Australian Shorts Episode 11 Laura Jean McKay

Episode 11 of Australian Shorts features Laura Jean McKay. Laura was the 2025 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow to Cork, Ireland and is the author of two short story collections, Holiday in Cambodia and Gunflower. Her novel The Animals in That Country won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2021. The French translation, Les animaux de ce pays, won the 2025 Prix Gargantua. Laura teaches Creative Writing at Massey University. She is based in Magandjin (Brisbane) Australia.

In this episode Laura reads A Sensation of Whirling and a Loss of Balance from her collection, Gunflower. She then discusses the fly-away comment that led her to write this story and talks about why animals are integral to many of her stories. Laura also explains how short story writing helps her to write novels.

This episode was recorded on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people of Magandjin, Brisbane.

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

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. Episode 11 features Laura Jean McKay. Laura is the author of two short story collections, Holiday in Cambodia and Gunflower, and one novel. Her novel, The Animals in That Country, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and was co-winner of the Aurelius Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2021. The French translation also won the 2025 Prix Gargantua. Laura was the 2025 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow to Cork, Ireland, and she teaches creative writing at Massey University. Laura is based in Brisbane, Australia. Hi Laura. Hi Karen. Thanks so much for joining me today. Well, thank you for having me here. It's such a delight. You're welcome. So we are going to start with a reading from your second short story collection, Gunflower, and we'll get straight into that and then we'll have a talk afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Okay, thanks so much. This is a story called A Sensation of Whirling and a Loss of Balance. It was all very fine, nothing really happened. There were layers of supreme matte around Tanya's eyes, and when I called her Tanya instead of mum, she looked relieved. That's the thing. When you've been away, you can't tell whose history you're in when you get back. Is it yours? Is it theirs? Is it in a photograph you stared at on the shared computer until the person who had been waiting had waited long a fucking knuff? I watched Tanya's mouth move. When she pursed her lips the hairs on her face that were white with foundation bowed into the cracks. On the plastic lace tablecloth there were cupcakes and dips, a bread hollowed out with cheese put inside and baked or something. There were no drinks except for cordial. Everyone had their own plastic cup, and you could write your name on yours with a permanent marker. Gary was there with a cup labelled Gary. I would have said I was surprised that he and Tanya were still talking, except they weren't really. His cordial had an amber tinge, and when I followed Tanya from one room to the next I caught a whiff of him. Whiskey warm and perilous. My cousins were there too, smiling and stooping as though the crosses around their necks both weighed and supported them. They'd visited me while I was away at least twice, so I didn't feel the need to stop. I trailed Tanya right across the lounge room rug until it turned back to regular carpet and then became bathroom. Tanya disappeared behind the door. I was in the lounge room with the rest of the guests, those cousins still smiling, another Christian couple, some more people who looked as familiar as extras on a TV show. I needed some of that cordial that Gary was drinking by the kitchen door because I'd just noticed my sister was there too, in a frame beside the television. Tanya hadn't thought to pull her down, or she had thought too much. She'd probably been propping that frame up and down all morning until those Christians had told her that memories are close to godliness. I met a lot of Christians while I was away, and I get that where they're coming from, I do, but who can remember all the rules? Love someone and not someone else, don't fork food off someone else's plate, eat fish, something something neighbour. Laurel was in the lounge room too, still with that avalanche of her face. Tanya would have told her that she's my best friend, so she had to be there. Tanya had told me the same thing. But Laurel wouldn't look at me. She kept her droopy eye fixed on the cheese ball and crackers. Other than that, there were just a few busy kids trying to coax something out from under the couch. Those kids had been dressed up in some sort of extreme party wear I didn't even know came in kid sizes. They were like awful dolls, quietly convincing the darkness under the couch to come out into the light. I pinned those kids on the Christians that weren't my cousins, but then another kid in an amazing mustard skivvy slid up to them, and the Christian dad put his arms across the boy's chest like a seat belt and he was safe. The other doll kids, loose in the world as spare change, must have belonged to the TV extras. What I needed was Gary. I blinked desperately at the space he and his drink had left, and then I smelled his cigarette smoke feeling its way through the open back door and into the lounge. I wanted one of them too, so I followed the smoke, but Gary wasn't on the porch. He was at the far end of the yard, messing with something by the fence. A hole. I couldn't tell if he was trying to make it bigger or smaller. I would have gone out there and bugged him about it, but Tanya came out of the bathroom behind me and fluffed her hair and smiled. There were more layers dark and wet as concrete over the old ones on her face. I stuck my gaze on her like my eyeballs were arms wrapped around her leg, and she was nineteen and I was only three, and dressed in cordroy pants and a t-shirt I'd picked myself. One with a dolphin that had been printed so the snout went under my armpit and I could trap it there. Without a snout, a dolphin looks like a pumped up blue tyre. I don't know what my sister would have worn. In the picture beside the TV, she wasn't wearing anything. She was just a head. When I tried to imagine her body below that, I got dizzy and had to sit on the couch for a while. Tanya hadn't planned for dinner, but Gary stayed stuck to the door like sugar, sucking on that Gary cup. I thought that making something that we could all eat standing up would be easiest, but Tanya said, Now that everyone's left you start talking? That's good, that's really great. And I realized I should help more. I spilled cordial on the plastic lace tablecloth, and Tanya seemed like she would have a nervous breakdown, so Gary unstuck himself and took the jug away from me. I got pretty strong while I was away, but I also got better at people. I understood that Gary and my mother were at least fucking and maybe even thinking about something serious again, so I let go my hold of the jug and tried to look Gary in the eye. I only got as far as his clean shaven chin before I had to wipe my cordially hand on my jeans. The TV extras had gone, and so had Laurel and my cousins, but the Christians were still in the kitchen with their skivvy kid, and in the lounge room the two doll children were pressed against the carpet with their faces under the couch. Who do you belong to? I asked them. There was something going on in the next room between Gary, Tanya, and the plastic lace that I didn't want to be a part of. The kids seemed a safer option. He just lives here, one of the kids said. They both had their faces under the couch and they were little, eight or nine years old, so I wasn't sure which of them spoke. The boy, who, for all I could tell, was wearing Lederhosen, or the girl that someone had dressed as a human meringue. When I didn't answer, the girl pulled her face into the light, and that face was a round red miniature version of the Christian dad in the kitchen. Is he