Do you love the creepy and strange, the howling and mysterious, the disturbing and shadowed (or sun-bleached)? Do you want to distil and brew your own range of Gothic tales? Writer and illustrator Kathleen Jennings teaches a crash course on harnessing the delights and terrors of the Australian Gothic. You will mine the visuals and themes of the Gothic for ideas, twist them into new shapes, experiment with shifting place and motif, and begin outlining short stories. This workshop is suitable for new and emerging writers who want to try writing Australian Gothic stories, and also for established writers who would like to try some rapid idea generation and variation in the Gothic mode. This version of the workshop focusses on writing techniques; however illustrator-artists are welcome to attend and draw their notes and stories.
NOTES AND EVENTS: Darryl will be on the Brisbane Goes Wild panel at the Brisbane Writers Festival this Sunday 14 May (with Coen Hird and Margaret Cook, chaired by Amanda Niehaus). Very unfortunately for me it’s at the same time as my Australian Gothic writing workshop — it does look like such a good panel. And on this Friday 12 May I’m giving an artist floor talk at the QUT Art Museum (Gardens Point) about the silhouettes I’ve done for them.
Through the good offices of Fiona Stager of Avid Reader, I met Darryl Jones, urban ecologist, who was looking for an illustrator for his urban ecology memoir, Curlews on Vulture Street.
Here is a very fast timelapse of the cutting process!
Timelapse!
Curlews on Vulture Street is hilarious, charming and fascinating, and I was eager to illustrate it. It was about birds, which I enjoy illustrating (the compact bodies, the fluid movement, the personality, the variety). It was all about the places and species I knew, many of which (brush turkeys and curlews) were occupying my garden while I sketched through the manuscript. I wanted to read the book anyway, for my own writing research for a project I will tell you about soon! And it presented some artistic challenges.
First, Curlews is definitely not fantasy, which is my usual field — especially for silhouette work. I love the fairy-tale connections of silhouettes, which I drew on (for the fairy-tale/Gothic adjacencies) in Flyaway. (I’ve written more about illustrating Flyaway over on Tor.com — also, for those in the USA, the US edition is now out in paperback and at the moment it’s on sale on Kindle).
Second, I’m not a science illustrator — I’m a narrative illustrator. Story and movement take precedence over accuracy.
But Darryl was keen to keep an element of that storybook quality, and I wanted to play with that line between accuracy and excitement. I had to be true to his writing (even removing elements from the sketches when they got edited out), and create identifiable birds, while also framing and tinting the story. and scientific delight. So there was a pleasing puzzle for me: how to keep my style while keeping the sense of wonder thoroughly non-fictional.
Third, the structure of a non-fiction book isn’t at all like a novel. Instead of braiding imagery into a long story-structure, foreshadowing and complementing it, I would be highlighting and framing incidents and episodes, with varied locations and casts. But the pictures would have to work together to create a handsome, coherent book.
I decided the best way to keep a through-line with a hint of ornament and enchantment was to decide on the composition first. I sent Darryl suggestions, and for the chapter headers we settled on a whiplash S-shape, set into a defined rectangle.
The shape, together with floral details, echoes 19th-century design. But on and around that, I could balance specific details: the sail-shaped tail of a turkey, the coils of cane chairs and spiral notebooks and cages.
It was a joy to illustrate, from puzzling out how to get 3d wire netting to ‘read’ clearly in silhouette, to the freedom of cutting out a sequence of tiny stand-alone birds to function as dividers within the chapters.
Here’s part of the frontispiece, ready for framing. This is my favourite illustration.
Preparing the frontispiece for framing
And it genuinely is a delightful, funny book — I gave a copy to my dad for Father’s Day, and he almost cried with laughter, recognising birds and situations.
These are thoughts on voice from my short story reading notes. I will refine them further in future — they are not exhaustive, and I have more observations to make!
Summary
A strong voice can frame and structure a story. A strong story frame or conceit can also leverage a distinctive voice (enhance, distill, excuse, focus…).
These calendar pages are made possible by patrons, who get them a little bit early, along with alternative colourways, and other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel. It is also supported by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
May is my birthday month, so books it is!
When you are small and wish you could actually get inside books, the obvious advice is always to become a writer. But writers spend most of their time reading the same book (which they themselves wrote) 97 times. I love writing and wouldn’t change it, but the closest I’ve gotten to the feeling of climbing into a fictional world is illustrating everyone else’s.
(Patrons get a few extra colourways, including, this time, orange flowers, and a turquoise-and-white version)
Here is how the design began in my notebook. I wanted to play around with the style of the Cold Hands illustration, but see if I could do a half-drop repeat. Which I nearly got right. It works, but took longer constructing the pattern file than it should have. Lessons were learned.
Here is the sketch (left) next to the inks (right), drawn with a dip pen (Hunt Crowquill 102 nib and Winsor & Newton ink, as usual).
The multicolour version of the design is now up on Redbubble on cases, scarves, notebooks, shirts, etc. Spoonflower will follow (there are a few new designs up on Spoonflower now, and I will post about those soon.
Supporting the calendar:
The calendar is a work of joy, but it also takes a lot of time. Here are some ways to help make it possible:
You can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month).
