I first met Lili Wilkinson when I was 14 years old. She was probably about the age I am now, and she was one of the key figures within the now-defunded Centre for Young Literature at the State Library of Victoria where she founded insideadog, and the Inky Awards (whose future is also sadly, in doubt). Her first novel, Scatterheart was about to come out. I thought she was the coolest person I’d ever met.
Since then, she’s written 14 more books for children of varying ages, completed a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne which examined how books for teenagers create activism for social change within teen readers, and established herself as a key figure within the Australian Young Adult literary scene.
Both of us are Melbournians, so when we spoke, we were both deep in the midst of the Stage 4 lockdown. Yet despite the destabilising experience of the pandemic, by the end of this year, Wilkinson will have released three books; her new YA thriller, The Erasure Initiative; the impetus for our interview, and two books for younger readers: Hodgepodge: How to Make a Pet Monster 1, and 2 (the second is set for release in December). Amid this, she’s also homeschooling her son who is in his first year of school this year. “I taught him to read,” she told me, “which I’m pretty proud of,” she adds. Fairly so.
Having written 15 books to date, it makes sense that even through a pandemic, she would keep writing, despite having, amongst other things, a son “who does not respect my creative process at all.” She speaks quickly, as though she’s got so much in her head that that she’s trying to ensure she gets out, punctuating her words with gestures that make the pink-coloured ends of her hair swing gently. It’s no surprise that this dynamic demeanour influences her writing routine and approach. She says firmly that she rejects the “cult of artistic suffering [a term coined by Elizabeth Gilbert when she interviewed Tom Waits for GQ many years ago]”; “I don’t like the idea of waiting for inspiration to strike, it sounds like procrastination to me […]the idea of being a writer or any kind of artist is that it’s different to do it as a hobby and as a job. It’s a great privilege to do it as a job, but there’s a lot of misinformation created about it.”
The Erasure Initiative, which was released on August 4, is a Young Adult thriller where questions of morality and ethics intersect with the mystery presented from the first page; a girl wakes up on a self-driving bus with no memory of who she is or how she got to be on the bus. Her nametag says Cecily, but she has no way of knowing whether that’s true. There are six other people on the bus, and they are asked variants of the classic trolley problem (one being ‘you are in a moving vehicle. Before you the road forks. Ahead, there is one human. On the side road there are ten cats. You can press a button and the buss will turn off onto the side road. The bus will not stop. Do you press the button?’). As the scenarios progress, the stakes become increasingly higher.
I saw Wilkinson at YA Day 2019, back in the days when author and book events actually meant being in the same physical room as other people. There, she teased The Erasure Initiative, and divulged that although she’d pitched a fantasy book (which she has in fact written but is as yet unpublished, although she loves it “more than anything I’ve ever done”), her publisher effectively gave her a brief: “write another thriller. […] You’ve done girl on a bunker, girl in a cult, you know, girl on a plane?” I’m intrigued at the process behind what is effectively, writing something on demand, so I ask her about it.
“I quite like writing to a brief,” she admits, although she quickly qualifies that doesn’t mean inspiration immediately struck. “I made list after list, I watched all of Black Mirror again. I knew I wanted something slightly speculative because that would be different enough from stuff I’d done before to keep me interested. I came up with a whole heap of different ideas. I thought about just-around-the-corner space exploration, floating trash islands and climate change, but nothing was really sticking. And then I woke up in the middle of the night with this image of a girl in a self-driving vehicle…originally in the city, and she has no memory of how she got into the car, and can’t get out. My initial image of her was banging on the windows of the car, and nobody in the city noticing her. The idea was of being somewhere really busy but alone and not able to escape. That didn’t make it into the book, but that idea of a girl trapped inside a self-driving vehicle with no memory was what formed the basis of the book.”
From the confident way Wilkinson speaks, it’s obvious that she views the world through a deeply analytical lens. When it comes to writing, she’s a planner, “with this book even more than usual,” and approaches her work in a profoundly cerebral, intellectual way. She admits, “I love to deconstruct other people’s books, too.” It makes sense, given the PhD.
She speeds up even more as she gets into talking about her research, passion and the years that go into that kind of endeavour enlivening her manner further. “The research question was: does young adult literature about activism make teenagers more interested in activism? The answer as with all good PhD or postgraduate research is: maybe. All the books I could find that were really specifically about activism; kids engaging in activism that promoted an ideological position, were not books that made young people go out and engage in activism. The books that gave young people questions to think about that would help them go out and interrogate their own worldview, or the things that they’d been taught […] but not given them the answers; the books that asked the questions but then gave young people enough respect and space to come up with their own answers were the books that created readers who were more engaged in activism and politics.”
But her research wasn’t just about how readers interact with texts, it was about what writers put down on the page, or “levels of ideology in text.” She goes on to explain what she means by that: “So you have a surface level, which is what the author wants you to know about what they think. I used JK Rowling as an example. There’s the ethos on the page in terms of what her characters are saying: ‘let’s free the house elves, mudbloods are just as good as pureblood wizards, girls are just as good as boys’, but when you peel back a layer and look at the implicit ideology, none of that is true. Every house elf who is liberated dies or becomes an alcoholic, there are no married women with jobs except for one who dies horrifically, and in the epilogue, there are no new pairings between wizards and mudbloods. Everything she said she wasn’t standing for, she showed us that she does.”
