Australian Shorts Episode 09 Alex Cothren

Episode 9 of Australian Shorts features Alex Cothren. Alex is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He is a winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke, Griffith Review Emerging Voices and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction. His satirical story collection, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere, was published in 2025 by Pink Shorts Press. Alex lives and works on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people.

In this episode, Alex reads The Juansons from his collection and explains why this story took five years to write and how it went from a 30,000-word polished novella to a 3000-word short story. Alex also explains the purpose and potential dangers of satire and reminds us that the harder things are to do in art, the better our art usually ends up.

 This episode was recorded on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people of Magandjin (Brisbane) and on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people (Adelaide). 

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Australian Shorts, a podcast about short stories written by Australian authors, is produced by Karen Hollands

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to Australian Shorts, a podcast about short stories written by Australian authors. My name is Karen Hollands, and each month I feature a short story read by its author, followed by a conversation about their story and about the wonderfulness of the short story form. In episode 9, you'll hear from Alex Cothron. Alex is a lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University. He's a winner of The Carmel Bird, William Van Dyke, Griffith Review Emerging Voices, and Peter Carey Awards for Short Fiction. His satirical short story collection, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere, was published in 2025 by Pink Shorts Press. Alex lives and works on the traditional lands of the Gorna people. Hi Alex. Hey Karen, how are you going? Yeah, good. Thanks so much for coming on Australian Shorts. Your collection, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere, was published in 2025 and comprises 16 stories. And in a moment we're going to hear you read one of these. But before you begin, I just wanted to give a shout out to Pink Shorts Press because they're a fairly new publisher on the blog. And not only do they publish great books, but they have really great cover designs too. And I really love the cover of yours, and I've got a couple of others of theirs too, and all the covers are really great. But they're in Adelaide where you are, aren't they?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

That's exactly right. So the two women who make up Pink Shorts Press are originally from South Australia. They worked as editors on the East Coast for a while and then decided to come back. And they've been welcomed with really open arms in South Australia. It's been really exciting. We've had a few small publishers in Adelaide for a while. Wakefield Press would be one that has put out quite a few books, but there was still definitely space for someone else to come in. And I think they've really come in with just a burst of energy, a real tight focus on what it is they want. They're not producing tons of books. They basically do two launches a year. And I think that's a really smart choice because every book they've put out so far has been incredible.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

And and they were also involved, heavily involved in the response to what happened at Adelaide's Writers Week. They were heavily involved in getting the not Adelaide Riders Week replacement event up and running. So they've just been a wonderful addition to the scene in South Australia, and we're all really grateful to have them.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Yeah, yeah, that's great. And they published your book, which was extra good.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

