My ebook of eight short stories 'The Dead Aviatrix' is available on:
And here below you can read a short history of the stories and how they came to be written
THE STORY OF
THE STORIES
The Dead Aviatrix is an ebook published
by Spineless Wonders in November 2017. It is the first book of short stories in
the Spineless Wonders new Capsule Collection series.
The eight stories in The Dead
Aviatrix are not obviously connected with each other by theme or character
or plot, although because they originate in my imagination, they all reflect my
interests and concerns. The ebook is a gathering of eight of my stories that
have been recently published in various journals.
Here is an account of how the
present collection came about:
The
Story of the Stories
A few years ago I wanted to
revise my book on writing, Dear Writer, and offer it as an ebook. I
discovered the wonders of Spineless Wonders which was a small publisher
specializing in ebooks. Dear Writer Revisited became an ebook, and
Spineless Wonders also produced it in hard copy.
Since then, they have published
my collection My Hearts Are Your Hearts, and in 2017 they began the
Capsule Collections which are small collections of stories or poems produced
solely as ebooks. They put eight of my new stories into a Capsule and this
became The Dead Aviatrix, published in November 2017.
Every short story has its own
history.
Story One : The
Dead Aviatrix
The title story ‘The Dead
Aviatrix’ was inspired by something that happened to me as the writer of a
novel some years ago. It was an awful and troubling thing, and I wondered for a
long time about how to write about it in a useful and interesting way. The
narrative involved my surname and the surname of an Australian woman flier, and
it was a story about publishing. Then one day I was reading online about the
phenomenon of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the first book-packager for children,
and I found there a story with a woman flier in it, and I was captivated by the
sentence:
The aviatrix sat
looking on through all this tumult with a happy smile.
Something went Ping! and suddenly
I had the story. Maybe the use of the term ‘aviatrix’ was what did it. A word
very much of its time. Female aviator. Not a word that is safe to use seriously
any more because it is unfashionable to characterize women workers as being
separate from men workers. You are not supposed to say, for instance,
‘actress’. So ‘aviatrix’ was horribly un-PC. In particular I loved the ‘trix’
part of it; I just liked saying it. The character of the intern invented
itself. Since I wrote the story, the matter of interns has become the subject
of government and media attention.
I chose the aviatrix as the title
for the whole collection. When I began telling people about the ebook I was
surprised at how many of them reacted to the title itself. The word ‘aviatrix’
set them off in various ways, and, curiously, so did the word ‘dead’. By
coincidence it was at exactly the time of the hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Amelia Earhart. Although the
story has in fact nothing to do with Amelia. This was one of those sweet
moments of coincidence that sometimes flavour and favour the writing of
fiction.
Story Two: The
Whirligigge of Time Brings in His Revenges
When I was at high school, I
played the part of Olivia in Twelfth Night. One of the lines in the play
that sometimes comes back to me is ‘The whirligigge of time brings in his
revenges’. Now skip to 2017. Social media rules. There is no privacy. Once upon
a time publishers were often remote and powerful figures, shadowy even. But by
2017 some of them began to give in to the temptation to express themselves on
social media. Whereas once they might
have mocked the writing in the ‘slush pile’ to their colleagues over lunch, now
they could give the whole world a good laugh. I found this quite shocking,
really. The lovely line from Twelfth Night leapt to mind, and there’s
the story.
Story Three: Cold
Case
‘Cold Case’ has its origins in a
memory I have from childhood. I liked to pick flowers that hung over fences.
Still do really. One day I picked a puffy greeny white viburnum bloom,
whereupon a hideous red-faced man materialized and shouted at me that he would
ram the flower down my bloody throat. I can’t really explain how the plots and
characters of stories build from these old memories, but clearly the incident
with the viburnum made a powerful impression on me, as did the line from Twelfth
Night, and maybe because my project in life is to manufacture fiction,
those things have the power to give birth to characters and narratives. I wrote
the story in the first person, but the narrator is only partly personal to me.