I ask how the research has altered her writing. Her immediate response is to say that thinks “more about what I’m saying, then what I’m really saying,” then notes that this is particularly important given “the changing ideology of a society. I’m doing my best to listen and learn and become a better person, and better writer, and to become more inclusive and to do that respectfully – I’m going to make mistakes, I have and will continue to, but I’m going to try hard not to. That’s slowed down my writing, not in a detrimental manner but I’m more cautious and aware of potentially harmful tropes.”
That deep interest in ideology and the intellectual seems to have permeated The Erasure Initiative with the second half more explicitly engaging with Greek philosophical concepts and their intersection with the questions of morality and ethics which dominate the story. “At the time of writing, I was playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey,” she says with a laugh. It’s a great game, and despite avidly playing videogames myself – and arguing that they should be viewed as legitimate forms of narrative – I’m still pleasantly surprised that Wilkinson games. She continues. “But I am interested in Greek myth and philosophy. The fact that we keep coming back to it a couple of thousand years later is quite telling.”
One of the running themes within The Erasure Initiative is the power and influence of massive tech conglomerates. One doesn’t have to look far for the inspiration for such a theme given the massive accumulation of wealth and power of figures such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Tesla’s Elon Musk. These men have the power to massively alter the state of the world as we know it, and the ego to match. The framework provided by Ancient Greek philosophy could easily be used – or warped – to justify their behaviour. Wilkinson actually admis that she was directly inspired by Musk: “The mythologising around Elon Musk is full on, and he absolutely buys into himself, that he’s going to save the world, and I think it’s hugely dangerous for any one person to have that much money and that much power.”
Wilkinson’s last two books feel eerily prophetic given the Covid-19 pandemic. Her 2018 Young Adult thriller, After the Lights Go Out, which was shortlisted for the Gold Inky award, charts what happens when a solar flare sends out an electromagnetic pulse which wipes out all technology; effectively causing a mini apocalypse.
I ask her how what we’re currently experiencing would affect how she’d write After the Lights Go Out if she were writing it today. She pauses. “Well, I already put in a scene where we run out of toilet paper,” she says, taking a moment to laugh. “But I think the political aspect has been very interesting […] I think I could bring in [questions of] are you pro or anti science. I find that development over the last decade very interesting that there are people who are so rigidly anti-science in many different ways, that it’s almost cult-y; anti-vaxx, anti-mask, people who are paranoid about 5G towers, that technology and science cannot be trusted, global warming is a hoax and the rise of that I find disturbing but also interesting, so I probably would have incorporated some of that into it.”
However, The Erasure Initiative has its own oddly prophetic aspects to the time we’re living through. Cecily and her fellow passengers are trapped in a small space, powerless to get out. Anecdotally, people have reported their responses to the various lockdowns imposed upon the population to curb the infection of the coronavirus, many of which involve looking inward. Beyond this, the behaviour of people has varied widely as we’ve seen the best and worst of human behaviour. We talk about this a bit, and she notes that while “there are always people who are going to be isolationist and ruin it for everyone else, in Australia, and Melbourne particularly, when we walk in the lockdown, people put teddy bears and rainbows in the windows, or leave out seedlings or their own produce for people,” which brings a measure of comfort. Although, “I’d like to see that a bit more broadly for other issues, too,” she adds, with a hopeful smile.
That optimism about people critically assessing their worldview and themselves and choosing to do better is a running theme across Wilkinson’s oeuvre. I make this observation, curious about whether this is a deliberate choice. Her answer is immediate. “Being curious and critical is hugely important to my worldview, and pretty much everything in the world that I’m suspicious of don’t do that or actively prohibit that. The world is really, really interesting and the more we think about that and each other, the better we’re going to be. It’s definitely something I try to promote in my books.” However, she circles back to her PhD and her finding that didactic messages in books don’t necessarily compel people to follow those directives. “So my own worldview does permeate my books, but I do try to explore ideas where I don’t think there’s necessarily a rigid right or wrong answer, and I definitely explored that with After the Lights Go Out and moreso with The Erasure Initiative; I wanted to come up with scenarios where there are no clear answers, no definite wrong or right thing to do. Any worldview that says there is always a right or wrong is dangerous.”
I’m still thinking about my conversation with Lili days after it took place. I remember something she told us back in the State Library about book-to-film adaptations; the first time I ever met her, actually. She had illustrated how films could show things that books had to describe, picking the scene from The Return of the King when the beacons are lit as Gondor calls for aid. “In the book, it’s just a list of names,” I remember her telling us, “but in the film, it’s this spectacular visual moment.” It’s little wonder that she has risen to become such a successful and beloved author – she has a knack for making things stick with you long after the moment, a fact to which anyone has read her books can attest.
