In Friends & Dark Shapes, author Kavita Bedford uses the term sea-creature days, ‘Days when things that lurk beneath the surface start to come up and feel a little stronger in day-to-day life than they normally do.’ We’ve all had days like that.
In episode 24 of James and Ashley Stay at Home, we interview Australian-Indian Kavita Bedford about her debut novel, Friends & Dark Shapes, Kavita has been published in the Guardian, Guernica, and Griffith Review.
A Sydney local, Kavita crafted the story as a love letter to her hometown. Its series of textured, lyrical vignettes centre around an unnamed protagonist, her share-house friends, and the lives of others they encounter across a complex, multicultural city where it’s easy to meet people but hard to make lasting connections. Grieving the loss of her father, the protagonist tries to shape her future in her city, while also tracing how it has shaped her.
Kavita drew on her own experiences of her father’s death in writing the novel, as well as her own experiences of Sydney. She was surprised by the complexity of grief. ‘Grief is such a slippery, tricky thing, and you do have moment of lightness within it.’
She was also surprised by the process of writing about Sydney. ‘When I started writing about my own city, there was such an initial outpouring of emotion that I wasn’t expecting.’
The resulting book is a powerful exploration both of grief, and of a metropolitan, multicultural city in transition.
Books and authors discussed in this episode – Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli – Teju Cole – Olivia Lang – Sheila Heti – Rachel Cusk – Jenny Offill – Elizabeth Strout – Disoriental by Négar Djavadi – The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen – Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon – Deepfakes by Nina Schick
When we spoke to David Vann, he was on his final day of a two-week covid quarantine in a hotel room in Cambodia. He had with him an AED (an automatic external defibrillator) and an EPIRB (an emergency position indicating radio beacon), in case of sinking. He wasn’t specifically concerned about sinking the hotel room, but if it happened, he was ready for it.
David Vann is the internationally bestselling author of seven novels and three works of non-fiction. Published in 23 languages, his books have earned him literary accolades worldwide, appeared on 83 ‘best books of the year’ lists and seen him featured at nearly 100 international literary festivals. Among many publications, he’s written for Esquire, Men’s Health, the Observer, the Financial Times and National Geographic Adventure. He’s currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick in England.
David spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska, a setting which features in much of his work. When he was 13, his father Jim committed suicide by shooting himself. The pivotal event in David’s youth has been explored and alluded to in many of his novels, but never more directly or confronting than in his 2019 novel Halibut on the Moon.
Halibut on the Moon is an excruciating depiction of a downward spiral to suicide, written from the point of view of Vann’s father.
In episode 23, James and I speak to David about his writing process for this novel and others, and what he considers to be great writing (to James’s dismay, it’s not Knausgaard). We also speak about gun proliferation and mental illness in the US, and the current challenges of the publishing industry, even for authors as accomplished as Vann.
Books discussed in this episode: Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace The World According to Garp by John Irving Goat Mountain; Aquarium; Legend of a Suicide; Bright Air Black; Last Day on Earth by David Vann Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter Shadow Child by PF Thomése Eight Lives by Susan Hurley The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
One of my favourite episodes of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History is Free Brian Williams. In it, Gladwell explores how memory functions, and the way it can be written overtime. If we tell someone else’s story enough, for example, and we’ve had similar experiences, we may eventually ‘remember’ ourselves in the story.
This month, I have a piece of flash fiction in a multimedia art exhibition run by Mounted, an artist-run initiative (ARI) located in Springwood, near Sydney.
In Reclamation: Exploring Memory, 16 visual artists will present work across a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography and video.
Mounted’s curators describe the show this way:
The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze said that “Memory is a past present, it brings the past into the present. The past and present are mingled: the past unfolding, the present creating and inventing.”
Memory, both personal and collective, is fundamental to a knowledge and understanding of both an individual life, and more broadly, the collective historical and cultural impulses of any society.
