Tim Clare: Not an Astronaut. Is a Published Author

Stand-up poet, writer, musician, presenter of Channel 4's 2005 series How to Get a Book Deal, Tim Clare has been casting his literary canon far and wide, writing for the Guardian, appearing on Radio 1 and 2, and being a resident at legendary literary cabaret night, Homework. His first book, We Can't All Be Astronauts (Ebury Press), is a memoir about chasing your dreams only to find out your friends have made off with them.

In the book, he deconstructs the writing process and the process of turning manuscripts into published works by chasing publishers, agents, coverage and the dream. The book also covers his literary grandfather and his efforts to be creative as a teenager, through writing short stories, making animations and playing games. We thought he'd be perfect to talk to about his reading journey, his work as a performance poet and his obsession with Buddhist self-help books.

> What got you into reading as a child?

I can remember my dad reading me Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, translating the German couplets into English in a very soft, lullaby voice, while I looked at the pictures of chickens being throttled with string and a Church organist getting the hair and skin flayed off his body in a massive explosion. Max and Moritz get killed by the miller at the end of the story, and from that point on I had a sympathy for troublemakers and a taste for the anarchic.

I remember really enjoying Michael Rosen’s Hairy Tales and Nursery Crimes. It was so stupid and rude and basically fun – like it was properly written for children, not written as something an adult felt children should enjoy. I loved how it played with language just for the sake of it.

> Being a poet, do you read poetry and did you as a child or teenager?

I read a bit of poetry, but I prefer performance poetry so that’s what I consume most of. I’ve just read collections by Simon Armitage, Roddy Lumsden and Luke Kennard, and I found stuff I really enjoyed in each book. As a kid I remember reading Roald Dahl and Michael Rosen, and my dad reading me stuff in German, but as a teen I wasn’t really interested.

> Who was your favourite author?

At the moment, my favourite living author is probably Steve Aylett. He’s got a fantastic grasp of how to construct an arresting sentence that engages the senses, he’s very witty, and he’s not afraid of filling his stories with cool things like armoured demons or manta rays that wrap around your forearm and work as guns. I also love Saki and Damon Runyon. I suppose I’m a bit of an impatient reader. I don’t appreciate having my time wasted.

> What are you currently reading?

I’m about two-thirds through Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. My word, he’s a good writer – although his take on the whole phenomenon feels discomfortingly ambivalent to me.

>In your book We Can’t All Be Astronauts, you talk a lot about depression related to striving to be a writer. Was there any book that helped you?

Um. Not really! Much as I’d like to claim to have learned a lot and become master of my emotions, I pretty much found that my mood improved when my external circumstances did. Feeling Good is a well-written, intelligent book on the subject, and I’d recommend it to anyone who struggles with low patches. I really like books like Shunryu Suzuki’s Not Always So. I read a lot of Buddhist books, which sounds a bit pretentious and probably is – I think I’m what’s usually known (pejoratively) as a ‘nightstand Buddhist’. I have the books on my bedside table but I never meditate.

> Being a serial blogger, do you find reading blogs just as important as reading a book or a newspaper?

In terms of convenience, I can download them for free pretty much anytime, anywhere, so in that sense they knock books and newspapers into a cocked hat. I’m a big fan of Metafilter, which is a community blog that tries to aggregate ‘the best of the web’. The standard of posts and comments is fantastic – I’ve been an almost daily reader since 2001.

My main qualm about blogging is how conventional print journalism tries to tailor its cloth to the blogosphere. The results are usually ghastly. Also, we’ve created a culture of commentary and counter-commentary that, when you zoom out, looks a lot like communal naval-gazing. My blog is just a way for me to organise my thoughts – in lots of ways it’s not really advanced from the rubbish ‘Dear Diary, why has Danielle gotta be such a DOUCHE’ stream-of-consciousness format that most blogs followed ten years ago. Except occasionally I try to use it to make people buy my book. So yeah. It’s like a teenage diary with ads.

> What one book changed your life?

Not very cool perhaps, but when I read Lord of the Flies as my GCSE set text, something clicked into place. Apart from the occasional flight into pompous cod-anthropology, his prose is robust, vivid and visceral. In Lord of the Flies he tells a suspenseful story, but simultaneously he’s pointing towards something larger. Until then, I never really understood that a story could be about something, except in the blunt, obvious parable sense. It made me a keen reader.

> How would you convince more teenagers to read more/hear more poetry?

To be honest, I don’t know if I could – and I’m not sure it’d be a sensible goal. For a start, a lot of them already do, if you jink the definition a little and include hip-hop. It’s one of the planet’s pre-eminent forms of mass entertainment. Secondly, I don’t think it’s helpful to push ‘poetry’ as this huge undifferentiated monolith. There’s so much variation, not just in style, but in quality too. There’s some stuff that I love out there, but it exists amongst a vast stir-fry of lazy, self-indulgent rubbish.

The best incentive to any demographic is artists writing and performing quality material that entertains them and speaks to them. Whether someone in their teens finds that in performance poetry, or music, or novels, or video games, or movies, or comics, or whatever, I don’t really care – the most I can offer is my tips on the stuff that I love myself.

Tim's book, We Can't All Be Astronauts, is out now.