The delightful Mirandi Riwoe, author of the short story collection The Burnished Sun, as well as the novels Stone Sky Gold Mountain and Sunbirds, talked with me over Zoom about her meticulous planning processes and how to mine history for the seeds of short stories. 

Mirandi points to Maxine Beneba Clarke’s short story collection Foreign Soil as the book that showed her she could write short fiction, and also refers to Elizabeth Jolley as an inspiration. She also mentions William Somerset Maugham’s short story The Four Dutchmen as direct motivation for her novella The Fish Girl (I make a joke in this episode about Mirandi “Wide Sargasso Sea”-ing Maugham – if you haven’t read Jean Rhys’s tragic and deeply compelling retelling of Jane Eyre, I highly recommend it). We talk about Mirandi’s short story Annah the Javanese (linked here to the Griffith Review, behind a paywall), which speaks to Paul Gauguin’s painting of the same name, and Mirandi mentions Manet’s Olympia as a visual art touchpoint for the same story.  

Read more about Mirandi at UQP’s website.