In this project, artists are participating in a process of reclaiming memory, exploring its diverse expressions and nature by bringing it into the present moment, giving it a physical form through art, a presence that can be examined, shared and reflected upon.
I’ve been involved in a few of Mounted’s previous exhibitions, including The Viewer Is Present, and I love how their hardworking volunteer team combines written and visual works in innovative, engaging ways. Author Arna Radovich, curator of the exhibition’s flash fiction event, writes:
A sculpture or installation is a material representation of something similarly confined within some form of physical boundary. So too when you read or listen to a piece of short fiction, you get the whole of it in one sitting, or one train ride, or one small chunk of time – whether limited by one page or several.
Reclamation: Exploring Memory is open on the following dates, 11am-5pm: Saturday 13 March: opening event, 2pm Sunday 14 March Saturday 20 March Sunday 21 March: flash fiction event, 2pm Saturday 22 March Saturday 3 April
Nash is not only the owner of a bad-ass mononym, he’s also an artist and now first-time author, and the latest guest on James and Ashley Stay at Home.
A Sri Lanka-born multi-disciplinary designer and artist, Nash has been based in Melbourne since 2012. His work is both cynical social commentary and an account of his personal experience as an immigrant – the ‘other’ in any society.
His first book is What to Expect When You’re Immigrating, and James and I were delighted to talk to him about the book, his career as an artist, his own experience of immigration, and how Vegemite tastes like rotten chocolate.
Nash is a funny guy, which is why we wanted to talk to him about how laughter can positively impact your health. According to the Mayo Clinic, laughing can improve your immune system, relieve pain, make it easier to cope with difficult situations, and improve your mood. This episode is full of laughs, and how they can also help overcome the challenges of talking to others about sensitive topics.
What to Expect When You’re Immigrating is out now, and you can find out more about Nash and his upcoming events on Instagram.
Steve and I are eating vegan this February, so on the 14th we celebrated what is now known as Vegantine’s Day.
Normally we don’t do much (sometimes the best gift is low expectations). But since the Chau Chak Wing Museum recently opened at the University of Sydney, Steve suggested visiting it together.
It turned out the museum cafe had vegan desserts! It also turned out they were not tasty.
I had no expectations of the museum, and I suppose in that way, it didn’t disappoint me. While it features many historically significant artefacts and culturally significant First Nations artworks, the Chau Chak Wing Museum is also full of monsters.
Check out these little terrors.
This pair of palm cockatoos have been haunting nightmares since 1788. Their latin name is proboscigers, and a fun fact is that their cheek colour “changes according to mood and health”, just like with humans. For example, the colour of these two birds’ cheeks indicates they’re dead.
So Steve and I are wandering around this museum, which is filled with taxidermied animals, Egyptian mummies, Etruscan pottery – you know, museum stuff – and then I spot this front and centre in a display cabinet.
It’s between two pieces of pottery, but unlike the pottery, it’s not immediately obvious what the thing is or how it’s earned shelf space in what is not a particularly large museum.
I examined this fur-covered object from every angle. It seemed vaguely familiar, yet hideously unknown. Finally, I located its identifying sign.
Are you ready?
IT’S THE TAXIDERMIED HEAD OF A CYCLOPS PONY.
Yeah, you read that right. Back in 1758, someone taxidermied the partial head of a deformed pony, and eighty-three years later, in 1841, some other weirdo decided it belonged in a museum.
Its sign reads, “Cyclopism is a relatively common birth defect in mammals: the two eye sockets do not form separately but fuse to create the appearance of a single eye.”
Which is strange justification for including the cyclops pony among the bronze-age spears and butterfly specimens. Also, if cyclopsism is so common in mammals, how come we don’t see more people with optic blast powers?
