Last year my company, Affirm Press, an emerging publishing company with more ideals than commercial sense, embarked on an initiative called Long Story Shorts. It was a commitment to publish six individual collections of stories by new and emerging writers, the last of which – Two Steps Forward by Irma Gold – was published this week.

The goals of the project were twofold: to demonstrate a commitment to new Australian writers and to venture into a publishing no-man’s land to demonstrate the scope, delight and viability of short fiction (in which Australia has such a rich tradition). Of course we were also hoping to kick-start the careers of some of Australia’s most exciting emerging writers, careers that would be spent with us.

Truth be told, there were many times we regretted embarking on this venture. When, for example, our sales manager begged us to cop ourselves on (‘Six?!’ he yelled, ‘SIX short story collections!’) We received 450 submissions, from all over Australia. It was more than we expected and, frankly, more than we could cope with. We were inundated and had to close the doors for all submissions for months. We actually hated short stories for a while. Writers berated us for not responding earlier or insulted us for not responding the way they would have liked  – to be fair, we did take too long to respond to some people, which was partly because we wanted to give everyone constructive feedback (naive, deluded us – we thought it might be welcome!)

But throughout it all, we loved the look of the series and keenly awaited each new cover from award-winning designer Dean Gorrissen. It’s immensely satisfying, as the digital age descends on us, to provide a series that seems to have aesthetically impressed just about everyone.

The series began with Under Stones, a collection of dark and moody tales from Bob Franklin, best known for his stand-up comedy and television acting. The collection won the 2010 Australian Shadows Award, was shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards, and described by Sonya Hartnett as ‘bruising and beautifully composed’. (The stories gave me the heebie jeebies, and I couldn’t read more than one at a time – with lie-downs and lashing of camomile tea in between.)

We followed that with music writer Barry Divola’s heart-warming requiem to youth, Nineteen Seventysomething, an episodic tale of teenage awakening. Gretchen Shirm’s cycle of stories, Having Cried Wolf, was shortlisted for the NSW Premiers’ Literary Award for New Writing, and earned Gretchen the Sydney Morning Herald Best New Young Novelist of the Year award. Emmett Stinson’s collection, Known Unknowns, was a favourite among the lit crowd and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Fiction award for short fiction.

Leah Swann’s Bearings comprised a novella and short stories, and the series is completed this week with Irma’s Gold Two Steps Forward, which we hope will be as well received as its forerunners. The most remarkable thing about Leah and Irma was that the material they wrote specifically for Long Story Shorts sparkled. Clearly, when the authors stopped questioning themselves, second-guessing every decision – and just flipping got on with it – they found their voice and their unique style emerged. This was the case with Leah’s novella, which she wrote to meet in a few days to meet our deadline. Amanda Lohrey described it as ‘masterly’.

That in a nutshell was the value of Long Story Shorts: to provide an incentive for emerging writers.

Some books have fared better than others in the market, and there has really been no predicting which. Along the way, each has found admirers and been positively reviewed. We took a chance on books that bigger publishers rejected (which must be a familiar story to all indie publishers). It’s true we sometimes published books that nobody else wanted, as Frances O’Brien (aka Robyn Butler) from The Librarians put it at one of our launches – and some of these turned out to be our most successful ventures.

But sales and commerce aside, we knew we’d succeeded by one important measure when in a Sydney Morning Herald review, Kerryn Goldsworthy asked where Affirm Press were getting their fiction writers from because, for the second time in months, she’d been amazed by the quality of a debut short story collection from a previously unknown author.

In an age where short fiction (certainly for the vast majority of new and emerging writers) is widely perceived as unsellable, we went a little way to bucking the trend. While it’s certain you’re more likely to get wrinkles than rich from publishing short fiction, this series has surpassed our expectations and imbued us with enormous excitement and energy. We are now on the lookout for more emerging fiction writers, so hop to it. Submissions are open at www.affirmpress.com.au.

Martin Hughes is publisher at Affirm Press, where Kill Your Darlings editor Rebecca Starford is Associate Publisher responsible for fiction.

