"Don’t take advice from me. Don’t do it my way."

What Steven asked David Cramer Smith, the author of Medway: A Novel

Steven has been in email conversation with David Cramer Smith ever since Medwayish started stocking Medway: A Novel. However, with David a resident of Australia, and with Local Authority’s budget not yet meeting international travel, they had to wait for David to visit Medway to meet. As such, they met at the Ship and Trades pub, and with Steven in the middle of an existential crisis whilst buying his first car, they discussed his surname, mycology and a sequel to Medway: A Novel.

David Cramer Smith

Please spell your name for the record.
D-A-V-I-D, C-R-A-M-E-R, and then S-M-I-T-H. No hyphen between Cramer Smith.

Is Cramer your middle name?
My partner’s surname is Cramer. Because David Smith is among the most boring names on the planet, I just needed to jazz it up a little bit. That seemed like the best, most convenient option, and I didn’t want to change my name by deed poll, because I don’t want to deal with any admin nightmares in the future. I just thought I’ll take it as a pen name and that would be my gesture that we’re connected by name in lieu of getting married as well.

What is your official occupation?
It’s not a writer. I am a programmer, a software engineer, contracting for the Australian government at the moment, public service. Just moved to Canberra to take up a new role, but I’ve been doing that for about seven years or something. Started off doing a bit of data analysis and all that kind of stuff, and then got more interested in the actual coding, contributing to the AI feature a little bit, a bit of building out LLMs (large language models).

But you try not to create a dystopian future.
I probably am in some way contributing, but trying hard not to.
Before that, I was actually a teacher for a brief period. I trained as a teacher in London around 2011. I did my NQT year in a school in East London and then shortly after moved to Australia. I probably shouldn’t have become a teacher. I wasn’t that good at it and didn’t really enjoy it, but I thought if I move into Australia, it would be good to be a teacher because I’m guaranteed work. I accidentally did a little bit of coding somehow, just got into the Python programming language, found I really liked it, did a bit of web development stuff and then just thought I’m probably going to be employable for a fair amount of time if I learn how to actually do that.

What is Python language?
It’s a programming language. It is geared towards people like me who had no technical background at all. I was actually probably quite a Luddite, especially in my early 20s. I didn’t have a laptop all through uni. I was quite resistant to tech stuff. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Or at least I thought I didn’t enjoy it. And then, I somehow did an online course. If you run a little program and then you see the output, because your code runs and it actually spits out what you wanted it to do, you get a dopamine hit. It becomes quite addictive. Most people think it’s not fun at all, but it’s fun to build stuff out and then actually get it working, and Python is a simple language. It’s easy to get into but hard to master. That was my gateway drug into programming.

What was it that took you to Australia?
My partner Meg. We met in London. We met online and then she came over to London. We met and lived in London for about three years. She wanted to go back and be near friends and family naturally. I went with her, and we thought we’d probably move back to London after a couple of years, and we never did.

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid? Are you part of any groups?
I’ve got an interest in mycology, mushrooms. A previous boss was part of the Queensland Mycological Society, and we got chatting about mushrooms. It was quite big. I don’t know if you ever heard of Paul Stamets? He did a Netflix documentary called Fantastic Fungi. I just watched that, and fungi were going to save the world. It’s good for health and mental health as well. He said, ‘If you’re interested in mushrooms, you should come along, and because you’re a little bit techie, if you want, you can run the website,” and I was like, “Do I have a choice in this?” “Not really.” I’ve been doing that for about five years, which means I do have to go to the committee meetings which isn’t normally what I’m into, but I quite like it. They’re nice. Mushroom people are quite good people.

Edible mushrooms or funny mushrooms?
It doesn’t have to be edible or funny, it’s all citizens science stuff. It’s like Pokémon, but mushrooms. You’ve got to catch them all. You’ve got to go out once a month on a foray and just try and spot. It’s a bit competitive. You can imagine some of these people really want to get the rare ones. Funny mushrooms are part of it, definitely, and obviously, psilocybin mushrooms are making the headlines, I suppose, because they’re finding that they treat or help with treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, things like that. But edible as well.
I think they’re going to have to work hard to up their PR because you might have seen that beef Wellington case. Famous one. Anytime you mention mushrooms, they think psychedelic or beef Wellington, with deadly mushrooms.

Australia, it’s either a barren desert or a beautiful beach coast. Do mushrooms occur naturally?
They probably are invasive species that were brought over. There’s a lot of rainforests in Australia as well. The Bush. Queensland is subtropical. It’s like Ferngully, Jurassic. Trees that are basically dinosaurs. They’ve been around since, I don’t know the exact era or whatever. There’s a lot of bushwalking and people getting out there.

We know you for Medway: A Novel. Doing background research for the interview, the novel was the only real hit that you have online.
Yeah, I’ve kept a low profile.