Emerging Writers Series: Ennis Ćehić
“I do find fiction a more suitable way to take control of my life. Or at least the parts of my life I feel deserve storytelling. Not everything we live through is worth telling unless you are Karl Ove Knausgård. I think fiction must be released from one's biography; otherwise, it's just memoir.”
Where are the lines between working for a paycheck and devotion to your own creative pursuits? How much of ourselves is really in our fiction writing? And what fantastical realms can we draw out of the realities we find ourselves immersed in?
These are just a few thoughts I had after finishing (and reviewing - have a read!) Ennis Ćehić’s debut collection of short fiction Sadvertising, and I knew this was someone whose brains I had to pick.
Thankfully, he was gracious enough to lend me some of his time. We chat about creative philosophies, carving out time for creative writing when writing is your day job and the role of auto-fiction in his writing.
It’s a bit of a cheesy question, but it helps to kick things off; how did you first get started on your writing journey? When did you know this was something you wanted to pursue as a career full-time?
At the end of high school, I began to take an interest in literature. My English teacher encouraged me to write a story for the Year 12 yearbook. I think it was the first story I ever wrote. At the time, I was unsure of what this interest meant, though it did start to make me think more existentially. At uni, I studied Marketing. I liked the course immensely, but my interest in literature didn’t wane—it intensified. I began to buy notepads and scribbled thoughts and poems into them. I also started to read ferociously and obsess about other writers. Especially Milan Kundera, Arthur Rimbaud, Henry Miller, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was a very idealistic, starry-eyed phase that romanticised the idea of the writer, but it was a very important part of my development. I think, even this early on, I knew I wanted to make writing my life. It’s also why I went on to study Creative Writing right after I finished my Marketing degree. But still, it took time for me to commit wholeheartedly. I mean this from both a practical and a psychological perspective because other than a strong will and dogged persistence, you need committed time, above all else, to make writing your life.
Sadvertising is such a richly imagined and intelligent collection, and I was impressed with how much you packed in. How long was this collection in the making, and could you share a little about its journey to publication?
Sadvertising was born in an advertising agency in Melbourne in early 2017. I felt a great deal of frustration and disillusionment with my work at the time, and one evening, I took a break from work to satisfy this existential dread with a cigarette and a book. I was reading a Syrian writer at the time called Osama Alomar, who is known for his work in the ‘very short story’ space, much like Lydia Davis. In that moment, while reading his stories, I had this sudden thought to write some of my own. I found myself thinking, what would happen to the precious work beliefs of my fellow colleagues if I suddenly took them away? If the Experience Designer had no empathy? If the Art Director lost their imagination? That’s how I wrote, quite impetuously, the very first Sadvertising stories.
With time, I figured out that they were all collectively bound by a unified voice. A sardonic, derisive tone that I wanted to interrogate further. And that’s what I did. I kept writing, but I also sought opportunities to help me develop and perfect the body of work. This is how I came across the Next Chapter Writers’ Scheme, which was in its inaugural phase at the time. I became one of the recipients and was awarded $15,000 and a mentorship with Nam Le. I then spent a year writing the book full-time, and Penguin Random House acquired the rights soon after.
As a content and copywriter myself, I identified with the themes in Sadvertising around feeling like you give everything you have to your work and not having enough left for your own writing pursuits - and I think lots of people feel the same across different creative industries. Do you have any tips or advice that’s helped you combat this?
The extreme version is to quit your job. The less extreme version (which I took) is to drop down to a three-day working week. I adopted this approach in 2018 and have been dedicated to it ever since. It gives you the ability to treat writing as seriously as work. Otherwise, you could be making money, right? In those two days, you can get a lot more done (and with greater concentration) than writing after work and on weekends. The writer Mohsin Hamid took the same approach early in his writing career. He worked three days a week at Wolff Olins, a brand consultancy in London, and on the other days, he wrote. The decision does bear financial consequences. But once you tame your consumerist lust and decide your wardrobe does not need to be all Margiela, you realise you’ve gained more than you’ve lost.
I loved how you tackled the notion that fiction (almost) always contains elements of biography in Meta Ennis Parts 1, 2 & 3, and, to quote, “I was losing control of my own story” - do you think fiction is a suitable way to take back control of the narratives in our own lives?
I personally find it hard to get to truth in non-fiction. Essays, while I do write them, take me a while to construct well. Somehow, I feel tense if I’m not writing a fictionalised narrative. So yes, I do find fiction a more suitable way to take control of my life. Or at least the parts of my life I feel deserve storytelling. Not everything we live through is worth telling unless you are Karl Ove Knausgård. I think fiction must be released from one's biography; otherwise, it's just memoir. In the ‘Meta Ennis’ stories, I found a way to control the narrative through metafiction. It’s a literary style I very much enjoy because it allows you to subvert expectations and reveal truths through self-reflexivity and direct insertion of self into the story, blurring the line between author, character and the reader.