The culmination of Long Story Shorts is being celebrated Tuesday, 20 September 6–8pm (tonight!) at Eurotrash and there’ll be ‘mild-mannered malevolence’ from comedian and author Bob Franklin. All welcome.

Included in the 2011 edition were stories from four established writers as well as the winner of and four runners-up in the Guardian’s short story competition. Reading through the collection, I noticed an all too familiar dichotomy. Most of the writers had produced a traditional type of story: having received their brief, they had chosen a path from which to create a familiar fictional world.

In short, there were eight writers, happy to write a traditional narrative… and then there was Jennifer Egan.

Egan won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel/linked short story collection A Visit From the Goon Squad. For the Guardian, she wrote To Do, which is, as it sounds, an eighteen-task to-do list; when combined, the tasks form a coherent, engaging short story. Or do they? Readers of Goon Squad were already familiar with Egan’s willingness to experiment with form; she’d included a story told in PowerPoint slides, and another in the guise of a music magazine interview. Though said parts were disparate, the whole evoked a near-typical reading experience, or to put it another way: A Visit From the Goon Squad was comfortably experimental.

To Do is far less accessible. Reading through the list, one senses only a general unease: a shifting from sanity to insanity that is at best uncomfortable, and at worst eerily accurate in its depiction of a particularly unhinged individual.

If the story riled readers, it’s because there’s a fine line between experimentation and pretension.  I certainly felt conflicted after reading it: I’ve always been happy to see authors think outside the box; still, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a case of an established writer being granted free rein to experiment. I don’t doubt there were numerous entries to the Guardian’s short story competition that had tried similar structural tricks, but I doubt many were given serious consideration.

Which is not to discredit Egan’s virtuosity. If I personally didn’t enjoy To Do, then that is my experience; it says nothing about my overall feelings towards either Egan or her other stories. I’m also glad she’s following in the footsteps of literary trailblazers Raymond Queneau, Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis and Georges Perec in experimenting with story structure. To my mind, we need more people like Egan – more authors willing to write challenging fiction, whatever the format. And not all of them need to be part of the literary establishment.

As a literary culture, we should be wary of ascribing genius to those writers who’ve already been so defined.  Equally important is a willingness to embrace experimentation and innovation at all levels of writing. Nationally, such experimentation is rarely nurtured, if at all. How many Australian authors have been rejected because their work wasn’t ‘commercial’ enough? And for how long will we have to read the same types of stories before the penny drops that in a strong literary culture, all types of voices should be represented?
Thematically, much of Australian literature has for too long been focused on what Jo Case described in Issue Six of Kill Your Darlings as ‘bush and beach’. It’s been locked in traditional, restrictive modes of storytelling both culturally exclusive and gender biased. These modes are of little relevance to a predominantly urban contemporary Australian society, shaped as it is by multiculturalism, globalisation and neoliberalism. More importantly, regionalist literature is driving away a potential readership, a readership that can readily find more relevant and compelling characters, settings and narratives in various other media.

Australian writing wasn’t always so conservative. The 1970s saw experimentation in its ascendancy: Peter Carey, Frank Moorhouse and Murray Bail all wrote seminal works during this period and today they’re three of Australia’s most influential male writers. In 1975, Kate Jennings released the deliberately unedited Mother, I’m Rooted through Outback Press, giving voice to 152 Australian women, most of whom were previously unpublished. Out of a similar spirit came debut works from eventual literary stalwarts Helen Garner and Elizabeth Jolley. While it’s difficult to quantify the impact of such a free-thinking publishing environment, its legacy can be seen in the those writers still revered more than thirty years later. It even stands to reason there’s a correlation between their early freedom to experiment and their eventual and prolonged literary success.

Australia would greatly benefit from a return to such a liberal aesthetic, and indeed recent works from Emmett Stinson, Tom Cho, Tim Richards and Josephine Rowe suggest there’s still hope for a varied and imaginative approach to Australian literature. That said, almost all experimentation is occurring in poetry and the short form, and much of that is coming from literary journals and smaller publishing houses, with few mainstream literary novels willing to take the risks that make for groundbreaking literature.

