Neil Campbell is the author of the novels: Sky Hooks, Zero Hours and Lanyards. Of the poetry collections: Birds, Bugsworth Diary and In the Gemini Café. Of the pamphlets Ekphrasis and Jackdaws. Of the short story collections, Broken Doll, Pictures from Hopper, Fog Lane, Licensed Premises and, most recently, Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents. Ahead of their March 11th event together, at Blackwell's in Manchester, Neil Campbell went author to author with Wayne Dean-Richards.
Wayne Dean-Richards: I’m a fan of your all work, I want that to be the starting point, and in many ways the idea of picking out a favourite is bollocks because human beings are so fickle we readily change our minds, but having said that, and as if to illustrate my own fickleness, I have to say I think your newest collection may be my favourite.
How do you feel about that?
NEIL CAMPBELL: Orgasmic.
WD-R: Do you favour some of your pieces more than others?
NC: I never read my old stuff, but I remember thinking Needle in a Haystack was a great short story and should have won the Manchester Fiction Prize. I really was robbed there.
WD-R: Do some books or pamphlets mean more to you than others because of circumstances surrounding the publication? 
NC: Broken Doll, as it got the ball rolling in 2007.
WD-R: Is the short story your favourite form?
NC: Not to be obtuse, but I have favourite writers rather than favourite forms. It would be hard to choose between The Busconductor Hines and Not Not While the Giro. Forms are only important to academics and publishers.
WD-R: There seems to be more anger, more indignation in Saying Dirty Things, which I love BTW: I don’t think we should accept the attempts to normalize things like gentrification – would you agree that this is the case?
NC: I think emotion is not necessarily a bad thing in fiction, brings it alive. I think it’s a real strength of your work, Wayne. I’ve probably crafted too much emotion out of my stories and novels in the past.
WD-R: If so, was it a conscious thing that you set out to do or did it emerge as you were working on the stories?
NC: Very little of what I write is a conscious decision. But I think I’m getting braver as I get older, no longer censoring my own voice or even giving a shit what anyone thinks. The worst of all things is to be damned with faint praise. A hard thing to get rid of when it comes to writing is your education. For example, Kerouac gave zero fucks about grammar. And you can make a counter argument for every single thing you learn on a creative writing course. That’s probably the best argument for them.
WD-R: Just out of interest how long did the new collection take to put together and how does that compare with your previous stuff?
NC: It’s taking me longer and longer because I work full time now, whereas for many years I only did three days a week. The actual writing in itself never takes very long, I just don’t get as much chance to do it as I used to. And it’s not good to write when you’re knackered after work. I write when I’m knackered on a Saturday morning. And my wife doesn’t like holidays so I can also do it when I’m knackered on annual leave.
WD-R: Annoying question alert – the other questions might well be annoying too, but this one may have more potential to irritate than the rest, hence the warning: with Saying Dirty Things, as with lots of your work, I find myself able to relate to it, so, when I read The Pink, for example, it brought back, as clear as day, memories of my old man puffing away at a Park Drive whilst reading it when we were out at a working men’s club on a Saturday night, and he was waiting for the Bingo to start - do you plunder your own real life?
NC: Absolutely. Fiction for me is a mixture of memory and imagination. By the way, none of this is annoying. My narrators are much more irritable than I am. I’m pretty chilled out these days and to be honest I don’t get asked questions that often. I love that there’s someone out there who has heard of The Pink.
WD-R: If so: do you have any rules?
NC: I never want anything in my books to hurt anyone I know in real life. There’s more to life than writing.
WD-R: George V Higgins said that he wouldn’t read any fiction whilst he was writing fiction, lest he be unduly influenced by what he was reading - how about you?
NC: I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I’m kidding, though he is a great model for dialogue. I used to read a bit of John Fante just to tune up in the morning. These days it might be Hubert Selby Jnr. or James Kelman.
WD-R: With the new collection are you conscious of any influences?
NC: Kelman was a great influence, although that doesn’t necessarily mean my work is anything like his.
WD-R: How about in general: some of the writers, or specific works, you’d pick out as being important to you? (What a shitter that Fred Voss died recently, eh?)
NC: Off the top of my head, some books I re-read are The Road to Los Angeles, Factotum, Fat City, On the Road, Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls, Greyhound for Breakfast, Cain’s Book, The Sportswriter, My Struggle (Knausgaard not Hitler) Below Cold Mountain, The Things They Carried, In Patagonia, The Snow Leopard, Arabian Sands, The Executioner’s Song, Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone. Fred Voss was a marvellous poet. It was the great thrill of my writing life when I had a poem of mine next to one of his in a poetry magazine called Penniless Press, circa 2003.
WD-R: My sons Ethan and Kalman made this great cartoon called Friday Morning Blue and showed me a photo of a group of guys gathered round to watch it on a phone during their lunchbreak, Kalman saying this was his ideal audience, and how they were watching it was great: having a laugh, escaping from the daily grind for just a few minutes.
How about you - who’s your ideal audience for Saying Dirty Things and where would you like to see them reading it?
NC: Recently a plumber came round, and I mentioned Bukowski and this plumber said he loved Bukowski so we chatted about books while he fixed the bog. There’s still something dripping in the cistern but that’s beside the point. Plumbers are my ideal audience.
WD-R: Finally, what question would you like to be asked in interview that you’ve never been asked?
NC: Would you rather be a polo mint or a fruit salad?
WD-R: Thanks for doing this. Looking forward to reading with you and Jim Gibson at Blackwell’s in Manchester on March 11th.
NC: Me too, it’s going to be great. Hopefully they won’t turn the heating off this time.
Essential Information
There's a Neil Campbell short story at outsideleft, here: The Last Bookseller
Neil Campbell's books at SALT here
