And while we’re at it, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre has posted the interview I conducted with members of their youth holiday program Press Club on Youtube.
So now you can hear more of my fatuous, deluded self-idiocy, but with added vision!
Well, here we are. The 29th, and final, Precious Things post. And I can’t think of anyone better to round off the whole thing than the woman I call ‘Luscious’, Lyn Battersby.
Lyn is a talented author and editor, with a writing voice I think is utterly unique. Her writing has taken a back seat over the last couple of years while she finishes a University degree. She’s currently in the final stages of a post-graduate teaching internship, and as one of the top two or three students in the state, she’ll have her pick of assignments when the adverts are answered towards the end of this year. Once she’s settled in her new job, she’ll be back amongst the pages where she has made her home over the last 15+ years.
For now, however, with thanks to the 28 friends, colleagues, peers, and artists I like and admire who have created this series, it’s time for the artist I love to speak.
An example of my gag writing being infinitely better than my drawing skills: this looks like I tried to get it to completion but gave up when I couldn’t get what was in my head onto the page.
Damn good gag, though.
“It looks like some sort of ransom note.”
Cat Sparks has done pretty much everything there is to do in Australian speculative fiction. She’s been a publisher, illustrator, and editor. These days, she’s expanding her long-standing writing repertoire: she’s just released her debut novel, Lotus Blue, and is putting the finishing touches to a PhD in climate fiction.
Here, she takes us back into the depths of her childhood, and goes some way to answering what so many of those of us who call ourselves her friends have wondered: how did she get like that?
Given the lined note-paper, and the care I took sketching out, I’m going to say it was one hell of a boring team meeting I was stuck in at the time. I clearly was too bored to come up with something funny.
“Hello? Base camp? I haven’t found the elephant’s graveyard yet, but I think I know someone who has…”
If you enjoyed Magrit, then Sue Whiting is the person to thank. Sue is, to put it simply, the best editor I’ve ever worked with: I learned more from working with her on this one manuscript than I’ve learned from the rest of my career combined. Her ability to pull threads together, to identify logic gaps and tighten sentences I thought screwed to their maximum torque, was astonishing. She did such an amazing job that she’s indirectly responsible for the difficulties I’ve had with my next work– now that she’s left Walker Books and gone back to her first love, writing, I’m no longer certain how much of my greatest success is mine and how much is hers, and for a long time I was paralysed by the fear that it was all down to her.
An accomplished author in her own right, here she lets us into both the beginnings and underpinnings of her literary career.
