Bronwyn
Standing up for short Australian stories
Welcome
Welcome to Spineless Wonders’ blog, The Column. Here you will find news, views and reviews from the short fiction scene.
In coming weeks we will be posting Spineless Wonders Asks, a series of interviews with short story authors from around Australia.
Here at Spineless Wonders, we love quality shorts of any stripe and we are passionate about promoting Australian short stories and their authors. The Column is a place for us to share our enthusiasms with a wider community of writers and readers.
We have invited guest bloggers to write about trends and issues in short fiction. Our bloggers will range across forms and genres; from realist to experimental, from crime to speculative fiction as well as to short fiction’s distant cousin, prose poetry.
You are very welcome to join in these conversations. You can add your views, add recommended reading and suggest topics for future blog posts in the box below.
We kick off with guest blogger, Ryan O’Neill, who takes a brief look at the history of experimental short fiction in Australia. Enjoy.
Guest blogger Ryan O’Neill
Marcus Clarke’s Offspring
Marcus Clarke at 20
In his 1958 essay, “The Prodigal Son” Patrick White railed against Australian fiction as being “the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.” While it is true that realism has long been dominant in Australian writing, and the Australian short story, there is a long tradition of experimental stories in Australia, as far back as the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the first experimental Australian short story writer was Marcus Clarke, whose stories included science-fiction, mysteries, crime, realism, horror, fantasy, farce and even metafiction. Clarke anticipated many of the innovations in short fiction that came to be hailed as new and exciting in the 1970s.
Clarke died some years before the rise of Australia’s most important and influential short story writer, Henry Lawson. Though Lawson was undoubtedly one of the targets of White’s criticism, he was in fact a radically experimental writer. No writer before him captured dialogue so realistically, or embraced themes so uniquely Australian. Anyone in doubt of this should pick up an anthology of nineteenth century Australian short stories. Inspired by Lawson, Barbara Baynton would soon add her own twist to Lawson’s realism to produce a number of extraordinary stories.
However, the radical style of Lawson was to become the new conservatism and for a number of years, with exceptions such as Hal Porter, Christina Stead, Marjorie Barnard, and Patrick White himself, Australian short stories tended to be couched in terms of “bush realism.”
This changed in the 1970s when the relaxation of censorship laws and the influence of foreign experimental writers like Borges and Brautigan led to an explosion of “New Writing.” The foremost practitioners of this new experimental short story were Michael Wilding, Frank Moorehouse, Peter Carey and Murray Bail. Each of these writers explicitly rejected the brand of literary realism that had flourished in Australia for so long. Alongside writers such as Vicki Viidikas, their stories embraced once taboo themes such as sex and drugs, and were often set in cities rather than in the bush. They were also formally experimental, utilising a number of postmodern literary techniques to great effect, and breathing new life into genres that had long been marginalised in Australia, such as fantasy and science fiction.
Since the 1970s realism has arguably been in the ascendance once more in the Australian short story, though there have always been, and will always be short story writers willing to experiment, such as Kerryn Goldsworthy, David Brooks, Glenda Adams and, most recently, Paddy O’Reilly. In the last year, The Best Australian Stories 2010 and New Australian Stories 2 as well as the latest Sleepers Almanac have all published a range of traditional and experimental fiction, demonstrating that the experimental tradition is alive and well in Australian writing.
Ryan O’Neill’s stories appear in The Best Australian Stories 2010 (Black Inc.), New Australian Stories 2 (Scribe). His short story collections Six Tenses and A Famine in Newcastle are published by Ginninderra Press. The latter was short-listed for the 2007 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. He lives in Newcastle, New South Wales with his wife and daughters.
Read a.s. patric’s interview with Ryan O’Neill here, at Verity La.
If you have any thoughts or comments to add to Ryan’s post, leave a reply.
Spineless Wonders Asks Jennifer Mills
Jennifer Mills
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
There are too many. I’ll restrict myself to the living: Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly, Steven Amsterdam, Gillian Mears, Yiyun Li, Etgar Keret, Karen Russell, and I know he’s won too many awards to be fashionable now but I loved Peter Carey’s Fat Man in History.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I would have to cite Flannery O’Connor’s masterful story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ for its humour, brutality, incredible tension, brilliant dialogue and character development. I still get shivers thinking about The Misfit. She was really a genius.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It’s very flexible. I love its capture of pivot points, its nearly mathematical tidiness, and its risk. I can pull off imaginative feats in short stories which I would struggle to hold together in a novel. I like the adaptability of short fiction to different delivery modes, like podcasting. As a novelist, I like the gratification: the end of the job is in sight.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I like to think of myself as a versatile writer, rather than a consistent one. I tend to buck a little at categorisation.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
The newest ones, of course. At the moment, that’s three that I wrote after being Asialink writer in residence in Beijing last year: ‘Aperture,’ ‘Architecture,’ and ‘Demolition.’
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Conversation, observation, speculation. Eavesdropping. My story ‘Plain Indians’ resulted from a conversation with a friend about land management in which we wondered why no-one had made a Western about bush regeneration. I ended up daring myself to do it.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I’ll jot down an idea and pretend to forget about it for a while, then one day I’ll start writing, usually when I am putting off some other unpleasant work. First draft often happens in a single sitting, but I will craft and carve away for months afterwards. I work alone until I think I am finished, then I like to put my stories to bed for a month or so and come back to them for a second or third finishing.
Very occasionally I will share work at a late draft stage with someone who was there for the story’s genesis. But usually I am on my own until it reaches an editor, with whom I hope I am gracious. I certainly appreciate good editors.
Many of my stories end up in zines or as podcasts on my website, so i am often involved in the publication too.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
By readers, definitely. As an online medium, it’s much more adaptable to new technologies and to the demands of our widening scopes of attention. I don’t have an ebook reader but I am a podcast addict. I think publishers are still catching up to the fact that short stories are the form of the future.
At the same time I think we have always valued a good story. I once had a stranger tell me Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ as though it had happened to one of his relatives. He seemed to really believe it was his own personal history and I hadn’t the heart to break it to the man that he had stolen it. The yarn-spinners of the NT are incorrigible plagiarists. But good stories can get inside you in a powerful way, become part of you, and I can’t see that changing.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Love it. My enthusiasm for the DIY potential sometimes clashes with my respectable published life. I wish I had the time and cash to investigate all the possibilities of the various technologies. Hoping 2011 will see some new developments at jenjen.com.au. Meanwhile, I will keep podcasting every month or two.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
I can only repeat the best advice I ever received as a writer, which applies equally to small publishing ventures: Persist.
Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a chapbook of poems, Treading Earth (Press Press, 2009). She was the winner of the 2008 Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Pacific Region of the 2008-9 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, and the 2008 Northern Territory Literary Awards: Best Short Story. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Hecate, Overland, Heat, the Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories, and New Australian Stories, and she is a regular contributor to New Matilda and Overland. She lives in Alice Springs.
Her second novel, Gone, will be out through UQP at the end of February 2011.
To find out more about Jennifer Mills, and to listen to podcasts of her stories, visit her website www.jenjen.au
Spineless Wonders asks Deborah Biancotti
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
‘Admire’ is such an admirably bold word! I admire Terry Dowling and Kelly Link and Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages and Rob Shearman for their short fiction. I admire Paul Haines though I’m also rather *appalled* by his stories (is it even *legal* to publish that stuff, Paul??). I admire Edgar Allan Poe a heck of a lot!
In recent years I’ve hunted out short story collections by authors known best for novels: so, Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley and J.G Ballard are now also on the list of authors I admire who write short fiction.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Man, this is a tough question. I thought about it for too long and now I have a dozen stories in my head. … I have to come back to this one.
Okay, I’m back. I rummaged through a bunch of collections & anthos. I thought I had one when I re-discovered Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Tangled Strings of the Marionnettes”, but turns out that’s a novella. I have hundreds of images pressing on my eyeballs from short stories I’ve read, but the titles escape me. But I’m settling on Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, from 1892. Because it is THE story of an articulate, untrustworthy narrator going quietly mad. It sets the standard. And it was inspired by the author’s own experience of post-natal depression. I’ve also just learned from my trusty OXFORD BOOK OF GOTHIC TALES, that she wrote HERLAND, a utopian feminist novel (under the name Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Which seems worth mentioning!
3. What do you like about the short story form?
The adrenalin jolt of a good, sharp short story, the ‘ha!’ of recognition that comes from a smart, sassy tale well told.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Full of cranky humanitarianism.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
It’s almost always the one I’m writing at the time.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Everywhere. I wrote “The Tailor of Time”, as an example, after surgery, feeling vulnerable and sick and wanting time to speed up so I could be well faster. But also wanting time to stop, so the threat of dying wouldn’t reach out and grab me. I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could ask some strange, ancient being to just, y’know, stop time for a day’. I was barely able to move around, but I wrote that story in a few short/long days, trapped on the lounge.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Usually I note down the idea first of all, & pump as many words as I can into it during that first sitting. Then I go away & do other stuff or other stories & I keep coming back until I have a narrative or an ending. Then I write the rest, run it past a handful of readers, re-write, send, get a bunch of rejections, eventually land a publishing spot, maybe, & start again. I try to hold onto the energy of that first idea while also polishing the slippery little thing into the best shape I can make it. It’s a razor’s edge we writers walk.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I think so. I think Australia is so very unable to support writing in general, as an industry, that short stories are just yet another way to legitimately spend your time while you’re NOT earning money. You know. Just like most Australian novelists. Does that sound cynical?
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I’ve been published both those ways & I love it, especially audio. Digital & audio are great because they’re usually free to audiences, so you can reach out to a lot of readers who wouldn’t necessarily spend money on your book without some kind of taster. And digital suits short stories down to the ground.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Well, I used to think Spineless Wonders was an insult until I read your blog. So ‘be prepared for confusion’ might be one bit of advice.
Deborah Biancotti is a Sydney-based writer. Her first published story won an Aurealis Award and her first collection, A BOOK OF ENDINGS from Twelfth Planet Press, was short-listed for the 2010 William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. Her work has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix, Eidolon 1, Agog!, Ideomancer, infinity plus, and Prime Publishing YEAR’S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR. Her most recent work was an essay for 21st CENTURY GOTHIC. She is now working on her first and second novels.
You can find Deborah Biancottti online and you can hear her read ‘Hush’, one of the stories from Book of Endings, here.
Read a review of Book of Endings by Overland’s Rjurik Davidson.
Spineless Wonders Asks A.G.(Andy)McNeil
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Recently I’ve been on a bit of a William Maxwell trip and I seem to enjoy his short fiction more than the novels. ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’ is the notable exception there, but it’s a novella. I always enjoy stories by E.L Doctorow, who is still alive and publishing. Peter Carey changed the way I thought about Australian short stories. For the better. Salinger stories like ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish ‘ and ‘For Esme, With Love and Squalor’ blow me away. Salinger wrote with so much affection for his characters; I read those and think there’s nothing more important.
I read Raymond Carver when my own work needs to be sort of reined-in, because he’s remembered for his simplicity. Which is unfair because if you read enough of those stories – ‘Errand’ and ‘Cathedral’ and ‘The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off’ - you realise they aren’t simple, they’re just excellent. Then, you know, there’s David Foster Wallace and Hemingway and Bolano and Chekhov and on and on and on. Also those of my friends who write.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
One of the first stories that comes to mind is ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ by Foster Wallace. Which is loaded with humanity and panic, but it’s also stylistically interesting as well as uncannily precise. I’m a big Foster Wallace fan but I don’t really have that attraction to avant-gardism, so I have this belief that Wallace became the writer he was not through being deliberately experimental but just by working impossibly hard, which necessarily includes elements of experiment. To a point where he could turn his attention to just about anything, take it in whole, and set it down on the page so perfectly that there’s this kind of retroactive force: you can’t imagine the scene being rendered differently; even the slightest variation and the story would have been flawed or incomplete. Which is probably a little hyperbolic, especially given the likelihood that the story was edited after Wallace was done with it. But still, ’Incarnations…’ is a neat example of an author showing off his skillset, with all the requisite heart and compositional know-how and so on. It’s one of the stories I’m always going back to. And there are others. Like Joyce’s ‘Araby’ and several stories by Flannery O’Connor.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I could say various things about icebergs and snapshots but mostly I enjoy short fiction in a pretty nerdy way: I get a kick out of watching as writers more capable than me solve whatever problem they’ve posed for themselves, or take the narrative in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, or just nail a sentence with a mastery and eloquence I wouldn’t have had the capacity even to imagine. Which of course is what most of us want from most art forms, it’s just that at the moment I try to write short stories and so I read them with a special interest. I don’t feel able to write longer things and it follows that I don’t read novels with anything like the same structural awareness or curiosity. Certainly some short stories should be novels, and some novels should have been short stories, so there is a distinction to be made between forms but it’s a complex one. For the moment, the short story is the only form I understand a little – tiny - bit about.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
It is constantly changing and it’s sometimes intensely difficult to persevere with, but it’s only after those difficult periods that I feel ok about speaking to real, hard-working adults about what I try to do. If I have developed anything like an identifiable voice or style it is only recently, I think. Among the handful of my own stories that I consider reasonable there are thematic similarities and recurring characters or personality types; there are trends, I’m sure, but I don’t have a mission statement. Other than to say that I hope to write stories that feel true to my experiences as a relatively young person in Australia as it is today, or as it was for me as a boy in primary school, riding my bike and pitching honkeynuts at my friends in the park. William Maxwell’s writing has taught me not to avoid those things, because they’re honest and heartfelt and they resonate. And Peter Carey shows us that Australian fiction isn’t all reinterpretion of landscape. ‘Voss’ is one of my favourite novels, but the lifestyle it depicts is – for the most part - alien to me. Naturally there is a compromise to be had. Clive James writes nicely about dunny men, and about Barry Humphries noticing snails in the letterbox, and there’s still no shortage of those details, so it’s a matter of uncovering them and letting the significance translate. Which it turns out sounds rather like a mission statement.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
The story I’m writing currently. Because I get to recall the weight of a honkeynut in my hand, but also because each new project feels like an improved version of the last.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I used to just take people I know, mash their personalities together and place them in hysterical scenarios. Because I didn’t know what I was doing. Now it happens that every month or so someone will say something or tell me a story and I’ll see a significance, or the potential for greater significance if I made some changes, and I let it stew for a while until the circumstances are right for me to make a run at it. The process might take a week or it might take two months, at which point I usually have to admit that it isn’t working. The first story I published, in 2008, started as a writing exercise with a close friend. We were in Margaret River, staying in this beautiful house, and he gave me the opening line: ‘Cassie’s love for horses was abhorrent.’ Terrible opening line, but a really nice time in my life.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I got ahead of myself in 6. There is also a reasonable amount of drink and despair. And in terms of publication: in each case it has resulted from people being much kinder and more supportive than I could have imagined.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I find it fairly difficult to stay in touch with what’s coming out and what people are actually reading. There is just too much to read. I also don’t know whether short story collections are more popular now than they were ten years ago, or if it’s just that I’ve taken an interest and now notice them on the shelves. I will say that I was watching with interest as Nam Le’s collection ‘The Boat’ received praise and attention. It struck me as unusual, because the stories turned out to be both good and popular. So I don’t know about ‘valued’ but I haven’t given up hope. So far the hourly rate isn’t much to speak of, but I don’t work as hard as I should.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
It’s nice to have anyone read/hear it and respond positively. I get to see the stories on a screen whenever I like and I think it’s only natural that I should enjoy seeing them in print. But there are new and interesting possibilities with non-print forms and it’s only my mum who buys the books anyway. I’m actually just thankful that people take an interest at all.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Without making a pun? Yours is a worthy cause. Do whatever is necessary to stay up and running.
A.G McNeil is currently working on a PhD at The University of Western Australia. His work has appeared in Best Australian stories 2008 (ed. Delia Falconer), New Australian stories and New Australian Stories 2 (ed. Aviva Tuffield).
Spineless Wonders Asks Louise Swinn
1.Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Salinger is the biggest cliché but aside from authors I’ve published – too numerous to mention – he still stands out, as does Amy Witting, Dorothy Parker, Michael Chabon. Emmett Stinson’s Known Unknowns has been the most recent to make me stop breathing momentarily. I really dug it.These lists really are difficult, aren’t they. I’d have a different list tomorrow.
2.What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Again, aside from ones I’ve published and some of Salinger’s Nine Stories, Alistair Macleod’s ‘The Boat’ would be one of them (one of the many).
3. What do you like about the short story form?
There’s that not having to explain thing that I love so much about short stories. They don’t go over the top and have to all match up neatly in the way that novels so often do, to feel well rounded. They are also short, which is good on a tight time budget.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I’d try to avoid describing my own writing, I guess. People seem to get their own writing wrong, don’t they? I don’t know – carrying on some kind of mundane realist tradition? Interested more in interiors and things not really happening than things actually happening. Interested in the way things don’t really change and sometimes, very occasionally, surprisingly, do.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Usually always the most recent story, which right now is one I’ve just finished called “It’s Been Going on For a While”. Why – probably because I haven’t spent as long loathing it, because it’s still fresh.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Ideas come from anywhere. Seeing someone do something, hearing an anecdote, looking through a window, imagining what would have happened if there had been a slight shift, something a tiny bit different, to the way things actually worked out. Mainly imagining what it would be like to be the person I’m looking at at the time.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I pretty much go it alone on my stories. I don’t know – I think of something and start mapping out an idea and then start writing it and when I get to the end, if I’m not physically revolted by it, I’ll re-read it and perhaps send it somewhere.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Yes and no. See the past seven years of my life for examples.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I feel excited. For people driving in their car to be able to hear a story – awesome! For those of us who read online all the time nowadays – I like knowing I’m there too.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Advice on starting a press, is that what you mean? I don’t know: if you’re not pissing people off, you’re probably not doing it right? That’s always good advice. Publish what you love. Or if you don’t love it, it should make you wildly rich so that you can publish millions of what you love. Know that if you like it, it has value. I don’t know – all advice is rubbish, isn’t it. Just do it, really.
Louise Swinn is a critic, writer and the editorial director of Sleepers, publishers of The Sleepers Almanac, and of award-winning fiction including Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming. Her most recent story ‘A Clean Kind of Dirt’ is in the current Kill Your Darlings.
Twitter: @Louise_Swinn @sleeperspublish
Websites: sleeperspublishing.com
Little Bleeders – talking short Crime Fiction
In preparation for this blogpost, I contacted a number of writers and publishers seeking their views on the past, present and future of short crime fiction in Australia. Professor Stephen Knight’s name invariably popped up in these responses, as did his very popular short story anthologies, Crimes for a Summer Christmas. So I contacted the Prof at Cardiff University for his thoughts on short crime fiction and his reply is below. (Fans will be very pleased to know that he is heading back to Oz soon and very keen to continue promoting Australian ‘criminographers’.)
From: Stephen Knight
To: Spineless Wonders
Dear Bronwyn, You are right about the importance of short stories in general, and specifically in crime fiction. The short story was the dominant, almost the only, medium for self-aware crime fiction until late in the nineteenth century, and short stories long continued as both a mode of experiment and also considerable income for authors — Christie was a great exponent, as we see on television today. Conan Doyle got to novella length only four times, and Sherlock Holmes is a product of the short story — though they could run to 15000 words. The very important American private-eye form came out of the Black Mask story tradition. In Australia the great Mary Fortune exclusively wrote crime fiction, of very varied kinds, in short-story mode from the 1860s for nearly fifty years, and she had many local parallels — my anthology Dead Witness was compounded of some of the best of them.
The Crimes for a Summer Christmas series that Allen and Unwin started in 1990 showed that the crime short-story spirit was strongly alive in the present, and that the form permits writers to venture into crime fiction either as a change from their mainstream activities – notable examples were Elizabeth Jolley and Mudrooroo Narogin — and also enables new writers to find their feet in criminography.
Best wishes, Stephen
The Crime Scene
Here, The Ned Kelly Award’s Peter Lawrance and Lindsay Simpson, and crime novelist, P.M. Newton describe their experiences with the SD Harvey Short Story and Queen of Crime competitions respectively. Plus, there’s an interview with Jacqui Horwood, an award-wining writer and judge of crime fiction.
Lindsay Simpson: When Peter and I discussed the possible ways that the SD Harvey award would work, we decided that the short crime genre was worthwhile pursuing. I felt this was a relatively untraversed genre in Australia and we felt the competition should be able to produce internationally acclaimed short stories. The entries we receive are fiction although the SD Harvey entry requirements stipulate it can include creative nonfiction. For many people this might be a harder option. But this award may start writers to think about different ways to tell a crime story.
As one of the judges, I am looking for something more original than potboilers, considered coasters by crime fiction aficionados. So much of that kind of writing seems to have moved to TV viz. Underbelly. Sandra Harvey and I prided ourselves in providing a gritty realism that had foundations in truth. I don’t expect the entries to be as close to the kind of veracity we aspired to (one of our books, My Husband My Killer was used by the prosecuting team as a background to the case for the judicial inquiry into Andrew Kaljzich’s culpability. Similarly, my current book Honeymoon Dive is also being used as required reading for the prosecution team prior to Gabe Watson’s upcoming US trial.) I guess this is a long way of saying I’m looking for something more than stereotypes which are an easy fallback.
In terms of experimentation, we do see this in the short listers. Originally, we had asked for 3000 words but I asked Peter to extend that, because with crime writing I think you need more space to develop the plot. This has produced some cleverer entries. As a journalist I am a great believer in writing to a word count but 3000 was a tad short.
Peter Lawrance: In the two years since the inception of the SD Harvey Ned Kelly Award there’s been a surge of interest in our competition. Add to those the number of people out there writing short stories, and one could safely argue the form is in a strong state.
I am doing what I can at this stage to nurture short crime, in terms of setting up the prize, and ensuring that it receives support. On this basis the prize money has been reasonable ($1000+) although everything’s relative, and naturally there will be prizes around with a more handsome bounty. However, the Ned Kelly Award has an additional factor. As part of the prize there is an agreement with Scribe Publications to publish the winning story in their annual New Australian Stories, edited by Aviva Tuffield. There’s an agreement to publish the winner in the Sydney Morning Herald ‘Summer Edition’ too, although an unforseen difficulty there lies in their word length. For example, this year’s winner wrote a story of approximately 4000 words and the SMH will only publish 1600 or so. Consequently, the winning writer should be prepared to ‘edit’ their work to fit the newspaper’s requirements! I’d also add that unbeknownst to the three shortlisted writers in the 2010 Ned Kelly Awards, I made an unofficial presentation of a second and third prize (a couple of hundred each), by way of encouragement. In essence this is all possible because of the support from CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) and various individuals who have made donations in support.
As with any writing, quality varies. I know one of the previous short story judges, himself a well-known Australian crime writer, who was not going to tolerate what he called ‘writing by word processor’. He was tough in the technical context, although I’d also stress he was extremely generous too. This is important in terms of maintaining standards. So critical appraisal is important, objective editorial work would also assist many writers, not just a careful read-over by their best friend. Above all, constant working at the craft.
P.M. Newton: I think the crime writing competitions still function pretty much as auditions from writers hoping to gain recognition and then publication for a long form crime novel. Whilst some writers can and do specialise in the short form, they tend to be literary fiction or Sci-Fi. But I’d bet, you ask any writer who has won a short crime fiction competition here, whether they want to write short collections or a novel – they’ll say novel.
I think there are challenges in the short crime fiction genre. If the writer relies on very plot driven stories then trying to shake that out into a short form can end up being very heavy on exposition, or a very by-the-numbers procedural. Look at the difference between a crime-a-week TV cop show which has to spend a fair bit of its 45 minutes setting up the crime, the investigation and the solution, versus something like The Wire. Your crime a week is a series of short stories (albeit with the same characters) whereas The Wire is a chapter a week, five volume novel.
Short crime that works, probably places the crime in the background and the characters, the place and the atmosphere up front. The crime becomes almost incidental, or hasn’t even happened yet, but is building towards it, or happened in the past and someone is paying for it now. The screenwriting term for creating strong scenes; “In late, out early” applies equally to most scenes in a novel, and I think it applies with bells on to the short form.
Jacqui Horwood
How would you describe the state of short crime in Australia?
I think the short crime fiction market is a lot like short story market in general – heaps of people of writing it but not so many people publishing it. The Sisters in Crime published their first volume of Scarlet Stiletto winners a few years ago through Harlequin’s MIRA but we’re basically going it alone for volume 2 and self-publishing by way of Lindy Cameron’s publishing venture, Clan Destine Press.
There’s far more happening online for short crime fiction writers. There are loads of crime fiction blogs and websites. There are opportunities to get published in e-zines, although admittedly many of the e-zines are US-based. There was the recent re-launch of Crime Factory magazine which was originally started by David Honeybone in Melbourne in 2000 before it was finished up in 2003. A couple of Australian writers and an American writer have resuscitated the magazine online and it’s a great place for writers of hard boiled short crime fiction to get published.
Ideally I’d love to see more opportunities for short crime fiction writers in Australia whether it’s book-based or web-based. I think there is an opportunity out there for enterprising publishers to use e-readers and allow readers to buy single short stories.
Describe your experience of writing short crime. Is it any different, for instance, to the other writing you do?
My experience of writing short crime is very uneven. My first foray was for the Scarlet Stiletto in 2003. That story, “Slasher’s Return” actually won that year. My next attempts weren’t so successful. So I left crime alone for a while and wrote general fiction and articles on parenting.
I’ve gone back full circle and I’m now working on a young adult crime novel which I’ve finished and am re-drafting. I’m also trying out another short crime story for submission.
I love writing short crime. It’s challenging to try and tell a satisfying crime story in only a few thousand words. It’s also exciting to explore the What ifs of human nature and human behaviour.
Which of the crime short stories that you have written do you most like and why? How did the story idea came about and what was the process of writing it like?
It’d be no surprise to you to know that my favourite crime short story is “Slasher’s Return”. It’s been my most successful and the one where I think I was able to create and maintain a voice. The story is about a burnt-out police woman who is on long term sick leave after a breakdown. She’s working in a pub and one day a criminal walks in and orders a drink. It’s the criminal who’s responsible for her breakdown and who has been missing for a year. This is her turning point. She needs to decide her future.
At the time I wrote the story I was working as a project officer at Victoria Police and we had a police officer working with us who’d just come back from a breakdown. So the idea came from a combination of my own mini mid-30’s crisis (“Is this all there is?”) and working with this guy and listening to his story.
The process of writing “Slasher’s Return” was stop-start. The beginning of the story came in a rush and then I reached a point where I had to think about the plot. That slowed the writing down for a long time. The ending was written on holiday. All over I reckon it took me nearly a year to write and then re-draft the story a few times. Having a deadline for the Scarlet Stiletto certainly helped me focus.
Who are the writers (alive or dead, Australian or otherwise) that you admire and that influence you?
Crime-wise, I love the more hardboiled writers. I guess I really admire the pared down approach of those sorts of writers. I know James Ellroy’s not for everyone but stylistically he’s amazing. I love Peter Temple – both his Jack Irish books and his stand alones. The Broken Shore is brilliant. I love Val McDermid’s Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series. She’s created two complex and intriguing characters who are always fascinating to read about. I’ve recently discovered Louise Welsh. The Cutting Room is an incredible achievement – a modern day story set in England that evokes 1920s Berlin.
Non crime-wise, I’m a huge Tim Winton fan. His words are like music on paper. I WISH I could write like that. I love Jeanette Winterson’s imagination and daring.
Crossing both genres, I’m an admirer of Dorothy Porter’s work. Her crime prose is such an achievement. She’s a loss to Australian literature.
Can you think of a crime short story that really stands out for you? Talk us through why you like it.
The short crime stories I remember most are the ones with an interesting voice telling the story. Because I’m one of the Scarlet Stiletto judges, it’s those stories I remember the most. One of my favourites is Roxxy Bent’s “Mrs Wilcox’s Milk Saucepan”. The narrator is an 80 year old woman who is captivating from the start. She’s observant and interesting so as a reader you are happy to follow her through the story. Another one is Mandy Wrangle’s “Persia Bloom” for the same reason. Persia is a fascinating character with a unique story to tell. I guess it’s less about the plot and more about the characters and their voices.
Feel free to add to the discussion. You can use the Comments box below, or send me an email bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au
Look out for Little Bleeders Pt 2, where we’ll look at the crime genre and literary criticism, and profile more writers of short Australian crime.
Spineless Wonders Asks Rjurik Davidson
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
There are many, so I’ll have to just name a few. My tastes are pretty varied, and I love Chekov as much as I love Kafka. A while ago I read a lot of New Yorker stories, and people like Alice Munro made an impression on me. Still, I tend towards the more exotic, and in the genre I work in – speculative fiction – it’s Borges, Ballard, M John Harrison, Peter Carey, Margo Lanagan, Angela Carter, Kelly Link. In any case, I love the form: the way short stories are condensed, like little polished jewels.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Uh, ah, um. I’m going to have to point to a few. Ballard’s ‘The Drowned Giant’, M John Harrison’s ‘The Blue Rays’, Harlan Ellison’s ‘Repent Harlequin Said the Ticktock Man.’ See, I could just go on, and fail completely at answering the question.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Sometimes people suggest that at its centre is a single idea, though sometimes I think it’s often two ideas running against each other. Others say the perfect short story has no unresolved conflicts, no unnecessary scenes, no superfluous words. In any case, compared to the novel – which is often a rambling overblown structure – the short story is self-contained. There’s a craft to keeping it so condensed which I love to see in its best practitioners.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
In terms of fiction, it’s speculative fiction. There’s surrealism in there, fantasy, magic realism, a very little science fiction. Basically, my work is non-realist. The fantasy that I write has been well received so I’ve tended towards writing more of that, but I intend to move away from it at some point in the future. I’ll go back to the other modes. Sometimes I wish I could write straight, mimetic, fiction. Alas, I can’t. My mind works better when the mimetic or realist aspects are thrown into a new light by something unusual.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
At the moment, I quite like “The Cinema of Coming Attractions”, a story set in Southern France somewhere during the 1960s. Every year a cinema comes to town that shows the audience their future. It has unexpected effects. The story is my meditation on New Wave French film, among other things. It’s the first story in my collection, The Library of Forgotten Books.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Let’s take “The Cinema of Coming Attractions.” My friend Andrew Macrae had written a story which featured a ‘Museum of Replicas” or something like that. The title of my own story popped into my head, and I wondered, well what is that? What are the coming attractions? I’ve always been interested in the philosophical concepts of free will and determinism – do we have agency, or are we controlled by the structures around us? – and the idea of seeing your own future is a good way of thinking about this. I’d also read a fair bit of Ballard by this stage, and so the opening of the story is very Ballardian:
During the summer the crowds came to the town – starlets and champion surfers, playboys and fortune seekers, retired generals and declining pin up girls – and bustled around the squares or lazed on the rocky beach beneath the white cliffs topped by even whiter buildings. Here they acted out their desperate affairs and petty dramas. The more adventurous sailed out to the rock pools on the picturesque islands or along the coast to the famous Sparkling Grotto with its fractured and kaleidoscopic light. But chief among the enticements was the Cinema of Coming Attractions. Each day, as my gang scammed tourists from the Place de la Revolution, I watched the famous and the wealthy stagger from the matinee sessions at the Palais Cinema. Sometimes they would be arm-in-arm and laughing. At others they came out drawn and white. And, of course, I’d heard the stories of breakdown and suicide.
I wrote the story when I was in France, so the location was simply my own immediate one, though I wasn’t in the south but in Burgundy. In terms of plot, I can’t exactly recall I’m afraid, except that as usual, it turned out to be more complicated than I’d hoped!
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Each time it’s different. Sometimes I start with a scene, other times a plot, other times a title, most often, though, a concept – an idea. So my notebook is full of little notes like: “Character born without eyes: metaphor of society as blind?” Then I just throw myself in. I always have fellow writers read it – I’m part of a group called Supernova, who are all accomplished writers. They usually give the story a thorough going over, the way Tony Soprano would give someone a thorough going over. “For your own good, you know…” After I’m out of hospital, I see that they were usually right. Then I rewrite it. Finally it gets sent out to whoever’s been buying my stories lately. Usually to the US or the UK.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Not really. Sometimes I think it’s a writers’ form. Most people seem to like reading novels more than stories. It’s just a reality we have to face. It’s a pity really. But I work in perhaps the one form – SF – where the short story survives.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I don’t mind at all. I agree with Cory Doctorow that the danger for the modern writer is anonymity. If digital or audio helps get the work a hearing, I’m all for it. Personally, I like paper. But that’s just me. Some of my stories are available online, such as “The Interminable Suffering of Mysterious Mr Wu”. It’s companion piece, “The Fear of White” is available on a podcast. Probably my most well-known story was first published online also, and still lives on here.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Do what you love, do it for the love of it. Publish things that you’d like to read. Don’t worry about what anyone thinks about it. Ask yourself, “Is this what I would like?” Then go for it.
Rjurik Davidson is Associate Editor of Overland magazine and the author of The Library of Forgotten Books. His novel Unwrapped Sky will be published in 2012.
Spineless Wonders Asks Tiggy Johnson
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Assuming you don’t want a crazy-long list, I’ll list just three: Paddy O’Reilly, Zenda Vecchio, Ryan O’Neill. Make that four: David McLaren.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
There are quite a few, but I’ll choose one, semi-randomly. A story I published in page seventeen Issue 3: ‘The vast expanses of Antarctica’ by David McLaren. The story is funny, real in an unreal kind of way, offers vivid images and McLaren’s writing style is a delight to read with an easy flow.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It’s compact. You can experience a new world, a new character and their situation, in such a short time.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I like to write about ordinary people, with ordinary lives, particularly if I’m exposing a reality that many of us often don’t consider, or an issue usually not talked about. There are so many things screwed up in our society that are swept under the carpet. They’re the things I want to write about (although probably not all of them).
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I’ll go with 2. One is a story in my collection called ‘A dash of milk’. It was one of those pieces that just worked, even as it grew from about 1800 words to 3500. I spent a lot of time trying to get it right, enjoyed the editing process more than I have with other stories, and the feedback I get tells me it was worth the effort. It has also acted as a springboard for other works, in terms of the themes and type/s of characters I want to work with.
The other is a story that is not yet published, called ‘Waiting’. At a prompt from an editor, I tried something completely different when writing this story. Well, a few things different I think. It’s a dark story (darker than usual) with a bit of an experimental form, for me, blending a bit of the real with the unreal. It’s a confronting story and I most like how it stretched me as a writer to achieve something I wouldn’t have guessed I could do.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
With the story I mentioned above, ‘Waiting‘, it was initially sparked by the editor suggesting he was looking for stories that ‘would make his readers feel uncomfortable’. I was keen to accept his challenge, although my initial ideas weren’t working when I tried to put them down. On my way out one night, the news came on the car radio and one of the stories gave me the idea. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it had something to do with a rapist having had his case heard that day in court, and I instantly thought, imagine being a fly on the wall when that happened. I shared the idea with a friend later, as I didn’t have anything to write it down with, and a brief discussion helped me cement a few extra details, although most details formed themselves when I sat down to write.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I go through phases where my process changes, but my current preferred method is this, and suits me being able to write in shorter chunks of time than to necessarily sit down and do it all in one go. I make notes about an idea as it forms. I write as much as comes to mind at the time, especially if it’s come in dialogue form, or an actual image. Often, I get an idea of what might come next, and if so, I note that down too. When I have some writing time, even an hour, I like to make a rough plan. I do this scene by scene and include any information that applies to that scene. After doing the last scene, I return to earlier scenes and change details as necessary and/or include extras that will help me reach the conclusion (foreshadowing).
Next I write the actual story, from beginning to end.
I was part of a writers’ group last year (but have now moved) and I would get feedback from other members before redrafting. I love this process as it helps me see things I wouldn’t necessarily be able to see, certainly not without letting it sit untouched for a while. I also often have to just let a story sit untouched for a while before coming back to redraft. How many redrafts I do depends on the story and how I felt about it working as I wrote the first draft, although this kind of confidence has come with time as I’ve got to know my writing over the years.
Then I stress a lot about trying to decide where to send it and often take weeks to make a decision. Imminent deadlines help.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Yes and no. In some circles it is and it’s difficult to see outside your own experience. I think the short story has a growing audience, although I suspect this might be more about my hopes for the future than reality.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I’m still not sure how I feel about digital form. It probably has more to do with the publication for me than just a basic consideration of print versus digital. If it’s a publication I respect, the digital form wouldn’t necessarily bother me, although I have withdrawn an accepted story from a publisher after they decided to do a digital print run instead of a paper one. In that instance, I was partly concerned about me not being able to access a copy at all for myself because I don’t have the appropriate technology, but I also didn’t have much time to make a decision and possibly made the wrong one. Who knows.
The same goes for an audio publication, it has more to do with my thoughts on the publisher/producer, although I have the necessary equipment to listen to an audio piece.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
When it comes to selections, listen to your heart; when it comes to all the rest, listen to your head.
Tiggy Johnson co-founded the publication, page seventeen, in 2004. Her stories and poems have been published in various literary magazines and she won 2nd prize in the Herald-Sun Short Story Competition in 2004. Her short story collection ‘Svetlana or otherwise’ (Ginninderra Press) was released in 2008 and her poetry collection ‘First taste’ in 2010. She recently moved from the outskirts of Melbourne to Brisbane and blogs at tiggyjohnson.blogspot.com
Spineless Wonders Asks Favel Parrett
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Short fiction authors I admire (not in any order):
Ernest Hemmingway, Robert Drewe, Michael Sala, Petina Gappah, Tim Winton, J.D. Salinger, Oscar Wilde, Junot Diaz, Kerstin Ekman… There are SO many!
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
In Another Country by Ernest Hemmingway is my favourite story. I read it often. I keep it on my desk and even though I almost know it by heart, it gives me chills every time I read it. It is written simply with a kind of truth that I feel in my heart.
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.
To me it is an important anti-war story and I find it incredibly moving. It is the story I turn to when I need to ground myself in good writing. I very am grateful for it.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Short stories are very difficult to write – to get right. It takes so much hard work, drafting, time. I admire writers that take the time – put in the work to give us these seamless and complete worlds.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I would describe my writing as simple. I think most of the story is told off the page, in the spaces behind the words. Someone who reviewed my book said ‘… deceptively simple writing that resonates long after the final pages have been read.’
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I have been working on a few short pieces set in Africa. Set in African airports to be more specific. I suspect they are part of a larger work, but for now I am enjoying the feeling of arriving at Livingstone airport, smelling frangipani waft through the arrival hall and stepping out into that golden light that is like no other light in the world. Africa!
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I will use the Livingstone airport example.
When I was in Botswana last year I briefly met a man who was from Melbourne. We got talking and he told me he had just come from Zambia. He said he had had a wonderful time and he was glad because he was actually born in Zambia. He never thought he would remember it because he left when he was very small. However, when he touched down at the tiny airport of Livingstone and saw that giant flame tree growing by the runway, he got chills. He was very moved by the whole experience.
That conversation stayed with me for many months. When I can’t get something out of my head, it usually means that it is a lead for me to try and follow. Sometimes it turns into a story. Here’s an extract from Welcome to Livingstone.
A bald man winked at him, stamped his passport. And with his bags in hand, he made his way through the crowd of visitors being met by guides. He walked out of the glass doors, out into the light. Not blinding like his home in Perth, but warm, golden. Illuminating every leaf, every blade of grass.
And he knew it.
The courtyard outside like a quiet and sacred avenue of honour. Lined with full-grown jacaranda trees, frangipani trees. The sleepy, sweet smelling airport of Livingstone like a dream.
This place.
His own memories. Ones that he was sure did not exist. He was only four. How could a four year old know anything, remember the substance of a place. A country. A home.
Home.
Faces that held a certain light – a glint of life from long ago. Open faces – a song in voices.
Welcome! Welcome! Welcome to Livingstone.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I have a small room in the city where I work. Notes, reading and ideas are for home and other places, but my studio is where I do most of my writing. I draft A LOT. I go from the raw rough draft and then I cut it back – tighten and streamline. I usually do 7 or 8 drafts. It seems to take me a long time. My stories always start off long and end up tiny. I wish I could write long short stories. Welcome to Livingstone was 1500 rough draft and ended up being 470 by the end.
I workshop some of my work in a writing group and this is always very helpful.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I am hopeful that short stories are becoming valued. There seem to be more anthologies coming out which is great.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I am really happy for my work to be published in any form. The wider the audience the better.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
My only real advice is for writers…
When your story is the best you can make it, send it out to journals, comps, etc. When you get a rejection put it out of your mind and send your work somewhere else. Don’t give up. Believe in your writing. Keep working and keep writing.
You have to back yourself and put your work out there. Be your own champion.
Favel Parrett is a Victoria writer who loves to surf in the Southern Ocean. She was a recipient of an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship in 2009 and has had a number of short stories published in journals including Island and Wet Ink. Her first novel Past the Shallows will be published by Hachette Australia in MAY 2011.
Here is a link to Favel’s Waterproof, Lightweight, Good in Snow published in Wet Ink: Issue 16 and you can find out more about Past the Shallows here.
