Speaker 1 00:00:11 Welcome to the Freeman Press podcast, Ty Literary Awards special edition. This podcast is recorded in Wola on NoJa, and we offer our respects to Noar elders past, present, and emerging. My name's Georgia Richter, publisher and Judge of the Fogy, along with publisher Kate Sutherland and author Brook Tennell. We're here to introduce the Fogy Literary Award shortlist. This was a year in which we found ourselves a unanimous agreement and unable to split the top of the field, which is why we found ourselves placing six very strong manuscripts on the short list this year in a moment, 2021, Foley Literary Award winner Brook Nell, whose author of the Glasshouse will interview Prema ASU about their manuscript, the Anatomy of Witchcraft. But first, I'd like to tell you a bit about why I love their work. Promo Rasu is a Blu based writer with a PhD in creative writing from uwa a, currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Mind, UWA Deep Sea Research Center.
Speaker 1 00:01:15 They've published creative and academic work in Westerly, consilience and Limina. Prema regularly runs workshop in person and online on world building and science poetry with a strong focus on bringing accessibility, inclusion, and diversity to the local arts scene. They're a strong advocate for promoting speculative fiction in the Australian arts and publishing industries. The world building aspect was very strongly in evidence. Here I confesse as I began to read to getting Harry Potter vibes from the novel as far as it features witchcraft and boarding school and a friendship between two teens who are called Lock and Leo. But this is also a highly distinct and original work that's fabulous in its own terms. It's a Locke Boy with witchy abilities in a society where witchcraft is very much the domain of women. Locke's mother is an admiral who's very keen for him to follow in her rugby playing footsteps. There's some really interesting gender work and political intrigue going on. It really is a wonderful read. So let's hear the interview. Brooke Nell has recorded with Prema Oras.
Speaker 2 00:02:22 Prema, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 00:02:23 Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 00:02:25 So it's really great to talk to you about your manuscript, the Anatomy of Witchcraft. Can you tell our readers a little bit about it?
Speaker 3 00:02:32 It's about a boy or person called Hemlock. Ians referred to as Locke, who from a young age develops an interest in witchcraft. He grows up, he's sent to a boarding school and he is told that witchcraft is just not an option for boys. He's, he faces reactions of apprehension and like, oh, that's a bit weird. This is set in the imagined high fantasy world of Morgan Cast, which is a city state with South Asian, um, and Victorian London influences. And it began as, uh, an exploration in gender, in fantasy. So the book starts as he's forced to leave his school because he's facing an expulsion for an accident involving witchcraft, and he has to figure out what he wants to do while initially at least struggling with this sense of failure and being displaced from ex an extremely privileged life of boarding school to the more destitute area of the city where he's living at his cousin's coffee house, which is also, uh, an establishment for political radicals.
Speaker 3 00:03:42 He, he spends a lot of time avoiding responsibility, but his friend Leo tries to reintegrate him into society by finding out what a male which could do in that world. It's a comedy, it's a coming of age. The novel has no central dark Lord or villain because I think everyone's sort of a villain in their own way. It's more about overcoming the self, um, and the system. There's no good versus evil, black versus white, whatever. And it's a satirical take on politics, the educational system, academia, uh, gender roles, fixed identity, and it's definitely a parody of the fantasy genre itself. And I hope it's an enjoyable read that doesn't really bombard you with the, the morals or whatever message, but rather leaves a lot of it to interpretation.
Speaker 2 00:04:35 Great. Yeah. So it sounds like there's lots of ways in which it's adhering to some of the fantasy conventions, but then there's lots more ways in which it's pushing against them and and making us rethink them, it sounds like.
Speaker 3 00:04:46 Yeah, but I don't think it's necessarily alienating to people who aren't so familiar with fantasy. You don't need to know all the law and all the tropes and conventions. It's really a narrative about people and identity and becoming.
Speaker 2 00:05:01 So are you able to share a little extract with us for people to get a bit of a taste of it?
Speaker 3 00:05:07 Locke made it to Strong Bone House in a daze. Every sleepless night, every early morning of rugby practice spent enduring Bradley's constant torture. His near perfect rank meaningless once in his room, lock paste back and forth in the small space between his bed and desk, kicking aside loose socks and bits of paper. He contemplated ignoring his mother's instructions, going to his exam and begging Professor Jill to let him sit the last few minutes. He wept and buried his face in his sheets. He threw his rugby boots at the door in a fit of rage and cursed as one of them bounced back to hit him on the shin. He stood over the wash basin and scrubbed at his face until it was disgustingly blotching, not even the perpetually ice cold water of Waburn college's dismal plumbing scene to cool his rapidly escalating fever. He pressed his forehead to the fogged up window paint.
