The Big Idea: Trent Jamieson

Posted on July 21, 2022    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

With all things in life, balance is the key. This is also true for author Trent Jamieson’s newest novel, The Stone Road. Follow along with this Big Idea to see how he found balance between novels, and in his own life.

TRENT JAMIESON:

A week after I turned forty, the seventh cranial nerve on the right-hand side of my face was severely damaged by an infection, I literally woke up to a different face in the mirror. I couldn’t speak clearly, I couldn’t blink my right eye, the right side of my face drooped painfully: everything changed. 

I went back to work a couple of days later, and after the tenth person asked me what was wrong, and I mumbled my response for the tenth time (Bell’s Palsy is almost impossible to say when you have it) I sat in the storage cupboard behind the counter at the bookstore where I work and cried.

I’d written five novels in the previous couple of years, and I was exhausted. Everything had been rush, rush, rush, while holding down a day job, and teaching at night. My life was a wreck, and I’d lost the face that I’d known all my life. I needed to slow down. But it’s a risk to slow down. All my books had been fast-paced, rollercoaster rides, that rattled from scene to scene. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to write novels any other way. I wasn’t sure if I slowed down that I would even have a writing career left.

The answer was in my short fiction. Before I ever really thought about writing novels, I had been a short story writer. Bittersweet was my happy place. Slower, more reflective work the kind of material I leaned into. It was the sort of fantasy that I liked to read as well, the Earthsea Books in particular, but I had never been confident enough to bring it into my fiction.

I had been working on a novel based on a short story of mine called Day Boy. It was a dystopian fantasy about a wild kid that worked for a vampire in a small country town. It was a book of grim fathers and violent sons, and the choices we all must make between dark and light. It was epic in a quiet way, it was a heart breaking, and an angry voice shouting defiance. I decided to write it as an episodic novel, building slowly to a wild ending, a sort of violence as dislocating and sudden as losing your face to Bell’s Palsy.

Day Boy was the best book that I had ever written, and people liked it. It even won two Aurealis awards, and was short-listed for a few other prizes.

But I felt it needed another story to balance it. And that balance found itself in The Stone Road. It is a book of grandmothers and granddaughters and the boundaries that they must walk to protect their town. I imagined it in a weirder, wilder part of the Day Boy world, and I wanted it to address the violence at the heart of Day Boy. 

Like Day Boy, it had begun as a short story, but it went in directions that I had never expected. In Day Boy, the vampires protect people from the monsters that threaten their communities by fighting them, in The Stone Road, Jean and her grandmother must deal with monsters by outsmarting them. It’s a book about community, death and family secrets: a slow burning fire that blazes by the end. 

Both books reflected my bewilderment at life, at the abrupt change I found in the mirror, and both taught me a lot. That there is power in the quiet and the slow, and that resilience isn’t found quickly, and even when it’s found it’s fragile, but we move on. We have to.

It’s been a decade since I got Bells, my face never quite recovered, I have a crooked smile, my right eye waters when I eat, and sometimes the nerve will start ticking in my eyelid or locking up when I am nervous or tired. My body will never let me forget. I wrote these two, quiet books, about community, and fathers and sons, and grandmothers and granddaughters, and I became a father myself. My life is richer, different, but it’s still me. I write for the joy it gives me, no matter how hard writing often is. 

I look back at that sad broken person who started their forties, and I hardly recognise him, but together we took the path into the quiet, slower places, and we’ve done alright. You can tear yourself apart, but you can also put yourself back together again. Maybe that’s a little idea, I don’t know, but it feels big to me.

The Stone Road: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s website. Follow him on Twitter.