It was an enormous privilege to have Adam Thompson, author of the incredible short story collection Born Into This, join me for the last episode of this season of the podcast. We caught up over Zoom to talk about creating and experiencing joy in fiction, writing in service of your community, and what happens when you stay open to opportunity.

Adam mentions Nathan Maynard’s play The Season as the catalyst that turned him on to writing as a viable creative pathway. We briefly discuss Adam’s short story Honey, which won him the Tamar Valley Writers Festival award, and which he’s kind of sick of talking about (though that shouldn’t stop you reading it, it’s amazing). The mentorship program that catapulted Adam into his current career is the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program. Adam mentions Tony Birch, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Kate Kennedy as short story authors he loves, and shouts out Wells Tower’s collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned as a book he returns to over and over.

Read more about Adam at UQP’s website. 

The delightful Mirandi Riwoe, author of the short story collection The Burnished Sun, as well as the novels Stone Sky Gold Mountain and Sunbirds, talked with me over Zoom about her meticulous planning processes and how to mine history for the seeds of short stories. 

Mirandi points to Maxine Beneba Clarke’s short story collection Foreign Soil as the book that showed her she could write short fiction, and also refers to Elizabeth Jolley as an inspiration. She also mentions William Somerset Maugham’s short story The Four Dutchmen as direct motivation for her novella The Fish Girl (I make a joke in this episode about Mirandi “Wide Sargasso Sea”-ing Maugham – if you haven’t read Jean Rhys’s tragic and deeply compelling retelling of Jane Eyre, I highly recommend it). We talk about Mirandi’s short story Annah the Javanese (linked here to the Griffith Review, behind a paywall), which speaks to Paul Gauguin’s painting of the same name, and Mirandi mentions Manet’s Olympia as a visual art touchpoint for the same story.  

Read more about Mirandi at UQP’s website.

Multi-award-winning Queensland short story writer Laura Elvery and I caught up over Zoom to talk about her astonishing record of sweeping story prizes – as well as what it's like to write about women winning prizes of another kind.

In this episode we talk about several writing awards, some of which are now defunct. The ones you can still enter (depending on your location) are the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction, the Nielma Sidney Short Story Prize, and the Kill Your Darlings New Australian Fiction Anthology.

Laura mentions her short stories Replica, Brushed Bright Bones, Trick of the Light and La Otra, which are all published in her collection Trick of the Light, and Frost and The Fix from the collection Ordinary Matter. She also recommends the deeply affecting short story Dreamers by Melissa Lucashenko, the virtuosic start and finish of Abigail Ulman’s Warm Ups, from the collection Hot Little Hands, and refers to Julie Koh, George Saunders and Tony Birch as sources of inspiration.

Read some of Laura’s short stories and find out where to buy her books at her website.