Other monstrosities include a fruit bat who wants to flash you:
A memorial to eclectus parrots (I doubt there’s any left in the wild at this rate):
And a two-dimensional platypus who looks well over it (granted, you wouldn’t look great if you’d been bathing in formaldehyde since 1799):
You can also find out what the Parthenon would look like if the Greeks had built it inside a disco.
And here it is, possibly the worst monster of all – the graphintegrator!
The graphintegrator is, according to a sign, “a mechanical device for solving differential equations in graphical form”. But I’m pretty sure it’s also a Batman villain.
Lesser Monsters of the Chau Chak Wing Museum include this pangolin. Last year I became obsessed with them, which is how I discovered that if you search the term pangolin too often on Instagram, your account will get flagged.
You might not think this little spotted kiwi is a monster, until you find out it used its own mother’s tax file number to commit identify theft.
Last and strippiest, a Tasmanian tiger with real cute eyes.
When we visited Tassie a few years ago (yes, that trip where I utterly failed to climb Cradle Mountain), Steve said that he planned to find a Tassie tiger. Despite being classified as extinct, there’s still rumours of sightings. I spent the whole trip shouting, “Quick, look, there’s a Tassie tiger!” and then telling Steve it was right behind him.
Would I recommend visiting the Chau Chak Wing Museum? Let me ask you this – where else can you see the distingeatrating remains of a cyclops pony head?
After the museum, you can also say hello to everyone’s favourite roogoyle (who of course features in How to Be Australian).
And don’t forget this other classic University of Sydney highlight, the Vice-Chancellor’s Lawn!
PS. If you haven’t heard, My Name Is Revenge is now available in audiobook. Sign up for my newsletter for your chance to get a free copy!
“I was pretty well bedridden, unable to move very easily for about the first year … I’d sort of have to shallow breathe into the tops of my lungs.”
When Josephine Taylor first began to experience chronic pain, she started to reduce her commitments. She was a career woman and a mum. But gradually, she had to shut down her whole life. Meanwhile, she struggled to get a diagnosis.
Eventually the doctors concluded she had vulvodynia, chronic vulva pain lasting three months or longer that is medically unexplained. “That doesn’t mean it’s not real,” she adds. “It’s a very real medical condition.”
Josephine is a writer and freelance editor who lives on the coast north of Perth, Western Australia. She is Associate Editor at Westerly Magazine and an adjunct senior lecturer in writing. Her debut novel, Eye of a Rook, is drawn in part from her experiences with vulvodynia.
Trapped with condition, she began to learn its history and write about it. “It seemed to me very important that people understand that actually there hasn’t been a great deal of movement forward in understanding or awareness since the 1860s.”
Eye of a Rook is a novel with two narratives, both about women suffering from vulvodynia. One storyline is set in contemporary Perth, and one set in England in the late 1800s. The historical narrative includes shocking details about women’s medicine and treatment at that time, drawn in part from research into “The London Surgical Home for the reception of Gentlewomen and Females of Respectability suffering from Curable Surgical Diseases”, which opened in 1858. Taylor describes the barbaric surgical procedure, called a clitoridectomy, which is proposed in the opening chapter as the solution to one of your main characters’ suffering.
For both women, their illness affects their personality, and robs them of themselves, as well as affecting Alice’s career in Perth. We discuss how vulvodynia affected Josephine’s life, medical victim blaming, the difficulty of being diagnosed with a little-understood condition and the ongoing confusion of it, and the ‘finitude of possibility’ that chronic illness inflicts on a life.
Josephine is full of excellent advice and reassurance for anyone suffering chronic and/or invisible illnesses, about surrounding ourselves with people who believe us, and not letting our past dictate our futures.