For the most part we’re trapped in postcolonial mythology, and while regionalist retrospectives may create the illusion of a cohesive national voice, they won’t create a diverse literary scene worthy of the world’s attention. Experimentation in form, voice and structure may not guarantee sales but it will guarantee a vibrant mix of original writers, all of whom are dedicated to creating, innovating and broadening the scope of Australia’s literary output.

If Jennifer Egan is already on board, then why aren’t we?

Laurie Steed’s review ‘Revenge of the Nerd: Fetish, Fantasy and Chuck’ appears in Kill Your Darlings Issue Six.

For Issue Six, Kill Your Darlings was delighted to speak with North American writer Ron Rash. A poet, novelist and short story writer, Ron Rash has won many awards for his work, including the 2010 Frank O’Connor prize for his short story collection, Burning Bright. We spoke with Ron about his Appalachian stories, the evolution of his writing from one form to another, and the ‘dream state’ of writing.

Ron Rash: I think that, in many ways, the best training I have received as a prose writer is reading and writing poetry, because it demands vividness and concision. I was actually, earlier in my career, better known as a poet. Some people have chastised me for not writing much poetry now, but I hope when readers read my novels or stories that they sense that I am a poet writing prose. A lot of the poetry gets into the prose.

Kill Your Darlings : One thing that struck me about Burning Bright, as indeed it did in your novels Serena and One Foot in Eden, was the precision of your language. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you craft your sentences? Is it a very laborious process?

RR : It is. Actually, when I’m working on a story or a novel, during the last couple of drafts I’m just purely concerned with sound. I’m reading the words and the sentences and the paragraphs, and I’m listening to how they sound. And by that I mean I’m listening to which syllables are stressed, which are unstressed, and what type of rhythm each gives the paragraph. I’m very conscious of every word.

KYD : Does this mean that writing takes you much longer than it might an author who has written prose from the outset?

RR : I think so, because of what I tend to do… I think I wrote 14 full drafts of Serena. And I’m talking about full drafts. I don’t ever reread my novels because I always find places where I wish I could have done it better.

KYD : Just going back to the fact that you do, evidently, focus so closely on the words and the stress and the cadence of your prose – I read that your first novel, One Foot in Eden, actually began as a poem. How did it evolve into a novel?

RR : Actually, the poem/novel began with an image. Every novel I’ve written has come from a single image. For One Foot in Eden, the image was of a farmer standing in a field, and his crops were dying around him. That was all I had. I remember that image came to me essentially out of a dream. I woke up and kind of dredged it up, and that day I wrote a 14-line poem about a farmer in a field with his crops dying. But when I finished it I knew that… The image that I had in my head, that poem couldn’t contain it. And then I wrote a short story and that didn’t contain it [laughs]. And so I thought, well, looks like I might have to try and make this a novel.

KYD : Were you apprehensive about venturing into a new form?

RR : Oh yes. Very much so. Because I’d tried a few novels before and I’d never had any success, and I was fearful of that kind of commitment. Because I knew that it was going to be a commitment of a couple of years.

KYD : So, One Foot in Eden began with an image, which evolved into a poem, and then a short story and finally a novel. Do you generally get most of your ideas for both your short stories and the novels from an image and then write from there?

RR : Yes. Every novel or short story. When I wrote the title story ‘Burning Bright’, I had an image of this woman looking out towards the mountains and I knew it was a time when fires were possible. The whole story started with this image of a woman looking out at the mountains. That’s how it happens.

KYD : Once you receive an image, how exactly do you begin to build on that?

RR : The best way I can explain it is that when I get this kind of image, when I get a true, important image – and I know when it’s important because I can’t get it out of my head – the image nags at me. I don’t know where the novel’s going; I don’t plot out my novels and I don’t outline them. Very often I don’t even know who the characters are. I just start with that image.

