Parley with Tom Cho.

Tom Cho

Throughout the festival, I thought I might entice authors into the broom cupboard with me for a little chat. My first victim was Tom Cho, whose book Look Who’s Morphing was shortlisted for The Age Fiction Book of the Year.

I don’t think we can talk about ‘Tom Cho’ and ‘Melbourne Writers Festival’ without discussing a prank you once pulled.
Are you referring to my bid to lower the quality of the festival blog by having greater attention paid to the sexual innuendos in MWF session titles?

Well, there was a little MWF parody program project I once organised. I wrote a fake MWF program in 2002, and a bunch of other writers joined me in mass photocopying it and distributing it at the festival.

Recently, I had a chat to a writer I’m interviewing for MWF, Josephine Emery. She said to me that she thinks it’s essential for people to live with contradiction. She was talking about something very different but, afterwards, I thought about my MWF parody program and my appearance at MWF and thought, “Hmm. She could be right about that…”

Actually, I think my appearance at MWF reflects not so much an issue of contradiction but more a challenge of positioning and vested interests. One of the most interesting things the parody program exposes is the difficulties of critiquing writers festivals when one has a stake in them.

At the same time, I don’t wish to over-estimate the prank either. It was also just a little stunt pulled by a bunch of young scallywag writers that’s destined to be forgotten except for the fact that I still mention it on my website and that I also added it to the Wikipedia entry for MWF and that we’re talking about it now and that it will be associated with me for the rest of my career.

Your book Look Who’s Morphing uses short fiction formats to examine facets of identity. How did you decide on the title?
I went for the old trick of ‘name your fiction collection after the title of one of the stories’. My publisher and I looked at the list of stories and, at one stage, we actually did discuss calling the collection ‘Pinocchio’. Looking back, even if the notion of morphing neatly encapsulates the spirit of the collection and its ironies, I now realise that the collection really should have been called “AIYO!!! An evil group of ninjas is entering and destroying a call centre!!!”

Among other transformations, the characters in your book turn into muppets, giant rock and roll gods and celebrities. What’s the deal?
I thought these were all tropes of Australian literature?

Anyhoo, to better answer your question, the book draws strongly upon popular culture to explore its central theme of personal identity. Perhaps the question most often attached to personal identity is “Who am I?” But some of the more interesting questions of identity include “Who am I becoming?” and “Who do I want to be?” These were questions that became of great interest as I wrote the book. As a result, Look Who’s Morphing is filled with some audacious fantasies of transformation.

Another interesting, pivotal question of identity is “If you were a Muppet, what Muppet would you be?”

What are you reading at the moment?
I’m about to read the books of my fellow panellists for another writers’ festival that I’ll be appearing at. I wish I could get out of reading the books right now — not because the books don’t look interesting but purely because life is so busy and I wish I could read the books at my leisure. Another writer has given me tips on how to look like I’ve read the books. It involves the use of post-it notes to suggest a studious, close reading.

Have you checked out any MWF sessions so far?
I went to the launch of Verandah yesterday. Verandah is the literary journal attached to Deakin University’s Professional Writing program. I did my undergraduate studies in Professional Writing at Deakin and I’m also just about to finish my PhD there too, so I’ve had a long association with the journal. It was good to go there and see old friends.

I have booked in for some more MWF sessions — they’re all still to come. Although, having re-read the MWF program yesterday to uncover its hidden sexual subtext, I really wish I’d picked different sessions.

Thanks, Tom!

http://www.tomcho.com

Estelle Tang, 3000 BOOKS
Festival Blogger