The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Ben Walter is an award winning writer of stories, essays and poems. He is the fiction editor of Island magazine and is joining me today with his debut collection of short stories What Fear Was.

What Fear Was takes the reader through a diverse set of landscapes and into strange yet familiar spaces. From our relationship to the natural world to natures barely withheld disdain for our mistreatment, and abuse. This collection is a surreal exploration…

What Fear Was constantly challenges our sense of where we fit in the world we too-often think we own.

Ben Walter joins Andrew to discuss his debut collection of short fiction What Fear Was...

Discover more from Ben on his website

ben-walter.com

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

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Jane Rawson is the author of novels, essays and non-fiction. She won the Aurealis Awards for Science Fiction for her novel From the Wreck.

A History of Dreams transports the reader to Adelaide in the late 1930’s.

Margaret, Esther, Phyl and Audrey are finishing high school with dreams of what the future might hold. Margaret wants to attend university but her father forbids it as improper for a young woman.

Within their lives and their families, each of the women is constrained in their own way by the society around them. The world seems to be pushing them towards marriage and nuclear families, no matter what they want for themselves. But Audrey has a way to fight back, a secret passed down through generations of spinster women. Audrey is going to teach the others witchcraft!

The group form the Semaphore Supper Club and wield power over dreams to instigate changes in their social lives. Their influence begins as small changes. Shifting the perspective of the men in their lives; nodding them towards equality.

Their mission becomes serious however when the club uncovers a conservative cell amongst a male poet’s group. These men come together to tout national myths that erase all but those they deem worthy. Bent on power they are emboldened by events in Europe.

Can a group of young witches with the power of dreams defeat a rising tide of authoritarianism that would have them all chained to the home?

A History of Dreams hits a pitch perfect period atmosphere of early twentieth century Adelaide. In Margaret, Esther, Phyl and Audrey we are presented with four protagonists who are varied and sympathetic, whilst also pushing out against stereotypes of their position in their society.

More importantly perhaps is that the novel reminds us that the rise of racist nationalism in the early twentieth century was not the exclusive provenance of an Austrian house painter. A History of Dreams shows how the frustrated ambitions of small minded men can be bent towards oppression no matter where they hail from.

We travel alongside the quartet of witches as they grow into their power and their place in the world. Despite being able to manipulate dreams they find themselves stymied in making their own dreams a reality. We are shown that power and strength are held within institutions and despite the four’s efforts they are always working from without.

It’s interesting to think on the ease with which male power wields itself within the novel. The men declaim their presumed superiority openly and with impunity.

This sets up a tension between the magic of the Semaphore Supper Club and the power of institutions, the weight of societal expectation.

The world of a History of Dreams parallels our own up to a point. Of course the witchcraft is an initial departure and this plays on the notion that women at that time had very little in the way of power. Young women seeking to influence their future might well have thought of choice or autonomy as being as fanciful as a dream. Equally they would have had to work subtly, changing minds through persuasion rather than exerting brute force.

The metaphor of the exercise of power is extended as the Semaphore Supper Club’s opponents are able to commend increasingly powerful forces. These are not foes who have to win hearts and minds. They exercise fear and sow division; a prominent arm of the authoritarian government is even called Orders and Borders and well, I’m not going to tell you how to interpret that…

This is an alternate history of Australia and I’m not going to give up the secrets of the story, but suffice to say it has much to say about conservative flirtations with Nationalism and authoritarianism.

As I was casting around for which book we could discuss in this week’s book club I got to thinking about all the ways we organise our reading and think about our books (some more obvious than others) And the thing is, if you’re in the know then you know but for others it can be a mire of acronyms and loosely defined genres.

A part of this discussion is inspired by a book I’m reading but haven’t quite gotten to the point that I want to pull it apart for a book club…

This book is YA (that’s Young Adult fiction) but it’s probably more accurately described as middle grade. See already there’s all sorts of distinctions around age. Middle grade is books aimed at the 8-12 year old set, while YA hits around 13-18.

Now I know that there are plenty of fully adult listeners out there still enjoying wizards and vampires and I don’t want to get proscriptive. These categories are helpful for finding books with relatable protagonists, btu we’d be in a lot of trouble (I think) if people only read books where the lead looks and sounds a lot like them.

As well as being a mid-grade/YA novel, this book also loosely falls into the genre of Cli-Fi. I’m sure a few of you have already guessed that Cli-Fi stands for climate fiction. Here again we don’t necessarily have the clearest of delineations but suffice to say that Cli-Fi encompasses books that deal with the impacts and effects of climate change in all its permutations.

The label Cli-Fi is credited to the author and freelance journalist Dan Bloom. The term was first used in reference to a novella Bloom had written back in 2011.

Of course this doesn’t mean that Cli-Fi magicked into being only a decade ago. Writing that deals with the climate and more specifically changes in the climate have been around for a while (doesn’t the Bible have a climate change story?)

