When you’re thinking spring, poetry, daffodils, butterflies and blossoming love ‘spring’ to mind. ‘Killer-thriller’ not so much. Yet that’s the treat in store when this month, as part of the WA Spring Poetry Festival, the hugely successful Australian writer Dorothy Porter comes to town. Renowned for her mind-bogglingly difficult to write verse novels, Dorothy is visiting Perth to discuss her latest offering, El Dorado, in which poetry meets psychological thriller.
A multi-award winning poet, Porter is the author of six collections of poetry including Driving Too Fast, Crete and Other Worlds; two novels for young adults; and three previous verse novels, Akhenaten, The Monkey’s Mask and What a Piece of Work.
Zoe Carter spoke to Dorothy to find out more.
Zoe Carter: Can you tell us a bit about El Dorado?
Dorothy Porter: It’s my fifth verse novel, like [previous novel] The Monkey’s Mask it’s a crime thriller. In this case it’s about a friendship between a policeman, a homicide detective called Bill, and his best friend from childhood called Kath, who works in Hollywood as an imaginary world specialist director. She’s a lesbian, and they are tracking down a child serial killer together in Melbourne. In that space all sorts of things happen, including Kath having a relationship with a much younger woman. So, El Dorado is a verse novel; it’s a serial killer thriller about a whole lot of other things as well. It’s about the nature of love, and the nature of friendship; it’s about a friendship between a straight man and a lesbian, etc; and in some ways it’s a bigger book than The Monkey’s Mask, there’s a lot more going on. The Monkey’s Mask was also written in one voice, and this one’s written in two.
ZC: Has it got any easier working in the verse format?
DP: It’s still a challenge, each book takes at least 3 and a half to 4 years to write. I personally think this is the best, but readers can judge for themselves. Anybody out there who’s reading newspaper who wants to get a taste of El Doradocan come and hear me read!
ZC: Have you found that your relationship with language has changed over the years?
DP: Well I hope so, I hope my use of language has become more vivid, more concise. I think over the years I’ve become tighter and clearer… I hope so. When I first started writing I was much more wordy, much more obscure… now I’m more lucid and I hope more vivid.
ZC: I often think of language very visually, as being like a landscape of words. Do you feel when writing that it’s like a process of discovering new terrain?
DP: I felt this when I was writing my last verse novel, called Wild Surmise, about outer space and an astrobiologist, and I was using lots of imagery, from space, and imagery from new discoveries made about planets. I was finding that an extraordinary challenge – freshening up my use of language and using language as a landscape that very few people have written about.
ZC: What excited you about El Dorado as a project?
DP: The combination of writing what is I hope a really tense and compelling psychological thriller, plus a book about a friendship. I’ve often written about love and sex, and again El Dorado is about love, but it’s a completely different take on love. It’s also a take on childhood and memory, there are a lot of poetic scenes, things that are found in cliques of poetry like childhood and love but within the landscape of a psychological thriller.
El Dorado is published by Pan Macmillan, and is widely available.
‘An Afternoon with Dorothy Porter’ is on Sunday the 14th of October at 1pm At the State Library of WA’s Library Theatre. Tickets are available at the door or for more info see
www.thewordisout.net.au/
