The Kill Your Darlings Podcast

It’s a few weeks post film festival here in Melbourne so we at Kill Your Darlings assume you’re over your film fatigue and are fit for another foray into the form. Or at least into the ways writers interact with films (apart from writing them).

In this episode, we speak to writer Anthony Morris who reviews for SBS Online, Empire Magazine, The Big Issue and Forte Magazine among others. He’s also the co-author of The Hot Guy. Then, it’s on to literary agent and consultant Alex Adsett, who pitches and negotiates film rights for the authors she represents.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. I’m Meaghan Dew, and this is our film episode for the year, where we look at a few ways writers and screen insect. Later we’ll speak to Anthony Morris, on film reviewing. But first up we have agent and consultant Alex Adsett, talking about screen rights. 

Alex Adsett: So I am a literary agent and a publishing consultant. I work for myself, I’ve got my own business up in Queensland, and as an agent, it’s a lot of reading manuscripts, it’s a lot of looking for the amazing manuscript that just wants to rock your world, and then making sure that manuscript gets to the right publisher. As a publishing consultant, I help authors who don’t have an agent negotiate their contracts, so that’s sort of my area of expertise.

KYD: So when it comes to putting those manuscripts in the hands of publishers, how does that work when it comes to film rights?

AA: Yeah, absolutely. So film rights, it’s…a lot of it is luck, basically, selling film rights – A producer going on holiday, picking up a book, loving it, and decided to make a movie. But then more and more there are opportunities for publishers and agents, and sometimes authors directly, to pitch directly to film producers. Which is, you know, obviously the focus of this podcast, because we’ve just had the Melbourne International Film Festival and for the last 10 or 12 years, they’ve been running the amazing Books to MIFF books to film pitching opportunities. So I do pitching there, and so through doing that I’ve built up contacts with film producers, which is amazing. So when I get a new book that I know a producer might be looking for, I can send it straight to them, and then as a consultant actually I’m really lucky, because I freelance for authors to help them negotiate contracts, in those really just like lightning-striking opportunities where a producer really does love a manuscript, or a book when it’s published, I can help the author, or a small publisher negotiate those deals. So I do a lot more of the negotiating of contracts than many other agents or publishers would do, because that’s my area. That’s not necessarily the pitching side of things, but that’s the negotiating the deal side of things.

KYD: When it comes to that pitching side of things, or to that reading the book the first time and thinking ‘this is one that I should be putting forward’, at which point do you feel that something might have potential for you to pitch at something like the MIFF industry events, or to one of those film industry people that you now have contacts with?

AA: It really depends, so it depends on my relationship with the producer, and… or the

KYD and The Rereaders present ‘Critical Attention’, a podcast series focusing on emerging critics. Every episode we will profile new Australian critics working in a variety of artistic and cultural spaces.

In episode three, we chat to the film critics of tomorrow about their experiences inside Critics Campus, the Melbourne International Film Festival’s week-long intensive critical incubator.

The 2017 Critics Campus alumni are Amanda Barbour, Blythe Worthy, Dominic Ellis, Faith Everard, Greer Forrester, Kai Perrignon, Keva York and Phoebe Chen. You can read their reviews, features and interviews at the MIFF blog.

Critical Attention is produced by Areej Nur, and is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Happy listening!

The post Critical Attention: MIFF Critics Campus 2017 appeared first on Kill Your Darlings.

It’s the 21st episode of the Kill Your Darlings Podcast – and while we’ve been fully formed for a while now, any excuse to speak to artists examining the highs and lows of coming of age is just fine in our books. So listen in to hear Megan Tan on recording her life for Radiotopia’s Millennial Podcast, Brodie Lancaster on writing No Way! Okay, Fine (Hachette Australia), and Emily Brewin on Hello, Goodbye (Allen & Unwin), our First Book Club pick for July.

Read Emily Brewin on the inspiration behind Hello, Goodbye here.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello, and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. 21 doesn’t come with anything practical in Australia – you can’t do anything then that you couldn’t do at 18. And while you might graduate from university, you might just as easily still be studying, or have been working for years. But we still have a big party; still see it as one step among many in our coming of age. So it seems fitting that we celebrate our 21st podcast by speaking to people whose work grapples with growing up, moments of change, and navigating your twenties. I’m done with my twenties – and you might feel they’re behind you as well. But coming of age is about making choices, and about living with the repercussions. We’ll be doing that our whole lives, and we’ll always be interested in how others choose to do the same.

