- What are you hoping the reader will take away from reading your book?
I hope that readers will enjoy it! Jean and Sue go through a lot in The Animals in That Country — they share troubled times — but they also share a sense of humour and a drive for connection. I hope that readers can join in on that desire to connect across species. How many of us have looked at an animal and wondered: what are they really saying? The novel doesn’t seek to provide all the answers, but it does, I hope, allow us to spend time in a world where that communication is possible. I hope that readers will put down the book at the end and look over at their companion animal, or the bird outside or the next ant they see and spend some time in that wonderment.
- What was the research process like for the book?
I went to live for a few months at an animal sanctuary in the Northern Territory. I would take a sound recorder, a camera, and a note pad and collect everything. I pressed flowers in the pages of books. Recorded dingoes howling and birds cackling. Took pictures of feeding charts. Noted down every smell, the angle of the sun, the sound of a bird’s wings, the particular coil of a snake. These moments aren’t depicted literally in the book, but they helped me to write in a sensory way. There was also a time where I hunkered down away from nature — peering out the window at passing birds and reading every book and article I could find about how other animals communicate. It was messy, uncategorised research. Some of that work I spent months on and never looked at it again. Other random items — like a recording of a refrigerator in a caravan, and a video of dingoes playing in an enclosure — I revisited over and over. I think most novels are like that: a pastiche of life and imagination.
- What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
For me, The Animals in That Country is two books spliced together — they’re entwined. One is the gritty realist story of a human zoo-guide called Jean who likes a drink and is struggling with divorce and life in general. The other is the apocalyptic fiction of a strange new flu that enables animals — particularly a dingo called Sue — to communicate with humans. It was really important to me that Jean’s story and Sue’s story were equally significant in the narrative, but also very different. A dingo’s experience is going to be very different to a human one. And even though Jean and Sue are close and their stories completely merge, they each needed to be given priority as characters.
- What’s some great advice you’ve received that has helped you as a writer?
I got writer’s block for the first time writing The Animals in That Country. At the time, I steadfastly did not believe in writers block, or taking time out from pages to recalibrate! I was more of a throw yourself repeatedly at the page until something sticks writer. But I had been throwing myself at the page for a month and a half and it was starting to hurt. The theatre makers David Woods and Kate Kantor were cycling past my house and dropped in for angst tea. After a while, David said, ‘Just spend time with the work. You don’t have to work on it. Update the page numbers. Play with the heading font. Make the punctuation neat. Spend time getting to know the text again in a way that is playful and without pressure.’ I did that and it helped me through. After a day or so adding perfect commas I started writing again.
- What’s your daily writing routine like and what are you working on at the moment?
When I’m writing well, in a perfect world, I get up early and do as much as I can before I eat, look at anything else or have a conversation. That’s a beautiful time. Everything is clear and the writing comes out interesting and brave. After breakfast everything clouds. As soon as The Animals in That Country went to print I started working on another novel idea and there was a moment where I wrote for 20 minutes every morning before work. It was lovely. Then coronavirus hit and, like everyone else, I went online and stayed there. The Animals in That Country was being launched into a pandemic and I couldn’t look away. The internet is absolute death to my writing. One day I want to find a shack without internet that I can creep towards every morning and stay there until the words are out.
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