Will Heyward: I like the epigraph to Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs where you say: “I should never have tried to write fiction or nonfiction or even anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.” And you say something similar in Barley Patch about rejecting the words novel and short story.
Gerald Murnane: There’s a piece in Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs that I first presented and delivered as a speech. I wrote conscientiously wrote for months about the effect on me of Proust. It started out as autobiography, but most of it is just pure fiction. I can’t say that I ever experienced half the things I wrote about in that, but it made for a good piece of writing. I presented it as an essay, but I would comfortably put it in a book of fiction. That suggests to me, if not tells me, that there is a very fine line between the two.
WH: This way you have come to understand the act of writing…
GM: I’m no closer. It’s a mystery. When you start to put down words your own personality becomes fractured. You’re never quite sure what part of you the words are coming from. It’s a fairly trite statement, but you begin to question the reliability of memory or even experience itself. What emerges from the writing is something that could never have been predicted. This is the magic, that writing is unpredictable. It leads to discovery, and that is a word that is overused and has a sort of twee sound, and it’s not a word I feel comfortable with. But you learn from writing things you couldn’t possibly learn by any other means.
To read this entire extensive interview, purchase Music & Literature no. 3...