This episode’s book chat The Fifth Season by Philip Salem Wintering by Krissy Kneen ‘The Wife’s Story’ by Ursula K LeGuin Imperfect by Lee Kofman (who we spoke to in episode 3) Unlike the Heart by Nicola Redhouse Pain and Prejudice by Gabrielle Jackson Show Me Where It Hurts by Kylie Maslen Hysteria by Katerina Bryant One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987-1995 by Helen Garner In the Woods by Tana French
In My Name Is Revenge, I met with emerging genocide scholar Asya Darbinyan to discuss her work and future career path. To mark the release of the audiobook, I’ve caught up with Asya to find out how her career has developed since then, and what she thinks about genocide studies today.
Ashley: The first time we met was at Tsitsernakaberd, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan. Where are you working now?
Asya: Currently I am a Visiting Scholar at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA, working on my book project tentatively titled Russian Imperial Humanitarianism: Assisting the Armenian Refugees of the War and Genocide.
I moved to the US in 2013 to pursue a PhD in History with a focus on the Armenian Genocide at Clark University. I was lucky enough to have Professor Taner Akçam, who is a character in your book, as my dissertation advisor. It was a challenging and at the same time quite a rewarding journey.
I defended my dissertation in December 2019 while I was also teaching courses on the history of genocide (a course for Master students, focusing on the Native American, Bangladeshi, Yazidi cases, in addition to the more traditional cases – Armenia, the Holocaust, Rwanda) and on the Armenian Genocide (this course was for undergraduate students, 35 of them, no single Armenian among them) at Stockton University in New Jersey.
That’s when I learned how much I enjoy designing my own courses and teaching college students.
Dr Asya Darbinyan
Ashley: What’s the focus of your research as a genocide studies scholar?
Asya: I consider myself a historian of humanitarianism and refugee studies as much as a genocide scholar. Regarding the latter, for many years genocide studies in general, and Armenian Genocide research in particular, have focused on official documents.
Most publications on the history the massacre and deportation of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire aimed at proving the crime of genocide by analyzing foreign sources, largely neglecting the voices of the survivors. As a result, the voices of those who experienced forced displacement, attacks on their houses and families, rape, abduction, forced conversion, starvation, exhaustion and epidemics were marginalized.
My scholarly work focuses on the humanitarian emergency and refugee crisis at the Caucasus front during the First World War, caused by population movements as a result of war and genocide.
But most importantly, reflecting on the experiences of the Armenians, my project addresses a number of questions related to the refugees’ understanding of and reaction to those developments. Analyzing testimonies, and memoirs of the refugee-survivors, I recover and raise their voices and emphasize the role they played in this struggle for survival.
They were not simply victims dependent upon external actors’ mercy and assistance: they were self-reliant, willing and able to self-organize.
Tsitsernakaberd, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan
Ashley: You inspired me when you said that you hoped to one day organise university forums to show the value and interest of genocide studies. Have you been able to achieve this goal?
Asya: That’s very kind of you.
It still is one of my most important goals. I have organized, moderated and conducted public lectures and workshops on genocide education and awareness, and mass atrocity prevention for high school students and teachers, for university students and educators from a variety of disciplines, and local communities in Armenia, Georgia, USA, and UK.
An important part of my teaching, as well as the goal of my public outreach is to demonstrate the relevance and significance of our past experiences of confronting humanitarian and health crisis, genocides and other mass atrocities, to our everyday life and present-day developments.
When the audiences – be it high school and college students, community members or colleagues from other academic departments – look at a hundred-year-old photograph of genocide orphans from the Ottoman Empire covered in rags, aboard a small boat trying to reach the shore of an island in Greece and find shelter there, next to a 2016 photo of a modern motor-boat transporting a group of malnourished children refugees from Syria to that same island for the same purpose, they start raising questions and engage in meaningful discussions.
They realize, that despite our different backgrounds or scholarly interests, mass violence, poverty, inequality, and struggle for survival are not topics to be discussed merely by those studying or teaching humanities. These are problems of humanity.
Republic Square, Yerevan
Ashley: What do you hope to achieve in your career?
