Texture and mood with Kathleen Jennings

In this episode, Amanda Niehaus chats with award-winning writer and illustrator Kathleen Jennings about stitching together her observations into stories and worlds, writing with texture and creating narratives using mood.

Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator and writer based in Brisbane, Australia. As an illustrator, she has won one World Fantasy Award (and been a finalist three other times), and has been shortlisted once for the Hugos, and once for the Locus Awards, as well as winning a number of Ditmars. As a writer, she has won a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J Bounds Award) and two Ditmars and been shortlisted for World Fantasy Awards, the Courier-Mail People’s Choice Book of the Year Award, the Crawford Award, the Australian Shadows Award, the Eugie Foster Memorial Award, and several Aurealis Awards.

Her British Fantasy Award-winning Australian Gothic debut Flyaway was published by Tor.com (USA) and Picador (Australia) in 2020, and her debut poetry collection Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion (part written travel-sketchbook, part poetry) was published by Brain Jar Press in 2020.

Purchase Flyaway
Purchase Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion
Read  The Wonderful Stag, or The Courtship of Red Elsie
Read  Observation Journal: Introduction
Read Observation Journal: Surfaces
Read Observation Journal: Variations on Descriptions

The Science Write Now (SWN) Podcast is a 3x/monthly podcast for people who love science and the arts. If you’re interested in learning more about great books, plays, and films; writing, research or editing; the lives of scientists; and creative insights into contemporary science; then you’ve come to the right place!

The SWN Podcast is hosted by Amanda Niehaus and Jessica White and produced by Taylor Mitchell with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.

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Our opening song is 'Balmain' by Pure Milk: https://www.triplejunearthed.com/artist/pure-milk.html

Transcript

Kathleen Jennings

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

book, writing, story, world, reading, genre, fairy tale, words, gothic, find, flyaway, people, kathleen, sense, australian, structure, landscape, mysteries, ideas, bit

SPEAKERS

Amanda Niehaus, Kathleen Jennings

Niehaus  05:55

Hello, and welcome to Science Write Now. This is Amanda Niehaus. And today I am here with writer and illustrator Kathleen Jennings, who is based in Brisbane, Australia. She's a multi award winning illustrator and writer of books including 'Travelogues', 'Vignettes, from Trains in Motion', and the blockbuster, Australian Gothic debut, 'Flyway'. Thank you for being here today. Kathleen.

Kathleen Jennings  06:25

Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.

Amanda Niehaus  06:27

Yay. I really want to talk about 'Fly Away' actually at the beginning of of chatting with you because I found it a very stunning book. So congratulations to you on that.

Kathleen Jennings  06:40

Thank you so much.

Amanda Niehaus  06:42

To me fly away is well, I'll give I'll give our listeners a bit of an overview of what the book is about. So it's it's a very evocative book about a young woman called Bettina Scott, who's living sort of a quiet outsider life in the outback town of Runagate, looking after her very unusual mother, after her father and brothers mysteriously disappear. and then a note appears and Bettina is compelled to discover what happened in this place that she lives and the role of her family in it. Your book is strange in all the very best ways and I'm not the only one to think so. 'Runaway' won the Sydney James Bounds Award for Best Newcomer at the 2021 British fantasy awards. Congratulations. 

Kathleen Jennings  07:28

Thank you very much.

Amanda Niehaus  07:29

And was shortlisted for the 2021 Courier Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award, which is phenomenal. So well done. One thing that strikes in this book is the way that you write landscape. Can you talk a bit about where the world of runaway Oh, so why do I keep saying this? I'm so sorry. Let's do this again, because I keep calling it runaway and I don't know why I'm doing that. You can actually write this in big letters. Okay, and we're going to start again, because I can't I don't know how long I've been saying run away. actually have the book right here. I'm an idiot. Okay, let's try this again. All right. All right. Hello, and welcome to Science write now. I'm Amanda Niehaus. And today I'll be chatting with author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings, who's based in Brisbane, Australia, but known worldwide I'm so sorry. Oh my god, now I've got like a hot flash. Okay. All right. Hi.   Welcome to Science write now, I'm Amanda Niehaus and today I'm chatting with author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings, a writer who's based in Brisbane, Australia. Kathleen has won far too many awards for me to list all at once, so I will include them later on in the podcast. But she has also illustrated for clients including tor.com, Little Brown, Simon and Schuster, Small Beer Press, all of our favourite indie presses around the world. So welcome today, Kathleen.

Kathleen Jennings  09:44

Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.

Amanda Niehaus  09:45

Yes. So today I would first like to start by chatting about your debut novel 'Flyaway', which was shortlisted and won some major awards including the Best Newcomer Award at the British Fantasy Awards this year and was shortlisted for the 2021 Courier MailPeople's Choice Queensland book of the year. So Flyaway—just to give our listeners a bit of an overview—Flyaway is what I found to be a very evocative book about a young woman called Bettina Scott, who's living a quiet outsider life in the outback town of runagate. She's looking after her unusual mother, after her father and brothers mysteriously disappear. And then everything changes when a note appears. And Bettina is compelled to discover what happened in this place that she lives and what role her family played in those changes. Your book is strange, in all the very best ways, Kathleen, congratulations. So one thing that strikes me in this book is the way that you write landscape. Can you talk a little bit about where the world of Flyaway comes from for you?