I’ve come up against the term numerous times over the years and I have to admit it can seem a little slippery. I believe this more a product of the difficulty in finding some simple way to characterize writing; whether it be aimed at a group, a country, or an age there are always going to be a range of tastes and styles that people gravitate towards.

Cli-Fi can variously be realist or speculative. It may be set in the ‘now’ (whatever that means for a constantly evolving world), in the near future or even the distant future.

The science in Cli-Fi is usually to some degree credible. Of course science changes as we learn more, but Cli-FI tries to engage with real science more than the purely imaginative or impossible.

If you’re looking for Cli-Fi it’s everywhere. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx And Crake trilogy is an example but Australian authors produce some incredible examples including Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, James Bradley’s Clade and Jennifer Mills Dyschronia.

And Cli-Fi can be for all ages, which kind of brings us full circle. I know we’ve talked about the work of Mark Smith on book club and his most recent If Not Us pits a teenage protagonist against the polluting business that is the mainstay of his town.

In these YA Cli-Fi novels we see narratives of climate change and climate action that centres and empowers young people. We live in a world where legally the minister for climate apparently has no duty of care to protect young Australians from the impacts of climate change. It’s not surprising then that climate anxiety is a real phenomenon amongst young people the world over.

I’m not trying to suggest that Cli-Fi, or simply telling noise stories is the way to solve the climate crisis, but I do believe that the adage if you can’t see it you can’t be it can apply to all of us through our life.

Climate change operates on a planetary level and that can seem daunting but through genres such as Cli-Fi and its intersection with YA and middle grade novels, young people have a model and an example of their role. It also allows them to explore the science in a way that can be more accessible.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Jennifer Shahade is a two-time US Women's Chess Champion

Chess Queens tells Jennifer's own story alongside those of the top female players from around the world.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

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The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

The Stella Prize is now in its tenth year, beginning when a group of women in Australian publishing banded together to address the huge and unacknowledged disparity in the ways women's writing was represented in Australia.

Jaclyn Booton is the Executive Director of The Stella Prize and she joins Andrew to talk about the work of The Stella Prize, the recent achievements of the Stella Count and the 2022 Shortlist announcement.

In alphabetical order by author surname, the 2022 Stella Prize shortlist is:

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Emma Viskic is a musician and author. Her series staring Deaf PI Caleb Zelic has won Ned Kelly and Davitt awards and has a long list of shortlistings for other prizes. The latest in the Caleb Zelic series is Those Who Perish.

Emma joins Felix Shannon in conversation on the podcast today.

Deaf PI Caleb Zelic has always been an outsider, estranged from family and friends. But when he receives a message that his brother, Anton, is in danger, Caleb sees it as a chance at redemption.

He tracks Anton down to a small, wind-punished island, where secrets run deep and resentments deeper. When a sniper starts terrorising the isolated community, the brothers must rely on each other like never before. But trust comes at a deadly price …

Need more Felix Shannon in you life?!

Felix takes you on a world wide mystery tour each week on Death of the Reader

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

There is a wealth of great short story collections lately and one that really stands out is Andrew Roff’s The Teeth of a Slow Machine

The Teeth of a Slow Machine is an extraordinary collection that invites both pure enjoyment alongside deeper existential exploration. The name gives you something of the flavour of what’s to come…

Walking along an escarpment, guiding overindulged holiday makers a young zoologist laments that there are no jobs that better fit her qualifications. Stuck on this exclusive island with one percenters she’s not allowed to fraternise with, she observes the jutting headlands are like the teeth of a slow machine. The analogy is jarring and a little strange, invoking some sort of inexorable movement between entwined pieces. In the pages to come we will be shown the surrounding landscape as both sublime and as the playing thing of the rich. I was never quite sure if the slow machine might be the passage of geological time or the man made erosion working invisibly even in the most remote locations.

Collections can be taken as a whole or enjoyed one out. I’m still reading Slow Machine (that’s how much I’m enjoying it, I had to bring it in early) so I’ll give you a flavour and impressions.

Each story in this collection feels a little Twilight Zone, like viewing the world through a funhouse mirror. It’s the stuff of lucid dreams and strange what ifs…

Like in the opening story of the collection ‘Bock Bock’, where we follow a shadowy pair of enforcers as they travel the countryside ensuring the brand integrity and intellectual property of a fast food chicken franchise. Moving from small restaurants to flea markets these operatives are almost fanatical in their desire to keep the recipe and the founders image safe.

In a connected world where it too often feels like our devices are listening to us, it’s not hard to believe that big brands might employ hit squads to maintain their image.

In Else/If we learn a love story written and code and programming language as a woman tries to write an algorithm that will calculate her partners chances of surviving. This felt like the bleeding edge of our over intellectualised mortality. A kind of love letter to our collective attempts to assess and rationalise all the risk we’ve been forced to confront over the last two years.