Story Four: Cactus
In the goldfields region where I
live there are fascinating little old towns that have in the past been busy, grand
and elegant, but that are now very very quiet, perhaps more or less dead. One
time when I went to Tarnagulla, I saw vast areas of prickly pear gone wild in
the middle of the town. It’s an introduced weed. It was beautiful, the
proliferation, the sea of thick ears of green sprouting vicious needles and
blooming with silky peachy yellow flowers. And the fact that ‘cactus’ is
Australian slang for ‘dead, beaten, kaput’ appealed to me as a metaphoric
description of the place. There’s a beautiful old bank building, and several
handsome red-brick churches which I really love. All these buildings have been
converted into residences, I imagine for people who have come from the city to
enjoy life in the country. From time to time in towns like this, people set up
shops to sell crystals, or to tell fortunes and so forth. Anyway, my visit to
Tarnagulla inspired me to write the story ‘Cactus’. The lives of the characters
in the story are pretty much cactus too.
Story Five: The
Matter of the Mosque
I live in the Bendigo region of
Victoria. In recent years there has been considerable controversy about the
establishment of a mosque in Bendigo. The community is divided on the issue. I
should clarify here that I am in favour of the mosque. Sometimes I am stopped
in the street by strangers who rant about their belief that the mosque is going
to bring violence and terrorism to the city, that land values will drop, that
women will be raped, people will be slaughtered.
My most vivid experience of this
irrational prejudice occurred in an unexpected location. I used to take my
small grand-daughter to ballet classes. As the only grandmother among the
mothers who waited in a separate room while the children took the class, I was
invisible and ignored. The mothers talked among themselves, and every now and
then they would interrupt their discussion of ordinary everyday concerns with
expressions of rage and fear and disgust about the mosque. I simply told this
story as a third person narrative, dramatizing and foregrounding the vicious
intolerance that seemed to be as normal to the women as their talk about
hairspray. I just allowed them to talk. The story is a portrait of the
blindness and smugness of a certain section of local society in its own words.
Story Six: Surrogate
I wrote this story at a time when
surrogate pregnancies were big news in Australia. When their surrogate baby son
turned out to be ‘imperfect’, an Australian family rejected him and left him
with his birth mother in a foreign country. Rather than meet this story head
on, I explored the issue of surrogacy and imperfection as a type of fairy tale
from the nineteen fifties. I think that some of the issues involved in
surrogacy can be highlighted by shifting some of the emphasis, and by adopting
an unexpected tone for the telling. Unlike many of my stories, this one has
distinctive characters and a straightforward plot. Incidentally, it is set at a
time when Europeans were arriving in Australia after the Second World War. The
Dutch people in the story are of course figments of my imagination, but I knew
several Dutch families in Tasmania in the fifties, and memories of them just
entered the narrative.
Story Seven: Love
Letter to Lola
I think extinction of species has
been one of my preoccupations since my father told me that the last Tasmanian
Tiger had died in the Hobart zoo a month after my older sister was born in
1936. My father had seen the animal, but I would never see it or its like. Small
evidences of this interest have surfaced in my writing over the years, but
‘Love Letter to Lola’ is the probably only story I have written purely on the
subject. In 2003 a friend asked me if there was a book I would like for my
birthday and I said I would like Tony Juniper’s book about the extinction of
Spix’s macaw. The friend was a bit surprised at the choice, but she gave me the
book, I am happy to say.
In 2016 a publisher invited
writers to contribute to a book of love letters. For some reason the idea that
came to me was a love letter from the last Spix’s macaw. So I tell, through the
voice of the parrot himself, the terrible story of the extinction of the bird. Tony
Juniper told the history; I gave the parrot a voice.
Story Eight: The
Tale of the Last Unicorn
In 2013 I was guest editor for an
issue of Griffith Review. The topic of the journal that quarter was
fairy tales, one of my particular interests. The notion of ‘fairy tale’ is
still more or less lodged in the popular Australian imagination, possibly
thanks to Walt Disney, in the narratives of the Grimms, and in other European
traditions. At Griffith Review, it became clear that although there are
glorious Indigenous foundation myths and other legends, and also stories such
as ‘The Magic Pudding’, there is very little literature past or present that
falls into the category of ‘Australian fairy tale’.
With this at the back of my mind,
I began writing a new story. It’s always a mysterious process, writing fiction,
and so I can’t really explain why the idea of the Rainbow Serpent and the
Unicorn meeting in Tasmania occurred to me. But it did, and I began writing,
and it turned out to be an end-of-the-world story. Extinction of everything. In
a way it is a long-awaited response to the story my father told me long ago about
the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger.
