Language learning with a twist: Welcome to the school of swearing
Andrew HC McDonald tells stories in many forms – through photos, comedy, visual arts, and now novel writing. In this interview, Andrew tells us how his debut fiction book, The Montegiallo School of Swearing, came to be, and how swearing in a foreign language may actually help you learn.
Where did this idea come from, and what is your own relationship to swearing?
I have been learning languages off and on for many years. Anyone who is a language learner knows that the taboo words are almost irresistible. I remember the horror on a Chinese colleague’s face when I spoke just two forbidden bare syllables in Mandarin. Like it is for the Sicilians in Montegiallo, it does give a certain freedom – and thrill – to use swear words not already preloaded with the emotion of your own tongue.
It also goes back to when I went to a Catholic school in Perth. We had an exchange student from Mexico who only spoke Spanish. You can probably picture the first two words we taught Huglio and, his loud, enthusiastic and extensive use of them.
How do you research your fictional Italian town – because it feels very real to me!
Many of the small towns in rural Italy have a kind of ‘fungible’ charm, the piazza, the church, the old men in suits and hats, the stone and the pockmarked render. Montegiallo is a mixture of some of the innumerable tiny towns of Umbria and Tuscany I have visited. The interior of Brian’s palazzo partly comes from my brother’s house on the Mornington Peninsular in Victoria which is an over-the-top 80s Italian mansion. In that house live the real Becky the stove, the original gold bidet, and, yes, six toilets.
And how did you research Italian swearwords?
My Italian is pretty much exactly on Brian’s level. I started out online with the ones I didn’t know, but advice on the swear words – and every word uttered by an Italian – was given by Dr Agnese Bresin in Melbourne. There was quite a bit of discussion on the right ones to use between my editor Georgia Richter, myself and Dr Bresin. They had to be just in the right spot between funny and insulting.
Who were your favourite characters to write?
Oh, absolutely Gianni as my favourite. After he gets a taste for swearing, he just about steals every scene he’s in. If the book is ever a movie, I hope there will be a fight for the role between the world’s best young comic actors! I enjoyed writing all of them, esp. Viviana, Father Dom and Pola. But I loved writing Brian too. In the beginning he was going to be quite funny, cracking jokes etc, but I soon decided that even as the hilarity rises around him, he would not speak a single deliberately funny line in the whole book. As soon as I decided that, he wrote himself.
Do you think that a ‘school of swearing’ might actually work?
I genuinely think this could work for real. If I saw an ad for a class for say, ‘Learn to swear in German!’ I’d be tempted. And second language learning is often a lot of embarrassed mumbling. Belting out swear words could definitely help with confidence and pronunciation.
What’s next for Andrew McDonald?
Well, I already have notes for another book, and I did some research for it when I was recently in Japan. But I have a lot of other creative outlets, live performing, (comedy/true storytelling) Photography and visual arts. Aside from writing, rubber stamp prints are my major artistic activity now. Have a look if you like: https://www.ahcmcdonald.com/
The Montegiallo School of Swearing is out now from all good bookstores and online.
