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.

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.

You mention the ever-ubiquitous iPod and the tastemaker of the 90s, MTV. How do you think the way we listen to music has changed?

We take it for granted so much more now. We don’t expect to have to pay for it, yet we want it to be there on tap. Ironically, we pay more for water now, which used to be free, and pay nothing for music. I think the stakes have dropped a lot. A new album doesn’t mean as much. It’s the equivalent of getting free food from someone who works at a supermarket and throwing half of it out. We churn through songs and bands on our iPods in low-quality mp3 form. Meanwhile, bands are all sounding so similar with their Pro Tools super drums and artificial brightness – in some ways it’s a glutinous age, like the Roman Empire before the crash. Yes, it’s exciting to have all this choice, but for a generation of indecisive people – perhaps it’s too much.

What has made your ears sing lately?

Spoon’s ‘Transference’ is the best album I’ve heard in a long time. Before that, Bibio’s ‘Ambivalence Avenue’. I don’t listen to much music really. When you make your own albums you kind of ruin music for yourself. Your brain is honing in on the snare drum sound – it’s like a film student watching Neighbours for the camera angles. Overall, I’m still obsessed with Boards Of Canada, and trying to figure out how they make their sounds.

In ‘Lying in Intensive Care: The Plight of the Album’ (Kill Your Darlings, Issue One), you wrote ‘When I was fifteen, I recorded my first album of songs…most of them seven-minute power ballads about Jennie Garth’. Are any of the lyrics from your Jennie Garth power ballads still extant?

She left so many footprints on my heart.
I loved you, (x4)

I think many Melburnians could make an educated guess, but what’s on the new Bedroom Philosopher album, ‘Songs from the 86 Tram’?

‘Songs from The 86 Tram’ is an exercise in character exploration taken from the Melbourne Comedy Festival Show of the same name. In comedy, bogans get made fun of all the time, and old people and junkies are all easy targets. I was interested in taking on demographics that are rarely satirised in any way. Indie musos, wanky artists, middle-aged women and refugees all get a mention. My last album ‘Brown and Orange’ was all about me and delving into my own strange mind, so for this project I was keen to basically not be in the songs at all. Yet, at the same time, naturally, I’m in each of the characters in one way or another.

I’m always trying to find the perfect blend of music and humour, so that one doesn’t compromise the other. I want to write and record songs that are musically rocking and lyrically funny and engaging, that stand up to repeated listening and you could put on the background at a party without everyone suddenly calling cabs. With this album I feel like I’ve finally achieved it. After ‘Brown and Orange’ I wasn’t in a great place. The album took too long to make and was heavily delayed and burdened by all kinds of problems and it depressed me and took a great toll on my confidence and sense of momentum.

With ‘Songs from The 86 Tram’ I hadn’t done Melbourne Comedy Festival in four years, and sat down at my desk and literally wrote myself out of a hole. So to then essentially direct and produce the show myself, and have it go so well and win awards was enormously healing. Subsequently, the album was a dream to make. I learnt a bunch of lessons from the last one and had my band The Awkwardstra all fired up. And now that second single ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’ has gone so well I feel like I’m back on the map, not just the I’m So Post Modern guy. (‘Really…is he still going?’)

Finally, let’s do some future-gazing. What’s the next technological step in listening to music going to be?

The satellite hat: a surround sound, 24-bit stereo speaker hat that has access to every song in history that is bounced back from a series of satellites cruising the globe. Guaranteed at least six months continuous play until you die from cancer of the attitude.

Justin Heazlewood appears in Songs From The 86 Tram at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, March 25 – April 18. Click here for details.



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.

Tell us a little bit about ‘The Girl and the Cat’.

I wrote ‘The Girl and The Cat’ a few years ago, and revisited it a few times before I was happy with it, which is how I always tend to work. The story emerged, as many of mine do, from personal experience (the feelings that surfaced after I finally moved a whole lot of my childhood belongings from my mother’s house into my own home), but then branched out into other, imagined directions. I have a few people that I workshop my writing with.

Peer feedback is immensely helpful, and I think it’s vital to consider a reader’s experience of your work; but, in the end, you need to balance that with a confidence about what it is that you want to do with your story, otherwise you lose that thing which makes it yours.

Now, what are your processes and passions as an editor?

At Scribe, I work across the non-fiction list, but I tend to take on a lot of the books that fall under ‘narrative non-fiction’, because this is where my reading interests lie.

As an editor, I love seeing a manuscript transform into an actual object with aesthetics and a physical presence that will hopefully appeal to its target readership. It’s a bit like the satisfaction that you get when you do a jigsaw puzzle.

I enjoy all aspects of editing: people often think of copy editing as a pedantic and mechanical job, but it’s just as challenging as the bigger-picture structural editing – both involve a kind of logical engagement with ideas, just at different levels. And of course I love assessing manuscripts, because it’s an opportunity to read widely and to practise my critical reviewing skills. I also love the more creative, lateral aspects of my job, especially writing cover-design briefs and blurbs.

Can the roles of writer and editor overlap or assist, or even cannibalise each other?

