TatTle – #2

The monthly newsletter from Tall and Tiny Tales

G’day!

Welcome to the second issue of TatTle.

I was wondering what to write this month and thought I might look at a specific aspect of my stories.

I’ve learned a lot from twenty months of writing fiction: things that twenty-six years of writing schoolbooks didn’t teach me. One of the lessons is the importance of place.

A sense of place

I come from a small country, where there are footpaths between villages; towns are rarely more than a morning’s brisk walk apart; country lanes are narrow and winding. A lot of my youth was spent walking the south Hertfordshire countryside, getting to know its hedgerows, copses and spinneys; its footpaths and bridleways; its rivers, reservoirs and flooded gravel pits; its modest hills. They were places of magic and mystery to me, though probably they were rather banal, scruffy and urbanised in reality.

When I grew up, left home and went out into the world I took the same fascination with quiet places and minuscule discoveries to Yorkshire and Lancashire, the Pennines, Dales and Lakes; to the windswept strands of Germany’s Baltic coast and the castled hills of the Black Forest. To the winter streets of Reykjavík. Even in Australia with its long, straight roads, big landscapes and vast shorelines, my home for the last 20 years, I still haven’t quite lost that myopic, pedestrian perspective.

My way to absorb a place is to walk and, well, basically potter about. It gives me time to think, muse, dream. Even ordinary places have their magic, if you let them speak to you.

So now, when I start to write a new work of fiction, it tends to be inspired by a place. The location might suggest a protagonist: I may see quite clearly what sort of person they are, maybe their occupation, maybe an issue that they’re trying to work through – or to ignore. Other times, the trip might furnish just a tiny spark of an idea – which needs something else to provide the fuel: maybe a personal experience from many years ago. Just stepping outside my daily reality for a few days is always beneficial to my creativity.

A research trip to the Yarra Ranges

This week Susan and I are on a beautiful 30-acre bush property in the forested hills above Warburton, in the Yarra Ranges. Here’s the view from the front garden.

And here’s a map of the property:

In the shady garden, king parrots and crimson rosellas gather for a feed, while wonga pigeons and a little black chook peck around the foot of the bird feeder. The owner’s three donkeys bray from the adjacent paddock. Smoke rises blue-grey from our chimney, and down in the valley the mist hangs white and heavy over the Yarra.

Our host has owned the property for 30 years and has a rich fund of local stories. Some of them might find their way, in fictionalised form, into future Tall and Tiny Tales. There was the Catholic women’s quilting circle who refused to leave the property during a bushfire. There’s the poor guy further up the valley who built a concrete fortress of a house to survive the anticipated nuclear Armageddon, but met an unexpected end while installing a radio antenna on his roof. Then there’s the pack of wild dogs roaming the hills … and the primary-school teacher and troupe of little walkers who wandered oblivious into a long-planned shoot, having ignored the ‘path closed’ signs. The shoot had to be called off, of course, and the dogs are out there still.

I spend a morning walking through temperate rainforest in the national park uphill of the property. The trunks of mountain ash rise like the pillars of a great cathedral, forty metres from the damp treefern understorey. The forest echoes with the calls of whipbird, shrikethrush and kookaburra. A soft, fine rain is falling on the mossy path. The air on the forest floor is still, although the canopy far overhead is buffeted by strong gusts. All around me is the sound of water: trickling, dripping, rushing.

The walk hints at other stories. There’s the hand-painted sign on a neighbour’s boundary fence: ‘RULE .303: TRESPASSERS KEEP OUT’, for example, or the eerie ruined shack with the graffitied walls.

I planned this trip to begin research for a longer project, a historical novel, but I’m hopeful that I’ll go home with some ideas for short stories too … or possibly instead, as I feel the novel’s concept slipping from my grasp. Too many improbabilities stacked up make a rickety structure. Maybe I need to pull it apart, start again from a stronger foundation, or build a different structure entirely? No matter: research is rarely wasted.

Places and stories

I can map almost every story I’ve written over the last 20 months to a place I’ve visited. In most cases, the bare bones of the story occurred to me either while I was there or upon getting home. Here are the places and stories here on Substack:

• Port Fairy and the Shipwreck Coast (Astrid; Writer’s Retreat)

• The Otways (Badger Hill; Cast Ashore)

• Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula (Down on Corio Bay¹)

• The central Victorian goldfields (Jacky Winter²)

• The Yarra Ranges and the Acheron Valley (Lethe; Acheron)

• The Victorian High Country (Naming Calls)

• The western slopes of the Blue Mountains above Mudgee (Forked Creek³)

Most are sparsely populated rural or coastal areas: places that are still quite wild, where nature is strongly felt.

The stories that took place there would not have turned out the same way in other surroundings. I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that the place is a key character in each of the stories I’ve listed above. It might be benign, aloof and austere, or malign: a refuge, a challenge … or a trap.

Book news 📚

Minds Shine Bright Confidence Anthology

My short story ‘Gone South’ has been chosen for the anthology Confidence, which will be published in October. It’s a collection of 46 short stories, flash fiction, poetry and screenplays from writers around the world, each with its own take on the theme. To judge by the author readings at the online awards night last week, it will be a book full of diverse and wonderful discoveries for the reader. Details on how to order it in next month’s TatTle.

Congratulations to the winners: overall winner Françoise Thornton-Smith for her short story Red Bikini; category winners Kevin Dyer and Michael Leach (poetry), Poppy Brazier (flash fiction), Jed Stanley (script) and Alexandra Svoboda (short story). It’s an honour for my little story to be in such company.

My thanks to Amanda Scotney and the team at Minds Shine Bright for organising this excellent competition.

Patreon

How would you feel about getting my short stories and novellas in an eBook / pdf format? We’re talking whole stories here, laid out in book format for Kindle and other apps, not weekly episodes. No more trying to remember what the hell happened last week …

This is an idea that I’m kicking around for a new Patreon site. I like the idea of presenting my stories in a form which feels more finished, more published, than this storyletter, but still freer and more spontaneous than formal publication.

This would be in addition to Tall and Tiny Tales, not instead of it. There would be special deals and free downloads for my Substack subscribers.

Published story collection 2023

I’m planning a published collection of my short stories and novellas for 2023. It will be around 320 pages, paperback and eBook, and will feature some stories from Tall and Tiny Tales along with new material. Details to follow later in the year.

The Substack app

If you don’t already have the free Substack app, it may be worth downloading it. It could make your reading, listening, commenting and browsing experience on Tall and Tiny Tales and other Substack newsletters better.

Some of you will be well aware of the wider Substack community, some may not. There are thousands of newsletters here, by individual writers and writer communities. There’s fiction and poetry, a vast array of non-fiction, podcasts, art, workshops – all kinds of creative projects.

I’ve barely had time to look around Substack properly myself, but it’s definitely worth exploring. Some newsletters require a paid subscription, but most have a lot of free content.

Charity of the month: Lighthouse Foundation

The Lighthouse Foundation is a Melbourne-based charity providing homes and therapeutic care to children and young people impacted by long-term neglect, abuse and homelessness. By creating a caring community, they give homeless kids and foster families a place to belong, heal and thrive.

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That’s all folks! Happy reading! 📖👀✨

1. My second Friday Novella, scheduled for October onwards.

2. My third Friday Novella, scheduled for early 2023.

3. Coming up soon on Tall and Tiny Tales.