yours? she asked me. I glanced at the boy. Isn't he your brother? Yes, but the little dog I got down on my knees, which was hard on them, and that's a sad thing for a twenty three year old to say. The space under the couch was empty of everything dust, coins, blankets, shoes, except a creature about the size of two fists. Its eyes shone out from way down against the wall. I smiled at it. I thought my teeth might make a light in the dark. It didn't growl. It didn't do anything. Why are you dressed like a boy? I ducked my head out. It was the girl. You can talk, I said. She looked down at her froth in confusion. That's just the way we talk where I've been. We talk rough to each other, and that way we're friends. We also test each other. Like I bet you could get that dog out if you we're getting takeaways, Tanya said behind us. Well I was on the ground with those two children, but I didn't think she should look at me the way she did, with all that makeup slid forward on her face and her eyes shining like the dog's. Is that your dog? I asked her. I was living here now, so I thought I should know. You want Chinese? Or there's pizza, but it's not good. I wanted Tanya to recall that I used to live here before with her and my sister, so I knew all about the takeaway options. But I was on the floor with these children. Somewhere under the couch the creature was looking at how my jeans had ridden down to show a smiling, toothless crack. We got pizza. Tanya had the table all set up, but when it came, we took the plastic plates and cups and sat in front of the TV and watched the Simpsons in silence until the news came on, and everyone relaxed a bit in front of a civil war and some robbery that went so badly you could laugh. I laughed. Tanya and the Christians, the mum, the dad, the three kids stared at me. Even Gary stared. I glanced under the couch, expecting to see the two button eyes of the little dog staring too, but it kept itself to itself. The Christians thought it was time to take their kids home. The doll children ran out to their station wagon without a backwards glance, but the skivvy kid said such a formal goodbye to me and Tanya and Gary that I was moved to shake his hand. He had a strong, bony grip. I realized he was probably thirteen and could almost date my sister in the picture because she was not quite fifteen there. I wanted to give him some sage advice. Don't go away, kiddo, or better, don't get done. But the Christian dad was honking the car with unchristian impatience. I was left alone in the doorway of the house. When the car had gone, I realized I could just walk out into the cool night. Unless I left the state, no one cared. When you stand on a cliff's edge, it's not vertigo that makes you fall. It's your body just naturally wanting to fling itself off whatever high thing it can. And you have to put a stop to it. I shut the door and went back inside. There were noises coming from Tanya's room. With my ear pressed against the cold paint I could hear them, not sex noises, but more talking than either of them had done at the party. Gary rumbled and Tanya laughed, and then it seemed like she was crying. They'd turned off the heating, but they hadn't put away the cordial or Gary's jacket. In the inner pocket was a hip flask of whiskey, three quarters drunk, a half soft pack of cigarettes, and some notes and coins, a winning lottery scratcher for fifteen dollars, and a pill without a blister. I popped the pill, then upended the whiskey into a nameless plastic cup, filled the rest with the cordial, and made myself comfortable on the couch. My old room was filled with sewing stuff and boxes, and it didn't have a bed. I could sleep on that couch. I guess it had been five years and four and a half months since I drunk anything that wasn't home brewed in a plastic bag. But soon enough my head came unstuck and floated up around the light fixture. From there I could see tomorrow. Gary and I would clean out my room and fix a bed and maybe a desk and a lamp in there, some drawers to put my underpants and jeans. My head bumped against the light bulb, and I could see into the past. I showed my sister how to go into other people's houses, but not how to leave. I smacked my forehead on the roof and could see the present. The little woolly dog crept from under the couch and stared at me like my sister in the picture on the mantle stared at me. My head floated down and made a soft landing on my neck. The dog's eyes and my sister's eyes were much the same. They were both very round and very small, and they shone with their own brown light. I didn't know the dog's name, so I called it Comet. My sister liked flying and heaven and things. I took my plastic cup into the kitchen and rattled around until I found an open sherry next to the soy sauce and cooking oil. Comet and my sister were still in the lounge room staring. I took a sip of the sherry and stared back. My head loosened again, but stayed attached to my neck. Comet, I said. The dog didn't respond, so I tried calling my sister. Amy My voice snagged on the why, and the dog stood up. I said it again. Amy! Come on, Amy! The dog totted out behind me. The backyard was cold and bright with stars and a wonky moon. I lit one of Gary's cigarettes and sucked so deep my throat caught on fire. I didn't choke though. I always told my sister, you've got to be quiet, but she never got it. When the smoke came out, we were near the hole that Gary had been bothering at the fence. It was about the size of the little dog. A pile of dirt lay at its edge. I tapped the dirt with my sneaker, and some of it crumbled and disappeared. The dog made to follow it. Oh wait up, Amy I put my smoke in my mouth and got down on my hands and knees and peered in. It wasn't a hole, it was a tunnel. The moon shone through on the other side where I knew there was a paddock thick with rabbits and crickets and cheat grass and not much else. When I sat back, the dog was staring intently, its black nose snuffling through to all those things on the other side. Go on, then I pointed at the tunnel. That dog might have been small, but it had the sense enough to not come out from under the couch when there were kids around, and sense enough to get into a hole when there was fun on the other side. Only after its tail had disappeared did I think about how it might not have the sense to come back.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Thanks, Laura. Thank you. What an incredible story. You know, every time I read it or hear it, I have new thoughts about it. And even then that it happened again. But this is something I love about your stories. I think you treat your readers very intelligently and you keep us thinking and hypothesizing. And in this story, this starts, this kind of uncertainty, I guess, starts with the first word in the first line. You know, the first line is it was all very fine. And we quickly learn that nothing is fine. So even that first word, it is it's very unclear what it's referring to. Um and and I love this kind of uncertainty that you have here. And you know, like as the title suggests, there's this vertiginous thread through the story with this 23-year-old narrator who I'm assuming is female. Um, and she's returned to the family home after five years away, but and you plunge us straight into this family gathering. Everyone is strange to her, including her own mother. Um, nothing feels quite right. Her sister's absent, presumed dead, and unfamiliar or strange people are in the house, children in strange costumes. Um, you know, and you give us very little backstory about all this. And what you do give us is quite vague. Like we know there are these elephants in the room, but we're not quite sure what it is. So um the the experience for the reader is very vertiginous too. And I just, despite this kind of discombobulated essence to this story, I get the sense that you were very much in control when you were writing it, and this was actually the effect that you were wanting, like to unsettle the reader as well. Um is that correct? Am I seeing that right?

