WARNING: the following may contain excessive use of exclamation marks

Submitting to fiction competitions is a rollercoaster of rejection, revision, rejection and more revision. It’s hard to know if your work is enthusiastically received or read with a wince before hitting the delete button. So I was ecstatic to learn I had not one but two stories longlisted for the Peter Carey Short Story Award this year! (You were warned about the exclamation marks.)

Peter Carey’s work has had an enormous influence on my development as a writer. I read his book of collected stories twenty years ago and it transported me to worlds both eerie and familiar, each as fully realised as a novel but short enough to be experienced in a single sitting. At the time I was more interested in drawing and painting than writing, but Carey’s magic-realist and fantasy stories demonstrated the imaginative power of the written word. I decided to focus on writing and ended up landing a job as an advertising copywriter and later a journalist.

I went along to the ceremony at Bacchus Marsh library absolutely certain that I hadn’t won, because surely the winner would have been told in advance. Apparently not. The organisers knew I was coming and wanted to keep it a surprise. When my name came up, it was quite the shock! I was too busy looking after an 11-month old baby to hear the speech properly so asked the head judge, Anne Casey-Hardy, for a copy later.

Here it is:

Iso is an original story about something that affected the whole world. It is driven by a dark exhilarating energy towards a nightmare world where people turn into composites of human and non-human elements. The voice is confident, biting and funny, all the way through. The ultra-macho Virus-deniers are hilarious but they’re having a go, constantly reinventing ever more absurd ways to ‘win’. This is how they cope. Under all the humour lies a hard polished stone of desperation. The story amplifies the way we morphed into sub-humans through lack of contact and human connection. How we turned into couches and furniture, how we lost our minds.

Most of all I like the way this story just keeps rolling, unfaltering, staring down weakness and defiant to the last word. It’s visceral – the mould, bleach, deranged theories, being called a ‘skank’ by a group of beanbags. All the old rivalries, resentments, bitterness and delusions are stronger than the metamorphosis from fully human to remnant human. We are, at our core, our petty selves more than anything potentially heroic or insightful.I find this story masterful and uncompromising. It scores on brio, boldness and ambition, humour, derangement and pathos. It is never judgemental.

– Anne Casey-Hardy

(Anne’s book, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls, is exceptional by the way. It has exactly the kind of dark energy she describes above, with piercing insight into the world of teenage girls and just the right amount of strangeness. The world is recognisable but off-kilter, which makes it so unsettling. Worth picking up a copy if you haven’t read it.)

Anyway, no blog post about winning an award is complete without a giant novelty cheque, so here it is:

The whole experience left me buzzing for weeks. I spend my day job thinking about climate change and the extinction crisis, and sometimes it gets me down. As it should. I started writing weird/funny short stories as a kind of coping mechanism to keep me going – self-care through creativity. It’s vindicating to know someone else finds these stories entertaining too.

Now to spend the prize money on more books…

My short story ‘Shitmining’ was just published in Australian science fiction/fantasy magazine Aurealis. Buy a copy here.

In the beginning of the world, Pachacamac, the male child of the Sun and the Moon, created a man and a woman. But he did not supply them with food. As the man lay dying of starvation, the woman prayed to the Sun for help. In answer to the prayer, the Sun descended from the heavens, gave her relief, and impregnated her with his fertilising rays.
—Origin story of the Peruvian coast

I first see the island from the air, arriving the way the birds do. Ten thousand cormorants scatter to make room as our helicopter shudders in the ferocious winds and then perches on the uneven surface below. Even while I’m waiting for the blades to stop rotating and the dust to settle, my nostrils wrinkle up in disgust. So, the rumours about the awful smell are true.

My flash fiction story ‘Swim camps’ was published in Antipodean SF, archived here.

STEVE looked up from the dinner table to see a panda standing in front of him. It was his wife, Margaret. She had synthetic fur – black for her paws and hind legs and white for her belly – up to her neck. Above that was her face, red and sweaty from wearing the costume all day. Under her arm was the panda’s head, its eyes rimmed by inky bruises, the pupils plastic but somehow alive.

Steve stared at his wife, speechless. He was surprised because she usually came home dressed as the arse-end of a hippo.

‘Cutbacks,’ she explained. ‘A hippo requires two actors to look convincing. A panda, just one. Guess the zoo went with the cheaper option.’

AFTER passing through throngs of poor Chinese outside the station and negotiating queues of rich Chinese in the ticket hall, you and I finally make it onto the train platform, which is crowded with both groups. Men, women and children are packed so tightly together they have become one seething mass of human flesh.

I imagine this entity as a person who is both male and female, old and young. The person is wearing a rich man’s jacket and a schoolgirl’s dress. Begrimed beggar’s fingers protrude from sleeves adorned with gold cufflinks. One of the person’s thighs is brown and cracked, desiccated like a dried-up riverbed, and the other is milky-white and youthful. The person’s skin is wrinkled under the chin and taut on the cheeks.

A train screeches into the station. We become swept up in the tide of bodies clambering for the carriage door. Somehow, we keep our heads above the surface of jostling shoulders, paddle past the flailing limbs and make it onto the train without being crushed alive.

I look at your shocked expression and know what you’re thinking. I had the same thought the first time I found myself part of a desperate mob in China. How can there be this many arms and legs in the one place? This many kicking feet, jabbing elbows and clawing hands?

As we fight our way to the dining carriage I note that you have not yet complained about the constant shoving. I broach the subject, almost apologising on China’s behalf. Rudeness is a necessity here, I explain. With so many people competing for so few resources, one needs to be pushy to survive. Politeness is a luxury enjoyed in rich and roomy nations.

A boy scampers past carrying a bowl of steaming noodles. Suddenly he slips, sending pasta tendrils snaking across the linoleum floor. From the volume of his crying, I assume he won’t be getting another bowl tonight. I know that you have a spare noodle packet and, given the circumstances, I expect you to hand it to him. Instead, your head morphs into a carnival clown’s and the carriage booms with cackling.

That was an extract from the full story, available here.

‘THIS burger is scrumptious Dad.’

At the time I didn’t really know what the words meant or what the repercussions were. But Dad did. He bolted upright, dragged me to the sink, scrubbed my mouth with soap and water and then picked up the phone.

‘Boy’s sick.’

‘Words.’

‘Take look.’

‘Tomorrow?’

Dad slammed the receiver and turned to face me.

‘Shut it,’ he said.