Sourcing sources, building spreadsheets
Hello!
This’ll be a shorter post than usual. Macquarie had a close-down period between Christmas and New Year’s Day so I only worked three weeks instead of four – and in my head canon of labour laws my posting should reflect that.
The Palestinian genocide is ongoing and relentless. So must our resistance be. I am in awe of all my Palestinian friends who continue to fight out of spite. I am in awe of their strength, and through them I learn of the love they have for their homeland and histories.
RESEARCH
Building from last month I kept on building the databases. They are getting hefty now. I have one main database for First Nations spec fic stories – and I’m just adding every story I ever remember reading or watching that has speculative elements, and I am also adding others that I haven’t read, including of course all those slated for release in the coming months. This is an exciting time to be a First Nations spec fic fan, let me tell you! In this main database I’m loosely grouping all the texts according to genre, as I’m organising the chapters of the monograph by genres.
In no particular order, I’ll have six chapters –
- Ghost stories & the gothic
- Horror
- Fantasy
- Science fiction
- Climate fiction
- Futures: post/apocalypses, utopias and dystopias
I want to start getting stuck into the ghost and gothic stories, horror and fantasy as I spent 4.5 years researching and writing the other three, and I’m excited to work with new ideas. But! I really think I should just start with what I know, especially as I’m a little rusty with research and academic writing. I’ll get these more familiar chapters out of the way and then move onto new fields. I plan to re-read each of the texts, even those I’ve read more than once, as I think it’s good practice to read within new frameworks. For example, for my thesis I was reading specifically for futurism that aligned with Aboriginal sovereignty and for futures that could map onto the Tweed. In this project I’m unmooring my work from my community and even from my politics. This time I’m reading for genre theory and ways of understanding our pasts, presents and futures, and so it is a matter of respect to revisit all those futurist works and look at them with less blinkered thinking. Next month (January) I’m gonna get stuck back into the reading of the stories and the theory. Plus, since I submitted my thesis in December 2021 there have been many more stories and bits of theory published. So it will feel fresh regardless.
This kinda brings me to a research problem that I encountered during my doctoral degree: what is the cutoff date for new sources? In a field like this that is always being added to and re-theorised, do I make up an arbitrary cut off date and risk missing exciting new work, or do I expend considerable energy staying on top of all the newest releases? I’m inclined to the latter, but only to a certain point. I think, in the last year of this fellowship, once I have a really good edited manuscript, that’s when I should stop adding and tinkering. I think it’s more important to write what’s out there really well rather than wasting time adding all new stuff just to prove you’re on top of things. Case in point: in the final year of my doctorate, dozens of new and exciting spec fic stories came out that I should have or could have included, but I would have had to rewrite considerable chunks of my thesis and then needed an extension. So I made a cut off date of 2020, which felt nice and well-rounded as the first blackfella futurism text was published in 1990 (Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung), and thirty years was a solid period for retrospection. I can cover all the new stories in this new project anyway, and maybe one day, years after the monograph is published and the sales doing well, the publisher might commission me to revise and update it. (Fingers crossed.)
I still have a bit of admin to get through at Macquarie, which feels impossible in December given how many people take holidays, and how our brains are just not really wired for tackling new things. It’s wrapping-up kinda energy. So I did what I could and I’ll start on all the big stuff in the new year. My ORCID and Scopus are the main admin projects I’ll do then.
So, again, like last month I didn’t get a whole lot of reading done for this project, and I was also still reading for that prize. (Done now! But I gotta keep mum until they’re announced in May.) I kinda just flicked through and scanned about a hundred texts to categorise them for my databases. I’ll read them all with pencil and highlighter at hand next year. Too hard to start this kind of work at the arse-end of a year.
PUBLICATIONS
Book chapter: ‘Future Tweed: envisioning the possibilities of Bundjalung Country, community and culture through speculative fiction’, The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures
Another Routledge chapter! This publication timeline was much shorter than the last one though. I think I was asked for something in April 2023, submitted it in May, and I received my contributor copy this month. This chapter is an amalgam of reworked sections of my thesis. In it I outline the Goori Futurism Research Framework, which I used to research and write my story collection Always Will Be. This framework is comprised of three spheres: the politics of Aboriginal Sovereignty, the setting of Future Tweed, and the genre of Blackfella Futurism (see my previous Routledge chapter for more on the latter). In this chapter I spotlight the ‘setting’ sphere and run through how I read and imagined and wrote about country, community and culture in the Tweed in various futures. I’m excited to read this whole book, as well as the other Routledge book too, next year, when I get my head back into theory, particularly around Indigenous futurisms.
Short fiction: ‘The Goodness of Their Hearts’, Meanjin Summer
I was commissioned to write this for the previous issue of Meanjin edited by Eugenia Flynn and Bridget Caldwell-Bright, but I overcommitted and misread the deadline and just couldn’t get it over the line in time. But that’s okay cos that issue is jam-packed with good black offerings anyway. Outgoing Meanjin editor Tess Smurthwaite emailed me a few months after to see if I had any stories lying around and I agreed to work on this. It was mostly done anyway, and where I could not for the life of my figure out its resolution earlier in the year, this time around, after some time of forgetting and forbearing, the ending came to me quickly and wholly. No surprise, given all the commentary about The Voice that was going on at the time. So, this is my take on The Voice, though not its aftermath. Just my view on its worth and value as a proposal for our people. It’s written in a fairytale-esque gothic mode, something I found fun to play with. There’s something about rendering the horrors of colonisation flat and grotesque that just makes a whole lot of sense to me. I still haven’t received my contributor copy so I haven’t been able to read any of the other work in this issue, but I am particularly excited to read Jumaana Abdu’s fiction. She’s a wonderful writer and person.