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah, what thank you, Karen. What a lovely analysis of this story. Um, I'm so glad that you brought up the first line because I was on the phone to a friend a long time ago, and um I knew she'd she'd been to a strange gathering that that would spoken about before she went, and I called her up and said, you know, how did it go? And she said it was all very fine, nothing really happened, and I just knew that everything had happened, but but whatever had happened wasn't necessarily a major event, and it wasn't even perhaps worth talking about. Um, but and so, and so perhaps, you know, um it was oh, you know, you could say it was okay, you know, you know, it was pretty boring, but but the way she said it was all very fine, nothing really happened made it made it. I think that summed up so many awkward family gatherings for me. And to me, writing the dinner party story or the Christmas story or the or the funeral story, you know, is one of the biggest challenges um that we can set for ourselves as a writer. These these large gatherings of people that we know very, very well, um and but perhaps haven't been in their lives for a long time, and having to navigate those situations uh can be very complex. I I think I read somewhere once that a party is one of the most, or you know, a a commu a gathering of people is one of the most stressful, you know, situations that a human being can be in. It comes up in the list with um, you know, with death and and divorce and moving house and parties. Just because we have to navigate so many things, but I think it's also one of the most important situations that we can be in, especially when we're dealing with you know online lives and and you know, global pandemics and and our increased presence um you know in an online situation. We lose these magnificent skills that we develop when we're in in community spaces or in parties or in crowds, where we're trying to navigate all of these personalities, whether they're people we know or people we don't know. Um that really, really fascinates me what what we bring to these gatherings and how we how we um work our way through them and also the power dynamics on the page.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Yeah, yeah, it that's really fascinating because you know that there are extroverts and introverts, and you know, you think maybe extroverted people kind of thrive on those kind of gatherings, but yeah, that's a I hadn't thought of it like that. How you know you have to navigate so much when you're in a group of people rather than just with with one or two people. Um and I when I was reading the story, I you know, I was constantly trying to put the story together in my head and figure it out. Um, you know, is this yeah, but there were so many aspects and I was thinking, you know, has the narrator been in prison? You know, did the um the is there this unresolved blame between the mother and daughter and all these different thoughts. And then at some point I just thought, well, maybe the point isn't to get the facts right. Maybe I don't need to do that. Um, and you know, when you zoom out of your story, it really powerfully conveys all those themes of like grief and loss and heartache and longing. Um so then I thought maybe you were actually asking the reader to rethink how we read and how we view the world. Like, were you consciously thinking like that?

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Or were you I mean, that's a that's a beautiful take on this story. Um I'm not sure that that was a conscious thing. I mean, I think I'm always trying to make these bigger themes that we're dealing with um, you know, relatable and something that that everyone can can get something out of, even if they're surprised by the situation or it's a new situation for them. So for me, the protagonist in this story has um been away in jail um for a period of time. And for me, it's because um she was breaking into houses and she convinced her sister to too, and something went very wrong, and her sister. Died and now the protagonist has come back to a sort of a welcome back, a really grim welcome back party, which of course is you know very um upsetting for everyone. So that's sort of the basic premise of the story. But I also wanted to make it um everyone's strange family Christmas, everyone's strange, um, strange communal gathering, you know, everyone's awkward week or weekend away with old friends, um, where you know what it's like um to go into a room and and just feel feel like you're on the outside, and to try desperately to perhaps cling to the one person who you think is your safety net. And in this case, it's it's it's the mum, you know, the m young mum Tanya, who um just isn't really able to provide that safety anymore because she doesn't feel safe herself. Um and in the end the protagonist goes back to their old ways of uh essentially, they just can't help but but um but to try to take control of situations by by getting people to do things that maybe they're not comfortable with. And I guess I wanted to show that devastation as well. And you know, I I did I didn't know much about um about the prison system, but I suppose there is that that idea of incarceration and and looking at that, and um, you know, in in some cases, you know, some people do find a lot of help in that space, and in other cases um it's just really really hard to come out the other side. And I was really pleased actually because this story was first published in J Journal, um which is a journal out of New York, and it's Justice Journal, and it's run out of a law department, and they publish stories that are about centred around incarceration and looking at the different aspects of that. So it's an amazing feeling to sort of explore this topic, you know, as a as an area that I don't personally have experience with incarceration, but to connect with um with a journal and and readers who, you know, um often have had that experience and to find that audience there was was really amazing. I certainly didn't write it with that intention of of publishing in that journal, but I found my place.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

