Amanda O’Callaghan is an Australian writer who currently lives in Brisbane and many of her short stories have won awards in Australia, Ireland, and the UK. Most recently she won the E J Brady “Mallacoota” Short Story Prize 2018-19 for The Ice. 1867. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Queensland and was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship (2016) to assist in the completion of her first book of short stories, This Taste for Silence.
Nerd Daily contributor AB Endacott had the pleasure of asking Amanda a few questions about about This Taste for Silence!
Tell us a little about yourself!
I was born and raised in Brisbane, where I now live (although I lived overseas – in London and Ireland – for many years). My background is in advertising and I’ve also done quite a bit of academic work, teaching undergraduates, mostly. I started writing seriously about six years ago, chiefly short stories. I’ve also become very interested in flash fiction, which has a huge following in the US and UK —it’s starting to gain momentum here in Australia. Flash fiction pieces are very short, usually under one thousand words but often much shorter. They are difficult to get right as every word must do a lot of heavy lifting. Writing a good piece of flash fiction requires quite a bit of discipline, and I think it helps my writing overall. This Taste for Silence features both short stories and flash fiction.
What forms the genesis of your stories?
It’s an odd mixture. Writers are pick-pockets, always collecting little bits and pieces. A story might arise from something that has happened in my own life, or in the experience of someone I’ve met or known. However, I would say the majority of my stories are prompted by a snippet of everyday life, whether it’s something I’ve heard on the radio, or in a cafe, or seen on the internet. Often it can be something as simple as a certain look. The genesis of one of the stories in my book, “The Turn”, came when I was waiting at traffic lights late at night. I was watching a man take a bag of rubbish down a laneway, and he suddenly turned as if someone had called him, although there was no one there. By the time I got home, I had the start of my story! I would say that most of my stories feature a variety of these snippets that I’ve picked up over the years. For me, it’s rare that a story grows from just one small incident, although this one did.
How do you classify your work? It’s not thriller, exactly, but there are thriller-esque elements in the way that you hint at the macabre, or something sinister lurking beyond the frame of the story.
Someone recently commented that my stories contained a lot of delicately rendered dread, and I took that as the highest of compliments! Yes, I do think there are thriller-esque elements to a lot of my stories. But it’s subtle. I like the idea of pulling the reader along and making them increasingly uncomfortable as they realise that all is not nearly as normal as it first seemed!
What in your opinion is the strength of the short story form? As a writer, I’ve always found it best to conceive of them as semi self-contained snapshots of a bigger story, but the temptation for me is always to tell a bigger story, so I guess the second part of this question is how do you keep your stories contained?
I love short stories, and I think they can be incredibly powerful. For me, they’re not a fragment of a bigger story. A good story should feel absolutely satisfying in itself. One of the stories in my book, “Tying the Boats”, is only 168 words long. Although, of course, there’s a sense of a wider world—a ‘bigger story’, as you say—beyond those brief lines, I’d like to think that even this super-short piece feels whole. I think all fiction has a sense of something lying beyond it, even novels. How do I keep my stories contained? I feel very strongly that I cannot let my reader down. If I take them on a journey, if they trust me to do that, I must work to the best of my ability to make good on the promise of creating a satisfying whole. That’s what I work towards every time.
I noticed you hold a PhD – how did/does academia influence and shape your writing?
Writing a PhD is a very lonely business. It was good practice for being a fiction writer! I don’t think my PhD—which was on that wonderful story-teller, Robert Louis Stevenson—shaped my writing in any way, but it certainly shaped me. It takes tremendous discipline to focus on a single subject for years, reading and researching and then, in the final period, writing it all into a cohesive manuscript. I think the key thing it taught me was clarity. No puffery. No beautifully-crafted sentences that don’t move the story on one iota. Stevenson understood that very well—he wrote a lot about the craft of writing—and I learned from the master himself!
I’m always fascinated by the way writers have such varying writing routines. Would you mind going into a bit of detail on yours?
I don’t plan any of my stories. I never know, when I start them, what is going to happen. I might have a vague idea that this character might be wonderful, or wicked, but largely the story unfolds as I go along. I’d love to say that I’m one of the those writers who gets up at dawn and writes for a couple of hours. I wish I could do that, but I cannot. I’m much more likely to write late at night. I always read my writing out loud. Holes in the story, or poor dialogue, soon emerge when you hear the tale rather than read it. It’s invaluable. I find beginning a story the hardest part. Once the story begins to flow, the words come quickly (most of the time!). When I start to get a clear sense of where the story is going, I often press on rather than editing what I’ve already created. I find that if I go back to look at what I’ve done, the sense of momentum can just disappear. I’m also a great believer in ‘resting’ a new story; ignoring it for a couple of weeks, even months. When I go back to it, I can often see flaws that I had not noticed before. I always have quite a few pieces in development at the same time but sometimes a new story will just push them all out of the way, and off I go.
What, if anything, do you think is the defining feature of Australian writers’ voices?
An interesting question. I don’t think there is a defining feature of Australian writing. Confidence, perhaps? Certainly, there are a lot of superb Australian writers. Because I’ve lived in three countries, I find I’m very influenced by my time in other places. I almost never choose the setting for a story; it seems to choose itself. Once it emerges, I cannot change it. If the story is set in England, say, I cannot seem to place it into an Australian setting. It just won’t go! I think quality writing has no borders.
What’s next for you?
More writing. I plan to do this for a long time. I’d like to tackle a novel, now, although I doubt I’ll stop writing short stories or flash fiction. Because I don’t plan my stories, I never really know how long the story is going to be. Hopefully, one will emerge that makes it to novel-length!
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for us?
I’m just finishing Tony Birch’s new novel, The White Girl (which The Nerd Daily has reviewed). It’s beautifully written. Haunting, I think. For non-fiction, I’d recommend Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. I didn’t think I’d be interested in this book about the sinking of a luxury cruise ship in 1915 but I thought it was absolutely gripping, despite knowing from the start how it ends! I read quite a bit of poetry, and I love David Malouf’s latest collection, An Open Book.
Synopsis for This Taste for Silence: The balance of power in a marriage shifts, with shocking consequences. An elderly woman recounts a chilling childhood memory on the family farm. A taxi driver with a missing wife reveals unexpected skills. An inherited painting brings an eerily troubling legacy. Subtle, compelling and unsettling, Amanda O’Callaghan’s stories work at the edges of the sayable, through secrets, erasures and glimpsed moments of disclosure. They shimmer with unspoken histories and characters who have a ‘taste for silence’
You can find Amanda at her website and on Twitter.
