February: Celebrating writing that leaves you breathless
Award-winning crime and speculative fiction and a triumphant story of hope and survival
Well hello!
After a huge swathe of new books, our February edition is a little lighter as the world of publishing takes a breath ahead of a surge in new releases in time for Easter and Mothers Day. This month, we shine the spotlight on short stories, crime and memoir from three very different writers.
In our Meet the Author section, we chat with Dr Mykaela Saunders, author of an award-winning collection of speculative fiction short stories filled with love, humour and sharp-eyed truths. For lovers of memoir, we delve into the astonishing story of a woman who has faced death too many times to mention, yet faces the world with great joy and wicked humour. And we review the debut crime fiction by Aotearoa New Zealand writer, Gavin Strawhan. The Call won the 2023 Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize and it’s a cracker read.
And, of course, the newsletter wouldn’t be complete without a giveaway, would it?
Let’s go!
Happy Publication Month!
Congratulations to all these hard-working debut authors on the massive achievement of being published. May your books fly off the shelves.
Books to Love
The Call by Gavin Strawhan
(Published 19 March 2024 ANZ)
DS Honey Chalmers has returned to her home town of Waitutū after an horrific encounter with members of one of New Zealand’s main bikie gangs, The Reapers, left her almost dead. She’s planning to use the time to recuperate and look after her mother who’s suffering from the early stages of dementia. But she’s also returning to her past. There’s her sister, Scarlett, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen. And there’s Marshall, her best friend from school, whose life was also irrevocably altered by Scarlett’s death and has been carrying the blame for it all his life.
Honey’s life is still in danger. When two of The Reapers turn up in town, she knows they will not be happy that she’s survived. She blames herself for the situation she finds herself in. Her relationship with an informant, a gang WAG, got too personal. Both their lives were put in danger and now the informant, Kloe, is missing, presumed dead. But Honey can’t fight the feeling that if The Reapers are looking for her then there’s a good chance Kloe has survived too. And, if that’s true, there might just be a way to hit The Reapers where it hurts most and keep them both alive.
Screenwriter Gavin Strawhan turned his hand to fiction during the long New Zealand lockdowns and produced The Call. His debut novel went on to win the 2023 Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize and has seen him hailed as a major new voice in crime writing for this tense and twisty drama about cops and gang warfare. Honey Chalmers is a great protagonist and Strawhan has populated the story with a rich cast of characters with complex motivations to seek revenge or stay one step ahead of the bad guys. The triangle that is the relationships between Honey and Marshall and Honey and Kloe provides fertile territory for drama and a good dose of humour. Morality is a slippery thing in this tale which makes for nuanced storytelling and a great read.
A little bit about the author …
Gavin is a creator/writer/show runner and executive producer of many NZ and international shows.
Most recently he wrote Testify, a five-part series for Warner Bros NZ. He wrote Black Hands, a true-life drama, also for Warner Bros NZ. He was co-creator of Bad Mothers for Channel 9 Australia and was co-creator and show runner of Hyde & Seek, an eight-part thriller that also screened on Channel 9. Gavin was co-creator and writer on two seasons of Filthy Rich (winner of best drama at the 2019 Seoul International Drama Awards) for Filthy Productions. He wrote the historical telemovies What Really Happened – Votes For Women and What Really Happened – Waitangi. Gavin co-created the hit television shows Go Girls and Nothing Trivial (for which he won best script at the New York Film and Television Awards) and was show runner and writer of the critically acclaimed mystery thriller This Is Not My Life.
Australia: Preorder the book here
Breath by Carly-Jay Metcalfe
(Published 27 February 2024 ANZ)
Carly-Jay Metcalfe was born with cystic fibrosis and has spent her life in and out of hospital. At the age of twenty-one, she had a double-lung transplant. By the age of thirty, she had a rare form of cancer. Along the journey, she lost too many friends, developed an opioid addiction, loved and lost. But what is remarkable about Carly’s memoir is not the multitude of tragedies, set-backs and facing death more times than anyone should in their lives but how she managed to maintain a wicked sense of humour, a joyous outlook on life and generous compassion to friends, lovers and family.