Kathleen Jennings  11:00

Yes, so I grew up mostly out in western Queensland, at the sort of Miles to Roma area. And I thought it was the most beautiful area growing up. And part of that was because I was filtering all the books, I was reading through that landscape, but it was genuinely very, very lovely. And growing up reading a lot of Australian books and Australian Gothic, which I am very fond of, I was never seeing the landscape represented the way I'd known that a lot of Australian Gothic, particularly, and Australian novels generally tends to take quite a dry, harsh, falling apart, terrifying view of the physical world, which is not illegitimate. But it didn't reflect what I was seeing, which was so many trees, this glittering golden silver light, this sense of it being infested by all of the stories that I've grown up on. And so when I wrote Flyaway, I very much wanted to consciously and deliberately try to write the world of it as both definitely Australian, but also very beautiful. Hmm,

Amanda Niehaus  12:14

Absolutely. And so what are some of the features of the landscape? I mean, you did mention the trees, but what are some of the other features that really sort of stand out in your memory and in your book.

12:25

The trees yes, and the light, there's this tinsley sort of light that you get a certain time today if the dry creek beds cutting through it and almost spinning shining discs, so spiderwebs in the trees, and we had a lot of ironbark scrub and in the evening, the light shining through it looks like it's like lanterns shining througah iron bars or something. So that light and the particular colours I wanted to capture. There's some amazing Australian painters who captured this dusty light and brilliance in a way that seemed very accurate to me. And as I was writing the book, I realised that I was getting to write in a painterly way. I am an illustrator, but he's a lot of lines and black and white work when I draw, and this was my chance to try and go full Tom Roberts on dusty light.

Amanda Niehaus  13:27

Can you could you describe that a little more what you mean by writing in a painterly way? That's it's really intriguing to me.

Kathleen Jennings  13:34

Sure, I wanted this was something that I again, was deliberately trying to do in Flyaway because I've been reading a few major Australian Gothic books, which I loved, including obviously Picnic at Hanging Rock, but also some by Shaun Tan and Rosalie Ham's 'The Dressmaker', all of which have a really strong visual vocabulary. It's fabric primarily in 'The Dressmaker'. It's literal paint in Shaun Tan's 'Tales From Outer Suburbia'. Joan Lindsay was an artist and she she was part of several big Australian artistic dynasties very much involved in the gallery world. And as I read her book, I was noticing many books named after a painting, a lot of painting they name checked in 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. So I wanted to try and use some of those techniques in Flyaway, which are then complicated by writing it largely in first person, from the point of view of character who wouldn't have seen a lot of art so I couldn't name check the paintings that I wanted to use. So I ended up actually looking at both photographs in my own memory and revisiting the area but also looking at paintings that really captured the correct feeling for me, and taking words from the painting whether it was the the quality of light the angles of shadows, the particular tones of colour, and describing the scenes easily those words. So almost describing a painting, which I wish I could have painted, but I can't.

Amanda Niehaus  15:09

Yeah, do you? Do you create inspiration boards when you're working on a project?

Kathleen Jennings  15:14

To varying extent, yes. And yes, when I certainly had not a huge number, but a few paintings pinned up around, almost not always to go, I'm going to take The Breakaway by Tom Robertss and use the light in that—although I did at one point. But to remind myself to aim for this, there's a very strong, there is a very strong Australian Gothic visual vocabulary, which has a lot of red  dirt and death and decaying houses and stuff, which I definitely used to varying extents. But it's a very strong pull. I think a lot of  Gothic is a very image heavy genre anyway, and all the sub genres of Gothic are. And there are certain visual elements that get heavily used, which are iconic, which can just summon the genre up straightaway. And I could feel as I was writing it, this incredible pool of decay and ugliness, the sort of abject decadence, eroding, corrosive, kind of visual vocabulary, and I didn't want to do that. It is a Gothic Book, terrible things happen. But I wanted the world that it was happening in and the surface of the world that it was happening and to be beautiful, and that beauty to be reliable. In a lot of gothic books, there's a strong sense that a beautiful thing is going to either be threatened, and and destroyed, or you're like, touch it, your hand will sink through into something rotting. And I didn't want that to be the way I wrote the world and the environment and the landscape.

Amanda Niehaus  16:51

So in a sense... Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Kathleen Jennings  16:55

I wanted it to be full of potentially terrifying things, but also at the same time, glittering and glinting.

Amanda Niehaus  17:02

Yeah. And beautiful. So the, the Australian Gothic genre or sub genre is, is very defined by this sort of sense of decay. And so your your book kind of stands up an example against that, do you think is that one of the things you were trying to do?

