An Interview with Joanne Anderton
Joanne Anderton is an award-winning Australian author of speculative fiction, creative non-fiction, and children’s books. She has previously worked in the publishing industry, has a master’s in creative writing from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and lived and worked in Japan as an English-language teacher.
Her work includes The Veiled Worlds series and the short story collections The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories (Winner of the 2013 Aurealis Award for Best Collection), Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear and 2022’s The Art of Broken Things. Her first children’s picture book, The Flying Optometrist, was published in 2018, the same year her first work of non-fiction, a personal essay in Island Magazine, was also published.
As Kaaron Warren states in her introduction to The Art of Broken Things, regarding Anderton’s work: ‘She works to smooth out glitches, so on reading her works you find no wrong words. You have no moment where you are taken out of the story; you ARE the story.’
We recently spoke to Joanne about her experience as an author.
Joanne Anderton (supplied)
What got you into writing in the first place?
Oh, I know the exact moment! I was in year three, would have been about nine years old I think, and we had to write a story. I was really into cheetahs at the time, and the dub version of the anime Kimba the White Lion, so I wrote a story about a cheetah named Cheetakins. As you do. She had all sorts of adventures, battling humans and probably hyenas and eating zebras. It was the best story in the class, so I got to stand up the front and read it. As soon as I got a reaction from the other kids (during a particularly gruesome zebra-eating scene I believe…) I was hooked.
How has your career influenced your writing?
I worked in book marketing and distribution for fourteen years, and that’s probably the closest thing to a career I’ve had. I learned a lot about the realities of publishing and that came in very handy when my first books came out. I’m not in the business any more, instead I’m at the tail end of a creative writing PhD. Teaching and research have brought a whole new set of approaches to my writing, and really given me the space to play with new forms and weird ideas.
Are there any particular authors you look up to?
Angela Slatter and Kathleen Jennings are at the top of that list, for their dedication to the artform and sheer work ethic. Along with Helen Marshall, they’re incredibly generous with their time and support too. Not to mention they all write the most amazing novels, short stories, graphic novels, radio plays, academic articles, nonfiction, how-to write books and blog posts… seriously, the breadth and depth of their collective craft knowledge, industry experience, and nerdy attention to detail leaves me in awe.
What are you reading, listening to, or watching at the moment?
I just finished reading Kathleen Jennings’ debut short story collection, Kindling, as well as the novel(la?) A Legend of the Future by Agustín de Rojas (who is often referred to as the ‘father of Cuban science fiction’). Both were wonderful, though vastly different! I’m now getting stuck into T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead and enjoying it very much. My go-to podcasts are currently If Books Could Kill and What Went Wrong (I just listened to an episode about the making of the original Ghostbusters so apparently I will be watching that tonight).
What is your approach to writing short fiction, as opposed to novels? How do you start?
Both short fiction and novels start from the same place really, and that’s worldbuilding (honestly I wish I started with characters and plots but that’s just not the way my brain works). My stories usually start with a weirding of the world. My little brain takes an apparently normal thing, makes it strange, then enjoys following the logic. If, for example, a place really was so fertile that you could stick a pencil in the ground and grow a tree (something I overheard during a meeting which eventually became the story ‘2b’), what would the consequences of that be? Fertile sounds all well and good until things don’t stop growing. What does that do to a society? What if you were the only infertile thing (and I mean thing) there? How would that make you feel?
As I said, both novels and short stories start this way, the difference is in the shape. Usually, I have a feel for that when I start writing. A novel feels looser, a short story tighter; a novel has multiple threads, a short story one or very few. Literally, a novel feels expansive, a short story contained. That said, sometimes I get it wrong! Or, sometimes a short story evolves into a novel (as is currently happening with a WIP).
Can you give us a few of your favourite pieces of short fiction that you’ve read over the years?
Two that immediately jump to mind are:
Margo Lanagan’s ‘Singing My Sister Down’ from Black Juice is probably my favourite short story — its deep worldbuilding, its heartbreaking simplicity and rich humanity. Honestly, everything in Black Juice is amazing. I learned so much about short stories from just reading that collection.
Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, (which was made into the movie Arrival, of course), for that moment when everything ‘clicks’ and we, the reader, finally understand just what’s going on (I probably don’t need to be so vague but even so, spoilers).
What’s one trope you’re tired of seeing at the moment?
Socially isolated gamer gets reincarnated as a *whatever* in some RPG / D&D inspired world.
What’s one thing you wish people wrote about more?
