First Word

It was an enormous privilege to have Adam Thompson, author of the incredible short story collection Born Into This, join me for the last episode of this season of the podcast. We caught up over Zoom to talk about creating and experiencing joy in fiction, writing in service of your community, and what happens when you stay open to opportunity. Adam mentions Nathan Maynard’s play The Season as the catalyst that turned him on to writing as a viable creative pathway. We briefly discuss Adam’s short story Honey, which won him the Tamar Valley Writers Festival award, and which he’s kind of sick of talking about (though that shouldn’t stop you reading it, it’s amazing). The mentorship program that catapulted Adam into his current career is the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program. Adam mentions Tony Birch, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Kate Kennedy as short story authors he loves, and shouts out Wells Tower’s collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned as a book he returns to over and over.Read more about Adam at UQP’s website. 

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.

Multi-award-winning Queensland short story writer Laura Elvery and I caught up over Zoom to talk about her astonishing record of sweeping story prizes – as well as what it's like to write about women winning prizes of another kind. In this episode we talk about several writing awards, some of which are now defunct. The ones you can still enter (depending on your location) are the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction, the Nielma Sidney Short Story Prize, and the Kill Your Darlings New Australian Fiction Anthology. Laura mentions her short stories Replica, Brushed Bright Bones, Trick of the Light and La Otra, which are all published in her collection Trick of the Light, and Frost and The Fix from the collection Ordinary Matter. She also recommends the deeply affecting short story Dreamers by Melissa Lucashenko, the virtuosic start and finish of Abigail Ulman’s Warm Ups, from the collection Hot Little Hands, and refers to Julie Koh, George Saunders and Tony Birch as sources of inspiration. Read some of Laura’s short stories and find out where to buy her books at her website. 

Fiction, comedy and TV writer Jack Vening is a funny bloke. We caught up over Zoom to talk about George Saunders, writing humour, and how to elegantly devastate your readers. In the course of our conversation Jacky mentions several authors he draws inspiration from, including Garielle Lutz, Donald Barthelme, Joy Williams and Benjamin Weissman. He recommends the episode featuring Roberto Bolaño’s Gomez Palacio by Daniel Alarcon on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which you can also read yourself here). We also talk about the excellent Story Club by George Saunders, and Jack’s own newsletter Small Town Grievances. The short stories of Jack’s that we talk about are After the stampede, published by Kill Your Darlings in 2020, Local Curses, published by Hobart in 2021, and Night Guard, published in The Nervous Breakdown in 2019. Find out more about Jack, including a selection of his short stories, at his website.

Ben Walter is a Tasmanian author of fiction, essays, poetry and experimental prose, whose writing has recently appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Saturday Paper and Griffith Review. His most recent book is the short story collection What Fear Was. We caught up at his home in the Huon Valley to talk about sources of inspiration, and following your nose into your prose. The stories we discuss in this episode are It’s all happening here, published in Overland in 2016; For the perishable body, published by the Saturday Paper in 2020 (behind a paywall), and The Bridge, published in the Griffith Review also in 2020. You can find out more about Ben, including where to buy his new book, at his website. 

Author, essayist and academic Ellena Savage and I caught up over Zoom to talk about sources of inspiration, discipline, waking up in the middle of the night/the very early morning to write, and our mutual desire to throw our devices off tall buildings. The podcast that I mention in this episode where Ellena talks about writing forms is actually not the magnificent ‘Take Home Reading’, hosted by Stella Charls at the Wheeler Centre (although you should definitely listen to that one here) - I got it mixed up with the equally excellent Sydney Writers Festival podcast ‘Reckoning and Retribution’, hosted by Maeve Marsden and featuring fellow Australian non-fiction writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley. Ellena recommended the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols as writerly must-haves; she also mentioned the importance of building a library of reference books in general (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, books of quotations). For more on the Christian community getting woken up in the middle of the night for procreative sex, check out Michel Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’ [PDF]. Ellena’s book of essays, Blueberries, was published in 2020; you can buy a copy here. 

Brisbane writer Yen-Rong Wong and I caught up over Zoom to talk about how and why to write about race and identity, addressing your younger self with your creative practice, and her idiosyncratic writing and editing style. I highly recommend checking out Yen-Rong’s curated selection of her writing here - it deals with growing up, race, culture, parents, and sexuality, in a really broad range of forms, from brief op-eds to lyrical reflections (and you should read her excellent reviews too - we love to see confidence borne out by talent!). The essay Yen-Rong mentions about her childhood and her parents’ approach to physical punishment is ‘The Trauma of Discipline’, published by Griffith Review - a long read, and a must-read. 

Melbourne author Sam van Zweden and I caught up over Zoom to talk about revisiting memory, writing mental health, the importance of having a dedicated “input day”, and how to turn a mango into a memoir. The books that Sam recommends in this episode are The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and Intimations by Zadie Smith (which is a book of essays Smith wrote and published during the early days of COVID019). She also gave a well-earned shout out to Eloise Grills, Liminal magazine, and Sydney Review of Books (particularly the Writers at Work series). Sam’s essay that I mention about periods of inactivity is ‘Learning to come back: on creativity and rest’, published in the Sydney Review of Books in 2019. Her debut memoir, Eating With My Mouth Open, is out now - you can buy it here. 

Award-winning Tasmanian novelist and all-round good bloke Robbie Arnott and I sat down together in Craig Farrell’s office studio in New Norfolk to talk about knowing what you want to say before you say it, editing hacks (drink the revolting tea), writing masculinity and resisting publishing trends that you know will be bad for you. Robbie’s essays that I mention in this episode are ‘Best Man in a Crisis’ in Kill Your Darlings, and ‘Birds and Knives’ in Meanjin, both of which come highly recommended. His most recent novel is The Rain Heron, which you can buy here. 

In the first episode of First Word's first season (!) Tasmanian novelist Erin Hortle and I sat down together to get really in-depth about the practical process of writing and editing (hot tip: have a clean room!), the shifting landscape of feminist literature, surfing, Tim Winton, and the sometimes indistinct line between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. The ABC conversation with Ben Folds, about the musician who asked the muse to come back at a more convenient time? That’s with Richard Fidler of the ABC, and the musician was Tom Waits. The catalysing text she mentions in this episode, that convinced her that one could in fact compose the mood of the surf, is Breath by Tim Winton. At one point I refer to Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (and highly recommend it), and also semi-accurately quote Ira Glass on the “taste gap”.Erin’s essays that I refer to in this episode are ‘The problem of sexiness in surf culture’ in Kill Your Darlings, and ‘Historicising ambergris in the anthropocene’ in the Australian Humanities Review. Her debut novel is The Octopus and I, and you can buy it here.