David Grubb
Photograph: N. Wills
David Grubb is the author of three novels, one autobiography and several collections of poetry and short fiction, his most recent being the poetry collection It Comes With a Bit of Song which was published by Salt last year. He is also a lecturer in creative writing and has headed up aid organisations working in places of extreme poverty and civil conflict. His short story “I Want to Tell You Some Things” is published in Geometer this week. David kindly agreed to be interviewed via email:
Geometer: The prose in “I Want To Tell You Some Things” shares its rhythm and a kind of momentum with some of your longer lined poetry. How do you distinguish the two – do you set out definitely to write one or the other, or does it work itself out in the writing?
David Grubb: The feel for the concept of what I am about to engage with usually selects the genre; poem or short story or prose poem. Sometimes I write a poem that will later become a short story but that is rare. The rhythm and momentum in the prose is to do with a journey, the travel of ideas and in the narrative, shaping the story and the voice. Whether a poem or prose this is all about finding the words to enter deep into the impulse, discovering things along the way and the gradual building up of connections. In the prose in particular this is why certain phrases are repeated, certain elements merge.
G: I’ve recently been listening back to Glenn Gould’s radio documentary “The Idea of North”, and there’s a line in it where one of the speakers says that the north is “a land of very thin margins”. I had this in mind when I was reading your work. Much of what you write seems concerned with the thin margins of life – the constant threat that what today we take for granted may be lost tomorrow. Is this something I’m importing into the work or is this something you’re concerned with?
DG: During the last year or so I have been working with short prose. For years I found that poetry was the best way to enter concepts and reveal things and now I am finding that a short story can do the same thing and allow me to release language about as you express it the “thin margins of life”. I think I would rather express this as writing across the edges and a great deal of this has to do with things I have taken a long time to settle in my head to do with working in a psychiatric hospital many years ago and working on the edge of madness in several war zones where all the edges show.
G: I read in your Biography on the inner sleeve of It Comes With A Bit of Song that you have worked in conflict zones and areas of extreme poverty – Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti. How did you get involved in this work, and how do you think it has affected your writing? Do you think these experiences also come to bear on your writing about life in more settled, less tenuous conditions?
DG: I headed up two humanitarian aid agencies and this work took me into places of great poverty and you simply cannot ever get the killing on one hand and the courage on the other out of your being. Experiences in Bosnia, Rwanda, Romania, Albania and several other locations as well as working on poverty in this country have deeply influenced why I write and what I write. The impact of these events in my life means that when I want to write about something much more normal and at peace I am likely to see it in a different way. I suppose I no longer see anything as fixed or finished or final in any of the writing, in fact in some of the short prose I am beginning to discover that few things are actually resolved.
G: While I was reading “I Want To Tell You Some Things” I was reminded at first of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – which shares the concern with catastrophic change in the world being accompanied by the censorship of aspects of the past. In The Road the father represses his memories of good times so that he can survive in the bleak present – in your story the censorship seems to come from the outside; part of the catastrophe, not a response to it. Also whereas McCarthy writes about the near future, I get the impression your story is happening now and in a world you’re at pains to make familiar. Is this obliteration of the past and the need to conserve it something you’ve witnessed in your work?
DG: Most of my short story writing is about now, the immediate, the present, being there, and the merging of totally different things. I work within the overall idea that everything that is happening in the world is one way or another happening to all of us or something of it enters every house and room.
G: I recently read the review you wrote of “Poems from Guantanamo”, where you talk about the importance of those poems’ witnessing to a world prior to Guantanamo. Quite often in your poetry you are concerned with preserving memories and recapturing “lost histories”. Do you think this conservation and holding together is one of the main concerns of poetry?
DG: I like your phrase “lost histories” but I would rather say discovered narratives. The discovery and the way we express this is I think central to what poetry makes happen.
G: Which writers would you say have influenced your work?
DG: I think that it is readers who note the stylistic influences whereas I would rather make a note of writers who have influenced my ideas about why we are writing and what we are attempting to do.
The prose writers are attempting totally different things; William Trevor, Paul Auster, Italo Calvino, Joyce, Ballard, Lessing, Marquez, Roth and the wonderful William Saroyan. And the very earliest writer who woke me up to what the words can do was Steinbeck.
The poets also have very different ways of saying; WS Graham, Peter Redgrove, Robert Duncan, Robert Lowell, Christopher Middleton, Geoffrey Hill, Charles Olson, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, John Burnside, Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov , Ken Smith, Sharon Olds and what I can understand of John Ashbery. The first poet to light up my mind was Hart Crane. Although I read poems just about every day of the week, these are the poets that I return to, these are the unfinished voices.
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Read David Grubb’s short story “I Want to Tell You Some Things”.
DAVID H W GRUBB was born 1941. His poetry collections include The Memory of Rooms, Selected (Stride 2001), The Elephant In The Room (Driftwood 2004), Out Of The Marvellous (Oleander 2006). He has also published three novels and an autobiography. Hullabaloo, his collection of short stories, is to be published in 2009 by Salt, who also published his last collection It Comes With A Bit Of Song. A new collection of his poetry is due from Shearsman in 2009. He was a prizewinner in the 2007 Bridport short story competition, and is the editor of Sounding Heaven and Earth (Canterbury Press 2004). He is also tutor of Creative Writing at University of Reading, the River and Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames, Norden Farm Arts Centre. He also runs a mentoring scheme for individual writers. Much of his writing had been influenced by working in places of extreme poverty and civil conflict.
David Grubb
25 Belle Vue Road
Henley on Thames
Oxon
RG9 1JQ
01491 575528