DEXTER PETLEY
About Dexter Petley
Dexter Petley was born in Hawkhurst, Kent and is the author of four novels: Little Nineveh, Joyride, White Lies and One True Void. He is editor of the anthology of new fishing writing, Powerlines. He also translated The Fishing Box by Maurice Genevoix from the original French and is a regular contributor to Waterlog magazine. He lives in a caravan in Normandy and when not writing he is fishing or working in his organic vegetable garden.
See Dexter's blog at: http://caughtbytheriver.net/category/arcadia/
Dexter's website is at www.dexterpetley.com.
Praise for Dexter Petley
'Delivers scene after scene of exhilarating rage, tenderness, lyricism and pitch-black comedy as its angry young hero discovers that "there was a chasm in society that no book-reading would ever fill". Conventionally enough, this is a rite-of-passage story about the events that fix the path of a bright but stranded 17-year-old. Less predictably, Petley writes, with a bittersweet mix of stifling intimacy and sizzling exasperation, about the English rural working-class of the early 1970s – no longer the peasant stalwarts of Hardy or Lawrence but the pikey scum that all now feel at liberty to loathe.' Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
'Petley's wonderfully acerbic style ... breath[es] new life into the rather jaded form of the bildungsroman ... written by someone at a high point in their writing career.' Lesley McDowell, The Scotsman
'Funny, savage and, despite the time frame, naggingly relevant, One True Void is the product of a distinctive voice you'd be wise to lend an ear to.' Scottish Review of Books
‘Petley’s style is like acid on a plate, biting into whatever it sees and leaving extraordinary linguistic marks.' Derek Beaven‘Izaac Walton with attitude and Mogadon.’ Tibor Fischer
An interview with Dexter Petley
I'm an instinctive, driven writer who avoids 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.
My writing/fiction influences are mostly non-British, even if my coming to literature at age sixteen was just to impress a girl who wrote modernist poetry. I copied and mimicked, filling notebooks with dreadful verse. Aged eighteen, I saw some light when I read Sylvia Plath, David Jones, Middlemarch, Kafka’s Diaries.
The breakthrough literary influences were mostly American. Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, for instance, a real turning point in my early twenties when up shit creek on my first novel, taught me to pinpoint language. Then came 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 academic fraudulence, self-parody, historical backwardness and preciousness.
I labour 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 over an average of ten years. All my projects leap-frog each other, and One True Void has traveled with me these last twenty years, bearing minimal relation to the book it started as, but always remaing the novel I really wanted to publish.
All writers need a fictional centre, an experiential core from which to disperse their voice into narrative and meaning. Mine is rural childhood in Hawkhurst, my native Kent village. One True Void is my purest attempt to date to deal with '70s rural adolescence. I hope I've developed a distinctive voice which manages to stay provocative and radical. My objective is 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, like I’m sitting there telling you this story for real.
My writing doesn’t come 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. Life is simplified and elemental, self-sufficient, albeit dependent on old dirt-encrusted Macintosh iBooks. Fiction is a winter sport. I wake up, convert the bed into a desk, coffee on, light the stove, 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 or potter on the land.
I’m an avid book-burner. My stove is a contemporary fiction hell.
