New dream job and admin nightmares and ongoing genocide
First and foremost,
Almost two months of this. But really, almost two decades of this for Gaza. But really, it goes back much farther than that. This is abject and horrible and horrifying and beyond fucked up. This is genocide and ethnic cleansing. Death march. New Nakba. Beyond sharing things on social media to amplify and spread info, I’ve been going to rallies. Holding my loved ones closer. I bought a bunch of eSims to help info get out. I’m also in the process of divesting from UniSuper. I’d been meaning to for a while due to their climate changing investments, but after learning they invest in Elbit systems, I’m done. I’m pulling my meagre money out. You should too, if possible.
RESEARCH
I spent most of this month planning out my research project for the next three years and creating two complementary databases. The first is of First Nations spec fic works I need to read (or re-read). The second is a database of spec fic theory, divided into scholarship by our writers and other writers. I’ll share these once they look a bit better.
My vague plan is to just read and take notes for the first few months so I can figure out my framing of each chapter, and which texts I’ll discuss through the lens of each genre. I’ll start drafting the chapter next year once I have solid frameworks and examples for each of the chapters. I don’t want to plan too finely as things always get derailed and pushed back and moved around. But it’s good to have vague plans and fuzzy deadlines. It helps me to be able to zoom in and out of big projects like this.
I also spent way too much of my time this month on admin. Starting at a new uni requires a lot of onboarding tasks, and emailing back and forth to get the invariable wrinkles ironed out, and all the hours devoted to completing workplace modules about data protection, bullying and what not. I think I completed ten modules. That’s almost as many hours down the drain. I spent even more time getting used to all the new systems – Workday, email, library databases, ORCID, Scopus, and all the rest of it. I was hoping to get all of this annoying stuff out of the way and learn the traps this month so that from next month I can dive into research undistracted.
So, this being the first month I didn’t get a whole lot of reading done for my project. And at the moment I’m reading for a literary prize, and there’s about half a dozen texts I’ll use in my research but I can’t discuss those texts yet (more on that later in this post). Some useful texts I did read and can talk about:
- Stories about Stories: fantasy and the remaking of myth by Brian Attebery, which gave me a wonderful framework to think about fantasy, myth and how we use them in story, and how they’ve been applied to our work whether it fits or not. I’ll be using info from the earlier and later chapters for my chapter on the fantastic. Love Attebery’s writing here and in other places too.
- ‘Author experiences of researching, writing and marketing climate fiction‘ by Alex Cothren, Amy Matthews and Rachel Hennessy. I loved the idea of this paper but was disappointed that no blackfella writers were interviewed (a limitation that the authors acknowledge). I would say there are some overlapping concerns with settler writers, but our writers are clearly gonna feel a lot deeper things about contemporary climate change.
PUBLICATIONS
Always Will Be
My first book, while technically not published yet, is now available for pre-order. It’s coming out on the 27th of February 2024 and will be posted out just before then.
From my publisher’s website:
“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 the ground-breaking winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award. This 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.”
I’m so happy to see these stories turn into a book. I wrote them for my doctoral thesis – which took nine months to be passed – and happily, this won the David Unaipon Award in September 2022 the same week I got my examiner’s reports, so it was a real happy time for me and all things felt fully circled.
Happily, Jeanine Leane and Natalie Harkin have endorsed my book. (They examined my thesis.) Here’s what they had to say:
‘Always Will Be is a unique and exciting collection that writes Aboriginal people, dreams, radical hope and love into the future. In these stories, Mykaela Saunders challenges dominant colonial ideologies and honours the wisdom of ancestors as forward thinkers. Astute, warm and affecting, this is a major contribution to First Nations literature.’ – Natalie Harkin
‘Goori writer Mykaela Saunders breaks new ground in her debut collection of First Nations speculative fiction Always Will Be. In post-invasion Australia it is time for a reappraisal of the binary between what is real and what is speculative. Mykaela writes First Nations futures as an extension of the possible, not the impossible, and in doing so contests and challenges the assumptions and expectations of settler binaries and deficit discourse that attempt to constrain and restrain what is possible for First Nations peoples and our futures.’ – Jeanine Leane
It’s the best feeling to have the support of strong black writers on the cover of my first book. I felt a bit thing about asking random writers to endorse it. My gut says endorsements don’t do much for book sales (happy to be corrected), and I felt gross cold-calling people I have no relationship with to do all this unpaid labour – or even worse, getting my publisher to do it on my behalf. So I asked Jeanine and Natalie as they’d already read most of my stories and enjoyed them. They were already in a loving and rigorous relationship with my book so it wasn’t a stretch for me or them.
