An unfortunately brief encounter with Damien Wilkins

Newsroom

20-05-2025

I interviewed Damien Wilkins for an hour the morning after his beautiful novel Delirious won the $65,000 fiction prize at the Ockham book awards last Wednesday night in Auckland, but the tape recording went awry and only kept the opening question and answer, and another question and answer around about 40 minutes later. This was most unfortunate and has left an elliptical transcript of our interview which reads like a man wandering into a room at random intervals to make interesting remarks, and then taking his leave.
We met at the Sky City Hotel, where guests of the Auckland Writers Festival are given lodgings. He is 61 years old and moves with the languid, physical grace that in his teens made him a promising footballer with the wonderfully named club Stop Out. He was dressed in jeans slung low on his slender hips and a striped buttoned shirt. He has blue eyes which shyly peep out beneath low eyelids with a kind of melancholy. But he has a boyish smile which he will likely never grow out of. He spoke at length and with considerable charm. As director of the IIML writing school at Victoria University, he is one of the most well-liked figures in New Zealand literature, a calming and generous influence in the lives of hundreds of students. He was raised in Woburn, in Lower Hutt, as one of seven children who had the run of a large house. He said that his father, a mountaineer soon to reach 100, was like the eighth child, and told a story about how his Dad would take turns with the kids to lick the pudding bowl. His mother has dementia in a nursing home. She is a model for one of his characters in Delirious, and he also drew on the death of his sister Miriam. The book has tragedy in it – the pages inhabit a particular quietness of grief when the protagonists, Pete and Mary, are taken to identify the body of their young son – but it's also very funny, and expertly crafted. He worked on it for about three years and had a hot streak when he wrote a lot of it in three months.
'Thank you so much,' he said to the woman who passed by after cleaning his room. We conducted the interview on furniture at the end of a carpeted corridor. Wilkins lounged on a sofa and I sat at his feet on a kind of pouffe. Wellington author Noelle McCarthy also passed by; she spied my copy of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Series 1, the model I used for my questioning of Wilkins, and enthused, 'Oh! How great! I can't wait to read your talk with Damien!' The two remaining fragments may allow some insight into the writing practice of the winner of the richest prize in New Zealand literature.
I recently interviewed Catherine Chidgey on the craft of fiction, and she described this kind of obsessive mathematic of writing 400 words a day, every day for 18 months. I wondered whether the oxen of your work also strained under such an exhausting yoke.
They do not. They do not. I have never been a writer with a certain productivity in mind. And if I look back on some of my books, I'm a bit horrified by the erratic pattern of my production model. I mean, there's no pattern. There's nothing. It's just an enthusiasm which lasts for about, you know, six months and might go away for a bit and then return.
And I've never held to a word count every day, even though I tell my students this is what you should do. I do believe in word count as a thing to help you through, because it's compounding interest. Four hundred words is not 400 words. It's actually 800 words because by writing 400 words, you've written the beginnings of another 400 words by your choices you made in those 400 words.
So the compounding interest idea of fiction, I totally believe that. But I've just never been able to have the kind of Maurice Gee or Catherine Chidgey discipline of sitting down every day to write. It's just so boring. I just can't bear to.
Delirious is his 11th novel. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, and an essay published in 2002 by Four Winds Press, When Famous People Come To Town, that was at once intellectually exhilarating and a comedy routine of one hilarious zinger after another. It was on the strength of the essay that I declared in the Listener magazine, 'Damien Wilkins is unable to write a bad sentence.' I hold to this conviction. His style has been used against him by critics who are suspicious that it implies a lack of substance. Dunedin author Breton Dukes laid waste to this fallacy in his Landfall review of Delirious. 'Wilkins gets called a clever writer. He's a good educator, he's brilliant at craft, so the nonsense conclusion is that he can't also possess emotional force. He's incredibly eloquent and funny in a knowing way, so maybe also he's too neat, with the haircut, those muted tones of his slim-fitting cardigans? But—he always delivers power. See his YA book Aspiring. See Max Gate, his marvellous book about Thomas Hardy. However, I think Delirious hits hardest.'
What are the responsibilities of using the stories or lives of others?
Well, the first call you've got to make is can you do it. And I think I struggle with this a little bit with the writers that come through the IIML. Their worry is, 'Oh, I can't do that.' I say to them, 'Well, you haven't done it yet. Can you do it? And then we'll decide whether it's actually got to where it's even alive.'
I think there's a bit of a cart before the horse thing at that point. You know, I want writers to approach material that they might feel hesitant about, write it, and then we can think about it rather than decide, 'Oh yeah, it's inappropriate for you to take on that material', or 'You shouldn't because it's going to make you feel bad, or it's going to make your mother feel bad.'
We don't know whether your mother is going to feel bad if it's actually alive as a piece of writing. Your mother might be very proud, happy. So that's the first thing you've got to get over. And I think that's a live question for every writer. You know, 'Can I touch this?'
My mother is still alive and she's in the dementia ward, so the question was, 'Is it right to write now?' Because surely the writer waits until someone's died. There's an end to it. But what I was curious about is not the end, but the ongoingness of it.
So that's how I rationalise it for myself. The ongoingness of our mother's condition and the kind of weird ways in which she's been reinvented as a person. That was the story for me, not the idea of a terminus, that it's all finished.
So drawing the emotional resonance for me was the ongoingness of it, which kind of chimed for me with Pete and Mary's story of their relationship to the life and death of their son. The idea that you might put away a trauma in a certain drawer and then someone somehow would open it or really you hadn't put it away at all.
And so the responsibility is that you have to do it well, that the language has to be good, that you have to do it with precision and enough detail to make that alive for readers. You know, I could never write this as a memoir. I could never imagine trying to do it. I would feel extremely strange and uncomfortable about sort of writing it as 'I', you know, like, 'I walk into the room and I see my sister.' That for me would feel very hard.
It's just not the way I'm built as a writer to then convert those sort of conversations into straight memoir. I need to displace it. I need to give it to someone else. I need to give it to characters.
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He said the essential thing in any story are the characters. He said he never wrote anything in longhand. He said he did not take notes or rely on a chart. He likened his writing process to drawing things out of a container; I asked if he saw it as a shipping container, something immense and heavy, but he said he always had in mind an oval bowl, something slippery and smooth.
Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) was named the ReadingRoom literary awards of 2024 as Best Novel as well as Best Book of any kind, and won the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham national book awards on May 14. It is available in bookstores nationwide.