Spineless Wonders Ask Will Elliott
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
George Saunders is at the top of the pack, not far behind him are David Foster Wallace and Kelly Link. Karen Hitchcock would be my pick of Australian short story writers.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Probably “Adams” by George Saunders. It’s a comic masterpiece. [You can listen to a podcast of this story here.]
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I like the opportunity it gives writers to mix around with different styles they may not normally try. If I discover a good novelist, I’m very anxious to get hold of whatever short stories they’ve written.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
These days I’d call it dark fantasy. I’ve written in several genres, with short stories I guess my better ones could be called “quirky mainstream”, which probably describes a lot of the authors mentioned above (except Kelly Link, who writes horror.)
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I’d say my best short stories are: “Ain’t no ordinary ham” because it’s nice and weird, as well as “Mrs Claus’s Christmas”, because it presents a side of Santa we don’t always see (ie, an elf-exploiting fatass.) I also rate a horror story I wrote last year, soon to be published in a UK collection, called “Hungry Man”. It’s probably the most disturbing fiction I’ve written… I was actually a little shaken afterward for a day or two.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Sometimes from the ether – as in, you just start at some random point and find they lead somewhere (“Ham” was like that.) It could be anything from real life – you see a man frantically fumbling through a pocket for his keys, and you begin to wonder why he was in such a hurry, what was really in his briefcase, etc etc etc… Next thing you know your imagination fills in some blanks and there’s a story there.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Others are seldom involved, I don’t even have proof readers these days. The process differs with each project and very much depends on the nature of the project. Rough drafts come out relatively quickly, then it’s best to let the story sit for a while before rewriting. Many times I’ve submitted something too quickly, and found later it wasn’t ready to go out in public.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Not at all, except by writers. There’s no market for it. It’s a dying art form, as is written fiction in general. People no longer have the attention span for books and our schools are designed to worsen this trend.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Slightly curious to see if this makes writing less or more economically viable for authors to continue with what they are doing. There is an opportunity if it works to bypass publishers altogether, to hell with a 10% royalty rate, how about 100%. That aspect of it intrigues me.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Get your kicks before the shithouse goes up in flames.
Will Elliott is the 32 year old author of four books. His debut, Pilo Family Circus, won five national literary awards and was short-listed for the international horror guild award. His memoir, Strange Places: a memoir of mental illness, was short-listed for the 2010 Prime Minister’s literary prize. He has just completed a fantasy trilogy called Pendulum. His other novel, Nightfall, will be published in 2012.
Spineless Wonders Asks Julie Chevalier
1.Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Tillie Olsen, Ernest Hemingway,Alice Munro, Pam Houston, Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tina Lupton, Katie Chase, Elizabeth Strout. From Australia, Ryan O’Neill and Sue Taylor.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
My current favourite is Sue Taylor’s ‘A Picture is Built’ from her relatively unknown collection, Large Nudes with Small Parrots. Fellow writer, Linda Godfrey gave it to me a year and a half ago and I still think, I want to write like that. When the narrator shows the absurdity of the defences she is constructing, it is as though she is without defences. What remains is a woman listening to a radio broadcast in a self-obsessed paranoid and very funny way. Well, I can identify with that. Lots of humour and an unusual depth of understanding of motivation.
2.What do you like about the short story form?
The invitation to experiment and play. I can write a story from one POV or tense or voice and change it into another on the same day. Radically changing a short story is a 50-yard dash rather than an international marathon.
3. How would you describe your own writing?
I have changed my approach to writing poetry in the last few years and I want to make similar changes in my prose, to loosen up, take more risks.
4. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
‘Cherry Pie’ has always been a favourite. How many stories write themselves on the kitchen table over a cup of coffee? Muse, wherever you are, please send me another one of them! As well, I like ‘The Executioner’, in which the coming of age theme is played out on political as well as domestic levels.
4. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Usually stories start from a few words I overhear, probably incorrectly, or a tiny incident among strangers I think I glimpse and then fantasise about. The story ‘Skim Flat White’ is full of tiny real and imagined interactions on the 470 bus line that runs from Lilyfield to Circular Quay in Sydney. I can’t remember which incident hooked me first.
From the bus I used to stare at a sign on a wooden door in Booth Street which still intrigues me. On the sign is a Greek word for a hierarchy of taxi drivers. I looked it up. I interviewed the sister of the man in the vegetable store. I borrowed a camera and stood in the street to take photographs. I scanned one into the story. I wrote thousands of words imagining what happened up the stairs behind that door. No evidence of that remains in the story.
5. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I write organically. I am not interested in slick script writing solutions or stories that show a character who wants something and has obstacles placed in her way. I like ideas leaping around, plenty of shifts and surprises.
I keep adding and crossing out fragments, hand writing on the backs of printouts, on a clipboard, preferably using a 0.3 pen. I repeatedly copy over and rip up. This annoys anyone around me. An idea starts to flash, look here. I respond to the pressure of workshopping deadlines. Eventually some scraps get selected and arranged and I can see that they might relate to each other. Maybe I do some hasty research in a few areas and more things slot into place. I roughly type this mess into my laptop, save in the latest drafts folder.
Eventually I take the infant story to workshopping with two peers. I rewrite and edit for months or years. The same story gets patiently workshopped maybe three or four times. Suddenly I know what it’s about and can delete what’s unnecessary. I put it aside. Every six weeks or couple of months I meet with my mentor, joanne burns who comments before I send something out, usually poetry. I am so lucky to be surrounded by enthusiastic and inspiring writers.
6. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Increasing interest in the past few years, thanks mostly to publications like Sleepers Almanac, but there is no centre, no clearing house.
I’d like to see an Australian body of short story writers, editors, publishers, even mentors and agents to support writers of short fiction. A national body could make a database that would be helpful to organisers of writers’ festivals, to organisations wanting to run workshops, to groups needing a judge for a competition, or needing a short story writer to teach a class or do a reading. A national organisation could provide a venue for passing information and opportunities around. Maybe they could host a festival or conference occasionally. Perhaps if editors had access to such a clearing house, they would acknowledge that a chapter of a friend’s novel is not the same as a great short story.
7. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
A wonderful opportunity to reach a wider audience.
8. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Buckets full of the best wishes. If you want advice you will ask.
Julie Chevalier writes quirky poetry and short stories in Sydney’s inner west. Remembered phrases, writing exercises, and eavesdropping provide her inspiration. Permission to lie, a collection of her short stories, will be released by Spineless Wonders in May 2011. A poetry collection, linen tough as history, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann. She has completed a book-length series of poems about the life of the artist Henry Darger with the working title, Darger: his girls.
Find out more from Julie’s website http:juliechevalier.net
Interview with Carmel Bird
Most literary awards (Hal Porter, Josephine Ulrick, Elizabeth Jolley) are named after writers who are now dead. How do you feel about the Spineless Wonders short story competition being named after you?
Dead or alive, it is flattering to have my work in short fiction recognised in this way. I never actually think that Elizabeth Jolley, for example, is really no longer living. I suppose that’s the thing about books, maybe, they have a life of their own anyway. And it’s nice to think that I, in a way, am giving new writers the opportunity to see their work recognised and showcased. I do like to be involved in encouraging young and new writers. This is a small way of doing it.
How important do you think such competitions are for writers?
Short story competitions have always been very important to new writers. They help writers to focus their work as it progresses. They give a time-frame. They provide a kind of excitement and hope. They give the story a destination, and even a validation, although only one story will win.
As well as being a writer of short fiction, you have been on the other side of the coin – as fiction editor of Meanjin, for instance and as a competition judge. What can make a short story stand out for you? And what can turn you off?
I like to feel immediately invited into the story, offered the chance to open something up with the writer as the story goes along. Reading is a conversation between the reader and the story, and by implication, the writer. I like to sense the writer’s excitement as the story unfolds. I also like to feel that I as the reader am doing some of the work – this is a courtesy that the writer extends to the reader. A good short story gives me a thrill.
What turns me off is if I find the story dull and boring, I reveal a very personal approach, but I can’t really think of a more specific way of explaining it.
You were editor of The Penguin Century of Australian Stories published back in 2000. It’s a fat book stretching from Barbara Baynton and Henry Lawson to Marele Day and James Bradley. What was that experience like and how might it differ from that of the editors of this current century’s crop of stories?
Well the editor of the 21st Century of Australian Stories will have millions more stories to read. It was an exciting book to do. I had the idea and put it to Penguin, so I feel very personally attached to it. One nice thing was that among the writers I approached for permission to published their stories, only one refused. So I felt the project was really supported by the (living) writers involved. All the stories are works I had read before, and it was really wonderful to bring them all together, and see how they related to each other in various ways. One of the criteria was length. They had to be quite short because of the size of the book.
You are one of the few Australian writers who have published multiple short fiction collections (Birth, Deaths and Marriages, 1983; The Woodpecker Toy Fact and Other Stories, 1987, The Common Rat, 1993 and Automatic Teller, 1996 and The Essential Bird, 2004). How difficult was it to get short fiction published and how did you go about it?
To tell you the truth, I have never had any difficulty having my collections published. I actually just work away at various projects, discussing things with the publisher, and sometimes what appears is a collection of stories. I am always writing something. I love writing short stories, and they build up, and then I put the idea to my publisher. It seems to me that lots of collections of stories are published, although I don’t know the statistics. I realise that publishers often tell writers that the writers need to have novels before the publishers will consider collections – and that seems to me to be fairly logical. Of course these days writers can publish their stories very easily online.
As well as publishing single author collections and short story anthologies, Spineless Wonders will be looking to publish novellas. You were instrumental in the 2006 Novella Competition jointly run by Meanjin and Readings Books. What was that experience like and what observations would you make about the form?
As a judge of the novella competition, I put aside a whole room in my house where I set out the manuscripts on a very long table. I worked my way along the table, and shifted manuscripts back and forth until the short list developed at the far right hand end.
I think the novella is a lovely form. It has the possibility to give that thrill that belongs to the short story, while offering the reader a broader scope for the imagination, while not demanding the commitment demanded by a novel. I look forward to the Spineless Wonders novellas.
About Carmel Bird
In 1981 there was no such thing as a course in writing short stories in Melbourne. Carmel proposed teaching such a course at the Council of Adult Education but was told nobody would be interested. However she persuaded the supervisor to let her run an advertisement and see what happened. The course was fully subscribed and ran for several years.
Subsequently, Carmel ran courses at RMIT where she designed their first course in writing novels. Also courses at Deakin, Holmsglen, Victorian College of the Arts, and at Monash and Latrobe Universities.
Carmel has edited the literary journals Syllable and Fine Line, and was fiction editor at Meanjin from 2003 to 2007. She took part in The Fictitious Woman performance at the 2010 Newstead Short Story Tattoo.
The titles of her collections of short fiction are:
The Essential Bird
Automatic Teller
The Common Rat
The Woodpecker Toy Fact
Births, Deaths and Marriages
The titles of her novels are:
Child of the Twilight
Cape Grimm
Red Shoes
The White Garden
The Bluebird Café
Crisis
Unholy Writ
Open For Inspection
Cherry Ripe
She has edited collections of essays and short fiction:
Home Truth
The Penguin Century of Australian Stories
The Stolen Children – Their Stories
Red Hot Notes
Fathers and Daughters
Her books on how to write are:
Writing the Story of Your Life
Not Now Jack – I’m Writing a Novel
Dear Writer
Carmel grew up in Tasmania and her attachment to that state runs through much of her work. She now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria. Her website www.carmelbird.com first went up in 1996. She is also on twitter, and has a blog at www.carmel-bird.blogspot.com
For details about The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award see the Submissions page on the Spineless Wonders website.
Spineless Wonders asks Michael Giacometti
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Jorge Luis Borges – Fictions
Nam Le – The boat
Steven Amsterdam – Things we didn’t see coming
Jennifer Mills – her own zines (www.jenjen.com.au); look out for a collection later this year or next
Samuel Beckett – First Love and other novellas
Michael Ondaatje – The collected works of Billy the Kid
Cyril Wong – Let me tell you something about that night
I read Meanjin and Island to keep abreast of contemporary Australian short fiction.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? Why does it stand out for you?
‘The Circular Ruins’ by Borges (published in his Fictions). The opening is sublime, yet it is not until the final sentences that you realise what the opening, and the title, really mean. Repeated readings bring new insights.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
The immediacy. At their best they are gut-grabbing exposes from another world.
I put myself in the Borges camp (as he outlined in the foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths: ‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes … A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.’
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Decidedly unprolific. Often the stories have a consciously unconscious underlying Buddhist theme, either of being stuck in the never-ending repetitive cycle of samsara, of suffering, or escaping the trap.
‘The uncoupling of Eduardo Martinez’ in the collection Bruno’s Song and other stories from the Northern Territory (NTWC 2011) is an escape story, hidden behind the veneer of Eduardo Martinez, the same-named first-born son of the same-named first-born son, of the … who is, who all have been, the signalman at the local railyard.’ When his father Eduardo suddenly dies, young Eduardo is set to take his place.
‘Just like the Phantom,’ his father used to joke. ‘Same name, same job, but a different person behind the mask.’
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
The ones I am currently composing (mostly in my mind): one, a blind translator visits a remote outback town with a strange, un-nameable curse; another, a story of addiction told in the round, with no beginning or ending, the reader chooses where to start observing and where to break off.
I will always have a fond place for ‘Elijah Upjohn, public hangman’ (although ‘fond’ is probably not the right term for a story that chills me every time I read it) and ‘Encounter at Kalayakapi, circa 1880’ (which Sophie Cunningham asked to publish in Meanjin).
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
If I knew I would drink from that soak more often.
‘West from Failure Creek’, a story recently completed, is an exploration of ego and vainglory, told from the perspective of Captain Sturt at the threshold of failure in his quest to discover and sail upon the inland sea. It grew from a joke about the proposed web domain name for my solo walk across the Simpson Desert in 2008: Sturt’s Hell, or sturtshell, which reads more like ‘sturt shell’. The shell became the metaphor for his grandiose ego. The rest springs from the well of my own adventures, and the vicarious reading of Sturt and others who dared to confront the fearsome interior.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Alone or involve others)
Years go by …
The idea and first draft of what has become ‘Elijah Upjon, public hangman’ was written in 2000; ten years later it won the Trudy Graham Biennial Literary Award (Prose). I am not a flowing writer, allowing any words to come out so that a first rough draft emerges. I edit – I know I should not – as I write. The writing for me is very visual. Often I write notes for scenes, so a story is sketched in pencil; layers and textures are slowly added over time.
I do request, on occasion, feedback from others, but generally I allow large chunks of downtime between drafts. In this way stories evolve slowly, often taking years. They are essentially complete when published, although I cannot resist the red pen when I re-read them.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Hmm. Not financially. $300 for 2000 words in Meanjin. Arnold Zable shook his head when I told him that. How can you survive? 80 cents-a-word in The Age, $1 for The Monthly. I make less than pocket money. It is a sickness … a love job.
Artistically, it seems to be making a comeback thanks to daring publishers (such as Sleepers), excellent writing (Nam Le, Steven Amsterdam), and the critical and public praise for Le’s The Boat. Because of the brevity of the short story, it is a form of writing that should appeal to the now-generation. Maybe as texts, or tweets.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I like the idea of bringing life to words with audio. With the right readers and character interpretation it can be transcending.
The printed book will never die – just look at the comeback vinyl has made – but the demand for digital content will grow. Especially if you can underline passages and write notes in pencil in the margins and procure second-hand digital copies with the ephemera of previous readers.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Avoid the green crystals in the garden. Don’t feel that you are a lesser evolved being because you don’t have (or need) a backbone.
Break a leg. Or somebody else’s (since you have not).
Michael Giacometti is an award-winning writer and adventurer based in Alice Springs. His poetry, fictions and essays have been published in Meanjin, Island, Wild, Fishtails in the dust: writing from the Centre (Ptilotus Press, 2009), How to look after your poet in the event of a cyclone (NTWC, 2009), Adrift: poems inspired by the raft journey of artist Ian Fairweather (NTWC, 2010) and Bruno’s Song and other stories from the Northern Territory (NTWC 2011).
This year, he is the recipient of an NT Writers Fiction Mentorship to work with Melanie Ostell on his manuscript, ‘This Landscape of Failure.’
He is currently an Australian Poetry resident Café Poet at Café Gonzo in Alice Springs.
Spineless Wonders Asks Josephine Rowe
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Australian: Dorothy Hewett
Otherwise: Janet Frame
Living: Sam Shepard
Dead: Richard Brautigan
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Difficult question, but perhaps ‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver. Though it’s the actual drawing of the Cathedral that sticks in my mind, more so than the lead up to that moment. It’s one of the most beautiful happenings in literature. The ending of ‘A Small Good Thing’ is also of that calibre. For all the raving people do about Lish’s involvement in Carver’s writing, I think his shortening ‘A Small Good Thing’ to ‘The Bath’ was criminal.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Please see question four. It’s buried in there somewhere.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I am terrible at answering this question. I always mean to come up with a decent answer, and instead wind up talking about how terrible I am at answering this question. But I’ll try again here.
Say a novel is a house you are invited into, and you are able to move around the house from room to room, to open its cupboards and sit at its table and drink from its coffee cups.
By comparison, the short story is a room you are invited into, and from everything contained in that one room you are expected to perceive the house.
Most of my short stories are like a corner of that room, in which there is only a chair or an empty birdcage or a record caught in the runout groove, and I hope that readers are still able to imagine the house.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
At the moment it’s a tie between ‘Love’, the first story in How a Moth Becomes a Boat (you can read it here: http://josephinerowe.com/books/) and a little piece called ‘The Taxidermist’s Wife’, which hasn’t been published yet. ‘Love’ is a favourite simply because it turned out exactly as I meant it to, which doesn’t happen all that often, and ‘The Taxidermist’s Wife’ I like because it’s a little more playful than other recent works.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Writers are essentially of the rag and bone trade. Ideas for stories come from anywhere and everywhere; an overheard conversation or a newspaper article, a souvenir somebody brings back from a place you’ve never thought about visiting, the inscriptions inside the covers of second-hand books. A while back I bought a copy of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, with an inscription that reads
Peter – Hope you enjoy this account of ‘A Bear Hunt’ while reflecting on our hunts for ‘The Deer’! I look forward to our future hunts – Billy Hillestad. Athens GA USA, 15 Oct 1984. *
That will probably turn up in a story. About a year ago I was staying with a friend in the country. She’s an op-shopper extraordinaire, and had found a great old book on crocheting for a friend’s birthday. I was reading through the chapter headings, one of which was ‘Suitable For a Lampshade’. I thought that would be a wonderful title, so it stayed in my notebook for a while and eventually I wrote towards it. The result can be read here
* After answering this question I decided to look up Billy Hillestad. This is him
Stand by for a new story entitled ‘How Much Pressure Can a Buck Stand’ or ‘Facts & Myths About Antlers.’
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
My stories mostly start as images or brief exchanges – or, as with ‘Suitable For a Lampshade’, simply as titles – and grow from there in a somewhat fragmented, non-linear manner. They accumulate, is perhaps a better way of putting it. I edit as I go, which means certain paragraphs or sections have gone through numerous edits before I’ve even finished a complete draft. During this process I dance back and forth between longhand and the laptop, and the finished version has usually been hacked down to its bare bones from something much longer.
Ideally I like to let stories sit for a while – a few weeks or a month – then go back and harass them, typically with more omitting. In these final stages I’ll often ask my fiancé, Patrick, to read over them and let me know what’s working and what isn’t. He’s a brilliant writer and a very savvy editor, and usually knows what I’m trying to achieve within any particular story.
I save submission mail-outs for days when I’m having a lousy writing day, then at least I can feel like I’ve achieved something. Even if it’s just writing a cover letter and licking an envelope.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Yes and no. By literary journals and anthologies, they’re definitely valued, at least as valued as they ever were. But to the non-lit journal reading public, they’re often not, and to Australian publishers they are still largely considered to be ‘publishing poison.’ I find that saddening, as US and UK short fiction writers seem to be better off in that regard.
It seems for a short story collection to sell well – as well as a novel – it almost has to be marketed as a novel (or more generically, a ‘book’) rather than what it is: a collection of unrelated stories.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I feel great about audio – three or four years ago most of what I was writing was for performance, or with performance in mind. Possibly one of the reasons dialogue has been overlooked until recent years; it generally doesn’t work all that well when read aloud.
As for digital, I am unabashedly a technophobe. I appreciate the idea of literature in a digital format – affordability and accessibility being major factors – and I can definitely understand the practicalities of a digital library (especially considering my house, which is lined with teetering piles of books due to a lack in shelving). But even if they developed an e-book reader that smelled like a book and felt like a book, one that was safe to read in the bath, I would still prefer the real thing.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
I’m not sure I have helpful advice, but it’s heartening to see publishers who are devoted to short fiction.
You can find out more about Josephine and her publications from her blog, Everything But Snow. Click here.
First sentences
Listening to Stanley Fish talk about the sentence on The Book Show got us thinking here at The Column about exemplary first sentences from Australian short stories.
Here’s what Fish had to say about the opening sentence. ‘It is a promissory note. It telegraphs everything that’s going to follow … It has an angle of lean. It leans forward… allowing the unfolding of the sentence to be, in effect, the entire work. If you write a first sentence that has in mind all the sentences that are to follow, it’s going to have a particular power.’
We asked three writers, Caroline Reid, Laurie Steed and Phill English for their choices of outstanding opening lines. And here’s what they had to say.
Caroline Reid chose her opening line from Dorothy Hewett’s short story collection, A Baker’s Dozen:
“I am running down George Street with a northerly blowing grit in my face, one and a half hours late for my wedding.”
Caroline Reid was born in Wales and grew up in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia. Her play, Prayer to an Iron God was published by Currency Press in 2010. Her short story, ‘Cooked Bones’ appears in Bruno’s Song and other stories from the Northern Territory (NT Writers Centre 2011).
The Sentence:
“He is teaching her how to break bottles against the side of the house.”
Why it rocks: Josephine Rowe creates emotional landscapes that ache with truth. In her story, Love, she explores a father/daughter relationship strewn with cruelty and the shards of broken bottles. In one sentence, Rowe captures both the flawed legacy being passed on and the key themes of the story. Furthermore, she freezes a moment of heartbreak so powerful that it leaves us shaken, our ears still ringing from the sound of breaking glass.
Laurie Steed is a writer and editor currently based in Western Australia. His writing has been published in The Age, Meanjin, Sleepers Almanac, and The Big Issue, among other places. He also reviews for Australian Book Review and Readings Monthly. Laurie is Communications Manager for the Small Press Network (SPUNC) and a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Western Australia.
Phill English chose the opening of ‘Decent Men’ by Linden Hyatt in volume 70 (1 – 2011) of Meanjin.
The sentence:
“On the night of 23 February 1968 the men in the bar at the Rosebery Hotel were four deep in the corner by the eight ball table watching a heavy-set man called Digger Munro bash a young boy; punching him, smashing at the boy’s thin hands held up to his face to defend himself, until the boy collapsed to the floor and curled in a hunch and was kicked in the head with a steel-capped boot and still the men were roaring and chanting ‘Kill him, kill him, kill the poofta’ as the kicking continued, to his arms, his chest, and the boy’s legs gave and arms went limp and only when his body was kicked further under the pool table and blood leaked from his mouth did anyone intercede and pull the man away.”
Why it rocks:
Long first sentences are a tricky thing to pull off; their length must be justified in some way, otherwise the reader will get bored halfway and move on. Linden Hyatt’s introduction to ‘Decent Men’ is one of my recent favourites for the way it uses its length to create a greater impact. We are barely allowed to take a breath throughout, and the beating seems to go on forever. By the end of the sentence, not only are we well and truly caught up in the act of violence, but we also have a very good sense of the tense mood of the story and the social scene that it takes place within. A really fantastic example of using the form to complement the message.
Phill English lives in Perth, Western Australia. He is a Ph.D. student and enjoys reading, writing, and thinking critically and creatively. His writing appears in Verandah, Voiceworks, Ricochet. Phill blogs at Tooth Soup.
Over to you
Here at The Column, we are wondering what opening sentence has caught your eye lately. Does it have this angle of lean that Fish speaks of or some other quality? We’d love to hear from you. Doesn’t have to be a lengthy response. Just:
1. Quote the sentence, the story and Australian author it came from.
2. In a few sentences, why it stands out for you.
You can post your reply in the comments box below, or email to bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au.
Also we are planning a blogpost soon on endings, so if you have a favourite final sentence you want to tell us about, feel free to drop us line.
Spineless Wonders Asks Melissa Beit
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Golly, how to choose. Margo Lanagan. Ursula LeGuin. Kirsty Gunn. Max Barry. Cate Kennedy. J.D. Salinger. Peter Carey. Annie Proulx. David Mitchell. Lots more. As a teenager I loved Roald Dahl. That dude was the master of the gruesome twist.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Singing My Sister Down, by Margo Lanagan. I was traumatised by this piece of writing. I met Margo recently and said, ‘How could you do that to me? I cried bucketfuls of tears. I was a mess for days.’ She said, ‘Yes, sorry about that. I cried too.’
If you haven’t already read this story, you should. It’s the first story in Black Juice. I borrowed it from the library, read the first story, and then returned it, being, as I said, utterly traumatised. It took me several years to get up enough courage to read the rest of the collection. They’re all good, but Singing My Sister Down is the stand out piece.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I prefer to write short stories than read them. I like it that they’re so straightforward and manageable compared to a novel. I like it that I can write a short story in my kids’ daytime naps. I love being able to ‘try on’ another reality or personality for a short time. And I enjoy the challenge of having to make every word count.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Eclectic! One thing I dislike about short story collections by a single author is that after awhile the voice can get a bit same-y, so I try and write with a different voice for each story, although my husband has pointed out that I have a penchant for male voices. Maybe because I never had one. Who knows. My protagonists are old men, eight year old boys, teenage boys, 30-something year old men, and occasionally women or girls.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
A story I wrote recently for a short story competition. It’s called ‘Spelunking’.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I wrote a short story called ‘Flight’ that was published in the Sleepers Almanac a couple of years ago. It’s about a 17 year old boy who is stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag by his (former) best mate, and then abandoned. This idea arose from an experience of mine snow caving in New Zealand. It was really cold one night and I had cinched up my sleeping bag until the opening was just big enough for my nose to peep out. I must have rolled over in my sleep, because I woke to find the bag pressing down on my face and the opening nowhere to be found, resulting in about ten seconds of pure, claustrophobic fear. I started to think about what it might be like to be put in a sleeping bag head first, so that there was no way to get your hands down to the opening. To be authentic, I had my husband put me in a sleeping bag like that (in the middle of an Alice Springs summer), while he filmed my subsequent panic. I was in there for about 30 seconds and that was long enough. And then, to be interesting, I made the protagonist’s best friend be the sleeping bag stuffer. It grew from there.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
The idea has to stew around in my head for a period of time, often years, before it’s ready to come out. I can’t just sit down and start writing without some sort of theme to hang a story from. If I’ve let it stew long enough, the story usually pours out onto the page and the whole thing is done in less than 2 hours. Then I do some light tinkering before declaring it complete. If it seems to be taking a lot of tinkering, it’s usually better if I just bin the whole thing and try again another day.
I was very lucky in my early days of short story writing to be selected for a 6-month long mentorship with Marele Day. Marele is a wonderful mentor, and I learned a lot about the editing process from her. She also suggested appropriate places to send my stories, so that I could get a feel for what different publishers might be after.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Yes I do. There seems to be a myriad of publishing options for short story writers at present, and new collections arising all the time. I feel like now is a good era in which to be writing short stories.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Great! Free publicity. I have been contacted by several publishers about work of mine they have seen on-line. I have had one story made into a talking book as part of a Vision Australia initiative, and another story is going to be broadcast on Radio National this year. The more mediums the better!
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
None. It’s a great idea. Good luck.
Melissa Beit writes from her home in coastal New South Wales. She has had short stories published in Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Skive Magazine, New Australian Stories, Meanjin and the Australian Women’s Weekly. When her last baby grows up a bit she’ll get around to finishing her novel.
The Column – calling for contributions
‘Australian websites such as Literary Minded, Spineless Wonders, and Verity La do great things for this country’s literary culture.’ Laurie Steed in conversation with Verity La’s Alec Patric.
Want to be part of this exciting literary conversation?
Spineless Wonders is currently looking for contributors to its blog, The Column. We are looking for news, reviews, interviews and commentary.
If there’s a short fiction writer you’d like to showcase or a particular story that you think is worth a closer look, we are interested. Impressed or otherwise, by a recent collection, anthology or journal featuring short Australian stories – why not blog about it, here at The Column.
We want to interview more writers for our Spineless Wonders Asks series. (Writers from Queensland, Tasmania or South Australia, take note. And a special callout to regional and remote writers.) There’s TEN questions, you know what to do. Don’t forget to send in your author bio, photo and any links to your web, Facebook or Twitter.
We are also interested to find out about your short story writing life. Are you in a writing group that’s working well? Are you in an online group, or do you have an email or coffee shop buddy? Write and tell us about your literary relationships. It can be an individual contribution or In Conversation format. Are you a midnight scribbler, or a lone writer. Tell us about it. Have fun.
We recently we ran a feature on opening lines where three guest writers each chose a story with an arresting first sentence and told us why it stood out. You are welcome to send us your choice of openers. Next, we’ll turn our attention to final lines – so if you’d like to take part, send us your choice of final sentence, details of the story it is from (title, author, where it is published) and a brief comment.
Whether you are a Creative Writing student, an emerging, experienced or established writer or an avid reader – all contributions, large or small, are welcome. Write to bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au
Spineless Wonders Asks Emilie Collyer
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Wow. I admire so many. Three stand out as changing what I knew was possible to do with the form: Haruki Murakami, Margo Lanagan and Ali Smith. Oh and Tom Cho. So that’s four. The way they use language and situation blew my mind. Other than that I dearly love Katherine Mansfield, Barbara Baynton, Miranda July, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, JG Ballard, ZZ Packer. And recent stories I’ve read by local writers such as Steven Amsterdam, Emmet Stinson, Bob Franklin, Josephine Rowe, Cate Kennedy … There’s too many. I know I will wake up tonight thinking about all the writers who should have been on this list.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Good lord. What a tricky question. Okay, right now, today, three come to mind. The child by Ali Smith. It’s beautiful, odd and laugh out loud funny. Singing my sister down by Margo Lanagan. It’s moving, uncompromising, set in a world nothing like ours but entirely familiar. Hunting Knife by Haruki Murakami. The image in that story of the hunting knife has never left me. Why don’t you dance? By Raymond Carver. A whole life time in a few pages. So that’s four.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It’s so wonderful to read and so difficult to write. As a reader it’s like eating a delicious meal – doesn’t last long but can linger in the memory forever. Short stories can make you see or hear something you’ve never noticed before. Kind of like tuning forks – they help you listen closely to the world. As a writer I find it an incredible exercise in shape and discipline. I have only written a couple that I think really work. So I see it as a life long challenge. I used to play the piano and in a weird way enjoyed practising every day as much as performing. That’s a bit how I feel about short stories.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I’m going to borrow the words of someone who knows my writing well. I asked him this question recently because I was having trouble seeing my writing very clearly. My stories usually contain one or all of the following: 1. An odd or slightly skewed perspective or situation 2. Humour. 3. A somewhat melancholic overtone. That resonated with me. My writing has also been described as like ‘being inside a bell jar’ and ‘taking the reader from the mundane to the metaphysical and back again’. I am naturally more of an ‘internal’ writer. I have to work hard to ensure there is action and externalisation in my writing.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I have a soft spot for a story I wrote a few years ago called Tiny Happy People. It’s one of those rare ones that kind of came out whole. I like the emotional truth of the story and its execution. It’s a story I would enjoy reading, unlike many others of mine that make me squirm a little. Having said that, I am generally fond of the most recent story I’ve been writing. It’s like we’ve been through a big journey together, sometimes a battle, and hopefully come out the other side in an okay shape. Unlike Tiny Happy People, the story I’ve just finished writing: Uncharted has been through about five complete re-writes and at least that many drafts. We’re both tired now and going to have a little rest.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Something I see or hear that goes ping! A question I don’t know the answer to. Roland Barthes speaks about the ‘punctum’ of a photograph – the thing that draws your eye and gives you an emotional charge. I look for those around me, in images, conversations, news stories, objects etc and then try and write about them. Recently I was hanging out some washing and a melody line from a song popped into my head. I couldn’t remember the name of the song, I knew it was from the 80s and I’d liked it, but hadn’t thought about it in years. I googled the line from the song, found it, watched the video on YouTube and was really taken by its ‘dagginess’. I wrote a story structured around that song and the questions of memory and yearning it provoked in me. The song was I won’t let you down by PhD.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I am generally a solo writer. I like to keep ideas in my cave until they feel strong enough to bring out for further inspection. I have taken plays through extensive ‘workshopping and development’ and that’s taught me a great deal about when work is ready to be shown and tested and when the process can do more harm than good. Now I am lucky to be a part of two writing groups, a poetry one and a fiction one. I don’t workshop every piece, but the outside perspective is really useful for some. Many in the fiction group are genre writers, which I’m not particularly. Their clarity of vision is enormously beneficial for me to test if a story is working or not. My partner is also very helpful. He’s a writer as well, but in comedy and performance, so we complement each other. He’s very honest.
Each piece has its own trajectory. I usually have a few different things on the go, at different phases of development, and even in different forms. That way I can work consistently but let pieces rest that need time to settle, circle back, edit them when I’m ready or when a deadline demands it.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
It is absolutely valued by writers and the literary world. This is indicated by the number of competitions, journals, workshops and articles I see dedicated to short stories. I think readers love short stories but perhaps don’t always think about them as a first choice purchase from a book shop (as with a novel). Perhaps they are seen more as these gifts that come with the Sunday papers occasionally. If you’re interested in earning a serious income from writing I don’t think short stories would be the way to go. It’s not a hugely commercial venture for most people.
I wonder if short stories are viewed similarly to short films? Studies in the craft that are done in preparation for a more substantial or ‘meaningful’ work – a novel or feature film. I don’t agree with this, I see them as different art forms, but I can see how it might be a perception of some people.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Delighted. However it can reach a keen audience, and especially a different kind of audience, is wonderful. A friend of mine has a podcast about impro (theatre) and he has recently started broadcasting some of my short prose pieces as part of that. I love that kind of crossover of art form and audience.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Relish the process as much as the product, those hours spent in the world of the story are frustrating, exciting, what it’s all about. Read the work of wonderful writers. And then have breaks from reading – go to galleries, out for walks, get on public transport. If you’re smarter than me you’ll strategise your writing and career. Otherwise you spend a long time wandering around, bumping into things (plays, or is it poetry? Oh excuse me, short stories, and a novel?).
And these bits of advice from Wells Tower (and yes, he should be on that list above): Can you make it better? Write in good faith. Work hard, try hard, try not to be precious or sentimental.
You can visit Emilie Collyer’s blog at www.betweenthecracks.net to read samples of her writing and links to where you can find it in publication and performance. Read her story, The Good Son online, here at Australian Literature Review.
Emilie will be launching a book of illustrated poetry called Your looking eyes in September that she wrote while in residence at c3 Gallery, as part of the Australian Poetry Cafe Program.
Angus Benson with guest interviewer Vanessa McKinley
The Column welcomes guest blogger, Vanessa McKinley who has interviewed surfer turned writer, Angus Benson whose story, ‘Down South’ appears in this year’s UTS Anthology.
The UTS Writers’ Anthology showcases the considerable talent emerging every year from one of Australia’s most respected writing programs. The Life You Chose and That Chose You is the twenty-fifth in a series that began with Pink Cakes in 1982. For some students, the Anthology marks the beginning of their writing careers, creating an opportunity for that elusive first publication.
This year’s contributions were selected by a student editorial committee from over 300 submissions to produce a publication of the highest quality. In her foreword, Amelia Lester, Managing Editor of The New Yorker, describes how, in modern life as we produce and consume more words than ever, ‘the creation and promotion of writing that endures in our imagination is more vital than ever before.’
Angus Benson’s story, ‘Down South’ is both a tale of self discovery by the central character and an exploration of social and racial issues in contemporary Australia. The story is set during Oscar’s final summer holidays and tackles the small humiliations and alienation associated with growing up. The writer reveals tensions between the sexes, exposing the abusive tendencies of the young men in a scene between Mul and ‘some blonde’ and in the group’s attitude to a young Indigenous girl who might be ‘put on lay-by’.
Benson exposes the uneasy gender and class relations in a country we like to think of as ‘equal’ and ‘classless’. His deft touch is evident in the scene at the Aboriginal mission when Oscar, terrified after being left behind by his mates, is simultaneously attracted to the local girls, even as he pities them and is humiliated by their laughter. Oscar recognises his own hypocrisy ‘for thinking I was superior.’
The urgency of the young men to prove themselves in the surf break signals an important ritual in their progress towards manhood, as does Oscar’s realisation that he has grown apart from his mates, recognising that, ‘I felt lonely even with them around.’
What inspires you to write?
Writing gives me a chance to remember things from when I was a kid. I like to bring them back. Then I can reshape those memories any way I like on the page. I’m still surprised every time I realise I’ve created a rhythm and a mood in a few words.
Sitting down during a quiet moment, with a pencil and paper, is about as close as I get to a sense of peace.
I had an email from my uncle after he read the story. I rarely talk to him. But now we’ve got a bond that we’d never have otherwise. If this isn’t inspiration, then it’s inspiration for my next story, because I know there’s someone who’ll be willing to read it.
In ‘Down South’ you tackle Indigenous issues, do you see Indigenous culture as a significant influence on your writing?
Yes. I tried to present the picture as I see it. If I use the Indigenous plight (which it is) as a yardstick, the challenges in my life pale in comparison. Also, I feel like I owe a debt. But the urge to repay the debt isn’t because I want to relieve my chest of the guilt from the pile of invoices owing.
Are there any influences that have been important in developing your writing?
Debra Adelaide has taught me more about the nitty-gritty of writing than anyone else. She’s a demon when it comes to finding the weak points in a story, but a saint when it comes to helping fix them. Until I met her, I had my head in the clouds. The same goes for Delia Falconer, but I only had the pleasure of listening to her lectures.
What other creative writing programs have you been involved in?
Martin Harrison taught me so much about ‘new writing’ in a subject called Writing Laboratory. There I realised just how much space there is for writing.
I wrote a narrative of logos for this subject. Then I had the opportunity to exhibit this work with some other students/friends. We made a night of it with drinks and food and nervous public readings.
Can you tell us more about this?
The subject or the exhibition? Well, both are a bit of a blur now. Some of what Martin had to say made sense to me for a few weeks, because I was in overdrive trying to come to grips with it, reading Helen Cixous, Derrida, Heidegger, Benjamin… I honestly couldn’t give a decent response. The subject was enlightening, but I’m not enlightened enough to explain it in my own words.
What are you writing at the moment?
I’m trying to write a chapter two to ‘Down South.’
Who are your favourite authors and why?
Debra Adelaide – because her writing has poise, and her words are poised – on the edge of something, always elusive. Like her writing, the more I get to know her I feel I know her less and less.
Tim Winton – because he’s an Australian literary star. I get the delights of reading an awesome writer, with the comfort of his characters, his accents, the small towns and big landscapes.
Charles Dickens – I don’t know how, but there’ve been times where I’ve thought this guy was my best friend. He’s still a friend, but I haven’t caught up with him for tea in a while.
Where do you see your writing taking you? What is your ambition?
Hopefully to a writer’s festival where I can meet Tim Winton, but realistically no further than my desk. My ambition is to find the confidence and stamina to take my writing a step further.
Angus Benson grew up surfing, and through a Writing and Cultural Studies degree, has found inspiration from the stories of Indigenous Australians. He likes to explore cross-cultural interactions through writing.
Angus Benson blogs at hhtp://angusbenson.blogspot.com
Vanessa McKinley was planning an academic career after gaining first class honours in English Literature at UNSW and beginning a PhD on Branwell Bronte. She began working part time as a technical writer and editor. Her career moved into management consulting where she developed her business writing skills. For the past few years she has concentrated full time on creative writing, working on short stories and children’s books.