What happens inevitably, with a novel at least, is that there comes a time after maybe six months, or a year, where the book just seems to die. It reaches a dead end and I can’t seem to work out what to do next. Sometimes this will last several months, sometimes a few weeks. I think writers need particular beliefs, whether they’re true or not doesn’t matter. And the one I have to believe in, or that I make myself believe in, is some ways a little bit like what Michelangelo believed. You know, he would look at the untouched block of marble and he would believe that the statue was already in it; that it was just a matter of finding it. And what I believe is that if this image is so strong, if it haunts me day after day, if I can’t get it out of my head, and I can’t forget it, then I make myself believe that the whole novel is out there. It’s just a matter of my discovering it.

KYD : I’d heard of Michelangelo’s belief about his blocks of marble, but I’ve never heard a writer thinking of a novel in the same way. You often hear of writers speaking of how they don’t know when their novel is going to end, or they’re not particularly sure about their characters, but I’ve never heard of a writer thinking of the novel as fully formed before it is written. I think it could be enormously useful.

RR : It’s very helpful to me, and it sounds crazy but it works. It’s a great help in those bleak months of despair. You sit there thinking, ‘I’ve lost a year of my life writing this novel and now it’s not working and I’ll never complete it’, and I make myself believe that that novel is out there somewhere. The older I get, the more I write, the more mysterious writing becomes. Where does it come from? Say you write a short story – why is it that one day you think of an image or a character, and you’ve never thought of that before, and then one day it just comes. You know? Why is that? It’s not something that I think can be easily explained.

KYD : Do you think there’s a danger in questioning that too much?

RR : Of where it comes from?

KYD : In trying to analyse the intuitive, creative process.

RR : Yeah, I do. I think writers work best on intuition. Les Murray talks about writing as being very similar to a dream state. And I think he’s right about that.

You can read the rest of the interview in Issue Six of Kill Your Darlings, available here.

Leah Swann’s short story collection, Bearings, tells of the tumult of life, featuring characters who are yet anchored by hope. Her tales have been called ‘perfect little parcels of humanity’. But how did she begin her writing journey? Leah told Killings about her writing craft.

Before I could write, I told stories. Little made-up things about my dolls, or why a blue spade had mysteriously appeared in the sandpit. I told my cousins about the fairies that lived in the empty block two doors up and we collected grass from there (with the fairies supposedly clinging to the blades) in an icecream container. My cousins loved my fairy stories, but their father didn’t. He turned the container upside down and banged out the contents, they told me later.

‘See? Nothing. No fairies.’

I felt accused of lying, but it didn’t stop me. I learned to write my stories, and they became private and delicious. It wasn’t until I had children that I told stories again. It was different to reading; it was somehow pulling the raw stuff from the air, and both my children and I felt it.

My usual method was to retell tales I knew, making up whatever I didn’t remember. But one winter’s evening, the three of us cuddled up in my daughter’s bed, I felt tired out, with barely a thought in my head.

‘Please, tell us a story.’

‘No. Mummy can’t think of anything.’

‘Yes you can!’

My toes were sticking out from under the doona, prickling with cold. I didn’t want to tell a story. Not a bit.

‘Come on, Mum!’

The wheedling went on and I knew they wouldn’t let up, so I forced myself to speak. What came out was:

‘One night, a snow giant came striding down the hills…’

I stopped. I felt like a tight-rope walker without a net.

‘Yes,’ they said, impatiently. ‘What did he do?’

I focused on the giant. He was a massive yeti of a thing, hard packed but soft at the edges. He walked silently over the powdery fields until he came to a town, the moon casting his long blue shadow over the houses.

‘Keep going, Mum!’

There he paused, feeling a harsh wind whipping his back. And as everyone knows, a harsh wind is fatal to a snow giant. All at once it was too much for him and he collapsed, falling over the town, and when everyone woke up it was dark because they’d been buried by the snow giant…

This is creativity at its purest: when there’s only the tiniest bit of tinder – an image, a feeling, a shadowy concept – to fan into the fire that warms the listener and the teller. It’s a bit nerve-racking. There’s often tremendous resistance at the inner effort required.