That doesn't help. Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that too. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Yeah. All right. So we're going to start with a reading from your collection. We'll hear that now and then we'll have a chat afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Okay, so over to you.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Okay. So this story is called The Hwansons. When the last passenger disembarks, the minibus pulls back onto the highway, leaving behind a thick finger of dust that gradually shifts in the hot air. They walk north, away from the highway, through mangy scrubland that has forgotten even the concept of rain. The sweat on their exposed skin glistens like pool water as they move. After fifteen minutes they reach a small hill and begin to climb, slipping here or there on the loose topsoil, swearing under their breath. Some stop at the hill's apex to admire the strata of stoned wash mountains to the far west, but most just go on. At the base of the hill, tucked out of view, is a small prefab construction trailer, a generator whirring by its side. The group lines up at the trailer's only door. Selena and Jaime are somewhere in the middle of the line. They hold hands. After a few minutes, a man in a Nike singlet pops his head out the trailer door, whistles like one would to a dog, and those in line begin to enter. Every thirty seconds or so there is a brilliant flash of light, visible in the edges of the trailer's single curtain window and in the cracks of its doorframe. No one comes out. At half past six, the Johnson's boy, Eric, knocks on Norma's front door. She takes him inside and pours him a glass of iced tea, then calls his parents' mobile numbers three times. Sally and Jerry Johnson are friends of hers. Sally's phone rings out each time, but Jerry's eventually connects. Hello? Jerry, it's Norma. Where are you? Eric says you guys haven't come home from work. What? No, no, I'm not Jerry. I found this phone on the sidewalk. Norma calls the police. The two police officers arrive minutes after her call. They cordially accept Norma's offer of coffee, and they talk to Eric in soothing tones. While they are talking, she feels at ease. The worries return when they leave. Car accident, mass shooting, terrorism. She focuses on the boy, the boy's needs. She fields him a grilled cheese sandwich, and then they cross the road to the Johnson's house, a tidy, white and navy bungalow, where Eric retrieves a key from the underside compartment of a fake stone. He changes into a t-shirt and pajama bottoms, turns on the television to the cartoon network, and curls up on the sofa like a cat. Norma sits next to him. She doesn't even realize that Eric has fallen asleep until the knock at the door. Once the police have taken him away, she crosses the road back to her own house, as empty as a tomb. She lies in bed for an hour, and then gives up and goes downstairs. The sandwich press is still out on the counter, so she makes a grilled cheese for herself. As she eats she remembers a winter lunch, what feels like a thousand years ago, when she made sandwiches and tomato soup for her and her own boy in this same kitchen. He tipped the bowl over and spilled the thick red soup all down his front. She scolded him far too harshly. The memory of his pouting lip a barb in her heart. In the morning she walks over to the Johnson's place and knocks on the door. Nothing. She calls the police, but once the officer on the phone understands that Norma is not the boy's kin, he brushes her off. She makes coffee and goes into the living room and turns on CNN. A banner across the top of the screen reads Instant ED portations across US. After ten minutes, she turns it off and goes to the bay window and looks out on the gray morning and at the Johnson's quiet house opposite. You old and useless idiot, she says. They had been neighbors for close to a decade. She still remembers the day the two of them, this was before Eric, arrived and unloaded their few boxes from the back of a mustard yellow station wagon. She and Al watched them from that same bay window. Norma was struck immediately by Sally's doll like beauty, her long and corn blonde hair. They went over later to introduce themselves, Norma holding Cody's hand, Al holding a welcome basket of fruit. When he handed the basket to Sally, Sally began to cry. It is all anyone talks about at the Patterson's dinner party that night. Can you believe it? says Dan Stolts. All this time we may actually have been living next to the Hwansons. The way I heard it, says Julia Stolz, the government's been building the satellites to pull this off ever since he got elected. There's some irregularity in their DNA or something it can pick up. Ashley Woodland laughs, and to think I used to be jealous of that woman's hair. Incredibly, the Stolz's little girl, Molly, actually saw it happen. She tells them how one minute she was waving to Sally at Safeway, and then the next minute Sally was gone, her clothes slumping into a little heap. They all shake their heads at this. Your poor girl, says Mary Patterson, what a thing to witness. My boy played over there all the time, says Caitlin Debris. He slept over. Norma feigns a stomach bug and leaves early. At home she turns on CNN, but it is all the same. She switches to Fawkes and watches the red faces gloat for an hour straight. Her blood boils. She goes back to the Patterson's. They're eating dessert, and the table quietens when they see her standing there in the dining room arch. Shame on you, she says. These were our friends. Well hang on, says Dan. She turns and leaves. Although a fierce wind is blowing and she has only a thin cardigan on, she walks the ten blocks to the corner of Collins and Lincoln. The bouquet that she taped to the stop sign only five days ago is already ragged. Grief hits her in a way it has not for years, and she sits down right there on the cold sidewalk. A passing car honks at her but does not stop. After a while she gets up and goes home. She brews a pot of coffee, turns on her computer, and begins a letter to her senator. That day, she had come home early from work to pack. They were going to the country for the weekend, up to a lake house that they time shared with the Stoltzes and Pattersons. She filled the cooler with food and soft drink, and put Cody's clothes and a few favourite toys into a small suitcase, being careful to include Seneor Burdo, the stuffed donkey Cody could not sleep without. When she was finished there was still fifteen minutes before Al would be home with Cody from kindergarten. She made an espresso and sat down on the couch with a collection of check off short stories, and she had been reading for half an hour when the knock comes. Two police officers stood with hats in hand on the front porch. The paint on the porchboards was faded and sunflaked. Al had promised he would touch it up in the summer. She wakes with a shock in a ragged armchair. The TV is back on CNN. Deleted? Whereabouts of E deported pirate immigrants still unknown. She turns it off, heart sick. It is not yet dawn, an anemic light just visible outside. Through the bay window she sees a blur of movement on the Johnson side of the street. She hurries out the front door and down her porch steps, bone cold mist in the air. Eric, she hisses. He freezes. The fake rock is in his hand. He is wearing a black hoodie from which his breath emerges and pulls above him like a thought bubble. It's okay, she says, when she crosses over to him. I know. The Johnsons brought an ice blue bouquet of African lilies to the funeral. Seven months later, Norma crossed the street with a stuffed bear of the same color. As she climbed the steps to their porch, she heard the baby wailing inside. She bent down to leave the bear and card on the welcome mat, but as she stood up, the door clicked open. Sally stood there with Eric, writhing in the crutch of her arm, her eyes like empty wells. Norma, she said, help. In the Johnson's plushily carpeted living room, Norma gingerly took the child and laid him face down along her arm, putting pressure on his little belly. He immediately quieted. Oh my God, whispered Sally, I'll pay you a thousand dollars an hour. Norma sent her for a shower and sat down on the couch with Eric. His eyes were the same blue, same wild thatch of hair too, the color of wet sand. She leant in and took in the aroma of milk, and no time seemed to pass before Sally sat in the chair opposite, smiling at the two of them. She was in a towel and slippers, and Norman noticed for the first time a small tattoo just beneath the protrusion of her ankle. Ornate, cursive lettering Hi me. Old boyfriend, said Sally. Eric had been fostered with the family twenty miles away. As soon as everyone was asleep, he stole his foster mother's phone and used the GPS to walk home. She helps him take his Air Jordans off in the kitchen, socks dripping with blood. She puts antiseptic and band-aids on his raw blisters and makes him a bowl of Cheerios and a cup of hot cocoa. I am so sorry I let them take you, she says, sitting across from him with a coffee. They told me they'd located your relatives. He shakes his head. We don't have anyone over here. Well, you have me. He crunches for a while, eyeing her shyly. Did my parents tell you? No, honey. I guess I figured it out. Are you mad? Lots of people are mad. Oh, I'm plenty mad, Norma says, reaching over and patting his hand. But not at them. Everyone had just assumed that she would move. How could she stay there? Ghosts greeting her in every room. She put the house on the market. Her neighbors told her how sorry they were to see her go, but she could see something like relief in their eyes. No one wants to be reminded of how brittle the ice is. She didn't resent them for that. It was only the Johnsons who seemed to be genuinely distraught. When she told Sally that she was going to accept a bid, there were tears and then a demand that they take her out for dinner that night. The restaurant was a cozy Korean fusion place tucked into an alleyway in the city. The manager knew the Johnsons. He bought chilies from their small food distribution company. The dishes arrived in unrelenting waves, as did the watermelon margaritas with go chang chili sauce, and before long Norma was shimmeringly drunk, the words and laughter rolling from her like the past year was a prank. The next morning she took a black coffee into the backyard, the sun rising over the top of the willow tree to kiss her forehead. Then she went inside and called her real estate agent and told him she wanted more time. I guess you haven't checked the news yet, he said. The bubbles burst big time. Eric slaps his hand to his forehead when he sees her ancient computer. Does this think even have presents on it? She shrugs and leaves him to figure it out. With a foster mother's phone in her hand, she goes out to the garden shed and takes the hammer from Al's meticulously organized tool wall, and then puts the phone on the brick patio step that Cody once chipped a tooth on, and she reduces it to smithereens. The Stoltz's tabby is perched on the back fence, eyeing her coolly. One word in your next, she says. After she has swept up the glass and plastic and dumped it all in the trash, she goes back inside and finds Eric, chatting to the hovering hologram of an elderly woman. This woman jumps when she sees Norma lurking in the backlit arch of the kitchen doorway. Stavian, says Eric. This is her. The woman laughs and puts her hand to her chest. She has a beautiful smile and soft brown eyes, above which seem to be tidily painted eyebrows the deep purple of blackberry juice. Hi, says Norma, aware that her own untended eyebrows look more like a blackberry bush. It's nice to meet you. Gracias porquira nuestra nieto, says the woman. Familia is toro. When the economy went belly up, so too did the Johnson's distribution company. Norma was worried that they would lose their house and move away. She had already paid off her own mortgage with a sizable accident settlement from the trucking company, but others were not so lucky. Even on their beautiful tree lined street, foreclosed properties had started showing up like dead teeth in a smile. The Johnsons, however, adapted quickly, and within weeks both were working multiple low wage jobs that provided just enough to make ends meet. But this meant long hours, sometimes arriving home well after Eric was asleep. Norma can't remember whether they had asked or she had offered first. Whichever way, she began picking the boy up from school, always taking the long way to avoid Lincoln. She would make him an after school snack and leave him to play in his room or watch TV until dinner, while she read a book on the Johnson's couch. As he got older, she helped him with his homework, his heart beating against her arm as he leant in to watch how she multiplied and punctuated. Eventually he got old enough to catch the bus and stay home by himself. Then Sally managed to find an office job that allowed her to be home at a reasonable hour. And yet it was still rare for Norma to eat dinner alone. She had quietly, without any fuss, become a member of the family. Birthdays, school plays, soccer games. She was there for all of them without question, but also for the quiet moments too. Many a night Eric would fall asleep next to her while the family watched the late show. So she was there, cradled in her corner of the Johnson's increasingly frayed couch on election night. It had been, even by the usual standards, a terrible election, the open wound of the economy bringing out the worst in everyone. Harmless deceptions that most people happily overlooked when convenient, had been recast as a cancer poisoning the whole bloodstream. Just another churn of the endless cycle. Norma had been disgusted, but not surprised, when that horrible man, as if the country hadn't had its fair share of them, strode out to declare victory. What did shock her, however, was the violent burst of first Sally's and then Jerry's tears, and the raw fear on Eric's usually jovial face. They are watching the wailing faces on Telemundo when the slam of car doors outside jolts them both. A black van is parked in front of the Johnsons, the letters ice emblazoned across its side. Upstairs, she says, under the bed. She rushes into the kitchen to stack his dishes in the dishwasher, then puts the kettle to boil and looks out over the sink at the lightly swaying willow and tries her best to empty her mind. The kettle is not yet steaming by the time they cross over and knock on her door. She makes her way through the kitchen, already feigning a look of surprise and worry, and only then does she notice the thin constellation of blood trailing across the linoleum and down the hallway carpet to the laundry room. She stops dead. Another knock, louder. Eric's socks are soaking in a bowl of red water atop the washing machine. The doorknob jiggles. Her car is in the driveway, the blaring TV clearly visible through the bay window. She bends down and tries to wipe at some of the blood with the inside of her sweater sleeve, but is half congealed and sticky and refuses to come away. She rushes back to the kitchen bench, the door pounding now, and she slides a knife out of its wooden slot. For a brief moment, she just stands there, talking to her husband and child, cherishing them, and then she plunges the thing into her palm.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Thanks, Alex. That was a great reading. Could you talk a little bit about the genesis of this story?