Kathleen Jennings  17:27

I imagined since it is Gothic, and just thinking back. And there's a lot of there's a lot of decay in it. But I didn't want it to be a sense—which is easy to do reading Australian Gothic characters go into the Outback—they are threatened by it and destroyed or barely escape. I wanted it to be people who've been living there long enough to not have another place that they felt they'd come from, or to go to. And have been living there long enough to embed themselves into the narrative of this place, for better or worse. And to have failed to examine how they came to be there and the effects that they were having on the landscape, their neighbours everything else by being there. So I wanted it to be less about decay than about growth, not necessarily, in always natural growth. I think that sort of unnatural growth things growing rampantly are out of control things growing, where they shouldn't be feral plants and animals, noxious weeds, all of those things that are part of the everyday bit vocabulary when you grew up in a farming community. I wanted to use that a bit more than simply going somewhere being the innocent out of place. And being threatened by that.

Amanda Niehaus  18:45

Absolutely. And even at the beginning when I you know, I just grabbed Bettina as an outsider, but she only feels like an outsider within her community. I think maybe through the journey that she takes in this book, she learns how integrated into this place she actually is.

Kathleen Jennings  19:02

And that something I think there's a real potential for in the Gothic and especially the beautiful gothic is to examine the place within a community that someone has without necessarily justifying it or redeeming it. But to be able to look with a degree of frankness, heavily obscured by the degree of frankness at the situation. You've got yourself into possibly over several generations.  And there's something that came up. I was gonna say there's something that came up in some of those beautiful gothics that I mentioned, which is less a sense of risk from the landscape and more a sense that you are at risk. if you don't yield yourself to the landscape, that's a huge thing in Picnic at Hanging Rock. The people who resist being absorbed by the natural world are the most violently destroyed by it. The people who just disappear into it, it's always treated very delicately and beautifully. The same thing a lot of Judith Wright, poetry, even 'The Dressmaker' to an extent, there's that sense of, perhaps to an extent dissolution into a beautiful world is actually the better option, not the most terrifying one. 

Amanda Niehaus  20:25

And I know and you and I have talked a little bit about climate fiction previously, and I wasn't even going to bring it up today. But that just reminds me so much of, you know, thinking about our, our sort of disconnect from the environment. And you know, that whole, that whole image that you just gave us about the people who let themselves dissolve into the landscape, or let themselves become part of, you know, the environment around them were the ones who did better. And I wonder if that's almost a kind of metaphor for the future of humanity in a way.

Kathleen Jennings  21:00

I think it's an interesting, I think it's a very interesting and variegated question, perhaps. But as we have discussed previously, something I am interested in is watching the progression of lots of genres which do this. But in the specific case of climate fiction, watching it progress from a genre, which seems to be defiant, in the sense of that genre, defiance of having to establish itself as a genre, rule out what it's talking about the boundaries of what it's talking about. And then shout what needs to be said all which is very important, and certainly a phase in the creation of most genres. And then watching it get to the point where those concerns start filtering out around the edges into other genres. So that climate change, environmental issues are just part of the fabric of writing a narrative generally, as well as being dealt  with in climate fiction, which could have the effect of essentially lifting some of the effort that needs to be done by climate fiction as a genre, because they'll be a certain miasma of awareness in the book world generally. And then kind of fiction can go on and start doing further innovative storytelling from that base, rather than just going, you know, things are going to change, this is what could happen to take that as given. And go beyond that I find really interesting. And I do want to acknowledge I know we're talking about landscape and environment, which is why I've been focusing on that they're clearly not the only issues that climate fiction and Australian Gothic are dealing with as far as colonialism and race. But people are digging themselves down into and craving for their own and dealing with or being absorbed into, like, there's a lot. There's a lot going on there. But just in case anyone's wondering, we were talking about landscape, which is why it was focused on it.

Amanda Niehaus  22:55

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, going back to what you said at the beginning there about it's the it's the shoutiness I think it's some of the some of the sort of, I guess, the early contemporary climate fiction that I I don't find engaging reading, , when I can see what a books trying to do. I don't know about you, I mean, I look at your writing and your writing is, is very, like, I feel like you want to take us into a place and let us figure out what that place is for ourselves. And, and that's what I love about, you know that that's what draws me to particular books and stories. And it's the ones who I can see what they're trying to tell me that that I find, I don't connect with. So I am interested in in what this next phase of climate fiction might entail.

Kathleen Jennings  23:57

It's, I just find it really interesting on sort of the natural life cycle of genres as it were.  I've been watching it in a few other genres and like the rom com and romance space, starting to grapple more visibly with asexuality, and how do you tell a story with romantic or romcom shape that isn't about sex and romance? And really meet watching some books come along that do that. And you can see that they're having to very clearly state what they are and are not doing very explicitly in the book, which can give something of that shouty effect, but it's necessary because they need to carve out what this new type of story is going to do. And I'm really looking forward to seeing in three or five years, what people writing that sort of story will be able to take for granted instead of having to stand up and say that they're doing and I think the same thing with climate fiction is going to be very interesting.