I love the cover. I had a pretty firm idea for what I wanted for the image and talked to UQP book designer Jenna Lee, who also worked on TACBN’s cover using the artwork I commissioned from Jess Johnson at Nungala Creative. Jenna and I zoomed and emailed and shared ideas back and forth, and here we are! A stylised representation of a powerful, important mountain, foregrounded with fresh and salt water, backlit by the colours of our flag. Jenna told me she thought about my stories in terms of layers in the land, and I loved that. I was inspired by a design of a flag I’ve seen at a few Bundjalung and Northern Rivers gatherings over the years. Here’s a photo I took of it at back the 2001 Nimbin Mardi Grass –
Finally, about the title of my book (here’s an abridged note from inside) –
The title of this story collection, Always Will Be, comes from the popular land rights slogan ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’, which originated in the 1980s through the grassroots Aboriginal land rights movement in far-western New South Wales. The phrase is attributed to Barkindji land rights activist William Bates’s father, Uncle Jim Bates…I want to honour Uncle Jim Bates’s futurist thinking by adapting his slogan for this collection of stories that never cede sovereignty or ownership, in any kind of future.
If you are willing and able to do so, please preorder my book. Preorders help so much, especially for debut authors like me. And get in touch with UQP if you’d like a review copy.
Book chapter: ‘Blackfella Futurism: speculative fiction grounded in grassroots sovereignty politics’, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms
I wrote this paper years ago – it’s largely lifted from my doctoral thesis – and it’s been a long publication timeline since my abstract was accepted in 2020. Glad to have it out finally. Academic publishing is such a rort yet we are expected to publish or otherwise perish. I wrote this paper when I was a full time student without institutional financial support – so I wrote it for free. In it I make a case for there now being a canon of Blackfella Futurism (which is an offspring of Indigenous futurism). It’s kinda like a manifesto of the genre according to myself. I put forth a few criteria for the genre to include and exclude certain texts from the canon. Goori girlboss gatekeep baby!
Short fiction: ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’, Into Your Arms: Nick Cave’s Songs Reimagined
I was commissioned to write a short story in November 2022 for this anthology edited by Kirsten Krauth. I almost said no (cos no bandwidth) but ultimately said yes (cos needed money), so I had a little exploratory writing session to see if I could come up with anything, and I did. I wanted to write this story to celebrate the role Nick Cave’s music has had in my life, particularly when I was younger and sharing heady times with friends, while also being critical of his apartheid-apologist actions and gammon cries of silencing. Briefly: some years ago Nick Cave was asked by Palestinians and non-Palestinian artists to not to play Israel (not least because Israel uses artists like Cave to legitimise itself. These artists are paid good money and treated like royalty over there.) Cave resisted and said some tone deaf shit about censorship. Other artists responded with an open letter, and Cave played the gig anyway and then kept carrying on about it. And now look where all this legitimising of Israel has gotten them – genocide with impunity! Anyway, I took this song and imagined it was being narrated by a young woman and her sister watching their street being taken over and destroyed by a violent occupying force. One year on, now that it’s published it is far too close to home for comfort. Fuck you Nick. You have always been on the wrong side of this, and especially now. You thought this was a war about censorship, but it’s really a genocide – mostly of children.
TALKS
Symposium: ‘A Profound Reorganising of Things’
This month I presented with the inimitable Jeanine Leane and Evelyn Araluen at this University of Melbourne conference. My paper was about climate stories and cli fi, and how we’ve been telling climate stories since forever. It was good to get my head back into academic thinking. I’ll have a chapter on climate stories in the monograph, so this was a good beginning for a draft. I was asked a question by Greg Lehman, one which I found very exciting: he asked whether our stories have their own spirit so once they go out in the world, they will stand on their own two feet. I think (but can’t be certain) that this was in response to me talking about the need for rigorous scholarship to grow around our creative work. I do agree with Greg, I do, and not just in a ‘the author is dead’ way. I do believe our stories have their own power. Yet. Yet! Our work is misread, misappropriated, and it has always been used against us. And isn’t our scholarship creative too? Doesn’t it also have a spirit, and therefore a right to exist as well? Thank you Greg. I loved your question and will hopefully refine my thoughts about it over the coming years, and incorporate anything useful into my research.
