John Murray, author of A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1963, and received his medical degree at the age of twenty-two. During most of the 90’s he worked as an epidemiologist for the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta after earning his master's in public health from Johns Hopkins University. This position allowed him to travel to many developing countries in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, and those travels helped enrich many of the themes in his debut collection. In 1999, John and his family moved to Iowa where he enrolled in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop on a teacher-writer fellowship. A short story from this volume, “The Hill Station” won the Prairie Lights Short Fiction Award, and the title story of the collection was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for the Best New American Voices 2002 anthology of short fiction. John recently moved back to Australia with his wife and two children after graduating from the Iowa Workshop and is currently working on a novel.

Standaert: The first two stories in your collection A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies are partly about parent/child relationships, about separation and of the child striking out into the world on her/his own. Mother, daughter … father, son. Why do you think this topic hold particular resonance with you?

Murray: Well I think our families are fundamental to who we become as adults and the choices we make, in many ways, sometimes obvious ways and sometimes ways that we can’t recognize ourselves. One of the things that this book was examining was what makes a person—and for me this often comes back to what happened to you growing up. This does not have to mean that there is a major trauma in the past, or something terrible—it can also come from small things. Small things can become big things. Also I became a father myself when I was starting to write these stories and this affected me in ways that I did not expect—it completely unnerved me. It was very powerful and it changed how I saw the world in many ways. I knew that I wanted to try and get a fuller picture of the main characters in the stories—to give a sense of their lives.

Standaert: Does this go back to some of the conflicts your own father, who wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry, had with his father, who was an Australian sheep farmer that didn’t see the value in this? There also seems to be a touch of the immigrant aspect to this, the allegorical and real leaving of one’s country, one’s parents, and adapting to something new, being changed, being sculpted both in good and dire ways? Do you see some of that in these stories? Is this something you were trying to focus the microscope on?

Murray: I actually have a good relationship with my father and (as far as I know) do not have any real conflicts with him resolved or otherwise. Like a lot of people I had to leave home and my own country in order to follow the path I had chosen—because I wanted to work in international health. Becoming an immigrant myself put me in touch with other immigrants; and my work with refugees and people in health emergencies also put me in touch with people who were displaced in some way. And this state of being nowhere and looking for a new life; while reconciling the new life with everything that has come before became one of the themes of these stories. Many of the people I know are somewhat lost and de-nationalized. I wanted to write about people coping with change.

Standaert: What led you to leave medicine and pursue writing? And why the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?

Murray: The drive to write became stronger than the drive not to write. I had been writing off and on for a long time, in snatched moments. I realized that I had reached a point where I would never really devote enough time to it unless I took time off. Also, I was questioning what I was doing, because I had seen a lot of my work come to nothing, for a variety of reasons—and had seen a lot of development money squandered. Writing was a way of working it out. I found it really hard to stop working and felt that a writing program would help force me to stop and take the time. I had read about the Iowa program for a long time—it has a wonderful reputation. When I was accepted, it made the decision for me.

Standaert: Were there any particular people who encouraged you in this, or who were influential in pushing you to make the leap?

Murray: The decision was entirely mine, I think, but once I had made it several people were encouraging. Actually Valerie, my wife, was really very supportive and if she had not been I may never have done it. We came to Iowa with a one-month-old baby, and she was leaving behind a lot, so I am very grateful to her. I also had several work colleagues who told me that I was not insane. This was useful. It was difficult for me to go. Later I realized that I had a sense of loss over leaving—because I was working on country programs and had a network of colleagues who I liked working with—and I loved working in countries. At the time I thought I was giving all this up. It turned out that I was able to keep working on some international health projects from a distance, and part time, but I did not know this then. Several people I worked with who told me that I was not completely mad—that it was a quite reasonable to pursue something that was little more than an inclination—were very helpful. Giving permission is important. It was for me.

Standaert: What did you get out of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop besides the time to write this work? Had you started in on any of these stories before you arrived or were they wholly composed at Iowa? Also, there is sometimes the feeling in literary circles that the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, as well as the whole MFA explosion, produces a certain type of story, that they are critiqued to death and that the originality gets diminished by going through the whole ‘setting, plot, character, style, language, etc.,’ mill before producing a final product. Do you see this, or are these people off their chairs? If you did see some of this, how did you combat it? Would it be easier for you to do, then say, a younger writer without a huge body of life experience to pull upon, to take what works for you and leave the rest?

