that, from being able to code switch, to conquer imposter syndrome, and come out the other end with a strong sense of empathy for others. We’re all, to different degrees, making it up as we go along.

With this in mind, being older and hopefully somewhat wiser, I believe that it’s important now to control both my experiences and my influences. I will go through phases of obsessively reading a very specific set of authors or journals. I read and re-read all volumes of “Heavy Traffic”, given how much emphasis editor Patrick McGraw places on the style of the writing over the narrative content, as well as the work of Audrey Szasz and Philip Best from Amphetamine Sulfate press. I found both of these disparate sources of inspiration had stylistic and tonal similarities that I very much resonated with.

A2: What was the catalyst for your decision to explore your creativity?

IN: I can’t point to a single “road to Damascus” moment, except that I knew from a young age that I had to write and that I had a natural talent for it. I was in high school in northern Tuscany and the professor of Italian would read us Dante in the original Tuscan and this blew me away, and I would write passionately about this in the essays we were set as homework. It still took me decades after that of finding myself and building a stable life before I could even think about creative writing.

I was at a party, saluting dawn with some old friends, and the topic of my wild days as a 19 year old in Johannesburg came up. I realised I’d never told anyone much about those times and how formative they were, or had begun to explain or lay out where I came from and why. I spoke English with a South African accent for a decade after the three years I’d spent in Joberg. So I went home and started a Substack (“Minor Observations”), starting from Johannesburg, working forwards and backwards from there. It started off as a straight, blow by blow memoir, but along the way I encountered the poetry of Richard Siken, and how he states in the poem “Why” that “undigested biography is boring”, so I began experimenting more and more with fiction, prose, prose poetry and poetry.

Melbourne is very fertile literary city, largely because half the people here are from somewhere else, it’s just a question of which generation made the move, and I’ll credit both writing workshops and poetry open mic nights here as being another very recent catalyst in driving my creative impulses into overdrive.