Amanda Niehaus  24:56

That's right. It's like that, you know, some of the very basic writing craft advice about, you know, at the opening of your book or story, you have to teach the reader how to read the what comes next. And at the moment, maybe we're learning how to read these these new forms. I really like that. Yeah. So I would like to share with your with all of the listeners the we'll post the connection, or the link to Kathleen's blog, which is absolutely phenomenal. It's a, an amazing resource full of prompts and ideas about writing and thinking and illustrating. And we're actually going to feature some of Kathleen's blog posts in our next edition of Science Write Now. But I would just love to hear from you directly, Kathleen, about kind of the evolution of your idea making, and what are some of the ways that that you used to get words on the page?

Kathleen Jennings  26:06

Well, today, I feel like I'm grappling with fixing the words once I put them on the page.

Amanda Niehaus  26:12

Yeah, that's the

Kathleen Jennings  26:16

So in terms of getting words, or perhaps in terms of getting thoughts and stories and the sense of worlds onto a page, because this applies to both writing and illustrating, I've always drawn a lot on everything. And I've written constantly on the margins of lecture notes, and work notes and all of that. So it is a constant state that I tend to try and be in. But I've had to learn out of that to both to write projects deliberately and finish them. And also to perhaps use some of that play more thoughtfully. So I think it's very important just to play just to draw, follow the line. Writwe ords, see what sounds neat and comes after the next. That's important that I wanted to spend a bit more time consciously kind of handling my ideas about writing or my ideas for stories, what I liked what I didn't like, and at the beginning of 2020, I was helping to run a subject on creativity at the University of Queensland, and I was designing the tutorial activities for it. And one of the pieces of assessment that was set was an observation journal, that I had quite free rein to design what that looked like. So I was keeping one for myself trying to work out what would be reasonable quantity and structure for students to use. Because I didn't want it to be something that was interpretable as purely busy work. And I wanted it to be something that could be suitable for different creative fields, whether people were coming out of business backgrounds, or psychology or music or writing or art. So I was fiddling around with a lot of different approaches to keeping something like this. I didn't just want it to be there, notes on elections. And I started reading quite a few books, and Lynda Barry's books, I found very helpful. And Austin Kleon's as well. I resisted those a lot. Because they're square gift book shaped. Like  you're not for me, but they turned out to be great. I was very miffed about that, but they are they were excellent, especially 'Steal Like an Artist' and 'Keep Going'. And I started keeping that observation journal at the beginning of 2020. And I'm still keeping it now every weekday. And one page of it is literally just things I saw, heard, did that day. Which is great if like me, you have a sneaking suspicion that one someday someone will askk, you where you were on the night of the 25th of October 26th of October, and you'll have no idea that you did the night before, and yet refuse to ever be pinned down to actually keeping a diary. So it can be here are some things that happened today. And it can be here as me trying to describe clouds. So it can also function as a source of material. I found the project I'm working on now is very much based in something like Brisbane and being able to flip back through a year and a half's worth of material. Just noting the smells, the sounds, the little seasonal things that are happening. And to see that rhythm over a year has been great. So that's that page, and then the opposite page in the journal. Every day I've been doing some form of exercise, activity exploration often just trying to break down on the thing I'm interested in put a whole lot of things that have fascinated me on a page and go, what's the commonality? Or to go, Okay, there's something with the way people describe machinery when they love machinery, which is incredibly beautiful, and is not like steampunk writing. And it's not necessarily technical, but it can be. And it's very much the antithesis of the way a lot of fantasy tends to deal with the industrial, which is very much the industrial versus the natural world. And trying to break that down and come up with my ideas about what an industrial fabulousism might look like. Or just to practice different ways of shuffling things I like until I come up with new ideas and notice what caused the spark. And then see if I can find a pattern out of that which is useful for me in thinking about the structure of a story or the impact of a picture. For example, I struggle a lot with using the traditional story breakdowns to write a story. So beginning, middle and en,  three act structure, all of that I found very useful in talking about stories, and editing them. But I find it lifeless when it comes to writing a story. But recently, I've been going through short stories I like and breaking them down in terms of the three big moods that the story shifts through. And that's been incredibly useful for me. And then to be able to go my favourite Gothic stories, for example, if I'm writing a short, creepy story, what are the patterns of those sorts of stories that I tend to like, and one of them is, you know, a door metaphorical or otherwise opens, that sense of a door opening, and then the middle being that sense of something having come through, and the final mood being the sense of the door being shut, you can never forget what was behind it. And being able to take ideas and then run it through that pattern of moods has been really fascinating. I could keep going on at length, as you know. It's been fun. I love practising.

Amanda Niehaus  32:04

Yeah, no, your your blog about the journaling specifically really inspired me when I came across it a few months ago. Because I think like you say, on the on the website, you yourself, were never a big journaler. And that's always been a hang up for me. Like, it's something that I feel that I should do. And in fact, I was so excited to go back a few years ago to my parents house and dig out all of my, you know, preteen, teenage journals, and just have a look at, you know, to remind myself what it was like to be of that age. And I was so disappointed. Because they're all they were all basically like, I like so and so, you know, so and so looked at me today. They were the lamest journals ever. And and I've never been able to kind of really get into the sort of writing the sort of journaling that, you know, that gets published one day as your, you know, your legacy to the world. And yeah, and so I've I've actually started some days, I will do the the sort of, you know, these are things I've seen today or not today, or some some days, I'll do like a study of, you know, an empty peanut shell, and just, you know, examine all of the different ways of experiencing the peanut shell. And but anyway, it's it's got me sort of doing this little bits of writing again. So yeah, thank you for that. 

