We love learning more about our contributors, and an interview seemed like a fun way to hear more about the writers and artists we publish, so we gave them a choice of questions to answer. We hope you also enjoy hearing more about the artists and their works. Read on and check out issue 27 for work from K.M Naughton.
If you’re part of a workshop group or other creative community, tell us about it! How did it form, what do you all do, and how does it help your creative process?
There are three main writing groups in my life and they are all very different!
a. There’s the writing group we formed in November 2013 at our local library. Started out as a weekly write-in, and then November ended and... we just kept showing up. The library staff adopted us. It’s more a “group of writers” — we don’t workshop our writing; we talk about writing (we do occasionally actually write). “Laughing so hard that you can’t breathe” is a frequent and contagious malady for the Knox writers.
b. There’s the weekly online Zoom group, Written Off, a small crew of Melbourne writers who formed first in the pandemic and then grew over time, started by one very determined man. That’s a structured writing session: half an hour of chatting and catching up, then fifteen minutes with a drabble prompt as a warm up. We share the drabbles, take a break, then come back and work with a main prompt that someone has put together. There’s a rule: no apologising or negative talk about oneself or one’s writing. It’s amazing what a difference that makes.
Without this group, I wouldn’t have written the piece I wrote here – this is how I started writing shorter pieces, in an attempt to finish a piece from the prompt. It’s also how I started experimenting across genres and voices.
c. Last but definitely not least is the Melbourne writing Discord server that originally grew from the November challenge, nicknamed the “SS Gentle Cutlass.” We’ve been through some rough waters, but we’re now sailing calmer seas, with a wonderful, inclusive and supportive crew. In April and July we run a month-long collaborative writing exercise. This taught me how to collaborate and how to edit pieces while preserving someone else’s distinctive voice; it also taught me to embrace utter absurdity with a spontaneous live writing event where each chunk is shaped by the reactions and in-jokes of the audience.
We share writing resources and open markets, and without that, I wouldn’t have found out about After Happy Hour!
What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
It’s a mix. Most of my short pieces are often born from the Written Off prompts, which means I have at most 20 minutes for them to come together. I usually know if I can finish a draft in that time – there’s a shape to them, a feeling of how to balance the narrative. Scratches had a concept, an opening image, and a sense of creeping unreality and fear.
For longer stories, I tend to have waypoints, critical scenes that have unfolded in my head. The discovery is figuring out how the story travels between those points. I learn about my world and my characters by writing them. “Nothing in this world exists until my characters trip over it” has mostly served me well. It does result in a need for continuity edits...
What do you do in the rest of your life and how does that connect and/or conflict with your creative life?
I often feel like my life is chaos. For the past four years, I’ve been focused on rebuilding our house in the woods after it was cut in half by a catastrophic storm. For the past two years I’ve been reconnecting with my music after years of neglect, writing songs, playing guitar, singing.
Professionally – mostly via short-term casual contracts – I’m a marine invertebrate biologist, a taxonomist, a genetics PhD and a dive guide. Science asks, “What if...?” and it’s the same question I ask when I write. There’s a sense of discovery, of wonder (especially if I end up on a research voyage for four weeks).
Disaster recovery is exhausting on every level. Sometimes finding the energy to write felt impossible; sometimes I was physically too sore to pick up my guitar. But the stories, the songs, and the sea – they help to make sense of everything else.
They remind me to be curious.
What is your white whale?
Marine invertebrate biologist, I said.
(did I pick that question entirely so I could make that joke?)
(...yes, yes I did.)
What is your favourite vice? What are you drinking at happy hour, in a literal or metaphorical sense?
Probably coffee is my favourite vice. I’m from Melbourne, after all -- we have a stereotype to maintain! But at happy hour, if I’m having a drink, I’m probably having whiskey on the rocks. I’m a lightweight, so it’s nice to have a drink I can just slowly sip and enjoy over a couple of hours.
I’m especially partial to an Irish whiskey called “Writer’s Tears” but maybe that’s just nominative determinism.