Spineless Wonders Asks Claire Aman
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
My favourite short fiction authors include Gillian Mears, Patrick White, Elizabeth Jolley, E Annie Proulx.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
The most memorable short story I’ve read was an American story called ‘Berceuse’. I don’t remember who wrote it. I was about nine or ten and it was in a short story anthology from my father’s bookshelf. The narrator was the writer, and it was all misspelt. ‘Berceuse’ meant ‘Because.’ It was a love letter from a young girl, a poor girl, to an older and more powerful man who had abused her. I remember it because it was so heartfelt, and I liked the bad spelling.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
The short story form is fun. Writing one is like going for a gallop. You can pretend to be someone else for a while, very intensely but not for very long. You don’t have to explain too much, and you don’t even need to fully understand the characters or the plot yourself– I like this.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
My writing can tend to be a bit obscure. Feedback is always good, to see if I need to make things clearer. My stories are about the human condition – mostly love and death. They’re often sad but can have funny moments. They’re never about me, always about more interesting people.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I’m always in love with the latest story I’ve written. Then it’s replaced by the next. It’s probably because I love the work of writing more than the finished article.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Ideas for stories come from my short preoccupations, images that stay in my mind and stored notions. They somehow become synthesised in my mind after rattling around together for a while, and a story forms. There’s usually an image I can’t stop thinking about, and other images and notions gravitate towards it and they all stick together as if it’s magnetic. I know an idea has taken hold when things happening around me refer to the story. It’s not magic but there seems to be a strange subconscious interest at work at those times. I’ve just finished a story that found its expression from a chocolate box, but it fitted with a thought from years ago about pearls, and those images let me tell a story about getting old and dying. I’d wanted to tell the aging story for a long time but I couldn’t do it until those images – the chocolate box and the pearl – had come together. Even then, it couldn’t go anywhere without me reading up on geology. The mind seems to grope around and find the right elements and make them into something new. I trust it, including when it feels like nothing is happening.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Short stories take only a month or so to write. But I think about them for a long time before I compose anything. I keep a notebook for images and ideas. When I’m happy with a story I show my husband and my son. They’re pretty good for feedback. I send short stories to competitions for feedback. It’s encouraging to be commended or even win something. I submit stories to literary journals and any publishers who are inviting submissions for anthologies. There’s nothing to lose.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Short stories are becoming more popular and there are more collections appearing. Some people say they don’t like short stories because they are always cryptic, but I think this is changing.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Earlier this year, my short story, Jap Floral, was read on ABC radio as part of their Sunday Story series. This was wonderful, and the actor who did the reading was perfect. It’s good to listen to a story. I wish radio would do this more.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Maybe Spineless Wonders could publish some short stories as audio. [Great idea, Claire. We're onto it. Ed.]
Claire Aman grew up in Melbourne and has lived in Grafton for the last 23 years. She works as a town planner and writes in her spare time. Gillian Mears has long been an encouraging presence and Varuna, The Writers’ House has also helped cultivate her writing life. Her short stories have been published in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 1 & 2, Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories 2008 and in Southerly, Island and Heat.
Her stories have received honourable mentions, commendations and have been shortlisted in the Tasmanian Wildcare Nature Writing Prize 2007, Federation of Australian Writers Angelo B Natoli Award 2007 & winner, 2010, EJ Brady Award 2008, Alan Marshall Award 2008/9/10, Hal Porter Short Story Award 2009, Southern Cross Literary Award 2010.
Spineless Wonders Asks Demet Divaroren
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
There are so many! Paddy O’Reilly, Cate Kennedy, Margo Lanagan, Dan Chaon just to name a few.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Margo Lanagan’s “Singing My Sister Down” heartbreaking, beautiful and bloody eerie! She manages to plonk us into a foreign world where a young girl Ikky is being executed in a tar pit and manipulates our feelings so skilfully that we’re emotionally exhausted by the end. I love how she sets up this foreign culture that shocks us but as we navigate through the confusion we realise we aren’t so different after all.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It’s so damn powerful. In a few pages, we can be slapped, confused, charmed or violated. We can be moved to tears, humoured or frustrated. The best ones leave us baffled and rereading to find the answers to questions that aren’t hidden on the page but in the place the writer has so skilfully unlocked within us.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I love to mix it up and explore different styles, genres and voices. It’s very important that I keep my writing fresh. The minute I feel like I’m writing the same stories, recycling the same words etc I lose interest.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
“Hindsight.” The story is set in a small village where my teenage narrator, Jarn, is going blind and lives alone with her grandmother in a stone cottage. This place, this world with its stone hearths, wings and magic trees seems so familiar to me, it’s as if I’ve been there in another life. Every time I read it I return refreshed and full of possibilities.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Everywhere! It can be a sentence, an image, a mannerism, anything really. I once watched a short clip of an old woman dragging her disabled grandson to school in a plastic basket through the snow. That display of human spirit and determination stayed with me for three years until I figured out who they were and wrote their story.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
It’s very much a solitary process. I toss ideas around, sleep, eat and procrastinate until I hear a voice. I then sit and find the first line of the story and question who he or she might be, where they come from and where they want to go. The first line is an anchor, without it all I have is an idea, a lost voice. I’ll chip at the story for a few days until it takes shape in my head. I don’t like planning, I like to be surprised by my characters and let them show me the way. Once the story is complete I put it away for a few days before I write a redraft. I then send it off to various magazines…and cross my fingers!
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I hope so! I love writing and reading short stories and I’m not the only one. There’s a market out there and a keen readership, perhaps all we need is a little more faith.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I don’t mind. As a writer you want your stories to be accessible to a wide audience. If that means audio and digital so be it.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Believe. And never stop. There is no stronger ally than self-belief.
Demet Divaroren has a Professional Writing and Editing diploma from Victoria University. Her writing has appeared in Island magazine, Scribe’s New Australian Stories anthology and The Age Epicure. She is the co-author of “What a Muslim Woman Looks Like” (www.whatamuslimwomanlookslike.com), a not for profit book that profiles twelve women and aims to challenge stereotypes and raise cross-cultural awareness. She is the Writer in Residence at the Hunt Club Community Arts Centre and has recently received an Australia Council Artstart Grant. Demet is represented by Curtis Brown Literary Agents. Visit her website http://www.demetdivaroren.com/
Spineless Wonders Asks Michael Sala
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Some of my favourite short fiction writers are; Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, Ernest Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Ilse Aichinger, Gene Wolfe, David Vann, Patrick Cullen, Ryan O’Neill and A.S. Patric.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
The most memorable story for me is ‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff. I first read it in the back of someone’s car and I remember my ears burning with excitement as I read the last words. I felt utterly transported in a really brief space of time. This story has such an intense poetic focus. I love the way it shifts several times in tone and style – the way it combines humour and drama and lyricism – and the sheer scope of what is a relatively short piece. Another story that I love is ‘Story in a Mirror,’ By Ilse Aichinger. This story was written more than fifty years ago and has been copied or echoed in many interesting ways. It’s a story told in reverse. Like the movie, Memento, or parts of both Slaughterhouse-Five and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It uses a simple shift in vantage point to expose the story in this really beautiful way.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
When I read a good story, it affects me rapidly and powerfully. It’s a glimpse of something beautiful and I can carry the feeling of it around for the rest of the day. The other day I picked up this ipad on display in a department store because I was waiting for someone, and started browsing the web, and found a story by Alice Munro – Gravel – in the New Yorker. I was surrounded by people and stupid music and fluorescent light and reading on this somewhat glary screen, but I was completely inside the story and totally somewhere else, as if I’d stepped into a wormhole or something. That’s what a good story should do. It should create living space in your head. In terms of writing them, I love the way short stories let me play and experiment with ideas and approaches. I like the relatively unthreatening possibility of failure in this form. I like making little things and the fun of figuring out how to imply a whole world of relationships and events that exist beyond a few pages of words.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Curious might be a good word. Fairly simple use of language, character-driven, chronologically challenging, a bit dark, and not funny enough.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
This is a hard question, because I find it hard to be that satisfied with any of my own stories. I probably like ‘Old World Charm’ the best because I enjoyed writing it the most. And it takes some risks with form and genre that I’d like to explore more.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Often my stories come from real life. I write like I make my way through a supermarket: in a perplexing and erratic way. When I wrote The Hind I’d been reading all of these newspaper articles about dog attacks. Getting attacked by a dog seems to me probably one of the more visceral close-to-nature experiences the average urbanised human being might have, and it happens surprisingly often. I think people always like the idea of being close to nature, to that level of engagement with themselves and the world, but the reality also scares us, because it’s so difficult to control. It’s safer being a couch potato and watching reality television or crime shows, yet nature can still intrude into and disrupt even the most seemingly safe or well-managed lives for better or for worse. I like the way that dogs can symbolise that potential. I read one news story in particular about an attack by this pack of hunting dogs on a jogger. I started imagining this person that was obsessed with being in control of their life and super fit and all that and that had it all turned upside down in a split second. Then I wondered about why this character had issues with control and started imagining the details of her life. Then I remembered how I had accidentally killed a baby turtle when I was a kid and I felt that there was a relationship between this and the rest of the story that I wanted to play with. This situation with the dogs also made me think about Greek mythology and the first version of the story actually had a long passage about a Greek myth in which a hunter comes upon the goddess Artemis, who happens to be bathing naked in a forest, and she turns him into stag so that his own dogs eat him. I love that story, but my readers told me to get rid of it from my own piece, so I did. And a lot of the time in my writing process, I create this framework of ideas that I later remove in just this way.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
My process is different for each story. I generally rely on a few friends to provide a reading and any editorial suggestions, but for the most part my process relies on me just having an idea, sitting down and writing to see what happens.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
The short story form tends to be valued in an underground sort of way in Australia. I don’t think that the average person sees it as a reading priority. The short story form is like literary writing in general in that it requires a bit of work on the part of the reader, while most of our popular media discourse doesn’t – or doesn’t seem to. There is a vibrant short fiction community out there though, heaps of competitions, and there are lots of great literary magazines out there too, from established ones like Meanjin and The Griffith Review, to new and exciting ones like Etchings, Kill Your Darlings and Harvest. Literary agents tend to recoil in horror when you mention the short story word, which makes it a great way to end an awkward conversation. Really though, the short story environment is a shifting landscape and can lead into many interesting places and a fantastic book like Things
We Didn’t See Coming shows that readers care more about what a book does than what it is, whether it is composed of chapters or stories.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I think it’s great to get work out there in whatever form. I like e-books and old hard backs as well. I think the more people read your work the better and technology has dramatically changed not only the consumption but the production of all creative work in really exciting ways.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Surprise yourself on a regular basis. An exciting failure is always better than a mediocre success.
Michael Sala was born in Holland and grew up moving back and forth between Europe and Australia. He was short-listed for the Vogel/Australian Literary Award in 2007. His work has since then been published in HEAT, Best Australian Stories 2009 and 2010, Charlotte Wood’s Brothers and Sisters, Etchings, Kill Your Darlings, and Harvest. He is currently finishing off a memoir while living and teaching in Newcastle.
You can read some of Michael’s writing here, in Heat and here, at Mascara.
Spineless Wonders presents … Interview with Caroline Reid
What is Spineless Wonders presents … and why are you so excited about it?
It’s a night of short story readings, in a local pub, by professional actors. I’m calling it Spineless Wonders presents … a short evening of tall stories.
The pub is a city pub (in Hindmarsh, Adelaide) with a country feel, there’s not many of them left. The Jolly Miller is a place where community clubs and groups have meetings. The manager is right into supporting the community and local talent.
I’m uber excited because it’s the ideas and enthusiasm of many different people coming together: Writers, actors, director, publisher and a pub audience. It’s about telling new, quality Australian stories in a relaxed environment. We’re reading six stories by published Australian writers followed by some music by an original Adelaide singer/song-writer. Short, sharp, entertaining.
What is a short story reading and how does it differ from a playreading or theatrical performance?
A short story reading is all about the words, about storytelling, no bells and whistles. There’s no lighting or costume, no sound effects. Just one actor telling a single story. It’s a good challenge for actors to keep their audience entertained and engaged for ten minutes telling someone else’s story. You’ve still got to pay attention to structure, changes in thought and pace, how you’re going to deliver dialogue, accent and diction – all the stuff that you need to consider in a play reading or stage performance.
Tell us about your own background in theatre.
After finishing an Arts degree in theatre and creative writing in the early nineties I was commissioned by Black Swan Theatre to write a play but it didn’t really go anywhere. It’s still in my bottom drawer. In my twenties I knew I wanted to say something but I didn’t know what. So I shut up. Then, in 1999 I was appalled after reading about the incredibly high rate of youth suicide in Australia. A friend, theatre director, encouraged me to write about it. Ten years and three productions later (in WA and SA) that play, Prayer to an Iron God, was published by Currency Press. Sadly, the rate of youth suicide is on the rise again.
I’ve written for youth and community theatre. The Proper Shoes was developed in conjunction with the women at DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantaged in the Arts WA), broadcast on Radio National and performed as part of an inclusive Festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. Working in theatre is a lot of fun. It’s such a fantastic process of building, layer upon layer. It’s wonderful watching it all come together. Theatre has taught me how to listen, it’s taught me patience and creative problem solving. And it’s allowed me to meet some wonderful people.
You are a short fiction writer as well as a playwright. Tell us about the kind of writing you do. Is your short fiction influenced by your experience in theatre?
I’ve been described as a narrative, lyrical writer. But I like terse writing too and putting humor into stories. Make em laugh, make em cry. I like a sense of the ridiculous, but not too much. I’m still making discoveries about my writing, I hope this doesn’t stop. In the past, my best writing has been character based, I often start with character when writing plays. I’ve got a thing about dogs and vodka in my stories at the moment, so there’s a collection waiting to happen.
Right now I’m concentrating on narrative and that’s a lot of fun, trying to relinquish control of where a story is going. I find it quite liberating. I’m definitely more focused on short story writing now. Playwriting takes me such a long time. I find it exhausting. It’s strange, I got sort of stuck in one form (plays) and had to give myself permission to move away from that. Ah, but there’s another reason why I’m so excited about Spineless Wonders presents … a short evening of tall stories – it’s a way of combining elements of both the short story form and theatre.
As well as offering short story readings, you will be running workshops and masterclasses next year. Have you some tips today for writers who want to do public readings of their stories?
- Practise what you’re going to read. Out loud. Read it to your Mum, your dog, your friend. If you have none of these, record it on your mp3 player or your computer, leave it for a day or two then listen back – be critical – do you have an annoying upward inflection at the end of every sentence? Can you understand every word? How’s your pace, are you reading too fast? Try varying the pace, take pauses, change the dynamics.
- Be choosy about what you’re going to read. Some pieces are magnificent on the page, but may not be so good read aloud. Don’t be afraid to edit your work if you feel it’s too long. It’s not sacrosanct (even though you might think it is). And if you feel it’s too long, so will your audience. Leave them wanting more.
- Warm up your voice before a reading. Take a deep breath through your nose and hum the breath out; do this at different pitches. Do it in the car on the way to the gig. Hell, do it on the bus. Try a few tongue twisters (‘I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s son and I’m only plucking pheasants til the pheasant plucker comes’ – that’s always been a favourite of mine). There are books written on this stuff, find them. Not only will a few voice warm-ups make you heard and stop you from tripping over your tongue, they will also calm your nerves.
- If you’re really really nervous, try Dutch courage. Works wonders.
- Look at your audience occasionally.
Your first gig is coming up in September. Tell us a bit about the process you are going through – eg choosing the stories, working with the actors.
Okay. The stories are already chosen for the first gig. They’re all by published writers. The emphasis is on quality. We want to provide a platform for writers who are serious about their craft. Most of the writers we will showcase have a connection with Spineless Wonders in some way, such as Julie Chevalier and Alec Patric whose collection will be out in October.
For the September gig I’ve chosen stories that are quite short. Most of them are about 1000 words, the longest being 1300 – that’s Jennifer Mills’ Look Down With Me that was published in Bruno’s Song and other stories from the Northern Territory.
I’m hoping the September gig will be the first of many. My wish would be to perform every second Tuesday night of the month. So it’s a bit of a trial, this first one. I’m very interested to see how an audience will react. Maybe down the track we’ll include an open mic section, if the demand is there.
Most of the actors I know from living in Adelaide three years ago. They’re all professionals, they know how to read a script, so we’re not being heavy handed with rehearsals. They’ve already honed their performance skills. We’ll meet a couple of times before the performance to make sure we’re on track and clear up any grey areas. I trust them. And I trust the material they’ve got to work with. The stories are excellent and diverse. It will be an entertaining and unusual night, I promise.
And finally, what else is planned for Spineless Wonders presents… ?
I’ve had discussions with writer, Jen Mills, who lives in country South Australia, and is keen to get something like this on the road, touring country towns. I believe it’s very possible, 3 actors in a van.
Into the future, I’d like to see us taking part in writers festivals. We are looking at performing readings and offering Writers Reading workshops at next year’s Emerging Writers Festival. That all means finding money to pay our actors and their expenses. But I’m hopeful. People have been really enthusiastic about what we are doing. It’s fantastic.
SPINELESSWONDERS presents…
at THE JOLLY MILLER TAVERN, Hindmarsh
Tuesday, September 13th
at 7pm for a 7.30 start
Spineless Wonders Asks Kim Westwood
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
I’m currently being impressed by Laura van den Berg. Some others for today (tomorrow I’ll think of more I wish I’d said) would be Janette Turner Hospital (‘The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman’ was very powerful), Margo Lanagan’s anthology Black Juice, and Nalo Hopkinson’s stories in Skin Folk. A long-time favourite is Italo Calvino’s beautiful vignette style in Invisible Cities.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
What sprang to mind first when I saw this question was a story by Helen Garner about a magician. In fact, it’s an article about going to see a magician perform. ‘The man with the pearl-white cord’ is a thing of beauty about a thing of beauty: evocative and spare, everything limned to perfection. Then I thought of a story called ‘The boy who could lay eggs’. I searched for it in my bookshelves, and discovered it was a poem. The poet, Caroline Price, had created such a powerful moment in time that I’d incorporated it into my memory as a short story. Genres of things have a peculiar way of merging in my head.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
As a reader: the enjoyment of a compact story arc. As a writer: the challenge of a compact story arc. To me, the short story is about creating a world that fits perfectly in a teacup. It’s a good balancer to novel writing, which is like heading into the labyrinth to find the Minotaur, and which takes me years—and an awful lot of string—to work my way out again.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Personal. Political. Poetic. Ooh—alliteration!
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Probably ‘Nightship’, a grungy industrial dystopia set on Australia’s eastern seaboard. It rattles hard at the cage of sex-and-gender power structures, and was launched in equal part by documentary footage I once saw of a woman being stoned to death, and the sight of fox pelts strewn across a bed in Harrods, London. I’ve always known there’s a much bigger story hiding in there, so I’m turning it into a novel. Out of the teacup into the labyrinth…
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
It can be from an image that sticks in my mind, or a phrase or poetic line that feels really full, like a grape wanting to burst. To explore it, I have to write. No other medium will do. It’s my version of an archeological dig. But it’s as much internal as external. I dig the inside and the outside concurrently and never know where I’m going to end up. I’m not a writer who constructs the skeleton of the story then fleshes in the details. This is moot for ‘Nightship’. Unstitching all its seams and laying it out raw again, who knows where it will go?
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Private. Very private. I keep the story in the brain bubble for as long as possible, because I’ve learnt that’s how my imagination works best. It’s important to find your process and honour it. When I think I’m done and the story has been worked to a shine, I let it out for appraisal. But I choose those people very carefully. I’m not into group discussion. The last—the only—time I did that partway through a story, it destroyed my ability to finish it. To return to an earlier analogy, it’s like opening a piece of fruit before it’s ripe. It oxidises too early.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I’m not sure how to answer this, because I don’t feel like I have my finger on the public pulse. But I’m reminded of a quote I saw recently by Simon Prosser, the publishing director of Hamish Hamilton. He said ‘the short story form is better suited to the demands of modern life than the novel.’ These days everything seems to need to be faster and in smaller bites, which points to Simon Prosser being on the right track. As far as choice, there are quite a few competitions and plenty of publications that accept short stories; but is the form valued generally, or by just a few? I honestly don’t know who’s out there reading those stories.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Great idea. The wider the range of media the better. I signed the permission for The Daughters of Moab, my first novel, to be made into an ebook because my friend Brenda said how much she likes reading her Kindle. And I got a thrill hearing ‘Tripping over the Light Fantastic’ (a dance tragic goes to a dance studio audition) being read on ABC Radio. It was fun—not to mention challenging—to record ‘Nightship’ for Terra Incognita, the Australian speculative fiction podcast site. More recently I’ve discovered the excitement of going to word performances and poetry slams.
Click here to listen to ‘Nightship’.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Advice? Don’t think you need advice—just a big thumbs up for what you’re doing!
KIM WESTWOOD realised she might be a bit speculative when her story ‘The Oracle’ won a 2002 Aurealis Award. Since then there’s been more speculation, much of it with an apocalyptic air. Her stories have been chosen for Year’s Best anthologies in Australia and the US, and for ABC radio broadcast. She is the recipient of a prestigious Varuna Writer’s Fellowship for her first novel, The Daughters of Moab. Her second novel, The Courier’s New Bicycle, will be released in August by Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Set in Melbourne just a few years and political changes from now, it’s twenty days in the adrenaline-fuelled life of Salisbury Forth: bike courier, Animal Protection Vigilante and gender transgressive.
For more details and Kim’s full bio, go to www.kimwestwood.com
Spineless Wonders asks Tim Richards
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
So many: Gogol, Chekhov, Kafka, Borges, Salinger, Flannery O’Connor, IB Singer, Donald Barthelme, Carver, Peter Carey, Beverley Farmer, Gerald Murnane, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill … I’m leaving out dozens.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I’ll cheat and go for four less obvious choices… I don’t know a better story about vulnerability than Janette Turner Hospital’s ‘The Owl Bander’, a story that always makes me cry. Miranda July’s ‘Majesty’ seems like a ribald stream of unconsciousness only to reveal meticulous craft. And Peter Carey’s ‘Do You Love Me?’ and Gerald Murnane’s ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’ have been the stories that have most influenced my own work.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Stories are all about defining a sensibility, a very particular way of viewing or engaging with the world, and they seem to me to offer a better vehicle for dealing with ideas than the novel.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Expressionistic, conceptual, dark-humoured.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
In this recent collection, ‘The Darkest Heart’ is probably the signature story: strong narration, heaps of irony, black humour.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
You find the seed of an idea that you might want to explore and then you extrapolate. I once heard a segment on Phillip Adams’ show about a Scottish doctor being prosecuted for manslaughter after one of his patients died during the amputation of a healthy right leg. The patient had insisted on the operation because the leg was ruining his notion of being complete, and he would have no choice but to commit suicide if it wasn’t taken off. You bang an idea like that together with the prioritisation of youth suicide prevention, and you get a story like ‘The Enemies of Happiness’…
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I write the first draft as quickly as possible (by hand) – I prefer violent dentistry to writing first drafts. Those initial drafts are rough and unruly. Generally, the published versions of my stories are twenty percent shorter than the first draft. There’s a lot of cutting and polishing, word and phrase strengthening. I’d probably average ten drafts, and it’s rare that I’ll feel a story is ready to be sent out within 12 months of its first draft. Sometimes it takes twenty drafts and ten years. I’d never let anyone read a story that hadn’t had at least a couple of drafts. If you’re very lucky, an editor or fiction consultant will take the time to give you useful feedback. Ivor Indyk at Heat gave me great notes on ‘The Darkest Heart’. Kalinda Ashton at Overland helped me knock ‘Dog’s Life’s’ end into shape. Denise O’Dea at Black Inc has been great, but you can’t rely on others to do your editorial work for you … Keep reading the thing out loud. Not quietly under your breath. Loud. Over and over.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Clearly, there was a long period when the publishers’ lack of confidence in short fiction became a self-fulfilling prophesy, then Nam Le came along, and now the scene has opened up again. While the form’s importance may have been under-appreciated from time to time, you’d be hard-pressed to find better Australian writing in any form than the stories that were published in the period 1973-1988. The likes of David Malouf and Peter Carey are fine novelists, but they are way better short story writers. It’s a great pity that Carey has never returned to the short story.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
At this stage, I’d prefer to be published in print first, and to have the other forms of publication augment print publication. Any electronic book publication that didn’t come with an audio option would seem to be seriously betraying the potential of the medium. I’ll buy into the idea of the electronic book only when it’s stuffed full of added extras.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
I was lucky to be taught by Gerald Murnane when I was thirty, (1990-1991) and was already writing professionally (for TV) having completed a Masters in Oz Lit, and having a pretty strong idea of the kind of stories that I wanted to write. From the Murnane classes I keep returning to four five key quotes:
Every true piece of fiction turns on the mystery of personality – Frank O’Connor
I must ask to find my own fundamental problems…The true road is the road into my own darkness
- Eugene Ionesco
Trust your own obsessions – Robert Bly
I write in order to learn the meaning of images in my own mind – Gerald Murnane
Before I write, I should be certain that it’s a story that only I can write – IB Singer
Tim Richard’s short stories have appeared in The Best Australian Stories, the Age, Meanjin, Heat, Sleepers Almanac and Overland. The author of Letters to Francesca, The Prince adn Duckness, he has worked as a television comedy writer (Full Frontal, Fast Forward) and script editor (Looking for Alibrandi). His collection of short stories, Thought Crimes, published by Black Inc, is released this month. He currently teaches creative writing at Box Hill TAFE and RMIT.
Recycling Tales: unearthing treasures in the short stories of Angela Carter and Margo Lanagan
This week, guest blogger, Karina Brabham dives into the work of two short fiction greats, Britain’s late Angela Carter and Australia’s Margo Lanagan, to find out how they each take something old and turn it into something shiny and new.
Writers are recyclers at heart. Not necessarily in an environmental sense, but rather that we recycle stories. We tell the same plot lines over and over again. If we look back to the earliest examples of stories – myths, legends, folk and fairy tales – they resemble a lot of what we tell today. They have birthed the formulas of plot the reader knows too well – and yet despite this predictability, they continue to be told.
There are many examples of explicit retellings of older stories. Disney’s adaptations of fairy tales are an obvious case in point. More literary examples also present themselves such as, in the short story context, Angela Carter’s rewritings of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and other stories. Our familiarity with the fairy tales is what enables Carter to subvert them for her own feminist agenda.
In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, for example, Carter makes some significant deviations from the traditional plot of the Bluebeard myth. Instead of the brothers of the Bluebeard character’s wife riding to her rescue, it is her mother in Carter’s version. The mother, as Carter created her, is a startling figure of female empowerment – she has “outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand”. She is indomitable yet still maternal. In contrast to Charles Perrault’s original Bluebeard, Carter does not allow women to be exclusively branded as victims; they can be heroines too.
Yet the danger here is to only value Carter’s collection of rewritten stories on their political level. Although her manipulation of known plots facilitated her message, it is limiting to solely name this as the reason for the piece’s success. Setting, language, tone and a whole host of other features make up a story – it is how the writer handles these that is the key to making something fresh from the recycled tales we know too well. From the beginning of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ a dark and ominous tone haunts the pages, created through foreshadowing, imagery and symbolism. Carter captures the reader as the tense atmosphere of the story builds to its climax.
Margo Lanagan, in her new collection of short stories Yellowcake, recycles old tales in a less overtly political but no less effective manner. Two of her short stories, ‘The Golden Shroud’ and ‘Night of the Firstlings’, are both recognisable as new versions of old tales.
‘The Golden Shroud’ is a retelling of the Rapunzel story told from the Prince’s perspective. From his point of view the story clearly shines as a tale of young love fraught with the threat of loss. The Prince’s youthful voice provides a vitality which engages the reader anew with this old tale. It is told in Lanagan’s distinct style that highlights an emotional intensity of the character’s experience. In her version the reader is immediately thrust into the Prince’s despair at finding his beloved gone from her tower and her abundance of hair lying on the ground. The strong images she creates within the fabric of the story add a visual beauty that catches the reader’s imagination. For example:
“I lay in the slippery whorl of her hair, the spread sun on the ground, trailing and looping out into the green. I smelt, I felt, the grass through the perfumed strands pillowing my cheek. What had the old bitch done: had she killed her? Had she worse? Had she found worse than this tower and this tether of hair?”
According to the acknowledgements in Yellowcake, Lanagan’s ‘Night of the Firstlings’ was inspired by the Paul Kelly song ‘Passed Over’. This song is, in turn, is a musical retelling of the Biblical story of the Jewish people’s escape from slavery in Egypt. It focuses on the final plague when the angel of death passed over, taking the eldest son from every family – except those with lamb’s blood painted on the doorway.
Lanagan again grounds the story in the immediacy of one character’s experience. This point of view adds a vividness to the tale which a reading of the source story in Exodus does not offer. The terror of the moment as death passes over is given a horrifying reality to the reader. Lanagan builds up the tone through each word and each image, chosen specifically for this purpose. With the narrator, the reader hears it:
“The noise blotted out every other noise, louder than the wildest wind, and composed, in its beatings, of beating voices, crowds shrieking terrified or angry or in horrible pain I could not tell, and the groans of people trampled under the crowd’s feet, and the screams of mourners and the wails of the bereaved, all the bereaved there have ever been, all there will be, torrents of them, blast after blast.”
By taking something old and recycling it, something new can be made. In the hands of superb writers, like Carter and Lanagan, these retellings are fresh and vibrant despite having begun centuries ago. In fact, the history behind it means it can be built on and taken in entirely new directions. We see that clearly in Carter’s feminist rewritings of fairy tales. We see that through the lens of what has already been said, what is said differently becomes so much more significant. Yet above all, as writers, we learn that it is not a plot that makes a story – although a good plot always helps – it is often rather how we tell the story which determines how great it will be.
Margo Lanagan blogs here at Among Amid While
Katrina Brabham studies creative writing at the University of Wollongong.
Spineless Wonders asks Emmett Stinson
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Uh, I like the pretty standard kind of literary, ‘intellectual’ short story writers that, or so it seems to me, are liked by slightly pretentious, overeducated bourgeois dudes like myself. So people like Donald Barthelme, Julio Cortazar, James Joyce, William Faulkner, David Foster Wallace, and so on and so forth. I do like Chekov and Carver and Hemingway, although I’m not very interested in most contemporary ‘realist’ fiction (with notable exceptions, like Brad Watson’s brilliant Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives). When I was growing up, I loved (and still love) Edgar Alan Poe, Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl’s adult short stories (which have probably ‘influenced’ me as much as anything). Most contemporary Australian short fiction is written in a ‘taken-as-read’, minimal-realist mode that’s not really my cup of proverbial tea, but there are great books coming out here. Last year, for example, I loved Catherine Harris’s Like Being a Wife, Jospehine Rowe’s How a Moth Becomes a Boat and Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Probably James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ for the simple reason that it utterly baffled me when I first read it at the age of thirteen. I remember re-reading it in my last year of high school and actually ‘getting’ it, and feeling really excited about that—like I’d happened on a new way of seeing, and that I understood a whole new set of possibilities for what writing and fiction could do.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
These days I tend to read more prose than poetry (it used to be the reverse), and I read more fiction than non-fiction (in my spare time, anyway). I like well-written, stylised prose that’s interesting, challenging and beautiful and I don’t really care if it’s long, short or in-between.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Erm, I’d prefer not to, I suppose. My book, Known Unknows, runs the gamut a bit, I think, with some ‘realist’ stories, some ‘experimental’ stories and even a piece of speculative fiction. At the moment, I’m not writing or interested in writing any more realist fiction, but this could change with all the speed of Melbourne’s weather. I guess I’d say that I write literary fiction and would be happy to leave it at that.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I find that my feelings about my own work vacillate wildly, and I try not to think too much about work I’ve published once it’s published, because it isn’t really mine anymore (which is what Nietzsche called the melancholy of things completed). At the moment, however, I am still fond of my most recent story, ‘The Funeral’, which was published in The Big Issue last year, and is available online at Verity La.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Very occasionally from my own life, more often from stories that other people tell me (so be careful what you say to me), and frequently from other books that I have read, which spark an idea. I like to spend a long time thinking about stories before I write them (for example, I spent something like three years thinking about the final story of Known Unknowns, called ‘Great Extinctions in History’, before I finally sat down to write it). Usually, I like to have a first and last line written in my head before I start writing (although they may change), but more and more I find the process of writing every story very, very different. I’m not a big believer in creative writing process—at its worst, focusing on process is a deadener that’s sure to result in boring writing, and at its best, it’s incredibly dull to talk about. To be honest, some of the most painfully boring conversations of my entire life have been about ‘Creative Writing process’, but I think I’m just much more interested in books than I am interested in authors.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I’ve been in lots of workshops in the past, which have been helpful although usually not in direct ways, and have had trusted friends who would read over things. These days I feel much more confident about what I want to do, and don’t really show anyone anything until I feel it’s finished enough to be edited. I tend to agree with Lawrence Sterne’s view of process: ‘I begin with writing the first sentence – and trusting to Almighty God for the second.’
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
It’s absolutely, positively clear as day that the short story form isn’t valued on any particularly significant cultural level in Australia aside from a few thousand devotees here and there, and (very) occasional interest from a larger reading public (itself a small subset of the broader public). To say otherwise is absurd, but, thankfully, I don’t think either short stories or the short story as a form need to be measured in terms of public outcomes.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I feel great about anyone who wants to publish anything I’ve written in any form at any time, especially if they’re going to pay me for it. If they pay me well, I feel even better about it. Sadly, this is rare.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Take your vitamins and be kind to children and animals.
Emmett Stinson was born in the U.S. in 1977. He has received the Melbourne Age Short Story Award, the ArtsSA Creative Writing Award, and a Lannan Poetry Fellowship. He is a co-founder of Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing, the President of SPUNC—The Small Press Network, and a panelist on the Federal Book Industry Strategy Group. His essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in The Australian, The Big Issue, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, The Melbourne Age, Pindeldyboz, Etchings, The Sleepers Almanac and The Modernism Handbook (Continuum, 2009), among others. His collection of short stories, Known Unknowns, was published by Affirm Press in 2010.
Emmett blogs here at Known Unknowns
Spineless Wonders Asks Lucy Sussex
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Chekhov, for ‘The Lady With a Little Dog’. Mary Fortune, who as Waif Wander wrote 500 pioneering crime stories for the Australian Journal between 1865-1909. James Tiptree Jr, alias Alice Sheldon, the great American science fiction writer. Ellen Davitt’s 1867 ‘The Highlander’s Revenge’, about Gippsland massacres of Aboriginal tribes. She almost certainly interviewed a witness, then wrote the story.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Oh, there’s too many to name. I am a reviewer, and scholar of the C19th, a golden age for the short story.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It enables you to say what you want in a succinct form. The trick is to find something that will fit into that form. If it won’t then you’ve got a novel on your hands, a different kettle of fish altogether.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Feminist, playful, po-mo (but never po-faced), using realism and non-realism in a way that was yesterday called slipstream, today interstitial. Two blokes said my stories were too clever—since when is a woman too clever, I ask?
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I tend to like a story when I’m working on it, not so interested in them afterwards. But of the recent stories, I like ‘Alchemy’, for forcing me to write about ancient Babylon, and ‘Thief of Lives’, which is about writers as psychic vampires.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
With ‘Alchemy’ it was that the first chemist was a female Babylonian perfumier named Tapputi. When you linked that with a passage from the Biblical Book of Enoch, about fallen angels teaching women the secrets of enamelling, making perfume etc. in exchange for sexual favours…that set off the narrative. I had to research domestic life in old Babylon, which was fun. It turned into a love story. Then towards the end, I discovered that the US army had demolished part of the historical site of Babylon to build a base. That went in too. All grist to the mill.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Usually me alone, but sometimes a writers’ group is involved, if I think there’s a problem with the story that I can’t quite fathom. Then, of course, you can get 15 different suggestions on how to solve it!
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia?
Not as much as it should be.
What makes you say this?
Readers don’t realise its possibilities, except in genre fiction (horror, sf, fantasy), where there is genuine appreciation of the form. The problem is that most Australian short stories are usually published in small literary mags, with limited readership.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
The more the merrier.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Never give up.
Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand in 1957. She has degrees in English and Librarianship from Monash University, and is a freelance researcher, editor and writer. She has published widely, writing anything from literary criticism to horror and detective stories. In addition she is a literary archaeologist, rediscovering and republishing the nineteenth-century Australian crime writers Mary Fortune and Ellen Davitt. Her short story, `My Lady Tongue’ won a Ditmar (Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award) in 1988. In 1994 she was a judge for the international Tiptree award, which honours speculative fiction exploring notions of gender. Her collection, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex was published this year by Ticonderoga. You can read the launch speech here. Thief of Lies, a collection of four stories, was published by Twelfth Planet Press in July this year.
Find out more about Lucy from her website:
Little Bleeders 2 Talking short crime with A.S. Patric
This week, The Column asks Alec Patric, winner of the 2011 SD Harvey Short Story Award about writing short Australian crime.
I spent years reading prose that was lit up with insights and revelations. Dense with psychological verisimilitude. That exposed all the nuances of our most precious relationships. Years with tortured prose that demanded a kind of attention and dedication not seen outside the study of physics, linguistics and theology.
It occurred to me that this is not why I started reading or writing. That there was something more basic. There was a spell writing cast over another person’s mind. It was what I was really looking for as a reader, and a writer. It’s the creation of a compelling reality we can call narrative but it’s nothing more complicated than the need for pure storytelling.
I became fascinated with books that compelled us to turn pages. Crime writing is the purest of narrative forms in this respect. There’s no other genre, (including the literary fiction genre), that focuses more resolutely on the great events and challenges of our daily lives. It might seem absurd when looked at from the perspective of suburban lives, entertained by the violence and mayhem of Crime, but our lives are always on the verge of death, no matter how comfortable they may seem. Even in regular workplaces, emotionally, the day to day can feel life and death.
I hadn’t consciously decided to write a genre Crime story before I wrote ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ recently. It had already started forming as an idea on the page before I found out about the Ned Kelly award for short fiction. I knew they gave out the award of course, for novels and the like, but it gave my emerging story incentive and focus.
Once I’d decided to have a go at the award, I wanted to write a genre piece that would fit a classic definition. I wanted to write something with a terrible murder and a surprise ending. I wanted to have a hit man and a prostitute and I wanted them to dwell in a harsh, gritty, ‘noir’ landscape. Las Vegas was the perfect place to set my story.
As soon as you start writing something like this, you find that clichés are not just risks of lazy sentences and poorly realised ideas, but are the actual figures you are playing with. There’s just no way you can write a hit man or whore that hasn’t been done before. A protagonist in a crime story will be defined by the crime, but all you can do is tweak a few features in the bio.
Ian Rankin’s John Rebus loves fashionable rock music, and Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole practices yoga. Features like these seem ridiculous in isolation, but the authors are desperately attempting to escape cliché. With James Lee Burke, his character Dave Robicheaux is an alcoholic, ex-soldier, disillusioned cop, etc, etc. James Lee Burke is a superb writer and it’s all believable and compelling, but where he really distinguishes himself is in the detailed evocation of New Orleans; its landscape and culture. So while crime writers play with clichés from beginning to end, they have to find something unique in the way they fulfil genre expectations.
In ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ I wasn’t interested in the casinos, the decadence, or any of the clichéd perspectives of Vegas, though I do play with the post card images we all have of ‘Sin City’. I became entranced with the idea of a fabulous palace in the middle of a desert. Emotionally, it was the perfect place for my character, but also for myself. Anyone who practices art within our culture, with its corporate culture and social materialism, its predictable obsessions with sport and cargo-cult fascination for celebrity, is living within an artistic desert. ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ is a term that sums up what it feels like being a writer in Australia at the moment.
But to be honest, we go blindly into these narrative structures searching for other, less tangible details. So for me, what I was reaching for is this sense that some of us live in the light of ideals (a noble sense of caring for the planet and its life forms as passed down to my hero from his parents), or within a sense of order and justice (the virtuous won’t get terrible diseases and/or kill themselves in utter defeat) for basic functions of humanity (being a husband and father) and without these ‘lights’ the world becomes an endless afternoon stretching into evening.
As unfashionable as it may be, ‘Hemisphere Travel Guides: Las Vegas for Vegans’ even has a moral to its story: tend to life in all its details, nourish your soul, care for those around you as far as that’s within your power to do so. I know, a little touchy-feely, but I really do believe we live by the lights of things such as ideals, compassion and connection. I’m not sure if I’d recommend any of these things to writers wanting a long career in crime writing but that’s what went into writing ‘Hemisphere Travel Guides: Las Vegas for Vegans’.
The SD Harvey Short Story Award
This was established in honour of the late writer and journalist Sandra Harvey, author and collaborator on a range of important investigative works. The award recognises the importance of the short story form in Australian crime writing. Entries can be submitted by published and unpublished writers. These can be in the form of fiction or non fiction.
A special feature of the SD Harvey Award is the signature word. This word, announced at the beignning of the competition, must appear in the title and body of the stories submitted. The signature word for 2011 was ‘hemisphere.’
Winning stories from the SD Harvey Award are published by Scribe in their annual anthology, New Australian Stories.
A. S. Patric writes in Melbourne and is a St Kilda bookseller. Alec is featured in Best Australian Stories (2010), and his work has been widely published, appearing in Overland, Southerly, Wet Ink, Etchings, Quadrant, Going Down Swinging and other literary journals. His collection, The Rattler & other stories, will be released in October by Spineless Wonders.
