CARL NIXON Writer

Words: Philip Matthews Image: Joseph Johnson

"Violence is the way to solve problems, that's what stories are telling us these days.''

The south of France. Those words prompt all sorts of glittering images. You think of Cannes, you think of Nice, you think of St Tropez and if you are a particular kind of New Zealander, you think of Menton.

It is an outpost, a site of pilgrimages, maybe even a branch office. Since the 1970s eminent New Zealand writers have been picked to spend about six months working in Katherine Mansfield’s old writing room in a house called Villa Isola Bella. Everyone from Janet Frame to Michael King to Elizabeth Knox has had a go – it is like a Gallipoli for local writers.

Wellington poet Kate Camp is just finishing her stay. Christchurch writer Carl Nixon is going next year.

Nixon and his wife will take their two teenagers out of school for some deep French language immersion. He has a novel in progress with an English setting; after Menton, he skips over to London for some research.

Does the Arts Foundation, which oversees the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, require anything specifically French to follow? Not really.

‘‘Basically they’re just giving you the opportunity to break up your writing life. The farthest I ever travel is from here to my home office,’’ he jokes.

But perhaps the hope is that some of the Mansfield magic rubs off on other writers. Is Nixon invested in the Mansfield legend?

‘‘In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge Katherine ....’’ he says, and pauses. ‘‘I respect and like the short stories but maybe it’s because I’m a guy, I’ve never really got into the life of Katherine Mansfield. It didn’t ring my bells personally.

‘‘When I was looking for inspiration in writers, I was looking at people like Owen Marshall and Maurice Gee – that later generation who were writing when I was a teenager. This is what it meant to be a New Zealand writer.’’

Marshall, Gee, Nixon: is there a school of white male realism? He partially agrees but adds that Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning the bone people was a key book for him as well. He wants good writing in service of a good story. Plodding realism bores him but ‘‘a wallow, where you read just for the sake of the words’’ doesn’t do it for him either.

Asked to identify the kind of writing he likes and aspires to, Nixon leaps up and approaches one of two large bookshelves in the lounge of his home in the wooded hills above Christchurch. He reaches for some Australians: Tim Winton, Peter Temple, Murray Bail, Roger McDonald.

From the local scene, he loved Lloyd Jones’ The Book of Fame: ‘‘Rugby guys going to England on tour in 1905 but almost poetry. I really like that juxtaposition, and that’s what a lot of those people do in some form or other.’’

Nixon adapted The Book of Fame as a play for the stage. Other plays include one about Barry Crump, titled Crumpy, a version of South African writer JM Coetzee’s award-winning novel Disgrace and a religious comedy called Matthew,

Mark, Luke and Joanne. And rather than being a novelist who ventured into theatre, he went the other way.

He was in an improv troupe at Christchurch’s Court Theatre when he became interested in stories. He started writing children’s plays for the Court – about 15 of them in total. He also wrote a young adult novel, Guardians of Mother

Earth.

But writing for grown-ups goes back 20 years to when he won a Sunday Star

Times competition, judged by Owen Marshall, with the first short story he ever wrote, ‘‘My Father Running with a Dead Boy’’.

‘‘That was a real boost, maybe I can do this,’’ he remembers thinking. At the age of just 30, he had resolved to write full time.

According to legend, the famously reclusive and forbidding Coetzee approved of Nixon’s plan to adapt his novel after he read and liked that winning short story.

It appeared in a collection called Fish

‘n’ Chip Shop Song, which Nixon agrees has one word too many in the title. There have been three novels: Rocking Horse

Road, Settlers’ Creek and The Virgin and the Whale.

The third was a deliberate departure, an attempt at a female-focused and historical novel, following two novels that were roughly contemporary and very male, ‘‘partly for the challenge and partly because it’s primarily women who read novels’’. Set in New Zealand straight after World War I, the book has a female nurse telling stories about a balloon adventure to her young son and a man who lost his memory in the war.

When it appeared in Germany its title was Lucky Newman because, in all seriousness, the publisher was concerned that German readers would see The Virgin and the Whale as a pornographic title.

The German connection came about when New Zealand was the featured country at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2012. Publishing house Weidle Verlag picked Nixon as its Kiwi author and all three novels have now appeared in Germany, with Rocking Horse Road, which got to keep its specifically Christchurch-linked title, making German lists of top crime novels.

There are two questions writers are asked by the public. Where do ideas come from and can you make a living? In Nixon’s case, the answer to the second is yes. Plays generally pay better than novels and writing for film and TV is more lucrative still. He has just been adapting The Virgin and the Whale for the screen with South Pacific Pictures producing.

‘‘Thematically, it’s about how we create meaning in our lives and identify through storytelling,’’ he says of the book and perhaps the movie.

The theme has been present throughout. Nixon has a masters in religious studies from Canterbury University but when asked, he says he is not religious himself. Instead he is interested in the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works and how we should live our lives.

We all consume stories. But are they good ones, he asks. What do they teach us?

‘‘Most of them are meaningless drivel,’’ he says. ‘‘How much of being male is informed by the stories you watch as a kid? What does it mean to live in a world where Marvel movies bombard us and every single character solves their problems by beating the crap out of other characters?

‘‘Violence is the way to solve problems, that’s what stories are telling us these days. I don’t know how that influences violence in society, that’s a complex issue, but it’s got to have some impact if you grow up with that as your narrative.’’