Metcalfe pulls no punches in this brutally honest and sometimes difficult memoir. Her candour is remarkable. Yet what shines through is what a strong, resilient, intelligent and warm person she is. There is not an ounce of self-pity on the page. Quite the opposite. Metcalfe examines everything about her life in great detail from losing her virginity, being hi-jacked by bodily functions, her vanity about her body when steroids made her balloon, medical staff—good and bad— survivor guilt and her incredible family. It’s also an insight into the changing nature of medical care over the course of Metcalfe’s life. Throughout this constant invasion of, and the dictates of, her physical and mental being, she has pursued academic excellence, trod the boards as a singer and actress and embraced life.
Breath is a memoir that makes you sit back and take stock. Facing death so frequently has perhaps given Metcalf a unique insight into what it means to not just be alive, but to live. To make sense of the craziness of what it means to be human. And to treat life as a gift and appreciate each and every breath we take.
A little bit about the author …
Carly-Jay Metcalfe is a Queensland-based writer. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, The Guardian and TEXT Journal. She is a passionate advocate for organ donation and for more honest conversations around dying and death.
Find Carly-Jay Metcalfe
Instagram Carly-Jay Metcalfe
Australia: Buy the book here
Meet the Author
Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher, and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award–winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction. Always Will Be won the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Mykaela has won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for creative non-fiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and at the tertiary level since 2012. They are currently an Indigenous postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, researching First Nations speculative fiction.
A little bit about the book …
In this stunningly inventive and thought-provoking collection, Mykaela Saunders poses the question: what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?
Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty – reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric – while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates.
Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, Always Will Be is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing – and becoming.
Can you tell us a little about the title of this collection, Always Will Be, and how that was a source of inspiration, or a driving force, for this collection of stories?
Always Will Be is part of the famous land rights slogan ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.’ I grew up hearing it and chanting it at rallies. The slogan is attributed to Barkindji land rights activist William Bates’s father, Jim Bates. Reportedly, one day in the early 1980s the two men were out on their country out in far west New South Wales, and Jim had made a comment about the place being their land, and William kind of dismissed him by saying that it wasn’t his land – that now the whitefellas owned it. But Jim wasn’t having it. He said to his son that the whitefellas only borrowed it and that it ‘always was and always will be Aboriginal land’.
Now, I didn’t actually name my book until I’d written all the stories so I wouldn’t say the slogan was an inspiration or a driving force, except maybe subconsciously. But I suppose the ethos and spirit of the slogan has been with me all my life and particularly through the writing of this book. I began writing these stories in 2017, the year William Bates passed away, and in the same year Barbara McGrady, a wonderful Gomeroi yinnarr and photojournalist who I know, had an exhibition in Sydney using Always Will Be as the title. So even though it took a few years for me to marry the stories and its title, the history of the phrase and its deeper meaning came into focus for me when I began writing this book.
The reason I decided on Always Will Be as the title for my book is because my stories explore different versions of the Tweed in various futures. The common thread in these stories is that the Goori community are always thriving and asserting their sovereignty in whatever way they can. I wanted to say that no matter what climate or political situations come to meet us, we ain’t going anywhere and we will always be together, in community, and strong in culture.
Always Will Be is a collection of speculative fiction set in a future of the Tweed River area of NSW, Bundjalung country. What range of possibilities does speculative fiction allow you to do with story that you felt wasn’t possible in other forms?
I had originally planned to write this as a novel that was set in one time and place, but as I read and thought and wrote about ‘the future’ of the Tweed, I realised that there would be multiple futures and the possibilities became endless. Writing these possibilities felt much more exciting and challenging than writing just one story. I was also learning to write short stories at the time, so I wanted to play around with craft and practice these skills and have fun with voice and perspective and the shape and structures of stories.