Kathleen Jennings  33:32

You're welcome. Iove hearing that. And there's like, there's different ways of using it, because something about me is that it's a very limited structure, because I wanted to give parameters to the students developing it, yes. But for me, that means that I can I can change it, I can do different things. I can get super introspective one day and then realise at the end of the page, I'm like, I hate this. I hate looking back at introspective journal pages. I don't like doing it. And then just make a note at the bottom going 'don't do this again.'

Amanda Niehaus  34:04

So you have to you ever ripped pages out?

Kathleen Jennings  34:08

No, I haven't. I haven't at all. But occasionally I'll get partway through a thing. And I might, I might even get some useful information out of it. But I personally, it could work quite well for being introspective. I don't enjoy doing that. So it's less about ripping pages out. And more about I was having a bar at the bottom of each page for anything I noted about writing on that page. Whether it's like if I had a watercolour board and I just really like the what the textures that I got. That might be the note it might be Wow, this got introspective and not to do it. Or it could be a little list of fascinations that emerged in the margins of that page that I want to follow in future directions for future pages. It's quite fun reading over it as I go back, because I'm only up to about halfway through last year pretty good on the blog. So material to work with seeing, seeing things that I try and then decide, yeah, no, not that something else, don't use a journal this way, I don't like it. But that stands there as a reminder that I didn't like that structure. And then there's things that keep coming up, epiphanies I have regularly. Like, if you start the thing that needs to be done, it gets done. This is a major major life lesson, which I learn almost every week, it shows up regularly. And then also to see, for example, the idea of staginess, which I really liked, stagey stories, I think it was after watching Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, I love things that are over the top melodramatic, and have that way they do, as you said before, tell you how to read the story when you go in. But then going from that to the idea of a world that is navigable by the reader, stories that aren't about changing the world, that are that becoming expert in a world, and then following that through into the industrial fabulism, or whatever it is. And then maybe half a year later, I'll say that I've picked up one of those threads, again in a different context, and can now draw that information in. And also having all of those thoughts, interests, clarification of even what tools I prefer using to write or draw from some exercises has been incredibly useful for avoiding pitfalls, and also for writing either blog posts or articles or having opinions on things.

Amanda Niehaus  36:40

Do you have a process like this for your illustration, as well?

Kathleen Jennings  36:44

I so do a lot of illustration-related exercises in the observation journal and some of the ones which are technically about writing I'll do via illustrations. So for example, I was just doing some playing with taking a classic story and reconsidering the surface textures of it in either written or drawn version. So that take Cinderella, but make all the surface textures, keyed to Little Red Riding Hood. So suddenly, it's furs and red velvetsand attic rooms with the grandmother, or the fairy godmother can be in an attic, bedroom, things like that, and just trying to change the texture of the worlds and see where it starts to force you to change the story itself. So I was doing that all in ballpoint pen and watercolour, but the ideas were coming through as writing ideas that I wanted to use. So it goes back and forth that way.

Amanda Niehaus  37:43

So that sort of writing and illustrating sort of feedback on each other. You very much. Yeah, yeah,

Kathleen Jennings  37:49

I have a short story. I am hoping it will be coming out early next year, which I actually sat down and drew across two pages, as almost I did lift the pen a little bit, but almost a single line drawing, just going through drawing characters, and then what happened, and then this and then movement and running and all these adventures and so forth. And just letting that pull the story through. And then I propped up the book. And then I sat down. And I typed the first draft just describing what was happening in the pictures. And I've also used that to try and edit another story where I realised that the problem with the story, because I could not get it drawn was that people were just sitting around talking a lot, which is very boring to draw. And there's others that were drawn, say three or four pictures, and then worked out what order felt most like a story and then written the story to fit it. And there's others where I've written a short story and illustrated it, and then illustrated it and illustrated that and then discarded the words and just kept the pictures. So they do feed through each other a lot for me. And I find that taking notes in drawings sometimes is a really good way to just capture, maybe I want to say where a person's riding a bicycle and this happens, that happens. But if I do a quick sketch of it, I can catch a person bicycle and their certain attitude or mood. Which I can come back to without having to wade through actual words and rework them.

Amanda Niehaus  39:24

Yeah. You've left sort of little messages for yourself in the in the image. I would like to, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Kathleen Jennings  39:34

I was just gonna say I do the same. For example, when I'm illustrating a book. I'll read through the author's manuscript, and I'll take notes in pictures. And then I'll distil those into the final suggested illustrations.

Amanda Niehaus  39:50

So when you illustrate someone else's book, how much back and forth is there on in terms of the illustrations? Or do you usually get it right the first time?

