Author to Author with Craig Cormick

My name is Craig Cormick and I am what might be termed genre-promiscuous – in that I write across all kinds of genres – literary fiction, speculative fiction, kids books, historical non-fiction etc etc… I am lucky in that I just go where the interest takes me – but there is often a speculative bent.

I spent my professional life as a science communicator and always had a penchant for history and my writing tends to range between those – often straying into speculative fiction waters.

I have published close on 50 books – across lots of genres and have also been lucky to win quite a few very nice awards – twice shortlisted for an Aurelias Award, shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Literary Award – twice won ACT Book of the Year Award, won the NSW Premier’s History Award, and won quite a few short story awards – and a few others, but yeah that’ll do.

The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke

This story showed me how a last line could turn an average story into a brain-turning stupendous clout.

It is about a Tibetan monastery who install a computer to list all the possible names of God – believing that is the purpose of their existence – and once achieved, there is no other purpose to existence.

And the narrator is going down the path from the monastery at the end and looks up and “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Understated and powerful. Amazing.

Cathal’s Lake by Colum McCann

This is a story that I got to the end of and realised I’d been transported away somewhere – and had to go back to and try and find the trick, the key, the device that did that – but of course I couldn’t find it. That’s not how awesomely great writing works.

I am so impressed by this story – and the whole collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, that I press it upon up and coming authors and say – Read them all – find the voice within your soul that resonates with them.

It is a very simple story – but so sad and poignant – about the Irish Troubles – and I can’t tell you too much more in case you want to find it and read it, but it starts with a farmer in a small farm in rural Ireland looking out the window and thinking to himself. “It’s a sad Sunday when a man has to dig another swan from the soil.” 

The sort of story that follows you around for days (or in my case, years).

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel García Márquez

I discovered magic realism while at university and thought – finally a genre that blends myth and reality into its own truth.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the starting point for most people to engage with (Cien años de soledad), but I would argue this story is a better starting point.

In the story an old couple find an old, winged man has crashed into their chicken coup – and rather than see him as an aged angel – they imprison him turn him into a side-show spectacle.

A very short and simple story – but so deep with metaphors that you’d swear you just read a thesis on religion and consumerism and the history of South American colonialism.

Small things like these by Claire Keegan

As I get older I find it harder to find stories that affect me way that stories did when I was young – when my brain was a big empty chamber waiting to be filled with ideas – so I was so surprised to find this story hitting me so hard. 

It has just been made into a film and I am putting off watching it, fearing that they might not do the story justice. Another story set in rural Ireland – this time dealing with the Irish Magdalene Laundries – where unmarried mothers and children were put to work in terrible conditions by an authoritarian church. It is a story of moral choices and injustice and things said and unsaid – and the things you know as the reader that the characters might not. Some stories need just the right place and time to read them too – and I saved this one up to read inside a Belgium Cloister (long story there in itself) and the setting might have helped it do its job more than sitting in bed or in a café ever could.

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Some people are born with LOTR, some people achieve LOTR and some people have it thrust upon them. I was in the last category. This is included both for its influence on me as a reader and how I came to it.

I remember one day at the old Curtin Library in the 1970s, when I was in year 5 or 6, running into the school bully and thinking Uh-oh! But he said, ‘Hey, you want to read a good book – read this!’ And he thrust a copy of The Fellowship of the Rings at me. Hardback edition. Covered in thick plastic some librarian had wrapped it in. Slightly yellowed pages.

When he had gone I opened the book – didn’t love the first line “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton”- but then I opened the map of the back of the book and I was hooked.

It was like a story I had always been waiting to read – and all those Commando Comic, the Phantom and Conan the Barbarian comics were just practice for it. But I had to share the book with my twin brother – and so we read bits and then would give it to other to catch up so we could talk about it.