MWF 2010 authors on… alcohol

I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.

Kirsten Tranter

Charles Baudelaire

I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler while writing my novel, among other things, and one of the things that kind of seeped into my own writing was a ridiculous amount of drinking. Reading his stories and novels sometimes it seems as though characters pour themselves another drink after every two or three lines of dialogue. If you look at the picture of Ray in this gallery of drunks and addicts you will understand. I decided to take out some of the drinking in my book after feedback from two of my first readers. I didn’t want it to be that noticeable. There’s still too much tea drinking in there, but that’s ok I guess.

Kathy Charles

I’m not allowed to drink anymore because it contributes to my migraines. If you encounter me at the festival please excuse my social awkwardness.

Chris Womersley

Alcohol? Never touch it.

Emmett Stinson

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all writers must be drunks (although it could also be said that many drinkers happen to be writers), but, like most universally acknowledged truths, this assertion is in want of a correction: not only do writers drink, but they also sometimes write about drinking. Shakespeare does this through the character of the Porter in Macbeth, who argues that drinking ‘is a great provoker of three things’, including ‘nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery… it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance’, which (if you’re of those people inclined to believe that all writing is autobiography) may provide a little bit more information about Shakespeare than you wanted to know. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ John Keats also yearns for a drop, calling ‘for a draught of vintage! that hath been/Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth’, but apparently he couldn’t hold his liquor very well, as his description of inebriation illustrates: ‘a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,’ which basically proves that even drunk Keats was a bit of a downer. Thomas Love Peacock (whose name almost reads like a transitive sentence describing an amoral act) loved to wax philosophical about liquor, arguing that ‘There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it,’ which just goes to prove that if you’re looking for a reason you will invariably find it.

Angela says…

See my post on the creative ‘spirit‘.

Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.