Or tip the artist (me) a few dollars through Ko-Fi:ko-fi.com/tanaudel. Either is greatly appreciated!
There are more lovely things people have said about Flyaway on Tor.com here, and links to quite a few reviews (and a few more blog posts and interviews) on the blog here.
In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers—a note that makes her question memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure.
A beguiling story that proves that gothic delights and uncanny family horror can live—and even thrive—under a burning sun, Flyaway introduces readers to Bettina Scott, whose search for the truth throws her into tales of eerie dogs, vanished schools, cursed monsters, and enchanted bottles. Flyaway enchants you with the sly, beautiful darkness of Karen Russell and a world utterly its own.
This post is a roughly tidied version of my April 2023 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (linking to where they are first mentioned). Finishing early this month because I have to prepare for a workshop in Gympie on Friday 28 April and get some PhD paperwork in!
And I should mention, my novella Flyaway, while one story, contains several almost-stand-alone short stories, and comes out in US paperback this month!
Fascinations and encroaching interests this month include:
Big Ideas vs actual theme
Compressing a story shape
Innocence and experience (vs story structures)
The interrogation of objectivity
Stories that trap the protagonist
Passivity and flat affect
Food and AI
Competence
Background and related posts:
Each dot point is one possible three-mood shape — one way of reading the shape of the story. I use “mood” very broadly.ee Story Shapes — Three-Mood Stories for detail.
How I select these stories. (At the moment I’m working through the Locus 2022 recommended list and catching up on The Sunday Morning Transport stories.)
This observation journal activity is closely related to The Caudwell Manoeuvre, an approach I enjoy tremendously, and it’s a nice way to play with patterns I’ve observed (whether they delight or exasperate me), and things in others’ work that I’ve wanted to run off and play with (see e.g. five things to steal). It can also reveal and clarify opinions about the source examples.
Choose some characters/roles you’ve seen/read (or written/drawn) frequently. E.g. I’ve been reading a lot of old murder mysteries, so there’ve been many satisfied academic sleuths and desperate suburban housewives hiding a variety of secrets.
Pick two. This could be a frequently matched pair (grim loner father figure and recently acquired plucky child for whom they are responsible; talented ingenue and mysterious mentor), or you could choose two at random.
For each, make a few dot-points listing their distinguishing characteristics (floral housedress? taciturn? collects fine glassware?).
Now, switch the descriptions. You can do this a few ways:
One is to simply move the dot-points to the other character (the housewife is exceptionally well-read in a narrow field, wears rather shabby tweed, and is on gently-scolding terms with the local teenagers).
Another way is to drop the stereotypical person (the actor, as it were) into the opposite role (the wiry physical comedian becomes the hero to the large taciturn sidekick). Or try both.
Bonus round 1: Sketch (a paragraph or drawing) a scene of one of the new characters in action.
Bonus round 2: What happens to the idea and the original roles? Are the new ideas comic, tragic, unchanged (and why)? Which pull into new territory? Which deepen your understanding of something? Which might it be fun to follow into a new story?
Example:
I was thinking about this at the time because of the neat little role reversals in Baby Done. But on this page I was riffing on the “kept woman” and “businessman” roles from The Eye of Love (a book that comes out of the gates playing with expectations), and with Holmes-ish and Watsonian characters. One of the fun reminders from the latter was how much kindness and humanity is in (book) Holmes, vs many later interpretations. Might it be the case that it is Watson who closely observes conventionality and applies it, while in fact it is Holmes who is teaching him about humanity?
There’s also a note there that I wanted to take some elements further, perhaps by adding an interesting voice. Voice is an element that has been coming up again more recently (not least in the short story reading posts), so I will have more to say about it!
Other observations
Here’s the full pages, in case you want to zoom in and see what was happening that day.
This is when I realised I needed blue-tinted not red-tinted sunglasses, if I wanted to continue to derive joy from the world with them on.
Crows bearing gifts
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TV sketching! And a new season of Midsomer Murders has commenced…
But first, an older episode: “Death and Dust”, from season 10:
It’s always fascinating watching extras, but particularly when they’re all suited up in blue scene-of-crime suits. Such high contrast with almost everything — particularly the more bucolic Midsomer settings — and really interesting to block in visually.
There were so many animals in this episode I convinced myself the solution would be something to do with them.
The really striking buildings are tempting to draw, but the camera doesn’t linger long enough! You can’t rely on just capturing a sense of movement in the same way as with people. (Well, you can, but that’s not usually what I want to convey with the architecture.)
And intriguing lighting can also be tricky to capture at this speed — but I keep trying.
I’m pleased with that red teapot above — it’s similar to one of my favourite pieces in the illustrations I did for the QUT Art Museum, .
Season 23 Episode 1: The Blacktrees Prophecy!
Half my friends are thrilled there’s a new season, the other half sheepishly admit to never having watched an episode of a show which they’ve definitely joked about and which began in 1997.
Anyway: more blue suits!
Tough as it is to capture anything recognisable, I do still enjoy trying to get down interesting compositions and scenery.
Also this episode had a bonus orange suit to draw.
Kathleen Jennings 