“The more you torture your characters, the more people are going to worry for them,” Margo Lanagan says with a chuckle. Certainly, subjecting a female protagonist to a hot, slow death in a tar pit has done wonders for her literary career.
This is the scenario of Singing My Sister Down, the harrowing yet tender, award-winning short story from Lanagan’s acclaimed collection Black Juice.
Between them, this year Black Juice and Singing My Sister Down have won two Aurealis awards, the nation’s leading prizes for fantasy, science fiction and children’s fiction, and two Ditmars, a respected prize for local science fiction writers.
Last month in the US they carried off two World Fantasy Awards — a keenly fought competition for fantasy writers from across the globe. Days later, Lanagan was awarded a once-in-a-career fellowship — worth $80,000 over two years — by the Australia Council.
“It’s been a monster,” she says of 2005. She speaks so softly, I strain to hear her over the clash and scrape of chairs and crockery in the State Library of NSW’s cafe.
“I’ve put out a fair few books and you do hope each will be the one that will be the breakout book.”
Ironically, Black Juice marked the first time “I’d taken my eye off that ball. I [told myself] whatever happens, happens. I should just concentrate on the work.”
Lanagan, 45 and from Sydney, is best known as a fantasy and young adult writer. John Marsden called her gritty, realist teen novels The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly “two of the best teenage novels ever published in Australia”.
But Black Juice, her second collection of short stories, has been her breakout book, the one that has transcended the confines of its genre and made critics and awards judges sit up and take notice.
A critic for The Australian, Michael Sharkey, described Lanagan as being “in a class of her own” and Black Juice as “one of the most imaginative and attractive collections of short stories to appear in more than a decade”.
The collection, published last year, has won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for young adult fiction and was short-listed for the main fiction prize in the 2005 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, a rare achievement for a genre writer.
It was also short-listed in the 2005 Queensland Premier’s and Children’s Book Council of Australia awards.
Where did Lanagan research the brilliantly unsettling Singing My Sister Down, in which a young woman submits to tribal law and sinks to her death in the aforementioned tar pit, while her family bids her a long, anguished goodbye? It turns out she got the idea from the SBS documentary series Global Village.
Another of her Black Juice stories offers a bleak, futuristic vision of an environmentally toxic Australia, while her teen fiction has taken on tough subjects, such as a best friend dying. Is she drawn to the darker side of life?
“Satan makes for a more interesting hero than a saint,” she jokes.
With her fiction for teens, “I didn’t want to write something that was tame or preachy”. She also wanted to tackle the “messiness of life. I wanted to show people struggling and making decisions they have to live with because children do that all the time”.
She is working on a third collection of short stories and a novel, and says the Australia Council fellowship will allow her to move from being an “almost full-time writer” to a full-time one.
When asked to describe her novel-in-progress, she admits that “it happens to have just fallen apart in my hands … It’s in crisis”.
A mother of two teenage boys, she yearns to approach her fiction writing as she does her part-time work writing technical material for food packaging and banking companies: meeting deadlines and “completely knocking off”. Instead, she finds herself “going off to the library or my writing room and carving pieces off myself all day”.
For all her self-flagellation, a robust pragmatism has played a key role in Lanagan’s 20-year writing career.
In her 20s she defected from poetry to prose partly because she wanted to write “more generously” and partly because she wanted a bigger audience.
In her 30s she became a successful young adult writer, then “I got into fantasy because I wanted a wider audience because the market in Australia’s so small … I really did want to make a living as a writer”. (Black Juice has been sold to Britain and the US.)
In the 1980s she churned out teen romances for a flat fee. She’d toss off 100-page bodice-rippers in two weeks, tops. “That is how I taught myself to stay sitting until the 10 pages [a day] were written.”
Lanagan keeps up the 10-page a day habit, even when she hits the wall.
“I’m in a plagued spot at the moment,” she confesses, though she also nominates 2005 as the high-water mark of her career.
It seems that this writer who has cracked the code of the crossover book can be as hard on herself as she is on her characters.
Source: The Australian, Written By: Rosemary Neill