That's great. I I love the way you also just um you know, even if we haven't had those experiences, you really we we could just really feel the discomfort in that house at that time and how everything was just kind of you know tilted and and a bit off and everyone's just trying, yeah, trying to get through it, really.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Yeah. I mean it's funny because I I had I haven't thought about this before, and that's why these com sorts of conversations are so wonderful, but I was writing this story at the same time as I was writing my novel, The Animals in That Country, and one of the one of the big difficult tasks that I set myself for um the animals in that country was to make everything very much in the present and not to have any flashbacks. And I think in this story, um, and I was writing a lot of short stories at the same time as the novel to try and navigate these bigger themes that I was looking at, and we can talk a bit more about the dog, the dog down the track if you want. Um but in terms of um creating sort of this sense of um a character being very present in this scene and not really having that much backstory, and the moment that she does sort of flashback is when she's inebriated and getting into the sherry in the cupboard. That draw that has a lot of parallels actually with the novel that I ended up writing, where there's this very present character. Um she she likes her booze and her smokes a lot, um, she really struggles with with relationships with other people, and she's sort of trying to navigate this very complex world of of people and animals. And so I see reading through that story just then I really see a prototype of that of that later character in this one.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yes, it it's it really struck me how much this is written in the present, you know, and but I think um that's what makes it a really engaging story, just not having the backstory and just pulling it all in, and it just mirrors so nicely what she's going through. Yeah, well, I guess what everyone in the house is going through that that discombobulation, and that then having no backstory makes us feel a bit like that as a reader too. Um yes, let's talk about the dog, because this creature under the couch, no bigger than two fists, and I thought, wow, the the your choice of word there, fists, was very um uh intentional. Um I was thinking it was a black dog, but nowhere did you mention black dog. Um, but I guess I was thinking black dog depression and this tiny little dog. Um and the mother ignoring the question about the dog, you know, the adults are really kind of pretending that it's not there at all. So it's like the elephant in the room, um, and the main source of discomfort really. And then you, you know, you kind of um the you make the line between the dog and the dead sister very blurry. Um and this is how I was reading it, and I'd love to know what what your intention was, but you know, so the narrator sets the dog free, which kind of sets the family free a bit too from the weight of their grief, I think, or this lurking spectre, this lurking grief. Um so is that the role you're intending the dog to play in the story? Or was it just because you have to have an animal in the story? I can't help it.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Yeah. Yeah, I I mean I was thinking a lot about animals and human-animal relationships at the time. And as with as with the dingo in my in my eventual novel, um, who just appeared on the page one day and never left, the dog in this story just appeared. I did not create this dog. The dog was just under the couch suddenly, and then that and then became a very, very important part of the story. Um and uh the dog has many, many roles in this story. The dog and the sister are mirrors of each other. Um, and I have to be very careful with that because there's a lot of tradition, especially, especially in Western literature, of having animals stand in for human meaning. So the you know, the dog is is representative of you know of the human's grief, and and this happens this or this analysis happens over and over again. But I think that that animals uh can be equal characters in stories. And so my intention is definitely for for the dog to be a metaphor for for grief and for the sister, but also for the sister to be the metaphor for the dog and and the position that the dog has in this family of this sort of yeah, as you say, the elephant in the room, this little being that that is being ignored and and everything about it is unspoken. And um the protagonist in the story saw the sister as a person outside of the family and as someone who could do things outside of the family. And unfortunately, because of the protagonist being into breaking into houses, they pushed the sister into a situation that the sister wasn't ready for. But they did, they obviously had well, I hope it's obvious, they had a very close relationship at one point, and equally the protagonist sees the little dog, and so do the children, and and sees this dog as as something else, and something as you know that has potential outside of a little woolly thing under the couch. And so when they go into the backyard, um, yeah, that is a very big scene. Uh uh I think your analysis is is really beautiful and very kind, the idea that the protagonist might be setting the family free of, you know, of of this grief. But also the protagonist is also getting the dog into a situation um very similar to what they did with the sister, and and um, you know, and maybe pushing the dog out into a world that that a little cat a little sort of domestic dog isn't ready to run through paddocks with rabbits and and grass.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

I know, I I was thinking it's actually a really shocking end. Um and this is you've done this all the way through, you've kind of got these dual things going on. Um yeah, so it it felt really shocking that she let that dog free. It was like this jolt that she'd done really something really significant and irreparable, which I guess is what happened with her sister and the robbery. And that's right.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

And I I guess I wanted that, you know, she'd gone through this this system, this, you know, this prison system and spent all this time in there, and it's only when she meets the dog and and goes through the same situation as she did with her sister that she that she actually learns the lesson. So it's sort of a a real um it's a moment of freedom for the dog and a moment of of teach for the for the human character.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

Yeah, yeah, it's great. Yes, you had to have the dog there for sure. Um, I'd love to hear your thoughts on tension versus drama, because in this story that I feel the drama has already happened before the story begins. You know, the the daughter who's dead and the other one who went to jail and has now come back. So we're mostly seeing the tension that was created by those things. Um, although then perhaps the drama returns at the end when the narrator sets the dog free, um, which will then ease the tension that we've had all through the story. So I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that, on drama versus tension.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

Oh, I love this question, and I don't know that I will answer it very well, because I don't think I'm particularly good at I I my character my stories are very character driven, and they're I always start with character and go through with character, and as I said before, characters will just appear and I'll go through and hope that they become important or useful to the story in some way. And then after I've finished a story, often I think about the plot and and how and how um tension and conflict and things like that might work. Um I I don't think I intentionally um intentionally went this through this story thinking about the points of drama and tension. I think in a short story it's much easier for to let those things naturally play out and then you can tweak it in the edits. But in a novel-length work, you really do need to think about these things. And I guess as a someone who's can often considered as a speculative fiction writer, you could sort of think about it in terms of apocalypse and post-apocalypse. So, in a way, this is a post-apocalyptic story, you know, the the awful thing has already happened, and now they're in the aftermath and trying to clean up afterwards. But I think you've raised a really good point that I actually hadn't thought about in the writing that in a way she creates a new event at the end because there's going to be aftermath of this. Everybody's gonna wake up in the house, she's gonna be hung over on the couch, and the dog is going to be missing, and they're going to go through the same grief and strangeness all over again. Um, so it is sort of a circular story in that way. I don't know that I've answered this question very well, but I I I could I would love to be someone who is better at at plotting out um tension and drama, but I don't think I am I don't think it matters, Laura, because your stories are really good.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

I don't do that either, but I just know I I guess I was just thinking how um even in a short story you have to have tension on s or conflict on some level. And so I I think I was just thinking about how yeah the drama has happened, but this is all about the the aftermath of that drama.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

It's such a good point. And actually, do you know the way I think I I work it out for myself um is I think more in terms of power and power dynamics on the page. So in every relationship, there is a power dynamic playing out. As soon as you get two people or two beings together, there is power, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's you know, power is we often think of power as always terrible, but sometimes it can be about levels of respect or levels of seniority or you know being junior or being younger than someone, you know, these things are all sort of power dynamics. So in this story, I I would have been thinking it uh thinking about it more in terms of the power relationships, and the protagonist is coming into this scene in a state of very reduced power, you know, there's someone who the family is looking down upon because of their incarceration, and the person in the story with the power is Tanya, and the the protagonist is trying to hold on to that power, but then slowly realizing that Tanya isn't with her, it's her and Gary are a block, and so then the power dynamic changes when the little dog, as soon as the little dog comes in, the protagonist shifts to to uh um a power dynamic with that little dog and um and and forms a relationship with them. So so I'm really interested in the way um these things shift, and I love bringing in an animal into the situation and giving them giving them power and going, well, what happens? What happens when the little dog who looks very much like her sister enters the scene? How does that change the relationships in this scene?