Spec fic allows us to imagine the seemingly impossible: when writing a spec fic story, the writers asks, if x was true, then how would y be affected? It’s a fun game to play. In this collection, I would ask for example, if the oceans rose and reclaimed the land, how would my community be affected? Or, if Gooris conducted a fascist coup, what would such a dictatorship look like? And even, if humans were forced to leave the planet, how would my people grapple with that? More realistic or mimetic genres do not allow for this kind of speculation. The constraints of consensus reality mean that stories must bend to the rules of the here and now.
There’s a conversation going on between multiple generations in these stories, between the living and the dying, the past and the future. There is an intimacy on the page that was quite breathtaking and plenty of humour too. Was this something that you consciously set out to do or did it evolve in the writing process?
I didn’t consciously set out to do any of that, though I suppose because of who I am, how I was brought up and how I live these things just naturally come out in my writing. For example I am part of a sprawling multigenerational family and community that traverses time and space, and I am always grounding myself in these relationships. I also have deep and intimate relationships with many amazing people, and most of them are really fucking funny too. So of course that would all come out in my writing. It couldn’t not come out – unless that was a conscious choice, I think.
I believe there’s often a very close correlation between the way a writer thinks about the world and the way they write. So if a writer creates story in such a way that just seems so different and alien, it’s likely because they are grounded in different cultural ways.
You’ve won so many awards for your short stories. This collection, Always Will Be, was the 2022 David Unaipon Award winner. Apart from being personally validating to you as a writer, what does winning an award like the David Unaipon Award mean? Does it have a broader influence that extends beyond you individually?
Winning the David Unaipon Award was the coolest thing. The announcement came at the exact right time in my life too, as these things do, and I was able to focus on writing for a while with the prize money. Money is the most important thing for any writer, especially one like myself who does not have the privilege of finding the time and space to write without it.
Having this award to my name also means I get to join a list of some of my favourite writers whose careers were launched by the award too, such as Jeanine Leane, Samuel Wagan Watson, Ellen van Neerven, Lisa Fuller and Jazz Money to name a few. I now consider these people my friends and colleagues which would have been unfathomable when I began writing fiction in 2017. We are in such a golden and exciting time for Indigenous literature, with our writers pushing the boundaries of form, genre and subjects like never before. Awards like the Unaipon help attract new writers and elevate the standards of what is being published.
I should know, as this was the fourth time I’d entered the Unaipon. I first entered it in 2017 with a very bad first draft of my unpublished novel Last Rites of Spring, and it didn’t get a look in so I kept working on it and it was shortlisted in 2020. Then I entered Always Will Be in 2021 as I felt it was ready and perfect and amazing. The judges felt otherwise, and that’s a good thing because I was humbled enough to keep working on the manuscript – which in reality sorely needed it – adding new stories and editing the old ones, and the judges of the 2022 award saw what I wanted them to see – that these stories were ready to be out there in the world. And here we are!
To WIN a copy of Always Will Be, scroll down to Freebies
Find Mykaela Saunders
Instagram @this_all_come_back_now
Website www.mykaelasaunders.com
Australia Buy a copy of the book here
Freebies!!
If the interview with Mykaela Saunders has got you hooked, then this is your chance to win a copy, with thanks to the wonderful people at University of Queensland Press. All you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this very tricky question.
Where are the stories in this collection set?
The fine print: Giveaways are currently only open to subscribers and you must reside within Australia to be eligible to win (postage!) The winners will be picked at random and will be emailed on 18 March 2024. Good luck!
The End
And here we are at the end of our second newsletter for 2024. I hope some of the books discussed have tickled your fancy. Please leave a comment, follow us on socials and come back again next month where there will be more bookish news, reviews, interviews and freebies. See you soon!
Don’t forget, you can always catch up with us on Instagram @newvoicesdownunder
And, if you’d like to subscribe to Meredith’s author newsletter, you can subscribe to A Cuppa With Meredith here The next edition is out Friday 5 April!
Thank you so much for such a kind and generous review, Meredith 🙏🏼 It's a fabulous first review! XO