I have a particular obsession with hopeful futures at the moment. And, yes, I am aware of the irony because that is absolutely not what I usually write, but maybe that’s why it’s been playing on my mind. We’re starting to see a lot more attention on hopeful futures, and a greater understanding of how the stories we tell impact the future we can imagine and, in turn, the way that future may or may not play out. But as a natural pessimist I find hopeful futures that feel solid, grounded, and not naïve a difficult prospect. I want to change that about myself, and I want more of those to read to help rearrange the old synapses. So more hopeful science fiction, please!
You’ve done something a lot of our writers would love to do: publish a short story collection (several at this point – along with your novels). Can you tell us a bit about the process and how you achieved this?
My first collection, The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, only happened because of the wonderful Tehani Croft. Tehani ran the small press FableCroft, alongside all the other incredible things she did and continues to do for the Australian speculative fiction community, and she approached me about a collection. I’d published a fair number of short stories by then but hadn’t even thought about gathering them into a book. We looked through the list together, found stories that resonated with each other (double checked which rights had reverted to me!), and I wrote a couple of new ones to round it off. Tehani is a wonderful editor and working with her is always a dream. The collection went on to win the Aurealis and Australian Shadows awards.
"Keep in contact. Make connections. Support each other. Pay it forward."
Bone Chime has recently been reissued by Brain Jar Press, and I’ve released two more since — The Art of Broken Things and Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear.
My first collection taught me that stories can have more than one life, and that bringing them together really helps reinvent them.
The stories in The Art of Broken Things traverse many environments, settings, and time periods. What do you think is the theme that ties them together? And why did you choose the short story ‘The Art of Broken Things’ as the title for the collection?
Finding the commonalities and sustaining a through-line in a collection is one of my favourite parts of the process. For The Art of Broken Things, I started in a similar way, collating the stories I’d published, working out which ones I had the rights for again. And then I spread them all out on a table and looked for commonalities. I quickly realised there were reoccurring themes and images happening — ones of breaking and being rebuilt, of falling apart and coming back together.
Sometimes these themes are more literal (‘The Last Tiger’, for example, hunting souls to maintain her biomechanical body) or a bit abstract (the slow collapse of a relationship in ‘Wreck Diving’), but the thread was definitely there. It only felt natural, then, that ‘The Art of Broken Things’ should be the title story.
It’s a story that marries Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken crockery with gold) with the dissolution of self (in the form of aging, dementia, and the collapse of a nascent AI), and plays with the possibility of recovering and repairing that self.
I thought it captured the essence of the collection so neatly that it just had to be the title.
My publisher not only agreed, but really leant into the image of veins of gold on the cover and in the internal design. I couldn’t be happier with the way it came out.
Some stories in this collection are based in Australia or have Australian characters. Whether it’s an Australian feeling isolated and lonely while teaching in Japan (Warabi Mochi), or a widower facing the fallout of bushfires in an expected way (Bullets), or a young girl in the suburbs needing to find a goblin a sofa (Street Furniture) do you feel like having these characters/settings bring something to the stories that they otherwise wouldn’t have if these stories had non-Australian cultural touchstones?
I think trying to write any of these stories from a non-Australian point of view absolutely wouldn’t have worked. Partially because some of them are deeply Aussie — I know we’re hardly the only place to endure bushfires, but they have a particular cultural resonance for us that I really wanted to capture in ‘Bullets’. But mainly, I think, because Australian cultural touchstones are my own. I’m not convinced I could inhabit a different cultural voice even if I wanted to try. I hope this brings an authenticity to the stories and their characters.
Up until recently you were living in Japan and some stories in this collection appear influenced by that experience – perhaps in uncommon ways. Warabi Mochi is about an English-language teacher struggling to find her place – in not only Japan but perhaps this reality. Ten Thousand Gates shows a western tourist in Japan haunted by the ghost of her lover. But then we also have Traces, about a robot on a seemingly endless, but deeply sad, quest in a radioactive Japanese wasteland. Can you speak about the influence living in Japan had on these stories or you’re writing in general?
I’ve always found inspiration in Japan, and it has had a huge influence on my writing. My novels (Debris, Suited, and Guardian) were very much inspired by my love of anime and Japanese RPGs. ‘Traces’ emerged from reports I was reading in the aftermath of the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and ‘Ten Thousand Gates’ came out of a trip to Kyoto when I climbed the Fushimi Inari shine at night in the rain and somehow managed to stray from the well-lit path.