SPEAKER_01 36:00

Yeah, yeah, that's wonderful. Do you remember I I'm not sure how long ago this story is written, so you might not remember this, but do you remember how long it took you to write it or how many revisions you had to do to before it was ready?

SPEAKER_00 36:15

I think it was a very quick story. I'm pretty sure I was on the phone to my friend and I wrote it down on a little sticky note that uh it was all very fine, nothing really happened, and then that sat on my wall for a while while I was doing the other things like writing my novel and my thesis, like I was supposed to do. And then when I had a moment, um I went back to it, and I my memory is that I wrote this story very quickly and quite easily, and that everything just sort of flowed out fairly naturally. Um, and then I think I tried to get it published in a few places and it was rejected. And I was sort of sad because you know, when a story comes out quite neatly, you feel a real affinity with it. You know, if if you've really laboured over something, sometimes you feel like okay, well, I can keep labouring over that, it's just a hard story. But if it comes out quite easily, it's very disappointing. So I think my recollection is that I worked on it a little bit more just to tighten it up a little bit and make all the symbols sort of maybe a little bit clearer. And then um I had met um someone at a at a conference when I'd gone over to the US and they were running this J Journal, and I thought, oh, actually, I think this is the right place. So it was really interesting to be pitching around in Australia and not getting any takes, and then I sent it over to the States and they and they took it up very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Yeah, it's like it was waiting for that home. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and so did you say you were working on your novel for your PhD, and then you wrote this story in that during that time because because at the start you were saying how this story kind of uh you know has parallels to your novel. So maybe that's was partly why it was quick, because you already had that novel in your head, and this was kind of a little offshoot of it in some way.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

That is such a good point, and I think I I I mean I know that I I think m more naturally in short stories, that's just the way that's just the way my art comes out right. For a better way to put it. When I write a poem, I don't really know what I've written, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Um and my novels tend to be labours of love, maybe less on the love and more on the labour. Um I mean the animals in that country, every sentence, I mean, yeah, every sentence was was a struggle. Um but I think the stories that I was writing on the side and a lot of gunflower came out um during the time of of that novel's writing. Um I think there's something about just um the fluidity and the and the containment of a short story that I very naturally have an affinity to, and so they've really really helped me write to write novels. And I'm working on another novel uh right now, and it's the same situation. Every word is difficult, and I'm writing some some really lovely short stories.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

So it sounds to me like um the short stories really you know what you should be doing. I loved the I love the animals in that country, but it's like the short stories, you know, are um are kind of like your comfort food, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

Absolutely, and the novel is made is my vegetables. The vegetables are great, maybe something a little more. The novel is the fibre and the Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Short stories of the toast.

SPEAKER_01 39:39

There's another short story writer, Anne Casey Hardy, who I've also interviewed on this podcast, and she was recently quoted in a KYD article, and she said, Whenever my writing falls short, it's because I have not risked or dared enough. I fall short through timidity and regressing to the quotidian. When I'm willing to go further, I usually get closer to the target. Is this the case with you too?

unknown 40:06

Is this the case with you too?

SPEAKER_00 40:08

I mean, yeah, I I think I always push my short stories and probably novels, or my writing in general to the edge. Um every now and then, you know, I sort of black something out that that just doesn't work. And you know, there I have drafts of things. Um, but in general, I'm always pushing it right to the to the edge of my abilities and the subject matter that I'm looking at. Um one of the great difficulties I have with my story is that stories is that I always want there to be some big topic that is being addressed, you know. I'm going to write about, you know, a cup of tea and also global poverty. You know, it's always it's always in there. And and back in the day, um I I was pulled up about this, you know, back when when a lot of people were writing more sort of character studies, and and when your stories weren't supposed to really be about anything, or if they were about something was supposed to be very, very subtle, um, people would say that my work was too topicsy. Um but thankfully um we've moved into a new phase now where where that's not only um encouraged but it's celebrated, and you know, I can sort of proudly be an environmental writer and a writer who writes about animals and a writer who who writes about colonization and and whiteness. Um, you know, and and that's something that that is fine and important and even sought out by readers. Not always. I mean, some people, you know, there are definitely readers who who uh feel you know frustrated by um by the intensity of my stories. Um sometimes in Gunflower I think that I should put one particular story, I should have put it a little bit later. It's about chickens, and it's about a group of chickens who are in a a battery hen situation. And I honestly think that some people stop reading Gunflower at that point because the chickens just get to them. The chickens really, really, you know, grab their heartstrings and and give them a good tug. Um so sometimes they think oh maybe I should have put that that traumatic chicken story at the end.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Well, I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing that it gets to them, but also um I don't know that everyone reads short stories in order. Like, do you do you think that everyone should read stories in the order that they've been put together in an anthology?

SPEAKER_00 42:41

It's so funny because I'm friends with um quite a few short story writers, people like um you know Laura Elvery and Mirandi Rewood, and we all lament about the fact that we spend so long putting these short stories together and labouring over which story will go first and which story will go last. And most people, including myself, just pick up a short story collection, flip through it, and go to the story that speaks to the most at that point in time. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Yeah, yeah, or it might be I mean, I've had this conversation with Laura as well. Um, you know, I I know she was horrified to learn that people don't just read them in order because because you put so much time and effort into putting them in a particular order, but uh I know I sometimes will flick through and choose one that might be shorter or longer depending on how much time I have at that moment to read. So I'm trying to be better about following the order and respecting the author, but um, but sometimes I do jump ahead and go back.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean I I think a short story collection, you know, unless it's a linked collection, which is a different thing, it's more that's more novelistic. A short story collection is like more like an album. I think it it it it more closely sort of relates to music, and um, you have your greatest hits in there, and you know, you have your beasts. Sides. Um, and you, you know, and and people will will listen or or relate to the piece that you know they most feel like at the moment. When I was working on Gunflower, it was it was a lovely stretch, actually, because a lot of the stories I'd written, you know, in my in my twenties and early 30s were too spec. I was writing 1,500 words or 3,000 words so that I could submit them to Australian literary journals that that all had that word limit. Um, so when I had to write 30,000 more words of gunflower, I just let loose. There's ones in there that are 10,000 words, there's ones that are one paragraph long, and it was such a joy as a short story writer who'd been working for 20 years just to go for it and have a publisher who supported that as well.