Speaker 3 00:06:08 The window was bolted shut and had been for years, but Locke wrenched it open, whether by witchcraft or raw strength he couldn't say. And an icy gust of wind enveloped the small room blowing papers about there were blackened prints on the window frame where his hands had been. He focused everything he had into his left from which erupted a column of green flame. It wasn't a large flame, but that wasn't the point. Hi was one of the first forms of which craft Locke had ever tried. It was often used as a beginner's exercise as it taught two essential skills, self-preservation and control. And at that moment, Locke had neither. He held the flame for not more than a few seconds until the pain of his flash searing forced him to recoil. Locke examined his palm. There was nothing yet except for redness, but the pain would escalate in a matter of minutes and blisters would form the open window, overlooked the rugby field, which at present was empty.
Speaker 3 00:07:17 There was what looked like a burned crater near the posts past that was Gogan School for girls, where Locke had learned everything he knew about witchcraft. Almost everything he hated college, hated the old walls, the corridors full of sports trophies and buffed and paintings of alumni. He hated the professors and the refusal to read anything above word count the noise and stink of other boys. The universal conviction that rugby was more important than anything else in the entire world. The exams and all the useless mnemonics and declensions and conjugations and formulas, the two small desks covered in drawings of fallers, the communal showers and their miserable water pressure in that moment, he made up his mind. He wasn't wanted at Y Band with his right hand, he clumsily pulled on his pajama trousers, some dressing gown, throwing the contents of his cupboard haphazardly into his ballas.
Speaker 3 00:08:16 There was no room for his school books or anything else. Locke dragged himself and his val downstairs and out into the hallway. There was no one around at this time of day, everyone was in class or taking their exams in the dining hall, and he managed to make his way through the gates unnoticed. The sky erupted into heavy rain and within moments he was soaked through. Was a small station hardly in use this time of year. Mercifully Locke didn't have to wait long. The train almost didn't stop, but as lock stuck, his injured hand out, it slowed to a crawl. Dorsal sails billowing in the wind. He threw his val into an empty carriage and himself onto a seat. When the conductor came around to collect the fair, he paid his way to the end of the line.
Speaker 2 00:09:06 Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing that. So in that scene, um, we've got this main character of Locke leaving y Verne College, which is one of the main settings. Um, but when I was reading the Anatomy of Witchcraft, the manuscript, one thing that I noticed was this really strong sense of world building in this city state, like you said, of Morgan Cast that created. So I was just wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about where you drew some of your inspirations from in creating, um, this world, in this manuscript, and also how did you manage to kind of keep it clear and straight in your mind because there's really a lot of like interesting stuff going on.
Speaker 3 00:09:47 I love world building. It's an interest of mine. Uh, and it began as an experiment in world building when I was an undergrad at uwa. I didn't just come up with a story until I started writing it for my PhD, which began in 2019. So it began as a universe called the Morgan Cast. And this was because I had a sort of guide on world building and I was looking at this giant list of all the things that you need to build a world. You need to figure out how long days are, if there are days of the week and they're called that why they're called that if they're months, there are years. Like if the year has a number, why is that? It required a lot of historical knowledge because then I had to consider why things were this way in the real world and figure out reasons why it could be this in the fantasy world.
Speaker 3 00:10:34 One thing that really struck me was that I was studying a lot of Victoriana at the time and I thought about how many things are named after Quinn Victoria at the height of the British Empire. Things were named Victoria everywhere. Victoria is the name of a species of rose, a type of plum, a cake, roads, and suburbs and musicals and streets and like everywhere across India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Africa, it's just everywhere. So I thought if that's how things are named in real life, then you could have a fantasy world where everything was just named after the Monarch. Um, and this made things really easy for me because I just came up with the monarch's name as Morgan and then all the currency and units of measurement became Morgan's. There's like Morgan Biscuit as Morgan Ball, which is the support. And it made things easy for me and also worked as, I guess a satire of colonialism in a kind of fun way.
Speaker 3 00:11:29 And I didn't actually have to think about units of measurement or like dates or anything as specific things because it could be inconsistent internally for comic effect. So I went with that and I found it kind of funny and I just continued building this world around it. And I found when I started writing a book, it suited the story I wanted to tell. That's what was happening in the backdrop. As for all the world building, I began writing a lot of footnotes, which is why the word count is something like 15% footnotes. And I later incorporated them into the actual story itself, but that's partially how I kept track of them. In addition to that, I also just had a massive, massive notebook where I wrote everything. The toughest thing I think was the timeline of events and keeping track of all the years because in this world years unnamed after different animals.
