Writer and journalist Mark Mordue is the author of Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip, published last year by Allen & Unwin, Australia. Dastgah is a collection of stories, poems and impressions written during a one-year odyssey that took him through India, Iran, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Mordue's work has been published by Interview, Madison, Speak, Salon , and The Nation the United States., and Purple in France. In Australia, his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, HQ, Vogue, The Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, GQ, the Bulletin, and HEAT.

Born and raised in the east coast Australian steel town of Newcastle, Mordue spent much of his teenage years in Aboriginal and mining country in Arnhem Land. Inspired by the new wave of music and rock 'n' roll journalism of the late 70s, he moved to Sydney and began a writing career that diversified across the cultural spectrum of music, film, literature and the arts.

He was a founding editor of Australian Style (1992-1997) and is also the winner of a 1992 Human Rights Media Award. He has also co-directed and written a documentary, A Night with Louis Tillett, with his partner, the writer and filmmaker Lisa Nicol.

Mordue was an Asialink 2001 writer-in-residence at Beijing University, and is currently developing a novel set in Beijing which he describes as "an offbeat thriller with a political edge."

Derek Alger: A good beginning. I suppose, is to ask how you came up with the title Dastgah for your book, and what it means?

Mark Mordue: Well that's like presenting you with the key to the book -- I can't help but want to open the door as well and show off the whole house, so to speak. So you might have to excuse a rambling explanation here!

DA: I'm sure it will be coherent rambling. Please, continue.

MM: I should first of all explain that Dastgah is a collection of stories involving a journey across the world that I took with my girlfriend Lisa --through India, Nepal, Turkey and Iran, as well as London, Paris, Edinburgh and New York.

It's a travel book and it's also a love story too -- and like any road story, it's about questions of identity and self as much as the information I bring back from other countries. So it's deeply personal at times. Nonetheless it was very important to me that I not spend the whole journey vomiting my ego all over these other worlds. I think there has to be a balance between the personal and a more external set of observations, and I hope I found that balance.

DA: I would describe you as a very versatile writer, which comes across in Dastgah.

MM: Well, let's just say I try. I also think travel demands a variety of responses. And I wanted to mirror that variety of experiences through the prism of different tones. So the book incorporates all kinds of writing styles: including New Journalism, poetry, memoir, impressionistic glimpses, even a dream. Each piece from each moment or place has its own individual integrity -- with the deeper notion that they all eventually move together in a larger story. Something like a mosaic or a puzzle that makes final sense when the last piece drops in. If that puzzle was made up of lots of smaller, coherent pictures.

But how does one title a book of so varied nature in a way that represents all its features? To me, that was a crucial question. The funny thing was the word 'dastgah' was always in my mind as a title. It's basically a type of Iranian classical music. When I was in Iran I fell in love with this music, especially with a singer called Shajarian whom I mention a few times in the book.

DA: What was special about the music?

MM: Local musicians have compared the music to an underground bazaar because a 'dastgah' is made up of a collection of pieces, or melodic fragments, an open combination of what can loosely be translated as 'streets' or 'corners'. Once you've learnt the entire suite of these pieces -- something that can take years -- you then have the ability to move through this 'place' or dastgah at your own discretion, improvising your journey by weaving together these fragments to make your way.

It's like a jazz, I guess. That felt like a great metaphor for my book and how I was putting it together. I had all these pieces, but I didn't just want a collection, I wanted something larger and more complete to emanate through the stories and their relationship to each other, a kind of submerged narrative. I also knew I didn't want to write a book that evolved in an A, B, C kind of way. As I wrote more and more pieces and began to assemble them together, I realized the structure could be more musical, more poetic and jump-cut in style, and that this could still work, still have a direction and an overall pulse.

Obviously, I'm not pretending my book matches the complexity of a real 'dastgah', but I felt there was some kinship there. And nothing else I could think of for a title grasped what I was attempting so it felt structurally appropriate.