The Drifters @ Meanjin
A few years ago I began researching ‘creative non-fiction’ as a concept and platform for my writing, and found two fascinating books: From Hipsters to Gonzo: How New Journalism Rewrote the World by Marc Weingarten; and, Tom Wolfe’s collection of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I’m also a fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s work (like many other writers), particularly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more recently Andrew Ricketson has written an excellent essay over at Meanjin about ethical issues in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I am keen to learn more about ‘gonzo’ and its relationship to non-fiction writing, and how narrative, subjectivity and fiction writing techniques can be applied to non-fiction stories.
The Drifters is my new essay that has grown from my interests in this field. It is about Billie Anne Baird, a young woman who is one of a small number of female drivers in Victoria that build, modify and drive cars in ‘drifting’ events. Drifting is a lifestyle that involves customizing high performance and other vehicles to increase speed and allow drivers to deliberately oversteer so that on a race track cars lose traction and ‘slide’ around corners. It’s an exhilarating, adrenaline charged sport, but is also very much about the art of car modification and the dedication and learning it takes to get a car safe, on the road and ready to drift.
The essay has been published in the new issue of Meanjin. It is the first time a photo I have taken has been included with one of my stories. I’m pretty stoked. The design team at Meanjin have done a wonderful job in terms of the colour and layout of the image – my aim was to capture Billie’s wide eyes, which are quite pretty in the photo, in relation to the leather of her jacket, the hard metal of the stall’s roof and the heavy black of the steering wheel and dashboard in her Nissan ‘Sil-eighty’. 
Meanjin’s reproduction of the image nails it. The purple rendering of the image is gorgeous.
I’m unsure how or if this essay contributes to wider theoretical debate and practice in the field of creative non-fiction. My research on the concept has been on the backburner due to other writing and day job projects. Reading the piece now with some distance and in print, it strikes me as fairly straight forward in that it combines personal narrative with a series of interviews and my ‘on the ground’ observations as a writer in the field. I wrote description of actual events in a way that I felt was evocative and using fiction writing techniques, and included the occasional dose of humour to signal generational differences. The Media Alliance Code of Ethics was also an important reference for me when writing the story. When I get my head around the theory, I expect to understand more about the challenges and opportunities of my writing process for telling stories about real people and events.
What I love about the piece is that it tells a story of drifting and car culture from Billie’s perspective. She is passionate, lives life on her terms and is keen to involve more young women in the motorsport. Yesterday, after reading the story for the first time in Meanjin, Billie told me, “It’s really well written, paints the picture perfectly.” I felt pleased when she said this because I was striving for accuracy during the story in terms of what it feels like to be on the race track, and to present a complex representation of a young person involved in car culture and her lifestyle and pre-occupations.
Tags: adrenaline, Australia, Billie Anne Baird, Car Culture, Cars, clutch kick, corner, Drifting, Essay, gender, hairpin, Japan, lifestyle, Maori, Meanjin, media, modding, modification, motorsport, Nissan, Nissan Silvia, non-fiction, oversteer, Pacific Island, purple, race track, VicDrift, victoria, young people, young women
Creative Non-Fiction, Essay, Photos | benomara | 
February 9, 2011 8:50 am | 
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