Kona Macphee was born in London but grew up in Australia, where she flirted with a range of occupations including composer, violinist, waitress and motorcycle mechanic. Eventually she took up robotics and computer science, which brought her to Cambridge as a graduate student in 1995. She now lives in Perthshire, where she works as a freelance writer and tutor, and moonlights as the co-director of a software and consultancy company. Kona received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. Her first collection, Tails, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004, and she is selling the remaining copies to raise money for UNICEF. Her second collection, Perfect Blue, is recently published by Bloodaxe Books. To support new readers of poetry, she has released a free companion e-Book for Perfect Blue, including author commentaries on all the poems.
Kona will be reading at The Golden Hour this March 24th.
Kona, the subject matters in your new collection, ‘Perfect Blue’, range from trotting pheasants to the impact of the media to your intriguing ‘Book of Diseases’ series of poems. You obviously have a wide range of interests, which are also reflected in your skills of writing, drawing and even software engineering! How do these personal creative interests inform each other in your work or do you prefer to keep them separate?
I guess these creative interests are “separate” in the sense that I’m not doing multimedia projects (though I’m quite tempted by the idea of making some computer-animated short films, possibly with music…. ah, if I only had more time!) However, I don’t think of them in a compartmentalised way, because they’re all just different flavours of the wonderful pleasure of “making things”. I’m completely addicted to “flow”, that awesome state of mind where you become deeply absorbed in some challenging creative task, and time just seems to vanish. I don’t care how I get the flow, as long as I get it every now and then!
I suppose there’s a further common thread in that, for me, a key purpose of artistic work is to communicate – and particularly to communicate emotion by recreating it in the mind of the reader/listener/viewer. Music is fabulous at this, but poetry can be pretty handy at it too. Obviously there are other motivations – sheer playfulness, for example, or the desire to try something new and difficult (which explains my drawing efforts – I’m no artist!), but the need to communicate emotion is always there in the background for me.
Coming from a postgraduate background of robotics and computer science at Cambridge, you have incorporated this experience into your electronic music-making. Would you encourage the incorporation of computers or technology into artists’ work these days? Do you find that technology helps or hinders your work?
My definition of “good technology” is something that quickly disappears into the background and allows you to focus on what you’re trying to do, rather than battling with how to make the tools achieve it.
I do my writing on computer, using a very techie, no-frills editing tool called “vi” which has been around since the 70s. Because I spent so long using it to write computer code, editing with vi has become as instinctive as driving a car – the technology simply fades away, and I get on with the writing. (By contrast, trying to use a WYSIWYG editor like Word, with its requirement for a lot of mouse use, drives me bonkers and constantly distracts me from my goal). I have a somewhat fetishistic love of stationery, so I regret the fact that I can’t write fluently with a pen and paper anymore: being so used to on-screen writing and editing, I get intimidated by the fact that I can’t easily move things around on paper, or quickly try out different variants of a particular line. Somehow paper is associated with finality, whereas on screen there’s still a liberating provisionality.
New technologies can obviously open up interesting new ground for artists to explore, and they can also assist in more traditional activities; for example, the excellent “Rosegarden” software makes it possible to write some multi-instrument music, and then play it back, in a way that would be difficult without it. However, I’m no advocate for incorporating technology simply for its own sake; there has to be some compelling reason (in terms of artistic intentions or productivity gains). If I wrote more easily on paper, I’d write on paper.
You appear to be a very active blogger which, you’ve said, has helped you overcome your own writer’s block. This is obviously a benefit to blogging but why else do you feel compelled to do it and are there any pitfalls to putting your work in the public sphere in this way? For instance in putting rough work up, etc?
I don’t actually think of myself as a proper blogger, because I’m not writing a conventional blog (is there such a thing?), but simply posting a poem once a week (with an accompanying commentary and usually an audio recording).
The “Poem Of The Week” blog has really turned my creative life around. By 2007 I’d pretty much given up writing, and assumed I’d never produce another poetry collection; feeling that I had nothing to lose, I started the blog as an experimental challenge, just to see what happened. I’d always been a very slow writer, so the goal of writing a new poem every week seemed like an absurdly difficult target. I built up a cushion of six poems before I even started, and figured I might be able to keep it up for maybe three months. The fact that I’ve had the blog for more than two years now, and I haven’t missed a week, still seems unbelievable – and it has given me a new-found faith in creativity’s abundance.
