Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For March that debut is Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders (UQP), a timely collection of speculative fiction imagining futures where Indigenous sovereignty is fully reasserted. We spoke to Mykaela about the collection, her writing process and her advice for aspiring speculative fiction writers.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity. To watch the video conversation, visit KYD’s Instagram profile.
What’s your favourite story in the collection and why?
My favourite story in the collection—well, it changes around so much—but right now my favourite story is ‘Cyclone Season’. ‘Cyclone Season’ was really fun to write and, hopefully, it’s fun to read too. It’s set in a future version of the Tweed where the oceans have risen and instead of moving inland to encroach on people and seek dry land, the local Goori community have actually just stayed in the area, finding creative ways to live on the water. So it’s a little bit water world, a little bit Mad Max and very heavy metal, a very surfer type of story.
What does your writing process look like?
My writing process for this book was quite varied, depending on the story. I’d never written short stories before starting this project. I wrote two of the stories in creative writing workshops at the University of Sydney, which is where I started this project. That taught me the fundamentals of fiction and fiction craft. Then the training wheels were off I suppose; I started writing experimenting with voice, point of view, all the rest of that fun stuff.
Some of the stories I started with thinking about the world. For example, what the Tweed be like if the world was frozen, or if it was underwater, or overcooked due to global warming. With other stories, I started thinking about ‘what if the Goori community had full sovereignty of country and community and culture?’ So all these ‘what if’ questions started throwing up all these possibilities, and with all these questions came so many possibilities. I wrote many of the answers to these questions out using the tools of fiction. I’m lucky that many of these thought experiments turned into stories and the ones that ended up being dead ends were just good exercises anyway, good practice.
Did your experience of editing a short fiction anthology impact your approach to this collection?
Look, my experience of editing anthology kind of did, and it kind of didn’t. So, for context, I edited this beautiful anthology called This All Come Back Now which was published by UQP in 2022. So, yes and no. No, in the sense that I’d already written most of my stories when I edited this [anthology], but absolutely yes in the sense of sequencing the story. In This All Come Back Now, I likened an anthology to a mixtape, and I sequenced the stories in such a way that the anthology told its own larger story, which is greater than the sum of its parts, I think. I did this by thinking about characters and themes and genre so that each story was in conversation with its neighbours. It felt like a puzzle and it was really satisfying once I got the order right.
In Always Will Be, with all these stories being written by myself, it’s more of a concept album than a mixtape. The concept is Goori sovereignty in the future of the Tweed. I also wanted to take care with sequencing in this book because I find it really pleasing to read collections where the order of the stories seem to suggest a bigger story. I tried to suggest a chronological sense of time with the stories here—though many speak back to western linear time—but I found it made the most sense that way.
What’s your number one tip for aspiring spec fic writers?
I have two tips for aspiring spec fic writers. The first is have fun! It is a very fun genre to write and read. But also: read as much as you can in your particular genre to see what’s being done—and read it critically. For Always Will Be, I read every example of spec fic that featured at least one Aboriginal character. Unfortunately, most of these stories were written by non-Indigenous people, and most were terribly racist or just ridiculous. What this reading did was create a fire in my belly that drove me to create stories where my community were not just present but thriving in the future.
Of course, I’ve also read every story by Indigenous writers that featured at least one Aboriginal character. What this reading did was show me what our writers have been concerned with in terms of country, community and culture in the future. I used a lot of these themes as inspiration. For example, soon after I read Ellen Van Neerven’s queer story ‘Water’, I created a similar saltwater mangrove world with its own queer love story. That story’s in [Always Will Be], it’s called ‘Terranora’.
I also used my critique of these stories as inspiration too. For example, there are some Aboriginal stories that have a lone Aboriginal character in the story, and this made me sad because we are communal and collective people. There’s no way we’ll survive in the future without each other. So, I wrote a few stories where this solitariness is what gets them into strife.
What books have you loved lately and what’s on your TBR pile?
I’m rereading Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung from 1990, which is the first Aboriginal spec fic text ever published. It’s very weird, very out there. I love it. Ellen Van Neerven’s story that I mentioned earlier, ‘Water’ from Heat and Light, from 2014. Land of the Golden Clouds by Archie Weller—this novel was published in 1998, again a very weird science fiction fantasy. The gold standard (I think!) if you want weird futuristic novels—The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, an absolutely beautiful book.
I’m not just reading futurism—I’m looking into horror and ghost stories, so I’m rereading Ghost Bird by Lisa Fuller, which is wonderful, grim and creepy.
One book I’m reading that hasn’t got anything to do with speculative fiction is Woven, a new anthology commissioned by Red Room Poetry. It’s First Nations poetic conversations from the Fair Trade project, edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu. The reason I’m excited about this [book] is that it doesn’t just feature some of my favourite poets, from here and around the world, but it features these incredible coupling of poets and I’m just really excited to see what they’re doing in conversation with each other.
You can pick up a copy of Always Will Be at your local bookstore today.
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