First off we speak to Megan Tan, creator and host of Millennial – a podcast about coming of age.

All right, so I have to admit I’m a little embarrassed coming in here today, I’m just getting over a cold so my radio voice is radio-y than usual, and my headphones broke, so I was using my boyfriend’s gaming headphones, which look less profesh than I’d like. And then I thought someone who started off doing the podcast mainly in her closet would probably understand those issues. Is it weird to meet people who have listened to so much of your life up until this point?

Megan Tan: To be honest I totally forget that people have listened to my life up until this point. So I think maybe it’s more strange for other people than it is for me.

KYD: So Millennial, while it’s carefully crafted it does chronicle some of the messier elements of your twenties – so the indecision, the doubts, and these aren’t the sort of things that you tend to put in a resume, for example. When we’re increasingly expected to treat Facebook like LinkedIn, and Twitter as a professional platform, did you ever worry that what you’re putting out there might come back to bite you?

MT: No – I never thought about it like that. Millennial was supposed to be something that I used in order to practice making audio stories, and so it was just, it’s like a portfolio piece. There was this one time, though, where I was interviewing for a job and the people who I was going to be interviewing with had listened to the podcast, and they told me, and I was just like, ‘what episode are you on?!’, because I felt like, man, they they know more about my lif

We at Kill Your Darlings love short fiction, so we’re pretty thrilled to present three masters of the form.

Tomorrow’s Short Story Masterclass at the Emerging Writers Festival includes a range of workshops, presentations and panels with writers and editors. But for those of you who can’t make it (or are considering going) here you’ll find a taste of the sort of advice and expertise on offer. So go forth and write more short stories! Finish those you’ve started! We’d love to read them.

Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor-in-chief of Writers Bloc. She is about to start a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship to work on a series of essays and is the winner of the 2017 Feminartsy Fiction Prize.

Melanie Cheng is a writer of fiction and non-fiction from Melbourne. Her debut collection Australia Day will be officially released in July.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based author. Her first novel The Wood of Suicides was published in 2014. Her short story collection The Love of a Bad Man is out now.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hi and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. I’m Meaghan Dew and today we’re featuring the Emerging Writers’ Festival Short Story Masterclass. So if you need something to listen to between events or you couldn’t make it down to Melbourne for the festival, here’s a good chance to benefit from the combined wisdom of Elizabeth Flux, Laura Elizabeth Woollett and Melanie Cheng. We’ll start with Liz, telling us about her experience editing short fiction. 

Elizabeth Flux: So I was previously the editor of Voiceworks magazine for two years so we worked with writers under the age of twenty-five who wrote fiction, nonfiction and poetry and worked with them for about one or two weeks to get them to the point of publication. So most of my fiction editing experience is from that, as well as swapping work with friends, talking about that and also working on my own fiction pieces, so…mixed bag.

KYD: Is there something particular that you look for when you’re reading a piece for the first time?

EF: So the main thing is to read it all the way through, because a piece can seem great at the beginning and then really fall off at the end, or vice versa – it can seem like it has no potential at the beginning and then suddenly come through with something amazing that’s worth pursuing. So reading something all the way through, finding what is at the heart of it and then drawing that out and then working on it.

KYD: You must come across a lot of pieces while you’re reading that have potential but perhaps might need a little bit more work than a publication can dedicate to it. Where do you draw that line, and does it change depending on what sort of work you’re doing? 

EF: Yeah, so it depends on the publication you’re working for. If you’re doing something that has, like, quick turnarounds, within a week, that factors in – so first thing is time. Most pieces are salvageable in some ways– it’s very rare

Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped (Scribe) is the KYD First Book Club pick for May. In her collection, Jessica navigates post-partum depression following the birth of her son, touching on many other facets of her life along the way. Here she reads from the first chapter.

For our interview with Jessica Friedmann, listen to the latest Kill Your Darlings Podcast. You can stream the episode above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Things That Helped is available now at Readings.

Editor’s note: This piece contains discussion of suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know needs support, please contact Lifeline (13 11 14) or Beyond Blue (1300 22 4636).

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hi, I’m Meaghan Dew, and I’m afraid I can’t welcome you to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast, because I’ve already done that this month. What you are welcome to, though, is this reading from Jessica Friedmann. Her debut essay collection, Things That Helped, is the KYD Book Club pick for May.

