Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to Not Quite Right.
My name's Ed, and I'm Amanda, And we are here at Words on the Waves,
and we're speaking today with Jennifer Mills.
We spoke to Jennifer about fairy tales, actually.
So Jennifer was invited to reimagine the story of Hansel and Gretel for the stage.
And we also talked about the experience, I suppose,
of having your work translated to the stage and seeing how someone else has
imagined your writing.
And we also spoke to her about the climate emergency and what hope there is
for the future.
So here is our chat with Jennifer Mills.
We are here at Words on the Waves with Jennifer Mills.
Good morning.
So you're here at Words on the Waves for a few things.
Why don't you tell us what brings you here?
Well, I did a couple of events yesterday.
One was about the publishing industry as part of the professional development
stream, and that was fantastic to talk with some
emerging and aspiring writers.
And yesterday I also chaired a session called Inked In,
which was about bushfires and Australian writing with three really interesting
novelists.
And today I'm talking about fairy tales on a panel with Kate Holden,
which will be very exciting.
And is that in relation to your book?
Yes, so this is actually the book that I'm
talking about today is actually a side project.
So I do have a practise as a novelist myself.
So my last book was Salvage which came out in June last year.
But then in my spare time I was commissioned to write a reimagined
version of Hansel and Gretel by a theatre company in Adelaide called Slingsby for a
show they were doing called A Concise Compendium of Wonder.
They commissioned 3 writers to write stories.
They're all staged by the same three actors.
They are each one hour plays.
And I wasn't writing directly for theatre, I was writing a short story that was then
adapted for theatre.
So it was a very, very interesting process because it was
the writing part of it was quite ordinary, my own.
But then the the production and seeing it all happen was very magical.
So did you have a role in the playwriting or did you step aside once you'd written
the short story?
I stepped aside.
Slingsby did tap me on the shoulder occasionally and asked my opinion about
certain things, but it wasn't a process where I was
involved in the the adaptation or the script.
And for me that was really exciting because it was it allowed me to see what
someone else would do with it.
So when you write a novel, it has to be imagined again by a reader,
but as a writer, you don't get to see how they imagine it
or what their interpretation is unless they tell you.
Sometimes people do at festivals, like why did you do this?
And they'll say things that I'm like, oh, I didn't know that was there.
But with theatre, who is able to very quickly see how how
they managed the sort of storytelling, how they built the world,
how they imagined the characters, hearing sense and everything as well,
you actually get to visualise it.
So yeah.
And hearing your own words.
So the the script actually is quite verbatim to the story because it is a
storytelling kind of a play.
And they're staged for young people.
So it's very much like, come in, we're telling you this story,
which is fantastic, but hearing your own sentences spoken
really beautifully by professional actors is something that I think I could get
really addicted to.
OK, so tell us about the adaptation.
You're saying Hansel and Gretel.
What was your take on that?
So I set the story in a kind of fairy tale mediaeval village.
But I was interested in the idea of the famine and the hunger of these children
and why they would be hungry was my starting off point.
And from there, I sort of created this world where
there's a landlord who's collecting tithes or taxes from the peasants.
And this family, they've lost their mother.
So the two kids are living with their father.
They're very poor.
And it hasn't stopped raining for about two years at this point.
And so the land is not producing anything.
And they're working the land for somebody else, for the landlord basically.
So I was interested in the kind of social causes of famine rather than are you
getting these ideas?
I know well the world around me.
But I was also looking at my own sort of family story as well because my mother's
family is Irish.
So I was interested in that history and, you know, colonisation causing famine.
And the kids in the story who are called Cran and Ray, they're sort of teenagers,
young tweens I'd say.
They selected by the landlord to be taken to the town and there is a threat that
they will be eaten because the famine is so terrible.
And they escape and they run into the forest and then things get really magical
from there.
So that was my interpretation.
Rather than making it an evil witch in the forest.
I was really interested in, OK, where is the villain in this story?