Do you have any general philosophies (or favourite philosophies) on the concept of creativity and how we generate it consistently?
I have a post-it note above my desk that reads ‘shut up, and get on with it.’ It’s a quote by Gustave Flaubert. I typically have it positioned just at eye level, so every time I look up, I see it. It reminds me not to overthink.
Generally, I don’t subscribe to many philosophies. I think it is important to know how an idea is generated. If you understand the steps well, you know how to look for relationships because ideas are all about relationships (finding new combinations of old elements). ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ by James Webb Young, published in 1965, is a great book to read on the general process of ideation, despite it being a book written for purposes of producing advertising. It helped me see through the mess of creativity early in my career as a writer.
Who are some writers or creatives who inspire you that you’d recommend to others?
At the moment, I am in the novel mind frame. A lot of my reading is theoretical, and one book I am enjoying immensely is ‘The Curtain’ by Milan Kundera, a 7-part essay on the history of the novel. I am also re-reading some of my favourite authors, so I’ll name them here for they must be read. Knut Hamsun was the great Norwegian writer of the 19th century. He wrote a book called ‘Hunger’ in 1890, largely considered the precursor of modernist literature. I am reading his novel ‘Growth of the Soil’, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. I'm also reading Samuel Beckett's trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. He wrote these novels under this great spell of creativity, a time he considered his creative peak. These books evoke the pain of existence and nonexistence unlike any other, and I’m heavily drawn to this kind of work right now. There’s more, but I won’t name them all here. But other than that, Cy Twombley, the artist, is pure magic.
You mentioned you’re currently alone in North-Western Bosnia, working on some new writing. I was curious if this is part of a writing retreat, as the idea has always intrigued me, and how these have aided your writing craft (if this is the case!). Where do you think the line is between being engaged with others and spending time alone to produce creative work, particularly writing?
It is no official writing retreat, but it does bear the essence of one, for I am treating it as such. I am currently in a small village called Suhača just outside the town of Novi Grad in North-Western Bosnia & Herzegovina. This is where I am from and where my family is from. It is also the place I was exiled out of, along with my family, in 1992, which made us refugees. We have a house here that we visit from time to time. But to answer your question, I think the line is drawn at points of necessity. Writers are fueled by experience, but the act of writing demands solitude. So we go out to go in, so to say. Seclusion from life is a prerequisite because writing is utter solitude—there’s no other way around it. But it’s not lonely, for we inhabit worlds during that time with imagination.
Mohsin Hamid (I’ve mentioned him twice now), in a recent interview with the New Yorker, spoke of this very eloquently; ‘'one of the prices of writing is spending so much time alone. One of the pleasures of writing is that while alone, one is able to try to be other people, to live other lives. You isolate yourself, and then your imagination undoes your isolation. You make a void, and water enters the void, and you have a well.'
And on that note, could you tell us a little about what you’re currently working on and where we might find your work published in the coming months?
I am currently working on a novel set in the same village where I am now. I’m here to both imagine and conceive this novel; however, it is entirely uncertain what this book will be but completely inevitable that I need to write it. I can’t say more than that. I’m simply observing and writing without a clear narrative structure or direction. There’s a loose plot, but day by day, it is disappearing. I am simply here to listen. And hopefully, if I concentrate hard enough, I’ll hear something worthwhile. I have a very profound relationship with this village. It is the place of my formative existence. From 0-8, I was here. It’s the time of a child’s life when they learn more quickly than at any other time in their life. Then I was exiled from it forever. Time has stopped here, but it is full of memories. I sometimes think it’s all there is; sad, nostalgia and yearning, but it isn’t. By being here, now, as a grown man, I’m realising there’s so much more. In the unseen, there’s everything from great empires to political histories, tragedies of love, myths and legends, nostalgia, war, exile and religion. Let’s see what I make of it.
Ennis Ćehić focuses on ideas of displacement, creativity and existentialism. His writing has been published in a variety of publications, including Meanjin, Assemble Papers and Going Down Swinging. In 2018, Ennis was selected as an inaugural recipient of the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Writers’ Scheme. He was mentored by Nam Le.
He is the author of New Metonyms, a literary photography book about his homeland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, released with photographer Shantanu Starick in 2020. Sadvertising, his debut work of fiction, was released in March 2022 by Penguin Random House.
He lives and works between Melbourne and Sarajevo.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