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah, uh absolutely. Um so I'm very lucky. I'm you know, I've listened to all your episodes, and you know, some of the authors have to say, Oh, I have to really think back. I'm very lucky because this was part of my PhD. So I could go back and look at my notes. A lovely thing to have. Um so I would have started writing this, as I said, as part of my PhD, which is uh was a collection of sh um satirical short stories, a half of which I guess ended up in the final collection. The other half I had to write afterwards. Um I would have I started writing this, I think, around the end of 2018-2019. Um it was the end of Trump's first term, and I think it sparked very much around that time the big scandal, one of the mini scandals, um, was the stuff that was happening, the child separation policy, um, where when people were being deported, they were just grabbing the children from them, the parents were going to one place, the children were going somewhere else, and because the administration was such a mess, um, records were not kept properly and children were just getting lost. Um, so that was the spark of it. You know, that's definitely what my notes were replying to. But it was interesting looking back at my notes that originally part of the purpose of the story was not just to satirize that. Of course, that's a terrible thing, but also kind of satirize the guilt that someone like myself feels when you read a story like that, like just the utter helplessness of it. Um, and we'll talk about some of the processes of this, it's a fascinating process to get to the story, one of the wildest I've ever had. But I definitely remember that in some of the early drafts that involve the Norma character, she was I was kind of satirical. I was kind of making fun of her inability to do anything. That line about her going home and making copies. And then writing a letter to her senator originally was kind of a satirical thing. It was just kind of this like, wow, you've really done something big here. And yet, what are you supposed to do in the face of you know both what was happening then and happening now? It's just a huge thing. And the protests are incredible. Someone like Norma probably isn't going to go and get involved in a violent protest. It's just not likely to happen. And so the ending just kind of came as this thing, well, I I gotta get her to do something. And in the if this small thing is just to give a little bit of blood, you know, which I like to think a lot of people that even like myself who think we have the right politics but maybe don't do anything radical, given a moment like that, we would step up. You know, I like to think that anyway. So it ended up being not quite as satirical around that character as I originally thought. But certainly the rage for the system itself remains.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Yeah, uh well, most of the stories in your collection are political. Um do you write with a political purpose? You know, is that is that kind of your aim?

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Yeah, I mean look, certainly um that book, because again, I was writing a PhD. Um a PhD is a lovely thing to do because it forces you into a framework. Because at one point you've written 30,000 words of theory, and you can't just be like, I'll do something else now. No, you have to stick to that. So very much I was saying, okay, let me find the things at the moment that I think are worthy of satirizing, and then let me think through the techniques of how to do that. So definitely in those stories, I was literally had a hate board while I was writing that book. I literally had a physical board with sticky notes. I'm like, what do I hate? I mean, it was overflowing, you know, as it would be now. Um, and so yes, definitely it was just I would have things and I knew they were upset me on a daily basis. How to get into them is is the tricky part, you know. It's it's there's various angles to it. Um I would say that that story is one of the more serious. I mean they're all serious, but it doesn't have a joke in it. It has a little bit of playfulness in the terms of the speculative fiction part of it. Um, but it's not meant to be funny, you know, in any respect. And I guess that does make it stand out from some of the other stories a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Yeah, I did want to ask you about that because I thought maybe my understanding of satire is too narrow because I I didn't really see this as a satirical story. I mean it those speculative aspects are there, but even those um, you know, that the satellite technology that detects the DNA and and the you know disappearing once you go into the trailer. Um but apart from that, it's not even that futuristic, sadly.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Yeah. Um yeah, becoming less every day for sure.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Yeah, but but I did wonder, is this actually a satirical story? So what what is that definition then, if you include this as satirical?

