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.

Read more

Samuel Rutter is a new, exciting voice in Australian fiction. His story ‘Comfort Inn‘ appears in Issue Two of Kill Your Darlings, and he was recently published in The Big Issue’s fiction issue, alongside stalwarts such as Christos Tsiolkas, Linda Jaivin and Toni Jordan. Unfortunately, we’re losing him to South American shores, but we managed to speak to him about his Recommended Reading before he hopped on the plane.

1. What books did you read as a child?

As a child I can remember reading a lot of Roald Dahl, and I also loved the Asterix comics. I was fairly nerdy so I also liked those history books for children, the ones with lots of pictures.

I can remember reading a book in primary school called 100 Pink Balloons or something like that. It was about a little girl who has leukemia, and for every birthday she’d have a cake with the corresponding number of pink balloons made of icing on her cake. Then she gets HIV from a bone marrow transplant and starts dying really quickly. She says all she’s ever wanted is 100 pink balloons, so friends and families and nurses start giving their birthdays to her, so she can get to one hundred, but she dies before that happens. I remember being being absolutely devastated by that book, it’s the first book I can remember that made me cry. From memory I think it was a true story written by the mother of the girl. I was only about eight years old, I was pretty upset by the whole thing, I’m not sure how I even got hold of a book like that.

Read more

Melbourne bookseller Leanne Hall won last year’s Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for her beguiling debut novel, This is Shyness. KYD associate editor Jo Case spoke to her on the eve of the book’s publication – about the book, the tenuous boundary between adult and young adult writing, the business of being a teenager, and her writing process.

J: Leanne, your writing in both your short stories and books is often realist in style but also has those fantasy elements which veer into the eerie. I wonder what it is about that kind of writing style that attracts you?

L: I don’t think it attracts me – I think it’s just the way I write. If I try to write straight stories, those other elements just creep in and I almost don’t identify them as being unusual or magical or slightly odd elements. To me they’re just in there, and it’s only when people read it that I realise that there are other strange things in there – and I’m like, but that’s not strange at all. It’s just there.

Honestly, when I do write my stories, I feel like I’m writing something really real. I feel like it’s just reality that I’m representing – which of course it isn’t. I don’t know what that says about my brain or what my everyday life is like.

J: Yeah, in everyday life you just walk into another suburb and it’s all dark.

L: It says a lot about me, doesn’t it? Like, that’s just normal, that’s how I experience the world.

J: No, I think it says something about your storytelling style. You’ve obviously written both adult and YA stories. Do you have a preference? And when you sit down and write, do you know which it’s going to be? Or does it just come out that way?

L: I think it comes out that way. I guess all my short stories have been adult in nature, but that just says a lot about the venues for short story publication in Australia. There’s very few anthologies or magazines or journals that will take stories that have a children’s or YA audience, so your only outlet are things for adults, so that’s what I write. But really it’s a matter of what you call it or how your present it. I mean, some teenagers could read some of my short stories, and that could seem like a story for them, but it’s just in a publication that adults are reading. Read more

In Issue One of Kill Your Darlings, Justin Heazlewood wrote: ‘If the album isn’t dead, it’s certainly lying in intensive care’. Killings spoke to him about how technology has changed the way we listen to music, which musicians can still make him sit up and listen, and what songs from Melbourne’s Number 86 tram sound like.

So the album’s dead?

Sort of. Although one hates to make generalisations, huh? I mean, you hear things like ‘Kids aren’t buying albums anymore, they’re just buying tracks off iTunes,’ but I suppose you have to take it all with a grain of Salt ‘n’ Pepa.

The album is certainly sick. It’s like the second wave of the Nintendo generation. Remember when suddenly everyone’s attention span was drastically reduced by the flash-happy graphics of MTV and video games? Perhaps that is what is happening with music. Because you have your entire music collection at your disposal, you’re tempted to keep flicking between songs. In the old days, you just stuck on a CD and you would listen to that all the way.
Read more

It’s often said that writing and editing are two sides of one coin, and it’s not unusual to find a person who incorporates both into a literary life. So it is with Nicola Redhouse – by day, an editor at Scribe Publications, and by night, a fiction writer. Killings speaks to Nicola, whose story ‘The Girl and the Cat’ appears in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings, about being on both sides of the fence.

What are your processes and passions as a writer?

I’ve always felt a creative compulsion to record things in words – and of course tied to this, to read – but my interest in the different forms has changed over time. As a child, I experienced utter pleasure reading, and then discovered a similar pleasure writing my own stories. Then, as a teenager, I began to read poetry and verse novels (Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson were favourites, and of course Dorothy Porter), and I became interested in psychoanalysis, and I suppose I discovered the rich associative possibilities of poetic language.

I’ve now moved back into really enjoying the more extended involvement with character that you get reading short stories and novels – Alice Munro and Joan London are among my favourites – and wanting to achieve that in my own writing. Short stories are an incredible form – I think they’re capable of both that more associative meaning and symbolism that I love in poetry and the expansive characterisation of longer narratives that so deeply engaged me with books as a child.

Read more