Kathleen Jennings  40:03

There's a few stages which nearly every book goes through. I haven't had a lot of back and forth beyond those except for one book where I was really struggling with getting a donkey right. And the person I was doing it for knew donkeys very well. I had to go through a few iterations. But for the most part, I'll get the book I'll usually people know my styles when they come to me. So they know to an extent, what they're getting something quite chatty. I, I love, I love technical stuff, and accuracy and precision in other people's art. I don't particularly enjoy doing it myself and my illustration style, I lean a lot more towards the extremely sketchy, chatty, almost, it feels almost like a dialogue or spoken monologue to me sometimes rather than an accurate depiction. So I'll sketch my way through the manuscript, that will usually tell me the images that appealed to me, the images that seem to key and the things that I want to draw, but will need to work out how to draw in that style. And then I break that down into a few thumbnail sketches, which I send to the art director or client. And they'll pick the ones they like, and let me know if they'd like any adjustments, and then I'll do a much more detailed sketch full size based on that for approval. And then I'll do the final work based on that sketch. By that stage, there's usually a fair bit of there's been a fair bit of confirmation of the direction that it's going into, there's usually only usually only fairly minor differences at that stage. There have been a couple bigger readjustments and redirections partway through usually for very good reasons. But yeah, not usually a whole lot of pushback, like something I really want to draw, and they don't want me to.

Amanda Niehaus  42:01

And then you just draw it for yourself. So there! I would love to return again to your writing Kathleen and I would love to invite you to read a little bit from the beginning of a recent story, the wonderful stag which was published on tor.com. Because one of the things I love most about your writing is the lyricism of it, how the how you put words together, and so I would love to enable listeners to be able to hear a bit of that for themselves. Would you would you mind reading for us?

Kathleen Jennings  42:36

I'd be very happy to. I'll just clear my throat. This is from The Wonderful Stag, or The Courtship of Red Elsie. Once, not so long ago, a marvellous stag lived in the forest at the foot of our mountain, on the other side of the little bridge you must still cross when you leave our village.  The stag was wily, and it was wise, but — most wonderful of all — its antlers were hung with golden rings. They gleamed in the sun and rang in the breeze, and cast spangles of light around him when he ran.  In those days, if someone on our mountain wished to be married, they would go out into the woods and hunt him. Such merry, mazy chases those were. At certain seasons parties of young people, youths and maidens alike, would gather laughing to trap him with linked hands and chains of flowers. At other times, solitary lovers would slip into the forest by the light of the golden moon, to seek the stag and offer silent petition.  Often enough, the desired rings were captured, or granted. But sometimes the stag and his bounty remained — forever, or a time — just out of reach. The villagers believed that to be advice, of a sort. Those who accepted it were in general happier than those who did not.

Amanda Niehaus  44:06

I just want you to keep reading forever, Kathleen, that's gorgeous. 

Kathleen Jennings  44:09

Thank you.  And I'm going to put a link to the entire story qlongside the podcast. One of the things I love here is the way that you use alliteration and assonance in the nouns and verbs of of the story and in all of your writing. This is something that I see across everything I read of yours. So for example, you know, wily and wise or married Maisie chases or one of my favourite sentences in this bit, "they gleamed in the sun and rang in the breeze and casts spangles of light around him when he ran". I wonder Do you hear your writing as you write it? Oh, that's an interesting question. Sometimes I do usually more at the editing it's almost more of a textural thing. Almost in the hands, somewhere between my brain and my hands, not necessarily through my mouth, although obviously, obviously, that is that strong oral component. And it's probably just, I talk a lot, and I spend a lot of time reading out loud and being read out loud to. So there is that strong sense of the texture and weight of the words. And in the observation journals, I've been doing a lot more deliberately playing around with choices and phrasing and metaphor. So it is very important.

Amanda Niehaus  45:35

Yeah, absolutely. And I could see this as being something that sort of reading a lot would also help you attune to and noticingthe way that you use words such as in your observation journal. Yeah.

Kathleen Jennings  45:49

Definitely, and finding what I like. And I grew up learning a lot of, due to my dad, Banjo Patterson, poetry off by heart. So a strong sense of the rhythm and weight, and the texture and I suppose the mouthfeel of words. There's another story, my first story on tor.com, which was The Heart of Owl Abbas, where I realised the difficulty I was setting myself writing this way when it came to editing. Because of those little internal rhymes and echoes and essence, when someone asks you to move a word or change a sentence you're, like Oh, no. It's like pulling a thread. And then it just racks up all the fabric on either side. And there was one point I was trying to edit that other story. And I ended up like, two in the morning, like, Who do I know who's gonna be awake and a friend in America, I am messaging her going, please, can you tell me a word that means numinous? But it can't had any ns. Yes, I do that. So I use my thesaurus all the time for that kind of thing. Like, just give me a word, any related word that starts with this letter or sounds this way. And so you found the word? I am trying to balance that, I found a word that I cannot remember what it was. I wish I did. I just remember the question. But a lot of it then too, is that sense that echoes and repetition. And I do like a strong fairy tale element when I'm writing and it does not have to be surface level visible, but I love the structures, the internal structures and construction of fairy tales, I find extremely pleasing and very useful. Because I know them quite well. So I can pick them up and use them to serve different purposes. But there's a lot of repetition in that classic fairy tale style. Unfortunately, I have a friend Angela Slater, who she looks over something of mine, she'll go through and she can see that she can see the repeated words and highlight them and pull them out. So you can only keep this many stop saying green find something else to describe trees!