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Yeah, sure. I mean the hi the the silly academic hill that I will die on, all academics have one, is that satire doesn't have to be funny, though. That's actually it's an understandable misinterpretation because the ma majority is funny. Um but actually the the word that I use when I define it in my PhD and and now is playful, which I think is a different thing than funny.

unknown 24:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Playful in the sense that it's never going to just be realist. If this was just a story about a family being separated as they were during the time of Trump, that's just a realist story. Um there's there's much less of an interpretation journey the reader has to go on. I mean, they might have to figure out the themes for themselves and what your politics are for sure, but they don't have to try and connect it to their real world. It is the real world. So if you look at something like the Handsmaid Tale as an example I often point to, that is not a funny novel, Margaret Atwoods The Handmaid's Tale, but it is it is often classified as satire because it's using some playful stuff to take us a little bit away from our world and then kind of like point back at the world we've just left a little bit. And so that's my kind of definition. I like the word playful. You have to kind of mix around with the real world a little bit, mix around with the form of what you're doing to make it satire, because there has to be some sort of interpretive leap by the audience to be satire, but and mostly when you do that, it ends up being funny, and the way to catch people's attention is often to be funny, and that's what satire is trying to do. Um, so a lot of it is funny, but it doesn't have to be. And I and that's why I would fit this story into that framework.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Hmm. And um so this it's a only like it's I think it's about 10 pages long, it's probably around 3,000 words for this story. Yeah, and and yet, and this is what attracts me to short stories, is it has so many layers to it. You know, in such a short space of time, you've you've evoked pathos and tension and indignation. Um, and all of your stories evoke empathy for the vulnerable. So, you know, they're they're often about really decent people just being really poorly treated by more powerful people, and and they're this commentary on humanity. And I just wondered, is this what is driving your storytelling, apart from you know, writing about everything you hate? Um is it about giving voice to unfairness and inequity? Is that what drives you to write?

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Yeah, partly absolutely. Like I would say the hate leads. That's kind of what you go to first. You're like, I don't like this. But again, I I love how much I get to talk about my PhD in this podcast. Again, the actual um theory behind the PhD was is Satai really doing a good job when it says, Hey, I hate this thing, so use an example of Trump's treatment, treatment of immigrants. A very classic satirical response to that would be to just exaggerate Trump's voice even further and just say like even further horrible things about immigrants and be like, I'm obviously being ironic, I'm making fun of what he says. But a lot of my research shows that actually, even when people understand your joke, and a lot of people don't, uh, but even those that do understand it, actually the actual language you use actually sinks into a deeper part of the brain. So you can be using really racist, um, let's say, you know, racist terminology about immigrants, and people can tell you joking, but actually there's a lizard part of our brains that just kind of like it connects to the concept of immigrant, the things you're saying. So that's what my PhD was about. And so I'm very conscious when I'm doing satire that you don't get a free pass just because you're attacking something bad. Like the other decisions you make along the way matter too. So, yes, it is very important for me, and I had to redo a lot of the stories to be like, okay, uh, people probably get what I'm angry about here, but am I actually being fair to the people who are actually suffering from this? Yes, it's annoying me, and I'm, you know, I'm I'm raging about this thing, but I'm not actually being deported. I actually need to think about people that this is actually affecting. How are they actually being treated in the story? And so that was something I had to rework a lot of stories from my first year of the PhD, going, hmm, I'm just doing that kind of ironic racism thing here. I need to dig a bit deeper. Um so yes, it's definitely in front of my mind, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Yeah, that's really fascinating. And did that come out of doing the PhD? Like as you would as you were doing it, you realised that. Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

There was some case studies along the way. Like the thing that was actually the trigger point for me was um there was a cartoon about Barack Obama that was the front page of The New Yorker. I think what was this? It was in the lead up to his first election. And it was a cartoon on the front cover of The New Yorker, which is clearly like a more left-linging magazine. And the the writer of the sorry, the cartoonists themselves was making a joke about all the ridiculous things people were saying about Obama. So this cartoon is a picture of him and Michelle in the in the Oval Office, and Obama's dressed in like Muslim garb, and Michelle is carrying like she looks like a Black Panther, and she has like an AK-47, they're burning the American flag in the fireplace. There's a frame picture of Osama bin Laden. And the cartoonist is clearly trying to say, look how ridiculous these things people are saying are. But all the research around it was like, you do not understand what you've just unleashed here. Like A, that gets onto the internet, people just take away the New Yorker thing, and that just becomes the perfect image for people that believe that stuff. And so at that point, when I got to that, which became a big case study in my PhD, I was about a year in, and a lot of the stories I were doing were were literary examples of that. And that was the point where I'm like, ooh. But what was interesting was challenging yourself not to do the thing that satire often does, which is just exaggerate the record of your enemy, is hard. It's actually hard harder to do. But harder things to do in art usually end up in better art, is kind of my argument, which is, I mean, my big thing right now is railing against this so-called concept of cancer culture. Um and and I just did this interview with comedians, and they're all saying it's very easy to make a joke that shocks people. It's very hard to make a joke about a difficult subject that says difficult things that makes people think in an interesting way. It's harder. And because it's harder, the jokes end up being better. Um and that's kind of my my general theory on everything.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Yeah. So I'm thinking satire is dangerous, and we've always known that, but it's a double-edged danger, isn't it? You know, it yeah. It's dangerous in that it can be taken seriously or or um, you know, used in the wrong way.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

No, you're totally right. I mean, the and the thing about satire is there's not really any proof that it makes massive changes either. So it's not like, you know, back in the day, I feel like most people have given up on this, but back in the day, people would do dangerous things with satire. And the excuse would be, well, I'm putting, you know, I'm trying to change the world here. We don't have any data that satire does actually. I mean, I feel like the Trump election nailed the lid of the coffin on does satire change the world? Which doesn't mean it doesn't do anything, you know, it does absolutely, it can focus people's attention on things, which is often why it's funny, because it grabs people's attention. Um, it can it can make us think a bit deeper about an issue, it can bring communities around something. Like if you see other people angry about something, it actually can be a useful thing as much as it can also be polarising. So it does do good things, but the excuse of, well, yes, I'm putting something out there that could be misinterpreted, but you know, it's gonna it's gonna make people hate this thing and and you know vote against it, there's nothing out there. So really that excuse is gone too. And so you're really you're really threading a fine line of I know this is gonna change the world, but I still think it's important, and also you're threading the line of I don't want this to be too obvious. Like satire can't just be this is about you know my anti-ICE sentiments, let me explain it to you. That's not satire, that's an essay. So it still has to be art, and art has to be ambiguous. So it's a really fine tightwalk, uh, you know, tightrope you have to walk. But again, learning to write to to walk a tightrope is an incredible skill, and when you get it, you you have a very powerful thing to do. So learn to rock walk the tightrope. You know, don't go for the easy thing, try and do the hard thing.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

