Nigel Featherstone on fear and feeling like a fraud

As first lines go, Nigel Featherstone knew he was onto a cracker with this one.

Familial tension boiling over, a hurried departure with the sun barely peeking over the horizon, promising a journey of some kind in the following pages.

It's also violent, leaving many layers to be uncovered. Could he do it, or should he ditch it for something safer?

Then he recalled an essay he'd written back in 2021, about the fearless writing of Christos Tsiolkas, an author he deeply admires.

It was time for him to be fearless too.

And the book that emerged, My Heart Is A Little Wild Thing (Ultimo Press), was like something from a fever dream of writing to a self-imposed deadline after months - years even - of thwarted attempts to write what he calls a "rural" book - one set in the landscape, out of the city and partly in the wild.

Eventually, with certain pivotal scenes in his head, he gave himself a talking to.

"I remember saying to myself - I had to go to Sydney on the train in two weeks' time - and I went, I want this f***ing novel done by the time I get on the train," he says.

And so it happened - two weeks of furious writing, with something resembling a first draft at the end.

"I remember finishing it, standing up in my writing room, and just staring out the window for 20 minutes," he says.

"And I remember going, I've been on a journey."

Featherstone is someone who can only be described as a writer's writer, both in terms of his output and his outlook.

Quiet and erudite, bespectacled and vastly well read, a self-described "natural hermit", he loves nothing more than to read, enthuse and gossip about books, to re-read and revel in the greats, to reach for his heroes, to marvel at the process - of imagining, creating, conjuring people and scenes on the page.

He's also what some might describe as a pillar of the local writing community; although he's lived in Goulburn for the past 12 years, he identifies firmly as a Canberra artist, working one day a week at the Canberra Writers Centre since 2013.

A constant champion for his fellow Canberra writers, literary writers, gay writers, his fellow lovers of the written word, his conversation is peppered with names. But they're just as likely to be people he admires (Tsiolkas, Delia Falconer, Hemingway) as those he knows well.

It's an all-in commitment, you might say, to the writer's ethos. Why is it, then, that on more than one occasion, he's spoken on the record and without any irony, of his constant sense of being an impostor, a fraud, a pretender, regularly convinced that nothing he writes is any good?

This, from the author of three novels, three novellas, a play, a libretto, at least 50 short stories, and at least 120 non-fiction articles and essays.

This from a writer who, more than 20 years ago, made a personal commitment to write every single day, no matter what, and has done so ever since. Who has a special room in his house (see above) just for writing. Who writes in longhand, page after page, sometimes, he says, so intensely his nose is almost touching the paper.

And he arrives for our interview armed with, as proof, a stack of notebooks and anecdotes about the exquisite pain, torture and joy of writing his latest novel, My Heart is a Little Wild Thing; he's an author who has always been remarkably open and generous about sharing his process.

What I'm trying to convey is that the jig is up; Featherstone is the real deal.

"No, but really, it goes way back," he says.

"See, here is a note saying, 'I just want to write one good book and then I'll never have to do it again' - here." He's showing me the words scribbled down in his own handwriting.

"I said that to [author] Marion Halligan, and she said, 'No, you'll do one, and then you'll want to do another one'."

And she was right, of course.

His first two novels were critically acclaimed; 2019's Bodies of Men, a story of two Australian World War II soldiers who become lovers, is still making waves. His book reviews for The Canberra Times are legion; these days he prefers to review only debut works, as he would never consider overlooking an author's entire back catalogue before critiquing their latest. He just doesn't have the time for that these days.

And his latest work is one he describes as a personal novel, although it's clearly fiction. Nevertheless, its provocative opening sentence is one that he agonised and soul-searched over, wondering whether it was just too much.

In fact, it sets the temperature to hot right from the start, and yet the book is, ostensibly, a quiet and contemplative one. It's a fictional memoir of a quiet person. Patrick is stoic, accepting, and beset with a middle-aged anxiety that, along with the decline of his mother, is propelling him on a - still quiet - journey of discovery, one that will finally let his heart be wild.

It's a personal novel, but it's not autobiographical, although it certainly reads like it could be.

Except that the protagonist bears no resemblance to Featherstone whatsoever. A quiet, single man, Patrick has settled for a small-town life without a family, in order to care for his elderly mother, who is steadily succumbing to dementia. He's gay, but has never been in a relationship. He has writing ambitions, but has never fully realised them.