Jessica Friedmann: In the beginning there was the river, wending its way around the top of the suburb, then snaking out protectively towards the south. The water was deep and cold and full of silt, and in the months after I had my baby I would often dream of going down to drown myself in it.

At dusk the river’s parklands were beginning to empty out, the cyclists and joggers wary of the cold and the settling night. Old men who squatted on their heels reeled their fishing lines in, carrying their lures home in scrubbed-out paint buckets. Soon it would be dark; soon a cloistering silence would descend on the leaves and grass, broken only by the rustle of the wind and the steady drone of the highway, as persistent as seawater or the beat of a heart.

I thought of the water as I listened out for the baby’s breath, in and out, lightly broken, sometimes, by a hiccup or a snore. We had made the walk to the river’s banks a hundred times over the summer, Mike sometimes breaking off for a run while I saw how many native grasses I could name. Now, in the deep of winter, it ran through my thoughts nightly, bringing a cool little rush with it, a rush of relief. We kept the heating on at home, trying to fend off the drizzle and damp, and ran it through the night for the baby’s sake’, though in truth he seemed alright – a hot little furnace running hotter in his sleep.

Through the tide of hormones surging within my body, and the little runnels of blood, and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep; it was no longer safe. If I did drift off, the baby’s shrills of noise let down my milk and sent a hot flush of sweat through my body before my brain had a chance to catch up, and I would wake sticky and panicked, and sure that something was wrong. The sickening Wrench of waking was awful, so I lay in bed playing possum; it was better to be passive, to let the baby suckle me without protest and then settle him down to fall asl

Dear Listener,

In this episode of the Kill Your Darlings Podcast we explore connections made through correspondence, and through the private made public. We listen to Jessica Friedmann speak about our First Book Club pick, Things That Helped, hear how Angie Hart went from reluctant Women of Letters speaker to co-curator, and ask Alexandra Pierce about the multiple identities of Dr Alice Sheldon.

We hope you enjoy their stories as much as we did.

Sincerely,

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Meaghan Dew (KYD):  Hello and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast – and to the new Kill Your Darlings. We’re going fully digital, so Issue 29, out now, is the last printed one you’ll find. It’s a happy-sad time – like you, we love the feel of paper between our fingers, but the exciting thing is we’ll be publishing more writers than ever, so do subscribe to our website for even more of what you love. But for now, keep doing whatever you’re doing and settle in for the podcast. Today we’re talking about correspondence, and about the previously private made public – or public-er, in any case. We start with Jessica Friedmann, whose debut collection Things That Helped is the Kill Your Darlings Book Club pick for May.

The essays cover really broad territory – were there essays which didn’t fit in as seamlessly, or topics that had to be discarded because they didn’t feel like as cohesive part of the whole?

Jessica Friedmann: I think a lot of the aspects and elements of the essays themselves got shuffled between essays a little bit. I’d start with something which felt like the kernel of a story and then I’d realise that it made more sense to be told elsewhere in different form, in a different story. I also really can’t think in a straight line so a lot of them are quite recursive and loopy and I think there is an element of “everything fits everywhere” and, you know, I hope that’s worked for the book because it really was like making a jigsaw puzzle by the end of the process.

KYD: Who read the book while it was still in progress, and how did their feedback shape the finished work, if it did?

JF: The first person that I really showed it to was Grace Heifetz, my agent, and I showed it to her at a point in time where I’d been approached by a publisher and I didn’t know what to do, and I sent an email to Curtis Brown saying “hi, you know, if I could take somebody out for coffee, not necessarily to be represented by you, but just, help, I’m freaking out,” and then 5 minutes later I got an email from Grace saying “let’s have a chat on the phone,” and she read the essays, I think ‘Red Lips’ was one of them, and maybe maybe ‘Skywhale,’ maybe that came later, they were some of the earlier ones I wrote. And she just, she liked them. And then we signed with Scribe, which was wonderful, Marika, my editor read them, I worked on them and worked on them, and then I got to a point where I really had to show them to other people. So I think everyone who’d seen them before it was published were the people who featured in the book. You know, my husband Mike is in there, we went through the manuscript together, just to make sure that he wa

It’s no surprise that here at Kill Your Darlings we love books and everywhere they pile up. We visit bookstores, hibernate in libraries and stack our to-read piles high. But these books don’t arrive the way we receive them – there are hundreds of small tasks and different skill sets that take each book from a writer’s manuscript to the copy in our hands. This podcast touches on just a few of them.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Hello and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m Meaghan Dew, and instead of interviewing authors today, we’re going to do something a bit different. Today is a day in the life of the book industry. We’ll start a bit before 9am.