Working as an editor is a dream job for me – I am involved with writing and reading every day, and am stimulated by that engagement with words and stories. There are some benefits to working in non-fiction, in light of the fact that my current focus as a writer is in fiction. For one, it means that fiction reading is still left as something that I can do simply for pleasure, and pleasurable reading has always been vital to my productivity as a writer.

But I don’t think that being an editor necessarily cannibalises one’s own writing capacities: at some point as a writer you need to apply critical editing faculties to your work, but for me the process of writing comes from a much more unconscious, creative part of me than editing does. Still, working as an editor definitely causes a degree of brain fatigue – I mean, if I worked all day making cheese I probably wouldn’t want to eat it for dinner. Sometimes I just have to give in to that, and watch bad television instead of pushing myself to write or read at the end of a day.

I think training and working as an editor has helped me with my own writing in a few ways. It’s given me a capacity step back a bit from my words and place myself in the reader’s shoes – because that’s essentially what I have to do as an editor: be an astute reader. It’s also of course given me an invaluable insight into the publishing industry: I understand better the kinds of factors that are involved in assessing work for publication.

Being a writer certainly enriches my work as an editor: I have an all-too-acute sense of how it feels to have your words critiqued, and this has helped me to adopt what I hope is a style of editing that is constructive, and that views the process as a dynamic collaboration.

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.

I’d say that my strongest influences on my work – what I write about and how I tend to write it – are likely to have come from outside of literature. I think that the deformative years of childhood are very much behind the way I look at the world. That stuff accumulates in your subconscious and no doubt finds its way out onto the page. While some of the writers I’ve enjoyed reading might make sense when you read my work – no prizes for guessing that I’ve read Carver – there are a lot of other writers who I think are better, certainly better for me to be thinking of learning from, but you’d be hard pressed to see them as an influence. Krzysztof Kieslowski, John Coburn, and Arvo Pärt have as much to answer for as Carver does. Each of them has created something substantial, something that I keep going back to because it resonates, something that keeps me at my desk.

‘Carver’s Unkempt Lawn’ is from a collection of stories that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years. They’re all stories melding well-known facts, lesser-known facts, little white lies and outright pork pies. The first of these stories, ‘Kieslowski’s Unlikely Comedy’, was published in Sleepers Almanac No 5 and for each new story it’s been some obscure fact the quickly brings to mind the some sort of plot. What follows is a rapid process of assembling facts and then spinning a web of fiction in which to bind them all. ‘Carver’s Unkempt Lawn’ came about after I’d been reading Carver’s essay, ‘Friends’, about his friendship with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. The essay includes the photograph I refer to in the story and the sentiments attributed to Carver, and it got me thinking about friendship in general and how such a particular friendship – between three great American writers – actually comes about. I knew that they met as men in their 30s or 40s but for some reason I started to imagine them as boys. And then from there, you just throw in some late nights…That’s about as much logic as I can retrofit to any of these stories.

I actually read the story a couple of years ago at a short story conference in Ireland. I launched into it and was really enjoying myself but then, as I looked around the room, I came to the realisation that there were people in the audience who knew every person I was toying with as a character in my story. It felt quite awkward then but having made it halfway already, I just pushed on. Tobias Wolff was actually at the conference. I’d been talking to him earlier in the day, so, thinking that word of my reading could find its way back to him, I emailed as soon as I got home. Essentially, I apologised for choosing caricature over characterisation, and he replied a couple of minutes later with some wise words about what a writer owes their impulses.

Like most people, I tend to have a few books on the go at any one time. There’s always something I’ve been at for a while (Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy) and something new (Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It and Carol Sklenicka’s biography of – surprise, surprise – Raymond Carver). Then there’s an assortment of things – poetry, prose, plays, screenplays – that have caught my eye. It’s probably these last things, the things I just pick up impulsively, that really feed my creative impulses. I was really impressed with Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, which is an assemblage of fact and fiction about Buddy Bolden, a jazz musician from the early 1900s. But, as far as showstoppers go, there’s a scene in the novella at the heart of David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide that damn near turned me inside out. It sent me reeling and once I’d regained my footing I went back to my own work feeling like anything was possible.

At the moment my writing is a curious mix of professional, academic and creative projects. I’m working as a web author to pay the bills. I’m also trying to finish of the exegesis that stands between me and my PhD. And, in the no-man’s-land between the end of one day and the beginning of the next, I’m tinkering with rewrites on a couple of stories, scribbling notes for a novel, and working on a treatment for a screenplay that someone’s interested in me writing for them. I’m always thinking, ‘If only I had more time…’, but I remind myself that if I had more time, at best I’d just take more time to get the same amount of writing done, but it’s more likely I’d settle for less.

It’s been a controlled sort of chaos for the Kill Your Darlings team for the last couple of weeks. Not only have we published and distributed our inaugural issue, but we have launched it in both Adelaide (as part of the Adelaide Writers’ Week program) and in Melbourne.