When I write, I find planning is helpful. I like a map. It gives the restless brain something to hold onto. But the sensation of not knowing what’s coming is the adventure. Something quickens in the imagination, and as writers we step into unknown worlds leaning on words like walking staffs, happily conscious of making something new.

In the best writing, both writer and reader make discoveries. Fiction is not telling lies about fairies; it’s about shaping the events, characters and symbols side by side until they reveal something universal.

Bearings is out now through Affirm Press.

For this Recommended Reading column, we asked Louise Swinn, editorial director at Sleepers Publishing and member of the Stella Prize steering committee, for some of her favourite books penned by women. Among her selections are an Age Book of the Year winner, a literary superstar, an American memoirist and a Kill Your Darlings contributor.

Amy Witting, I For Isobel
Amy Witting just knew so much about people and managed to find a way to show it. She did domesticity, realism, office life, family and siblings, and, perhaps what first attracted me most, she knew so well how to write people being alone. This book took the breath out of my body when I studied it, so I wrote to Amy to tell her, and when we corresponded I found her to be just as wise as her books. She was pretty amazing to spend time with – perhaps unsurprisingly, very erudite, she knew everything about everyone, and she was incredibly funny.

Ruth McKenney, My Sister Eileen
A bunch of autobiographical stories first seen in the New Yorker, these also went on to become a film and a sitcom. The book, which is deceptively slight, is about two sisters from Ohio who move to an apartment in New York City. I remember them as being warm-funny and clever and thoughtful, the kind of stories where you actually smile while reading.

Karen Hitchcock, Little White Slips
Karen’s a contemporary Australian author who writes about contemporary Australian women without talking down to anyone – her characters are mean as well as nice, and her writing is crisp and exacting. This is a collection of stories so incredibly rich and precise, it will actually make you a better writer just reading it.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty
You either like Zadie Smith’s style or you don’t, and I do. But what I like about this book is just how funny she is with her characters. She kind of out-Malcolm-Bradburys Malcolm Bradbury at times, but it’s her expansive wit and clarity that I appreciate most: she tells you the characters how they really are; you don’t feel as though you’re being fooled.

The talent pool at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is clearly impressive – a student editorial committee has chosen from more than 300 submissions to deliver a tight and scorchingly successful collection of just 35 short stories, poems, and script-writing and non-fiction pieces. No doubt the final decision was excruciating, but apart from just two contrived stories, the offering is highly thought provoking and a teaser of great things to come from the writers represented here.

Managing editor of the New Yorker, Amelia Lester, kicks off the anthology with a concise foreword that wraps up the collection’s overarching themes in a neat bundle and hands them over to the reader: ‘lives are created through a series of choices. Stories are too, and the writers here have made daring and fascinating ones.’

And that is exactly the commonality of all these stories. Despite their myriad differences in tone, subject matter and style, they all deal with the consequences of the choices we make and the way we react to circumstances that are thrust upon us. ‘With a Little Help from Your Friends’ by Benjamin Freeman addresses a teenager’s response to his best friend’s heart-wrenching discovery that he is seriously ill, while the protagonist in Angus Benson’s ‘Down South’ has to come to grips with his own decision to move into adulthood and break away from his childhood friends.

The book is divided into two sections entitled ‘The Life you Chose’ and ‘And That Chose You’. The section title are self-explanatory, but some works encourage us to think more deeply about why the editors have chosen to include it in one section over the other. Sharon Kent’s ‘Jumping for Chicken’, where a 53-year-old crocodile hunter runs away from the responsibility of raising a child is placed in the latter section; while the reader may disagree with his decision, his profession has a strong pull on him that he’s helpless to fight.

A tinge of desperation and sadness hangs over a number of the tales. Many characters regret the decisions they have made. In ‘Odds’ by Rosie Cintio, Chelsea Hammond is left abandoned by the married man she had an affair with, while Louisa in Mathilde de Hautecloque’s ‘Close’ is trapped in the suburbs with just her four year old to keep her company during the day. She begins watching her neighbour, hoping he’ll reach out to her for company.