Spineless Wonders asks Sophie Constable
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
*has a terrible urge to read thousands more stories to make an informed decision…comes back to earth reluctantly*
I know I should be saying Saki, Emily Perkins, Turgenev, Oliver Sacks, Paul Jennings, (because it’s true, I do admire them all) but you know what? I’m constantly amazed by the stuff put out by unpublished authors, like the Fictionpress community I’m a member of. People like Emily Lundgren (fictionpress.com/~lookingwest), Xenolith, Starving Hysterical, Narq… in their poetry, prose (and prose poetry) they are constantly exploring new means of expression and new topics. Their courage pushes me to poke at my own boundaries, whereas the already-published gods one can only quail before.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I’d make a terrible judge. I love too many stories for too many different reasons. Turgenev’s ‘Loner’ because it’s so simple yet so haunting. Mohammed Dib’s ‘Naema Disparue’, Diane Ackerman’s ‘The Moon by Whale Light’, Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Veldt’. Joseph Kessel’s ‘Makno et sa Juive’, Emily Perkins stylistically wonderful and refreshing ‘Not Her Real Name’, Richard Adam’s ‘The Iron Wolf’, Narq’s ‘Home’, Xenolith’s ‘Anoxic love’. Because I wished I’d written them, of course. If I had to pick one: ‘Makno et sa Juive’, I suppose, because it’s one of the first I read that really stuck with me, and because of how it treads a wonderfully murky line between good and evil. The characterisation was awesome.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
As a writer: Succinctness. How they are little windows onto other worlds. As a reader: their amazing variety of style and voice and structure.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Oof. I’m a terrible judge of my own writing. Plus it’s still very much a young, evolving thing. A few years ago I basically only wrote bald dialogue, now I’m in a purple prose stage, lol. I write across any genre that grabs me at that moment too. Consistently though, I love plot, I love melodrama (too much), but I don’t want the writing to be too manipulative either.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Fond is a strong word… haha, it’s a love-hate relationship with some. I definitely get fond of characters though, fall in love with them, create acres of stories for them. The trick is knowing when to stop and what will work on the page. Currently I’m enjoying my manuscript Bloodline, an alternative history/ tragedy/romance of Russia in the late 1930s. The 30s was such an interesting time, and I’m loving the freedom given by an alternate history.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
A line of text, a radio story, a photo… anything. But once it’s got its claws in I have to get it down or burst. After my first visit to Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh I desperately wanted to not just be a passive visitor and move on, and writing was the only way I could make sense of the experience. But neither could I engage with the issue at the time, it was too raw. Strangely enough though, I found the experience allowed me to write about a related topic – Siberian gulags … does that sound seriously morbid? Anyway, I spent the overnight flight home scribbling away, half feeling really sorry for the poor guy trying to sleep in the seat next to me, but mostly just having to get the words out. I think he thought I was possessed. Or at least obsessive compulsive. He was probably right.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Usually I’ll start with either a particular sentence or a conversation, just go with the flow, get the idea out, and build up around that. With each rereading I look for what’s missing: characterisation, tension, description, setting, etc, and try not to overload the text either. I like to bang out a first or second draft before anyone else sees it (anyone reading it at this stage is going to diss it, because I haven’t communicated the idea properly yet, so I have to resist getting anyone else’s opinion til it’s in some kind of shape – hard lesson to learn). Then it’ll go to my trusty beta-reader/editor Narq (aka Yin Lin) to let me know if I’m way off or if there’s potential. A few more drafts to cut down chaff or fill in the gaps…and if I’m still keen I’ll run it past my online (FictionPress) or local writing group (Darwin Authors Group). By that stage I’m usually pretty sick of it and it’s fantastic to get a fresh perspective. Recently I’ve taken to drawing story arcs for longer pieces: a great way to get your head around multiple plotlines and see the bigger picture. But the first draft has to come first: if I try and plan it out ‘Snowflake’-wise I lose the motivation to write it.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I see people reading on public transport all the time, so to me it fits that niche really well. As life gets busier I certainly appreciate short fiction more and more, whilst at the same time adoring being absorbed into a novel. Is it a need that’s acknowledged or realised by readers? I’ll guess we’ll find out. To me, digitisation certainly helps make the format more accessible. I think there’s a thought out there that short stories have to be kinda high-brow and demanding, but short fiction that really absorbs you the way a novel does, gets me every time. I do think short stories aren’t publicised the way novels are, though – people don’t get the chance to know about them.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Love it. Communication is an ever-broadening field, and I love that other modalities are being explored. I love being able to access writing whether the bookshop is open or not, whether I’m in Darwin, Sydney, Phnom Penh or Maningrida, and I’m excited by the possibilities being explored in terms of multimedia fiction: combining text image and sound.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Congratulations on tackling digital publishing and short fiction publishing head on rather than complain about it like everyone else does 
Sophie Constable is an Australian author whose short fiction was recently awarded in the Northern Territory Literary Awards, the National Year of Reading short story competition and the online La Campanella awards. This year she was also chosen as Judge’s Pick Best Breakout Author in the online SKoW awards. Her e-book novella, ‘Written in the Clouds’ is currently available through Amazon.com. She has been featured at Darwin’s Off the Page and is currently working on an unruly adolescent of a novel that makes her dog look obedient in comparison.
Spineless Wonders Asks Irma Gold
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Some of my favourite contemporary Australian short fiction writers are Cate Kennedy, Nam Le, Helen Garner, Marion Halligan, Gillian Mears and John Clanchy. For the ‘otherwise’ who can possibly go past Alice Munro? And then there are the greats of the past, Chekov and Carver being two I admire most.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
At the moment it’s Chris Womersley’s ‘Theories of Relativity’ which I first read back in March last year. It’s the unsettling and haunting tale of a dysfunctional and deeply troubled family. The story is beautifully constructed and written, with an arresting opening line: ‘You learn things in this life, don’t you, whether you like it or not.’ Every time I read ‘Theories of Relativity’ I am transfixed, compelled to read on to the brutal conclusion even though I now know what is coming.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
As a reader I like that I can finish a story in one sitting. On the bus, over a cup of tea, lying on the beach. There is a particular pleasure in that complete slice of time, and the best stories linger in the mind long after the last word has been read.
As a writer I like that I can complete a story quite quickly and that, unlike a novel, I can easily hold the whole thing in my head. I also like that the story is a glimpse into a larger world. The characters must be authentic, fully-formed, and the reader must be able to imagine that they have a life outside the brevity of the pages. A single word or sentence has the potential to suggest so much. There’s nowhere to hide in a short story. Every word counts. And a passage that doesn’t work will stand out, everything’s exposed. I enjoy that challenge. I recently heard Kate Grenville describe the short story as a bikini compared to the novel as a baggy overcoat. A wonderful analogy.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
My stories explore the challenges and difficulties ordinary people face and their struggle towards some kind of happiness. Sometimes they get there, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they discover an unexpected kind of happiness in the smaller things. Dean Gorissen, who illustrated and designed the cover of my new short fiction collection, Two Steps Forward, described my stories as being about the real Australia, the one ‘not in the tourist brochures’, which I think is true. There has been much debate since the announcement of this year’s Miles Franklin Award on how we define ‘Australianness’ in literature. The shortlisted books were all written by men that engage with the past in rural settings. All great books I might add, yet most of us live in cities. We seem to have got stuck with this rather antiquated and romantic idea of what represents Australian life. Yet so many writers are producing award-worthy stories that engage with our contemporary city-based lives. I, too, am interested in engaging and reflecting this world, focussing on people who manage to find light among the shadows.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
It’s difficult to choose, and my favourites are always changing. I think I have three that I’m equally fond of right now for different reasons, all from my collection Two Steps Forward. Creating ‘The Art of Courting’ was an immensely enjoyable experience. It’s written in second person and this allowed me to play with language in a particular way. It’s about a single woman in her forties who plays a series of flirtatious games with a man who moves into the neighbourhood. So the story itself has a sense of play and the language does too. It’s a joyous story, and I hope people share that feeling as they read.
In contrast ‘The Third Child’ is about a woman who loses a child to miscarriage. I wanted to write about miscarriage because as a society it’s something we fail to talk about, both at a public and personal level. It’s also an experience that is not represented well in literature or movies where we are mainly offered clichéd images of a woman clutching her stomach, a bit of blood, and then it’s all over. It’s rarely like that, so I wanted to write something that was authentic. I’ve had a lot of people – both men and women – tell me this is their favourite story in the collection.
And then there’s ‘Sounds of Friendship’, set in a caravan park. When I met Dean Gorrissen for the first time he told me that this story made him cry, and also that he thought I would look different to what I actually did, because he felt I must have direct experience of that world to write about it. This was really heartening for me. That I created a world that was so believable for him that he felt it must be autobiographical.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
In truth, I mostly have no idea where my stories come from. Sometimes it can be sparked by a snatch of dialogue I overhear (I think most writers are terrible eavesdroppers), or by a ‘character’ I come across, or a situation I encounter. An idea comes to me and I mull it over before consciously sitting down to write it. But mostly a story seemingly comes out of nowhere. I begin writing having no idea where it is going to take me. I feel like I am just following it, allowing it to unravel. And I love that process, that sense of discovery. For instance with my story ‘Tangerine’ an image came to me of a man and a young girl standing together on a platform in the middle of the night. They were ill at ease with each other, and I wanted to know why this was, and what they were doing on that platform. The story unfurled from there.
These kind of stories usually come in fits and spurts over a few days, often when I’m in spaces where my mind can freefall. I can be drifting into sleep or out walking or driving the car, when I have to suddenly switch on the bedside lamp or pull over the car and begin scribbling furiously.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I work very much in isolation to begin with. I don’t even talk about the story to anyone. It feels too fragile. As if a comment (even a positive one) could prevent the story from emerging in the right way. I work in both longhand and straight onto my laptop. Each story tends to be a mix of the two processes. As I write I’m always going back and editing. I suppose this is one of the perils of also being an editor. But while many writers see this as a negative (if you’re permanently editing you’re not getting on with the story), I find doing this kind of revision allows me to be suspended in the space of the story, thinking deeply – in both conscious and unconscious ways – about what will come next. Once I have a polished first draft I like to get editorial feedback, either from the short story group I am part of, or from other editors whose advice I value. I enjoy this refining process, working hard to make the story as good as it can be. Once I have completed several drafts I usually put the story aside for a few weeks. This allows me to come back to it fresh and see what else needs to be done. I know a story is finished when I go through it changing a word here, a comma there, and then on the next reading change them back again.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
It’s certainly valued by writers but readers don’t seem as taken with the form. And yet it seems to me that the short story is perfect for our time-poor modern existence. Then again they demand a great deal from their readers. Short stories are dense, they are closer to poetry than they are to the novel. Publishers don’t like them either because they think they’re economically unviable. Yet it does seem that the form is slowly regaining some favour, inch by inch. The success of books like Nam Le’s The Boat and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming have demonstrated that a collection can attract a large readership. Let’s hope this gentle trend continues.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
There are now so many different ways for readers to access stories. I’m all for any medium that gets stories out there.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Well done for supporting the fabulous but underappreciated short form. Continue to be bold and brave!
Irma Gold is an editor and award-winning writer. She was born in England, grew up in Melbourne and now lives in Canberra. Her short stories have been widely published in Australian journals like Meanjin, Island and Going Down Swinging, and her debut collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward, was released by Affirm Press as the final book in its Long Story Shorts series this month. She is also the author of two children’s books, and is currently working on a novel. Read her blog here at Overland literary journal.
You can watch the trailer for Two Steps Forward by clicking here.
Spineless Wonders asks Mark Welker
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
I tend find inspiration from different authors at different times, depending on what I’m writing. At the moment my book pile is stuffed with shorts by John Updike, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortazar. I’ve also read a lot of Robert Drewe recently, whom I greatly admire as an Australian short fiction writer.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Probably the most influential is a story called Desert Notes by Barry Lopez. It’s one of those stories that (I think) gets behind the meaning of things, and gives it a little shove towards the reader. Loosely it goes something like this: a man observes a truck moving across an empty desert plain. He experiences the drive from each seat in the car. He steps out and walks beside it. He gets back in, listens to the engine, the tyres, the dirt beneath the tyres. He climbs out and waits as the truck recedes driverless toward the horizon.
Lopez uncovers something extraordinary in the ordinary, and the story convinced me of the power of short form.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Definitely the immediacy of the experience. Reading short fiction is like watching a polaroid develop. Not all aspects of life need or want to be explored in over 200+ pages (or 100 pages for that matter), and many novels I read really feel like short stories with packing foam.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I hope I’m working towards a style, but everything at this point feels quite loosely tethered. If I was to boil down my stories they would be probably be distinguished by a strong use of premise. I always start with a unique premise, a situation or circumstance, into which I pour my characters.
I heard recently that style is often the product of an author side-stepping his or her inadequacies and leveraging their strengths. I’m definitely still discovering what my strengths are, whilst learning at the same time to avoid my weaknesses.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I’ve got a story nearing its final draft that genuinely surprised me with where it ended up. This is the part of writing I enjoy the most. As writers, we take leaps of faith everyday. You start writing into a kind of abyss, the plank forming centimetres in front of your next step, not knowing how deep or wide the crevasse might be. But it’s exciting at the same time. You can’t always see to the other side, so it’s always a surprise to get there and peep around.
I keep a regular diary while I write and can see in it places where I’ve been trying to figure out where this particular story should go. The direction and tone completely changed as I wrote forward.
Writing is one of the few places where my mind, my thoughts, my imagination, still surprises me.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Every now and then I see an aspect of something I’ve read, heard or seen, formed as a kind of five second movie trailer in my head. Then I go and explore that trailer in a notebook until I’m convinced it’s a story. For example, a recent story came after travelling by air over a period of months, and the experience of living the transit life. I carried that thought around, which represented a kind of need to better understand the experience, and then I saw the Sydney dust storms. Suddenly I knew what I needed to write, and I began to bring the two ideas together, linked by that visual cue.
I’m convinced that my ideas form in some kind of creative primordial soup. I think writers should focus more on ensuring the soup is kept on the boil, than what exactly comes out of it (or how often).
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I’m an enthusiastic drafter. I’ll usually write the first draft by hand as it feels less formal than typing it on a computer. My first draft is usually awful. My second and third drafts are equally awful.
Instead of revising or editing during these drafts, I’ll usually start a fresh document for each and re-write them in full. It’s really hard to direct a story where it needs to go if you are squeezed between your existing sentences. Also the crap that comes out in my first drafts is never worth saving. If a line happens to be brilliant, it should stick in my head. I’ll remember it, I shouldn’t need to see it on each draft.
I’m really just exploring in these drafts, and that is rarely a pleasurable experience. But with each successive draft I start to discover the story, and things start to get interesting. Once I’ve got to the 3rd or 4th draft, I’ll usually feel I have a handle on the story, but need an external opinion to get at its core.
I’ve been working with a mentor and I’ll send it off to him and meet the following week. Some of his feedback is line by line, most though are thoughts and suggestions, lines of enquiry, sometimes a list of stories that I should read. This external part is essential in providing perspective. It’s also a nice forced break. I know once it’s out of my hands for review I can focus on other things until we meet up. At the same time I’ll also send it out to a few of my trusted readers, who help provide perspective on how a story might be received by a wider audience.
After I get the comments back I’ll run it through around two more drafts, send it back to the mentor for a final look and then start thinking about submitting. I have a list of places that I regularly check for themes and submission deadlines. A big part of submitting is about having the right story at the right time, and rejection usually takes at least three months. So it pays for me to think further out than just where my current story might go, and often I’ll wait for the right submission opportunity.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
In a financial sense, I’m not sure. Creatively, short story collections are being published more frequently in these last few years. Writers such as Cate Kennedy, Nam Lee, Stephen Amsterdam have all had collections/stories which have been well received critically. But if I ask many of my friends, who aren’t writers but are avid readers, when the last time they read short fiction was, they would say high school.
I think there’s an assumption being made that it’s easy to make the transition as a reader from long fiction to short fiction. And for those who have completed creative writing degrees, the transition probably is easy. But many people have never been exposed to short fiction before, hence encountering it, even in a familiar space, remains a little uncomfortable.
So while I think short fiction has the potential to be incredibly relevant at a time where brevity is all the rage, the distribution method holds it back.
Short fiction doesn’t belong in the novel format. Few of my friends would buy a book of short fiction, in the same way they wouldn’t buy a book of short form journalism. The behaviour of reading novels, ie sitting down, ploughing from beginning to end, isn’t always applicable for reading short fiction. There are many endings in a short fiction collection, and many beginnings. You don’t need to read one after the other, or for that matter, in order. Yet because of packaging requirements (ie you need a spine to be on a bookshelf) we treat short fiction like chapters in a book.
I don’t believe that mainstream relevance for short fiction is going to come from within bounds of a book, or the journal. People generally freak out when they find the unfamiliar in a familiar space, it’s what horror movies play on. In the same way, to an unfamiliar reader, the inclusion of short fiction in a book format has the potential to position its defining characteristic and strength (ie brevity) as a weakness. That and it’s totally confusing.
The product is sound, I just think the packaging just needs work.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
The more places, the more formats, the better. It makes absolute sense that short fiction should have its own system of distribution, and digital seems like one of the few mediums offering up innovation in this space.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
The best thing about writing short fiction is that you can fail often and you can fail cheaply. In business, this method of experimentation is a prerequisite for innovation. So I would say get comfortable in whatever format you write in, but give yourself opportunities to fail every now and then.
Mark Welker was 2009 Griffith Review Emerging Writer of the Year. He blogs at http://www.markwelker.com where you can read his stories and musings.
small wonder prose poems & micro fiction
small wonder
an anthology of prose poems and micro fiction
Is it a prose poem? Or poetic prose? Perhaps it’s postcard fiction or sudden prose. A vignette or a monologue. SPINELESSWONDERS invites you to break some rules. Try a little genre-bending. Let the line break take a stroll through the streets and fields of prose and surprise us with edgy, unexpected moments.
We are excited to have announced our new competition at Australian Poetry’s Symposium held in Newcastle this past weekend.
The competition will be judged by Sydney-based poet, joanne burns whose latest collection of poems, amphora, was published by Giramondo earlier this year. When asked what qualities she would be looking for, joanne said,’ Small and stealthy.’
So there you have it. Entries will be welcome from October 16, via this website and we are looking forward to reading lots of innovative writing. Check our Submissions page for further details
Spineless Wonders Asks Patrick West
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Vladimir Nabokov comes to mind first. I remember reading a raggedy copy of Nabokov’s Dozen, ages ago, at the beach. The book was so ancient that the pages were almost petrified. Each time you turned one it came away from the spine and you’d have to snatch it back from the sea breeze, which seems to say something about the fragile, fleeting intensity of Nabokov’s pages. Gerald Murnane is another writer I love and admire. Velvet Waters always inspires me and I think about it often. Anything by Borges too. But most of all Janet Frame, for the way her stories range so freely and confidently across realism, symbolism, allegory and anecdote. And because her tales feel like confidences being shared with you and you alone. Another fabulous New Zealand writer I’ve discovered more recently is Owen Marshall: “Kenneth’s Friend” is a masterpiece.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I’ll be bold and only name one: Frank Moorhouse’s “Revisions: A Found Story”. Nothing else is so funny and heartbreaking all at the same time. It’s the perfect match of formal experimentation with an abiding concern for the human condition.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Delia Falconer says it best when she celebrates its “under-the-radar freedom”. As a genre it has an unparalleled ability (once more I’m thinking of Moorhouse) to plunder other modes of writing for spoils to line its own dark caves of creativity. A short story can make work what wouldn’t work in a novel or a poem. It can play in any position.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
This is a tough one…. Perhaps along the lines of the Butterfly Effect. Or, as my writing is so often about water and watery conditions, another way of putting it may be more apt: introducing a drop of water into one edge of the ocean can sometimes bring about a tsunami at the other edge. My writing pursues the consequences of what are initially minor even trivial disturbances. It tries to increase the level of magnification that may be trained on the world—as if the pen were a microscope of infinite calibration—until seeing a new state up close makes it seem strange and distant all over again.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Like many writers I suppose, I’m usually most fond of the story I’m currently working on. If I don’t feel that way about a particular story then probably there’s something wrong with it. Having said that, the story “Nhill” is always one I think of fondly, and particularly of late. You see, when it was first published in The Best Australian Stories 2006 and in Antipodes it contained one line of dialogue, as it happens the last line, that attracted a little bit of criticism. In her review of BAS 2006 in Australian Book Review, Delia Falconer wrote that “Nhill” “would be perfect but for its last line.” When I read that I agreed straightaway with Delia’s analysis, and so the version of “Nhill” in my debut short-story collection, The World Swimmers, has had that last line taken out. That’s why I’m so fond of “Nhill” right at the moment. Removing the final three words has made a big difference to that story, has almost made it into a new story.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
“Nhill” was inspired by a trip to the Little Desert of the Victorian Wimmera. Still it took many years after the trip before I even started to write the story. But in the meantime, I suppose, it was incubating in parts of my mind and parts of my body that I know little about. Perhaps it is essential that a short story spend some time in the foreign territories of the writer before it is midwived onto the page and into the world? The funny thing about “Nhill” is that, while the title references the town at the edge of the Little Desert, the vast majority of the story is set not in the town but in the desert. I only realized this much later when a student of mine pointed it out to me. It’s almost as if the town, with its intriguing and evocative name (which, as I understand it, comes from an Aboriginal word meaning “early morning mist [or spirits] rising over water”) unconsciously provided a sort of envelope for me, as writer, to develop some new ideas about the desert lying just to its south. Of course, the notion of Nhill as suggestive of “nil”, “zero” or “nothingness” is also, I think, important to how I wrote the story and to the final product. Nhill, like “Nhill” I hope, is anything but nil.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
For a very long time in the development of any given story I fly solo. So much so that if I’m asked what I’m working on “at the moment” I will never give a straight answer unless the piece is almost completed. I’ll mention another writing project as a diversionary tactic…. I’m sure many but by no means all or even most writers do something similar. Still, when a piece is finished, I try to summon up the confidence to throw open the floodgates and let everyone say their bit who wants to say their bit. I’m pretty much of the opinion that all criticism helps improve a story, even or perhaps especially when the one providing the critique has little or nothing to say about it (exactly why someone would react like this, silently, is an important question for the writer to ponder). However, a story needs long development inside the writer and in the private space between the writer and the page before it should come out into the light.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
My sense is that support for the short story in this country runs deep and narrow and is probably stronger among writer-readers than among readers. As publishing becomes increasingly digitized it’s likely that the short story will grow in popularity. The times and the technology may well suit it. Of course, a digital future will also be a future less and less in the thrall of national boundaries. As an internationally available and valued genre, the short story around these parts may well mutate towards fictional expressions that no longer reflect even a vestigial sense of their “Australian-ness”. Let’s see what happens.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I’m all for it. Why people can be so strongly opposed to non-print forms of publication beats me. Surely it’s the writing more than the medium of the writing that matters most? From another perspective, digital developments do not, in any event, necessarily indicate the death of print. It is likely that, amongst the readerships of the future, print may come to be valued, and thus commercially viable, in ways that we are currently unable to perceive. Print might well be a big part of the digital future. Again, we’ll just have to wait and see.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Appreciate the pleasures, dangers and possibilities of reading ancient volumes of Nabokov on a windy beach….
Dr Patrick West is Senior Lecturer in Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University. His PhD from The University of Melbourne is on Julia Kristeva. Patrick’s first short-story collection, The World Swimmers, is published by the International Centre for Landscape and Language (ICLL), Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. He was an MA student and post-doctoral fellow at ECU in the late 1990s. Patrick is active in many creative and academic genres including the short story, literary journalism, film script, literary theory, television studies and poetry. The winner of many writing awards and competitions, he has been published in The Best Australian Stories twice and in many other prestigious academic and creative forums. Patrick is currently a research leader of a major funded project based on the volcanic plains of Western Victoria to do with creative responses to place and landscape. He frequently reviews books for The Australian.
Announcing! Prize-winners of 2011 Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award
Spineless Wonders is very proud to announce the following writers and their winning stories in The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award, judged by Sophie Cunningham for 2011.
Winner $500
Susan McCreery ‘The Gardener’
Runners Up $100
Claire Aman ‘Those Gauls Must Be Crazy’
SJ Finn ‘Paper Anniversary’
These three stories along with twelve others which were selected from the many entries for this competition will be published in Escape, the anthology of short stories due for release in December.
Spineless Wonders would like to thank all of the writers who entered this year’s competition. We received entries in a range of genres from writers all across Australia, as well as from Australians living abroad.
This year’s short story anthology, Escape, will reflect the quality and range of the many entrants to The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award. It will also include contributions from Ryan O’Neill, Jen Mills, Louise Swinn, Josephine Rowe, Julie Chevalier, Kim Westwood, Andy Kissane, A.S. Patric and many more.
With stories ranging from comic to tragic, romance to realist and fantasy to fabulist – this anthology is the thinking person’s escapist reading. At $24.99 it will definitely be this summer’s best short story smorgasbord.
Out for Xmas. As p-book and e-book. Check this site for launch details.
Spineless Wonders asks A.S.Patric
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Lydia Davis comes to mind first. That term, short story, sometimes gets redefined. What it means. What’s still possible. Lydia Davis cracks open words and out spills new DNA. Everything is changed. I am no longer who I was. I’m part of something more interesting, more unknown yet better understood. These are the kinds of writers I love best. Then there’s that Hemingway bravado of the sentence, Wells Tower and that elusive electric connectivity of his stories. There’s my splendid personal troika, Updike, Cheever and Paul Bowles. The humour and humanity of Keret. That Russian combination of grit & grace in writers like Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Lahiri has such a lovely kind of pathos and sense of family and place. There’s Philip O’Ceallaigh, Joe Meno, Andre Debus, that have all thrilled me again and again. There’s the tragically ignored genius of Ivo Andric. There are glorious women like Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore and Deborah Eisenberg. All of these writers and others have broken me open and tampered with my DNA.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych killed me. Which is to say, gave me the experience of death–> relentless and certain. That sense Tolstoy had of meaning coming from tragedy, and his incomparable spirit, which breathed life through words and made my entire skeleton glow like coals in a fire. The Damned Yard by Ivo Andric, How to be the Other Woman by Lorrie Moore, Some Other, Better Otto by Deborah Eisenberg, Sir Fleeting by Lauren Groff, The Overcoat, by Gogol, all force themselves into this answer. More want to come through but I’m going to skip to the next question.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Virtuosity.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I hope my writing has a balance of qualities. Readability and experimentation. Diversity and coherence. Humour and insight. Lightness and weight. Density and clarity. Sincerity and bravery. Modesty and audacity. More than anything, I hope it’s just good, solid storytelling.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Movement & Noise. Of course there’s that feeling of choosing your favourite child, but I’ve had about 60 such children and the truth is that some of them come out bright and strong, robust with a kind of life you yourself don’t own. There’s the occasional story that feels wayward, even troubled, though I can’t think of any I’d actually disown. Movement & Noise is a piece that fills me with a sense of fatherly pride every time I look at it. It’s the sense that it is as well made as your love and luck can manage.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Ideas comes from genius. That’s not something anyone can be. It’s not somewhere you can live but it’s within us all and we recognise it as something within ourselves when it’s reflected in another person. So a writer pulls a rabbit out of a hat–> one that we’ve been wearing.
I recently wrote a novella called The Action. It started as a conversation, at work, with a friend. Since we spend hours in that bookstore we’re both employed in, we’re always talking about writers. We started chatting about Kafka and I thought about that famous scene where Joseph K wakes up one morning in The Trial. I asked my colleague, wouldn’t it be cool to write a story from the perspective of one of the men that comes to arrest Joseph K. I wasn’t serious. It was almost a joke, but his face lit up, and at that point I knew I had to write it. I was surprised that it kept opening up the way it did, especially since it was set within Kafka’s geography and generation, and most of my stories are proudly Melbournian. If I think about it, I suppose the reason is that while The Action isn’t Kafkaesque at all, it was a response to the immense influence he had on me when I was in my early twenties. I spent a year or two in his company, day and night. It wasn’t always pleasant but it woke me up to a deeper sense of humanity. The Action is something that came from the genius that Franz Kafka really did seem to make all his own.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I could write books on Process. I think it’s the big question of any kind of creator’s life. Because how we get beyond our own blah-blah, our mediocrity, isn’t easy. I like that Nietzsche quote, ‘Truth is a mobile army of metaphors’. I feel like I need to keep coming up with new metaphors for every new project so I’m not just repeating the same kind of shit again and again.
For example, I used to think about traffic lights in writing. We begin with a green light but soon come to a red. While we work out the direction of the piece, familiarise ourselves with the landscape, deal with road rage, cats darting across the road, we negotiate greens, ambers and reds. I threw away all that allegorical junk and thought about how I could get to a place where it’s green lights from start to finish. I got to a point where I could write a 5000 word story in a day but then there are stories that dwell in those red lights for a year or more, and they’ve got value as well.
Recently I started thinking about stories like they are bubbles in the no-space of (un)consciousness. We can leave a story for months or years and if we’re careful, we can re-enter the space of that story and continue as though nothing has changed at all. Or if we think about something like Chekhov’s Lady With a Little Dog, I think what we love about it, is that it’s such a pristine, perfect little bubble.
And yes, people are always part of the process for me. Everyone at work is constantly getting pestered by me and my stories. What we are doing is communicating so I’m always eager to transmit. Since you become very annoying very quickly, doing that, it’s best if you can find people who actually want to tune into your station. Being attentive and respectful of any and all responses is of course vital.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
No, I don’t think it is. Whenever I encourage customers to read short stories in the bookstore, there’s the usual prejudice of ‘Oh, no, I don’t read short stories.’ All you can do is light a candle and not curse the darkness but I’m still trying to work out how to build a nuclear bomb in that respect.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Well, they say we’re seeing the end of print media. How do I feel about it? For some reason the Kubrick film pops into my mind–> Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Learn how to meditate.
(That’s a joke even though I’m totally serious. It’s the best advice I can give any writer.)
A. S. Patric writes in Melbourne and is a St Kilda bookseller. Alec is featured in Best Australian Stories 2010 and has also found publication in literary journals like Overland, Wet Ink, Quadrant, Etchings, Going Down Swinging, Page Seventeen, The Victorian Writer, The Diamond & the Thief, Blue Dog, (untitled) #2, Blue Crow, Miscellaneous Voices, Dot Dot Dash, The Lifted Brow, Blue Giraffe, Stop Drop and Roll and the Australian Poetry Centre’s publication, Dear Dad. His novella, The Rattler, was shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award and received a High Commendation. His crime story, Hemisphere Travel Guides: Las Vegas For Vegans, won the 2011 Ned Kelly/S.D. Harvey Award. Music For Broken Instruments, his first collection of poetry, was published in June 2010 by Black Rider Press. He has taught Creative Writing at RMIT and is co-editor of Verity La, an online journal that is archived by the National Library of Australia. Alec was a judge in the Essence of St Kilda Word Prize 2010.
Alec’s short fiction collection, The Rattler & other stories is published by Spineless Wonders and will be launched in Melbourne on Friday, 21st October.
Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems
Our small wonder prose poem/micro fiction competition kicked off on October 16 and so we thought it timely to reflect on the fine tradition of prose poetry in Australia. This week on The Column, Ali Jane Smith reviews The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems, Edited by Michael Byrne (Ginninderra Press, 2011).
Opening an anthology of prose poems, like opening a box of chocolates, is a moment for an intake of breath. The texts are neat and square, and there is promise of variety in the taste and texture beneath the visual uniformity. As the first anthology of Australian prose poetry, The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems is a welcome, indeed necessary, addition to Australian poetry in print.
Editor Michael Byrne has brought together a varied and accessible selection of Australian prose poetry. An emphasis on readability, especially for students, over a more scholarly approach has perhaps informed some of the editorial decisions. I enjoyed the way in which poems are arranged so that they pick up on thematic links from one poem to the next, and this rewards the reader who follows the anthology from beginning to end, but I would have appreciated biographies of each poet included in this volume. I also found it frustrating that the contents is a list of titles without poet’s names: instead, there is an index of poets at the back of the book. This decision might have been made to encourage readers to focus on the poems themselves, rather than scanning the contents page for favourite poets, but it seems an unnecessarily didactic measure.
Some of the selections in this collection of poems published from the 1970s to the present are interested in narrative, some play with narrative, and some are non-narrative. Some are engaged with language-play, others use conventional syntax. The collection might be described as a spectrum of the prose poem with, let’s say Ania Walwicz at the experimental end, and the editor himself amongst others at the narrative end. My own preference as a reader is toward the experimental, and I would have been happy to see more play and less narrative in the collection overall. Some of the poems here are from poets who write almost exclusively without line breaks, some have published books of prose poetry, while for others the prose poem is an occasional excursion. Poets who are men outnumber poets who are women almost three to one in this collection, a ratio that surprised me considering that the prose poem is a form that has proved rich ground for many women working experimentally with language.
On the evidence of this collection, and my previous encounters with the Australian prose poem, I would argue that Australian prose poetry owes its origins to interest in both French poetry of the nineteenth century, that is, those poets who are widely regarded as the founders of the form (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, amongst others), the unique Gertrude Stein, especially her Tender Buttons, and late twentieth century American poets, with a little sprinkling of the bush yarn in places.
The form allows the poet to play with standard usage and punctuation to create works that are cohesive but not necessarily coherent. Humour is also a noted feature of many prose poems, though the temptation to use the form like a joke or a fable, to deliver a punch line or a message, has not been resisted by every poet included in this collection.
There are so many poems to be enjoyed here: a lovely meditation on earthy fecundity by Miriam Wei Wei Lo in her poem Searching for Words; Rob Riel’s joyfully erotic Love, Mid Afternoon; the unmistakable world of Sam Wagan Watson; John Tranter’s Seasons sequence; the always stunning Ania Walwicz; several works from the always excellent Joanne Burns; a sequence from John Scott, who continues to operate across the boundaries of poetry and prose in recent work that has appeared in literary journals. There is a substantial selection of work from Gary Catalano and Alex Skovron, and a tantalising taste of the work of other poets, including Anna Couani and Susan Hampton. Reading this anthology will, happily, lead me back to my library and bookshop, hungry for more Australian prose poems.
About Ali Jane Smith
Ali Jane Smith’s first poetry collection, Gala was published in 2006 as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program. She has been the recipient of a Longlines Residency for Regional Writers at Varuna — the Writers House. Her work has appeared in publications such as Southerly, Cordite, and Mascara Literary Review.
For more information about the small wonder prose poem/micro fiction competition click here
Spineless Wonders asks Joanne Riccioni
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
For short stories I love Joan London, Cate Kennedy, Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anne Enright, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver and of course I can’t not mention Chekhov.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” bowled me over when I first read it. I love the way it is told in such an ordinary, innocent a way. You completely buy into the village life she has created but gradually become horrified as you begin to understand the implications of what’s being suggested. I also love the fact that this little story could have such a huge reaction at the time it was published (1948), with people cancelling their subs to The New Yorker and sending Jackson hate mail. Just goes to show how powerful the short story can be.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Good ones remain with you long after you’ve read them; like a great painting, they can create a mood in so few words; they are done before you’ve had time to get bored, and yet they never seem over.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
It’s a love-hate relationship. The first draft is like drawing blood from a stone. I wonder why the hell I do it. I avoid the desk at every opportunity and find more and more elaborate ways of not writing, until I become so angry and bored with myself I end up writing. When I finally have the bones, though, I’m in my element, re-drafting, re-drafting, re-drafting. A story is never finished – you just get sick of it (who said that?).
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
“Fond” would be a very euphemistic word to describe the way I feel about any of my stories. I just learn to dislike them less the more other people publish them.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
It might be a conversation you had with a friend five years ago, coupled with a trip you took last week. Your friend gave you the idea but the trip gave you a landscape. With me it is never just one thing but a blend of ideas. Sometimes you a have a line in a notebook that you suspect will be a story, but it is years before you know what to do with it. Warning: if you don’t write it down straight away, though, it will be gone forever. I have kicked myself many times for this mistake.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I always go it alone at first. The first words are so heinous to me I couldn’t bear anyone else to see them. After a while I might show the three girls in my writer’s group. We became friends via the group and a love of writing, not the other way round, so I really trust their opinions. They always pull me up on the things that haven’t been sitting easy with me, which is when you know you’ve got good readers. I still get very uncomfortable with my partner, friends or family reading my work even after publication. It’s like I’m schizophrenic and writing is another personality that I need to hide from them for their own good.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I think it has gained some ground in recent years, but I still don’t know about being “valued”. Ezines and online publications and competitions will help that momentum, as will the growth in writing courses focusing on short stories. There are also a lot of established names publishing short story collections at the moment, so that helps validate the form. But having worked in a bookshop I know that short story collections are much harder to sell via traditional streams than novels, even to avid readers. Short stories will always have a cult following.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
The short story form must jump on the bandwagon of the radical changes to publishing that are taking place today, as long as non-print form doesn’t mean non-paying form! I’m hoping audio book possibilities for shorts are going to grow. I personally listen to many short stories and novels as audio books and it has increased my reading tenfold. Not to mention the fact that books I might have previously struggled through, have suddenly come alive with the right narrator.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
If you want to write a novel write a novel. If you want to write short stories, write short stories. If you are serious about shorts, do them the honour of studying them in their own right by varied reading. Other than that, I find I have to remind myself every day what a good writing teacher once told me: “Don’t take it too seriously – it’s only a story!”
Jo Riccioni’s stories have been published in Best Australian Stories 2010 and The Age, as well as placing in competitions in the UK, US and Australia. In 2010 she won a place at the inaugural Scribe/Varuna Short Story Masterclass. She is currently working on a novel which will be published by Scribe.
Spineless Wonders Asks Laura E. Goodin
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Shearman, Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan, Terry Dowling, Peter M. Ball, Christopher Green, Ben Francisco, Jason Fischer, O. Henry, Ray Bradbury, Lee Battersby, Simon Brown — the list goes on and on. Mostly writers of speculative fiction.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
There are dozens I love, and that stand out. I’d really have a hard time pinning it down. Some are horrifying, some are milk-snortingly funny, some are weird enough to wrench your brain.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I love the economy of it, and the power that brings for deeper meanings. Paradoxically, because the form is so short, it forces the writer to create almost poetically: each word, each action, almost becomes emblematic for something larger and deeper. Something that can change how it resonates for each reader. It’s magic.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I try to write as straightforwardly as possible. Lush descriptions and intricate similes don’t — for me, at least — accomplish that economy that I talked about above. I strive for the spare image, the punchy, pungent dialogue that says more by saying less. Meaning and resonance only come into a story when you hint and glance, not when you shout and shove.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I have two current favorites. One, “Turcotte’s Battle,” was published in Wet Ink last year, and I love it because it’s one of the few genuinely funny things I’ve managed to write. I also love my story “Water Cools Not Love” (still seeking a home), because I set out to draw global politics, climate change, and the nature of human destiny down to the scale of one single cricket test match, and I pretty much managed to do it with a bit of style.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Well, “Turcotte’s Battle” came from watching an episode of “Iron Chef” not too long after I’d read Ben Elton’s Dead Famous, which blows the lid off reality television. I suddenly wanted to write a story that blew the lid off cooking shows. “Water Cools Not Love” came from the fact that I’d heard one too many times that you mustn’t EVER infodump in a story. The pompous rigidity in that pronouncement irritated me deeply, and I set out to write a story that would make the infodump work as a valid technique.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Hm. I get an idea, I write, I polish, SOMETIMES I send a story to friends for a crit, I let it sit, I polish it again, I research a few markets, I start sending it out. Each time it comes back, I try another market. If the rejecting editor has been kind enough to give feedback, I ponder whether they have a point, and if I decide they do, I refine the story a bit more. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I actually don’t have a strong opinion on this matter either way. Certainly in the speculative-fiction sphere, short-story markets — particularly online markets — are proliferating at a frantic rate. There are more stories accessible to more people than you could ever, EVER hope to keep up with. I guess that indicates that short stories are valued. At least by the people who write and publish them!
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Oh, yeah, bring it on. Bring it on.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Stay open to all genres and approaches. Don’t spurn unicorn stories or space-ship stories or zombie stories just because they are what they are. Give them a fair hearing and have fun with them! Whimsy is a valid artistic choice!
Laura E. Goodin’s stories have appeared in online and print publications ranging from Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine to the relaunched Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds Magazine. Her plays have been produced in Australia and the UK, and her poetry has been set for performance internationally. She is currently working on an opera adaptation of one of her stories with her composer husband Houston Dunleavy, and pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Western Australia. She, Houston, and their daughter live on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales. She spends what little time there is left over from everything else trying to be as much like Xena, Warrior Princess, as possible.
Laura blogs at lauragoodin.blogspot.com and you can read her flash fiction and poetry at dryastheremainderbiscuit.blogspot.com. Her website is www.lauragoodin.com and you can find her on Facebook at facebook.com/lauragoodin
Spineless Wonders Asks Sylvia Petter
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Roald Dahl, Alex Keegan, Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Janette Turner Hospital.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Several short stories resonate for me because they touch something perhaps buried, acting a little like smells that bypass language, and through an image, a mood, an ‘aha’ moment, go straight to work on the subconscious, and leave me thinking.