And I guess the the other thing um that might come from that is um even though you know there's the the risk of it being misinterpreted by people, that the people who are kind of sharing your view, sometimes you just need that kind of joke to come together and and it's a a way of um dealing with the stress of it all.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

And I mean, um there's a scholar here at Flinders, uh Robert Fidian, and he has a book out um which is not too theoretical, people are just kind of interested. It's called the CAD Theory of Emotions and Satire. No, sorry, public satire and the CAD theory of emotions, something along that line. And his basic um theory is that satire provokes three emotions uh contempt, anger, and disgust. And those are yes, negative emotions, and no, there's no proof that provoking those emotions in an audience leads to great political change in the way we'd like to see it. There's some examples of it leading to great political change in ways we don't like to see it. Like it's you kind of have to classify, say, for example, anti-Semitic propaganda in the Nazi era. That's kind of satire, unfortunately. Like, I the you can't get around that whether you like it or not. That's basically what it's doing. Um but it hasn't made the the nice changes we like to think. But giving, you know, letting people kind of release those emotions on a daily basis actually can be good. Um we you know, we can't every time a politician does something stupid, we don't want to flip cars and burn buildings and kill people. Um that actually is not a good functioning society. So it I mean, I hate to use that term, it does kind of let the steam off a little bit. Now, sometimes the steam should build and things should erupt, you know. Um but it is kind of a daily way of acknowledging some really hard things and thinking about them without being absolutely crushed beneath them or resorting to violence straight away. And obviously, the most often the most violent people are people that have the least sense of humor, in my experience. I think there's a correlation there.

SPEAKER_00 33:54

Yes. There's another PhD. Um so there's a a Truman Capote quote that you're probably familiar with that says, the test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this. After reading it, you can imagine can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final, as an orange is something nature has made just right. And I feel like this applies to the Hwansons, right down to the ending, which which is dramatic and shocking, but also perfect. Um so I wondered, did did you have the specifics or the shape of the whole story in your head before you began?

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Okay, buckle in, Karen. Uh this is quite the writers story. Like as I said earlier, this is one of the most complex writing pro. So I started this in 2018. I finished, I think it was the last no, I'm sorry, I didn't even finish it properly for my PhD. Like there was a version of it in the PhD that's never seen the light of day. So originally this was going to be a novella-length piece. It was gonna so I was gonna write about eight or maybe six to eight short stories, and then I had this idea for this novella. None of which is in the actual story. Um so I wrote about 30,000 words, which was the journey of the original couple, Selena and Jaime, from why they originally fled Central America, which in my brain was some of that, which was was gang violence, which you know, if we want to go into the history of that, was often the result of US action in that area. Um it follows them going through this this wild technology that basically like zaps them into a different-looking human being and across the border. Um there was a whole bunch of like wild stuff around that as well. So originally, um, you know, it's very dangerous to make the way to the US. People don't do it on a whim, you know, people die along the way. Um and the technology was faulty, and you know, as they came out on the other side, some of the people that came out were badly disfigured and died. So I think there was a whole bunch around that. And then it was the story of them trying to settle into the country despite having this secret of being these people that you know don't appear as they actually appeared before, mourning their lost selves, because of course they most immigrants would prefer to be in their home countries, that's just a truth. Um, and they would have preferred to be in their home countries if it was safe. So mourning their lost lives, gradually building a family, and then having it all taken away, and then switching to the son who has to go and try and find his parents who've basically been like copy-paste into another country. So that's about 30,000 words. And I wrote all of it. And when I say 30,000 words, it wasn't like a rough draft. I was like, it was polished, and I got to the end and I was like, this sucks. Like I did everything I could. I read every book on immigration I could. I read countless first-hand accounts from people who had done this, and it in it, you know, in a and part of it was the ooh, am I telling someone else's story thing? But I generally felt I'd done the best possible job I could. So it was partly that. It was partly the I'm not an immigrant that's gone through this experience, am I just kind of photocopying other people's accounts? That was part of the problem. The bigger problem is it just wasn't that interesting. Like the original concept, it was a bit too slow. The action kind of picks up 20,000 words in, it has a very finite ending, which he does find them, but they're kind of changed, etc. etc. etc. So, and quickly I was like, I can't even put this into PhD, because in the PhD you have to talk about your work, and I'm gonna like be lying about the fact that I like this. So I quickly wrote a version that was a chunk of their journey and then a chunk of their neighbor, which is when Norma came in. Right? And that was still around 8,000 words, and that's what's in the PhD. And then later I was like, I don't think I'll publish this because I don't think it's that good. It's two weird stories that have been jammed together. And then later I think I I kind of looked back and was like, I actually really like the second part. The second part does kind of work. And yet in that original second part, Norma goes on a journey with Eric into Central America to find the parents. Like she she gets them away from ice at that day, and then they go on this journey. And that felt it just felt fake. It was just kind of like I'm trying to resolve something that doesn't feel my brain it's gonna be resolvable. So I had to trim it down from I said 8,000 before, I think it was actually more around 10,000. I trimmed it down from 10,000 to about 3,000, which was keeping one scene, one single scene, from the original novella, which is them standing outside of this construction trailer, um, and then rapidly shortening the second part, which was the neighbor, and along the way I found that final image of her going, Oh my god, they're at the door, what can I do? I'll stab myself so they don't they think the blood is mine. And yes, at that moment, at that moment I was like, this is done. That Truman Capote quote was true. I was like, this doesn't mean anything else. There are if there's gaps, they're deliberate, etc. etc.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:41

An incredible methodology, I have to say, to write a short story.

SPEAKER_00 38:45

So what time frame what time frame are we talking there?