‘Close’s’ subject matter is achingly familiar. The language is exquisite in this portrait of highly identifiable domesticity: ‘I dragged one of Lenny’s singlets from the basket, flecked by torn tissue, shook it fiercely until drifts of paper snow fell on what was left of the lawn.’ De Hautecloque is skilled at tapping into the melancholy and the allure of the everyday.

The poetry too is flawless in its examination of common fears and insecurities. Georgia Symons hefts us back into adolescence with ‘Mollycoddled’. With her wonderful and sparse use of teenage vernacular she conjures up a party, barges into the minds of the attendees and shakes out all their hopes and anxieties. Anna Nordstroem’s description of blood in ‘On Tuesday Morning’ invokes the black dread of a doctor’s visit:

In the vial it’s almost black,
red
like lipstick on beautiful women
in black and white photographs,
darker
than my mother’s eyelashes
than the red wine in my glass
than my hair at fifteen
than the back of my eyelids
when I fainted this morning.

The poem’s sparseness is its strength – Nordstroem’s use of language tells us reams about her character, who is slightly detached, yet bordering on the hysterical.

The anthology does contain a couple of misses. ‘The Anniversary’ by Deborah Fitzgerald, about the fresh and raw pain of death, contains an unrealistic twist and the writing is laborious. ‘Bend in the River’ by Roslyn McFarland is about a playwright who confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. McFarland succeeds at making her protagonist unlikeable and self-indulgent but the other characters, especially the two policemen, are clichéd.

But on the whole, the ability of the various writers to access the routines, sufferings and hilarity of ordinary life is what makes this collection so successful. The anthology runs the whole gamut of emotions, from the darkly comic (‘Things That Remind Me Of You’ by Rebecca Slater tells how a woman disposes of her ex-boyfriend’s dead cat), to the sad and confronting (racial hatred in Annabel Stafford’s ‘The Mob Can’t Hurt You’). Each story challenges us to think about the inner worlds of others, and some of the best ones cause an imagination explosion, such are their evocative endings. Discrimination, illness, death, break-ups, success and popularity – the authors dissect the trials and tribulations of the everyday with aplomb.

The prose is skilfully rendered, the poetry original and evocative, and the non-fiction fascinating. The collection is a fantastic snapshot of the talent on offer at UTS.

Amy Roil is a book fiend who loves to write. Check out her blog here: www.bookwitch1.blogspot.com.

Many years ago I had an ‘aha moment’ when I encountered the CS Lewis quote, ‘We read to know we are not alone’. Reading has always been a highlight in my life, and was the sole reason I bounded into the local primary school at age five, desperate to decode for myself the books my parents had read to me.

I was an only child, and inevitably that means a lot of time alone. So characters in books became my companions. Even in my earliest Enid Blyton phase, I preferred human characters to animals or fairy folk. That is, Darrell and Sally from the Malory Towers boarding school series got the thumbs up, whereas Mr Pinkwhistle was relegated to ‘one read only’ status.

To this day, I remain a realist. The fiction I read portrays people pushed to the brink. And the more contemporary the setting, the better. Favourite authors include, Curtis Sittenfeld; Tom Perrotta; MJ Hyland; Alice Munro; Ethan Canin; Dan Chaon; Andrea Goldsmith; Julie Orringer; ZZ Packer and Cate Kennedy.

I love burying myself in a novel, but equally I love the sharp intake of breath an effective short story can produce in a reader. I’m reading New Australian Stories 2 (Scribe) at the moment and dipping in to the myriad worlds of others has a satisfying and voyeuristic thrill. My writing teachers at RMIT always suggested ‘dive right in to the action’ when you write a short story, and the pull of explosive dialogue or a character’s unenviable position has me, as a reader, right on the edge of my seat. With this collection, I sometimes have to close my eyes because I don’t want to face what I think will occur next.