Where can I sit the villain?
And you got some dark themes there, right?
And you mentioned it's directed at young people.
Did you find yourself able to really explore those and let loose,
or did you have to hold back a little bit on the exploration to protect young minds?
It was interesting, you know, because I didn't really think about it.
And when I had the initial meeting with Slingsby, I said,
but I don't write for children.
And they said don't worry about it, Just do what you always do.
We'll figure it out.
And so I was sort of encouraged to not hold back really.
OK.
But one of the other writers, Ursula Dubisaski, is a kids writer.
And so her story has a really different kind of tone that is, you know,
probably more age appropriate.
But it's I also think that just kids can handle a lot more than we think they can.
Well, Hansel and Gretel in it's a original form
is pretty dark.
It's a very brutal story.
There is cannibalism in it.
I didn't make that up.
But I also know that a lot of kids already do handle a lot more than they
have to in this world.
Like, people are dealing with poverty and
hunger all the time.
People are dealing with families and landlords causing trouble in their lives
and, you know, homelessness.
And we shouldn't live in a society where those things are happening,
but they are happening and kids know about them experiencing them.
So I wanted to speak to those kids as well,
the kids who needed a story like this, where those kids get to be the heroes.
That's it.
Like there is a level.
And we were talking with one of the other authors about this,
of release that comes with being able to experience that as fiction.
And even though it's dark and even though it's hard,
it comes with this sense of like, release that you've been able to think
about and talk about in a Safeway.
Yeah.
And I think that's part of the the fairy tale form as well.
Like really dark things can happen, but you returned safely to your own
reality.
That's it.
I think as well, like, you know, when we think of fairy tales,
we think of morals.
So we did you work to kind of avoid the moral.
Were you working into that moral view?
Like how did you treat that aspect of storytelling?
I didn't think too much about morality.
I thought a lot about responsibility and our relationship to nature.
So the story is set in a kind of.
When the enclosure of the natural world is just beginning and the peasants is
there cutting down trees, removing the forest.
And I was thinking about the climate emergency,
which is another really massive thing that kids have to do with.
They shouldn't have to.
I wanted to tell a story that would help people to navigate that by taking it back
to a place where decisions could be made differently,
I suppose about real relationship with nature.
But I also just wanted it to be fun and like, a bit scary, but also awesome.
Like, awesome fun kind of magic.
And so I have that in mind more than the moral kind of instruction just to
entertain pure entertainment.
Yeah.
And I think that stuff kind of comes out anyway.
Like when you're a writer, you have your own values and they emerge
through your work, whether you want them to or not.
They they're transparent most of the time because it's your worldview and you can't
help it.
So I just trust that that stuff will will be there and get through.
And you talked about being involved in or seeing the process kind of take shape.
Were you also able to see the finished product and see the kids reaction to the
finished product?
Was that what you expected?
So this year the three plays were staged as part of the Adelaide Festival and they
built a bespoke building for this production which can be packed down into
a shipping container for easy transport because they wanted to create a carbon
neutral theatre production.
So they're really working to their values as a company.
And so I was lucky enough to go and see all three plays and they were just
beautiful, so magical.
And it's incredible.
When you're a writer, you sort of work on your own a lot,
but to have this, all of these different artists brought in,
like the designers, the actors, the musician who composed music for each
of them.
And they're all like really different worlds,
but done with similar materials and the same exact room.
And it was just incredible to see.
It's incredible to me, like the investment that must have gone
into this and all the different artists and bringing them all together.
So who was behind creating this?
So Slingsby has been operating in Adelaide for the 19 years.
This is actually their final production.
They're closing up as a company partly because funding is so difficult,
but also I think they wanted to end on a high and close out on a beautiful note.
So it was a big responsibility to write for this in terms of that company's
legacy.
But yeah, they're funded through various structures
like state and federal funding and also a lot of donations and subscribers and
stuff like that.