Amanda Niehaus  47:57

Yes. Are there other other other elements of fairy tales structure that, that? Sort of? Because I hadn't really thought I mean, I can, I can sort of think back to the sort of European fairy tales that I grew up with and sort of the general storylines, you know, the, like you said, these sort of opening a door that you can't close again, like the blue beard type thing, maybe or, or the the journey? Because there's so many different varieties for me, but are there sort of particular themes that that really define the genre for you?

Kathleen Jennings  48:36

I think there are themes that I ended up picking up on in my writing from fairytales a lot, so I'm not sure if they define the genre for me, but there's a lot of transformation contracts contracts, is a big one that I'm interested in, I don't think it is what makes a fairy tale. But if you use a contract in a structural way at all in a story, you can invoke the rules of a fairy tale remarkably easily. I'm doing my PhD on jurisprudence and fantastic story worlds. But really my personal interest in that what I'm focusing on is the contract in fairytale fantasy because I think it is such a powerful element. And then, as I said, transformation and duty, duty and honour in the sense not of defending the family's honour or something, but in the sense of doing what you said you'd do, an obligation to something that I love. But I find them very useful because there's so many different things that you can do with a fairy tale. You can take a story about transformation and make it about that you can change the theme and it will still feel like a fairy tale. And there's a sense of them having been polished down to the bare bones by use, which is lovely because you can then pick up that little like skeleton of a story and insert it into another idea, and it will come to life because this is a structure that works. Not as this is the structure of all fairy tales. But as in this is the structure of a certain fairy tale, which is usually retold as Little Red Riding Hood. If you take that concept and push it into another setting and other world and other genre, it's got enough life that it can get up and walk around. And then you can tweak and adjust and make connections and make something out things out and explain it. And sometimes when I've written the story, I'll get to the end and go there's a story here, but it's just not, something's not quite working. And then I'll run through—I did this quite recently with that illustrating—I'll run through a number of short fairy tales that I like, just doing a really high level outline of them like is it about, and I'll do it differently each time, depending on what my interests in it is. It could be. It could be trading away family, isolation, unnatural growth, discovery escape, which would be one way to construct Rapunzel. I'll do that for a few fairytales until I find one that sounds a bit like the shape of the story that I was writing. And then I'll look for where they don't add up. Because sometimes that will let me know where I've missed a logic step. Or I've missed an emotional thread that needed to pull it all together. So I've done that a couple of times with stories. And it's not unusual for me to get partway through a story and go, Oh, I think I will key this to such and such a fairy tale or I'll play this story in the key of Cinderella, it doesn't look at all like Cinderella. It's not the same story. It's not that structure. But those are the moods I want to use. Those are the visuals I want to use. There's lovely strong images from fairy tales. And it might be the images of a particular illustrate retelling, I want to use that sheet of fabric in this story, which is about something else entirely. And I find it a really useful almost pre selection, pre programming that I have in the back of my head that I can pick up and go, Okay, can I can I use this as part of a way to correct a story. And there are lots of other ways to do that. People who are incredibly knowledgeable about narrative structure and theory. But for me, that always feels a lot more clinical and analytical. And I'm familiar enough with fairy tales, art, history, everything else, that it feels sort of ingrained for me, organic in a way.

Amanda Niehaus  52:44

I really, I really like this this way of kind of approaching a story whether it's at the even at the conceptual phase. I know for me personally, I one of the things that I struggle with is the frame to hang the story on, I sort of feel like I need to know, a little bit where it's going. I don't have to know the specifics. And and so many times I turn to science for that. But I think fairy tales are also a really good way to sort of help keep roo,  keep a story moving maybe even when it's you know, not a fairy tale story. 

Kathleen Jennings  53:23

Yeah. And it's part of it is affection and familiarity. So if science, like you said, is the same thing, as you're familiar with it, and you love it, and you know it. And it's less about how do I carefully take this thing and turn it into a story? Or more about how do I take this thing that's already inside me and push it through into the story to give it life. And I think anything you're familiar with, can run that way. And I have used animals, local native animals that I'm fairly familiar with their habits with. I've used like sort of explanations of magpie behaviour to run the shape of a little story. And it also helps narrow down a lot of the decision making in terms of visuals and words that you use if you just have a little, like I said a key.

Amanda Niehaus  54:12

Absolutely. I think that's one of the hardest things about reading fiction is is that, that sense of, Well, everything is possible. So you sort of have to start sort of cutting away a little bit of fabric progressively until you you end up on the right story, don't you?

