Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For May that debut is Peripathetic by Cher Tan (NewSouth Books), a collection of luminous and inventive essays that look beyond the performance of everyday life, seeking answers that continually elude. Paying homage to the many outsider artists, punks, drop-outs and rogue philosophers who came before, this book is about the resistance of orthodoxies—even when it feels impossible.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity and concision. To watch the video conversation, visit KYD’s Instagram profile.
Can you tell us about your journey to publication with this book?
I remember being nudged to apply for an award by a peer, and even though my immediate response was ‘I don’t have a book’, I thought about it again and figured that was untrue. My application didn’t get accepted then, but a seed was planted.
Then I took a writing workshop with Ellena Savage on building an essay collection, and through that I uncovered the book’s main conceit. From there I started planning what the tangential themes were and how the essays would speak to one another, but also being mindful about being too rigid. I told myself that if it didn’t feel good, I’d have to stop.
I then sought mentorship with editor Camha Pham on how to write a book proposal. When I had one, I emailed it around to publishers and agents, either those who had shown interest before or simply cold emailing. Then Harriet McInerney—Peripathetic’s publisher—was who I eventually felt I had the more rapport with and whom I thought understood what I was trying to do with the book, or at least she trusted me enough that I could go full ham. And here we are!
What role has the digital world played in your writing and career?
Writing in blogs and message boards online was my first experience with writing in a communal sense. It helped me develop confidence in writing, while also being able to discuss ideas with others in a public arena. It also helped me find a sense of community which was really useful in locating my selfhood.
I don’t really like to think of writing as a ‘career’. More often I think of it as a practice. Writing into the void was what helped me actualise this practice. But I don’t want to sound like a techno-optimist either. As we’ve seen in recent years, the so-called ‘enshittification’ of online spaces as mediated by big tech corporations has splinted this sense of discovery. So, over time my writing tends to interrogate that too—it’s all interconnected.
As an experienced critic, do you find yourself critiquing your own work as you write?
I don’t critique my own work as I write. I often put away my critic’s brain during the writing process. I don’t think it’s useful to pre-empt it because literary criticism is a service to other readers. If you critique your own work before it’s even finished it will almost certainly be detrimental to the overall quality of the work.
I do switch on my editor’s brain while working through drafts, mostly to guide me through thinking of elements such as coherence, style and voice. I often think about Lauren Oyler’s books as a good example of what happens when a critic applies literary criticism to their own work pre-publication.
How has your writing style changed or developed over time?
I used to think non-fiction was merely polemic, in that there wasn’t any room to play with the form unlike in fiction and poetry. I also thought there was a particular way to ‘sound like’, no thanks to the vaunted essayists who go on about genres such as the ‘lyric essay’. But as I’ve spent more time thinking about writing as an art form, and learning the rules in order to subvert it, I’ve learnt to incorporate literary devices often used in fiction and poetry to tell a true story that also interrogates society and culture from a Marxist worldview. I’ve also learnt how to write more like how I speak and think.
What other writing have you loved lately?
Ouyang Yu’s new short story collection, The White Cockatoo Flowers, left quite an impression on me recently. I love how he’s a first-generation migrant artist who hates Australia and isn’t afraid to say in his work, whether that’s poetry or otherwise. The fiction form really stretches those possibilities further. He manages to be really funny, yet angry and insightful.
I also really enjoyed Isabella Trimboli’s essay on Carla Lonzi in the new Left Review recently, as well as this Verge article by Josh Dzieza on this highly specialised seafaring industry that repairs internet cables at the bottom of the ocean.
Finally, I’ll remember this essay I read in Jewish Currents by Dylan Saba for a long time. It’s about Palestinian imagination of a world beyond exile. Free Palestine.
You can pick up a copy of Peripathetic at your local bookstore today.
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