Our interview with 2020 Barbara Jefferis Award winner Lucy Treloar

1.12.20

Last month, in our first-ever online ceremony, we were delighted to announce Lucy Treloar as the winner of the 2020 Barbara Jefferis Award for her novel, Wolfe Island.

Of Wolfe Island, the judges said:

‘This magnificent novel is set on a fictional sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay. Kitty Hawke’s life has been embedded there but her attachment to this place, as woman and artist, has caused her to live apart from her husband Hartford Darkness who dwells on the mainland where their two children were schooled. The archetypal role of a Wolf/Wolfe is expressed literally in the island’s name, and in the fact that her dog (named Girl), and constant companion, is a wolf. Now in later life, the arrival of her granddaughter Catalina (Cat) with boyfriend Josh, and two siblings and refugees, Luis and Alejandra, disturbs Kitty’s solitude, and heralds disturbing change. 

The weaving together of Kitty, her daughter Claudie and granddaughter Cat’s lives, the fractured world affected by climate change and the issue of US treatment of fugitives from the south, together with the ‘makings’ Kitty creates from ‘found objects’ on the mudflats near her home (which she calls ‘mudlarking’) is the recipe for a complex and tantalising soup of story. Kitty’s guilt as the mother of a resentful daughter, Claudie, and a dead son, Tobermory, adds another resonance to this tale which is also founded on metaphors of mothering and female choices and relationships.’

We sat down with Lucy to discuss her novel, the difficult decisions women can be forced to make to pursue a creative life, and her writing and publishing journey.

Why did you feel compelled to write the story of Wolfe Island, to write Kitty’s story? 

Honestly, I am not totally sure. It was a photograph, at first, that captured me. I was trawling around online, not doing something I was supposed to be doing, and came across this photograph of a house that took up the entire area of an island in the Chesapeake Bay: a big white weatherboard house. It was very raw, and elemental, and theatrical, and I just thought: ‘Oh my next book’, as easy as that. 

And instantly, I could see a woman standing in the upstairs window looking out sort of pondering the loss of her world. I don’t really know where characters come from but she had a very raw, elemental quality herself. I suppose she had a wolfish quality, as the name of the island suggests. And so her character arrived fairly fully formed. 

People say that you’ve basically got one story as a writer, you always write the same book and you have to learn to accept that. I wonder if my story is ‘solitary woman lives solitary life and finds it restful, but is forced out of it.’ [Laughs] It sort of makes sense. I find solitude very peaceful and slightly resent things that drag me out of it, though I love catching up with friends and so on. I don’t really know where it comes from, but there’s something in me that’s interested in that, and wonders how you manage solitude with the demands of society, including your own family.

Wolfe Island delves into those expectations of family and society about motherhood, and the difficult choices you have to make as a woman who may want to pursue creative work. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

I think it was partly that I was writing about how women find that space for themselves to do that work, to really pay attention to the creative impulse. And it’s not especially easy, even if your family is extremely accommodating, because you do get fairly obsessed with ideas. 

In a way, Wolfe Island is a little bit about me writing my previous book [Salt Creek]. I feel like I don’t remember much from family life from that year. I was upstairs at my desk writing and then I'd come downstairs and I'd be thinking about writing the whole time. You’re not being selfish deliberately but there is a kind of stubbornness that drives you when you're creating and that is the thing that you are really focussing on. I felt that quite strongly. I guess in a way Kitty is being an art monster. But also, good on her!

Yes! Despite the fact that Kitty risked her relationship with her family by choosing to stay on Wolfe Island and not return to the mainland, that choice felt necessary. It felt authentic to who Kitty was as a character.

I felt that too. I am not writing polemic, I am writing about this person and this person is doing that thing because that is who she is. And it's not my job as a writer to judge it, but to present the truth of that person, and to acknowledge that maybe she did have mixed feelings about that, but that she was going to do it anyway.

Was it challenging for you to write her as a character because of some of the ‘controversial’ or difficult decisions she makes?

It wasn't difficult. The difficult bit with her, or the bit that took a little time, was finding out what her voice was, so I could hear it. I’ve written a couple of first person novels and I have the character’s voice in my head all the time when I'm awake. They accompany me through life, narrating my life in a way. As soon as I had that, and I could feel what she was like as a character I was completely comfortable with her, but she did surprise me. A lovely moment when you're writing a character is when they do something that you strongly disapprove of, or you know you wouldn't do yourself. You think ‘Oh great, that is a separate person from me.’ It’s such a great feeling.

It sounds like you might be a ‘pantser’, not a ‘plotter’. Do you like to get a feel for a story or character, do you like to start with structure?

I am very strongly not a plotter. I have these terrible moments when I’m writing where I’m just wallowing around. With Wolfe Island I wrote at least 30 pages about vegetable gardening in a salinated environment and I got to the end of it and thought: 'Wow, that’s really boring!' It’d taken me a really long time to write that material and I felt like I needed to know what the possibilities were for gardening vegetables in that kind of setting. But it was trimmed back to three sentences. That’s the kind of thing I’d end up doing, and that would not be untypical. 

I write out of sequence too. It’s patchworky. While I am doing that I tell myself it will be fine, I just need to lay the patches out on the floor somewhere and piece them together. But there is a terrible moment of reckoning, you can’t just mush them up against each other, you have to make them all connect seamlessly. That’s really hard work.

Do you have a favourite moment from the book that wasn’t hard work? That was a pleasure to write?

Yes, there were some bits that came out sort of easily. I don’t really know why. In Wolfe Island there's this horrible man, a man Kitty shoots in the back of the leg, and his dialogue just poured out. I could hear him so clearly. That, and the final scenes of the book. It wasn’t especially fast to write, but it came out the way I wanted it to.