SPEAKER_01 44:50

Yeah, and and just let the story be however long it needs to be. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's great. I I love that mix of you know, a a paragraph long story than it's a six thousand words stories. Yeah, it's it's good. Um so do you think obviously w what you've what you can get published now, like you alluded to before, um is uh more variable than in you know in the past. But I'm just wondering, are there any rules around short story writing now that can't be broken?

SPEAKER_00 45:26

Oh, like oh, okay. Um I mean I think it is really good to learn how to write to spec and how to write to 1500, three, three thousand, five thousand words. Um, I think it's really, really good practice for an early career writer to learn um how to write, you know, a 3,000-word short story and how to limit your world to that, and also how to submit it on time, and also how to get to know your literary journals um and get to know what they publish. You know, why why are you publishing or trying to publish in Granter if you actually don't like any of their work? You know, is it that actually kill your darlings is where you all your favourite publishers, you know, sorry, writers are being published, and that's where you should go. Um so I don't know, I think there is uh I don't think you can break the rule of professionalism and and working with editors and realizing that you know editors aren't against you when they reject a story, it's not because they hate you. They might, but it's very doubtful. It's very doubtful they even know who you are. Um, they are just working their jobs, they're probably volunteers or they're working for very low pay, like writers are, and you know, it's such a beautiful thing to learn how to work um with an editor in literary journals in publishing houses. So I think the rule of professionalism actually, more than more than writing, in terms of actual story style, um, I just think it's really good to sort of know what you're doing and where your boundaries are and where your limits are and also where you can push that. Um, you know, if you're writing um stories that are all written backwards and every word is backwards and also shaped on the page like a cat, that's awesome. That's your practice. But if you find yourself becoming quite frustrated that no one will publish that, then it can be fun to look at what other literary journals are publishing and try other forms, you know. Um, if you want to be an experimental backwards writer and never get published, that's that's great. But you know, um, if you do want to be in the formal literary scene, you know, some it's just really lovely to just go, oh, that's that's a really interesting story that I just read there. Maybe I'll try that. Um, and sorry to harp back on the chicken story that traumatizes everyone, but I read a piece um years ago, and this is very frustrating for a podcast because I've forgotten the name of the author, but it was a piece um that was written in the collective we voice of a group of refugees on a boat, and and um the whole story was was written as the group, all going through this very intense experience, and I'd never read a story written successfully in the collective in that collective voice. Um, and so with when I came to um I was commissioned to write a piece in response to an artist Jade Birdstool's um artwork, which was uh some golden eggs that were all smashed on the ground, and I immediately just thought, well, what would it be like to write in the collective voice of a group of females who happen to be chickens? Um and and um sort of embody that sort of collective animal sort of consciousness and and the way that maybe people or animals do relate to each other in in situations of of great turmoil as you know as a collective sort of voice. And so, you know, it's I think it's really another another thing, I guess, that sh can't be broken, which again isn't really a writing thing, but a reading thing is is to read you know everything and read outside your comfort zone and to try to try new voices and styles and to see you know where you can go with that. Um and you know, and then also within that, um, I think that raises questions about authorship as well, and it's good to know what stories are yours to write and what stories aren't yours to write. And you know, when you're when you're talking about writing from other cultures, um you know, uh looking at, you know, looking at gender lines and things like that. Um, you know, we just because we want to write a story in a certain voice doesn't mean that we should. That want isn't a secret muse calling you. Um, you know, we have we have a lot of decisions that we have power over when we're writers, and um there are there are many voices we can write from, um, so it's good to just explore which is the voice that that you should be telling a story from.

SPEAKER_01 50:07

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Just final comment about the chicken story, and then we'll move on. Um, what I loved about that story, and and you've done it in other stories too, is I I didn't realise straight away that it was actually being told through the chicken's eyes, and I just thought that was such a fantastic way to make us you know think differently and and to see it from the animal's perspective. So even though some people might have been put off by it, it I really recommend anyone who eats chickens should read it.

SPEAKER_00 50:43

Why not? You just be there with the chickens too. Um yeah, and I really like with with this story um a sense sensation of whirling and a loss of balance, the one that I just read. A lot of people sort of assume that the protagonist is male, I think because they've been incarcerated. But I don't mind that. Um I don't mind I don't mind that that sort of fluidity um in voice. I wasn't I'm happy for for the protagonist to be read, you know, as you know, he, she or they, you know, it's it's not it's sort of a kn about about um gender so much as um the the situation that these people find themselves in.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