Riding in on the back of Philip Hoare’s enthralling account of whale-watching and his book, Leviathan, Kill Your Darlings launched Issue One to a packed-out West Tent in Adelaide on Friday 5 March. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to Charlotte Wood, acclaimed author of The Children and recently editor of Brothers and Sisters, who kindly agreed to launch us – and who spoke so eloquently and passionately about her appreciation of the Australian literary journal culture. And thank you, too, to Clementine Ford, who had us all laughing with her reading of ‘Love in a LOL-ed Climate’, which recounts her (disastrous) Internet dating experiences.

Pictured: Charlotte Wood, Deputy Editor Hannah Kent, Associate Editor Jo Case and Editor Rebecca Starford

On Thursday, we were delighted to launch the issue at that Melbourne lit-gig stable, Bella Union Bar, in Trades Hall. Thank you to our contributors Gideon Haigh and Emmett Stinson for reading from their respective pieces. And another huge thank you to Michael Williams, Head of Programming at the Wheeler Centre and general man-about-town, for launching the issue with his famous wit. (It seems unfair, doesn’t it, that the man can write, program incredible literary events and speak entertainingly in public?)

Issue One contributor Gideon Haigh reads at the Melbourne launch.

Most importantly, we’d like to thank everyone who came along to the launches and showed their support. We’d also like to thank everyone who helped in making Kill Your Darlings become a reality. Special thanks to all our families, and to Lorraine Harding, our business manager for the establishment period, who put in so many unpaid hours and contributed hugely to the concept of the journal; Anne-Marie Reeves, our very own designer extraordinaire and consulting editor for issue one; Martin Hughes at Affirm Press, for his continued support, encouragement and enthusiasm for Kill Your Darlings; Flinders University, for all its support; and all our editorial advisors, particularly Martin Shaw, who gave us invaluable commercial advice in starting up, contributes regularly to our blog and has been an excellent all-round KYD cheerleader.

So, stay tuned: the Kill Your Darlings website and blog under the guidance of online editor Estelle Tang will continue to grow – in its content and diversity. We look forward to bringing you Issue Two in July.

Finding Out by Kalinda Ashton

Love in a LOL-ed Climate: Internet Dating by Clementine Ford

‘Shit Never Fucking Changes’: The Enduring Pleasure of The Wire by Anthony Morris

‘Write it down,’ Kelly used to say. ‘All of it.’ Or, at least, I think she did. After the operation, her face was so strung up with wires; she could have been saying, ‘fight it out’, or even ‘right to drown’. I thought I should pretend to understand what she was saying, so I’d nod and even give a little laugh, just so she’d know I was listening. She could have been saying, ‘I want a toasted cheese sandwich’, or ‘I regret everything’. Only now I’m being fanciful.

‘Fanciful’ is Margaret’s favourite word for me. ‘Don’t get things into your head; if I know you, you’ll never get them out again.’ Funny thing is, everyone says I look so much like her – Margaret wouldn’t be pleased to hear that. They wonder if we are twins. Of course, it was Margaret who got me into this. Kelly was so patient, and Margaret so brutish; so peculiarly literal-minded. I often wonder how they ever fell in love. She must have had some hidden pockets of sentimentality, my sister, because Margaret sold the car after Kelly’s accident, even though there was no sign of it bar a darkish stain on the steering wheel. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, as Mr Humpton from Year Six used to say when he was teaching us the order of operations for sums. We’re ‘starting at the wrong end’.

Read Kalinda Ashton’s ‘Finding Out’ in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings.

Before I discovered that the lemons life throws at you are not always suitable for lemonade, I suppose I was like any typical girl who fancied she might one day get married.

It wasn’t a question of ‘if’ so much as ‘when’. Marriage seemed to be as much a natural, evolutionary progression of adulthood as the cessation of pimples or the ability to live away from one’s parents. I wasted little energy worrying about the fellow involved, imagining his entry into my life to be as perfunctorily inevitable as the very act of growing old. My husband would emerge into my life fully formed, the vagaries of courtship having been dealt with as if in a distant dream. One day I would be a young girl, allowed finally to wear her first lipstick; the next, I would be married.

Of course, the folly of youthful expectations never lends itself well to reality. Not only am I entering my twenty-ninth year convincingly single, I have discovered that there is no set date at which one can expect to be free from the brutal inconvenience of skin blemishes.

Don’t be alarmed. This isn’t one of those dreadful singleton laments that have become the domain of media puff pieces since Sex and the City dehumanised women everywhere. Nor is it an example of the lady doth protest too much, determined to convince her audience that the mere thought of tethering her wagon to some rogue cowboy fills her with inexpressible repugnance.

Rather, it’s an exploration of what happens when we find that what we expected as children turns out to be a fantasy driven by saccharine cartoons and the ritual brainwashing of Golden Books. It’s an examination of what my grandmother would refer to as ‘making the best of things’. It’s a perilous journey into the shallow end of the gene pool, only to discover that science hasn’t begun to scratch the surface of in-breeding’s lasting consequences.

Ladies and gents, I have stared into the abyss and found that it had only one thing to say: Welcome to Internet Dating.

Read Clementine Ford’s ‘Love in a LOL-ed Climate: Internet Dating’ in Issue One of Kill Your Darlings.