Petley, Dexter 1955–

PERSONAL: Born June 24, 1955, in Hawkhurst, Kent, England; son of Glady Wyn Henry (a handyman) and Doreen Elizabeth (Josh) Petley; married Alice Stokely Webster, June, 1989 (separated, January, 1997). Education: Attended West Kent College of Further Education, 1971–73. Politics: "Green, radical." Religion: "Atheist." Hobbies and other interests: "Angling, organic gardening, permaculture."

ADDRESSES: Home—Normandy, France. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Fourth Estate, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Casual laborer at farms, timber yards, and factories in Kent, England, 1975–79; English teacher in Khartoum, Sudan, 1979–80, and Uganda, 1980–81; British Broadcasting Corporation World Service, journalist and broadcaster from East Africa, 1981–85; full-time writer, 1995–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Scottish Arts Council Award, 1996, for Little Nineveh; finalist, Dazed and Confused Most Promising Writer Award, 2003, for White Lies; voted best new writer, Angling Writers Association, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Little Nineveh (fiction), Polygon (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1995.

Joyride (fiction), Fourth Estate (London, England), 1999.

White Lies (fiction), Fourth Estate (London, England), 2003.

Contributor to Waterlog.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Jealous Blue, a novel about criminality, creativity, and identity; Pisspot's Sappho, a novel about love and death in 1970; translating the work of Maurice Genevoix from French into English, with Laure Claesen.

SIDELIGHTS: Dexter Petley told CA: "I'm an instinctive writer, comfortable with a term usually reserved in British fiction for novelists who avoid current intellectual or political discourse. I prefer instead to explore what alienates people from this discourse. In writing, as in life, I endeavor to stay clear of all schools, groups, systems. My subjects are unfashionable, my characters normally voiceless outsiders stifled by class, family, poverty, lack of self-esteem, and, above all, a deep sense of failure. I take several years to complete a novel, undergoing a similar voyage to expression as the characters.

"I hope I've developed a distinctive voice which manages to stay provocative and radical. Having so few readers, but blessed by faithful editors, liberates me to continue that process, not just to blur the distinction between prose and poetry, integral to that voice, but more importantly to create a narrative which the reader is invited to 'auralize'; the eye has to 'hear' the words, words which refuse to be speed-read or skipped. This demands a total engagement from the reader, but the intimacy gained forces the reader to confront the subject, which critics always say is bleak, disturbing, and painful, but which for me is simply human truth: one person talking to another. To deserve such attention, I set myself the highest standards of language and authenticity; I use dialect and slang, phonetic spelling, and textual vocabulary which takes on characteristics of the subject or the language of place. If the word I need does not exist, I make it up.

"My writing/fiction influences are mostly non-British, even if my coming to literature at age sixteen was along the usual path of English literature. I copied and mimicked, filling notebooks with dreadful verse. Aged eighteen, I saw some light when I read Sylvia Plath, David Jones, Middlemarch, Rabbit Redux, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky. I didn't see why I couldn't combine them all to produce something extraordinary. My writing took on a narrative drive at least; I looked for emotional authenticity and descriptive power, and soon began to write fiction with the sole aim of becoming a published novelist by the age of forty. (In the event, it took exactly that long.)

"The breakthrough literary influences, as I was struggling in my early twenties with now long-lost novels, were mostly American. Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, for instance, a real turning point, taught me to pinpoint language, to only ever use the perfect word. Then came Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Jayne Ann Philips, Richard Ford's A Piece of My Heart, and Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here—fiction which made me reject the contemporary British novel with its fraudulence, self-parody, its historical backwardness and ponderous up-its-own-arse predictability and preciosity. The domination of creative writing school clones and Booker Prize take-aways (take-outs) made all American fiction seem exciting, fiction which defied the dominance of middle-class, urban settings, an important defiance in my own fictional world.

"I labor long and hard over every sentence (the ten-hour sentence is not unusual), conscious of that need to find a stateless voice, ungrounded and shifting, drafting and redrafting. My first novel, Little Nineveh, was begun in 1984 and rewritten at least twice a year until it was finally published eleven years later. I wish I could rewrite it again. There are fourteen drafts of Joyride, which began in 1989 and wasn't published until 1999. All my projects leap-frog each other, and one current work in progress has traveled with me these last twenty years.

"All writers need a fictional center, an experiential core from which to disperse language into narrative and meaning. Mine is rural childhood in Hawkhurst, my native Kent village. Even if my most important creative developments took place in the five years I lived in London, my fiction revolves around the rural setting. Childhood is not an infinite source of fiction, so with White Lies I've replaced one rural center with another; and as I've lived in France since 1994, Normandy has replaced the Weald of Kent as the fountain of all stories. Urban narratives tend to be temporary and truncated; rural stories endure, take place over vast lengths of time, and for me are more human, less neurotic. Unfortunately, British fiction is urban-centric, and rural or regional subjects have been devalued as the work of minor writers. I'd like to change this.

"I wrote seven novels before the eighth was accepted, and I still get rejection slips to this day, so my advice to any novelist would be distorted by these facts. Self-belief is the only quality you can't fake or disregard. Especially today, when so many publishers are promoting twenty-three-year-old mega-masters, the serious novelist is often in for the long haul toward publication and then recognition. This is not to be confused with self-esteem, which comes and goes, an essential and uncontrollable element in writing.

"Those seven apprentice novels were written in London, mostly on winter nights, with bad heating and a view of a yellow wall. This doesn't work. Nowadays I can't exist without a view of open countryside. Living in a caravan is the perfect writing solution, even if it rubbishes your career, far from the literary crowd. I've opted to live without book signings or self-promotion, commercially suicidal but personally life-enhancing. Life is simplified and elemental, self-sufficient, albeit dependent on old dirt-encrusted Macintosh Powerbooks. I wake up, convert the bed into a desk, coffee on, sit down, and begin writing while the water heats, usually around nine in the morning. Knock off at one or two in the afternoon after a working lunch, then go fishing until after dark, return about eleven at night, write and cook dinner at the same time. In summer I take the laptop to the lake in the afternoons and write until seven in the evening, then fish until midnight. Any reading I do takes place in the early hours. I read two books at once, to balance each other according to mood: one contemporary fiction, the other a detective novel. If a book is still rubbish on page two, I give it away, or if the stove is lit, I'll burn it. I can't have books cluttering up a caravan."