Asya: My short-term career goal is to expand the scope of my research and complete the revisioning of my dissertation, so that I can publish my book and share the results of my scholarship with everyone interested. Based on extensive research in archives and libraries in Armenia, Georgia, Russia, the US, and elsewhere, my book is going to shed new light on the experiences of those Armenian refugees of the genocide, who were forced to leave their homes in “Western Armenia” and find shelter and eventually a new home in “Eastern/Russian Armenia,” just like, for instance, my great-grandmother Anna and her son, my grandfather Andranik, did.
It will also revisit the history of Russo-Armenian relations and present the complexity of imperial policies towards Armenians during the Great War. These policies are never black or white. Russia did not want “Armenia without Armenians.” Those historians who still insist on these more cynical or overly simplified explanations of Russo-Armenian relations underestimate the importance of global and regional contexts in which these relations and policies are formed and developed.
My long-term plan has not really changed. I love conducting research, uncovering new files and sources, writing and publishing, as much as I love teaching and organizing workshops and other academic events for intellectual exchange.
To be honest, the academic path turned out to be much more difficult and complicated than I assumed it would be. A lot of the difficulties have to do with the still heavily male-dominated structure of academia. There are more female students interested in refugees and genocide studies than male, but the professors and the senior scholars are still predominantly men, especially in Armenian Genocide studies.
I have also faced a number of obstacles as an international scholar in the US, because of the harsh immigration policies and lack of both funding and job opportunities for non-citizens. But I believe that persistent hard work and continued effort will eventually produce results.
Tsitsernakaberd, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan
Ashley: Do you think genocide is an important topic for everyone to better understand?
Asya: I do believe that, absolutely! Genocide is a global problem. The Armenian Genocide is not the history of the Armenian and Turkish people; the Genocide of 1994 in Rwanda is not the history of the Tutsi and Hutu people. This is the history of humanity.
As we’ve observed during this global pandemic, the Native Americans were the most vulnerable group in the US with highest mortality rates (more than the African American communities). Why? Because one of the greatest democracies in the world has not yet dealt with its own past, has not faced the crimes committed against the real owners of these lands, hence not properly apologizing for the genocide and taking the full responsibility for the safe, secure and prosperous future of the first citizens of this land. And I believe Australians too can relate to this story.
In 2017, I found myself with a 12,000-word novella. It was best piece of fiction I’d ever written, and possibly my best piece of writing full stop, and it sat on my hard drive, dreaming of readers.
I hadn’t intended to write a novella; my master’s degree program had dictated the word length. But writing it had turned out to be very useful. It allowed me to more easily develop novel-writing skills on a shorter project. I was able to go from idea to final draft in 18 months, with heaps of feedback and revision, something I never could have found time for if I’d been working on a manuscript of 80,000 words.
But novellas are tricky creatures. Publication call-outs and competitions for novellas exist, but there are far fewer than for short stories or full-length manuscripts.
This is why I was excited to discover the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award, which accepted up to 30,000 words. It also suggested including an essay reflecting on the writing process. This excited me further, because I had a lot to say about my writing process. The novella had come out of years of research into the Armenian genocide, including interviews with 140 people on three continents, and two masters’ theses. In fact, I’d enrolled in a creative writing master’s program because I had the idea to write from the point of view of a terrorist connected to that history — and the idea terrified me.
Before entering the CBDLA, I read the examples suggested, My Hearts Are Your Hearts by Carmel Bird and Cracking the Spine: Ten short Australian stories and how they were written, both published by Spineless Wonders. Using these as a guide, I wrote my reflective essay, combined it with the novella, and sent it in.
In 2018, I was delighted to be one of 11 longlisted entries, and very surprised to learn I was one of three finalists. The prize included digital publication and $1000. The ebook of My Name Is Revenge was out by the end of the year.
When Bronwyn Mehan, the powerhouse behind Spineless Wonders, approached me about a print version, I said yes immediately. I’d been studying writing and revising drafts and racking up rejections for nearly a decade by this time, working toward the goal of having a published book. Technically I’d achieved that, but the book wasn’t yet a thing I could hold or sign or gift to my grandmother.