‘Warabi Mochi’, however, is the first of many stories I’ve been working on since living in Japan. I’m in the final year of a creative writing PhD, and my project is a ‘speculative fiction memoir’, a mixed genre collection of SFF short stories and creative nonfiction pieces about my time there. It’s my attempt to tell an honest story about a period in my life that had considerable and unexpected impact on me, on my understanding of who I am and what I want, and at the same time investigate the role the speculative has always played in my experience of the real.
It can be difficult to build a whole world in the short story format and make it resonate. But in this collection, from 2b to I Almost Went To The Library Last Night as just two examples, you manage to create compelling, fascinating worlds in a short amount of time. Can you speak about how you construct such worlds and what advice would you give to short story writers about this?
As I said earlier, worldbuilding is absolutely one of my favourite parts of the SFF writing process. I often find myself with a world before I even have a plot or any characters. I get to this stage because I’m particularly fascinated in ‘so what’… by which I mean: start with a novum, with a change that sets the world of the story apart from the real world. That can be a science fiction thing (drones spreading enemy propaganda by hijacking our synapses in the case of ‘I Almost Went to the Library…’) or a fantastical thing (‘2b’s aforementioned place so fertile that anything you plant in it will grow), but once you’ve got that thing, start asking yourself… ‘so what?’… and don’t stop.
To riff on the conceit of ‘2b’: A place so fertile that literally anything you plant in it will grow… so what if they don’t stop growing? So what if old women start having babies with bodies not capable of recovering from the trauma? So what if every infertile person desperately wants to get in there? So what if government attempts to regulate access but their surveillance cameras start sprouting too? So what if there’s an underground network sneaking in infertile couples not deemed ‘worthy’ enough? So what would life be like if you were the only infertile thing there?
I guess this is another version of the classic ‘yes and’, but it comes with one more step. One last so what. Because interesting worlds are cool and all but, fundamentally, without a story that takes that cool idea and turns it into something bigger than itself, something that evokes emotion or entangles a reader or explores an idea or challenges an assumption then, fundamentally, so what?
You’ve previously released other story short collections like The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories. What is your passion and interest in the short story format, especially when it comes to speculative short fiction?
I think of novels and short stories as exercising different creative muscles and I really do enjoy writing both. Where novels are a marathon, short stories are a sprint — certainly not easier, just different. They’re tight and intense, not a word can be wasted, and this makes them a great vehicle for exploring the crux of an idea, the knot of a problem, the pointy end of the stick. The short form also allows us to be more experimental with structure, style and voice. Part of that is the opportunity to leave things a little unfinished, as short stories don’t necessarily require the same kind of endings as novels — particularly speculative fiction novels — where readers want things to finish cleanly, with denouement and emotional catharsis. We can leave them a little more open, encourage our readers to fill in the gaps.
Is there any work you have coming up that you would like to speak about?
Nothing I can talk about yet, but watch this space 😊
What was the one moment that made you feel like a Real Author™?
Seeing my debut novel, Debris, on the shelf at Galaxy bookshop in Sydney. Galaxy had been my bookstore growing up and I’d always wanted to be able to walk in there and see something I’d written alongside all those amazing SFF books.
How do you beat writer’s block?
Usually, I’d say that what we call writer’s block is actually a sign that the story you’re writing is going in the wrong direction and that means it’s time to stop, take a step back, and redirect. It’s something we need to learn to listen to, as a writer. It’s the sound of all the stories we’ve internalised letting us know something’s not quite working.
I’ve only ever had what I’d call ‘real’ writer’s block once, and that was because of a whole heap of shitty life stuff that my brain needed the space to process that it usually dedicates to fiction. The only solution to that, I’m afraid, is time.
How do you handle rejections?
I always give myself a moment to feel disappointed, then I consider and possibly take on board any feedback that might have come along with it and send it out again!
What’s one piece of advice you’d like to give to new writers who are eager to break into the speculative fiction world?
Find your people. The speculative fiction writing community is wonderfully nerdy and supportive. Go to conventions and other book events, meet writers and fans. Keep in contact. Make connections. Support each other. Pay it forward.
Is there something about the industry that you wish you knew before you got involved?
Honestly, I thought I knew a lot before I got into it because I was working in publishing at the time, but it’s different on the other side of the fence. As writers, I think we see publication as an end goal — I just get this book published and I’ve made it. Hooray! What I wish I’d known, however, was that publication is really the start of the next step of your journey.