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Well, so I started writing it in 2018. This got published in the Griffith Review 2023.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

So about a five-year process.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Look, if I had the the time and the money, every short story I ever write would be a novel first and I'd trim away. Who has the time for that? Um but it is a fact and I think it helps the story a lot because I knew a lot of things that aren't on the page. Um so I wouldn't do that again on purpose.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

But it's not that we're not going to be able to do that. Well, do you know I don't think it's that uh uncommon to maybe not five years, but to start with something longer and keep trimming and trimming and looking for the essence and rewriting and pulling it out, which is why um, you know, I just think short stories are just as hard as novels to write. You know, they're they're just an art form in themselves and they need to be appreciated for what they are, and they can take years to get right. Um preaching to the gospel sister. Yeah. Um and yeah, I I mean Norma just feels so real. So that's really interesting that she came in quite late to the story.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

Um, I mean, if you think of this idea of I was trying to write someone that clearly wasn't myself, she's kind of the best appropriation of myself. And the other thing that came in really, really late was not in the PhD version, for example, uh, I don't think, was the fact that she'd lost a child and a husband earlier. Um I think in the early stage she was just someone that was just living by herself and so had the time to help this child. And I you know, it was one that it just really fleshed her out though, doesn't it? It just came, it just came. Yeah. There was just that one scene where I'd written the fact that she remembered her own boy, and I was like, hang on, where did that come from? What does that mean? And it kind of I think that was the component that ended up tying the story together for me because it became much less about I sucks, you know, which I agree with, you know, that's what I think. And more about and this is a story I actually cried at multiple times writing in those final stages, because it came the the message to me came less about this politics stuff and more about look, horrible things are gonna happen to us no matter what. We can have a country that is everything we want to see, completely equitable. There's still gonna be tragedy. People are gonna get sick when they shouldn't, people are gonna not be looking the right way when they're driving, and people are gonna die. These horrible things are gonna happen. So, why do we have policies that are doing these things to people, anyways? It's like we're already gonna be struggling through life. Yeah, so like I started getting briefly on that. So it became less about the pilot politics, and as I said, you know, more about people, the pain of human existence, which is why the Chekhov thing was in. I was like, she's reading Chekhov, and Chekhov's whole thing, he's a realist, right? But his whole thing is fiction needs to be the hammer reminding you that tragedy is gonna come at some point.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

Um it just kind of tied it all up together for me.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was nice. Um, and so I mean, of course, I felt so sorry for Norma, and I felt really worried for Eric, and I was horrified for his parents and angry with immigration officials, all those feelings. But the characters that got to me the most were the neighbours.

SPEAKER_02 41:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

You know, just I just thought this was such a beautiful touch because you could have made all the neighbours rally together, but instead you revealed this kind of ugly side to them, to these people who'd been longtime friends, you know, sharing a timeshare holiday house with Norma and friends with the Johnsons for ten years. And then all this really ugliness came out of it. So then Norma's forced to act alone and she doesn't have the support of anyone. Um, I yeah, so that they really got to me. That at that point it was just like, oh, and even the fact that you had um a variety of last names for those neighbours, you know, just showed, look, we're all just this multicultural mix, and at some point, you know, we were all okay until this point, and now we're not okay. And yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

And I mean I mean the whole thing for me is iCE is not new in the US. I mean, you know, it's a it's an off-quoted thing that Obama deported more people than Trump did. You know, that's it's so it's always been there. The cycles of it being a nasty thing come and go based on political expediency. And it's just this horrible constant thing that happens in the US where people are like a thing I think is very different from Australia because we don't have you know, we have immigration, um, but people don't intend to just come into the country. It's not, you know, without us knowing about it, etc. etc. The thing is in the US is people often hate that at a abstract level. You know, the the polling in general is like people would like the borders to be completely closed and to know who's coming in. But on the day-to-day level, they don't actually care. They often know people who are around them who aren't documented, and they will constantly say, Oh, I didn't mean him, you know, that family's great. You know, my kid plays soccer with them, I eat at their restaurant. I love those people. No, I'm talking about those other ones. Um, it's and it's just this constant cycle that for 90% of the time, most people are totally fine with it. And then various times politicians will just tap into the vein and it becomes this the wh the hor most horrible thing that could be happening in the country. And then it dies down again. Um and you know, both of my um many of my relatives in the US um Um are you know the Republicans, you know, they vote Republican most of the time. And yet they are also people that engage in charity, and often that charity goes to undocumented immigrants who are often some of the most needy in the community, and they don't care about that. They're totally fine with that. And so that just junction is just so strange that these people could grow these friendships with these neighbors, like cherish them as neighbors, think they're good people, and then all of a sudden be like, oh, thank God they're gone. Yeah. It it's just for me, it just represents this whole terrible cycle that happens in the US and just that that just frustrates me more than anything else.

SPEAKER_00 44:32

Yeah, yeah. Do your um characters ever surprise you when you're writing?

SPEAKER_01 44:38

Oh, yeah, all the time.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

I I'm not someone that has a firm control on what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:45

Um and I hope that never does come. Yeah, no, it absolutely does. And um, I mean, one of the nice things about writing short stories is I'm often writing three or four at a time because I'm never forcing them, you know. Like I will write complete drafts, but the complete drafts in my brain are just experimental things. Yeah, you know, so I would have been writing this at the same time as many other things. And that just means you can just when it's not feeling right, you just leave it. You just you don't force it. And then you come back and you're like, oh, let me put in this scene, and all of a sudden that scene feels right, and you don't quite know it yet, and then you let it go for another month or two and you come back again. Um I would love to do that with novels too, but it feels for me from people who've written novels, you really have to just kind of embed yourself in it. If I can ever write a novel in the way I write a short story, I'll try and do it. But if I can't, not interested.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

And the stories in this collection um have a variety of narrative structures. You know, you've got you've got one that's written as a transcript of proceedings and one that's a collection of newspaper headlines, and and then there's that hilarious um titular story, which uses the structure of an academic journal article, yeah. Uh, which I've encouraged all of my friends in academia to read. Um But how do you decide what form and structure to use for a story and and like how crucial is it to find the right form and structure for a particular story?

