KYD: Something that I noticed as I read, which kind of surprised me, was that there were a couple of occasions where you would lightly fictionalise something about Grafton – I’m thinking of Supplejack Island [in ‘Mrs Dogwether’s Bird Moment’], I’m assuming it’s Susan Island. It’s the sort of thing that 90% of readers wouldn’t pick up on, or care about, and it made me realise how much benefit of the doubt I give when I’m reading about other places that I can’t visualise or inhabit in that same way. I’m curious about what inspired this blurring of the line between the real and fictional Grafton?
CA: Well at one stage I was completely fictionalising Grafton, and I was calling it Plumbago. And I didn’t know what I should do, whether I should call it Grafton or not – and in the end it was Jane Pearson’s idea, she said, ‘go on, call it Grafton, it’s okay’. So I just did a name change, a find and replace. But I shouldn’t have called it Supplejack – it’s Elizabeth Island actually, there was a proposal to put the new bridge over Elizabeth Island. There could be other things like that.
KYD: Well, that’s interesting, because there are other instances like that, where I felt maybe there were a few things being combined together, and I wondered whether when you were writing you’d generally have a story in mind, and would kind of reshape Grafton to fit around it.
CA: I kind of did. I wouldn’t use it as a geography or history book, that’s for sure. And I’m sure a lot of local people are reading it at the moment – we had the local launch the other night, about 50 copies were sold. So I’m sure a lot of people are going to accost me in the street, and say, ‘this isn’t true, that’s not right!’ [Laughs]. And it does make you realise what’s fact and what’s fiction – it’s hard to write something completely fictional and completely factual.
KYD: As well as Grafton, the other common thread throughout the collection is the birds – it is called Bird Country after all. I was quite struck by how they seemed to be vehicles for grief or vulnerability or innocence and the way that we interact with them. You can really feel that tension between the boy in ‘Ash Miss’ wanting to care for the budgerigar but also feeling obliged to his cruel father, or protecting the doves on Supplejack Island in ‘Mrs Dogwether’, or the cranky old cockatoo kind of standing guard over the son in ‘Louis’. So they all seem to relate to the way that we protect the vulnerable. What it is about birds and our relationship with them that resonates with you in your writing?
CA: Weirdly enough, none of that is deliberate, but I know exactly what you mean. It’s just that magical aspect of writing – if you write about your preoccupations, without having to make a manifesto, you soon start saying what you really feel, without really trying to. I did notice after a while that [my writing] always seemed to have birds in it, and I did live next door to this woman who had aviaries, and I did seem to always notice, or end up noticing when there was lots of birds. But it was probably because I was open to it. And I do like birds, I do – I don’t know much about them, but I like them.
‘If you write about your preoccupations, without having to make a manifesto, you soon start saying what you really feel, without really trying to.’
KYD: I’d never really thought of the area as ‘bird country’, but it fits, it’s quite a lovely image of the whole Northern Rivers.
CA: There are a lot of birds here, it’s a really high biodiversity, once you’re aware of it.
KYD: It’s something I kind of took for granted until it moved away, but I feel a lot more fondly toward the area now than I ever used to.
CA: Do you? Yes, it’s nice to hear. It must be hard to grow up here. Young people don’t have a lot to opportunities.
KYD: In terms of sustaining a writing career, especially for young people – not just in Grafton but a lot of regional areas – there is this sense of being pulled towards Sydney and Melbourne, there is a sense that you need to be there if you want to make a writing career, or find a community of writers. I wonder whether that is something you’ve felt?
CA: I didn’t really set out to have a writing career, I worked as a town planner for a long time, and writing has always been something I did for fun. But I have, on the other hand, always been quite ambitious in getting my writing out, I’ve always sent things off to competitions and stuff, and tried to get things published, and I have been ambitious in that sense, to have a body of work. And it hasn’t bothered me living in the country – Varuna has good residencies for regional people, so I have had three or four of those. Not knowing a lot of other writers hasn’t bothered me a lot.
It’s a private thing that you do, really, sitting at your desk. I think Gillian’s influence there was that writing was private, she didn’t talk about her writing with anyone, she didn’t workshop it. So I kind of took a bit of that from her. But then I got a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors, and my mentor was Julie Chevalier, who is connected with Spineless Wonders, and she taught me that you can show your work to people, and you can play around with it, and do different things. So she did teach me that it is good to be more outwards.
KYD: So what’s next – are you working on something new now?
CA: Yeah, I have just finished a short story about a group of women on a motorcycle trip through the Kimberley to Melbourne – that is how we got to the book launch, across the Tanami desert and down through the Nullarbor on our bikes.
KYD: And you’re continuing to focus on short stories?
CA: Yes, I like short stories, I really feel happy when I’m writing short stories. And so that’s why I write them, because it gives me a lot of pleasure while I’m doing it. Even though there are few things that are challenging, I really like doing it.
‘I really feel happy when I’m writing short stories…it gives me a lot of pleasure while I’m doing it, even though there are few things that are challenging.’
KYD: Are there any writers whose short stories you particularly enjoy, or that you are inspired by?
CA: I recently picked up a collection of Arthur Miller’s short stories – it was absolutely brilliant, I love his work. I like Virginia Woolf, I like Gillian’s writing. I love Elizabeth Strout, I think she has been a good influence in writing about ordinary people. She’s great.
KYD: Are there any rules or strategies that you follow when you are writing, or other writers that have particularly influenced your style?
CA: No, I just go for it. I make a lot of notes in notebooks and I venture out and I never quite know what I’m doing. I’m always a bit – I don’t know, a bit frightened, I don’t know where things are going, and I never really know what I’m doing. But when I get to a point, I always use Cate Kennedy’s advice – I went to a workshop with her in Bellingen a few years ago, and she would say with short stories, the basic thing is, ‘what does this person want, and why can’t they get it?’ And that always lets me see clearly where I’m going. But I only call on that when I am off quite deep in a story, and I don’t know what I am saying. And Cate launched the book in Melbourne, which was really nice, and she said something else at that launch which was very insightful, which I now use. She said, ‘you have to ask yourself when you are writing a story, what infuses the story, and what is the urgency, and what is the belief?’ And it is such powerful advice, and it is now what I use in what I am writing now. And it helps you get your feet back on the ground and go, right, I know what I’m writing about now. I do get a bit lost, and that keeps me grounded.
Bird Country is available now at Readings.
