‘The North is a growing, pulsating sore on the map of my city, the part of the city in which I, my family, my friends, are meant to buy a house, grow a garden, shop, watch TV and be buried in. The North is where the wog is supposed to end up. And therefore I hate the North…’

– Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded.

I have a memory I cannot trust. After a party in Brunswick some time in the late 1980s, I tried to walk back to town, half-drunk and on unfamiliar ground. It took a while for me to realise I was going the wrong way; then I turned and walked back down the hill until the city’s towers came into view and the sun was rising. The memory of that walk is all mixed up with Ari, in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded, walking home at dawn from innumerable nights with a Walkman drowning out ‘the sound of trams, cars, the familiar voices of shop owners, the familiar landscape in which I have spent all my life’.

There are other places I’ve been: a grubby share house in North Fitzroy with old seagrass matting on the floor and a back gate that scrapes against the concrete paving; a fancy parliamentary chamber with decorative plasterwork and gilt finishes; a town that is ‘a flat place, divided up into a grid of streets by a draughtsman’.But they’re not my places. They belong to Helen Garner, Shane Maloney, Peter Carey. They’re Melbourne, translated into fiction.

The curve of the Yarra between Swan Street and Princes Bridge, the ‘electric blue water’ of the Fitzroy Pool or the way the bells of Melbourne’s trams sit in the background of the soundscape: when I come across these things in fiction, my reaction is not jealousy that others also have them, but pleasure that they’ve been noticed, a kind of vicarious pride that I recognise from motherhood: look at my town. Isn’t she gorgeous?

Frank Hardy, Nevil Shute, Martin Boyd, Christos Tsiolkas and Michelle de Kretser have set novels here. Cate Kennedy’s short stories, Henry Handel Richardson’s threepart The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and C.J. Dennis’s proto-ocker A Sentimental Bloke all take a piece of their life from Melbourne.

It makes me wonder: why do we need to write about the city, when it’s all around us? Then I realise I might as well ask: why do we need to write about life?

When the writer’s subject is their own town, the result is often dismissed as thinly disguised autobiography – not proper fiction. The world around us is supposed to be somehow easier to wrestle onto the page. Fiction that imagines a completely different place, a different era, is admired, much as an actor who undergoes a dramatic physical transformation is Oscar material.

And yet they say: ‘Write what you know.’ And let’s be honest, it can be a lot of fun to read what you know. If evocative writing is the art of revealing to the reader what they had only dimly felt, evocative writing about Melbourne reveals what makes the city feel like ours. It does more than even the best guidebook, dispensing with exact truths in favour of capturing the zeitgeist.

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When did you start writing? Why?

I was given a beautiful burgundy journal when I was in Year Four and for whatever reason, I thought it’d be a good idea to walk around for weeks writing down everything my family members did. I remember watching TV with my brother and writing, ‘And now James is asking me what I’m writing about all the time’. I lost interest in this pretty quickly and then started writing about what I was doing, and it still slightly disturbs me how often I think it’s a good idea to write down everything that I do. Thankfully, this sort of mental illness only ever lasts a few weeks and I revert to my regular state of just writing about things that interest me; everyday curiosities.

Why do you write?

It’s a reflex. I’ve worked in a lot of boring, shitty jobs and if I have internet access at these boring, shitty jobs I write hundreds of emails to, well, my housemate, actually, to alleviate the boredom.

My motivation for writing is entirely selfish. It keeps me entertained and it’s the easiest way for me to keep check of the changing conditions of my mental weather. It gives me some idea of how to negotiate any impending storms.

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In ‘Up North’, the fourth story in The Dead Fish Museum, a man whose wife is having a string of affairs says, ‘Our marriage was like a constant halving of the distance, without ever arriving at the moment in time where, utterly familiar, I’d vanish’. In the collection’s final story, ‘The Bone Game’, a man comes across a crystal clear stream, but the fish, which the native Americans believe are their ancestors, are ‘thin and weak and mutilated, their flesh ripped and trailing from their bodies like rags’. Charles D’Ambrosio’s second short story collection is full of these inexorable equations: lives diminishing without fully disappearing.

One way of coming to terms with the diminishing returns is to accept that life is a pretty low-stakes deal. Tony, the narrator of ‘Blessing’, describes heavy misfortunes as ‘gyps’. He’s an insurance broker, so he knows all about hedging bets: ‘You expect a normal life, but wager against it.’ Boons aren’t of much consequence either; Tony’s wife, Meagan, an actress for whom parts are proving elusive, says, ‘I love you … At least there’s that’. In ‘The Scheme of Things’, Lance and Kirsten live off small amounts of money – ten bucks a pop – that they procure by posing as charity workers.

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Kill Your Darlings is delighted to be part of Magazine at the Melbourne Writers Festival. This new, free event will see Australian literary journals and magazines, including Meanjin, Overland, The Big Issue and Ampersand, taking residence in the Magazine shipping container on the banks of the Yarra River. We know that MWF is usually is a pretty frantic time, what with the array of authors, panels and conversations on offer. So here’s the lowdown on what you can expect from us on Saturday 28 August, from 1:30 pm onwards on River Terrace. Please come on down – we’d love to see you.

Kabita Dhara is the publisher at Brass Monkey Books, an imprint of Hunter Publishers. On a residency last year in India, she scoured the fiction market for books to bring home to Australia, and the first catch was Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head. I spoke to Kabita about starting Brass Monkey Books, which will bring Indian literature to Australia. We also discussed the small press scene in India, which is totally different to ’small press’ in Australia.

Lunatic in My Head is set in Shillong, a small city near India’s borders with Burma, Bangladesh, China and Bhutan. The locals are the Khasi tribespeople, and everyone else is a dkhar, an outsider. Lunatic in My Head is three immersive tales in one: Firdaus, an English teacher struggling with her PhD on Jane Austen; Aman, a philosophy graduate attempting to sit the civil services exam for the second time; and Sophie, an eight-year-old girl who thinks she is adopted. The three may seem completely different, but they are all dkhar: all subject to violence of body and thought, whether from themselves or others.

Anjum Hasan will be making appearances in Canberra, Hobart and at the Brisbane and Melbourne Writers Festivals. Kabita Dhara is an editorial advisor at Kill Your Darlings.

About 15 minutes. Produced by Rafiq Copeland. Music is Pompey.

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