TALKS
No talks this month! Just head down and bum up, the way I like it.
CULTURE
Reading
White Magic, Elissa Washuta. I really loved and admired this collection, which is saying something as I wasn’t that into the main gist of the content – the first was ‘being sad and pining after unworthy boyfriend’, and the second was ‘astrology’. (I do not believe in astrology and I get so bored reading and talking about it.) But there was other content matter that offset the boyfriend and astrology stuff, like Indigenous knowledges and histories, addiction, travel, Fleetwood Mac and Twin Peaks. But I didn’t love this book because of its content, no; Washuta is a master of shape and form – which comes as no surprise as she’s one of the editors of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: collected essays by contemporary writers which is a masterclass in writing that is conscious of form, shape and structure. It’s clear she thinks about the vessels of written pieces very deeply, and has fun with this thinking too. I really love the artifice of writing and I love thinking about form too, so I really vibe with both these books. Washuta’s essay ‘The Spirit Cabinet’ was the absolute highlight for me in White Magic – the way she weaves in elements of all previous essays in a form that interweaves references to Twin Peaks while replicating its dream logic was just so fucking satisfying. I might reread this book later on, purely as a lesson in craft.
Paradais, Fernanda Melchor. This novel was hard going. It follows two teenage boys down the spiral of violence and destruction that they wreak on an innocent rich family who live in the titular gated community. The boy who is broke works at the place and the other boy is well-off and lives there. They come together and end up plotting and enacting some really heavy stuff. But again, this content is not why I didn’t love this one. I adored Melchor’s Hurricane Season and have read it three times so far. In Hurricane Season, a much gnarlier and more violent book in every respect, we get multiple perspectives from many different kinds of interconnected characters – all pitiful in their own ways, even as we stop feeling sorry for some of the characters through their own actions and attitudes. But there is likability there. Sympathy. Understanding. In Paradais, we really only see the world through one main character, and a little through his sidekick, but neither of them are likeable in the slightest. I kinda need that if I’m gonna spend all this time immersed in someone’s thoughts. And immerse you Melchor does. Like Hurricane Season, Paradais is narrated through pages upon pages of close third person stream-of-consciousness which really gets you in the mind of the character. But I just didn’t want to be in this character’s mind for very long. In this book I didn’t really learn much about the psychology of boys in poverty, stuck in cycles of violence. Maybe I already know enough about this for it to not be novel or shocking. I dunno! Still, despite it being a harder and less fun book to read, Melchor is incredible at close third person stream-of-consciousness narration and I learnt a lot about this style in her choices. That, and the way she creates the texture of this world is out of this world.
Death of the Bystander – review of Nick Riemer and Antony Loewenstein by Micaela Sahhar, Sydney Review of Books. An excellent review of these two books as well as a clever way of telling a story too – one that matters more now than ever. Read it.
The Rooster and the Watermelon by Yumna Kassab, Sydney Review of Books. A brilliant essay about the potency of symbols, football and writing, from South America to Palestine. This bit wrecked me:
Palestine vs. the Socceroos
It is late on a school night.
I am awake to watch the Socceroos and Palestine. This is only the second time I have seen Palestine play.
In 2014, I travelled to Newcastle for Palestine’s match against Japan. I told myself I was going to be neutral, even as I made sure I had my keffiyeh in the car. I was neutral on the drive there, neutral arriving in the stadium, neutral as I spoke to my friend, neutral until Palestine walked onto the field.
And then I asked myself how can I be neutral about the flag carried by this team?
Now it is the Socceroos and Palestine, and I think of all the obstacles the world has placed before the Palestinian players, and yet they are here, like a miracle, like a dream.
There they are with their flag, their anthem, representing Palestine, Palestine said over and over by the commentator – Palestine the word, Palestine the place, Palestine and its people – despite all the pressure bearing down to teach us that Palestine does not exist.
Palestine faces us, and I realise that I would support them against any other team. For the next ninety minutes, Palestine, you are here, I am with you, and it does not matter what happens because it is a triumph already, and I’m lost somewhere between delirium and tears.
Music
- Found some Studio Ghibli music playlists which are lovely to write to (I’m listening to one now).
- I saw Whitehorse and Uboa the Flesh at The Tote. Made me think about seething sound and layers of songs and the way the stories I love the most have multiple stories working on different levels within the whole. I don’t listen to much heavy stuff while writing so this was a good reminder to listen more to other stuff and take it into my practice.
- I enjoyed the newish Goat album Medicine. It’s not their best but still good to dance and write to.
- Emahoy, as always, got a lot of airtime in my headphones.
Well, that’s it. Short and sweet. Happy new year, and free, free Palestine!
Mykaela
Tuesday the 2nd of January, 2024
Mykaela Saunders 