So tickets, yeah.
And you mentioned your work as a novelist.
Do you explore the same kinds of themes in your novels?
Yeah, definitely.
I'm pretty focused on the climate emergency and the shifts that need to
take place, which we're really not doing at the
moment as a species.
We're not self correcting and we're going to keep running up into kind of natural
disasters and crises of our own making.
So last year in SA, we had an algal bloom that was partly
caused by the condition, conditions related to the climate
emergency, which include the wind and currents
slowing down, very hot days, very hot still days and the algae just
kind of bloomed because of that, killed a lot of fish.
So these are the things that are kind of in my world that are surrounding me.
But I also, I wrote a book a few years ago called
Discronia, in which the sea retreats and the beach
is covered in dead animals.
And so when the algal bloom happened, I kept getting these text messages from
people saying your book came true, your book came true.
It's like, it's not my fault.
But I think as a writer, I'm really moved by these kind of images
of uncanny nature and uncannyness in the world.
And so that's my sort of angle where I keep returning to salvage.
My last novel is set in the near future, and it's about space billionaires,
but the space billionaires are sort of fairly peripheral to the story.
So there's two sisters and one escapes to a space station and the other stays on
Earth.
And so it's sort of the mostly the one that stays on Earth's life.
How do you find like you're obviously writing about these big themes and I
imagine you're very interested in it.
So it suggests that it's something that maybe you find distressing as well.
So to immerse yourself in these ideas and spend so long thinking about them and
writing about them, do you find that that soothes you or
feels like a release of those worries or does it feed it as well?
I am really anti putting my head in the sand.
Generally in life, I like to face things.
I think that information power, and I do find it very soothing to to
think things through.
And it's not necessarily because I find the answer,
it's because I feel better informed and I can make better decisions and I can have
conversations with people and we can learn from each other.
And as a writer, I think you have a bit of a
responsibility in terms of what stories you tell and where they come from and
what they do in the world.
I don't know if it's a responsibility or a curse,
but I do feel like fiction kind of carries that emotional weight for people
in a way.
And you're right, like stories are quite cathartic.
And I want, I want my books to be meaningful to
people who read them.
I don't want them to just be some disposable rubbish that could be
generated by a large language model.
You know, it's a human to human contact.
Yes, absolutely.
You know, you want to create something beautiful
and awesome fun.
But also something that helps in some way.
So you see your role as a writer as helping other people and communicating
and sharing that message.
I don't think that's my role as a writer.
I think that's just who I am as a person.
Like I just like to be useful in the world.
It's how my life has value, I feel like.
So you mentioned obviously the climate emergency.
I feel like the public discourse on that has maybe regressed in the last five
years or so.
And some of those images that you mentioned that feature in your books
around the the dead animals washing up, there's very powerful images.
Do you have any hope that things will change in the future and that action will
be taken?
Yeah, absolutely.
And the thing that gives me hope is that people are taking action now.
So I think one of the reasons that we've retreated a bit from addressing the
climate crisis is because of the pandemic was such a system shock to the culture.
And it's sort of how this compound crisis operates.
So things become difficult and then they're compounded on the last difficult
thing.
And then these crises get closer together and more difficult to solve.
And then you end up in this sort of emergency mindset.
And so that actually changes the way that you think.
It changes how you operate.
It can make you more selfish, It can make you shut down and not want to
think about the world.
I mean, I open the news and I look at pictures of
Gaza and I don't want to think about the world either,
but I have a choice to switch that off and a lot of people don't.
The things that make me feel optimistic is how many people are thinking and
writing and taking action about it now.
And especially young people, like all of the schools strike for
climate stuff and the actions that have happened in Newcastle in recent years,
shutting down the coal port and stuff have been really inspiring for me.
So keep doing that stuff everybody.
Excellent.
All right, Well, it was lovely speaking to you.
Thank you so much for having me on with your panel.
Cheers.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Waves Writers Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
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