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Often that is part of the early um grab of trying to write something, is that it's going to be an interesting format, and how do I do that? And I think a lot of that comes from I'm not in a I'm not a very good lyrical writer in terms of I can't sit there like Zadie Smith and just describe something 10,000 ways to Sunday and every description is beautiful. I just don't have that in my skill set. I can kind of like throw in images as I need them along the way. Um, which means often for me it's really fun to write in another form and that that often has its own type of writing. So you're just kind of diving into another style of writing, and and then then there's no requirement on your ego to describe things beautifully because it's a transcript of a World Commission. Why would anything be beautiful? You you can kind of write it silly. It's an academic article, I know how to write those. It's interesting that the few, and there's not that many, but the few stories in the collection that are just straight third or first person tend to be the most kind of heartfelt serious ones. Like they are just kind of the ones where uh probably at some point I did try and write them in some strange format, and it just didn't feel earnest enough. Like they are the few, and they are they're often the ones that were the hardest to write for me. Um but usually for me it's more fun to try and write in someone else's voice because I uh you have half the story then, and finding the voice is often really the hardest thing. And once you have it, you're like, well, I can just play around until this works.

SPEAKER_00 47:29

Um I think yeah, I I think voice is your strength. You know, you get all of your stories, you the voice is just so great. Um so you teach uh creative writing at Flinders Uni, um, my undergraduate arma matter. Uh I didn't know that. Yeah, not in creative writing, but yes. Oh, okay. Uh my first degree was speech pathology. Oh wow. Um so how necessary are craft books when do you think for someone who's writing? Like, can you write well just by reading and writing? Yeah. Do you use, you know, do you encourage students to use craft books?

SPEAKER_01 48:13

I don't think I could point to one craft book. In the terms of those ones that say like how to write a short story, they often have great tips in them. The ones that are better are ones that analyze other writing along the way. The ones that just like lay out the rules of how to write a character, I don't find very interesting. Occasionally I'll steal exercises from them and throw them into classrooms, but I don't think that would be the place to start as a writer.

unknown 48:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Um, you know, one craft book I really love is George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.

SPEAKER_00 48:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

But that's much less of a here's the thing you have to do and here's how I do it, and then let's read a story alongside it and see if what I do matches that, etc. So that's a great book, a craft book. Um, you know, can you become a great writer just by writing and reading? 100%, for sure. Which, you know, I I guess I'll be run out of university by saying that. Having said that, the in our modern busy life, doing that is harder than it sounds. Um, in particular, I think what a lot of us students get out of coming to university are being forced into smaller frameworks. Like just saying I want to write something, you you're just like surrounded by endless desert plains, which direction you're supposed to go into. Um, you know, I teach the the year one subject, I'm teaching it right now. The first thing they have to do is write a 2,000-word short story that's set in South Australia, that that is in the horror fantasy, science fiction, or romance genre. There's some parameters. Yeah, and from that they get some readings, and from that they can start to find their voice. It's not unlike what I said earlier about how much nicer it is to jump into someone else's voice.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:47

It's really hard when you're just like, okay, I want to be a writer now. And of course, along the way, teachers we also teach them little tricks and stuff. But we also we often teach them three or four options rather than here's how to do a character. Here's three or four different ways to do it. Try and see what works for you. And the being forced to try stuff at university, whether it's a university or whether it's doing something like, I don't know, the Kill Your Darling's mentorship or the the various great programs out there, that is really helpful.

SPEAKER_00 50:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

And then just having someone else read your work is really helpful. Like it's very hard to know how you're going. Because you could be going really well and submit to the what I don't know, four major literary magazines we have in Australia and constantly get knocked back. I'm a reader for some of those magazines. I read incredible stories that get knocked back just because it is a tiny percentage to get through. And so you think you're doing horribly, and you might actually be doing really well. And so when you're around peers and you're kind of gradually feeling yourself getting better, you're getting feedback, that is really useful for a writer. And you know, I the last thing, I feel like I now have to spruok it. Creative jobs, people that have creative skills, in this age of AI, we are actually seeing from industry partners at the university, they are the ones they are hiring. We had a guy from Microsoft come to the university the other day, and he was like, We're hiring creative arts graduates because they're learning skills that others don't have. So actually, I think a creative writing degree, will you come out the other after three years of an undergraduate and immediately be a polished writer? No, I wasn't, absolutely wasn't. I would cringe if I saw some of the stuff I read back then, but it was certainly big steps along the way. Um can you do it on your own? Of course. Many people have. Does that mean you you shouldn't waste your time learning? And no, it also doesn't mean that.

SPEAKER_00 51:29

And you know, you're saying about uh getting feedback is invaluable, but also giving feedback is such a great way to learn, isn't it? I are you in a writing group?

SPEAKER_01 51:39

I am, yeah, yeah, the famous writing group, yeah, the poor boys. Uh yes, I am, and that was huge for me. Um because it it filled the hole that I had post-university. You know, like once I finished my PhD, it wasn't anyone reading my work and giving feedback, you know. I could have asked my supervisors, but they're busy people to keep going. Um and so I often say, if you can find a writing group. You know, I do also know people that don't like them, um, that have said it haven't worked for them. Um I think it comes down to find friends that also enjoy writing rather than find a writing group and like really like don't don't foreground the we're all here to critique our work. Because that can get vicious sometimes. And if you're people that don't like each other, it can get competitive and weird. Um, you know, our writing groups we meet once a month on Teams because one of the guys is over in Melbourne. Um it's about an hour of gossip before we even get to the stories, to be honest, to be honest, you mean yeah, it's kind of like what's happening in the writing world, and that is almost as important. It's just a touching base with other people that are struggling along this bizarre landscape that is trying to be a writer. That's really important. So finding people that are doing that journey, and then yes, of course, along the way, send stuff to each other can be really good. Because it's really hard when you're on your own out there.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

Yes. How do you find uh the time and the headspace to write when you're also teaching creative writing?

SPEAKER_01 52:57

Uh yeah, sure. I mean, okay, well, first of all, I come out of teaching credit writing like immediately wanting to write because the kids are incredible.