Murray: These stories were all written during the Iowa Workshop—and the workshop process suited me. I really think that the notion that workshops produce mass-produced stories with no individual character is not true. There were wonderfully talented writers with me in the workshop and all of them were different in many ways—and there was no pressure that I saw to change the essence of what any of us were writing. All the people who were at Iowa when I was there who have published are different. It comes down to attitude. There is a lot of criticism, almost all of it sensible and reasonable, and designed to be constructive. Most people realize quickly that this criticism is not to be taken personally, and that not all of it is to be listened to. One of the amazing things about fiction, is how different readers can read the same text differently. Once you separate the criticism from yourself, and understand that you can take it or leave it—that there is no absolute right or absolute wrong (with some exceptions)—then it is easier. Some people do feel very discouraged and feel pressure to please others—ie. to avoid criticism—and I can see that sometimes this can feel like pressure to “be a certain way”. I resolved that I would write as much as I could and not care about the consequences. I learned an incredible amount doing this. Most of my first drafts were quite awful—but it really helped to have them discussed. The key to the workshop process, for me, is allowing yourself to be open to criticism. I learnt a lot from other students and faculty. Of course, workshops may not be for everyone; perhaps I could have just sat down and started writing—and I would have worked out what works and does not work on my own. But it would have taken me a lot longer and would have been harder. Also I would not have had the range of views and opinions—this helps.

Standaert: You have been receiving very good reviews for your first book of short stories, as well as a hefty advance (from what publishing gossip I saw a year ago) … and though it is probably too early to tell, how do you think this praise as well as the monetary gain, has changed you?

Murray: I don’t think it has changed me at all. I was not sure whether or not these stories were publishable—they are long and messy. I could see ten major flaws in each one—and a number of things that I could do differently. I have a tendency not to believe the good reviews. I’m a very insecure as a writer. I feel as if I could do better, It is a struggle and a battle with yourself, and whatever happens outside of yourself seems like something happening to another person. I paid off my debts with my advances, which is nice, but it had not affected daily life at all.

Standaert: Can you talk about your experience as a doctor, mainly as an outbreak doctor or working with refugees in very poor countries, and how these experiences have filtered into your writing? There is tragedy in some of these stories, but there is also a lot of hope? One would think that after years of seeing death and disease your outlook would be much more bleak. How do you explain the optimism?

Murray: I think you have to believe in people—in the ability of individuals to survive and make a difference. If you do not believe in people then there is nothing there. Belief in the human spirit is all we have. The people that I have worked with and encountered in developing countries have taught me this. It is amazing, but people with nothing at all often seem to be happy and to have a real spirit of generosity. And in many terrible situations I have met men and women who keep going, regardless of the conditions, regardless of everything, and who refuse to give up. Many of the Africans I know working in health have an amazing capacity to bounce back, and take a pragmatic view, and keep going. This is inspirational. The temptation is to switch off and walk away because the problems seem so difficult. But to do this is to deny the human spirit that is alive and well in the most difficult places.

Standaert: What writers have influenced your work; who do you admire when you look for examples of how to approach fiction? What are you reading now, or what have you read in the last few years that has had a profound impact on you, your work?

Murray: There are many of them. Gustav Flaubert—for rigor and attention to detail; Antoine Chekhov—for character and clarity; Joseph Conrad—for setting and place and plot; James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson—for the truths contained in Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio; Vladimir Nabokov—for the possibilities of language; Graham Greene—for explorations of inner life and morality. I started reading Alice Monroe two or three years ago and think she is quite brilliant—with an amazing range and scope. She has really opened up the possibilities of the short story.

Standaert: You are now returning to Australia after, what is it, four years in Iowa? What are your plans now? Where is home anymore, after moving most of your life? How is ‘home’ or concepts of a home-place important in your stories?

Murray: I will continue to write (I’m working on a novel) and to work in international health—doing periodic trips. I am not sure what home is—perhaps wherever your kids are. I am trying to work it out. In many ways I feel de-nationalized. Semi-nomadic. Perhaps we’ll move again.

Standaert: What surprises came about in the writing of this short story collection? Did you get blocked at any point? Did you workshop all or some of these stories? How about going from the process of writing a collection, to marketing it, publishing it? Did you go the route of an agent, or were there other connections that developed?

Murray: Everything surprised me about this collection. It surprised me that it was published at all. The reception that it received surprised me too. In a strange way it does not feel a part of me any more. I did not think about publication at all. I just wrote down what came out, tried to be true to what I had to say, tried to make characters with something true in them, and to make them readable. Everything else was icing on the cake. I sent stories to a few publications and was rejected—then send the complete collection to an agent who took me on. I think this collection works better as a full set, because if its recurring themes—so perhaps it was easier to sell the whole collection. The key to getting published, to me, is to not think about it.