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.
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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.

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photo by Tim McLean

Newcastle writer Patrick Cullen’s stories have been anthologised in those bastions of short fiction, Best Australian Stories and Sleepers Almanac, and his novel-in-stories, What Came Between, has been praised many times over. His short story about the friendship between Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, ‘Carver’s Unkempt Lawn’, appears in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings. Killings asked him to share his thoughts on reading and writing, and the germination of his tale.

Looking back at what I’ve written over the years I’ve probably followed a typical writer’s trajectory: teen poetry that ran on into my early twenties, evolving into prose and a largely autobiographical (and wholly unpublishable) novel, then finding a form to call home, which for me was short stories. Thinking about those earliest days I’d say that every time I sat to write I was as serious then as I am now, though experience tells me that taking writing seriously and having something good come of it are not always correlated. But you keep going regardless, writing whatever you’re fired up to write. Inspiration comes from anywhere and at any time, and much of the creative impulse comes from the challenge of trying to make something out of random fragments that lodge in my consciousness. The randomness of inspiration is probably echoed in the way influences work on you. Read more

Guest blogger Sukhmani Khorana interviewed New Delhi novelist Manju Kapur for Kill Your Darlings at Adelaide Writers’ Week.

When I first read Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters in 2006, I had just submitted an Honours thesis in Media and English. I realised it wasn’t very Indian of me to be pursuing a qualification at an overseas university that was not remotely related to medicine, science, engineering, accounting, law or management. Nor was it very feminine of me to crave financial and emotional independence over the security blanket of a bourgeois upbringing. And, worst of all, being an Indian national wasn’t proof enough of my fluency in English – despite thinking and feeling in a hybrid version of the language, I would have to pass an IELTS test.

Reading Difficult Daughters was a simultaneously familiar and removed experience. Set against the backdrop of the partition saga that divided India and Pakistan into two independent sovereign nations in 1947, it is both a love story and a coming of age tale. I had heard mention of the violence surrounding the historical event from the maternal side of my family, which had migrated from Lahore to Amritsar, crossing over to the Indian end of the divided province of Punjab. The central character of the novel, Virmati, is based on Kapur’s own mother, who was a difficult daughter living in a joint Hindu household in Amritsar. The family’s tenant, a progressive (and married) professor, fell for her independence and interest in education. Needless to say, her family was hostile towards the situation, and the state of the nation mirrored this hostility.

In reading Difficult Daughters, I was surprised to learn that difficult Indian daughters are not a 21st century phenomenon. Indian women were proactive during the independence movement, and entered public and political life before many of their western counterparts. Of late, they have begun to voice their concerns on the global tide entering India, and its impact on gender and family relations. Notable figures in cinema include Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Aparna Sen, while their literary equivalents are Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Manju Kapur, and numerous others. I looked forward to interviewing a role model of sorts during her visit for Adelaide Writers’ Week. Had she been a difficult daughter too?

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‘Finding Space’ Exhibition – The Carlton Hotel Studios
Curated by Jason Lingard
Open for viewing Wednesday to Saturday, 4pm to 7pm (20 January to 6 February)

Presented by the Midsumma Visual Arts Program, ‘Finding Space’ showcases fourteen artists’ work in photography, video and installation, exploring a symbiotic dialogue between their identity, their art and the constructed world in which they reside. ‘Finding Space’ touches on the precarious intimacy between imagination and physical space. Kill Your Darlings Editor Rebecca Starford attended the opening on Tuesday 19 January at The Carlton Hotel Studios, in Melbourne. She chatted with Marc Trabsky , whose installation Dianus, co-created with Maya Gnyp, is displayed at the exhibition.
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