Have you been at all surprised by the reception of your work? I know you are endlessly asked whether this book is a climate change book...

I was pretty shocked when a few people described Kitty as unlikeable. I felt incredibly protective of her, she felt like family to me. The climate fiction label that was quickly applied was interesting. I think we could more often normalise depictions of climate change in fiction; depictions of climate affected landscapes shouldn't necessarily mean that your book is a climate fiction. I'm a landscape-aware writer, but I'm not especially interested in focusing on climate change or in writing climate fiction. For me, the idea of a disintegrating landscape is a useful metaphor to work with. I am much more interested in character and landscape than in writing ideas-driven novels. The book is regarded as a dystopia too, but it's a dystopian world that we live in, in many ways. At the time of writing, Wolfe Island was a slightly dialed up reality, but it's becoming realer by the day.

In Wolfe Island, the landscape and what happens to it acts as a mirror to what happens between the characters, socially. There’s a slow erosion happening on Wolfe Island, and a slow erosion of the world the characters live in. The sense of dread about the water rising and swallowing the island is the same sense of dread one feels following the story and fearing for Kitty, Cat, Alejandra’s lives.

Absolutely all of those things. And the geopolitical situation too: countries fragmenting and tides of people moving through the landscape. It’s a world in flux where the old order is dissolving. In a way I see Wolfe Island as a Western. Westerns are about new frontiers, and old frontiers falling away, and people moving out into new worlds, and I see our world in that position now. We’re in a liminal stage. We can see that things are changing, and we don't know exactly how that's going to impact us long-term. All that wateriness and the dissolving is exactly what you’re talking about. It’s about people, what happens to them, and how they react at such times.

What was the research process like for this book? I know you visited the Chesapeake Bay area a few times, but were there other elements to your preparation for writing the book? Any particular books you read?

I read a few things: The Island Out of Time, Deer Hunting with Jesus, Vanishing Islands, Nomadland. There’s a lot of information I wanted to know: how long the islands have been dissolving for? What do people do on them? How do they spend their time? How did and do they adjust to rising water levels? But I stopped reading any personal accounts because the imagined reality of my book began dissolving as soon as I did that. I read Chesapeake Bay cookbooks too – Crockett’s Crab Dip, Shrimp Boulettes, Peach Supreme Pie – the food is so different! I could feel the people behind the recipes.

I did a lot of the writing here, but the most important research was being there and driving around and taking lots of photographs and getting the feeling of being in those places. And there were all the notes I wrote trying to capture feelings of being in an abandoned house or isolated landscape or getting lost in the middle of marshland. I wanted to capture that sense of beingness, which is so much about the kind of person that Kitty is. She wants not to be too conscious of herself. So when it came to writing, that was what I really wanted to communicate on the page: letting myself go and exploring that. 

I had no idea what I was doing. After I came home I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and began to understand. Solnit writes about the importance of writing in uncertainty, leaving ‘the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark’. She says, ‘That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.’ It’s incredibly true for me, but it’s not always comfortable.

How important do you think reading is to writing?

Crucial, absolutely crucial. It is not only about developing a sense of the rhythm of language, and the possibilities of language but also about developing a sense of what works for you as a writer, of understanding the 'rightness’ of a book’s trajectory. I don’t think you get that unless you read a lot. 

Reading as a writer is different from reading as a reader. All the time you’re thinking: ‘How did you do that?’ You’re looking behind the facade of the writing and trying to work out what mechanisms are being used, and why you, as a reader, are being affected in a particular way.

Do you find it difficult to get lost in books as a writer then?

I do. I adored reading for so many years, I was completely transported by it. I loved it in an innocent way, and I feel like I’ve lost that innocence. But there are some writers I read and I can just sink into their writing. Every now and then I can turn off that conscious thing and get lost in admiration.

You said in your Barbara Jefferis Award shortlist interview that you’d thought that if you were a real writer it would be easy, but then realised that writing is work like anything else – could you tell us a bit more about that?

I tried to write a couple of novels in my 20s and, looking back, they weren't bad ideas for novels. If I’d known writing was work and really committed to the grind of it, I probably would have written some novels then. But I’d write ten pages of these novels and look at them and think: ‘What are you thinking of?’ There’s something deeply humiliating about early writing, and I just could not face that humiliation.

There used to be this idea that something was not as valuable if you had to work for it: if it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t for you. That’s not a useful approach to life. No one cares if it’s easy for you, they care about the result. So when I went to RMIT, I did the writing and editing course and I really stuck at it. I have this strong feeling that writing saved me. When you’re in class with everyone else, people whose writing you love, and they’re worrying about their writing too, you understand that it’s normal. Writing is hard - it’s hard work.

After publishing two acclaimed novels, what do you know now that you wish you’d known before you started the writing/publishing process?

It would be great if there were a little manual of things to expect! So, for instance, if you don't hear back from your agent one hour after you've submitted your manuscript it doesn't mean she doesnt like it, that just means she’s an extremely busy person! [Laughs] I’ve been very lucky with my writing friends - it's really worth having a group of writer friends that you can go out with and share your worries, and say ‘My publisher hasn’t contacted me and I sent the email yesterday – what do you think it means?’ You need your support group. 

The other thing I’d say is, it's worth having a strategy and goals in mind that you're aiming for. For me the aim was to get some listings in some short story competitions, to get some publications. That’s the material you take to an agent. It’s your shopfront. You’re saying: ‘People have taken me seriously as a writer before.’ Be a little bit strategic about that instead of just sinking everything into a novel straight away. Have this other material that you’re developing running alongside. It’s getting a name at the beginning, a profile, something to put on a writer’s CV. This is a job – a wonderful job – and you’re applying for it.

 

Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar is published by Picador. Available from all good bookstores.