*

Hi, my name is Meghan Cummins, and I’m the inventory coordinator at Pan Macmillan Australia. As the inventory coordinator, my role is mainly concerned with making sure that we have enough stock to support demand, without having overstocks, and it’s not a role that exists in every publishing company in Australia – even as a company as large as Pan Macmillan, I’m the only team member who sort of exclusively deals with stock management. My days are pretty varied, and while looking after inventory probably takes up around two thirds of my time, I also spend a lot of time liaising with various internal and external stakeholders. Because I am sort of the go-to person on stock levels, sales reps will usually come to me if they have a question about availability of stock, and these are the sorts of queries I am answering every day. I also talk a lot to our key account managers in regards to the stock that they need for their major DDS and chain accounts, and often they will check with me in regards to stock availability or give us a heads-up before they confirm which titles will be catalogued or part of a sale. I’m often emailing our colleagues at Pan Macmillan UK and US about new titles and stock that we order from them, and then I also spend a bit of time in contact with our production and publicity departments up in our Sydney office. Managing stock, it’s the kind of job that needs monitoring all day every day, it’s not something that can be done for two or three days a week and then left for a few days and just sort of forgot about. So often this means I am ordering stock from the UK or the US every day, or I am emailing our printer or production department to get quotes for reprints and to get reprints going, so this sort of thing, we are constantly monitoring to make sure we don’t go out of stock of major titles. And while everyone I talk to is important, I do have a particularly good relationship with our warehouse, they usually come to us with a really varied list of queries, it can be anything from their customer service department or from the shipping coordinator or inventory or logistics, and these can range from anything like a question about title availability, to damaged stock or shipping information. And on top of all this I am also responsible for uploading and managing ebook metadata, so I do that every month, and we have a fair amount of interaction with the digital department because of that, so that’s really interesting too. So I guess as you can see, it is a really varied role, and a lot of my responsibilities, like stock ordering, are weekly tasks – things like ebook metadata are monthly tasks. So it took me a bit of time to really get a sense for how the process runs on a weekly and on a monthly basis. And it can be a pretty full on role at times, which I like, having a bit more of a full on role, and I work with a real

Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast for 2017. Summer is officially over, but don’t despair, there are some fantastic things to look forward to – starting with the AFLW. In our March episode we kick off (pun intended) with Angela Pippos discussing women in sport in Australia, before continuing with Kylie Maslen whose piece for Junkee finds more to appreciate in the AFLW than the gender of the players. Meanwhile, we were thrilled to speak with Peter Polites, our March Book Club author, about his debut novel ‘Down the Hume’.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

You can find our Q&A with Peter here.

Kylie was writing about football for KYD way back here.

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m Meaghan Dew and for the first episode of the year we will be talking about the same things that everyone else is talking about – the AFLW, and Peter Polites’ debut novel, of course. So we’ll kick it off, pun absolutely intended, with Angela Pippos.

For those who haven’t read the book, could you tell our listeners a little bit about your relationship with football?

Angela Pippos: Oh, my relationship is very close with football. It has been since about the age of eight, when I first went to a game. And interestingly it was my mother who introduced me to it. So it has come down the female line, which goes against what many people would think. It got into my blood from such a young age, and then I realised as I got older that it was about more than football, and I think that’s when my relationship has even become tighter and stronger. But I guess with that, once I discovered that there were problems with football as well, and a dark side to it, then my relationship became strained with footy. But I feel like I’m back in love with it again – I’ve dealt with those feelings, and I think,

It’s time to wrap up this oh so interesting year, and what better way than to reflect on a few of the better things that happened? In this episode we gather holiday recommendations from the Kill Your Darlings team, speak with Eimear McBride about The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and share some of Omar Sakr’s poetry with you all. Have a fantastic break and see you in 2017 for more interviews, readings, discussions and general enthusiasm from the Kill Your Darlings Podcast.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Alan, what would you recommend to people?