Speaker 3 00:12:21 And so I made sure that was consistent. So the story then came about when I was doing a PhD and wanted to focus on destabilizing ideas about sex and gender and how that can take place in alternative worlds. So Terry's dis world novels were a huge influence there because he uses the genre of high fantasy to kind of question notions of sex and gender from within fantasy labels like witch and wizard. He's also really against the notion that fantasy is a form of escapism, and he was very clear about his fantasy being political allegory. His major technique in achieving this was comedy. And I find that's really effective for me as well. The, the decisions around well building, so there's, there's the Morgan thing, but in terms of the magic system and the setting, things like food and language that was just taken from what I know.
Speaker 3 00:13:17 So I have a very, uh, mixed, extended family. Um, I have Southeast Asian, south Asian, and East Asian heritage, and I just put that all into the work. We're seeing a lot of fantasy which is advertised as inspired by harm dynasty, Chinese mythology or South Indian mythology or something. And I think that's really cool because it's speaking to a huge diversity diversification in the market. But I didn't wanna pin down one thing within me versus the sort of messiness and the conflicts that exist within my mixed heritage and living in Australia, which has its own like bloody colonial past. And I wanted to put that all into Morgan Cast, but again, that's just my process behind it. And you can read it however you want different levels. Yeah. Yeah. So that's just happening in the background. You can think about it or not. So because I started writing as 2019, then we all got locked in our houses for a year.
Speaker 3 00:14:22 So, um, there's a plague element driving the story. It's kind of like an underlying anxiety that's pushing everyone to do the things that sort of drive the plot of an awful forward. Um, I came up with this before Covid, but it was a really different plague then. It was very much, this is chaos. This is causing mass, mass death. Um, and during lockdown, I think we all realized that wasn't the case. A widespread pandemic is not panic, um, and mass death and chaos and riots and all these things, it's actually a very slow economic problem that impacts people of different backgrounds very differently. There's an aspect of privilege there. So that all made it into the, the text as well.
Speaker 2 00:15:13 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it's kind of like a more nuanced look at it, the things you are looking at a about like class and, and gender and things like that, and how is a plague gonna impact those things rather than just people, you know, walking around like zombies kind of thing. It's like quite, quite layered.
Speaker 3 00:15:30 Yeah, I looked at a lot of books where plague is a metaphor for other things, and I thought about the ethics of that as well because I think traditionally in plague writing there's tendency to explore plague as, uh, a moral infection. So that I've tried to consider in how I represented it for that reason, I'm very ambiguous as to like what actually causes it and its pattern of infection. There's no details on that because I'm acknowledging this tradition of playwriting where it's inextricable from ideas about moral purity.
Speaker 2 00:16:05 My final question for you today is that what does it mean for you to be shortlisted for this year's Fogarty Literary Award?
Speaker 3 00:16:13 It means so much for me that I was able to submit my manuscript to the Fogarty Award because I think especially for emerging and young authors, it's one of the only Australian awards that will even accept things that are considered non literary fiction. Uh, not that I really believe in genre or those things, and I think that sentiment is kind of making its way into publishing and manuscripts. But a lot of places, whether it's awards or an unsolicited manuscript submissions, they would just straight up say no genre or no fantasy. And I'm glad to see that's changing. There's, I think, a shift away from that elitism, and I'm really glad to see that the award is at the forefront of that change. It's indicating that Australia might be able to, or is at the beginnings of developing our own speculative literary tradition, where currently I don't see a strong sense of identity in speculative works, uh, at, in comparison to say like Australian literary fiction where it is a strong sense of like what it is and a, a canon and a sense of like a field you can read and then study and discuss.
Speaker 3 00:17:29 This field definitely would be led by indigenous authors. I think that sort of subgenre is really seeing a lot of new works at the moment, which is really exciting.
Speaker 2 00:17:40 All the best for the award, and thank you so much for talking to us today.
Speaker 3 00:17:45 Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 00:17:46 So I'm going to be the host of the 2023 Fogarty Literary Award, which is a free event taking place at the E C U Spiegel Tent on Thursday, the 25th of May, 2023. Tickets are available from the Freemantle Press
[email protected]. I'm Brooke Tennell, and thank you so much for spending time with us today.