‘One thing,’ Bronwyn said. ‘At 17,000 words, it’s not long enough to have a spine.’
So we added in two additional companion pieces, essays previously published by Griffith Review and Sydney Review of Books. This brought the collection up to 25,000 words. We also included photographs from my time in Armenia.
The idea of the thriller novella was to hook readers with a gripping story, set in Sydney and based on the real-life assassination of the Turkish consul-general and his bodyguard. The assassination took place in 1980 and remains unsolved. When readers finish the story, the essays and photos provide the historical context for its events, a history that has been suppressed due to the ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide.
We launched My Name Is Revenge in June 2019, with author Emily Maguire giving the launch speech. It was one of the happiest events of my life.
With the book out in the world, I organised bookshop visits and library talks. I pitched myself to festivals and podcasts. This helped when, later in the year, I had a full-length manuscript under consideration with Affirm Press, which became my second book.
I thought that might be the end of the story for Revenge, but Bronwyn is full of great ideas. There was a voice actor named Felix Johnson, she told me, who would be perfect to narrate Revenge as an audiobook. This delighted me; I love audiobooks.
I worked with sound engineer Jeff Zhang to record the essays, and Felix worked with Jeff and Eleni Schumacher to record the novella, with Bronwyn coordinating everything, working around covid restrictions. It was rewarding to have the opportunity to narrate my work — and also exhausting! I’d never guessed reading out loud could be so tiring. It gave me new respect for audiobook narrators, especially those who bring characters to life the way Felix does.
My Name Is Revenge is now available as an audiobook worldwide, and also in print-on-demand and ebook formats. It’s so much more than I could have hoped for when I wrote that 12,000-word novella, and I credit my success in the CBDLA with launching my writing career.
“What I would ultimately like, you know, my huge big goal [for the book, is that] people can look back on this and say, ‘You know, there are bits in that – as a non-Indigenous person – I didn’t understand, but that’s okay, and I don’t need to acquire and learn and make meaning for everything in that book,’ because sometimes parts of that book are for Aboriginal people, some parts are for Yuwaalaraay people, and other parts are for Yuwaalaraay senior people.”
Our first guest for 2021 is Yuwaalaraay author Nardi Simpson. From North West NSW freshwater plains, Nardi is a founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, and has been performing nationally and internationally for 20 years. Her debut novel, Song of the Crocodile, was a 2018 winner of a black&write! writing fellowship.
Speaking to us from a beach on the Northern Rivers, Nardi delved into the intercultural aspects of the book, and of navigating modern society as an Indigenous person in Australia.
Song of the Crocodile is set in the fictional town of Darnmoor, in regional NSW. The story spans four generations of the Billymil family and their effort to sustain their Indigenous culture and community despite the overt and covert racism of the settlers, and the corrosive impact of intergenerational trauma.
Filled with ancestral spirits and Yuwaalaraay language, it presents both an insight into an ancient worldview that understands the healing power of the natural world, and a sharp, affecting critique of Australian society.
Her book reminded me of my own research into my family members’ survival of the Armenian genocide and the process of weaving that research into fiction when writing My Name Is Revenge.
“What happened to those families is basically what happened to my family,” Nardi says. “I wanted to understand that, and I didn’t want to judge it.”
Going too much into detail on the connections would be a spoiler for both Nardi’s book and my own, but one of the broad strokes points we both explore is how much has been lost due to the violence suffered by both communities – not just lives, livelihoods, homes and land, but also cultural knowledge and worldviews.
It’s a great conversation, and Nardi is a fascinating speaker and well as a powerful writer.
In this episode, we also discuss Bindi by Kirli Saunders, The Road to Woop Woop by Eugen Bacon, and James’s thoughts on reaching the end of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-book memoir series.