I didn't think for one minute that it was a male protagonist because there was that comment from the child um why are you dressed like a boy? But I just wasn't sure if it was she or they. Yes. Um yeah, yeah. Um so do you where almost all of your stories, probably all of them maybe, um, have animals in them. And of course your incredible novel, The Animals in That Country, features many animals. Um so and you often show the reader the world from the animal's perspective. I just wondered where this interest in writing about other animals stems from.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Yeah, I always wonder about that too. I mean, I I grew up I had a rural childhood. Um I grew up in East Gippsland, um in small towns and on a farm for a long time, and and then we moved to Queensland, to central Queensland. Um so I was in small towns there and I didn't I didn't move to a city until I was almost 18. And so when you live a rural life and when you when you're uh you know go out into the bush um a bit as part of that, I mean there's nothing else to do, so you have to go out into the bush at some point whether as a little kid walking running around or as a teenager bee being naughty, um it I I think you you just uh you encounter animals all the time. They're just in your face, they're in your house, they're in your shoes, they're in the paddock, um, they're at your school. Uh it's so it's it's a beautiful sort of childhood spent in relation to other animals and sometimes in different circumstances as well, you know. Um being a rural kid, you also see um the violence um in the relationship between humans and other animals, um, especially in farm life, you know, that that can be it can be confronting, but also uh a part of the reality of of the way that a lot of us live is is is in a violent relationship with animals that a lot of us don't actually see. We see the end product of that in the supermarkets. So um, but when I was a when I was a kid, my family, I wouldn't even call them animal lovers, but just animal obsessed. Like it's really hard to walk down the street with my mum without her just stopping and just going, Look, look at what that dog's doing, like and just laughing her head off, you know, at the antics of a dog or a duck I've seen it happen with. Um, and I think I'm like that too, you know, and my partner has had to become very used to the fact that most conversations, if we're out and about, stop with me gasping at an insect doing something, or you know, or a bird. Yeah. Um, and so there is there is something that's uh a way that is very attuned to other species that just just um is in my blood, and I I don't know what that is. I don't know whether that's being country people or whether that's something it's a taught thing or whether it's just in there. So I think when I came to setting myself a challenge, my next challenge, you know, what are what am I going to write about? And I thought, well, you know, one of the most interesting relationships um that we have on this earth is with other species. Um, you know, who else can you just stare at? Like you're not allowed to stare unless you're a child. You're not allowed to just stare at other humans that you don't know that well because it's rude and weird and embarrassing. But you can go up to a cat that you've never met on the street and stare at each other and then try and work out how you're going to communicate. Like maybe you'll stick your hand out and they'll sniff it, then the cat will pretend they haven't seen you, then they'll come back around and do their cat cat thing. And that's so special, that interspecies relationship just blows me away. And so when I started writing about other animals for these stories in Gunflower and for the animals in that country, I sort of thought, oh, that will be a really, really nice relationship. It will be a lovely, a lovely little story about the way that humans are with other animals. But then I was going on a bushwalk. Well, a lot of things happened to change my mind on this, but but one thing happened was that I was going on a bushwalk with my partner who's from New Zealand and so tramping is very, very much, you know, um, what he does. And we saw a wallaby, and I we stopped and stared, and it was like, oh, this amazing moment for us seeing this wallaby out in the wild, it's so exciting. And then I looked at the wallaby and I had this realization that the wallaby wasn't in a situation of going, wow, cool, humans, wow, this is awesome. The wallaby was there because that wallaby was protecting the rest of their mob and they were in a situation of life or death. They were looking at this giant mammal who'd just come stumbling along and thinking, you know, are they gonna kill me? Basically, or am I gonna have to fight? Or how am I gonna let the rest of my mob know when it's safe to leave? And that is such a different interaction. I'm like going, oh, I wonder if it'll stay still enough so I can take a photo and put it on Instagram. And the wallaby is going, Am I gonna survive?

SPEAKER_01 56:46

Yeah, it's probably going crazy.

SPEAKER_00 56:48

That's right, and that's so that really changed things for me, um, you know, uh, in in terms of of how I was was writing animals, and it really helped for me to I guess get into animal characters' heads and let go of the the fear of anthropomorphism and all that stuff. How am I gonna depict animals and just go no? Their perception, their their worldview, their umwelt is very, very different to to mine.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Um, yeah, and I I'm just thinking of like with your mum and now you going down the street and noticing it's it's like that childlike attention to detail, isn't it? Which is really important for a writer to have.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

Yeah, I mean it's what Raymond Carver says in his favourite, in his famous um story Why I Write, I think it's called, or something like that. It's his it's his writing, writing piece, his non-fiction piece. And he says, a writer should be able to look at something as banal as an old shoe in absolute wonderment. He doesn't say it like that, he says it more in a Roman covery way. But um, you know, it's something like that. We should be able to look, stare at an old shoe in just fascination and basically write, you should be able to write a short story, and everybody could about an old shoe, and it would be compelling and unique to the writer. Um, there'd be detail, there'd be flashbacks, you know.

SPEAKER_01 58:17

Yeah, that's great. Um, okay, a couple questions before we finish up. Do you carve out non-negotiable writing time? Does it need to be regular? What if do you have a routine?

SPEAKER_00 58:30

Yeah, I mean, I tell my students one thing and then of course in practice it's another. So I do really stand by the idea, especially if you're writing a novel, of writing every single day. Um, and 25 minutes is I think a really good sweet spot of being able to keep up that practice because I think no matter how busy anybody is, you know, if they have caring responsibilities or full-on jobs or anything, everyone can do 25 minutes a day. You might have to replace some TV time or some exercise or something else with that. But it is doable. So for me, um, if I can wake up, because there's this moment when I wake up where I'm sort of in this dreamy, dreamy, very creative state, and I can if I can wake up and start writing immediately for 25 minutes, then that sets me up for the whole day before I eat or or even really talk much. That my entire day is different because of that. I'm sort of in the story, and so even if I don't get to the story for the rest of the day, you know, I'm thinking about it. So when I'm going to work on other things or talking to other people, I'm always I'm sort of looking for things that might feed into the story. Whereas if I wake up and look at my phone, I mean that is, you know, that's just the worst thing.

SPEAKER_01 59:52

It kills everything, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:53

It kills exactly it kills everything. So I guess that's the non-negotiable time. Um and years ago, um I did learn um from Stephen Carroll actually. I did a short story, uh yeah, writing workshop with Stephen Carroll at Writers Victoria way back, and he taught me about um about um oh what's it called? Like um sessions, doing sessions, which people know as Pomodoro now. So it's just setting a certain amount of time on a timer, turning off everything, going to the bathroom, doing it, making a cup of tea before you start, and sitting down and writing for the whole time for 25 minutes or 50 minutes or 90 minutes. And when I was writing um short stories, you know, you can sit down and in 90 minutes, you know, you can write an entire short story draft. And there's something very or you could write a really big chunk of a chapter if you were sort of had that motivation in that time. And of course you'd have to go back and edit it, but it it's a really it's a really good thing. So yeah, I guess it's the it's the regularity and trying to stay in the world of the story. I think that's the most important that's more important than having you know eight hours, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:10

Um or constant interruptions. That's right, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:15

And it means then you don't necessarily have to quit your job or ignore your family, you can do it all.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:20

Well, unless you want to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:22

Unless you want to.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:25

Yeah, I I'm a big fan of the Pomodoro method, it works really well for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:29

Yeah, yeah. Do you use it as well?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:32

Yes, just making myself stay where I am and not getting distracted. Put the phone in the other room. Absolutely works well.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:41

The phone is banned.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

Yes, yes. Um, so you um I know you have some ties to the Irish literary community, and last year you were the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork. So, can you tell us a little bit about your experience there? And I'm interested in the um the difference in the interest and popularity of short stories between Australia and Ireland, because I imagine that would be quite different.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:13

