Megan Dunn is the author of three works of creative non-fiction: Tinderbox, published in 2017 by Galley Beggar Press, UK; Things I Learned at Art School (Penguin Random House NZ, 2021) and, most recently, The Mermaid Chronicles (Penguin Random House NZ, 2024). You might have heard her discussing life and art on Radio New Zealand with Kim Hill, or seen exhibitions she has curated for City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.
She is interviewed by Gigi Fenster. Gigi writes fiction and creative non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Massey University.
Gigi: I’d like to start by talking a bit about your writing process. It seems, from some accounts of your process, that you start with one idea, get quite far into the writing, and then decide to change tack. Does that sound like a fair representation of your process?
Megan: It is definitely a fair overview of my first book, Tinderbox. Tinderbox was formed in a few stages. The first of these was my participation in the online writing platform NaNoWriMo, where I set out to re-write Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, from the perspective of the female characters. In NaNoWriMo, you are meant to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. You get impetus from thousands of others who are also writing online, and you can watch your word count going up—against the word count of the pack. I found writing at that speed, my whole draft went batshit mental. My characters were farcical and silly, and I kept going down different plot loopholes. I wrote a 50,000 word soup!
Later, I took a non-fiction writing class at the International Institute of Modern Letters with Harry Ricketts, for one day a week. I was a mature student, working as a project manager. Harry asked, ‘What do you really want to write?’ I told him about my failed attempt to rewrite Bradbury’s novel. And he said, ‘Well why don’t you write about that?’ and that became Tinderbox.
And then Tinderbox had all sorts of problems getting published because it was dealing with someone else’s material.
Gigi: How did you get around that problem in the end?
Megan: Tinderbox was always very short—33,000 words. It combined my personal story of working as a bookseller for the chain store, Borders, when it was liquidated in 2009. The other strand was me rewriting Fahrenheit 451, as Clarisse and Mildred, the two female characters in Ray Bradbury’s original sci-fi classic. But Bradbury’s estate refused to let me publish the fictional strand. I’d submitted it to an indie UK publisher, Galley Beggar Press, who said, ‘We can’t let this story go. You can’t write as his characters, but you can write about writing his characters.’ So Tinderbox became this highly meta enterprise—which I’m embarrassed about because I’m aware postmodernism, even though it’s very much my generation, is over. Is bad. Wrong.
Anyway, Tinderbox, a book about failure, became a minor success.
Gigi: It was a success. Why do you think it resonates with so many people?
Megan: I think it just had so many different facets to it. First, it was funny and fast-paced. And it intertwined bits of my own story as a bookseller and struggling writer with what led to my interest in Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s book was published in the 1950s and is about book-burning, freedom of speech, and the enduring power of literature. I was re-reading his book during the rise of Amazon and the influence of e-reading and the internet. Readers told me Tinderbox was a page-turner and booksellers especially loved it. Tinderbox is now ironically available as an eBook!
But the feedback I’ve always had is whenever I write about lowly little me, that’s always the stuff that people love the most.
Gigi: How about Things I Learned at Art School? Was this not originally going to be your mermaid book?
Megan: So the backstory to my Art School book is a bit complicated too.
Gigi: People love the backstory.
Megan: People do.
Things I Learned at Art School came out of my long-standing drive to make art or to write about mermaids. I first wrote a few chapters of a novel, about a mermaid, that kept stalling. I had no idea what the mermaid would do! And I realised, ‘Ah, maybe I’m not a fiction writer. Maybe my shtick is non-fiction.’ I Googled: what would mermaids do? And I found this online world of people who were becoming professional mermaids and swimming in real ‘silicone’ tails. And I thought, ‘Why make up a story about mermaids when there are all these real women trying to be mermaids?’
I wrote parts of that draft in a very crazed, experimental all-over-the-place style, and my publisher—the publisher I eventually did Art School with—looked at it and said, ‘This isn’t working, but what does work is essays about you, and your early life.’ I had published various essays that explored fragments of my life at art school already, and so I built on that. One of the essays was called ‘This can’t be about Daryl Hannah’ and was about me at art school trying to make a work about Daryl Hannah as a mermaid in the film Splash (1984). My feminist tutor screeched at me: this can’t be about Daryl Hannah!
Gigi: So you take advice? You take notes?
Megan: I take advice from publishers, yeah. I suppose I knew the person giving the advice, and I had good reason to trust in the merit of her advice. I could also see that the parts of Tinderbox that people had most responded to were the bits about me.
However, I do think it’s really hard meeting the market. And I don’t think all advice is created equal or is worth it. So I’ve got a complicated relationship with advice. And part of me has always resented the ‘write about yourself’ advice. I’m the reluctant memoirist. It is exposing. It’s difficult. And it is an expectation, particularly for women, and I do resent that gendered aspect. Even though I’ve bared my knickers.
Gigi: It is interesting that it seems to be an expectation for women. Why do you think that is?
Megan: My mum died when I was writing Art School, so while the book is mainly about my early life, in my 20s, the last essay I wrote, ‘Art in the Waiting Room’, was about me from who I was at the time rather than channelling an earlier, more naïve and arrogant character. The intensivist who worked in the hospital where mum died said to me afterwards, ‘It’s mainly women who carry the emotional load of people who are dying, who are there at their bedsides.’ So maybe the marketplace expectation for women writers to discuss feelings and their personal lives relates to a wider societal role. I’m sure there are many exceptions to this rule but, by and large, women are in the business of emotional labour.