Some of these are: “Love’s Lesson” by Edna O’Brien, “Genesis and Catastrophe” by Roald Dahl, “A Bit on the Side” by William Trevor, “Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet & Watch” by Alex Keegan, and “Litany for the Homeland” by Janette Turner Hospital.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I think the main thing I like about the short-story form is that a good short story is much more than the sum of its parts. I like how it can trade on images and associations, how it can include the reader by opening itself up to interpretations.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
My writing is a bit all over the place and I tend to have a cruising speed of under 2K. I often become conscious of different levels in my stories through feedback from readers. I like to play with words and go from nonsense to serious and back. I tend to write about relationships tinged by political issues.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I’m very fond of a story I just completed for an anthology which should be launched at the International Conference on the Study of the Short Story next June. An idea had been in my head since August, but it was only a few weeks before deadline that I was able to get the story together. I sent it off to an editor for feedback – I guess I needed a confidence boost as it was my first commissioned story – and then I worked on it a little more, always fearing that I might break it. I’m pleased with it. It’s called “Anna’s Flags”.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
My ideas come from anywhere, a smell, a sound, a conversation overheard, someone I notice, something I’ve seen in the paper or on the internet. My story, “The Burka”, a finalist at Red Room and subsequently published in 100 Stories for Queensland and Offshoots 11 – Writing from Geneva, started with my seeing a young woman in a burka at my local tram stop in Vienna. There’s been a fair bit of debate about the garment in Austria and so I wondered about the woman beneath it. My protagonist is a woman in a burka, an artist who, in an old Viennese café, asks a man if she can have his old tea bag. Once that question was asked, the story came together, basically through dialogue. There was a lot of tweaking. I’m always scared of breaking my stories with too much fiddling. I let it rest for a while, then sent it off.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I usually jot things down in a hodgepodge of a notebook. Then I scribble the bones of the story in the same book – I use school exercise books because they let me muck around. When I think I may have something coming together, I type it up, revising as I go. Then I let it rest for a while, get other ideas, go back to it, until I have something reasonable. I’m always struggling with structure, so at that point I’ll send it to a trusted writer friend for a gut reaction, no more. Then I revise, revise, revise. (With my latest story, I sent my almost final version off for a (my first) paid critique by a writer/editor I met on Facebook. I’d seen that he was respected and that his editing helped finance his life as a writer, so all was good.) Then time to submit and cross my fingers until I’ve forgotten it’s out there. When rejections come in, I try and work out why. But mostly I wait and see if another market comes up and submit again somewhere else.
8.Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I don’t think the short story is really valued yet in Australia. Maybe this is because it isn’t promoted by publishers. Short story collections seem to fly better on the back of a novel. Although the form allows a story to be read in less time than a novel, good short stories make you think, some even gnaw at you, and many readers don’t seem to want that, and would rather escape into a big fat book. A lot is happening in Europe, to promote the short story and flash fiction seems to be becoming established as a new sub-genre. Developments in digital publishing, I think, will help the short story genre gain more readers.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I started writing fiction in the early nineties and have been publishing in online literary magazines since 1995. Gangway in Australia and Southern Ocean Review in New Zealand were two of the first places to take my work. My first collection of stories, The Past Present, came out as an e-book in 2001, and my latest collection, Back Burning, published by IP, Australia, is available on Kindle. I also have several stories on mobile publishing with Ether Books in the UK, and a couple are included in podcasts, one at IP and another in the US. I write to be read, and different platforms let me reach out to a variety of readers.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Accept rejections as a necessity on the road to publication. Learn from them. Write, write, write, revise, submit. Persist. Support other writers.
Sylvia Petter is an Australian writer based in Vienna, Austria. Her stories have been widely published in print and online, and in her collections, The Past Present and Back Burning. Sylvia has a PhD in Creative Writing (UNSW) and is revising a novel. She is planning another collection of stories, as well as a memoir on her mother’s life in craft. Sylvia has a website at www.sylviapetter.com and blogs at www.mercsworld.blogspot.com
Spineless Wonders Asks Lucia Nardo
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
My favourite short fiction authors include Raymond Carver, Doris Lessing and anything, short or long, by Cate Kennedy.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
One? If forced to choose, it would have to be Raymond Carver’s ‘Little things’ for its brevity, the way the sparse dialogue takes us into a feuding couple’s world and the chilling consequence at the end.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I love the challenge of the economy of words. To be able to give the reader everything they need in a contained writing space. I enjoy the process of deciding which particular thread of a story I’m going to follow.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I’m a writer of extremes – comedic or sad. In the end of the day it’s probably the same thing.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I love the process of writing so what I’m working on or have just finished always gives me a burst of energy. At the moment, my favourite is ‘Things we don’t talk about’ a story about my relationship with my late mother. It took nine years to be able to write it. The story has elicited a strong response from readers, which has been affirming.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
The seed is in my everyday experience or that of others. It can be a remark or an event that sparks a string of story questions. For example, recently someone described quirky behaviour in a relative with Alzheimer’s disease. I took that one notion, did a bit of reading on the illness and started to ask myself: What would happen if? It grew from there and is the story I’m working on currently.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I’m not a huge planner. As soon as I get the idea I start to write. It might just be opening a document and jotting a few notes. I add to it whenever something else comes to mind. I let idea marinate for whatever time it needs—days or in one case, years. A lot of subconscious material permeates my stories. I often find themes emerge that I’m not choosing deliberately. I will begin to notice things as I go about the day and realize that these can be connected with what I’m writing about. I believe ‘we see what we are looking for’ so there’s a part of me always collecting data. At some point, the last line of the story comes to me. Once that happens, I start to write in earnest, heading toward that ‘last line’ goal. The story’s direction towards it develops as I write. I don’t limit myself to a word count. I get it down then cut it back.
It takes about two months to get it to the stage where I’m reasonably happy with it. I always read it out loud, often hate it and go back to refining. I share the story with a select group of people whose opinions I value and take on their feedback. I used to think the process of refining the work was what I most disliked about writing; turns out I was wrong. When I’ve finished, I sit on it for a while then come back with fresh eyes for one more tweak. If decide to submit it, I decide where and off it goes. Inevitably, I then experience a wave of ‘It’s not good enough!’ I think that’s common to most writers.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
There seems to be a revival. I know people who like to read short stories because they are time poor and feel that a novel is all much to get through. I personally enjoy short story anthologies for the mix of writing styles.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I like the feel of the book in my hands but not everyone is the same. As long as good stories are getting out there, I’m happy.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Don’t stop. Nothing you write is ever wasted. Persist. There is talent to be nurtured and developed.
Lucia Nardo was born in Melbourne. She holds a Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing from Victoria University; a Master of Business (RMIT) and a Bachelor of Social Work (University of Melbourne). Her short stories and poetry have been published in Offset, Platform and Seed Magazines and online. She is also the author of three non-fiction titles and teaches at VU. Three of Lucia’s scripts were awarded commendations and high commendation in the 2009 FAW National Literary Awards and her stories have received commendations and high commendations in the Ada Cambridge Short Story Prize for the past four years. In 2011, her story ‘Things we don’t talk about’ was the joint winner. Lucia’s website and blog can be found at http://www.lucianardo.com or Twitter @LuciaNardo
Short Crime: Liz Filleul
1. How would you describe the state of short crime in Australia?
Right now, there are a number of National competitions eg SD Harvey, Queen of Crime, Scarlet Stiletto. Yet comparatively few crime anthologies or single-author collections of crime stories are being published. Is this your perception? What, if anything, changes would like to see?
It’s an interesting situation at the moment, having national competitions for short crime stories, but not many outlets for publishing them. Crime fiction seems to be quite unique in this way too, because you see literary anthologies and a great many science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction anthologies. The market for short sci fi/fantasy/speculative fiction seems to be particularly buoyant in Australia – Twelfth Planet Press, for example, have been publishing one single-author collection per month over the past year. The situation with crime fiction isn’t unique to Australia either – I remember Val McDermid saying her British publisher didn’t want to publish her collection of short stories because ‘short story collections don’t sell’, and she eventually had them published by an indie publisher.
I think the situation is beginning to change here, though, with more indie publishers appearing on the scene. Clan Destine Press recently published the second anthology to be culled from the Scarlet Stiletto Awards, and I believe Dark Prints Press have an international crime anthology in the pipeline, with some Aussie contributors.
But these national competitions are great for your writing career, even if there aren’t many places to publish short crime fiction! Winning the Scarlet Stiletto Award triggered a lot of opportunities for me, not least of which was getting a novel, set in the same world as my winning story (the world of vintage school story collectors), published by a small-press publisher in the UK.
2. Describe your experience of writing short crime.
Is it any different, for instance, to the other writing you do?
All my short crime stories apart from one have been written specifically for the Scarlet Stiletto Awards! This means that they all feature female protagonists. They’re also set in and around Melbourne, in places I’ve developed a strong connection with – like the Dandenong Ranges, where I live, or coastal south Gippsland. In a way, the stories I’ve written for the Stilettos reflect my gradual immersion into Aussie life – my first entry, not long after I’d migrated here, was set in wartime Amsterdam. A few years later, I was writing contemporary stories set in the Dandenongs, with characters who barrack for Hawthorn. Until I ‘felt’ Australian, I found it hard to write realistic stories set here. My latest story, ‘Crime Traveller’ featured a time traveller from 2040 going back in time to 1991. I picked 1991 because that was when I too was in Melbourne as a tourist and I needed to re-create that ‘outsider’ feel.
3. Which of the crime short stories that you have written do you most like and why?
How did the story idea came about and what was the process of writing it like?
My current favourite is ‘Crime Traveller’, which just won two prizes in the 2011 Scarlet Stiletto Awards. It was something completely different for me, combining time travel with crime. I’d been fiddling around with ideas for a time-travel novel, and when I saw there was a cross-genre prize for this year’s Stilettos, I thought I’d have a go. I started with the idea of having a true-crime writer from the 2040s going back to the past to investigate long-gone-cold cases, and from there the idea of a personal time-travelling device developed. I really enjoyed all the world-building from that point: what kind of apps would a personal time-travelling device have? What would life be like in the 2040s? It gave me a whole new angle in terms of writing a crime story, and now I’m working on a novel set in the same time-travel universe. The other great thing about the story was that while it was set in the future and in the past, it gave me an opportunity to comment on the present and our gadget-obsessed culture.
4. Who are the writers (alive or dead, Australian or otherwise) that you admire and that influence you?
My favourite crime writers are Peter Robinson and Val McDermid. I also love Connie Willis’s Oxford time-travel universe books, which I only discovered last year.
In terms of admiring, though, I have great admiration for a bunch of Melbourne writers I’m fortunate enough to have as friends, who not only work hard on their own books, but also take the time to encourage and help less experienced writers. Lindy Cameron, in particular, is a fantastic supporter of other writers, whether published or unpublished.
5. Can you think of a crime short story that really stands out for you? Talk us through why you like it.
It’s actually one from the Scarlet Stiletto: The Second Cut anthology – Cold Comfort by Sarah Evans. I was reading my contributor’s copy on the train and couldn’t stop laughing as I read it. It begins with a primary school principal taking a meal round to her ageing grandad’s house, putting it in the freezer – and finding a body in there. It all gets crazier and funnier from there, but I don’t want to say any more about the plot … spoilers! I loved it because it was funny and clever and it’s one that’ll stick in the memory for a long time.
Liz Filleul is a writer and editor from Mount Dandenong, Victoria. Her first published short stories appeared in the British teenage magazine, Patches, but since migrating from England to Australia, she has turned to a life of crime – she won the Scarlet Stiletto Award in 2004, was runner-up in 2007, and this year finished runner-up again, as well as winning the cross-genre category prize for her time-travel/crime short story, ‘Crime Traveller’. She has had two novels published by British small-press publisher Bettany Press – the first of them, murder mystery To All Appearance, Dead, is set in the same book-collecting world as her 2004 Scarlet Stiletto winner – and she has also contributed to true-crime anthologies. Her first two Scarlet Stiletto prize-winning stories can be found in the anthologies, Scarlet Stiletto: The First Cut and Scarlet Stiletto: The Second Cut.
Spineless Wonders Asks Andy Kissane
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
My favourites include Jhumpa Lahiri, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore and A.L. Kennedy. This year I read the best short story cycle I’ve ever read, Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Olive Kitteridge. It’s a portrait of the inhabitants of a small town in Maine as much as it is of the central character, Olive Kitteridge, who stars in some stories, while in others she is just talked about and in one story all that she does is wave to the jazz pianist. I loved it. As far as Australians go, I’m a big fan of John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (Penguin, 2004). I don’t know if John is still writing short stories, but I hope he is. David Malouf’s Dream Stuff is a very strong collection.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
There’s no way I can narrow it down to one. I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” in Interpreter of Maladies for the beauty of its prose, its heart-rending story of the end of a relationship and for its sophisticated use of one character’s point of view that effectively illuminates two people. James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” in the collection of the same name is probably the most powerful story I’ve ever read, but it’s also remarkable for its clever manipulation of time, Baldwin’s compassion for the story’s racist policeman and his gripping, visceral narration of violence. I love Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” for the way the story of a baker and a family’s tragedy intersect. It captures both the sense of crippling alienation that living in a city has for many people, as well as delivering a way out of it. Although Gordon Lish did improve Carver at times, he certainly butchered much that was very fine and which is now available to us again. There’s no way that “The Bath”, Lish’s truncated version, is better than the emotional punch that “A Small, Good Thing” delivers. The first short story writer I fell in love with was Peter Carey, buying a hardback copy of War Crimes from the Ivanhoe newsagency when I was twenty. I can’t forget “Exotic Pleasures” with its addictive, evil birds or “American Dreams” with its scathing critique of tourism and the surprising twist at the end. Carey remains a giant of the Australian short story.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
What’s not to like. It’s a kick to the guts, an electric shock, a pure pulse of adrenalin. So much can be done within a short story, from uproarious comedy to captivating suspense. The short story can deal with multiple narratives as Lorrie Moore does in “Real Estate”, it can present one character in rich detail as Chekhov does in “A Boring Story”, it can mime the richness of a central metaphor as Tony Birch does in “The Sea of Tranquillity”. You can read it in an evening and if the story is top notch, then re-read it and still be hooked. Then there’s the strangeness that runs right through the form, from Herman Melville’s “Bartelby” to T.C. Boyle’s “Tooth and Claw”. I’m not sure why I love stories so much, it’s just something that’s happened gradually over the years as I’ve continued to read and write. One of the advantages of a short story is the way you can hold it all in your mind, which is not something I can do with most novels.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Initially I wanted to write poetic prose like Michael Ondaatje and Toni Morrison and there are elements of that impulse in Under the Same Sun and in some of my early stories. But gradually I became much more impressed by writers who aren’t obviously show ponies, writers like Colm Tóibín, Pat Barker and J.M. Coetzee who write beautiful unadorned rhythmical prose that tells a story and sings in a quieter, less obvious manner. That’s what I now aspire for, but whether I achieve it or not is really for a reader to say. The other shift for me was from writing historically researched novels to a book of short stories that is largely contemporary, except for one story that cuts between a nineteenth century frontier Queensland narrative and a contemporary university setting.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Probably “Old Friends” which was first published in The Sleepers Almanac No 4 http://sleeperspublishing.com/and will be in The Swarm (forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann around July 2012). A friend of mine calls it the barbeque story, because the central character decides that in response to the dreaded question people ask, ‘So what do you do?’ he will just respond, ‘I barbeque, I’m a barbeque man.’ It’s partly about male identity, but it’s also about unrequited love, death and catching up with friends years later, when life hasn’t quite worked out as you thought it might when you were twenty. I tried to capture that sense of living in a contemporary world, when nothing much is resolved, when the protagonist is struggling rather than being hugely successful and just making the best fist of it he can. It’s a hopeful story, but the hope comes from the struggle, from just living.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Probably different for every story. “Old Friends” came from the time I worked with actors producing audio books at Royal Blind Society and is partly inspired by hearing about their lives, but much of it is made up. I wrote “In my Arms” after hearing about people who lost their daughter in a swimming pool accident, but I never met them. Sometimes my stories are inspired by stories written by other writers, Jhumpa Lahiri for example. “The Fibbing Bird” came partly from the time I spent chopping and carting wood from two fallen trees in what was a jungle below our house, but the rest of it I made up. The first line of “Vanilla Malted”, ‘It’s the happiest day of my life when Tony brings this girl home’ I heard someone say at a wedding reception and that was enough to kick-start the story. Recently I’ve been playing around in poetry with bringing authors and fictional characters back to life, such as Raskolnikov, Captain Ahab and John Keats, and “The Elusive Tenant”* is driven by a similar impulse. It’s a surreal exploration of what might happen if you put Marc Chagall in St. Peters, Sydney, rather than St. Petersburg, in the late twentieth century. Chagall’s paintings were a central inspiration for that story.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Writing is a very solitary activity and you have to go it alone initially. But I’ve recently become very motivated when I showed work to people and I’ve decided to try to do that more often. After umpteen drafts you lose the capacity to experience the thing as a reader does, for the first time. Apart from that, my process involves starting somewhere and hoping that the thing will work and that I’ll end up with a story that hangs together. Trusting my instincts and my intelligence and just working at the thing. I used to have a lot of trouble finishing stories, but I’m slowly getting better at endings. I’m a big believer in the Alistair MacLeod method of putting the thing away for 6 months and then having another go at it. When it feels as if another person wrote the thing, then you’re in a good position to work on it and see it as a reader might. And MacLeod is another giant of the short story, so he must have been doing something right. Is there a better ending in contemporary fiction than the beautiful last paragraph of “The Boat?”
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I’d like to see more value given to the substantial, twenty page story. What is it with 3000 words? Why limit Australian short fiction to these abbreviated disappointments? The Americans provide places for writers to publish longer short stories and the results are there for all to see. The yearly Best American collections are almost always stronger than the Best Australian collections. This is partly due to population, but it’s also because more can be done in a longer short story and if done well, then they’re more satisfying to read. There’s more space for the writer to develop a story with emotional heft and more scope for a reader to become fully engaged with the story’s concerns. The length of a story should not be a major factor in whether it gets published and read; often stories need to be longer than a postcard to work effectively. In Henry James’s day, when writers made a living from short fiction, the average story length was 8,000 words. It would be good to move back in that direction. I realise there are sometimes constraints because of space, but thankfully even that seems to be changing with Australian Book Review’s Elizabeth Jolley competition now taking stories up to 5,000 words. Be great to see Spineless Wonders embrace the longer short story.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Audio is great, I used to produce audio books so I’m a big fan of them. If people want to read from a screen then that’s fine by me, but I like to hold a book in my hands and smell the paper.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Cultivate rich patrons and friends who can cook. Dream big. Just do it. I doubt that you really need any advice. Good luck! 
Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes fiction and poetry. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. A book of short stories The Swarm will be published by Puncher & Wattmann in mid 2012. He has published three books of poetry, Facing the Moon, Every Night They Dance and Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities and runs writing workshops for schools and the community. He coaches basketball, barracks for the Brisbane Lions, and is busy regenerating a bush garden. http://andykissane.com
*Andy’s story, The Elusive Tenant, appears in Escape, the latest release from Spineless Wonders. Available for $24.99 from our website or ask your local bookstore for a copy.
Spineless Wonders Asks Susan McCreery
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Amy Hempel, Miranda July, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Peters, Wells Tower, Etgar Keret, Karen Hitchcock.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Tricky, since I have a few faves. So I’ll cheat and narrow it down to two: ‘Feathers’ by Raymond Carver and ‘Something That Needs Nothing’ by Miranda July. With ‘Feathers’ I was out-loud laughing at the teeth on top of the TV and the ugly baby. He’s a master at making the ordinary into a page-turner. ‘Something That Needs Nothing’– well, Miranda July just breaks your heart. Funny, too. Can I mention another one? ‘Day of the Butterfly’ by Alice Munro.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
The craft of small things. Honing language. The fact that it’s so hard to get right, keeps you trying.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I know how I’d like to be writing – like Amy Hempel, Miranda July, Raymond Carver… I’ve had more attempts at answering this question than any other. I guess my style is still evolving. I firmly believe you have to find your own truths, whether they’re hip or not. Otherwise it’s pointless. I’m also trying to make my stories denser, less thin. Becoming more confident with complexities. I’ve written plenty of domestic, relationship/children stories, and I’d like to try to extend myself into a wider landscape. But then again, if that’s my truth…
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I’ve always been fond of a story I wrote when I was about 19 (sooo long ago). It’s a delicate little 800-worder, about a lonely girl and a cleaning woman. I don’t think I can ever do that again. No point in looking back, though.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I’m learning to trust my subconscious. I’ve wasted too many years thinking ‘if I don’t have the most brilliant idea it’s not worth starting’. Wrong. You only have to start for the ideas to come. And you’ll never improve if you don’t start. I’ve actually found that planning kills it for me. One method that can unearth surprises is to write to the sound of a loudly ticking timer – no stopping till the bell rings. This seems to quell distractions and editor-think. I handwrite first and only transfer to computer after I’ve scrawled enough pages to look like a story. Some of the stories I’m happiest with have started with a simple freewrite, to limber up. It’s almost as though I uncover the story as I write. Sometimes, when I’m flagging, I’ll break off and read someone I admire to reinvigorate me. I go through all the usual procrastinating rituals before starting, it’s awful! Yet I’m dispirited if I have nothing on the go.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Until a couple of years ago, I’ve always gone it alone. But these days only the early and final drafts are done alone. The middle stage is presented to my lovely writing group. These five women are brilliant at brainstorming through dilemmas, pointing out ‘I don’t get it’ moments, telling me I have too many characters, and so on. I adore a good critique. I come home and know what I have to do. This is the fun part. I’m finally inhabiting the story. It’s such a relief after the struggle to get something workable down. And the longer I let it lie after the first of ‘final’ drafts, the better chance it has of being any good.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I value it! You value it! Hooray for us. I wouldn’t call it undervalued, it just doesn’t attract as much attention. Like most small, good things (thanks Raymond), apart from diamonds.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Great! Spread the word. Let everyone grab a tasty bite in whatever medium suits. I do love a fine, handheld volume of stories, though.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Keep it up. Please.
Susan McCreery’s stories have been published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2010, Island, Islet, Page Seventeen and Sleepers Almanac 7. She has been shortlisted for The Age and Hal Porter short story competitions and won first prize in the 2009 Julie Lewis Literary Competition. She is also a widely published poet (Best Australian Poems 2009, Hecate, Poetrix, Blue Dog, Five Bells, Going Down Swinging, among others) and her first poetry collection, Waiting for the Southerly, will be out in 2012 (Ginninderra Press).
Susan McCreery’s ‘The Gardener’ was the inaugural winner of the Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award 2011 and is published in Escape.
Spineless Wonders asks Mark Vender
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Most of the short fiction I’ve read has been in getting to know the writers’ marketplace, so more than authors, I take note of journals and ezines. Places where I’ve enjoyed the stories include Overland and Meanjin (in Australia), as well as Small Spiral Notebook, Failbetter, The Summerset Review, The Barcelona Review and Narrative (on the internet). Having said that, the short fiction of Julio Cortázar and Annie Proulx blows me away.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Sylvia Plath’s Ocean 1212-W. It’s the way she toed the line between poetry and prose. So rich. Also the way she captured the essence of the sea. And it’s got a bit about listening to the poetry of Matthew Arnold as a child, which sums up what good writing can do:
“I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.”
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I like its punch, and the opportunity it affords for unusual settings and tones. Sometimes a distinctive voice which would become unbearable over an entire novel is very effective and memorable for a few pages. And for the reader and writer, it’s a relatively quick hit in terms of gratification.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
It’s an outlet for things I love or that really bug me, so I guess it reflects real-life issues. I try to depict life as honestly as possible, quite often “sweating the small stuff”.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I have one set in a nightclub called “Rules of the Dancefloor”. I’m fond of it because it needs the love! It’s been rejected a couple of times, and I think it deserves a home.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Usually the idea occurs to me and I just get a feeling that it is the right size and shape for a short story – that it fits the form. But the inspiration comes in lots of different ways. For my story “Cross words”, it was an aggressive email that we received at work. It’s very frustrating when someone throws a whole lot of negative energy at you, and you can’t respond. Instead, I used the email (with details changed, of course) as a jumping off point, fantasising about what it would be like to write back. The story emerged from there.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I write a couple of drafts, so that it isn’t embarrassingly raw, then workshop it. If I can do that face to face with a group, great. If not, I call on critique partners via email. After incorporating the comments, I let it sit for a while (a month or so) and come back to it with fresh eyes. If it’s ready at that point I’ll start trying to find a home for it, if not I’ll take it back for more critique.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I don’t see it in terms of “valued” or “not valued” – the form is simply better suited to some things than others. And a lot of people are in the habit of picking up a novel or a non-fiction book rather than an anthology of short stories or a literary journal. Maybe it’s a case of fostering new reading habits – the short story form seems perfectly suited to commuters with e-readers, for example.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I think it’s great. Whatever way the stories reach people is fine by me.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Just keep swimming, just keep swimming… It’s a huge thing for emerging authors to get a short story published and reach an audience. It’s also great for them to have the experience of working with editors. And it’s an exciting time for publishing with the digital revolution – there could be some great opportunities for the short story form. So keep at it!
Mark Vender is a freelance writer, sub-editor and translator. His short stories have appeared in various ezines including The Summerset Review, Word Riot, Eclectica and Slow Trains. He is currently living in Colombia and working on a novel.
*Mark’s story, Cross Words, is published in Escape, Spineless Wonders’ anthology of short stories.
Escape an anthology of short Australian stories
“Quality short fiction. Packed with surprises. Prepare to be transported.” Marion Halligan
Escapist reading is usually light and inconsequential – ideal for those times when your body is relaxing on the beach, lounging in bed with a breakfast tray or slumping its way to work on public transport. The twenty-eight stories collected here, in Escape, Spineless Wonders’ first anthology, offer escapist reading which will excite as a well as entertain.
To escape into reading is to leave the mundane and to take an imaginative leap. These tales take you anywhere from the outback to outer space. Diverse in theme and form, they will tickle your fancy and open your eyes?to world events and to your own backyard.
Escapist literature is traditionally the domain of well-loved genres. In Escape, we aim to disturb expectations and to delight. Turn the page and here is experimentation, here fantasy. Here’s crime, existentialism and romance. Now an escape artist, now an escapee. Our tastes are catholic, with quality of writing the overriding criteria.
Enjoy reading Escape. And to learn more about the authors and join the conversation about their stories, go to the Escape Facebook page.
This collection features stories by the following invited contributors: Julie Chevalier, Jane Connors, Michael Giacometti, Linda Godfrey, Andy Kissane, Jennifer Mills, Ryan O’Neill, A.S. Patric, Caroline Reid, Josephine Rowe, Jon Steiner, Louise Swinn and Kim Westwood.
The winning entries from The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award 2011 chosen by Sophie Cunningham are published in this anthology. Winner, Susan McCreery and runners up, SJ Finn and Claire Aman.
Also included are stories from The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award longlist by Sue Booker, Allison Browning, Michelle Cahill, Meredyth Cilento, Sam Cooney, Kate Geyer, Irma Gold, Tiggy Johnson, Yin Lin, Duncan Reid, Jenny Sinclair, Doreen Sullivan and Mark Vender.
RRP $24.99
Ask for a copy at your local bookstore or buy it now from this website. Free delivery.
Spineless Wonders asks Amanda Curtin
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
I admire Cate Kennedy immensely — Dark Roots feels like perfection to me. I (like so many people) was also hugely impressed with Nam Le’s The Boat, and other Australian collections I’ve loved include Josephine Rowe’s stories-in-miniature, When a Moth Becomes a Boat; the early collections of Gail Jones (Fetish Lives and The House of Breathing) and Joan London (Sister Ships), and recent collections by Susan Midalia (The History of the Beanbag) and Richard Rossiter (Arrhythmia). And I’ve just finished Janette Turner Hospital’s Forecast: Turbulence — wonderful!
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Only one? Oh, that’s tough! I might have to go with an Australian classic: Marjorie Bernard’s ‘The Persimmon Tree’, for its hauntingly beautiful final image of the naked woman glimpsed through the window — the simultaneous elusiveness and knowledge it seems to convey. Or (see my cunning plan to slip in another favourite?) there’s Julio Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’; from the very first paragraph, when narrator comes to the stunning realisation that he has become the creature he has been studying, this taps into visceral fears of being buried alive — an existential horror story!
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I love the tension between compression and expansion. You work with fragments, with glimpses and moments, and if you get it right, something whole will emerge from them — something that feels true — not the truth but a truth. I think of Walter Benjamin’s observation that ‘knowledge comes only in flashes’. This feels like the short story’s territory: that moment of seeing, of revelation. And I love the idea that we enter a story’s moment (whether that is the space of an hour or a day, or years such as in Annie Proulx’s long/short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’) and then leave it — and its world and its people continue in both directions, just as life does; the story has just cracked a window open for us to see a moment of change.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I think other people are far better at doing that. I can tell you some of the reasons I write, though. I write to work out what people think, what I think; to imagine why people do the things they do, to imagine what I would do; to try on other shoes, other skins; to puzzle over why things are the way they are; sometimes just to glory in the way they are. I don’t expect to find, or offer, answers or wisdom but hope for an insight or two along the way.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I think perhaps it’s the first story in Inherited, ‘Dance Memory’. The young widow, Jo, her little son Nicky, the ageing wheelchair-bound dancer Mignette, the family of ducks—they’re still very much alive for me. This story is one of several I’ve written about the ‘things’ of a life, the possessions we accumulate, our ‘stuff’, and, as the most recent of them, maybe it comes closest to saying what I’m trying to say.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Anywhere. Everywhere. ‘Gratitude’, for example, came from my puzzling over the proliferation of roadside crosses marking the site of fatal accidents — wondering whether they give comfort to those left behind, whether they claim something sacred about the site of death. And then I happened to notice a succession of photos in newspapers — grief-stricken parents, husbands, wives, all holding up to the camera photographs of their lost ones. These faces seemed to bear the same expression of despair and outrage. And so ‘Gratitude’ came from an observation, a few photographs in a newspaper — an attempt to make sense of what I was seeing, and to think about grief and what it is that helps people to carry on after tragedy, or prevents them from doing that.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
It’s a long, long process usually. I often think about an idea for a long time (sometimes years), just jotting down notes, before I actually begin writing, and then the drafting and redrafting can take many months. I have a few trusted writing friends with whom I exchange work for feedback, and I couldn’t do without their honesty and thoughtful responses.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I think it is cherished by many people. Unfortunately, this affection doesn’t always extend to a wide readership (or translate into sales). But things could change. Short fiction is perfect when you have limited reading time, and offers the immense satisfaction that comes from being able to read something in its entirety in one sitting. And there have been quite a few collections published recently. Maybe we’re on the cusp of a renaissance of the genre? I would love to think so.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I’ve worked in publishing (as a book editor) for more than twenty years, and I watch with great interest today’s changing publishing landscape. I confess to having an abiding fondness for ink and paper, but I feel privileged to have my work published in any medium. It’s great that readers can access stories in whatever way they prefer to read or listen.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Well, my advice to writers is always to read — but I don’t think I need to tell you that! 
Amanda Curtin is a novelist and an award-winning writer of short fiction. Her collection, Inherited (2011), and her first novel, The Sinkings (2008), both published by UWA Publishing, have met with critical acclaim. Amanda lives with her husband and her cat in an old house in an old suburb of Perth, and is currently completing her second novel.
For more on Inherited see: http://uwap.uwa.edu.au/books-and-authors/book/inherited/
Watch the book trailer for Inherited at:
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Spineless Wonders Asks Yin Lin
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
I’ll confess straight up and say that I actually don’t read a huge amount of short stories. Most of the short fiction I’ve read is from high school. I like Cilla McQueen, Apirana Taylor, Katherine Mansfield… Hm, my English teachers will probably notice a trend – they’re authors of the short stories we’ve been studying!
I also admire some writers who aren’t published yet. Peers at school, people on the Internet, sometimes their stories are so charged with emotion, or so authentic, or they present the story in such a creative way. These people I admire, and are wary of – they’re the next generation of short fiction authors, but they’re also my competitors.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I am so bad at answering these types of questions, maybe because I never have a ‘most’ memorable/favourite story. They’re all so good in different ways! The title that comes to focus out of the dozens brimming in my mind is The Lottery. Like many good short stories out there, I like how the author blatantly laid out the story, not distorting the camera lenses for the reader, not even till the last moment. I love how we go in without prejudice and the author trusts that we’re intelligent enough to make up our own conclusions.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I like reading good short stories because I find it interesting how exhaustive it is, just how intensely the writer is making the reader work. It’s almost like doing interval training in sports: I can’t read too many short stories at one time – I get burnt out! Now from the writing perspective…I used to favour the novel form more than short story but now I’m a uni student, that’s changed. An average day for me now is pretty packed. After taking out a must-have 6~8 hours of sleep, I’m left with being a full time medical student’s lectures and study and all. Plus 1~3 hours of sport. A-and, since I still want to steal time to gull my writer-self that I still care about her, short stories and poems become simply more practical. Writing short stories is also great practice. Sometimes I tell myself, okay, in this 3000 words focus on character, or a kind of style, or an emotion. Like doing drills, it helps fine-tone skills and really concentrate on the tooth-floss thin line of control over each element that makes up a good story.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Well, since I’ve only just started writing seriously last year (as in entering competitions), my writing style still very naïve and evolving. I’d like to think that my writing style changes to suit the theme or the writing form I’m interacting with. But to describe my writing in general…I try to take something from everyday life, something mundane, and show how special it. I’d hope that my writing is simple by nature, but talking about complex issues. You’ll have to tell me if that’s a valid description or not.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Oh, this is a hard question – I actually had to go to my folder of short stories and look through it to jog my memory. I think I’m particularly fond of Home just coz it’s won me some cash and that it’s going to be published. Home is also the short story that actually made me ‘click’ with the short story form. Um, after looking through my folder again, and, as bad as it sounds, there isn’t actually another ‘story’ that I’m fond of at the moment. There is, however, a poem that kind of brings a wry smile to my face when I think of it. It was the first (and I have a sinking suspicious feeling, also the last) poem that I will/have written this semester. I remember feeling fed up with not having enough time writing stories and wanting to write a poem because I ‘thought’ it would take less time instead. In the end it took me an hour to squeeze out the 363 words (so much for less time) and I can still recall myself being ridiculously drained but just so pleased.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Ideas. Anything and everything I suppose. Maybe a word, an action, or an event that provoked a reaction out of me – writing’s all about making the reader feel so if it made the writer feel, it must be worth it. Maybe a snippet of conversation that I overheard in the library. Or maybe I’ll steal a sentence from a favourite book.
I’ll take No More Nagging for my example. There was a girl two years below me in my high school that passed away very suddenly. In my school, everyone knew of everyone and so we were all affected. I felt compelled to do something. I only knew her by face and to put it simply, I didn’t think I would do justice if I wrote of her. But I knew I could simulate an event as close as what had happened. I knew of the girl through mutual friends – the reader hears of the character through the narrative; I saw the girl around campus – the reader sees the character in the narrative’s mind. As the story progresses, the reader becomes attached to this character even though they have never met her first hand…now, that’s enough of that story otherwise I’m going to spoil it for people.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Like I said, I’m really busy so whereas I used to be able to just sit down and pour everything out in one go, then leave it for a few days and edit and edit and edit. Now after inspiration strikes, the first draft is written over a longer time period. The bones are frantically typed out before lectures when waiting for the lecturer to come in, or when waiting for friends to arrive at dinner. That creates a very rough idea of the story. Then again, I try to grab snippets of time to flesh the story out till there’s an extremely rough first draft. I have to determine at this stage whether or not to continue filling out the story five sentences by five sentences or actually allocate a time to sit down and pound away at the keyboard without mercy. So this is when I shoot it over to my awesome editor/friend Sophie Constable to see if she gives me the green light. If boss gives the all clear, I start on the details. The story will go through quite a few drafts, and be sent back and forth between us two and critiqued over and over again. When it seems presentable, it’ll be promoted from ghosting around on my desktop to a position in the short story folder. And it’ll live there till a suitable competition catches my eye, and then probably undergo more surgery. Ahem, I meant, changes.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I get this feeling that the short story form is valued more by writers than by readers. People seem to know a lot more novels than short stories. I suppose for writers, the short story form provides a platform for writers to present their skills and also to enter (lots of) competitions.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I don’t think it’s much of a problem. It’s a great way to gain access to a greater audience and it’s impossible to resist change that’s washing over us like a tsunami tide. Personally, the traditional paper is still my highest goal and my most prized way of publication but I still see the different medium meaning reaching a different target audience. For example, audio and digital are often free so that would reach a wider range of people who read more for fun; hardcopy would reach readers who are more demanding because they’ve spent money to buy the piece and expect a degree of quality in the literature. There are pros and cons for each medium.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Great job in promoting the art of the short story, and thank you for creating opportunities for budding writers like myself to have a chance in the big wide world of publishing.
Yin Lin has being shortlisted by the Sunday Star Times awards, awarded a mentorship from the NZ Society of Authors, and been commended in the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition before moving to Australia. She’s been published online for the Auslit Review competition, and in the hard copy anthologies Across the Fingerboards , The World’s Steepest Street, Escape and The Temptation of Sunlight. She is now studying medicine and is self-diagnosed with literature deficiency.
Spineless Wonders Asks Kate Geyer
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Miranda July, ZZ Packer, Alice Munro and Josephine Rowe.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I read Helen Garner’s collection of short stories ‘My Hard Heart’ about ten years ago and I realised what it meant to be a woman and a writer and daughter. Recently I read her piece ‘While Not Writing a Book: Diaries’ in the Monthly and had a similar feeling of clarity and elation.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I like precision and truth and tidiness and cleverness. In short stories these things matter.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Sporadic. Gratifying. Containing liberal amounts of yearning/animal references.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Fluffy Animals – because I actually used a good, smart mentor to help edit the story and it paid off.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Walking, I’m always walking when a little spark of a thought reaches out and joins another little spark and then if I keep tumbling the two sparks together they become words, and then a story. With Fluffy Animals I realised that a number of my recent experiences revolved around yearning for a companion – whether that be animal or human, and I was also thinking about how in the transition from child to adult you merely swap toy animals and babies for the real thing. Most of my ideas do come from my own life; I’m compulsively grouping related things together when I write a story. These little things are related to each other and these other things belong here instead. It’s a literary compulsion.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Every piece of writing is different, but usually I’m slow and wait for an idea to hit me over the head before I commit to it. Deadlines and competitions work well as a motivating force. Sometimes too, I’ll illustrate the story – like a cartoon, or draw pictograms or a graph if I’m not quite sure what’s most important or how to express something elusive. Usually I need a good first sentence before I can move on to write the rest; sometimes everything hinges on that first sentence. I feel it has to adequately summarise the whole mood of the piece. Once the story is semi-coherent I’m happy for a handful of respected readers and writers to read my work and I appreciate when they write comments and make little ticks on it using an HB pencil.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I think it is undervalued by most but a devoted few. And those devoted few are really very devoted. I would love to see more short fiction in mainstream magazines and even weekend newspaper supplements. But the people who seek it out and make room in their budgets and bookshelves are reason enough for me to keep writing.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Great! I love the interwebs and the radio, and think all stories should be read aloud to someone you love for maximum enjoyment.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Keep your short fiction collection in a custom made bookshelf by the toilet; it’s a fact that good stories ease bad bowels!
Kate Geyer is a reader, writer and an illustrator who flits between Melbourne and Brisbane like a migratory bird. She has been published in Voiceworks, Tango and Spook magazine. Infrequently Kate writes at: thehickamorekid.blogspot.com and publishes zines via stickyinstitute.com Her short story, Fluffy Animals appears in Escape, an anthology of short stories published by Spineless Wonders.