I’ve always had a fascination for American culture and writing, so I try to keep up with the US book and short story market. I purchase books not available here from Amazon (apologies to all local independent bookstores) and keep a close eye on The New Yorker. I also subscribe to the brilliant One Story, a non-profit literary magazine that mails one short story to subscribers every three weeks. This year I’ve had significant reading mileage out of The New Yorker’s ’20 under 40’, which in their own words, ‘features twenty young writers who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction’. Some of these writers are already household names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Wells Tower) but the discovery of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum led me to her book of interconnected stories about a young middle-school English teacher titled Ms Hempel Chronicles. The wisdom and pathos in these pages puts it into my top three this year. My other belated discovery was the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li. I was fortunate to be able to review her outstanding book of short stories Gold Boy, Emerald Girl for Readings Monthly, and her writing is absorbing and beautiful as she charts the lives of people coming to terms with the modern age in China.

I find a lot to be excited about in Australian publishing. Literary journals seem to be flourishing, and small presses such as Sleepers and Affirm Press are on the rise. More writers are focusing on the ‘city’ as a location for their characters, which I enjoy. Interestingly, novels seem to becoming shorter and short stories longer. I like the fact that journals are making room for stories up to 5000 words. And that both traditional publishers and small presses are publishing my current favourite form – collections of interlinked short stories. In the past two years I’ve read some brilliant examples of these. Patrick Cullen’s What Came Between and more recently Gretchen Shirm’s Having Cried Wolf.

Image: Jeff Busby

There is silence as the house lights dim, and the blood red drapes become illuminated before opening in darkness. There is silence as the nameless man’s face appears, a spectre – floating almost. And with a strain of the eyes his body becomes just visible. The song ‘I could have danced all night’ pumps out, but with a rumba beat. The first ten minutes of The Tell-Tale Heart are delivered in stillness. It’s chilling.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story, adapted by Barrie Kosky, a man describes his obsession with the disconcerting milky raven-like eye of the old man with whom he lives. For seven nights at midnight he gradually opens the old man’s bedroom door and shines a shard of lantern light upon the man’s offensive eye. Each night he finds the eye closed – until the eighth night. As the shard falls upon the eye that eighth night, the young man sees that it is open and, unable to live with the sight of the pale blue filmy thing, he kills the older man who had otherwise never caused him upset.

Later when the police visit and he has convinced them that nothing is awry in the house, he cannot shake the sound of the man’s beating heart. Unable to cope with the pulsing noise he hears, and in desperate need of relief from it, he confesses his deed to the officers, who had believed him innocent till now.

Director Barrie Kosky has worked with time like a magician in this adaptation. Time is taken almost greedily and decadently. Even before a single word is uttered there is a sense of the amplified mind-state of this man who is about to give an hour-long confession. And in the confession too time is taken, masterfully, even between the syllables of words.

Performer Martin Niedermair handles each word carefully, drenching it in thought and then delivering it like a freshly born child, coated with emotion from the internal workings that came before. His skill is sharp. Every moment of anticipation in the text is accounted for. Niedermair’s physical presence feels hyper-real. Even in seeming stillness his body is alive and working to fill the space – every nuance, a brow twitch, a movement of the lip, feels magnified.

There is something endearing about the honesty of Niedermair’s Man. Despite the horror in his confession, he is captivating, intriguing yet unnerving all at the same time. From the audience there is no feeling of being implicated in the crime as you listen to the intricate detail. There comes no sense of empathy – almost a sense of separation, but still a morbid curiosity in watching his every nuance, not wanting to blink for fear of missing a movement.

The stage is reduced to just a staircase that seems to reach forever, darkness protecting the rest of the space from view. Anna Tregloan’s minimalist set coupled with Paul Jackson’s lighting is simply incredible. With no more than a handful of lights and one simple but grand structure, the horror of The Tell-Tale Heart is both framed and highlighted perfectly.

At times, the lighting design has the young man appearing headless or confined. In one moment his head appears to be spinning on his shoulders. The imagery created between body and light is macabre, gut-twisting.