The resulting narrative force had, for Featherstone, various sparks that set it in motion. One involved participating in a workshop during the drafting phase, led by acclaimed author Charlotte Wood.

"Charlotte talked about heat - there's either heat on the page or there isn't," she told him. "And you've just gone and written 120 pages of handwritten prose based on that opening sentence - there's got to be a lot of power in it. And it just went from there."

Patrick drives across the Monaro, to an country retreat that figured in his childhood, and reflects on his life, and what he has become. His personal story unfolds, patiently; he spies a rare spotted quoll, and tries to follow it. Along the way, he meets a man who changes his life.

It turns out the rare creature, the quoll, had been lurking in Featherston's subconscious for years. He later found a scribbled sentence, and a printed article, among his notes that he had forgotten about, well after the novel was under way.

It's a funny thing, how life paths are chosen. Featherstone was born in 1968, the youngest of three brothers. His father was a dentist and artist (and is exhibiting work well into his 90s), and his mother an early childhood teacher and bookseller; the two had a volatile relationship and divorced long ago.

He grew up on Sydney's North Shore, and decided to look beyond that world early on; he moved to Canberra at 18 to study landscape architecture at the University of Canberra. He did, he says, work as a landscape architect for a while but "wasn't very good at it".

By then committed to the local arts community, from 2005 to 2010 he worked at ArtsACT. "I got up at 5am every morning and wrote during those years," he says.

He moved to Goulburn in 2010, and has been a full-time writer ever since. He and his long-term partner, Tim Phillips, met in 1997 when Featherstone was 29. The couple live in separate houses and cities - Phillips works at Parliament House and lives in Queanbeyan.

When Featherstone began writing Wild Thing, his head was in the memoir space; his mother had died between Christmas and New Year, 2018. In an essay published in 2019, he wrote about her last months, as she too was engulfed by dementia. Parts of the essay are echoed in the novel.

"The book is filled with truths," he says.

"Two things happened when mum died. I actually did think, who the f*** is she?" he says.

"She was a feminist. She was fierce, had a terrible relationship with my father. And we weren't completely reconciled. We did have ups and downs.

"But Patrick is trying to record his mother, so I think he teaches me how you can do this."

Also lurking on the fringes of this book, though never quite visible, is Duende, the devil muse that should sit on the shoulder of any writer. It was another fellow Canberra writer, the poet Melinda Smith, who first introduced him to the concept.

"You've got the muse that goes, let's write beautiful stuff. And then you've got the devil, the goblin muse over there going no, let's talk about weird f***ing shit," he says.

"And for Melinda, Duende encourages her to write poems that people tell her that she shouldn't write."

He had already thought a lot about fearless writing, that of his hero Tsiolkas. It was time, he says, to be fearless himself.

"I just thought, I'm just not going to follow the nice muse - I'm now following Duende," he says.

"Whenever I have a creative choice, I could write a nice thing or I could write something that's really going to be very uncomfortable. I just kept on going with the uncomfortable."

There was a question hanging there - what if Featherstone had obeyed his own mother, back when he was deciding where his own life was going?

"She didn't want me to be gay, didn't want me to be a writer, and she once said 'You should live in the same street and look after me'. And in my 20s I went, no, sorry mum."

In a way, then, the story of Patrick could be seen as a story of what could have been for his creator - if the ties that bound him finally began to chafe, and he finally broke free in middle age, after life had been passing him by for decades.

"If I obeyed my mother, what would my life have been like? I'd be closeted, I would have written a couple of stories under a pseudonym, because she did say ''if you want to write, you should write under a pseudonym, because of the embarrassment'," he says.

"She didn't come to any of my events, ever."

Her excuse, he said, had always been that she would never be in the same room as his father, under any circumstances.

And yet, as he writes in his essay, when he and his brothers were organising her things close to the end of her life, one of them came across a large file, filled with everything Featherstone had ever published. Book reviews in The Canberra Times (of which there have been many dozens over the years), reviews of his own works, articles, essays, even mentions of upcoming events - all carefully clipped and filed away.

So, it seems, even his own late mother knew better than him that he was the real deal, even if she never let on.