Spineless Wonders Asks Jon Steiner
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Well, David Foster Wallace, for one, obviously. Here are some others: ZZ Packer, Robert Drewe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Grace Paley, Sam Shepard, Richard Yates. But also, I often read a story somewhere that totally blows me away—in the New Yorker, or an anthology or something—and I resolve to remember the name of the author and track down more of his or her work, but then I forget. But I admire them too.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
It’s hard to pick just one, but “Why Don’t You Dance” by Raymond Carver had a profound effect on me when I first read it, and is probably largely responsible for my lifelong interest in short fiction. I thought, “I didn’t realise you could do this! I want to do it too!” It’s a great example of the short story form at its best. It hooks you in right away: “In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.” The writing is tight and spare, mostly single lines of back-and-forth dialogue, but there’s so much going on—the man’s unusual reaction to the end of his marriage, the dynamics between him and the young couple, the way the young couple relate to each other. It’s the kind of story you think about a lot afterwards, you go back and read it again and again, savouring the words on the page, mulling over the layers. And it has a quintessential Raymond Carver ending, with the point of view shifting suddenly from the older man to the young woman trying to tell the story to her friends afterwards: “There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.” What an ending! Goddamn. It’s a good fucking story.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It’s so flexible. What makes a short story, really? A block of prose under, say, 9000 words? Beyond that, you can be as experimental as you want. I also love the economy of short stories; every sentence has a reason to be there. When a short story is good, when it really works, it affects you just as much as a good novel, but it’s in a highly concentrated form. It’s like freebasing literature.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I tend to write pretty short stories, usually based around some quirky premise or character. I usually like to use dialogue and action more than exposition, so people sometimes tell me my stories read like short films. I don’t know about you, but I hear the story in my head when I read, and good writing is a pleasure to “listen” to. So I try to pay attention to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences. When I’m revising my work, I read it over and over, listening for places where it doesn’t flow quite right and fiddling around with the text until it does.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I wrote a story about a rich guy who has a skyscraper built in the middle of the desert just because he’s interested in seeing what it would look like. I’m rather fond of it, though I’m not quite sure why. I think it has some deeper meaning, but I’m not quite sure what.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
They come from all sorts of places. Sometimes mid-conversation with someone I’ll think, Hey that could be a good story! Often they come at rather inconvenient times, like when I’m in bed almost asleep, or driving, or in a meeting at work, or in the shower. But I’ve learned the hard way that no matter how much I think I will remember a good idea later on, all I will remember is that I had the idea, not what it was, so I always try to write ideas down somewhere. I have various notebooks and scraps of paper and Word documents scattered around with random bits: plot ideas, characters, sentences, sometimes just a word I liked at the time. When I feel like doing some writing, I leaf through the notes and look for something that interests me.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I am not at all disciplined about writing. I write very sporadically. I always feel like I need to be in just the right state of mind, and then I usually just spend an hour rewriting the first sentence over and over. I know that a writer should really write every day, even if it’s total crap, just for the sake of putting words on the page, to develop the habit so that when a good idea comes along, they’ll have the chops to take it somewhere. But even though I know that, and constantly resolve to do it, I don’t do it. I had a writing teacher who said that every semester she saw two or three people in her class who had real talent, but only every few years did she see someone who had the other, more rare quality that makes a writer: the strength of character to sit down every day and do the work, to forego social events and television and Facebook and just put in the hours at the keyboard. Unfortunately, I am not known for self-discipline. But on the rare occasions when I do write something half-decent, it’s usually in one hit—I get in the zone and the story just tumbles out. I then read it over for a few days, fiddling around with the words a bit. I bring it along to a meeting of The Beak, my writing group, I get a writer friend to look it over, I get my wife to read it, and get feedback from them all, which I incorporate into the story if it seems like a good idea. Next I move the Word file to a folder on my computer called “Finished.” Every now and then I look through the stories in the “Finished” folder and think, well, yeah, I guess some of these are all right. Once in a while I submit something.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Last year I went to a talk at a conference where this e-publishing guru from California said he saw a great business opportunity for something like iTunes selling short stories for e-readers. He predicted that the digital age would bring about the renaissance of the short story, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think short stories have a lot of competition for people’s shorter attention timeslots nowadays: television, YouTube, Facebook, Angry Birds. For the longer attention timeslots, novels only have to compete with television series and maybe those role playing video games. But there is definitely still a niche of people who enjoy reading short fiction, probably populated mostly by people who are also interested in writing it, and that niche in Australia is just as robust as anywhere else. We have a very respectable number of literary journals and Graduate Writing programs per capita.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I know digital is the future and I don’t want to be an old fuddy-duddy, but there’s still something kind of cheap and soulless about it. Reading stuff online or on a Kindle just isn’t the same experience as reading a book or magazine, and never will be. Now, audio is interesting because there you’re venturing into the territory of performance—the art of reading a story well. It would be interesting to hear something I’d written as an audio item. But I will still always hold print in the highest regard. There’s a certain honour that derives from somebody deciding your work is good enough to be printed.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Keep forging ahead. Build a short fiction empire!
A native of Washington, D.C., Jon Steiner moved to Australia in 2000. He studied writing at the University of Technology, Sydney and has been published in the UTS Writers’ Anthology. In 2010, his short story, The Robber, was published by Parsnip Press and can be purchased from parsnippress@bettinakaiser.com
Spineless Wonders asks Michelle Cahill
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
I admire Cate Kennedy’s short stories, Maria Takolander’s psychological fragility, Nam Lee’s compelling realism and the fantasy in Tom Cho’s writing. I also like Roberto Bolaño, Sushma Joshi, Aravind Adiga, Jhumpa Lahiri. And of course I’ve loved reading Chekov, Borges, Hemingway, JD Salinger, and the autobiographical trauma in Raymond Carver’s restrained poetic shorts.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
One of my favourite stories is JD Salinger’s “For Esmé with Love and Squalor”, which tells of an American intelligence officer’s meeting with an English schoolgirl, opening to the themes of foreignness, love, war, youth, innocence and experience. An intimate cameo forms within a larger framework of human tragedy so that poignant emotions are delicately expressed through dialogue as the characters emerge. The perspective of the narrator changes half way through the story; the point of view subtle, since in telling about his encounter with the girl and the letter she sends him, the narrator is also telling us about himself.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
It’s a beautiful genre. I enjoy drafting sketches into detail, expanding the language, colouring in and segueing together its parts. The short story requires really careful attention. Unlike the novel it may be read in one go, so inconsistencies of tone or style become apparent. It’s not as indulged as poetry, which isn’t to say that it can’t be experimental, abstract or edgy. A poem might be easier to complete than a story, though I think a good poem is as challenging to write. Readers have expectations of a short story that a writer may provoke to some extent, but never entirely neglect. The poem might be dismissive or aloof, whereas the short story needs to engage the reader.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I guess my writing reflects a sense of fragmentation caused by the movement between countries and cultures. I’m interested in reinscriptions, also in magic realism, which can playfully disrupt logic and power. Writing from, or reinventing personas can be homage. It permits me to express irreverence for traditions and history. Intertextuality is a way to share one story with many stories, to revisit the past and question its authority.
There’s an emphasis on language in my writing, but the pleasures of language are not purely aesthetic for me, not just about style. I’m interested in perception, place, nuance and how dream moves forwards and backwards in time. Language is so many things: refuge, asylum, curiosity, home, power, and exhaustion.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
My favorite story is “Chasing Nabokov” It took me an embarrassingly long time to write but I’m glad for the immediacy and intensity of the voice. I like that it writes back to Nabokov with homage and audacity and a female voice.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I’m inspired to write by place, scene, mood, and experience. From the words I’m drawn into themes, characters and specifics. This involves lots of redrafts before the story emerges, so I can’t be in a rush. I like that fiction is so painstaking. Sometimes travel might intersect with writing a story, though the two are mostly accidental encounters. An example of this is “Duende.” I’d read about Lorca’s theory of death and art. I’d travelled to Seville myself, for another project. The brutality of the bullfight was confronting to me. Still I was intrigued by the risk and ritual, which goes back to ancient times. Slowly, the story took shape: it’s about betrayal, love and exile.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
The process is a lingering one. It begins with slowing down into words, ideas and is followed by lots of drafts. But this is also the part which I find relaxing because I enter into another world, intense and vivid. I become responsible for its symmetry and connections. I start to be fond of the characters. It can certainly be frustrating when it doesn’t all cohere and mostly my drafts start out like this. But you give them the patience and craft they deserve. I have one or two close friends, with whom I share my writing. A brief comment or hint might be a guide in the right direction. Mentorships are wonderful and so are writing retreats where you have the space to slow down into your rhythm.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
The realities of how difficult it is to publish a collection of short stories suggests that the form is not really valued in this country or, for that matter, abroad. Fiction is a tough genre in which to be published, it seems. But I think it’s true that amongst writers, the genre is appreciated, particularly as it appears in literary journals.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I’m sad about book shops closing. Digital forms of publishing are changing the status and role of books altogether. We’re witnessing a dramatic evolution of technology impacting on the way we read and write. Text, particularly in commercial forms, is becoming more accessible, virtual, abbreviated, networked. The potential readership from digital publishing far exceeds the potential from print. Still, I’m surprised by how many books sell by word of mouth, and I think small scale print publishers can be successful in expanding their readerships through their own networks and communities.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Keep talking to writers like this; and keep publishing excellent Australian short fiction!
Michelle Cahill’s fiction has appeared in Southerly, TEXT, Transnational Literature, Prosopisia, Famous Reporter, Escape and forthcoming in Antipodes, Alien Shores and Etchings. She received an Australia Council grant in fiction to undertake a residency at Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi. Other fiction residencies have been at Varuna, the Writers Centre and the BreadLoaf Writers’ Conference. Her collections of poetry are The Accidental Cage, Vishvarupa and Night Birds. She received the Val Vallis Award and was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize.
Spineless Wonders asks Sam Cooney
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Ryan O’Neill, Eva Hornung, Peter Carey, Jessica Au, A.G. McNeil, Amanda Lohrey, Frank Moorhouse Gerard Murnane, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Doris Lessing, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Barthes, Miranda July, Michael Cunningham, Raymond Carver.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. Like, hypertext magic alert! So many layers/tangents/literary recourses. A maze-like story about an infinite maze. Jesus Jumping Beans, did this guy sort of invent the internet or something?
The story is kind-of epistolary (a style which I really dig) and it melds philosophy with storytelling (which is why I open books). Affecting and clever!
The first time you read this (or many other of Borges’s short fictions) your brain sizzles itself a thick new synapse, one that can never be unsizzled.
Also, “Jorge Luis Borges” is fun to say in a faux-Spanish accent.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
With tongue entirely in cheek but also in utter earnestness: the shortness. A short story is by name and definition succinct/brief/fleeting. When a short story is no longer short — say over 15,000 words, to pick a number — it loses the lustre of immediacy. This is true for both reading and writing short fiction. As a reader, to step into a short story is like having a shower (opposed to lolling in a bath). You know as you enter either a short story or a shower that it’s going to be quick and warm, and that it will charge your energy levels so that chores or creative toils or making that difficult phone call are suddenly not as unfeasible as they were before. As a writer, short fiction is graspable. An idea filters down through the top of your head like coffee into a cup, and you can seize it and jot down a few seconds of notes and then punch away at the keyboard, and a day or two later, you have the chassis of a story ready to be tricked out. Even if the end result is just crap, that 48 hour period of writing writing writing is better than [insert hedonistic pursuit here].
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Try-hard. Fuelled. Noisy. Optimistically cynical. Like hugging a cactus.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
One that I haven’t written yet; pick any of the hodgepodge ‘story idea’ Word docs that stare out at me from my desktop.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I’m not sure where ideas come from. I can’t even go as far as calling them ‘my’ ideas. Does anyone really have an answer for this question that isn’t just horseshit? An idea appears. Sure, it’s an electrochemical process in the brain, as far as our current thinking goes. And sure, it’s also explainable through personality and character and private history. But none of this is ever going to be satisfactory. Try explaining to a five-year-old the physical reasons why a group of whales kill themselves by drowning in air on a lonely beach. How much can you persuade this five-year-old with an explanation?
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Alone alone alone, until the very end, when I reach out for friends. I don’t reckon there’s any other way to do it.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Yeah, sure it’s valued. I value the shit out of it, and I know many other Australian citizens who do also. That’s enough for me, for the moment anyhow.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
No wuckers is how I feel. Do with it what you will, it’s not mine anymore.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Um, read? No matter what else, for me everything always comes back to reading. (By ‘reading’ I mean ‘experiencing art’, like books, films, fine art, music, public transport, people, walking, sex.)
Sam Cooney has published fiction, creative nonfiction and journalism in a variety of places, both in Australia and overseas. He has also commissioned and edited writing for a few major Australian journals and magazines, and is currently the fiction editor at the Lifted Brow. His story, ‘From on high’ is published in Escape, an anthology of short Australian stories (Spineless Wonders, 2011).
Spineless Wonders asks Pierz Newton-John
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
There are so many! But some who spring to mind include Anne Enright, Wells Tower, Peter Carey, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Borges, Kafka.
2.What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
If pressed to name a single one, I’d have to go for Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’. It is a nightmare put on paper, distilling the horror hidden in a certain kind of ordinary existence. The image of a man suddenly and inexplicably transformed into a grotesque insect could be read as an allegory for many things: mental illness, neurotic self-rejection, the fate of the sensitive man in a bourgeois, materialistic society. What makes it great literature is that almost everyone who reads it shudders with an obscure sense of recognition. Somehow it is a universal nightmare.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
Ben Okri once described a novel as like a river, a short story as like a glass of water. That seems utterly apt to me. It captures the short story’s clarity, its self-containment, its capacity to be taken at a gulp – and a certain salutary asceticism about it. I suspect that ascetic quality is why the short story languishes in today’s culture, along with the poem. Short stories do not satisfy in the complete, explicit way of novels or movies. They sit subtly on the mind after one has finished them, pervading the intellect and the emotions, suggesting associations and meanings the way a fine wine suggests cinnamon or vanilla (to perform a Jesus-like trick on Ben Okri’s metaphor). To enjoy them requires the capacity for subtlety, and indeed they teach subtlety. Unfortunately, we do not live in subtle times.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I suppose I veer towards the melancholic, the elegiac, sometimes the blackly comedic. Writing is no fun if you’re not expressing forbidden thoughts and feelings. In my case, it seems to be the suspicion that things are more awful than we like to admit. The freedom of writing is honesty, unglossed by our usual defensive manoeuvres. Yet I think there’s an aesthetic sensibility to my writing that brings a redemptive touch, even if the story is black. I treat my characters with empathy and sensitivity, even while I torture them!
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Right this very moment I harbour an affection for the odd man out in of my collection: ‘Comrade Vasilii Goes to War’. It’s the shortest story and unusual in being set on the border of two fictional eastern European countries when all the others are set in (more or less) modern Australia. Somehow I feel a great warmth for the bumbling, self-effacing Vasilii. Perhaps, when I think about it, it’s that he actually is a hero of sorts, in spite of his conviction that he is the worst soldier there ever was.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Autobiography is always a great starting point, though the stories seldom remain there. Autobiography is like an armature you can build on. It can give you the confidence and the structure to start crafting something. Then slowly the thing starts to want to take its own shape, and eventually the real events are so deeply buried only I, the author, can still make out the rough bones of them underneath. Sometimes the story starts with someone else’s life. ‘The Thief’ – about a jazz guitarist in the late sixties – was based on my old jazz guitar teacher who died sadly of a stroke a number of years ago. He told me once about how he had heard ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ for the first time on the radio while driving in his kombi van, and how much it had moved him. I imagined the circumstances of that moment and it became the seed for the whole story.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
It begins in anguish and procrastination. I always have many ideas, none of which seem quite good enough. I start many, many more stories than I finish, a bad habit, because in truth I believe that the failure of a story should not be an end point. It should be the beginning of the next incarnation, born from the ashes of the last through a process of understanding what went wrong. Many of my final stories are like that – refined from countless cycles of death and rebirth like the Buddha! Still, I suffer from the delusion that perhaps this time, writing won’t be such hard work.
As for the involvement of others, yes I absolutely believe in that and rely on it. I have a hardy band of reliable critics whose feedback I always solicit before sending my work anywhere. A good writing group is gold.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Valued by whom? It is valued highly by a certain subculture of literary types, but the value ascribed to it by the broader culture can be assessed easily enough from the financial rewards of writing them. Money is our system of agreed value, and while one can make a living from such activities as spamming ads for penis enhancement pills, bashing people weaker than oneself outside of nightclubs, and short selling collapsing stock markets, even a rare talent like Cate Kennedy can’t make half of a decent living out of writing short stories. It’s quite remarkable that we do it at all given how painful and difficult it can be, the number of brusque rejections we face, and how pitiful the pay cheques are (if we get one at all). And most of the money comes indirectly from government grants; it’s not even a reflection of true market value. Fortunately those who do value it, value it deeply, and it’s for those people we keep going.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I think I’m not alone among writers in my sentimental attachment to good old paper. And maybe there’s good reason for that. Talking about value, to put words on paper (trees after all) is to enshrine them in a valuable medium, to bestow the dignity of a certain permanence. Whereas we know from all the worthless blogs, all the proliferating online verbiage, just how cheap a byte is these days. It’s hard to know the value of what you do once your product is virtual, once it vanishes it into the great, undifferentiated digital sea. That said, the economics of the e-book are becoming increasingly compelling and if e-books and e-readers help to create a new generation of literary readers, I’m all for them. As for audio books, I adore the idea of being someone’s bedtime story.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
No advice, just thanks for bearing the standard for Aussie short story writers.
Pierz Newton-John lives in Melbourne. In addition to being a writer, he is a guitarist, web developer, former psychotherapist and father. His stories have appeared extensively in Australian literary journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Overland, New Australian Stories, Kill Your Darlings and The Sleepers Almanac. He won the Alan Marshall Award in 2008 for ‘This Old Man’. His collection, Fault Lines, published by Spineless Wonders will be launched in Melbourne on March 15th at the Hill of Content Bookshop.
Spineless Wonders asks SJ Finn
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Annie Proulx, Elizabeth Jolley and Carson McCullers are a few of the many writers I admire for their short fiction. From a closer position I’ve gained knowledge and been influenced by collections such as Anson Cameron’s, ‘Nice Shootin’ Cowboy’, Tim Winton’s ‘Minimum Of Two’ and Thea Astley’s ‘Collected Stories’.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
If I pondered this question for longer I may come up with something else, but the story that keeps pecking at my brain is Fiona McFarlane’s ‘Those Americans Falling From The Sky’. The narrative is wended beautifully into a seamless and beguiling story while at the bottom of things, like a well with stones in it, there’s something quite disturbing going on.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I like the power the short story form holds, like a secret behind a door that begins to be revealed the moment it’s opened. It’s not that everything is seen at once but good stories take you to the heart of the matter very quickly unlike a novel which is more like being outside a house and first having to take in the garden, the path, the garage etc. before opening the front door. It’s the intensity of the short form that is attractive to me.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
My writing can be high tensile as it is in my story ‘Agapanthus’ in Sleepers Almanac No. 5, or it can be a little sinister as it is in ‘Angus’s Playground’ on line here. I do enjoy words which means employing discipline as a matter of course – while ‘matters of course’ require the same diligence as any matters, big or small. I’m drawn to the excavation of character, such as in my story ‘Flame Game’ from Going Down Swinging No. 27 and online here. And, lastly, my writing can be more emotional and interior such as ‘Paper Anniversary’ which has come runner-up in the Carmel Bird Short Story competition and appears in the anthology put out by the good people of this website, Spineless Wonders, called ‘Escape’.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I am partial to my story ‘Flame Game’mainly because it’s the first time I’d written in the second person and realised the power of the device. While bringing the emotional territory of a character closer, it creates a certain disturbing distance at the same time, the overall effect being ephemeral and spooky. The story, despite its brevity, manages to capture the protagonist’s character and explain why he did the terrible thing he did. In so doing, I feel as if I was just the conduit through which his voice was flowing; something that makes a story wonderfully watertight.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
To stick with ‘Flame Game’ (I have written other stories from similar kernels of thought, or is that emotion) I read an article in The Age newspaper about a Canadian psychologist who was treating convicted arsonists. I have a clear memory of where I was when I read the piece, the exact time and place, indicating perhaps the significant impact the article had on me. Stirred, I wrote the first draft in one sitting soon after. And it’s wonderful when that happens, when there’s something so truthful about the voice in a story that it flows from the fingertips, uninterrupted.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I love uncovering the first draft and find that the most exciting part of the process. I also enjoy the re-working, especially when the story starts to really shine through. I’m inpatient, however, and find myself sending my work off too soon, which can only lead me to conclude I’m in need of a writing group; even a ‘reader’ would do.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
The short form’s value (relatively speaking) is, I think, on the increase in Australia. The steadiness of the growth of publications of anthologies and collections is testimony to this. However it seems we’re way behind North America in regard to the short form’s status and I have a feeling that those reading short stories are mostly those who are writing them.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Good.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Maintain standards – contemporary but top shelf. In the end, harsh as it might seem to writers struggling to get published, the process of rejection will improve their work.
SJ Finn writes poetry and fiction, opinion and commentary for the Overland Literary Magazine blog. Her short stories have appeared in Going Down Swinging, Sleepers Almanac, as a mini shot for Vignette Press. Finn’s poetry has appeared in The Age newspaper, The Green Fuse, Cordite and Snorkel. War Through The TV appeared in the Best Australian Poems 2010. Her novel This Too Shall Pass was published by Sleepers in March 2011 and was highly commended in The Barbara Jefferis Award 2012.
She has a website at: www.sjfinn.com
The Column – one year on
In the past year we’ve had 11,000 visitors to our blog. We’ve posted interviews with 45 top writers of short Australian stories as well as discussions, reviews and essays on what’s new and what matters in the short fiction scene. So, why not join us …
Spineless Wonders is looking for contributors to The Column.
What have you noticed about the themes preoccupying Australian short fiction writers today? Do you notice any trends (or radical departures) in the style or form of recent short story collections?
Do you have anything to say about the status of the short story here in Australia in comparison to other countries? Do we need a short story festival or a national body such as we have for Australian poetry? Do we need more awards to celebrate anthologies and collections? Why are our short fiction writers so under-represented in international competitions?
Last year we ran a feature on opening lines where three guest writers each chose a story with an arresting first sentence and told us why it stood out. You are welcome to send us your choice of openers. Or perhaps you’d like to write about stunning final lines. Send us your choice of final sentence, details of the story it is from (title, author, where it is published) and a brief comment.
Whether you are a student, an emerging, experienced or established writer or an avid reader – all contributions, large or small, are welcome. Write to bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au
Spineless Wonders asks Doreen Sullivan
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
You know, and this is terrible, I tend to remember stories more than individual authors. But some names that I have gone looking for after being wowed at least once include: Maggie Alderson, Teresa Ashby, Steve Beresford, Leanne Hall, Cate Kennedy, Rose Mulready, Flannery O’Connor, Glenys Osborne, Elliott Pearlman and Diana Spelcher.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
There’ve been a few. One is ‘The Debutante’ by Leonora Carrington, first published in 1936. Woman invites a hyena to take her place at the debutante ball. Hyena behaves with impeccable hyena manners—that is, true to her species. I read it first years ago, and can still recall my amused surprise at how it unfolds.
Another is ‘In Reference to your Recent Communications’ by Tessa Brown, published in Harper’s Magazine in 2005. A very funny story that I showed to several friends and family members if they had ever expressed even the faintest interest in the short story form, and practically insisted: Read this. Now. It stood out for the character of the deluded girlfriend who did not accept her romantic break up. Very clever. The boyfriend is never on the page, and there’s creepiness to this story, just a tad. A hilarious creepiness.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
As a reader I like that it’s short, just the perfect length often, for a 30 minute tram commute, if it’s a longer short story.
I like the variety in anthologies, collections, and in magazine fiction specials.
I like how stories sometimes linger in my memory for years.
I like how stories turn up in surprising places, beyond the literary journal or general magazine. You can find stories in Cosmos, Nature, and even the medical journal The Lancet. Mind you, The Lancet fiction was from a one-off 2007 competition.
I like that most short stories are character studies.
As a writer I like that short story writers are pretty anonymous. No one has ever heard of you. There’s freedom there.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Someone once said my old stories had their own illogical logic. I’ve always rather liked that.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
Prototype Number One, because it was a lot of fun to write.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
The stories come from fragments of conversations, fragments of lyrics, and sentence fragments. Aural-snippets. Rhythms.
Having said that, the idea for Prototype Number One originated in a 2005 magazine writing class. Our teacher gave us an in-class exercise: Your house burned down. You need to tell your best friend, boss, and parents by email. Go. For the parents, the thought of a dinged up, disgruntled robotic type of person needing to go back home for repair after fire popped into my mind. But I wasn’t brave enough to go down that route and read it out. Instead I wrote something more standard. Safer. The idea stayed with me though.
This year, at a work conference, I picked up a sample copy of Cosmos magazine, thrilled to read a witty, whimsical short story in it about a man’s computer taking over his life, co-opting his girlfriend, etc. Loved it, though when I read others, I realised that first read story was atypical for the magazine. I saw (or I wanted to see) some broad similarities with that writer’s style and content and mine. So that gave me ‘permission’ and confidence to write a more fanciful story—knowing that some magazines publish this type of fiction.
7.What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I often bring stories to my critique group. The story published in Escape by Spineless Wonder story, Unrequited was read by them. Just having them as first readers often helps—especially for picking up inconsistencies like having timelines out of whack. Or letting me know if I’m going to try a macabre twist in the tale, then I need to give inklings of that from the beginning. This is true. I remain annoyed with a novel I read a good five years ago that was a delightful domestic comedy until the car crash horror in the final chapters. Man, did I feel cheated.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I think the form is appreciated by some, but not most. Though there seems to be a resurgence of interest over the past two years or so in literary journals, with new publishers. But I also think people not caring for the form is fine. If you don’t like something, you don’t like something. If you come to my place for dinner and you hate pumpkin I won’t force it on you, insisting you should eat it because it’s nutritious. And because I made it special. Just for you.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Great! Especially audio. Years ago I had the radio on for background noise and a play came on that so captivated me I stopped what I was doing and sat down to listen. Abandoned everything and gave it my full attention. If something I wrote ever affected anyone like that I’d be super chuffed.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
None. I’m thrilled you’re on the scene.
Doreen Sullivan wonders if it wise to crave anonymity. She is certain she has achieved it in most quarters, although her parents seem to know who she is. Sometimes she shucks her cloak of invisibility, for a nanosecond, to publish stories in Escape and Sleepers Almanac No. 7.
Spineless Wonders asks Sue Booker
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Those who spellbind me not just in a few of their stories (like Raymond Carver) but all through each collection they put out, like Amy Hempel, David Foster Wallace and Western Australia’s Chris McLeod.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
While 26+ pp puts this at the longer end of the genre, I’d have to say ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20’ by David Foster Wallace. You can read it in one sitting if you’ve got a spare 50 minutes. First, it’s a story within a story within a story. The framing story – a gender politics discourse – contains a love story wrapped around a horror story, a harrowing psychological what-if. Second, Foster Wallace gets away with talk of the soul by hiding behind a sceptical narrator. Third, the whole package delivers several twists or reversals, including a rape that isn’t a rape, a psycho killer who loses his nerve, and a rationalist who falls in love with his one-night stand. If it sounds like there’s too much going on, a lot is still omitted. For instance, we have to infer the nature of the ‘interviewer’. And last but not least, the theme is empathy for the other, however repulsive. Yet Foster Wallace, elsewhere a brilliant ventriloquist, achieves his effects without recourse to the popular device of adopting a guise far removed from the author.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
I love dense, complex and/or enigmatic narratives that need to be read more than once to make sense, and shortness makes this more practical. Shortness also necessitates omission, allowing the reader more scope to participate.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
So far, it mostly pans out as character-driven narratives about the crossing or violation of boundaries (physical and/or psychological) or taboos (personal and societal). Before writing took over, I’d spent years painting and dancing, neither medium of which I’ve abandoned, so it’s possible those disciplines condition my use of language.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
My fondness can change allegiance on a daily or hourly basis. It’s first an index of ideas that might yield new (or radically reborn) work; that is, the fondness is less for the story alone than for the ideas that flow from it. In this sense, ‘Under the Skin’ (in the Escape anthology) feels fertile; it continues to suggest further characters and experiments in form.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
The ideas can come from anywhere, but unless they’re marked by synchronicities or entwined with strong emotions, most of them will fade and dry out like pressed flowers in notebooks. For instance, the idea for ‘Under the Skin’ grew from a shouted conversation with a woman I barely knew. Some women, on hearing what I heard, might vow never to be without a mobile, but my sole concern was, what would stop my character from using hers? At some point, the woman’s chilling account reminded me of something an ex had once told me (which also served as a warning even if he didn’t know it!) and I began the story without knowing where it was going (not my usual MO). Then halfway through writing the first draft, I got injured by a total stranger, which modified the narrative arc in unexpected ways.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
Sometimes I’ll bounce ideas off my partner if they come up while I’m with him. Often I’ll brainstorm outdoors on scraps of paper. When there’s a draft that gels I’ll run it past random strangers (writers) online, some of whom won’t pull their punches or share my cultural assumptions etc. (good for objectivity), then I’ll rethink and rejig if necessary, edit and re-edit. It can take weeks or months but more often takes years to produce a story that satisfies me. Then comes the hard part: gauging where to send work that’s not geared to the established outlets.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
Yes. The fact that in recent years (or months) so many new venues have sprung up, e.g. literary journals and adventurous small publishers like Spineless Wonders, just confirms the growth of a short-story audience.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Digital forms have opened doors for a renaissance of the short story. And as I always read aloud throughout the writing and editing process, my work’s inherently geared for audio. So bring it on…
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
(Ahem…) As a helplessly visual person, I can’t stress the importance of seductive, standout cover design enough.
Sue Booker’s short fiction has appeared in Meanjin and Encounters: Modern Australian Short Stories. Her long fiction has attracted mentorships from Varuna and the Australian Society of Authors. She is currently exploring in-between-length fiction. Sue’s story, ‘Under the Skin’ appears in Escape, an anthology of short Australian stories (Spineless Wonders, 2011).
small wonder: Charles D’Anastasi
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in small wonder?
I like to build poems out of small incidents that take place around me. ‘Madame Bovary’ grew out of such an incident. During a poetry reading while listening to one of the poets, I became aware of the sound of horses’ hoofs and the accompanying noise of carriage wheels (the horse and carriage experience that’s seems to attract certain tourists) coming through one of the open windows. I stopped listening properly to the poet reading, although I still registered all sorts of minute details of the proceedings inside the room. Because of the sound of the horse’s hoofs, I gradually started to make a connection with the present and with that famous scene in the book. This connection made such an impression on me that I felt I had to try to write something about it.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
Usually, I do start in a small way. I might have one central idea and try to build around it. Often, I find that this isn’t enough – a dead end. I might leave the piece for a few days, perhaps even weeks or months. Sometimes, I abandon it. On other occasions, when I feel that something is working well I persist. I take notes. I try to think of different lines that might propel the piece forward. It might go either way – persistence or abandonment. I do try to research the subject matter, especially if historical details are involved. Intuition comes into it of course. Surely, this has something to do with the writer taking some risks, looking for possibilities in all sorts of places. Ultimately, for me, the process involves a lot of coming and going, a lot of rewriting and discarding of some troublesome word, or even an entire piece of writing. Also, I find that sometimes insightful comments from members of the writing group I belong to are a great benefit.
Repeatedly, I find myself working in terms of associations with objects. For example, I wrote a prose piece about a small photograph of a young woman that I found in a park on one of my walks. What happened, sent me to another photograph related story of a relative, which I interweaved with the story of the found photograph. Each episode helped me link both stories, and hopefully come up with a finished piece that deals in a satisfying way with the idea of rejected or lost images.
3. What advice do you have for other writers – about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Once, I heard a poet say that there are times when the title of a poem (I suppose this also relates to other forms of writing) is a poem in itself. In other words the title has a life of its own, while at the same time it must make one feel that it’s doing something special to enhance the rest of the writing.
In regards to first lines, I think one of the most obvious rules is that these lines must really hold the reader’s attention. At the same time, rules can be bent or stretched. One could start in a very simple and innocuous way; for example, ‘It was always going to be blue…’ and then try to build on that simplicity – and somehow find a way to get under the skin of the reader.
Last lines are just as vital. They seem to work best when they clinch a situation – perhaps leaving you agitated or numb, or pondering; possibly, even feeling disgusted, which would always be preferable, to leaving you feeling indifferent.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Everything and everyone around me inspires what I write. Everyday domestic incidents, news items, snatches of overhead conversations. It’s all there in the hard rubbish collection of everyday living. I’m sure that the most wonderful treasures are just there for the taking. And of course constant reading and pouring over all sort of books. I do believe that ultimately writing and reading feed off each other.
Over the years, the writers that have inspired me are the ones whose imagination, vision and writing skills have really moved me and stayed with me, writers like Alice Munro, Borges Julio Cortazar and Marina Tsvetaeva. Also the writing of Lydia Davis, joanne burns and Emma Lew. Of the new writers, I feel that Karen Hitchcock’s writing stands out. And I keep going back to the prose poems of Gary Catalano, for their clarity, yet enigmatic insinuations, and the marble sheen quality of their stillness.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
Often, when I’m stuck, I go to my notes. I’ll try to revive a piece I might have discarded, try different angles, with a word or a phrase. I find that I get many of my ideas for writing when I go for walks. Most of the time I find that walking has a calming effect on me, and creates a rhythm that puts my mind at ease and free to roam and explore. Afterwards, I might jot down a few exploratory sentences, with the hope that I can expand them into something meaningful and cohesive.
When it comes to writing poetry, which is my main interest, sometimes I try to get going by writing in some specific form, like the pantoum, which because of its repetitive line structure, provides one with a bit of a challenge, and the impetus to come up with the next line.
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I really don’t think that I have a particular writing exercise that always works for me. My own writing seems to be the result of any combination of the above, with an emphasis on persistence, revising and searching.
Charles D’Anastasi is a Melbourne poet. His work has been published in various literary journals. His chapbook The unreliable harbour was published by the Melbourne Poets Union. Recently, his prose poem The Weaver was selected as part of the program The Ariadne Project, based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne and Theseus, on the ABC 360 Documentaries.
Like to hear Charles read his prose poem, Madame Bovary? Available as audio download here.
Spineless Wonders asks Ryan O’Neill
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Of writers outside Australia, I love Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov. There are many Australian short story writers I love. In the 1970s Peter Carey and Murray Bail wrote some of the best short fiction ever produced in this country. Gillian Mears is another great writer who I wish wrote more stories. Of contemporary short fiction writers I admire A.S. Patric, Michael Sala and Patrick Cullen
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
There are probably two that tie for this. The first is “In the Penal Colony” by Kafka. The objective, everyday tone, contrasted with the horrific, nightmarish events in the story lingered in my mind for months after reading. The other is ‘The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe. It is a brilliant first person portrait of a psychopath. I re-read this years ago and it disturbed me so much I vowed I would never read it again.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
First and foremost, the variety it offers in form, style, setting, and characterisation. There is also the possibility of perfection. A short story can be perfect in a way a novel can never be.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Traditional and/or experimental.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
The story I am most fond of is “The Eunuch in the Harem” a story told through a series of book reviews. I love it because it was easy to write, because it makes people laugh (something I thought I could never do) and because it opened a door for me to get my collection published by Black Inc. Also, it’s the one story I’ve written that I can reread with some pleasure.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Sometimes from an overheard conversation, sometimes from reading a different short story, and sometimes I just want to do something that I haven’t seen before, just to see if I could do it. For example, I’ve always wanted to find a way to put a crossword into a story, and the story* itself flowed from there…
*Ryan’s story, ‘My English Homework’, which includes a crossword and many other ESL exercises such as a family tree, is published in Escape: an anthology of short Australian stories (Spineless Wonders, 2011)
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I write the first draft, (which is my least favourite part of writing) and then I revise, revise, revise. I’m extremely fortunate to have a number of friends who are writers, and so I then send the story off to them to see what they think. After another draft, I usually send it off to a journal. If I’m lucky enough to be accepted, I look at the editor’s comments and fix up any other issues. And then the story is published.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
I think the short story form in Australia hasn’t flourished since the 1970s. I think it endures, has endured for decades and will continue to endure. It is valued artistically, but not commercially, as can be seen by the aversion of some publishers to publishing collections. Yet there are always journals, and publishers, who are willing to take a chance on short stories, and I don’t think this will change anytime soon.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I think it’s exciting, but also a little scary. For me, a book has a front cover, a back cover and a few hundred pages in between. I sometimes find it hard to accept other media.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Don’t be afraid to experiment and take risks.
Ryan O’Neill’s stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Westerly, Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories and the Sleepers Almanac. He has had two short story collections published, Six Tenses and A Famine in Newcastle, the latter of which was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. His new collection, Weight of the Human Heart, is published by Black Inc in 2012.
Spineless Wonders asks Erin Gough
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
I lived in Vancouver briefly a number of years ago and remember a Canadian friend of mine telling me proudly that instant mashed potato was a Canadian invention. This struck me as a hilarious thing to be proud of, until I remembered how Australians always boast about the Hills Hoist. I researched the inventions for each country and when I realised I could rhyme “Trivial Pursuit” (Canadian) with “Ute” (Australian) I knew I had to write this piece.
2.Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I usually write a whole lot, then read it through and cut the parts I hate, which is generally most of it. I read it again, decide it’s too short, and start putting things back in. On the next reading it becomes clear that I have totally overwritten it so I delete swathes of paragraphs. This goes on, back and forth, for about eight years. I end up with a 300-word story by the end of it, if I’m lucky.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
My only advice is that the process is different for everybody, so ignore people who tell you there are rules. What I can say of my own process is that I sometimes focus too early on getting the first and last lines right because I end up cutting the top and bottom off the story in the editing process in any case. This can be a good way to plunge the reader into the middle of the action and drag them out wanting more. I try to choose titles that I think will make people want to read the story.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Everyone and everything. The toaster blows a fuse and I think: how can I turn this into a story?
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I read my favourite writers. I read the stories that I’ve written and still like. I try to find in other people’s writing the rhythm of the thing that I want to write next.
Erin Gough’s short stories have been published in a number of journals and collections, including Southerly,Overland, Going Down Swinging and Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories and have been read on ABC and 2ser radio. Her microfiction, William Shatner vows to save the Great Basin Pocket Mouse was runner up in the Prose Poetry and Microfiction competition and is published in small wonder.
Spineless Wonders asks Kent MacCarter
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/micro-fiction which is published in Small Wonder?
For ‘Light Foxing’, it was a confluence of events and pet likes. I think similar to most people interested in books-as-artefacts, I’m agog for the crumbling, musty hardbacks that line both the shelves of discerning antiquarian bookseller and bargain bins at naive opp shops. My first Australian whiff of foxing came while I was perusing a hoity-toity little ‘shoppe’ in Lorne, Victoria where salty, coastal air meets with brittle pages. And, oh! The foxing that was afoot in many of their volumes was rampant (heavy foxing, you might say). It was there I saw a fully foxed Bible; New Testament even.
I’ve been quite smitten with the term ‘light foxing’ for some time now. And I have always been partial to animals-as-nouns-or-verbs in the English lexicon: quit horsing around; are you fishing for a compliment; well then, you’ll have to pony up another twenty dollars; no, only you can ferret out the truth; go ape shit then. It’s one of my goals to start a new definition for ‘mongoose’, but so far nothing’s worked out for me.
Last year I ran across a brief article on what chemically occurs during the foxing process, why it occurs, how long it takes and in what conditions, etc. The degradation of fibers and chemicals got me thinking about literacy and education. I end the piece with a somewhat unnecessary slam again Wyoming – the least populated US state – for two reasons. First, while Wyoming was the state that wouldn’t get off Teddy Roosevelt’s back to enact Yellowstone National Park (the world’s first so recognised), was the first US state to allow women to vote far before any other and is the current home of Annie Proulx – all very good things – Wyoming also gave the world Dick Cheney and bred the despicable Matthew Shepard affair. Second, ‘Light Foxing’ is prose, but my lines breaks and lengths were calculated. I needed a place name or state that I knew enough about that was exactly 7 characters to fill a space just so. I find odd restrictions like this can occasionally help make a good poem.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
For this poem I did a bit of research, although nary an iota compared to what Proulx does for her novels and stories. This piece arrived relatively in-tact. Not sure how my obsession with trains winnowed its way into the words, but it fit the long and winding chemical process and the topography of Wyoming. If Wyoming, jagged chunk of land that it is, was a book, it’d be a Steinbeck tome with all the characters transmogrified into natural elements like trees, petrified trees, water sheds, feral weeds and native wolverines. Perhaps Of Mice and Men with nary a mouse nor man to be found amongst the pages, only the slow jujitsu of boulders, their glaciers and the grassy plains which once was an over-written description of a haircut.
Many of the poems I write are offshoots of something I am fussing over … fussing over to death. As I’ve said in other interviews, I call them ‘host’ poems. The ‘parasite’ poems that a host poem begets (which can be numerous) are typically my better efforts. ‘Light Foxing’ was absolutely a parasite poem. Oddly, I cannot even recall what catastrophe of letters was its primordial Jacuzzi.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
I don’t have a set of rules, but I advise any new writer to read Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town. It’s a collection of essays, largely centralised around the theme of his teaching creative writing for so many years, an occupation that he was quite renowned for. These are essays, distinctly not hokey how-to trumpetings.
I’m big on titles. Mine are generally ‘of’ and ‘about’ the poem that follows, but I try to put some thought or twist in them to accentuate or clue-in a reader on what’s coming next. I find they can be helpful preambles.
My only skerrick of advice – as I don’t feel to rest on any plinth with height enough for offering – is this: If you run across an event in your day that strikes you as one that you definitely must mine for a poem sometime, some day … it’s usually going to be rubbish. That and don’t force things out, expecting that which you are forcing to be genius. Writing exercises are great. They work. They can keep you sharp. Not always, but they can.
Six years ago I was on a tram in Melbourne, snaking through the CBD on Bourke Street. We stopped outside what was then Gaslight Records. There, kneeling on the kerb, crouched a corpulent man wearing a smock. His bald pate glistened. He had five one-litre bottles of Paul’s brand milk set out in front of him on the footpath like ten-pin bowling pins, each bottle equidistant from the others in a row of quintuplets. All the labels were facing the same way, outward. During the tram’s pause, I watched him unscrew the cap off the first bottle and slowly dribble its contents entirety over his head, the milk’s viscous jacket zipping all over his contours. Without flinching, he then reached for the second bottle and reenacted the cycle.