Kathleen Jennings  54:29

Very much so. And that's why I find sometimes like doing the draft getting it down. There's a story there. And then if I can work out the frame that best matches it, I can put that down over whatever in and then I can cut around the edges. Ideally, having said that, I'm having the worst time to reduce the number of words on a draft of a story correctly. Find that centre line. 

Amanda Niehaus  54:56

So you're working on a story and you're working on a PhD. Your PhD project also will include a novel, is that right? 

Kathleen Jennings  55:06

That is correct.  Excellent. We're very much looking forward to that. It'll be much more of a mythic fantasy with a lot of strong contractual elements in it. But based on not based on but threaded through by, yeah, fairy tales.

Amanda Niehaus  55:23

And just before we sort of finish up our chat today, Kathleen, do you have some books that you would like to recommend to our listeners that either do an element of craft really well, or that you've read recently and enjoyed or just anyone you want to give a shout out?

Kathleen Jennings  55:43

Let me think. You've put me on the spot. And I have told and you probably heard me say this, whenever, whenever you're about to talk to someone about a thing and will be recorded, they'll always ask you, if you have any books on the topic to recommend. So you should make a list in advance. I never do it@ So, I think in terms of Angela Slater's books, but particularly her sourdough Bitterwood Bible Bible and the Tallow Wife collections, I really, really love. She's an author who's taught me a lot, both through her writing by shouting at me about my writing. But those books still beautifully with that sense of the weight of a fairy tale. Picnic at Hanging Rock I always talk about because I don't think as many people have read it, as have ever seen the movie on the series, I just encountered it culturally. And it is a very slender little book. And it is gorgeous. And it is much more. And Joan Lindsay herself described it as this. It's much more of a painting than a novel. It's fascinating what it does. So that's something I really like. And I've been reading a lot of Georgette Heyer and mid century murder mysteries recently. But that could just be could just be comfort reading. Looking back through my list of books that I've read recently. Agatha Christie and Emma Lathen. Is there something about the the murder mystery that, have you I mean, have you analysed that attraction from a sort of craft perspective? A little bit, or it's come into it a part of it is that idea of a navigable world. So, which is the same reason I like Georgette Heyer, and it's the same way, like Michael Craven. And the sense of this is a world which has certain ways that it functions and you can learn to use them well enough to weaponize them. But if you run up against the edges of the world too hard, you can get damaged. So as I said, before, that structure less of someone, a world and then the person who comes into it to change it. It's much more a world and the person who learns to work in it is fascinating and both like Regency Georgette Heyer in long form space opera, science fiction, and I had an article out early this year about has very, very real and explicitly acknowledged by the author's impact on science fiction. Very interesting, that sense of a world that you can learn the shapes off and learn to navigate, and murder mysteries and aircraft investigations form a part of that. There's a sense in which you're taking the lid off the world and working out what was going on underneath and behind it. So that those hyper murder mysteries, I really enjoy that kind of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers category are very much more about oh, what are all the relations between these people where it happened? And and when I say this to that person, what effect am I hoping to get? So why do I choose my words that way? Which I don't see done as consciously and explicitly in many genres, other than mysteries. It does exist, like I said, some scientific thrillers and to an extent but less extent legal thrillers do do it. I love it because it's like getting to work. You're being let behind the curtain to see how the world works and how people put it back together better. So I've been reading Emma Lathen who I think was a husband and wife reading team I could be wrong about that. Emma Lathen Wall Street mysteries in which the main character kind of detective role is played by the Vice President of the third largest bank in the world who get's drawn into these various mysteries, which usually involve murder sometimes at the beginning, sometimes incidentally, quite later. But the mysteries themselves will turn on some thing like the possibility of insurance fraud at a hospital or, fourr years after it became possible to patent the DNA of tomatoes, argument over who actually developed a particular strain of tomatoes, and the story all takes place at a horticulturist conference in Chicago, in the winter. Aand it's very compelling, it had the same vibe for me as reading Jurassic Park. But just with a lot of paperwork and conference rooms, I loved it. Or, you know, a Cold War one from the 60s, which is usually very grim, this was lovely. It was dealing with forged bills of lading on wheat shipments, but all of them to an extent, or one of them, which was about, you know, misdeeds with traveler's checks at the Winter Olympics, but all of them are, again, about popping the top off the world and seeing systems that make it work and finding the person who either fell afoul of their systems or who worked out how to use those systems for their own purpose. And I really like that I think that joins up a lot of the books that I've been enjoying.

Amanda Niehaus  1:01:12

And it also it also to me goes back to what what you said earlier about, you know, finding it interesting how, for example, someone might write the mechanics of something that they really love in a very compelling sort of more emotional way. And even just hearing you describe that I can see, we can all hear how much you love these worlds and these these ideas and these questions. And I'm so, so pleased that you were able to join us today for this chat, Kathleen, it's been an absolute delight.

Kathleen Jennings  1:01:49

It's been so lovely talking to you, too. Thank you very much for having me.

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​​Transcribed by https://otter.ai