Q&A with Declan Fry

Interviews / By
A photograph of Declan Fry is set against a teal-tinted photo of street art on a brick wall. Declan has short brown hair and a beard. He is wearing clothing in shades of green and brown. He is softly smiling, standing with one hand in his pocket and gazing away from the camera. Behind him are maple trees, people, and buildings. Text beside the image reads ‘#41 aftermath interview Declan Fry’.

A recipient of the Hilary McPhee Award and a Peter Blazey Fellowship, Fry writes for The Guardian, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Memo, The Monthly, and is a regular contributor to ABC Arts. Recently appearing in The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin, a global anthology spanning from ancient Greece to the 21st century, he lives in Melbourne with his partner, their cat, Turnip, and a dachshund, Walnut.

Hi Declan. Thanks so much for chatting with me about your piece ‘Ready for My Close-Up: Writing as Method Acting’. What made you originally explore writing as a form of method acting?

Part of me wants to say: because of what we’re doing right now. ‘Method acting’ really means giving your voice up to other voices. That’s a large part of the magic of essays and novels and poetry. Being with someone who is both oneself and not oneself. People who feel real but whose reality is magically confined to the page. And writing is accessible! You don’t need a film crew or catering or anything like that.

I adore the passage in this piece that speaks to the fixedness of published text. As writers, I think we often struggle to ‘perfect’ a piece due to a conscious or unconscious fear of fixing an opinion, story, or moment in text forever. I adore the line, ‘Yet the work, whenever it is read, becomes something new.’ How do you decide on the finality of a piece?

Writing is generative because it refuses to stay fixed. What you read today you can never read again. Tomorrow it will speak differently.

When I read or write, I feel like I’m taking on the role of a host or guest. A guest in the work of another’s writing. A host building a series of rooms for the reader to inhabit when I’m writing.

In real life, there are many limitations of time and circumstance. Everything passes. When I write, I have the chance to expand upon those passing moments so that they don’t have to pass, or so that they can pass differently.

What drew you to use Edgar Allan Poe as your ‘host’ for method acting in this piece?

I have two very vivid memories associated with reading. One is when my mother read me Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The other is when I was young and I read Poe.

I can’t exactly describe what it was about Poe. It took me out of my body, I think. I tried reading him again as an adult and it wasn’t the same. His viewpoints seemed limited, less nourishing. But the closed, delirious feel of his writing is useful for getting outside oneself. Reading him as a kid, I figured the sense of confusion I experienced, the lack of contextualising detail—where is this taking place? to whom? why?—was just because he was too ‘adult’ or too deep. Now I think it was just him!