Methodically, fluidly, silently. Almost robotically? Yes.
The now-drenched man was reaching out for the third bottle as my tram pulled away. Nobody on the early week-day morning footpath seemed to notice; only me and another chap on the tram. We looked at each other in silent stupefaction. Occasionally, I wonder if what I’m telling you now actually happened … or if it was that a total stranger and I were locked inside somebody’s errant fetish or feral hallucination that simply escaped them like a cap in wind. But, I swear it’s true. And I thought that that event was one I would for sure write about. I never have. And won’t. It doesn’t need it and I know better now.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
My inspirations, if you can call them that, come via triggers (a term I freely co-opt from Hugo mentioned above). Mine are various inputs, oftentimes sound. The noise of cash register in a supermarket has triggered a poem. Listening to the album Z-Nation by Melbourne indie band Gaslight Radio, in conjunction with reading a book on population statistics, sewn together with a glass of tempranillo, catalyzed a poem in me about shipwrecks that eventually wound up in Best Australian Poetry 2009. There are occasions where I am reading – typically hefty ‘collecteds’ by O’Hara, Thom Gunn or Forbes as examples – where I am moved to jot some things down. I’d say my inspirations are fleeting.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
Lately I have been shoehorning my jumpstarts into exercises with ever more stringent forms than the previous major effort. Most recently, I’ve had a go at producing a series of pantoums that also incorporate a rhyming pattern of quatrains. This is reasonably preposterous … but it has netted a few poems I rather like, some taken for publication.
Upcoming events and publications
I will be reading at the Makassar International Writers Festival, Indonesia, in early June of this year. I have recently become Managing Editor for Cordite Poetry Review with much exciting stuff to come there. I am also editing a collection of literary non-fiction memoir essays (themes based around expatriation) from a variety of writers not native to, but now living in and writing from Australia. It will be out with Affirm Press, in conjunction with Melbourne PEN, later this year.
Spineless Wonders asks Moya Costello
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
These were extracted from my unpublished PhD novella ‘Harriet Chandler’. The novella is a hybrid text of prose poem and prose fiction, but also in terms of content: art, ecocriticsm, fictional biography etc. I am very conscious of ecocriticism, or an ecological point of view in literature, because of the crises in climate and environment. Ecocriticism is a rising genre in the twenty-first century. I wanted to try my hand at it in ‘Slippery as a Fish’. I also adore the prose poem for its intensity and brevity, for its narrative and poetic language. ‘Travelling (East–West)’ is my attempt to make a prose poem from my old travel diary. The final piece ‘Australia: Terra Omnium’ is specifically related to Murray Bail’s Australian novel, Holden’s Performance. (Harriet Chandler is a minor character in that novel.) Bail lovingly critiques the white, Anglo-Australian male, and ends the novel in a kind of list that foregrounds Holden’s mechanical being. I wanted to end my novella in a list that celebrated Australia’s plurality and diversity.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I am a slow writer, like Bail, and I draft and re-draft a lot. I also work by imitation (intertextually). I love working with language over narrative/plot. That’s why I love the short forms. I do research.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
If you get the right first line, you are often away on a short piece. Listen to your voice, to what you are telling yourself about something. Generally speaking, short pieces work organically, coming to their own ‘natural’ end. When you have a larger piece of work, you need to work from the top down, imposing structure from above, otherwise the work gets out of hand. I love titles. Often there’s one somewhere in the piece. But you may have to choose one that is indicative of the piece, while also enticing, so that the reader enters the work desirously.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
My pieces for Spineless Wonders have been inspired by Murray Bail, and the prose poem as a form and writers of it, but also the need to write ecocritically, contributing, through art, to … saving the planet! I love the short forms: the novella, the prose poem. They work via intensity and resonance.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I read (not only fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, but, say, New Scientist). Go to the theatre (even watch television). Listen to songs. Exercising, getting the body moving, is a great way to get inspiration. If you’re working steadily and consistently, which you should do, you are chock full of ideas, because one piece feeds another. Also, I am constantly on the look out for publishing opportunities, like Spineless Wonders, because they inspire you to think about … well, both topics/subject matter and genres/forms for work. I keep a hand-written journal, where I put down ideas, or actually start stories. Usually I write because I want to understand something, explain it to myself. Never throw anything away: there’s usually something, even a phrase, that can morph into a larger work. As well, sometimes it takes years to get the right angle on a piece, or find the right publication for it. Writing is hard work, but it’s also fun, a space to play, otherwise we’d never do it!
Moya Costello has published two collections of short creative prose and one novella. She teaches Writing in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University.
Spineless Wonders asks Adam Ford
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
I spent weeks walking past a poster for that Cowboys and Aliens film and I got to wondering why it is that in science fiction mashup movies the two cultures always have to be in conflict with each other (answer: it makes for a better action movie), but more than that I got to wondering what a movie where the two disparate cultures co-operated would be like. I thought it was a nice idea, and a good excuse to write about cowboys on the moon. Because: Cowboy on the Moon.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
It actually started as a tweet – the first line (including the title) is quite close to what I tweeted, but the idea stuck with me, and I got the itch to expand it. So I did.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Don’t be afraid to delete first lines. Even if they’re the first line you had the idea for. ESPECIALLY if they’re the first line you had the idea for. Same goes for last lines. And all the lines in between. You’d be amazed what can happen to a poem when you delete your favourite line.
Re: titles, I’m no help. They always come last and I often just cop out and make the first line the title, or repeat a phrase that I like from within the poem. The only rule that I apply to the poems I write is that they have to have the key to understanding it somewhere within itself. Sometimes I break that rule, though.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Too many things to write down in a way that doesn’t just seem like a list that is intended to make me sound clever. But maybe, if I ran that risk, I’d say something like pulp fiction, love, curiosity and pedantry. And a predilection for talking bullshit.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I read. I read my favourite authors, but it doesn’t have to be my favourite authors. Just reading anything gets the cogs turning, but poetry in particular is quite inspirational for the act of writing poetry.
I don’t think I have a FAVOURITE writing exercise, but I do like mashing two disparate things together to see if they can stand up independently, like villanelles and piranha movies, or sonnets and internet memes. Or aliens and cowboys, I guess.
Adam Ford is the author of one novel, three poetry collections and one short story collection, all of which can be sampled at his website, theotheradamford.wordpress.com. He lives in Chewton.
What we talk about when we talk about collections and anthologies.Part 1: The Reviewers
I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.
Sylvester Stallone
It’s not often that I find myself thinking the same way as Sly, but when The First Tuesday Book Club recently turned down my suggestion to discuss our anthology, Escape, on their TV program, that’s exactly how I reacted.
‘Short stories are really tricky to talk about on the show, because it is hard to direct the conversation to a single narrative’. It was a disheartening response from the biggest, most influential bookclub in the country – and all the more so given that one of its regulars, Jason Steger, has championed the form through his annual Age Newspaper Short Story competition.
What’s more, the rejection didn’t just apply to this one title. It was a rejection of the short story per se, whether in a single author collection or an anthology, whether the author was Australian or otherwise and whether the short stories were published by a newcomer like Spineless Wonders or by a larger, more established publishing house.
That bugler started playing, full bore, in my ear.
The first thing I did was send off some emails. I wanted to know of some of our top literary reviewers agreed that critiquing short fiction was ‘tricky’. Patrick West, Kerryn Goldsworthy and James Bradley are all experienced reviewers for the national press and their responses appear below.
I also started searching for instances of book clubs which read short story collections and anthologies. There are some useful resources, mostly from outside of Australia, which I’ll share, along with some tips and examples in What we talk about when we talk about short stories Part 2 – Book Clubs.
In one of those happy coincidences, there was a review of Escape in the latest Weekend Australian. Karen Lee Thompson’s review, Anthological adventures across the home front, is a very positive one; singing the praises of our anthology, Escape, as well as Sleepers Almanac No.7. The reviewer declares herself a ‘literary groupie when it comes to Australian short fiction’ and she commends both Spineless Wonders and Sleepers for ‘keeping Australian writing relevant and offering our writers a bigger stage with their digital crossover approach.’ If we need to set up a social media campaign to get short Australian stories on to The First Tuesday Book Club, Karen Lee Thompson will be one of the first to Like.
Please feel free to contribute to this discussion by leaving a comment below or by emailing me at bronwyn@shortaustralianstories.com.au
What reviewers talk about when they talk about short stories.
Patrick West wrote:
Short story collections, even more so anthologies, invite trouble!
Their stop-start nature almost guarantees that the reviewer will object, probably violently object, to at least one of the stories. Sometimes falling in love with one piece can, in and of itself, sign the death warrant of the next. We all hate being dragged away from something we love.
What can a reviewer hope to achieve? It’s hopeless and pointless, I think, to try to sum up an anthology, or even a single-author collection. If you can there’s probably something wrong with that book. Collections should not read like a cut-up novel. To me, a good single-author collection should have the aura of a multi-author anthology. One of the skills of writing short stories lies in constantly making it new, in expressing the many different people that each of us are.
So yes, it is tricky to review such publications, but we need to get away from the notion that we can, or should, be summing them up. In the days when I used to write advertising copy for real estate agencies, I worked on the premise that it was not necessary to give a picture of the whole house to prospective buyers. Rather, I just needed to get them through the door, to then experience the house for themselves. I usually concentrated on picking out some scintillating feature.
Similarly with reviewing collections and anthologies. What I look for in a book is something, anything, that will last me a lifetime. No matter if it’s the smallest scintillating feature, if it endures it is worthwhile. For me, the ethics of reviewing lies in identifying such nuggets of writing, if they are there to be found, and then hoping that the reader of the review shares enough with me, of what it means to be human, that they too are touched by something which endures. In short, if I’ve been touched then it’s likely, though far from absolutely certain, that others will be too.
So this is how I try to get people through the door of the publication I am reviewing, hoping all along that if I happen to come across a book where all the rooms are plain and drab, and nothing whatsoever inspires, that I will be brave enough to say, ‘stop, don’t enter.’
Patrick West is Senior Lecturer in Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University. Patrick’s first short-story collection, The World Swimmers, is published by the International Centre for Landscape and Language (ICLL), Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. He frequently reviews books for The Australian.
James Bradley wrote:
I have to confess I also find collections of stories tricky to review. The problem is about trying to find something coherent to say about them as *collections* while still attending to the stories themselves. It’s certainly not impossible, but you’re always fighting with the tendency to end up sounding like you’re just listing stories (it’s even more difficult when you’re dealing with anthologies). There are ways around it, especially if the writer already has a body of work you can bounce off, but it’s a challenge nonetheless. From my point of view what I usually want to find is some sense of unity – shared themes or ideas or techniques – which I can then use to guide a discussion of several individual stories. It’s a problem that’s made even more pronounced by the relative brevity of most newspaper reviews – trying to say something coherent about a novel in 700 words is difficult, trying to say something coherent about a book and then several stories is an order of magnitude more so. But all that said, a good review of a book of stories should be able to find some common shape and unity and then unpack a couple of the stories in ways that illuminate both them and the whole.
James Bradley is a novelist, writer and reviewer. He has published three novels, Wrack, The Deep Field and the international bestseller The Resurrectionist and he has edited two anthologies: Blur, a collection of stories by young Australian writers and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. In 2012, he was awarded the Pascall Prize for Criticism. He blogs at cityoftongues.com
Kerryn Goldsworthy wrote:
No, I don’t find it tricky at all — but over the years I’ve edited four anthologies of Australian writing and have been part of the editorial team of a fifth, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature that was published in 2009. So I’ve got lots of ideas about anthologising in general, and they come in very handy when reviewing.
To me the most important thing as an anthologist is always the gestalt of the collection — the idea that the whole should be more than the sum of its parts and that the collection should make sense as a book and contain a lot of internal resonances. So that’s one way to approach it.
Another is to focus on the theme of the anthology, or on its catchment area if it doesn’t have a theme — for example, two of my books are Australian Love Stories and Australian Women’s Stories, both published by Oxford University Press, and so if as a reviewer or panelist I wanted a ‘single narrative’, I would focus on the criteria for inclusion. Examples: does ‘love stories’ just mean romantic love? Does ‘women’s stories’ mean stories by women, or stories about women, or both? What does ‘Australian’ mean — does it mean that the authors were born here, or that the stories are physically set here, or what?
That kind of thing.
When it comes to collections by individual authors, it can be a bit trickier, but it still wouldn’t be all that hard to pull out some common themes or subjects or genres or stylistic approaches or whatever and talk about them. I think when it comes to TV, the ABC has always been a bit timid about talking heads, particularly when it comes to book shows, and worries that complex conversations on TV will be ‘boring’ (ie won’t appeal to a large enough number of viewers), so I think Jennifer Byrne et al tend to concentrate on the subject matter of books, and that does make a focused discussion difficult since most individual collections tend to vary in their subject matter from story to story.
Kerryn Goldsworthy is a freelance writer, a former columnist for the Adelaide Review, and the editor of the Australian Book Review and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She is the author of several books, including Helen Garner, North of the Moonlight Sonata and Adelaide. Kerryn blogs at stilllifewithcat.blogspot.com.au
Read Part 2 What we talk about when we talk about collections and anthologies: Book clubs
Spineless Wonders asks Anna Couani
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
The piece called The Old Manuscript was inspired by two things, one was a sculpture I saw in the 2012 Sculpture by the Sea show in Bondi and the other was thoughts about an unfinished manuscript I started writing many years ago which is partly about the Greek Australian community in Sydney in the 1960′s.
2.Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I always start with an idea and start researching it. In this case I started researching the sculpture 11:11 and the topic that the sculptor used. Initially I just liked the appearance of the sculpture but I found that the sculptor saw the work as having a particular numerological significance so then I followed that trail and found it led to some unusual political activists who were operating in the 1960′s.They entertained various political conspiracy theories and this reminded me of the fiction manuscript I had started that is loosely about the infiltration of the Sydney Greek community by ASIO. I widen my possibilities initially but write quite sparsely, then edit, mostly by deletion. You can also write a piece as prose and then change it into poetry or vice versa.
3.What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
I don’t follow any rules. You might start with something but then start moving parts of the piece around or deleting things. Each piece of writing has it’s own shape. A title can be anything you want but I think it should have some connection to the piece. But after you’ve been writing for a while, you tend to repeat patterns of behaviour or writing processes. I need for my pieces to have some kind of odd connections.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
The idea for writing can come from anywhere but I think that other writers or film makers are the most useful source of ideas. I always start with ideas and tend to think formally, even if some content I use has emotive qualities. I think it’s necessary to be able to step back from your work to be able to edit it.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I don’t do writing exercises but I do give them to my students. One nice exercise is to take a line from somewhere, some poem or other text. I tell them to use the line in a prose piece. Sometimes I give them another variable like a journey or some change. The students have produced some very nice results that I wouldn’t call exercises but would call pieces of writing. For myself, I can write on demand but the thinking processes require time and sometimes full time work gets in the road. I spend masses of time reading student texts and sometimes need a break from print.
Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and secondary ESL teacher. Her most recent book, Small Wonders Flying Islands Press, Macao (2012), is poetry with Chinese translations and drawings by Sou Vai Keng. Her previously published work is at: http://seacruise.ath.cx/annacouani/
Spineless Wonders asks Stu Hatton
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
‘meds’ I wrote a few weeks after I began taking a medication for depression and anxiety.
‘refuse’ arose from some diary-like jottings in my notebook. It was begun many years ago and has been chipped away at, smoothed and roughed up again over time.
2.Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
When writing prose poems, I tend to put sentences together like building blocks. I like playing with permutations of sentences within a paragraph. It’s partly trial and error.
Both ‘meds’ and ‘refuse’ are attempts at paratactic writing (from Greek, parataxis, ‘placing side by side’) with narrative threads running through them. In other words, these poems were written as a series of discrete sentences, and the arrangement of sentences within a paragraph became a focal point of the writing/editing process. Sometimes I like to work against the grain of traditional storytelling or rhetorical conventions, and experiment with structuring paragraphs so that the ‘link’ between one sentence and the next is oblique or lateral. I’d like to think that both of these prose poems are mosaic-like, non-linear, cumulative.
I don’t intend for these poems to be cryptic (or at least, not like a cryptic crossword is cryptic). But maybe they’re crypt-like in the sense that they’re weird archives of body and mind.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
First and last lines can be ‘fetishised’ in various ways, and I suspect this influences the writing (and reading) process.
For instance, it could be remarked that the first line is an opening: a door, a portal, a gate, a window … an orifice of some kind? Or it could be said that the first line is sometimes the most deceptive line.
In all honesty, I’m probably a bit obsessed with opening lines.
As for last lines, well, let’s be a bit pretentious and say the last line is a death, a disappearing, a farewell, another dissolving of consciousness.
I have no set rules for titles. Sometimes the title comes first, sometimes last. Sometimes changing the title can transform a poem, shifting agendas, or perhaps shifting genders?!
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
So many people, so many things. Maybe if I had to give a one-word answer I’d say ‘interrelationships’. But that’s probably a bit of a cop-out.
Sometimes I write poems for friends, as gifts. I think there’s something worth contemplating in this notion of writing as a gift, an act of giving (or gifting). Though a poem can be just as much an act of taking … But if a poet writes a poem as a gift, perhaps it takes on elements of writing a letter or postcard to someone, or whispering in someone’s ear, or making them a pair of shoes, or compiling a mixtape.
Perhaps the poem is also received by the poet as a gift, or a series of gifts, and then the poet passes the gift(s) on. It is a spreading of gifts. Or who knows, in some cases, the spreading of a curse? (if you believe in curses). Certainly parts of the poetry scene could be described as a gift economy … there are probably a few curses circulating too …
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
Grab a bunch of books from a bookshelf. Stack them in a pile. Then take the book that’s sitting at the top of the pile, and turn to a page at random. Write down the first word or phrase that hits you. Then place that book down, starting a second pile. Then take the next book from your original pile, turn to a page at random, write down the first word or phrase that hits you, then place the book on the second pile. Repeat until all the books from the first pile are now in the second pile. Check the words and phrases you’ve jotted down. Do any of them seem to link in interesting ways? Could some (or all) of these words and phrases spark a poem? Use these jottings as your starting point. If you get stuck, you can always work through your pile of books again, repeating the same process as before. Or choose some different books to ‘sample’ from if you like. You could try choosing books that might make for interesting juxtapositions, or choosing on the basis of the type of language or vocabulary they contain. Of course, feel free to modify any of your ‘sampled’ phrases to suit your poem. Gather, assemble, transform. Hopefully it’ll be the start of something.
Stu Hatton is a Melbourne-based poet and editor who teaches writing and editing at Deakin University. His debut collection, How to be Hungry, is available through http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/stuhatton
Spineless Wonders asks Jo Langdon
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
I can’t remember a particular moment of inspiration, but I suppose the story ‘Pause’ formed around ideas about memory and absence, and the accumulation of a few images: bits of gravel and Redhead matches, tree frogs and tropical fruits, blue kitchen tiles and chandelier glass.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I usually start sparse, with an idea or collection of images at most. Most of what I’ve written lately is very short; my recent short stories tend to resemble vignettes or episodes. I usually write in fragments, incrementally, and yet there’s always room to cut back. I definitely value concision, but it’s something I have to work at, too.
Like most pieces, ‘Pause’ has been through a number of mutations. The first draft was written an embarrassingly long time ago, and this particular piece is an offcut from a longer narrative. The two stories have since gone separate ways. Like estranged family members, or ex lovers, to throw in a dubious metaphor.
As for research, I guess it depends on your subject, but of course it’s really important for authenticity’s sake. Especially if you’re writing something that engages with an historical event, a specific time or place. For me it usually comes back to reading a wide range of texts, then figuring out what else needs to be explored, or what needs to be explored further.
How to go about including research, and ideally without being too deliberate, too hackneyed or too obvious, is something more intuitive again, I guess.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
I don’t think I’m in a position to offer advice to other writers. But like most readers, I really savour those striking first and last lines. And perfect titles. Any writing that’s good and memorable, really. So I’m grateful to those writers whose work I will return to again and again, for whatever reasons.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Things I read, see, hear. Poetry, short stories, novels, works of non-fiction. Films, visual art, and music. History. Postcards and souvenirs. Childhood memories, and misremembered memories; ideas about memory and absence. Travel, as well as the places I’ve lived, and the place I live now.
Anything can provide inspiration, of course, but I think reading widely definitely continues to improve my writing!
5. Tell us, what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I’m usually working to a deadline, and can’t afford to stop for too long. My poetry manuscript had a deadline last year; my PhD thesis has one fast approaching. Admittedly, I’m a bit hopeless when it comes to meeting them, but there is always a timeframe, a sense of something ticking, ticking.
If I really can’t stare at the computer screen any longer, I read. Then I’ll form a response to what I’ve been reading, even if it takes quite a different direction.
Walking is always great, too. For whatever reason, ideas seem more likely to magically arrive when I’m walking – or any time I don’t have a pen and paper at hand…c’est la vie!
Jo Langdon lives in Geelong where she is currently completing postgraduate studies at Deakin University. A chapbook of her poems, Snowline, was recently published by Whitmore Press.
Spineless Wonders asks Keri Glastonbury
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
I was travelling in China and India in 2009. After many years of teaching creative writing and facilitating other students’ work I felt very unsure of myself as a poet, but could feel myself being stimulated again by cultural differences and displacement. I had an Asialink Residency in Shimla and had never travelled to either India or China before, so was keen to get some contemporary cultural experience of these two countries that dominate the Australian media in terms of their emerging economies.
2.Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
My poems are like chimney-sweeps, dumps of ash which are the remnants of thoughts that flared and then disappeared. I have lost control of lineation so the prose poem suits me well. I’m a poet who really wants to be an essayist, but instead of a Rebecca Solnit-style essay manuscript I came back to Australia with some dense prose poems, hybrid oxymorons.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
I’m not very interested in conventionally well-crafted poems, and instead privilege sensibility. The poems are a matrix of a moment, but also remainders that allow me to remember how it felt to be on the cusp of something that felt alive and dynamic enough to want to transcribe it aesthetically. My poems are moments of synthesis and response to the world around me, which necessarily can’t be synthesized coherently.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Most of my poems are discontinuous dialogues with friends, even though the people who inspired them may not respond to the format of the poem at all.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I constantly facilitate writing exercises for my students, but I doubt I would respond to any form of organized writing prompts. I guess I don’ t practice what I preach!
Keri Glastonbury is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Newcastle. Her poetry collection ‘grit salute’ will be published in 2012 by SOI3.
Audio files of Keri reading her Small Wonder’s prose poems are available here, on our Audio page.
Spineless Wonders Audio
EARWORMS
Breaking the Silence
When I first began thinking about Spineless Wonders back in late 2010, I envisaged the three platforms, PRINT DIGITAL AUDIO. At last, we are now offering short Australian stories as audio files or, as we like to say, as Earworms, stories that stay with you.
In writing this blog post, we are breaking the silence in two ways. First up, we believe there are not enough opportunities for short stories from Australia to be heard. Some publishers produce audiobooks, but these tend to be of novels. And there are some fine examples of short story broadcasts such as Radio National’s Sunday Story and Paper Radio. We are delighted to see Overland Audio hit cyberspace recently, and hope to see fiction as well as poetry there.
But we want more. We want a website full of short Australian stories for you to download and listen to when ever and where ever you want. That’s why we invented Earworms.
It’s time to break our silence. We have been working away at the audio side of things for a while now here at Spineless Wonders, and whilst we are not done yet, we felt it time to let you know what we have planned. Right now, we are uploading recordings by contributing authors from our two anthologies, small wonder and Escape. See our Audio page. We will be adding more as they become available, as well as selected stories from our single author collections.
And as of today, we are open to submissions from other authors. Like all of our Spineless Wonders’ publications, Earworms will showcase the best of Australian writing. We are looking for quality, innovative works by writers who already have a publishing or awards track record as well as for works by new writers who come to us via recommendation. (If you’d like to submit, click here. You can find more details on our Submissions page.)
As for the future, we will have a bigger, searchable shopfront. That means you’ll be able to find stories by genre (including a category called ‘not yet defined’), by author and by length. We will have a Reviews & Discussion section featuring audio reviews and interviews with authors. (So if you fancy yourself as the Australia’s answer to the New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman and would like to record an interview with an Earworms author, discuss an Earworms story or if you have views you’d like to share about the short story in Australia – then get in contact with us.)
We have plans for wider distribution as well – currently we are selling straight from our website but we are looking at other platforms such as iTunes. We also plan limited CD production, especially for use in institutions such as public, university and school libraries. (We are keen to have a show of hands for CDs – so if you work in one of those areas, or have a preference for CD over mp3, then do let us know.)
Stories that stay with you
Yes, we do want you to pay for the audio downloads. http://bit.ly/OgZ4BP In fact, some of you have already done so. Thanks for your support and do come back for more. Prices range from $0.99 to $2.99. Majority proceeds go to the author.
How does it work?
Earworm audio files are sold without digital rights management technology. This means that once purchased and downloaded, the audio file can be played on however many devices the purchaser owns.
Our audio short stories are copyrighted works. Purchasers may not upload to, or otherwise share, the audio file through any personal, community or business website, blog, on-line forum or use any other means to broadly distribute Earworms without our permission.
Yes, we are relying on honesty here. Trusting, that’s us.
Spineless Wonders asks Laurie Steed
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
There’s been much written about love being either romantic or dystopic, or first one and then the other. I wanted to explore the idea of love occurring at the end of a relationship; how trust, quite often, comes in letting go rather than holding on.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
In But what have you done lately? I guess it was pure intuition. I usually write much longer stories. In this case I wanted to distill the emotion of a particularly pivotal experience while still honouring extraneous words, phrases and images that formed the narrative. In point, everything remotely related to the story felt vital in capturing a place, a time, and a series of overarching emotions.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
I‘m hesitant to offer any advice to writers other than to trust their own intuition. The craft of writing takes time but can most certainly be developed; a willingness to go deep is more difficult to foster. It relies, first and foremost, on a great deal of emotional honesty with oneself. Writing, in this regard, is both its own punishment and reward as one seeks a greater truth or series of truths.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
I’m inspired by any writer willing to be vulnerable on the page. While many of these writers are women (Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Miranda July, and Kate Cole-Adams), contemporary male writers such as Sherman Alexie, Etgar Keret, Tom Cho, and Patrick Cullen are also willing to expand upon notions of gender identity rather than relying on stereotypes. By opening up to their own flaws and insecurities, these writers inspire me to do the same. Ultimately, I guess it’s about compassion: a willingness to both read and write with acceptance rather than judgment.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
For me the same exercise has fuelled countless stories, and it is, “I remember.” My initial recollection soon morphs into something else: a series of people, places, and feelings I’m unable to forget. From there I’m (thankfully) taken away from my small sense of self into a fictional context. I’m not sure how or why this works; I think it’s because I give myself permission to write without too much evaluation during what’s essentially the creative process. In a way, I’m tricking my inner critic to drop the ball for long enough for me to get a story onto the page. Once that’s done, the critic’s more than happy to guide me through the subsequent redrafts…
Often it’s enough to give yourself permission: to tell yourself that your writing is wanted and appreciated. People will tell you otherwise, that writing is at best a hobby, at worst a distraction. These people have no vision, and while I’m sure they’re lovely, they simply don’t understand what it means to be a writer.
As a writer, you do understand. Write, revise, make mistakes and most importantly, grant yourself both permission and patience to grow on your own terms, at your own pace.
Laurie Steed is a New Zealand born, Australian raised writer, editor and reviewer. He has appeared in various literary journals and is currently completing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.
You can listen to Laurie reading But what have you done lately? at Spineless Wonders Audio page.
Spineless Wonders asks Mary Manning
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
There are so many: Colm Tóibín, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Malouf, Banana Yamamoto, Amy Kempel, Keri Hulme. Haruki Murakami has had the most influence on my own writing in recent years.
2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
I will never forget Katherine Brush’s ‘Birthday Party’. It showed how important language is in showing emotion. More recently Murakami’s ‘Man-Eating Cats’ inspired a story in Damaged in Transit.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
First, the brevity. I like having the idea for a story in my head and playing around with it, imagining how characters might think or speak, how they came to be the way they are, how they might change. Second, I see the language of short fiction as being similar to that of poetry where every word matters and contributes to the meaning and effect of the whole.
I greatly admire novel writers but cannot imagine tackling something so large unless it was structured as a series of loosely linked short stories.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
Several of my stories look at the ways people might be shaped or damaged by their circumstances, sometimes with humorous or unbelievable results. I think this style has evolved from my interest in science fiction, dystopias, fantasy, and magic realism. Some readers describe my writing as quirky and I like that.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
‘Train Train’ (in Damaged in Transit) makes me feel good when I read it. It’s about a young couple who are pulled apart by their experiences on a train that exists for no one but them. I keep wondering what the story is about.
I am also attached to ‘Yum Cha’, a story in progress about a woman and her ex at an exhibition where the art works all resemble food.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
Melbourne’s public transport system is a wonderful source of story ideas. The sounds and rhythms of trams and trains stir ideas that don’t come when walking or sitting at a desk. And there are so many people to observe and speculate about. I saw a metal-studded young man in goth gear carrying a plate that held a good sized slice of delicious looking pie. Who made the pie? When will he eat it? How does it feel wearing all those studs and jewellery? Does he feel as cross as he looks?
Other stories develop from snippets in the news like a brief report about a man who swum the length of the Amazon. I thought he’d have to be mad to do something like that, and the character in my story ‘Amazon Man’ is funny but decidedly mad.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
I write lots of scraps and put them in a file (called ‘bits’) which I search through if I’m short of ideas. If I find something with possibilities I might add a couple of hundred words and see if it’s going anywhere. If it isn’t I’ll save it put it away for another time. Then I’ll procrastinate for quite a time, plant some beans, make a curry, and finally get organised with notebook and pencil and catch a train to an unfamiliar suburb where I’ll sit in a mall, jot down words and images, sketch people or take photos.
At home I always work with the radio on. I rarely write by hand and don’t print the first draft until is more or less finished. Then I read it aloud in my head and move things around so the sentences sound better. This is a good time to apply the ‘less is more’ rule–take out all the adverbs, sharpen the dialogue, remove repetition and so on.
It can take weeks to get a draft ready for my writing group to critique and I get a bit desperate when the deadline approaches. Then, at the last minute, when it’s too late to make major changes I might realise that the point of view is all wrong, or the story would be better in present tense or the voice is flat. Or worse, that the whole story is silly.
My writing group is invaluable. Each of us has a distinctive writing style and set of interests. We ask the questions that matter: do you need this character? What does X expect to gain by this action? Would the story be better told in Y’s point of view? There is nothing to prepare us for Z’s behaviour here. We are constructive and encouraging. I always leave thinking my story is not silly at all but needs quite a lot of work.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
It is hugely valued by many readers although I sometimes feel it is an underground movement. There is very little in mainstream media about stories and it us up to writers, readers and festivals to spread the word. You only have to look at the fiction edition of The Big Issue which sells out quickly and is held in high regard.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
It’s wonderful to live in a time where it is possible to read in many ways. I read on my phone, eReader, iPad and books, of course. Stories are words– it does not matter how you read them. I think everyone will adapt to reading in different ways just as children do.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
More please. You are doing a great job.
Mary Manning lives in Melbourne and is a writer of short stories, poetry and educational texts. Her stories have been awarded in the Victorian Fellowship of Writers and published in Eureka Street magazine. Her poetry has been published and awarded in competitions and published. She is author and co-author of several books for senior secondary school students, research reports on adult education and study notes on fiction, poetry and plays.Her interests are reading, particularly of contemporary fiction, film, music, overseas and outback travel. Damaged in Transit is due for release in November, 2012.
Spineless Wonders asks Monica Goldberg
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/ micro fiction which is published in small wonder?
The realisation that I may never find the right words to describe my visit to Skierniewicza. My grandmother’s parents and siblings were victims of the holocaust. They simply vanished. I wanted to at least try to describe how I felt when I visited their town.
2. Tell us about the process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back ? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about. Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
Before I left for my trip to Poland my grandmother gave me a Skierniewicza shtetl memorial book. The book contained a photo of my great grandmother. I wanted to find out what happened to her and this image became the focal point of my research. I eventually turned away from the research and looked for techniques to link the present with the past. I put the story aside and started to think about displacement and the power of the absurd.
3. What advice do you have for other writers about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Set your direction but be prepared to change it. Perspective and distance is essential and I try to write the title as well as the first and last line after the story is complete. If I am not writing to a deadline I put the story away and come back to it later. If that is not possible, I create three or four versions of the same document then read them when I am away from the computer. I cannot explain the reason why, but this helps me get a sense of perspective. I always create documents that look professional and try to feel confident that they will find a home.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
I can still remember the days when I called my pets “Nately”, “Yossarian” and “Holden”and wrote “Sleep tight ya morons” on bathroom walls. Today, I am inspired by the elusive nature of truth and writers like Schulz, Borges, Camus, Duras and Stein. I am inspired by new forms and new codes. The relationship between politics and literature has always fascinated me and I am inspired by cultural reinvention and those who work towards conciliation. I am also inspired by marginal and disadvantaged writers. There is a lot of elitism and arrogance in the literary world and I think it is important that it is acknowledged.
5. Tell us what you do if you haven’t written anything for while and you want to get started writing again. Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
My ideas often emerge as concept and I have to wait for the story to arrive. In the early stages I express the concepts as microficton and prose. If I haven’t written anything for a while I often read over some of my old work then take a long walk and wait. I usually find another dimension or theme. I find good writing difficult to force so I tend to wait until there is something I want to write about. I need time to allow my thoughts to wander and make new associations. When I do have a good idea I write it quickly and try not to worry about spelling or grammar. I know I can edit anytime but good writing requires inspiration and a certain mood. I do not really have a favourite exercise but I do have a copy of Charles Bukowski’s poem “So you want to be a writer” above my desk and often attend literary events and festivals.
To listen to Monica reading The Stranger from Skierniewicza, click here.
Monica Goldberg is a surrealist poet writer and artist. Her short fiction and poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies both in Australia and overseas. Her poem Theories of Everything was selected for The Best Of Every Day Poets Two (Every Day Publishing, 2012). She is currently completing a novel about converso’s and the significance of cryptic faith.
Spineless Wonders asks Louise D’Arcy
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
I admire Cate Kennedy for the quiet way she digs deep into a story and, almost without you noticing, takes you somewhere you weren’t expecting. I’ve just read Ryan O’Neill’s collection, The Weight of a human heart and thoroughly enjoyed that, too.
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2. What is the most memorable short story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
That’s a tricky one. The one that first springs to mind (out of many) is Ryan O’Neill’s ‘The Beginning of the Sentence’.In this story he plays with form in a way that perfectly reflects the subject matter of the story and adds hugely to its impact. I also admire the way he uses humour in such an understated way that makes it all the more effective.There isn’t enough humour in short story writing.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
The limitations of length and scope perversely give you more freedom than a novel. A short story allows you to get out the microscope and have a really good look.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I would describe my writing as observational, often with an affectionate cynicism. I like to write with a kind of secret admiration about people who fall short even when they try really hard to succeed.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
I have a story which takes a close look at a character from the novel I’m writing. I feel I’ve caught the voice exactly as I wanted. I guess you’re always most fond of your most recent story. No-one else has agreed with me yet as it’s still in the revolving door of rejection at the moment.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
To use Flat Daddy as an example, the idea came from an article in the Good Weekend magazine, which briefly explained the concept of the Flat Daddy. A Flat daddy is a life-sized mounted and cut out photos of serving US soldiers that families can keep at home while their husband, father or son is on active service. As usual, I wrote the first sentence and then followed where it and subsequent sentences took me. It ended up with two voices, a child and her mother, something that evolved as I wrote.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication? (Do you go it alone or are others involved?)
On my own. Occasionally if I have a story that I’m not happy with but can’t put my finger on why, I’ll ask my writing buddy, Jane Downing, to tell me what’s wrong.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
It’s valued by the people who value it, which is to say something and nothing. It’s not mainstream and never will be but it has its devotees. I do think it will adapt very well to the varied world of digital publishing, better than other fiction and nonfiction forms, perhaps.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
I think it’s brilliant! The more markets writers have available to them the better. Who could complain about that?
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Keep on doing what you’re doing!
Louise D’Arcy lives on a small property near Yackandandah, NE Victoria. She has been writing for 15 or so years and has had more than 30 stories published in journals and anthologies including Best Australian Stories, Sleepers Almanac and Overland. In 2009, she won the Albury City Library Short Story competition for the second time and in 2010 she won The Age Short Story Award.
You can hear Louise reading her story, Flat Daddy here
What we talk about when we talk about collections and anthologies Part 2 Book Clubs
In Part 1, I asked some of our top reviewers how they felt about the task of reviewing short fiction. In Part 2, I ponder why it is that Book Clubs may shy away from discussing collection and anthologies, I ask the opinion of some short fiction writers and finally, I provide a few tips and approaches for Book Clubbers. A shorter version of the following blog post appeared in the September issue of Good Reading magazine.
The Australian short story is currently experiencing a renaissance. Never before have we seen so many short story collections (by single authors) or anthologies (by multiple authors) available on the market.
As a writer, reader and publisher of short stories, I am passionate about the form and, curious to find out more about its appeal, I have interviewed over fifty Australian writers.
Reading and writing short stories
Irma Gold, whose story ‘Just a suburban street’ appears in our anthology, Escape, says that as a reader she likes that she can finish a story in one sitting.’ On the bus, over a cup of tea, lying on the beach. There is a particular pleasure in that complete slice of time, and the best stories linger in the mind long after the last word has been read.’
Jennifer Mills, another contributor to Escape, finds that as a writer, it is both the ‘nearly mathematical tidiness and its risk,’ that attract her to the form. ‘I can pull off imaginative feats in short stories which I would struggle to hold together in a novel.’
Discussing short stories
With multiple stories to discuss, are collections and anthologies suitable for book clubs? There are a number of ways to overcome this challenge. One way is start with the particular and move to the general. For instance, choose just one story to discuss in detail and then extend the discussion to other stories in the book by way of contrast and comparison. Another approach is to start with the general. In the case of Escape, the anthology published by Spineless Wonders, the discussion can begin by looking at the variety of ways in which the stories (and the illustrations) treat the title theme. There are, for instance, stories about refugees, runaways and marriage break up in which ‘escape’ is the subject matter. Other stories have been included because they are written in forms such as crime, science fiction and romance which are considered ‘escapist’ literature.
When talking about more than one story, we sometimes move beyond the more straightforward aspects of fiction (such as subject matter, theme, setting and character) and end up talking about the techniques. This is especially the case with contemporary short stories where writers experiment with a range of techniques.
Sound daunting? Chances are, your book club already talks about writing techniques such as whose point of view the story is told from, whether the story has shifts in time and about the inclusion of different forms of writing such as newspaper articles, letters or diary entries.
Julie Chevalier, author of Permission To Lie, believes that what makes the short story very suitable for discussion is that the endings are often enigmatic. ‘There will be clues in the story that hint at what might happen after the story ends,’ she says. ‘The author leaves space for the reader to ponder, even participate .’
Pierz Newton-John, author of Fault Lines, believes that they are challenging because they do not satisfy in the complete, explicit way of novels or movies. ‘The key,’ Pierz says, ‘ is subtlety. Good short stories sit subtlely on the mind after one has finished them. They pervade the intellect and the emotions, suggesting associations and meanings the way a fine wine suggests cinnamon or vanilla.’
Different approaches
Focus on three – the facilitator nominates three stories from the collection or anthology to discuss. The selection might be used to show the variety of subject matter, characters, settings and writing styles.
Single story focus In the UK-based Short Story Book Club, a single story is chosen from a collection to be read out aloud to the group with pauses at particular intervals to allow for discussion. The reading is then followed by a general discussion of other stories in the collection.
First and last – book clubbers come to the meeting prepared to defend their choices of most and least favourite stories from the collections.
Anthology judge –the book club members vote for the winner and runners up, as if they were awarding prizes for the contributors.
Discussion questions
Here are some suggested topics for discussion:
Are there common themes, events and characters that preoccupy the writer?
If stories are written from different points of view (male/female, adult/child or in first, second or third person), how successful are they?
Short story writers often use the form to experiment with different aspects of storytelling. But not all of these experiments prove to be satisfying for the reader. What are some of the more experimental styles used in this collection and do they work?
What do the titles tell us and how well do they set the scene and tone for what is to come? Consider the title of individual stories as well as the collection as a whole.
Do the stories in the collection tend to begin in the same way or is there variety? Are the stories slow to build, with introduction and scene-setting, or do they hit the ground running?
Does the writer like to tie everything up neatly at the end, or to leave issues unresolved? Do the stories end with the abruptness of a clap or do they resonate like a hum? Is the ending unexpected and yet understandable?
Comment of the order of the stories. Is the collection best read in a particular order or is it fine for browsing?
What do reviewers have to say about the collection or anthology? Do you agree?
Are there interviews with the author available? Does he or she have a website or blog? What light do these shed on the stories?