The poems that are posted are always nominally “finished”, but some weeks they’re simply no good. It’s quite painful to have to post the bad ones and leave them up for twelve weeks, but it’s part of the process: I put up with being embarrassed by the bad poems, because the public commitment to the blog helps me write more of the good ones. (Anyway, it’s quite therapeutic for a recovering perfectionist to fail in public from time to time!) I also like to hope it’s encouraging for new writers to see so-called professionals producing spectacular failures on a regular basis. None of us should ever be afraid to experiment; a failure’s just a failure, not a huge black stain on one’s character.
A lot of poets seem reluctant to put any work on the internet. (I’d assumed this was because poetry magazines wouldn’t subsequently accept it, but that hasn’t been my experience; most of the UK magazines I’ve asked are happy to consider work that has appeared briefly on a personal blog and then been taken down again.) I get particularly frustrated by poets’ websites that provide long lists of publication credits but no actual poems. Don’t dazzle us with the length and breadth of your publication track record; show us some poems and let us decide for ourselves if we like your work.
In poems like ‘The questions that go at first unanswered’ and ‘My life as a B movie’, you seem to be interested in the spaces after the ‘typical’ narrative has ended. Is this curiosity about those untold stories a strong motivation when you’re writing?
I’ve never thought about it that way before! I suppose one thing that I’m obsessively interested in is psychological undercurrents: the thoughts that aren’t expressed, the feelings that aren’t acknowledged, the events that aren’t mentioned. I’ve long been fascinated by how we can hide such things even from ourselves. There’s a terrible loneliness inherent in being divided (by denial, repression or whatever) from your own authentic self; perhaps this is why loneliness of various kinds has been a recurring theme in my writing.
Currently you’re working with PoetryAid to raise funds for UNICEF by selling off the remaining copies of your earlier collection, ‘Tails’, and donating the proceeds to this charity. How did you get involved in this? What inspired you to feel so strongly about this cause?
In 2008 I acknowledged that, four years on from publication, any remaining copies of ‘Tails’ were destined to sit in a warehouse – such a waste! – unless I did something with them. Like many writers, I felt extremely uncomfortable about going out and trying to sell my book – it seemed embarrassing and boastful. (I acknowledge that this is a pretty irrational attitude if you’ve already accepted commercial publication of your work, but it’s not uncommon…)
I decided that if I could sell the books for a good cause, without making a profit myself, I wouldn’t find it so humiliating. Fortunately that proved to be the case: by deciding to give all the profit to UNICEF, I felt empowered enough to attempt my own amateurish experiments with sales’n'marketing. (I should note that I was also glad to be doing something to support Bloodaxe, who had taken a chance on me by publishing the book in the first place: poetry publishing is a terribly marginal business).
I chose UNICEF because I was already a regular donor. No large charity is without its inefficiencies, but I feel that UNICEF have the resources and the experience to make a difference, and to support long-term projects in “unfashionable” locations not featured in the latest TV news. Within reason, I don’t think it matters what particular reputable charity you support; the most important thing is that you do it. I prefer to support a charity working in the Third World because I feel incredibly blessed to be living in a wealthy country that provides free healthcare and at least a basic welfare net, a country that is not riven by war or famine; in this respect, we in the West occupy an incredibly privileged position in history. I feel it’s a duty – a joyful human duty – for we, the lucky, to share some of our resources. When I no longer have children to support – another (mostly) joyful duty! – I hope to be able to donate more abundantly. At the moment I feel like a terrible hypocrite for saying “I’m a charity supporter” when I compare what I give with what I have.
And finally, what was the last book you felt guilty for enjoying?
Here’s an admission that really does make me feel guilty – I don’t read nearly enough! By force of circumstance, our daily routine right now involves getting up very early (which, to be fair, has been great for my writing productivity). Sadly, since I need an absurdly large amount of sleep, this requires falling asleep very early too. My natural timeslot for reading is last thing at night, and so I don’t get nearly enough reading in. (If I don’t get enough sleep, I can’t do anything creative the next day – so sleep always trumps!) I could really do with an extra life or two, to give me some chance of fitting everything in!
Interview by Ruth Hallinan
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Some handy links
Kona’s website: http://www.konamacphee.com/
Kona’s writing blog: http://www.thingwright.com/
News story: http://www.konamacphee.com/news.php?story=12
Poetry Aid for UNICEF: http://www.konamacphee.com/poetryaid.php
