At family Christmas dinner, my young cousin was surprised to find out I have a regular day job. ‘Aren’t you an author?’ she said. I told her how much I make from royalties and now she thinks I’m a total loser. But yes: I do have a job, writing about conservation on private land for the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, and I have the largely unpaid job of writing novels and now I have another job! As of now, I am Island magazine’s fiction editor (print) - they’ve even added me to their ‘our team’ page. I’m taking over from Ben Walter (my co-editor on Breathing space - Tasmania is a small place) who has been doing a superb job bringing some strange and surreal stories to print. I hope to do something equally as interesting. If you’ve written a story you’re very proud of, you should send it in when submissions open.
I got to talk a lot about the geographic detail of my early books in this interview with ‘The Australian Legend’, and about how and why I started writing for publication, which was very fun. Bill is a gargantuan reader and reviewer of Australian writing, with a keen interest in speculative fiction and women writers.
And I’ve been reading some things including, unsurprisingly, Island. Island 166 had three pieces that made me glad to have eyes (which does make think - wouldn’t it be great if there were audio versions of these for people who prefer ears?). Keely Jobe wrote about what ‘place’ means when you’re in love with your home but conflicted about the ideas of private property and of settlement (an essay I’d like to steal and pretend I wrote). Kate Kruimink wrote the strangest, most delicious story about being a gruesome mermaid. And Michael Blake’s tale of a bloke falling over highlighted what a good job Ben Walter did of finding exquisite, odd fiction. All three authors are Tasmanian, so this is your regular reminder that Tasmania is producing some of the best writing around.
I’m working on a book (ambitious!) about what we think nature is and why we think that, and I’m about to hook into Cosmopolis, so wish me luck. I also recently read ‘Other ways to see’, from Dark Mountain, considering the act of looking at a view, how it feels when the view changes and disappears, why we look at some views and not others.
Sometimes I worry about the influence of Turner and Ruskin here, that in capturing this valley on canvas and page, in turning it from place to landscape and description, they somehow flattened it, established an official way to see: an official view, an official viewing point, an official way to relate to it. But places, like the people in them, are not static. The view of the Lune Valley hasn’t always been the loveliest scene in England. Turner’s painting may be considered a pastoral idyll, but what he actually encountered when visiting Kirkby Lonsdale was an apocalypse.
I’m off to the UK in March so maybe I’ll go to Kirkby Lonsdale and see what I can see. Meanwhile, I’m going to spend some time thinking about carnivorous mushrooms.