Episode 8 of Australian Shorts features Cate Kennedy. Cate writes across genres and is widely published but perhaps best known as a short story author. Her two collections, Dark Roots and Like a House on Fire have been used as teaching texts on the Victorian Secondary School syllabus for several years and she works as a fiction advisor at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program in Oregon.

In this episode, Cate reads Little Plastic Shipwreck from her collection, Like a House on Fire (Scribe) and talks about why this particular story is still mysterious to her. Cate also discusses many aspects of writing, including the value in capturing the small, ordinary details of our lives, plus fiction’s great superpower: its ability to reveal a character’s sense of interiority. She explains the power of the three layers of a character’s “self” and the richness that the gap between these provides to both reader and writer. 

This episode was recorded on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbul people in Brisbane and the traditional lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people in Castlemaine, Victoria.

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