In Kill Your Darlings Issue One, Paul Mitchell told how his campaign to inure his daughter to the evils of consumerism took an unlikely turn. Issue One is now sold out, but Paul appeared on Radio National’s First Person on Tuesday, with ‘Shopping for Values: A Journey with My Daughter’. You can listen to it here.

Rebecca Starford, editor of Kill Your Darlings, recently co-hosted The Conversation Hour with Waleed Aly. Their guests were Robert LaDouceur, Associate Professor at Laval University, and Sandy Jeffs, a poet who lives with schizophrenia. You can listen to the show here.

Some good news (or bad news, depending on how you think about it) – Issue One of Kill Your Darlings is sold out! This means that if you’d like to get your paws on a copy, you’ll need to visit one of our wonderful stockists. It also means that if you subscribe to Kill Your Darlings from today onwards, your subscription will begin from Issue Two.

We’re also delighted to announce that Issue Two will be out in July. Pre-publication orders for Issue Two are now available.

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