Small Wonder review
We are reproducing, in full, this terrific review by Ali Jane Smith of our first prose poetry/microfiction anthology, Small Wonder. You can find other reviews, great fiction and poetry in the final issue of Famous Reporter here. Copies of Small Wonder can be purchased from our Products Page or ask for it at your local bookstore. And you can interviews with contributors here and you can listen to audio recordings of Small Wonder prose poetry and microfiction here. And don’t forget that our next prose poetry/microfiction competition closes November 30. Details here.
Review - Small Wonder: an anthology of prose poems and microfiction
Editors Linda Godfrey and Julie Chevalier
Spineless Wonders
RRP $22.99
ALI JANE SMITH
I suspect that ‘Small Packages’ might also have been on the whiteboard when the title for Small Wonder was brainstormed, and it would have been apt, because there are many, many good things between the vibrant covers of this collection. Printed on the front free endpaper of the book is a quote from writer and editor Jonathan Carr that describes the difference between prose poetry and flash fiction. Carr’s observation that flash (or micro) fiction is about compression, whereas the prose poem “is often the very opposite … an exploding up of a form” nicely sets the paradigm. The publisher held a competition to uncover work for the anthology, as well as inviting a number of writers to contribute. A shortlist and winners were selected by poet Joanne Burns, herself an invited contributor, and the result is something that editors Linda Godfrey and Julie Chevalier describe as fusion. The sounds and flavours of the writing in the book show that the fusion metaphor has served readers well: although the prose poem form has been known to lure poets into something that reads like a parody of Italo Calvino, and there are one or two such pieces in this collection, overall the anthology is remarkable for its stylistic diversity. Contributors were encouraged “to bend genres and break rules”, and so it is to be expected the reader may love some of these pieces and loathe others. The book is something like a very good party: a few old friends to catch up with, interesting new people to meet, and all the ingredients for a strange and memorable night. A little like a Spineless Wonders book launch, perhaps.
Small Wonder opens with Dael Allison’s ‘dreaming poets dreaming’, from her series on the painter Ian Fairweather’s journey from Darwin to Timor on a flimsy, self-built raft. There is something about the visual appearance of the prose poem, about the dependability of sentences organised in square and sturdy paragraphs, that provides a handrail when the content itself becomes uncanny. Allison has taken advantage of this visual solidity to create an impossible confluence of Pablo Neruda and Michael Ondaatje as Fairweather’s shipmates. Allison’s second contribution, ‘nightburst’, is a richly visual imagining of Darwin Harbour as it might have been fifty years ago in Fairweather’s time. Both poems may lead the reader to seek out Allison’s recently released collection on this subject, Fairweather’s Raft (Walleah Press 2012).
Judith Beveridge’s ‘The book of birds’ is about queuing, about ego-conciousness, about the strange places that a search for meaning can take us. Beveridge takes advantage of the fun to be had with zoological nomenclature. She shares the pleasure she finds in language with the reader, offering wonder, humour, suspense, and narrative twists in the space of a page and a half.
In the prose poems contributed by Joanne Burns, the prosaic and the metaphysical, big things and little things, sit companionably side by side: a cheese roll and zeus, hair and Akashic records, dandruff flakes and exorcism. Joanne Burns is an extraordinary and accurate observer, and the proximity of the profound and the absurd or mundane in her work is more than funny and arresting, it is a manifestation of human experience, where small pleasures and irritations stand alongside the great things of our lives.
Anna Couani has been a significant presence in Australian poetry for decades. Her disrupted and disrupting text, ‘The old manuscript’, offers more with each reading. The poem includes repeated motifs of storytelling and creation, of watching and being watched. Although the syntax is not ‘experimental’ the piece is troubling, an aporia that has the reader tracing back and forth amongst the sentences and paragraphs to piece together a narrative or pattern.
Michael Farrell’s poem The story of what’s inside the heart makes a strange kind of sense. A line at the visual heart of this poem reads “Everyone wants to know what it means”, a question that this poet has likely been asked from time to time. The repeated use of the words “in” and “inside” do create what might be an illusion of depth of field, of inside and outside, perhaps analogous to meaning and language. As Farrell writes, “there’s so much style in style, it’s the only thing to eat, spoon by spoon”, but the question remains as to whether this poem considers the possibility that perhaps language can refer to that which is outside itself, or whether the use of images of hearts, blood and Jesus, are a play on the desire for something that lies beyond language. Best just to read the poem and see what it does to you – if you are lucky it will feel like having your brain pleasantly but relentlessly tickled.
At the micro fiction end of the Small Wonder short form spectrum, Shady Cosgrove’s ‘Visiting’, in which the narrator’s late mother is glimpsed at the wheel of a 1970s Cortina 1600, is a story with real emotional heft that unfolds in three short paragraphs of telling detail. Every word is in the right place, and not one wasted.
There are many more works in Small Wonder that deserve particular attention: Michael Sharkey’s ‘A musical offering’ employs the poet’s characteristic piquant wit, and his prose poem ‘The strong, the silent type’ is a fable that takes the breath away; Adam Ford’s contribution ‘Sequel’ begins where the graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens ends, and is a far more successful spin-off of the franchise than the movie; the always inventive and often very funny Carol Jenkins has contributed ‘An illustrated history of the bicycle’; Michelle Cahill has written a startling description of mothering; and Vivienne Plumb’s deft and amusing ‘The cinematic experience’ is a handy pocket review of whatever film you are thinking of going to see.
The winner of the competition as selected by Joanne Burns was Charles d’Anastasi’s ‘Madame Bovary’. A poetry reading becomes the carriage scene in Flaubert’s novel, an idea that makes perfect sense if you attend a great many poetry readings, and when you read this piece. Commended is the excellent ‘William Shatner vows to save the Great Basin Pocket Mouse’ by Erin Gough which lives up to its title, and Clare McHugh’s ‘Briefly’, a witty meditation on the brief for the competition.< /p>
Readers of Famous Reporter likely already know the value of the independent presses in Australia. We know that publishers like Walleah Press and Spineless Wonders guarantee the depth and diversity of our literature. More important, we know that we will have a good time with the writers and editors that they find and nurture. Spineless Wonders has presented this anthology with a bold, bright cover design and original illustrations from artist Paden Hunter that are themselves worth the price of admission.
The brief and selection process for this anthology allows the reader, and happily the reviewer, to set aside the usual hang-ups that go with anthology reading. Small Wonder does not set out to survey or comprehensively collect a field of practice, so who is represented and who is not is an irrelevance. Rather, this book operates in a space that, while guaranteeing the quality of the writing, leaves room for risk and oddity. This is not a collection to be set on a high shelf with the dictionary, the thesaurus, and your completes and collecteds. It is a book to be voraciously read and sumptuously enjoyed, and lent only to trusted, book-returning friends.
(Published in famous reporter 44)
Spineless Wonders asks Vivienne Plumb
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
I started writing prose poems a while back and really enjoy writing in that compressed form. About ten years ago, I was invited to an amazing literary festival called Vilenica in Slovenia, and it was there that I met the American poet, James Tate, who has used the prose poetry form frequently. He read in a venue which was an enormous underground cave. It was cold down there and we were offered shots of the local alcohol to warm us up. While Tate was reading bats flew over his head. It was the best writer’s festival! Hearing him read his prose poems was a bit of a big influence on me.
My poetry collection, The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and Other New Zealand Icons (Seraph Press, 2011), is about thirty prose poems that use different ‘iconic’ N.Z. subjects. (I have lived in N.Z., although I was born and grew up in Australia, with Aussie/Kiwi parents.) The ‘iconic’ prose poems have proven to be accessible poetry for people who generally never read poetry because they like the subjects: whitebait, severe weather warnings, mouthguards, luncheon sausage, motels in Taupo, the long weekend, and the cheese and onion sandwich, to name a few.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I write poetry, fiction, and drama, so I work in several different ways. But these are things that always work for me: I like to start work early in the morning (it’s quiet), I like to have a comfortable wheelie office chair (good for your back), I need many cups of tea, and a big wad of paper on hand – I write in longhand first of all and then edit it further as I type it into my Macbook (love my Mac).
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Writing is like sex – the more you do it, the better it gets. I once lived next door to a drummer. He practiced every day (ouch!) and you could hear him getting better. Most things are like that, and the same rule applies to writing. (So just sit down and do it.)
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
I believe in making my own resources. One inspiration would be my powers of observation – I think that’s a good writer’s tool. For example: why does the black rubber front door mat disappear from outside my neighbour’s apartment, and then re-appear? (My conclusion: she locks it up inside if she goes away.) I loved this funny fact and thought it would be a great beginning of something much larger.
I also have an ‘ideas box’ where I chuck in any ideas for a writing project. I believe in ideas fervently – they have the potential to become tangible magic. Always write those ideas down.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
This doesn’t happen to me (not writing) because writing is my occupation and main source of income. I do it almost every day, and when I’m not physically doing it I am still thinking about it.
If you wanted to get writing or to get yourself ‘warmed up’ you could try an exercise I dreamt up and have used for some serious fun when teaching creative writing: When you are next at the supermarket find a receipt (not your own) and read it. Use this to help you create a character and write about a situation they are in.
Vivienne Plumb writes poetry, drama, and fiction. Her collections: ‘Nefarious: poems and parables’ (2004), ‘crumple’ (2010), and ‘The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and Other New Zealand Icons’ (chapbook/ 2011) all feature pieces of prose poetry.
Open letter
Dear SPINELESS WONDERS, I facilitate a group of young, emerging writers and have been encouraging them to enter your Icons competition. Could you tell us a little more about it?
Yours,
Frustr8d Teacher
Dear FT,
Thank you for your inquiry and for the chance to explain a little more about our latest competition.
An icon is a representative symbol, usually of something which is admired. In Australia, for instance, the beach shack is an icon.
Our competition invites poets and fiction writers to take a closer look at such symbols. What is a beach shack? Do they exist these days or have they morphed into something else? Did the beach shack idyll ever really exist? Who does the beach shack icon represent and who does it ignore? What would Roland Barthes say about the beach shack?
Our competition invites poets and fiction writers to interrogate the Australian icon and to also have fun. To come at them from the side, to turn them upside down. We welcome submissions about iconic people, places, objects and expressions. We encourage creativity. We want the new mythologies for existing icons. We want writers to unearth the icons that are forming now, around us. To show us the icons that only exist in their corner of the country – or in their households.
Perhaps your young, emerging writers are also uneasy about the form that their submissions should take? We love the openness of the prose poetry and microfiction. Again, the idea is to be inventive and to have fun. So, the only rules really are that the lines run from one side of the page to the other and that each piece be no longer than 800 words. For those unfamiliar with either form, we highly recommend our publication, Small Wonder and Vivienne Plumb’s Cheese and Onion Sandwich & other New Zealand Icons.
Tell your young writers to get their skates on, deadline is November 30. Details here http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/submissions
Cheers,
Bronwyn Mehan
Publisher
SPINELESSWONDERS
Spineless Wonders asks Cara Munro
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Small Wonder?
In 2005/6 I lived in a single room apartment in Delhi with 3 other women. Our home was built on the rooftop, or terrace, of a three story building, a space usually reserved for chili drying, clothes hanging, kite flying and the like. It was a perfect world within a world. The events from that time continue to flavor my life today.
2. Tell us about that process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I am a terribly lazy writer. I can go for months not writing a word and then something happens and I feel compelled to write about it. These moments are rare and I am usually unprepared. Serviettes, envelopes, and borrowed pens have been of great assistance. I feel my healthiest when I am writing.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Sometimes I find the middle of a thought, idea or sentence is a dynamic starting point (you can always go back and add a first line later). For a while there, I was writing a lot of short pieces that began with the word ‘So…’ (ie: So she told him that…, So they decided…, So in the end…, etc). Try it and let me know if it works for you. 
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Writing is always a response to life for me. People I meet, places I visit something inspiring that someone is saying or doing.
5. Tell us what do you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favorite writing exercise with our readers?
For favorite exercises, Julia Cameron’s ‘Artists Way’ is a wonderful resource. She is so gentle and encouraging and at the same time has a powerful way of persuading you that you need to write.
Cara Munro is a registered Nurse. Her work has appeared in Eureka Street and the book ‘Learnings – Lessons we are learning about living together.’ She won first prize in the 2009 Margaret Dooley Award. Her story, An Arrangement, is published in Small Wonder.
Earworms festive season sale
Earworms Sale – 50% off until Feb 1!!!!
To celebrate the festive season, our short Australian audio stories are now on sale at half price. So this means you can grab yourself a 20-minute short story for as little as $0.99. Stock up for that summer road trip you have planned. Or if you’re working during January, download some stories to listen to on your commute. Available only from the Spineless Wonders website.
MP3 or CD?
The great thing about Earworms is you can download the audio files then listen to them on any device – your mp3 player, your smart phone or your laptop. Or you can burn the stories onto a CD and play them on your stereo or in your car. Step-by-step instructions are available on our Earworms tab on our website.
Audio trailers
You can try before you buy. Each story has an audio trailer plus links to author interviews. There are full length audio stories from our anthology, Escape, from our single author collections and from invited contributors. Plus microfiction and prose poems available – just use the pull-down menu on the Audio Tab.
New audio tracks
We will be adding new audio tracks throughout the year and we will soon have a brand new website devoted to our Earworms platform. Check this website or Spineless Wonders facebook page for updates.
Australian Icons competition results
SPINELESS WONDERS is proud to announce the results of the Australian Icons Prose Poetry and Microfiction competition, judged by Carol Jenkins. Our warmest congratulations go to:
WINNER ($300)
Mark O’Flynn, under the maw of luna park
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Richard Holt, Bush burial
Stu Hatton, down south
Trina Denner, Playing Outside
Paul Mitchell, The Old Man and the Pool
COMMENDED
Monica Goldberg, Leap of Faith
Zoe Annabel Davies, Friday Fries and Sunday Sundaes
Paul Kew, Saturday Night on Jonson St
Lynette Washington, The Swarm
Richard Holt, The Swimmer
Liam Copland, Top Floor Dogma
Caroline Reid, Who likes custard?
All twelve finalists will have their work published in our upcoming anthology, Stoned Crows & other Australian icons, along with over 20 other entries which have been selected by our editors, Julie Chevalier and Linda Godfrey. For updates on this new publication, click our RSS feed or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Long Story winner – Felicity Volk
What Amanda Lohrey said about Felicity Volk’s winning story – Go, you are sent forth (Ite, missa est)
‘ I chose this as the winner because it is a fully developed story. It took me somewhere interesting, it surprised me at several turns, i.e. it developed, and developed interestingly, and it took some bold risks in terms of subject matter. It has a subtle sub-text and a metaphorical dimension that takes it beyond the generic conventions of mere naturalism. It is well written in the sense that from the very beginning it has strong conviction of tone, an innate narrative authority and the dialogue is realistic but never feels formulaic or predictable. And finally, the main character has a complex sensibility with is rendered on the page with seeming effortlessness.’ 
Go, You Are Sent Forth
What effect does being without sexual intimacy have on our sense of identity? Exploring this question through the experience of a retired nun, Berenice, this story is also about the compromise required to sustain relationships when the people we love move beyond our reach, and the grace necessary to send them forth, with or without us.
Felicity’s story will be available as a Spineless Wonders eSingle, as part of the Amanda Lohrey Selects series.
Meet Felicity Volk
Daughter of two English teachers, both poets, Felicity Volk considers her story rightly begins with the sentence, “In the beginning was the word”. The printed word and the spoken – her father’s mellifluous voice reading each evening from Tolkien, Kenneth Grahame, the Bible – gave Felicity’s young world its rhythm, its poetry, its honey.
Felicity studied English literature at the University of Queensland and wrote short stories and award-winning poetry around other more directed academic pursuits – an arts/law degree. She set off to Canberra on graduation to work for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), swapping the pleasure of crafting words for herself, for the purse of crafting words for others.
An insistent voice called her back to her own blank page after diplomatic postings in Bangladesh and Laos, and following the birth of her two daughters. With support from the Eleanor Dark Foundation (Varuna – the Writers’ Centre) in the form of two residential fellowships and a grant from artsACT (the ACT Chief Minister’s Department), Felicity wrote a collection of short stories – several of which have won awards – and her first novel, Lightning, which will be published by Picador in 2013.
Felicity continues to enjoy her work at DFAT where she is currently the department’s adviser to Australia’s Global Ambassador for Women and Girls. She is working on her second novel.
Felicity lives in Canberra with her two daughters who are her heart’s delight.
Runner Up
Marian Matta’s Danny Boy
‘This also is very well written and beautifully paced. It could have been schematic and even crudely didactic but it’s a very strategic piece of story-telling that unwinds its skein with great care and subtlety and again, it surprised me in a good way. I didn’t see its revelation coming. The writer has a fine turn of phrase and an ability to generate genuine suspense.’ AMANDA LOHREY
Meet Marian Matta
For decades Marian Matta wrote whatever was called for, from medical articles to film scripts, but she turned her attention to short stories in 2006 after being inspired by Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and discovering the realm of fan fiction. A grand-mother, history tragic, Internet junkie and circus student, she lives in the hills outside Melbourne, and is pleased to call Heath Ledger her muse. Marian won the 2012 Hal Porter Award.
Runner Up
Joanna Atherfold Finn’s Jesus Sandals and Anchovette
‘Very engaging – manifest talent here. The child’s voice is artfully natural and the writer deploys her descriptive powers in such a way that they are consistent with a child’s point of view and language skills. In addition, the use of the second person is adroitly handled and the dialogue is excellent – minor characters conveyed with great economy.’ AMANDA LOHREY
Meet Joanna Atherfold Finn
Joanna Atherfold Finn writes and teaches in Port Stephens. She received the University Medal in English and is currently completing a creative writing PhD at the University of Newcastle. She has had short stories and articles published in anthologies and journals.
IWD Award ceremony
Results of The Carmel Bird Award (Women’s Long Stories) were announced in Canberra at the Electric Shadow Bookshop on Thursday, March 7, the eve of International Women’s Day. Read a lively account of the evening by finalist and blogger, Marjorie Lewis-Jones, here.
Spineless Wonders asks Jane Skelton
1. Who are the short fiction authors you admire (Australian or otherwise, alive or dead)?
Patrick White. He was a great short fiction writer, as well as novelist. Have read and re-read his stories, especially the collection, The Cockatoos. I still read them and discover new things. The novella, A Woman’s Hand contains some of the best prose I’ve ever read. Gillian Mears is another favourite. Her short story collection, A map of the Gardens, is brilliant. I like it for its variety of styles, some really experimental, and others more ‘traditional’. Her stories stay with me – not just the story but the images and the emotions they evoke. There are so many short fiction writers I love – David Foster Wallace, Murakami, Gabriel García Márquez. I’ve long loved the writers of the American South – Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, and Carson McCullers’s novellas and stories.
2. What is the most memorable story you have read? And why does it stand out for you?
A story by American writer Brad Watson stands out – a jewel of a story, ‘Agnes of Bob’. It’s about an elderly woman with one eye, and her one-eyed bulldog, Bob. The writing is spare, yet the all the elements of the story come together to create something unique. On the surface it’s simple, yet contained in it are the big issues – life and death.
3. What do you like about the short story form?
A story can encapsulate a world, or a moment. It’s a form that can vary widely in length, style and structure. It’s a form that can be played with. I think it’s more literary than the novel, more akin to poetry.
4. How would you describe your own writing?
I like to explore the Gothic side of things – the ‘uncanny’ in the everyday.
5. Which of your stories are you most fond of right at this moment and why?
In the collection Lives of the Dead, I’m fond of the story, ‘At the Fence’. The descriptions of the river flowing through the uranium miner character, in contrast to the desert images, works well.
6. Where do the ideas for your stories come from? (Take us through an example)
I usually carry a notebook (a paper one) and I write things down using a pen. I like to walk a lot, and let rhythms and words come into my head, and then I write them down. Or else I’ll write down a dream, or bits of a conversation I’ve heard. Stories almost always come out these scribblings. It’s the description I like best, when writing, the images. I’m not so interested in the ‘story’, or ‘plot’, if there is one. In the ‘Stones’ story, in Lives of the Dead, the images came from the bush and streets in the Blue Mountains. There was a homeless man living in the bush nearby, and the dog in the story is based on his dog, Jack. (Though the man in the story is nothing like this man.) The narrative is based on a letter in an old Blue Mountains Gazette, about another homeless man. These things eventually came together to make the story.
7. What is your writing process – from idea to publication?
The images come first, then a narrative gets wrapped around them, or joins them up.
I write the first draft in long-hand, then turn to the computer for subsequent drafts. There is something about writing by hand – it seems to me there’s more of a direct link between page and eye, or mind, it’s more like drawing. Sometimes I can’t read my own writing, and the mis-readings might suggest other things, which can be useful. A story usually goes through many drafts, they rarely come out ‘fully-formed’. Often they take years. A draft might be discarded, then years later I’ll have fresh perspective on it, go back to it and re-work it. ‘Looking After Cecily’ in the Lives of the Dead collection, was a rare story that did come out in one go. I wrote it in an afternoon, and the final draft is not that much different to the first.
Do you go it alone or are others involved?
There are always others involved in the process. I never show anyone anything until I think it’s a final draft. Then it’s read by my partner, who is also a writer, or other writing friends, and inevitably I realise many more changes are needed. The stories in Lives of the Dead were rigorously edited, even though most had been previously published in journals. The editing process can be difficult, and intense, but well worth the effort. I think all the stories in Lives of the Dead are improved because of it.
8. Do you feel the short story form is valued in Australia? What makes you say this?
No. Although I’d been published quite widely in journals and anthologies, it was impossible to get a collection published. Publishers always told me they don’t publish short story collections because they don’t sell. I never believed it. I love reading great stories, as do many of my friends. Thank goodness for Spineless Wonders and other small publishers who are changing the trend.
9. How do you feel about your work being published in non-print forms such as digital and audio?
Fabulous. I love the idea of my work getting out there in diverse forms – it’s sure to reach wider audiences.
10. What advice would you like to offer Spineless Wonders?
Keep doing what you are doing! SW is on the right track, or slime trail.
Jane Skelton has published short fiction in a range of literary journals and anthologies over the past 20 years, including in Hecate, Island Magazine, Australian Short Stories, Overland, Overland Express (internet journal), Going Down Swinging, Hobo, Hidden Hands, Idiom, and Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing. Her novel ‘earth eaters’ was a winner in the 2010 LitLink Unpublished Manuscript awards. In 2006 she was the recipient of a Literature Board (Australia Council) grant which had assisted her in completing ‘earth eaters’. She has since completed another novel, ’1983′. Jane works in the non-government community sector in western Sydney and lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
Stoned Crow: Mark O’Flynn
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Stoned Crows & other Australian icons?
I had collected a bunch of short aphorisms over several years that appealed to me. These took the form of pearls of wisdom from a range of different sources, including philosophy, haiku, other poets and many others. I was wondering what to do with them, then, during a dry spell, I thought I would rewrite them, distort and otherwise try to engage in a little private dialogue with them.
2. Tell us about your process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
Usually I start fast, then slow down. Initial speed, once the idea strikes, is important for getting the basic bones down, then I go through a long process of adding, revising, taking away, layering. This case was different however. Here it was a gradual gestation. Collecting the aphorisms felt more intuitive than anything like research, and I think too much research for me tends to stifle the idea. So how much research would I ever do? Just enough. In this case the idea of the dialogue with the aphorisms was a vague and amorphous one. It was never all that clear in my mind what I was doing. For example I used Chekhov’s last words (‘It’s been so long since I tasted champagne’). I then rewrote, or rather bounced off this and all of the other sayings so as to personalize them, and sometimes invert them perhaps to suggest the opposite. Plus I added in a few of my own in the hope it might all hang together. You can see how I have completely distorted Chekhov’s words, and most of the others you wouldn’t be able to pick from the original, so much so that I’ve forgotten where they came from. I’d have to go and look. Here’s one: the first sentence derives from a Zen saying: ‘Leap and the net will appear.’ Much better than my line.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Again, probably intuition. Trust the gut, trust the ear. Does it feel right? Read; read more would be the single most valuable piece of advice you can say to anyone. As Mark Twain said: He who does not read has no advantage over he who can not. Something like that. As for titles, I find if they don’t come instantly, then they can be hard work. Often the title is buried somewhere within the piece. If I have any rules I try regularly to break them. I’m also aware of trying not to repeat myself (too much).
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
That’s harder, and I think it changes all the time. Paintings, other writers are always good to kick start a piece of writing. Inspiration is a bit of a loaded word, so I probably think more in terms of what gives the impetus. Often this is a small thing; a fleeting image, an overheard line, an anecdote picked up from somewhere. In the other piece in Stoned Crows I read the line in Song of Songs – ‘How graceful are your feet in sandals’ and I thought why just sandals? and started thinking about shoes. I don’t know why, but the line appealed to me. I’m getting better at writing the idea down straight away, but it’s not always possible.
5. Tell us what you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
Apart from using the above kick-starters (reading, looking at paintings etc) I would recommend going for a walk. If ever I get stuck with something, or as you say, want to get started again, I go for a walk and by the time I get back the problem is often solved, or else I’ve seen something interesting that feeds what I’ve been thinking about. I suppose it’s a way of subverting a linear way of thinking, of getting out of my head.
An exercise I find useful is the acrostic form. It’s mechanical, but can lead to some interesting discoveries and can be as simple or complex as you like.
Changing the tense is also a useful exercise.
Mark O’Flynn lives in the Blue Mountains. After studying at the Victorian College of the Arts, and working for a number of years in the theatre where several plays were produced, Mark turned to fiction and also poetry. A first collection of poems The Too Bright Sun was published in 1996. A second book of poems The Good Oil was published in 2000. What Can Be Proven, a third collection of poems was published in 2007. A selection of these poems, Falling Awake, was published by Picaro Press in 2010. He won Third Prize in the 2012 Newcastle Poetry Prize.
His short stories, articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines both here and overseas. Grassdogs was published in 2006 after winning the Harper Collins/Varuna manuscript prize. False Start, A Memoir of things Best Forgotten, is published by Finch Publishing and his latest new novel, The Forgotten World, is published by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins Australia.
Stoned Crow: Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Stoned Crows & other Australian icons?There were a number of inspirations for these prose poems.
‘At Sculpture by the Sea’ is probably self-explanatory. It was a damaging experience in many ways.
‘The Mind Travels’ was my awareness that the mind goes as the speed of light, but the pen travels slower and that the disjunction is constant. I decided to record just one complete disjunction. It seemed to me that trout were a rather lovely image for the wriggling and beauteous operation of the mind which I experience as three-dimensional, not linear.
‘Diurnal: Slurry Heights’ was my first attempt to record my daily experience of living in Surry Hills in Sydney. I lived there for 11 years, the longest period I lived anywhere in my life. I couldn’t understand, before writing this poem under self-imposed compulsion, why I had not written about my ‘diurnal’ experience before. I’m still not clear because it’s a wonderfully diverse community.
2. Tell us about your process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
For these prose poems, I worked at them in stages. Initially, I poured detail into my journal, longhand, and then selected phrases which I thought most telling. A fluent response to the subject, followed by a refining process, helps me when I am crafting a prose poem. It is a different process from other forms of free verse poems. Generally, I allow myself a lighter touch with prose poems—I may use speech rhythms and syntax; or experiment by removing all indefinite articles; or mash images and let the flow-on of the lines influence the meaning.
If I am disciplined, I might catch a rainbow trout on the page and if I’m a good journeyman, I’ll skin and fillet it adequately. Sometimes, the product is thought worth preserving (pickled, dried, smoked?) [Was that a dad-joke metaphor?]
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Hard question. It’s a very sensitive and important thing, the first and last line question, not that you think about it overtly while you are writing. However, they — and the title — are very important to the editing process, I find. There are no rules, so far as I’m aware, but there are many things to be tried out. Sometimes ‘title’ is about theme or grand statement, other times it’s about obliquity or intimation; the last line/lines are about suggestion, other times about resolution, others about perception. It’s not possible to be legalistic about them. It’s a matter of tone, purpose, subtlety.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
I could go on for about a month. Charles Wright, Federica Garcia Lorca and The King James Bible all send me into fits of creativity. Solitude and simplicity. Poetry which I read in journals, saturating myself in entire books – reading from cover to cover and re-reading; reading articles in journals, essays, attending poetry events at writers festivals. Poetics papers given on panels … for some reason they are catalytic. I find the original synaptic connections which spark my poems are fleeting, that they are easily silenced or noised-out by everyday city life. To capture them I carry a notebook. After a weekend in the country where I have started to attend to the ideas and to heed the excitement of them coming up to the surface, I drive home and have to pull into the side of the road about 5 or more times, slam on the handbrake and pull out the notebook and start scribbling. As far as I’m concerned, this is a state of ecstasy. Cheap, huh?
5. Tell us what you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
Oh yes, I know this so well! To quieten the self-critic, I use the classic journal writing exercise. It’s more fun done with a writer-friend in a café (and dispels neurosis) but works solo too. I focus on each sense in turn and record without stopping what the sense is reporting to me about the world. I might allow myself a time in which to complete the work. I don’t change what I’ve written, I don’t edit it, I don’t worry about gaps in the information-feed coming through, my aim is just to keep being a channel for the sense’s report and always to keep writing, until the time is up. Then I turn the page and go on to the next exercise. I try not to judge myself or the product, just take pleasure in the process. If I’m with someone who enjoys doing these exercises, we may read our work aloud to each another (it’s very interesting hearing the product of the other person’s senses given the same environment and we will often be able to surprise ourselves with the quality of what we are reading/listening to). I do a couple of these before then giving myself a long, long time to continue to write—I might open a book, close my eyes and stab the pen or pencil on the page. Wherever it lands, I transcribe a phrase into my journal and then start with this phrase and write for a given period of time, say 20 mins, or for 3 full pages of the journal. Just the same as the sensory exercise, no stopping, no scratching out, no editing.
It is, of course, an artificial technique. However, be amazed by where your brain has led you by the time you are on that third page.
Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s second collection of poetry, Possession (Five Islands Press, 2010) won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s C J Dennis Prize and the 2010 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and was shortlisted for both the 2011 ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the 2011 NSW Premier’s Prize for poetry. Her first book of poetry, The Bundanon Cantos, was a Sydney Morning Herald Best Book of 2003. She was a committee member of the Poets Union Inc (NSW) and co-edited its journal, Five Bells. She was born in England, lives in Sydney, works in law and is a director of Australian Poetry.
Stoned Crow: Paul Mitchell
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Stoned Crows & other Australian icons?
‘The Veteran’ came out of a number of dream sequences I’d written that formed part of a novel. Now in about its sixth draft. I no longer needed them in the novel, but I always liked them. I decided to play around with joining them together, condensed, into a dreamy prose poem. ‘The Old Man and the Pool’ came out of an experience I had at the pool, strangely enough. And I wanted to play with The Old Man and the Sea in a contemporary context then blow it all apart with some bicycle references.
2. Tell us about your process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
I don’t write a lot of prose poetry or microfiction. But if they come that way I don’t hold them back. Just let them be themselves.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
Again, I don’t have any advice about this kind of writing. Except to say that if it takes this form, let it. Don’t let a good piece of writing become ordinary by trying to force it to fit another form.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
When it comes to prose poetry, Charles Simic, Charles Wright and Kevin Brophy work this territory with aplomb. Simic, especially, makes me want to argue with him, in a cheeky way, with a prose poem fired in his direction.
5. Tell us what you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I remember not being able to write poetry after my first book came out. I panicked. Then I realized I had about nine voices in my head. So I let them argue and then melded most of what they had to say into the poems for my second book. I should have called it a Univocal Decadron, not Awake Despite the Hour.
Paul Mitchell has published a short story collection, Dodging the Bull (Wakefield Press) and two collections of poetry, Awake Despite the Hour (Five Islands Press) and Minorphysics (IP). paul-mitchell.com.au
Stoned Crow: Barrie Walsh
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Stoned Crows & other Australian icons?
Inspiration for Howbeit I Howszat came from Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival 2013 at the time of writing to Stoned Crows.
2.Tell us about your process. Take us through an example if you want.
My thought process is lateral. I definitely research. I do a lot of editing. I work intuitively, although it’s not pure as such. My hunches over-indulge in conspiracy.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
None… I don’t consider myself a writer.
Note: I include some background that may or may not be relevant.
For 20-years I’d an studio architectural practice in New Zealand & so also wrote specifications, during which I did architectural competitions, practical [winner gets commission ] & theoretical [winner & also ran get prestige for future clients ].
Architecture has a story. Its blurb is the written brief. Architect as narrator flushes it out into a story. The architect’s POV is restricted by the aim to satisfy the client, who controls the plot & much of the themes & dialogue.
Practical architecture comes with a brief & so the above allegory applies, but theoretical architecture is more arbitrary in every respect, so my technical writing branched into writing briefs etc. as both architect & client.
Cut to the chase: my business failed after years of highs & lows such is the bust & boom building industry & I’d gone off on a tangent of conspiracy architecture.
I moved to Australia in 1997 & concentrating on theoretical architecture, over the last few years I started entering writing competition & submitting to writing outlets, furthering the above storyboard.
As to you question: first & last lines are important, as is the title & everything else; like a plan evolves from concept, thru sketches to working drawing & then into the built world with refinement throughout.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
I’ve always read both fact & fiction & continue to do so. Like there’s a lot good & some great buildings about with much dross, so is literature – I include all popular genres in this, as that’s where most of my favourite writers are classified.
5. Tell us what you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
I’ve no answer to this question. Don’t give up is seems too obtuse.
Barrie Walsh is a fruitpicker in Griffith NSW writing a collection of short stories & the ocassional poem on conspiracy architecture under the working title Noctural U-Turn Suite [NUTS]. A handful of stories & one poem have been published. He has a misguided background in both practical & theoretical architecture. He is published in Cordite and Mary: a journal of new writing (forthcoming).
Stoned Crow: Caroline Reid
1. What inspired you to write the prose poem/microfiction which is published in Stoned Crows & other Australian icons?
An idea to write a trilogy of 3 very short stories, each with a character called Michael in it. Could be the same Michael, or could be three different Michaels . This is the first story in that trilogy. There’s also a writing exercise I was thinking of where you tell a lie about yourself. So that inspired me to make the storyteller in ‘Custard’ a compulsive liar and I discovered fairly quickly he was a kid living in the suburbs, obsessed with famous American actors.
2. Tell us about your process. (Do you start sparse and widen out, or do you write down every possible association and cut back? Do you research the subject matter you are writing about? Is it pure intuition?) Take us through an example if you want.
A lot of intuition. I don’t have much structure before I begin writing. In ‘Custard’ I tapped into the voice of the narrator fairly quickly – what sort of stories he was telling about himself, (that’s not always the case, btw). Also, I was waiting for Michael to turn up in the story so I listened out for that character.
I start fairly broadly. Sometimes too broadly and I discover I’m trying to shove 2 or 3 stories in the one, so that involves some tricky decision making. Sometimes I narrow it down too quickly and need to go explore more, in a different scene or location –it’s like there’s something missing and I need to dig broader to find what it is.
3. What advice do you have for other writers ? about the first or last line? About how to choose the title? Do you follow any rules?
I don’t have any advice.
I tend towards symbolism in my titles.
4. Who or what inspires your writing?
Images. Other writers. Overheard conversation. Stories people tell me. Places. Dreams. People. Personal experience. I’m inspired by the idea of magic in reality.
5. Tell us what you do if you haven’t written anything in a while and you want to get started writing again? Could you share your favourite writing exercise with our readers?
If I haven’t written for a while I just listen for a bit to the natter that’s going on in my mind and begin from there, just a writing ramble and often something turns up on the page that’s worth pursuing. Or I just begin by describing a place, opening up the senses, then focus on one thing in great detail and start to ask questions – why is this important? who does it belong to? Then someone enters that place – more questions: who are they? what is the first thing they do? what connection do they have to this place? what is about to happen?
Caroline Reid’s plays have been performed and published, as have her stories. She’s finishing off a first collection, Satisfied, and curates Spineless Wonders Presents … a short evening of tall stories at Adelaide’s Wheatsheaf Hotel. carolinereidwrites.blogspot.com.au
Spineless Wonders Presents … a short evening of tall stories.
“A reliably enchanting event … closer to New York’s Selected Shorts than anything else in Australia.” (Overland)
@ The Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton, Adelaide
Short story readings at The Wheatsheaf Hotel in Adelaide where professional actors read work by contemporary Australian authors. These nights began in 2011, born out of a desire to bring people together and to provide a platform for new, quality Australian writing. Many of the writers are published by Spineless Wonders. Stories read so far include those by Jennifer Mills, Tom Cho, Ryan O’Neill, Julie Chevalier, Kim Westwood, Josephine Rowe, A S Patric, Cameron Raynes and Shady Cosgrove. Actors include Emma Beech, Craig Behenna, Patrick Frost, Tamar Lee, Holly Myers and Hew Parham.
This entertaining collection includes a romp of a novella called The Rattler, as well as short stories and micro fictions all set in and around contemporary Melbourne. Sometimes serious, sometimes seriously playful –always written in breathtakingly beautiful prose – these stories uncover the heartbreaking tragedies, slow-burning emotions and serendipity of ordinary lives.
Cover image by Miles Allinson, illustrated by Miles Allinson & Maxine Beneba Clarke
Praise for The Rattler & other stories:
“Spare and taut, sometimes tricky, sometimes shocking, yet always deeply and satisfyingly tender. A great collection.”
Paddy O’Reilly.
“An explosive mix of muscular prose and sharp originality. In this collection, A. S. Patric proves himself to be a writer who must be taken very seriously.” Vanessa Gebbie, author of Short Circuit, A Guide to the Art of the Short Story.
“A.S. Patric is that rarest of writers- he is absolutely fearless. His stories take risks, his characters soar and his prose sings. Be careful. These stories might cut you.” Ryan O’Neill.
In Permission to Lie, Julie Chevalier casts a curious eye into many different worlds. Her characters ride the citybound bus route, spend the night in a nudist colony and wait tables. Quirky and beautifully-written, these stories provide insights that ring with integrity and compassion.
‘A new voice in Australian fiction, wry, gritty, knowing and true.’
Fiona McGregor, Indelible Ink
Read an interview with the author, here.
What makes a man?
In this collection of short stories, Pierz Newton John moves through the full range of masculine experience, with an openness not afraid to show men at their most lonely, sexual, loving, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes abusive. First touch of a woman’s body in a cold and foreign land, tender moments between father and son, the deep love of a father separated from his child, treachery and opportunism mixed up with loneliness and internet dating, the casual violence of young boys exploring the world, rites of passage from young rebels to comfortable suburbanites, and what men feel and think about women. In Pierz Newton John’s stories it always come back to emotion?tenderness with children, warmth with wives after dreams of alienation, the pain of treacherous girlfriends, the loneliness of men. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose…….the reader is lulled by the seamless prose, undercurrents of contemporary music, the urbane writing, the suburban settings, but it is all happening behind closed doors.
Read an interview with the author, here
Purchase a copy, here.
In these seventeen stories, Melbourne writer, Mary Manning, looks at the ways people are shaped, or damaged, by their circumstances. The results may sometimes be humorous, sometimes tragic. Whether set on a tram, along a highway or on an outback road?it is the journey, the characters and the telling of the tale that will capture your attention.
Cover and illustrations by Paden Hunter
‘Mary Manning takes her stories to places few writers would dare to go. She ranges across different styles with ease in a unique voice that is tart, tight and compulsively readable.’ PADDY O’REILLY
Read our interview with the author, Mary Manning here
To purchase, click here
If you like your genres with a bit of edge, you’ll love this diverse collection of stories from Spineless Wonders.
Features award-winning writers such as Ryan O’Neill, Jen Mills, Andy Kissane, Louise Swinn, Julie Chevalier, A.S. Patric and Kim Westwood as well as stories chosen by Sophie Cunningham in the inaugural Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award.
Contains illustrations by talented young artist, Paden Hunter.
‘Quality short fiction, packed with surprises. Prepare to be transported.’ Marion Halligan
Purchase here
Read interviews with our contributors, here.
Listen to audio samples here.
An anthology of prose poems and microfiction from 30 Australian writers.
- Includes award-winning writers Michael Farrell, Keri Glastonbury, Judith Beveridge and Peter Boyle.
- Features prose poems and microfiction selected by competition judge, joanne burns.
- Cover and evocative sketches by talented artist, Paden Hunter.
- Read interviews with our contributors here
- Click here to here audio
To purchase, click here
Escape audio stories Vol. 2
Playlist
Those Gauls Must Be Crazy – Claire Aman 14:36
The End of the Beginning – Meredyth Cilento 25:50
Poioumenon – John Steiner 8:22
The Gardener – Susan McCreery 21:50
For more details about these stories and their authors and to hear audio samples from this CD click here. Also available as mp3.
Escape – audio stories Vol. 1
Playlist
Paper Anniversary – SJ Finn/JR Davidson 19:35
Under the Skin – Sue Booker 21:39
Unnameable – M. Giacometti 20:14
Home – Yin Lin 13:36
For more details about these stories and their authors and to hear audio samples from this CD, click here. Also available as mp3.
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