Absolutely. I mean, it was such an incredible fellowship to receive. Um, I entered this space where where short stories were beloved not just as a thing that's popular at the moment, but as a very, very important part of Irish culture and also sort of the revival of Irish culture post-colonisation. There's a really, really it's really really exciting in Ireland at the moment, even though obviously there are legacies, you know, of of colonisation, um, and and there's a lot of recovery from that. There's also a real joy in Irishness, and so Irish language, Irish music, um, the short story as a form, um, Irish, you know, folk tales um are all really, really being um, you know, being uh taught and learnt and and um and valued. Uh so it was a really beautiful time to arrive in Ireland and especially um living in Cork, which is um sort of the other capital. Um this this huge sort of rivalry between between Dublin and Cork, which was very very interesting. Um but it's sort of a playful rivalry, and really Irish people are just so thrilled to um you know to be part of a thriving literature literary scene that that the world is really recognizing at the moment. So I arrived at this fellowship. I was I was housed in an ex-convent with um some working nuns still at the convent, so that was it was very, very Irish, um, and um introduced as the fellow to some really really amazing local writers, um, and I was part of the of the Cork Short Story Festival over there, and that was a really really different festival for me. It was different to Australian festivals because at every single session, and I went to every session except for one over say three or four days, there was a reading, a substantial 20-minute long reading, which is why I love your podcast so much, Karen, because it's not it's it's kind of rare to be able to read your work. And so not only did I meet a whole heap of Irish short story writers, and not only did we only talk about short stories for three or four days, but I got to hear the writers reading their own work out, and not just snippets either, but entire stories. And you know, it's exhausting, it's exhausting to listen to eight stories, eight short stories in a day. Yeah, but it's an exhaustion that I welcome. I mean, what you know, I've done I've done eight-hour days of other work, and it certainly hasn't been as fulfilling as that experience, and it was just such a welcoming, robust, exciting scene, and not only that, but the short stories were of amazing quality, and you know, there could be something in the water, or it could be that this is a place that actually celebrates and values, as you said before, the short story, and and that probably brings a lot of confidence and gets people to try things that they might not otherwise try. And that was that was really amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:33

There's just this expectation that we will have stories in in in our culture and that you will listen to them. And um That's right. You'll sit there quietly. But maybe it starts in school, it's just uh this community of storytelling which is just built in to the absolutely does does start in school.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

Like people are learning and and feeling very proud of of their sort of um you know, their older Irish you know, the the founding sort of Irish authors. Um yeah, it's really, really great. And also while I was there, um the um the wage, the artist's wage came into play. So in Ireland, if you're an artist you can apply to have a basic wage that will will sustain you while you make your art. And so to be in a culture where not only were short stories celebrated but artists were getting a wage. It was it was quite mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:31

Yeah that's fantastic. You probably didn't want to leave.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:35

It was yeah I did feel like her left half of my heart there that's for sure it's it was it was the hard place to leave.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:41

Yes. Wow. Now I'm reluctant to finish on a negative note but I do want to ask you about the impact of AI on writers. I know that your first collection Holiday in Cambodia was published in 2013 with a trade publisher.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:58

What happened with regard to this book and this publisher and AI I'm not sure how much I should talk about it about that particular circumstance. But I mean it is on my website that um basically I was approached so all of my books and most authors published books have been stolen to train large language models which feed into AI. So every time someone uses ChatGPT I always automatically imagine like bits of regurgitated books just sort of racking across the screen because it really is like if you're if you're using anything to do with AI it's you're using stolen artworks and and more journalism all the stuff. So um yeah with my so that that book had already been stolen my first book and then I was approached by the publisher to um I guess strike a deal in which um my work would be used to train I AI further. So that this work um you know would you know would at least be part of a a contract when it went to train large language models and um war machines. But um I very very staunchly disagree I don't think that that there should be a contract um between between authors and AI. I don't think I'm not a person in IT I think that AI should be heavily regulated it should be used in the same way that say morphine or guns are used you know in some circumstances morphine and guns um are seen to be needed very importantly in terms of morphine in a hospital set setting say it's used by licensed people they know how to apply it and it's used to save people's lives or put people you know out of a lot of pain. Outside of that in general you and I are using morphine right now Karen not a good idea and quite frowned upon and that's the way I think about AI. So um I just can't believe the time that is being wasted on this time-saving device. I'm heartbroken for the people whose work is being stolen. I'm especially heartbroken to see that um a lot of indigenous communities are finding um that not only uh is their work being culturally appropriated all the time by white culture but now by AI as well so it's just it just really um targets people who can't afford to be targeted especially artists and it's just lining the pockets of of rich men really and and can't afford to fight it. Can't afford to fight it no that's right that's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:53

So yeah so is there anything else anything authors can do to protect their work do you think?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:01

I mean I think I think I think resisting it at all terms and just saying I mean I just do a blanket no I just we're where possible I I don't use it I don't agree with it I think it's I I let people know who do use it that I think it's um unless they're using it you know some people are using it um for you know in disability spaces or in hospital spaces I I think that's understandable but outside of that we don't need people we don't need a robot to help us with our shopping list or write a poem it's just silly you know um so I I think just being it's just an a a new thing that we need to be very vigilant about. And and organisations like the Australian Society of Authors are doing really great work um and you know there are a lot of people in a lot of spaces who are doing really great work to try to put in place regulation and try to hold the government accountable and I think supporting supporting those organisations monetarily if we can or um in social media campaigns or or just through spreading that word that it's not acceptable is is the thing that we can do.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:08

Yeah I think the ASA Australian Society of Authors has done some really good stuff. That's right that's right yeah all right so just finally um your work in progress so it's a novel?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:22

It's a novel it's really hard to write it's just as hard if not more so than the animals in that country because I'm looking at the joyous subject of of patriarchy um which it turns out is really really hard to put your finger on because apparently it's it's sort of like some virus it's just everywhere. So um but I am writing as I said before I am writing some really fun short stories alongside that and and exploring those big issues. So and some someday the novel will be out and you'll probably see the short stories out sooner.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

Excellent that's great as long as it all keeps coming that's right yeah that's really good. Thank you so much for talking to me today Laura I've had a lot of fun and I've learnt a lot and I really loved your story. Well thank you for your generous questions Karen it's lovely to talk to you you're welcome thank you thank you all the best you too this podcast was recorded on the lands of the yagra and tourable people of Mianjin, Brisbane. 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 it with others who you think will enjoy it too. Thanks so much for listening