The monologue is occasionally broken by musical interludes, combinations of voice and piano that effectively draw out tension and seem to extend time within the story, exemplifying the tenaciousness of this man who has taken no less than an hour each night to work open the old man’s bedroom door, slowly, without a sound. Niedermair’s incredible voice reaches soprano highs, and the transitions from song to text are flawless. Pianist Michael Kieran Harvey’s presence onstage, felt rather than seen, is ghostly and the music lends insight into the pace and intensity of the young man’s thoughts, depicting a madness he outright denies.

Kosky’s goal in this adaptation is clear: to do much with very little. A moment of silence from the audience before protracted applause made it clear he had succeeded. Kosky has given breath and dimension to Poe’s short story with just one astounding performer, supported by a small and inspired design team who were wise enough to not do much, but do it brilliantly. Kosky’s adaptation would leave Poe proud and gobsmacked indeed.

The Tell-Tale Heart runs until 2 December at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. Bookings 9685 5111.

Allison Browning is a writer, theatre critic and editor. You can find her in less formal attire here ; formalities are done with here.

Podcast roadmap: novels that don’t work – stories that come out of nowhere – writing many stories to get to the right ones – what you have to learn as a writer – Postcards from Surfers – the south coast of New South Wales – small fractures, large fractures – whether or not to identify as an ‘emerging’ writer – writers who are refugees from the law – ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’

Produced by Rafiq Copeland. Music is Pompey. Download the podcast here. Subscribe via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Having Cried Wolf Giveaway

Thanks to Affirm Press, we have five copies of Having Cried Wolf to give away. All you need to do is be one of the first five people to email affirm@affirmpress.com.au with ‘KYD giveaway’ in the subject header. Good luck!

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.

Of The Dead Fish Museum’s eight offerings, three are fishing stories and one is a hunting story. In ‘Up North’, a couple make their way from New York to a cabin in the snow for deer season. In ‘The High Divide’, two boys go on a fishing trip. The triangulation of life, death and nature is a classic configuration: a proven catalyst for unearthing family violence (‘Up North’), or a nation’s bloody history (‘The Bone Game’). But D’Ambrosio’s sensitivity to natural beauty makes the gambit worthwhile. Not only is the land tainted (in the title story, the ocean shore is awash with garbage), it is also promising and fecund, housing tulips in ‘a sea of red and yellow … rolling our way like a wave’.

Animals meet their ends quite readily in these stories, but for their human counterparts, life is a waiting room at best. Young Ignatius in ‘The High Divide’ watches his father sitting on the caged-in patio of St. Jude’s Hospital, his eyes like ‘blown fuses’. This sense of attenuated experience is intensified by the recurrence of details across the stories. In a García Márquez–like repetition of circumstances, the collection contains multiple failed actresses, guns, insurance workers and psychiatric hospital inpatients. This déja vu blurs the lines between tales, creating a spectrum of story in which the waiting never ceases – characters are reincarnated, waiting, in another purgatory.

D’Ambrosio’s prose is good, his dialogue great. ‘My life is so simple a one-year-old could live it,’ says the self-immolating ballerina in ‘Screenwriter’. Folksy vocabulary and unusual word choices enable him to nail character and description in a scant sentence. His dialogue and prose work together at their best in ‘Drummond & Son’, a study of the relationship between a typewriter vendor and his son. Drummond is patient, dignified, undemonstrative: ‘Sometimes your illness tells you things, Pete. You know that’. Yet twenty-five year old Pete is referred to as ‘the boy’ in the story’s prose, a protective tell construing his son’s interrupted life.

‘Half-life’ is a scientific term – a measure of the time it takes for a substance to halve in size or potency. It’s synonymous with decay, with deterioration, and thus with the consciousness that there’s only less to come. While the realism of The Dead Fish Museum is constructed with an eye to the compromised quality of its characters’ existence, it’s also anchored in the ‘strange becalmed moments’ of the outgoing tide. D’Ambrosio’s stories are portraits of humanity at the tail end of exponential decay, reminding us of the distinction between even a compromised life and silence.

Estelle Tang is online editor at Kill Your Darlings.