Gigi: ‘Art in the Waiting Room’ is also drawing on your skills as an art writer. I had always thought of ‘art writing’ as something distinct from memoir or creative writing. But part of what you do so successfully is to bring art writing into your work. Can you talk a bit about that? And also how writing about art, with the attention to detail that you pay when you do, might impact on your memoir and creative writing?
Megan: Art writing is where I started because I first went to art school as a young adult. Then I ran an artist-run space and started art writing then. We were putting out newsletters. I was writing about the art we showed in our gallery. So in a way, art writing is a kind of ground zero or happy place for me.
But I’m not writing about it as an art historian. I just organically started writing personal essays. I hadn’t read many essays or art writing when I started out. Later, once I got serious about non-fiction in my thirties, I started reading more. The essay is a good medium for me. I like thinking on the page.
Gigi: So when you were writing essays, you hadn’t read very many precedents. Do you think that was an advantage or a disadvantage?
Megan: I think writing essays is always a disadvantage. Writing anything that isn’t a novel is a disadvantage. And writing is a disadvantage anyway. Once you get into the real economy of writing, it’s quite brutally shocking.
I saw my tutor Harry Ricketts recently—I really respect Harry as a teacher and writer—he observed that, for me, it helps to have something else that I’m writing about—like Ray Bradbury or professional mermaids—and that other topic actually brings out the personal. If I put my attention on something else, that enables me to then reveal all this cascade of other things.
Justin Paton is another terrific New Zealand curator and art writer and he once said to me, ‘Yeah, you can be talking about an art work with a group of strangers and very soon, you’re discussing the big stuff. Life and death and everything. But the starting point is an artwork.’
At the moment, I’m a bit kind of wounded from the publishing churn and the brutalities of the artistic life, so I’ve returned to writing about art. It’s quite low stakes. No one’s dreaming of making it as an art writer. If they are they’re out of their mind. So it’s, like, nice to train your attention on something and go, ‘Oh, okay, let’s just closely look at this.’
Gigi: There’s a piece where you relate a conversation with the poet Chris Price, where she says that your writing rescues things from triviality.
Megan: I think that’s been something I’m interested in—rescuing things from triviality.
I’m from a lower middle-class family. I grew up with a single working mum. I didn’t grow up with a stack of New Yorkers in the house. I had a lot of time alone. And I was really into dolls.
I know that the Art School book, some people who weren’t my generation read it and felt alienated and thought, ‘This is just trivial stuff,’ but for others of my generation who had Strawberry Shortcake dolls or Smurfs, they loved it. And they would send me photos of their own dolls. Material culture and dolls matter, but they date quickly.
Feminised toys are quite looked down on. And yet, they are still really fascinating items that were important in my childhood. And now my daughter is into dolls too.
For work, I recently curated an exhibition of a woman’s Barbie doll collection, and that was massive—I mean we timed it to go with the release of Greta Gerwig’s movie, but we pulled the show together really quickly, and audiences exceeded our expectations. So many people had stories and memories of their own Barbies. Despite the glaring omissions and blind spots in Barbie’s design history, people wanted to see the dolls. So yes, an astute comment from Chris.
Gigi: Perhaps the drive of any writing is to rescue from triviality. I recently read something that said a job of the poet is to take the familiar and render it unfamiliar. Is that what you’re doing? Is it about paying attention?
Megan: Maybe paying attention to something that has become overly familiar, and then putting a spotlight on it and thinking about its strengths and its weaknesses and what animates it.
Spontaneity has been very important to me as a writer, and lots of the Art School book was written very spontaneously. I mean, it doesn’t mean I didn’t edit it. I did. But I wrote it to feel like it was a riff, like someone speaking to you and riffing.
Gigi: Of course, that riffing feel does take some control. Do you do a lot of work to maintain that spontaneous, flowing feel? Any particular tools you use?
Megan: Oh, it is controlled. I’m quite bonsai. Once I’ve got the guts of something down, I sweep through it and craft it line by line.
There are a couple of books by an American journalist called Roy Peter Clark that I found really helpful. He’s got one called, Help! It is broken up into chapters, there’s one, for example, called ‘Saggy Middles’. He addresses the nuts and bolts problems in really non-pretentious language. I admire journalists of his calibre because they’ve produced a lot of copy to deadline, which is something that a fernickety little art writer doesn’t have to do.
Gigi: I don’t want to leave this without discussing the role of humour in your work, and specifically a kind of ‘wise-cracking’, sharp humour.
Megan: It seems to me that my writing is very much personality-driven and voice-driven, and that the voice is some version of myself, and that there is this wise-cracking, self-deprecating aspect that must have developed quite young.
Gigi: Is the wise-crack always self-deprecating?
Megan: I don’t think it’s always against myself, but I notice with younger generations now, it’s less vogue or accepted to be self-deprecating. I guess there’s a desire to speak more kindly to ourselves.
Gigi: Is that also an expectation of the female memoir? That we expect it to be self-deprecating?
Megan: I don’t think so. I don’t think we always expect them to be funny or wry. Also, there are differences between memoir and autobiography or biography. They’re related but different species, aren’t they?
My writing reflects my relationship with the world, and that wry voice and attitude developed in me quite young, as a child. I talk a bit about being teased in my Art School book. I’m sure some of my humour was originally self-defence. But who’s to say? In the scheme of life, things could have been much worse for me.
Megan Dunn is now recovering from writing a book about mermaids. https://www.megandunn.org/