Kill Your Darlings Podcast #12: True Story

This incredibly honest, mainly truthful edition of the KYD Podcast delves into the fact behind the fiction, the origins of inspiration and – all right, perhaps a bit of truth bending as well.

Inside Catriona Menzies-Pike speaks about her book The Long Run (and her experience as a self-designated ‘crap athlete’), Maxine Beneba Clarke discusses her profiles for The Saturday Paper (including the one she sort of made up) and Hannah Kent talks to Liam Pieper about his debut novel, The Toymaker.

That last one’s just a selection – if you’d like the full conversation between Hannah and Liam, you can find it here. On Killings you can also find Stephanie Convery’s review of The Long Run.

You can stream the podcast above or on Soundcloud, or subscribe on iTunes or your favourite podcasting app.

TRANSCRIPT

LIAM PIEPER: He’s misogynistic, he’s sexist, he’s…

MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE: We got allocated nine minutes.

CATRIONA MENZIES-PIKE: It’s your body, it’s in public space.

MBC: (Laughs) I was like, yes, it was! You had sex with your teacher!

CMP: I was really really surprised…

LP: What happened, but that’s one person…

CMP: To find myself running, and enjoying it.

LP: Those little bits of reality that you take out to string together into your fantastical world.

MBC: I feel like the reader also wants to know what it’s like to be in the room with that person.

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MEAGHAN DEW: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. Today we are looking for the truth, or at least the fact behind the fiction. We spoke to Catriona Menzies-Pike about her book The Long Run, and dipped into the origins of Liam Pieper’s departure from memoir with The Toymaker. But first, with three books released, or to be released, this year, I decided to speak with Maxine Beneba Clarke about none of them, and instead asked a few questions about her profiles for The Saturday Paper.

SoI guess the first question to start with is, do you select your subjects, or the people you are doing profiles on, or are they sort of allocated to you?

MBC: Most of them I select myself. Occasionally, I think I have done, probably, about 25 or 26 portraits now, and I think five or six of them have been allocated. So I am very lucky that I have an editor who kind of, you know, was in pursuit, I guess, people that I’m interested in talking to.

MD: And like a lot of people, I first encountered your writing through Foreign Soil. Did you have a background in non-fiction before your collection? Or did this opportunity come around, sort of, in part as a result of your other written work?

MBC: I, so, I started out as a poet, doing spoken word, and then moved on to Foreign Soil, and this did come out of Foreign S