Workshops: Climate fiction at Trinity College
I also taught two workshops at Trinity College, one for students and one for staff. For the former we looked at climate fiction and cultural conceptions of climate stories. For the latter I discussed ways First Nations spec fic stories could be incorporated into various curriculums. I enjoyed dipping my toe back into teaching but I am glad I don’t have to do much at the moment. I’m a bit burnt out from it to be honest. I began working in education twenty years ago and have taught in some form or another every year since. I began as a teacher’s aide at my old high school in 2003, before becoming a teacher myself and working at various high schools and primary schools in Australia and England. Then I moved into academic teaching in 2012 at Sydney Uni, and have taught at a handful of institutions in various roles. There is no compulsory teaching as part of my MUFIR but I will do a bit of casual lecturing here and there. Just the bare minimum though!
As much as I enjoyed this week of talks I’m done with presenting for a while now. The lead up stressed me out a bit as I had to write a presentation and two workshops very quickly, and I’d much rather use that time researching. Especially at the beginning of my project. I want to harness that new relationship energy and ride it into glory. But it was great to think about climate stories and how the genre came about and how we use it culturally (and I inadvertently began drafting my chapter in the process).
CULTURE
Reading
I’m currently judging the Indigenous Writing category in the NSW Premier’s Literary Prize and I’ve read about 50 books for it. So as much as I would like to write more about this month’s reading habits I can’t discuss my reading for this prize – suffice to say it has been mindblowing and significant! Once judging is over I can write more about these books. Somehow I managed to read a couple of extra books?
- Secret Third Thing by Dan Hogan – I loved this so much. I’ve admired Dan’s poetry for years, and more recently their writing about housing and education – two things I feel passionately about too. They’ve got a good, cunty attitude to labour and capital and it shines through in this funny, grim and clever collection.
- Gawimarra: Gathering by Jeanine Leane – I was lucky enough to read and endorse this beautiful poetry collection which is forthcoming in February 2024. It’s special to me that Jeanine and I endorsed each other’s books, and that they’re both coming out around the same time. I’m excited that we’ll be on the promotion circuit together.
Music
I cannot listen to music with discernible English lyrics while I read and write, otherwise my brain wants to join in the conversation. So, while I work I mostly listen to instrumental music or songs with fuzzy singing or non-English lyrics. I have a playlist called Writing Music that I rinse every day on shuffle. But sometimes I get obsessed with a whole album or artist. This month I listened to these ones a lot:
- Palestinian techno DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi. Her Youtube sets are amazing: great to write to and to dance to. It’s important to dance despite all the grief and despair, and to celebrate Palestinian joy and creativity.
- Created in the Image of Suffering by King Woman. Plus their other albums too. I’m increasingly bored of artists I follow online who don’t say shit in support of Palestine. Fuck your brand! KNGWMN has been a real one through this.
- Rrakala by Gurrumul. Sublime. What a voice. Transports me every time.
- Anches en Maat by Grails. New Grails! Not their best but still. Grails! Saw them back in 2014 in Sydney. Danced my hole off. A tremendous gig.
- The Hired Hand (original motion picture soundtrack) by Bruce Langhorne. Excellent ambient cowboy shit.
- I’ve been listening most days to The Prayer of the Oppressed (Dua Nasiri) sung by Yasiin Bey on his Instagram. The prayer starts about halfway through the video. I have been in turns feeling so sad and angry for Palestine, and also grateful for my life and everything in it. This prayer helps.
Exhibitions
I went to The Lume for the Connection exhibition. Just lay on a beanbag for an hour and watched all the beautiful art and listened to the beautiful stories and music. So nice. And sparked lots of good thinking about our stories through time, which is at the heart of my project.
Film & TV
I didn’t watch a thing all month. I’ve been too glued to the unfolding horrors in Palestine so watching lots of Finkelstein videos instead. I’m finding less interest in TV and film and more in books anyway. Everything has its season I suppose.
Well, that’s it for my first research month, and my first research blog post proper. Til next month.
And finally,
Mykaela
Friday the 1st of December, 2023
Mykaela Saunders 