The collection is also dark to the point of macabre. In The MInd Body Problem we read a scientist's log as their team works to try and uncover the nature of the duality of consciousness. The experiment it turns out has been approved by a government desperate for funding to sustain their offshore processing facilities and thus the experiments are being done on detainees. As we follow this descent into infamy we start to appreciate that the true separation between intellect and emotion is unravelling in the team of scientists.

By taking a slightly skewed look at our world Roff is exploring something of who we are. How you read each story; is it realist or speculative, dark or funny will stem from your world view and life experience.

This is made abundantly clear in The Last Day of Christmas. A young girl jealousy steals away the chocolate her brother was gifted while a tragedy unfolds around her. While it is clear to the reader what is happening the girl herself is focussed more on her relatively minor crime.

It’s always tempting to try and see a larger pattern in a collection of short stories, some link that ties them together. As I look forward to the few stories I have left to discover in The Teeth of a Slow Machine I think that my link is that these are perspectives I need to see even if they are at times abhorrent, at times absurd.

Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. Her work has been featured in Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and the Sydney Morning Herald amongst. Yumna’s debut book is the critically acclaimed and much prize listed, The House of Youssef.

The subject of today’s book club is Yumna’s debut novel Australiana.

Australiana takes us to the north-eastern New South Wales region around Tamworth, an area Yumna lived for many years as a teacher.

Across diverse and interwoven sections Yumna weaves a tale of a region overwhelmed by drought and struggling to reconcile itself to the threat of oblivion that the lack of rain brings.

The book travels across literary styles and moves through time to evoke the region and the people who live there.

The opening section entitled The Town moves in tightly narrated vignettes that link each other via small details, almost talismans. Yumna describes her inspiration as the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, where every evening the story dangles linking to the next to ensure the continued telling and life of Scheherazade.

In the interlinking tales I felt the kinds of bonds of community that bring people together. Whether near or far everyone knows a little something of each other and these links forge the greater whole.

In the telling of the stories in Australiana we become privy to the minds of the town, riding alongside them as they face the increasingly dry landscape. In these perspectives we see something of what keeps each person on the land and the extremes that may yet drive them off it.

In the section entitled The Blind Side we sit and listen as the narrator tells the story of Barry to Barry’s son. Now missing, the narrator weaves a tale that encompasses a group of young friends moving to the city and their various fates away from the town.

As the only one to return to the town they grew up in, the narrator has some suspicion and disdain for his old friends but remains steadfast even as Barry finds himself with the town turning against him. Through the changing fortunes of Barry and the struggle of the narrator to stay true to his friend we learn a little more of how the land pulls at people in a way that perhaps we can never know in the city.

Australiana is a unique and fascinating novel, both for its subject and its ever shifting style. The name Australiana seems to evoke a kind of nationalistic kitsch. I imagined Henry Lawson and Dorothea McKellar kicking the footy while Banjo Patterson burns sausages on the barbie. But the result is a work that challenges the sacred cows of white Australian ruggedness whilst also asking us to look closer at environments that we often take for granted or see as only regional jaunts.

In describing the book, Yuman Kassab told me she shys away from the term ‘novel’ in favour of an ecosystem. The book seeks to encompass the human and non-human, living and organically inert to more fully encompass place and life.

The book is at turns serious and absurd, challenging and evocative and offers a unique perspective on our world.

Yumna Kassab’s Australiana is out now from Ultimo Press.

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Rhett Davis is a writer whose work has appeared in publications like The Big Issue and Meanjin. He won the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. His debut novel is Hovering

Alice Wren is mid-flight. At the insistence of an urgent email Alice has fled Berlin, returning to Australia and her hometown of Fraser.

After seventeen years the city is not what she remembers. The taxis are blue, her sister resents her disappearance and the nephew she has never met is now almost a man.

As for the city of Fraser; it changes daily, shifting, dislocating and rearranging itself in unfathomable ways.

Lydia and George don’t know what to make of Alice’s sudden return. Who is this woman who says she is there relative and what is the dark secret she is trying to escape from?

Rhett Davis joins Andrew to discuss Hovering...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Festivals are back and it's time to get amongst it with like minded book lovers!

With book stores featuring author events and Sydney Writers Festival about to drop its 2022 programming the time to read and mingle is now!

Blak & Bright Festival was established in Naarm in 2016. Making a triumphant return in 2022, the festival now features a Sydney event!

What – Blak & Bright Sydney Satellite event

When – Saturday the 19th of March

Where – Writing NSW, Callan Park, Balmain Road, Lilyfield

Details – blakandbright.com.au

You can check out interviews with so many writers from the Blak & Bright Festival line up.

Check out the Final Draft Great Conversations archive!

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.