Alan Vaarwerk: I would recommend, this holidays I’m going to be catching up on pretty much everything that I’ve bought but not read over the year, but this year, but I would recommend The Dragon Behind the Glass by Emily Voigt, which is like, it is a book about, a non-fiction book about a rare tropical fish called the Asian aruana, it is about pet detectives and about explorers and it’s kind of a mix of reportage and adventure and history and memoir and it’s amazing, it’s really, it’s incredible, it’s really good.

KYD: Hello and welcome to the very last Kill Your Darlings podcast of 2016. It has been an interesting one, but they have been a few high points and we will be celebrating today as I hope you all are in the lead up to the holidays. We have an Eimear McBride-heavy episode today, and interspersed you will find recommendations from the KYD staff, guaranteed to make your holidays great. The first of those was from Alan, our online editor. You will also hear some poetry from Omar Sakr, whose readings at the National Young Writers Festival was certainly one of my favourite parts of the year. But first, here is Eimear McBride, discussing her novels A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians.

The first thing that you are struck with reading your work is, it has quite a unique voice, which probably, I think, has been mentioned in every interview, so sorry about that. But how did you arrive at that voice, was it developed purely for A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing?

Eimear McBride: Well, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is the first thing that I ever finished, I have been writing ever since I was a child, and I was always very interested in language and what it could be made to do, but really it was reading Ulysses when I was 25, was kind of, you know – the blinkers came down and I realised that you could do whatever you wanted with language, as long as you had the sort of talent for it, you could do whatever you wanted with that form, and language was there to be played with, it was not there to be respected like a museum piece, I suppose. And so when I came to write Girl, I just sort of, you know, it just happened and I just let myself do whatever I wanted, and paid a bit of a price for that afterwards, but yeah, I mean, language is everything, I suppose.

KYD: You mentioned in terms of paying a bit of a price for it, there was some difficulty in getting the book published at first – was it the language that you felt, looking back, that caused it to be somewhat of a difficult propositio

While some of us try to avoid thinking about the future, others spend their time asking ‘what if?’ and reporting back with the results. From Briohny Doyle (The Island Will Sink), Marlee Jane Ward (Welcome to Orphancorp) and Justin Cronin (The Passage) come three very different takes on where our flaws (or, well, vampire plagues) will take us. In this episode of the KYD Podcast, we ask them how they construct their futuristic worlds, and why they choose to do so.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello, and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m Meaghan and I’ll be your host as we speak to Justin Cronin about coming to the end of the Passage trilogy and to Marlee Jane Ward about the future of Welcome to Orphancorp. But first, we’ll start with Briohny Doyle, whose debut novel The Island Will Sink, is the November Kill Your Darlings First Book Club pick. It’s also the first novel published by The Lifted Brow. In it, Max Galleon, blockbuster disaster movie director, plans the ultimate end of the world narrative while his own memories slip through his fingers.

First off, congratulations on selling out your first print run.

Briohny Doyle: I think it sold out by October, so I think it was, like, two months and we sold it out, and we did a second print run, and we’re coming towards the end of the second print run, and we’re doing a third print run. So it’s pretty crazy.

KYD: Yikes, I need to revise my congratulations – double congratulations then, or something?

BD: (LAUGHS). Not quite, not quite. I’m jumping the gun, I mean, we haven’t completely sold out our second print run, but they did say at the warehouse that the levels were getting low so we should restock, yeah.

KYD: So The Island Will Sink isn’t your only experience with the end of the world narratives, I hear –I think I’ve heard you described as a Doctor of Apocalypses. Would you care to elaborate a tad on that?

BD: Sure. So did my PhD Thesis on apocalyptic narratives, and specifically the function of apocalyptic narratives, like, how they function, how they have functioned in history and different things that they’re used for. So I kind of did more traditional apocalypses, biblical apocalypse, and then I started talking and thinking about contemporary apocalypse, and the function of revelation in the contemporary moment. And also contemporary post-apocalypse – the idea of a post-apocalypse is that it withholds revelation, so yeah, that’s what I was thinking about the duration of my PhD.

KYD: That sounds like it also simultaneously would have been some pretty damn good research for your book as well, which is very sneaky of you.

BD: Yeah, totally!

KYD: So one of the things you probably would have touched on is that novels and things speculate on the future, and particularly, possibly problematic parts of the future are usually shaped in large part by the concerns and preoccupations and technological developments of the present era. Did anything happen in the process while you were writing your book that you then had to sort of revise your idea of this future you were creating?

BD: Oh yeah, I don’t know if you know, but I have been wri