SPEAKER_00 53:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

Like we we set these exercises where they might have like five minutes to come up on a story premise based on some insane parameters we've just given them. The other day I did um I was co-teaching a lecture with Amy Matthews, who's a romance writer, and she put up um a bunch of romance tropes, and they had to choose like four of them and come up with a romance premise, like a plot synopsis that involves all four. She gave them like five minutes, honestly. There was like no time. And the stuff they came out with in those five minutes was absolutely inspiring. So that that doesn't drain me, it does the exact opposite. The actual finding the time thing is hard because academic, you have a lot of stuff. I have a young child at home, you know, life, etc. Along the way, I've tried various rules, you know. Sometimes it's kind of like 15 minutes on four stories a day, or you know, honestly, at this point in time, and I think that that those things can be really useful for a while when you're first starting out, because sitting down to write is one of the hardest things to do, even if you love it, that first few moments is actually really hard. So having some sort of thing like I want to do 500 words a day, I want to do 15 minutes, that can be important for a while. But I'm actually now at the point where I just like the process of that's a weird idea. Let me write out a really rough draft and see if it has anything, and let me then let me lend kind of enjoy that thing messing around my mind. I'll just find time to do it. And whether that's sometimes I wake up and I look at the clock and it's 6 a.m., I'll get up and write for that time. Sometimes there'll be three days in a row where life is crashing around and I don't have any time to do it. But I still want to go to bed at night, I'm kind of thinking of whatever story it is I want to write next. So you get to a point where you just enjoy the process enough that you just fill whatever time you can with it. You still feel endless guilt about you know wanting to do it more. But funnily enough, you know, um we had a writer in residence three or four years ago, a guy called Gareth Nix that was at um Flinders. And for a long time he had a nine to five job, and so he had a really small window to write, and he eventually hit it big with a novel that he could quit his job. And he actually did that for about a year. I might be telling the story slightly wrong, before I remember, he did that for about a year and then it didn't work, and he went back and to that job because actually it was kind of strange to have too much time to write. Yes. Um, I don't think I would suffer from that because I like to write so many things at once. I actually think I would be happy jumping back and forth. But for some people, it actually can be intimidating to be like, yeah, oh, I now have time to just be a writer. Yes. Nice problem to have. But so so those little slivers of time. I mean, how many incredible, you know, female writers over the years that have had mothers that they talk about, you know, I remember Kate Grenville saying, writing on scraps of napkin while waiting for my kid at the pickup. They often write incredible books on the back of that because they are so engaged in that moment. So actually having little slivers of time sometimes isn't the worst thing in the world.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

Yeah. I love that you have several things on the go because uh it's really validating to me because so many people, you know, so much of the advice is the opposite. But I'm I'm someone who has four or five books I'm reading at once, and I will have Me too. You know, I will be working on an essay and also have a couple of short stories in mind, and yeah, so it's great to hear that you work like that.

SPEAKER_01 56:09

The one thing I've had to learn though, and this took a while for me, was because I don't like writing not well, it took a while for me not to get out of the habit of just having a bunch of things on the go, but just tinkering with like opening pages forever and just kind of perfection, perfection, perfection. Now there are still some writers who do that, um, and that if that works for you, that's fine. But I actually have learned that it's really good for me to be like one story at a time, but one story at a time really quickly, which means like write a draft of that thing, read through it, make tweaks, and it's kind of like what's that game with the moles where they pop up and you have to work. I often find if I get to the end of a story, whether it's the first draft or the 20th, it gives my mind enough of a pause that another story pops up that I want to write, and I do that, and in the time it's taken me to write that one, something's clearly happened with the other one, and I go back to that. Or sometimes that one never comes back, and that just means that was a bad date, you know, it's not gonna work for us. I have hundreds of stories that we'll just never see a light of day. So I write multiple things at once, but I don't I I try and finish drafts of things. Yes. Yeah, yeah. That is useful too.

SPEAKER_00 57:14

So what's next? What are you working on now?

SPEAKER_01 57:17

So I mean, big quite my agent would love me to say a a trilogy of romantic novels, um, but that's not the case, sadly. There's there's no Alex J. Cutherin in the in the future. Um I just kept writing with a process that I always had, to be honest. Um, I definitely like I I want to know what it's like to write a novel, whether I ever write one that's good enough to do, but I also love short stories, I will continue to write them. Yeah. So basically there's been a few short stories lately where I've kind of said, hmm, what would this look like as a novel? And I've written much longer drafts. Not that much longer. Like often in my brain it's going to be 40,000 words, it ends up being eight, and that's just because of so many gaps and stuff. And there's been a few that have, you know, as the mole pops up the second time, I'm like, hmm, that still feels big. So maybe one of them turns into a novel along the way. But I'm really just kind of letting story ideas tell me how long they were. And when I was doing my PhD, none of them really could be a novel, because I kind of had to, I was talking about short stories and satire. That was stuck in. Now I don't have that. So really a story can be anything it wants. Sometimes it's 500 words, sometimes it's like, hmm, maybe that is a bigger thing. But I just do what I always did, which is just when an idea is in my head, in until you whack it with that little that little mallet, it's going to annoy you. So go and write that draft and then just see what happens. You know, I'm not a writer that has to worry about the pressure of the next big contract because the last one wasn't big and probably the next one won't be either, and that's totally fine with me.

SPEAKER_00 58:35

Yeah. But your collection, uh, the the stories in that are all different lengths, which I really like. You know, they're they're just as long as they need to be. So you're not trying to make them consistent, yeah, for the sake of publishing. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. We probably need to finish up, but there's so many other things I could talk to you about. Maybe we'll need to do a follow-up at some point. All right, sure. I'd love to. No worries. Yeah. So thank you so much, Alex. That was a really great conversation and a fantastic story, and I loved the way you read it too. I I have read that story myself probably three times now, but it was just so enjoyable listening to you read it. Oh, great.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

Um I'm glad to hear that. Um, thank you so much, Karen, for having me on, but also just doing this podcast. I think this is fantastic. It's needed. I've really enjoyed it. It's they're the perfect length of my drive from Flinders to my home in the the south of Adelaide. So I wish there was one a day, you know. Can you not quit your day job and keep going?

SPEAKER_00 59:26

I could do that.

SPEAKER_01 59:27

You could do one day if you wanted to.

SPEAKER_00 59:29

Yeah, I know. I know. I I have enough material to do more, but I don't have the time, sadly.

unknown 59:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

Well, thank you for taking the time out, I'm sure, which is your busy life to kind of shine a spotlight on stories. It's really appreciative.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

It's great talking to you too. Thanks very much. Awesome.

unknown 59:43

Bye.

SPEAKER_00 59:43

Have a good day. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Yagra and Turibal people of Mianjan, Brisbane, and on the traditional lands of the Gorna people in Adelaide. I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners, to their elders past and present, and to acknowledge their rich history of storytelling. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please like it on my Substack page or your preferred listening platform, and share with others you think will enjoy it too. Thanks so much for listening.