Alumni Interview: Felicity Castagna

by Diana Jenkins

Varuna has plenty of reasons to celebrate the 2014 PM’s Literary Awards, with alumni Felicity Castagna and Gabrielle Carey each taking home a lucrative prize. Precious time at Varuna assisted both authors in completing their award-winning works, so it’s with enormous pleasure I congratulate them both on their achievement. It seems only fitting to kick off the 2015 Monthly Features by chatting with these two Varuna authors. Here now is my interview with Felicity and I’ll be talking to Gabrielle in time for next month.

DJ: Felicity Castagna, welcome to the Varuna interview suite. You're a resident of the Parramatta Artist Studios - tell us about that and its advantages as a working environment.

FC: Parramatta Artist Studios is an initiative of Parramatta Council to provide studio space, exhibition space and promotional opportunities to artists in the CBD of Parramatta. I have an office there along with about 12 others who are mostly visual artists. It’s the first time I’ve ever had an office and it’s been really helpful. I get to work in a really supportive environment with a network of practising artists I can exchange ideas with. It’s also a really important mental space for me, particularly as a mother, getting out of the chaos and obligations of home and being able to work and to have set working hours.

DJ: Having personally lost all possible workspace first to one child and now another, all I can say is, that sounds wonderful. I can also imagine working alongside visual artists to be particularly stimulating. Now, The Incredible Here and Now is Giramondo's first ever YA title - what do you think persuaded the publishers that your novel was a risk worth taking?

FC: It was a big risk and I don’t think either my publisher [nor I] knew if we could pull it off but, fortunately, Giramondo is a publisher that takes risks. Even though they have not published YA before, in some ways it fits really well with their existing catalogue of books because it is highly literary and experimental for the genre.

DJ: Your protagonist is a young man dealing with a personal tragedy as well as the usual challenges of being a teenage boy. Were there particular elements to writing from a male perspective that appealed to you? How did Michael's character evolve?

FC: I spent seven years teaching in boys’ high schools and I still feel like I can hear their voices very strongly. I spent a long time studying them: what makes them think, what motivates them, how they move across a schoolyard. They were like a completely different species to me when I first started teaching, but slowly over time I came to understand how complex and beautiful the lives of young men are. I think teenage boys have this entirely different rhythm in the way that they talk and think and hold themselves that I wanted to capture on the page.

DJ: You've mentioned in other interviews that you wanted Parramatta (in Sydney's western suburbs) to be a character in its own right - how did you go about executing this vision? What elements in particular were you hoping to capture?

FC: The fact that the book is told in the vignette form helped a lot with this. The vignette form is a kind of micro short story that captures a specific moment and place in time. Initially, the book didn’t really have a plot at all, it just had all of these small places around Parramatta that I really wanted to capture and the intimacies of the small things that happen there which people just don’t notice: the break-dancers in the McDonald’s carpark at night; kids drooling in front of the Coke factory; the drinking parties at the old convict graveyards. It’s in these ordinary moments that communities come to life and you realise how extraordinary they can be.

DJ: What were some of the chief challenges you faced portraying this part of Sydney and this time in a young man's life?

FC: Young men don’t wear their feelings as outwardly as young women do, but that doesn’t make them any less emotional or sensitive. That’s a difficult thing to portray, because you have to show what they are feeling (but not saying) in the subtle gestures and actions they undertake.

There is both [ease] and difficulty in setting a book in the place that you live. On the one hand, I could never write any other community as well as I can write Parramatta and its surrounds because I know this place so well. On the other hand, there is also this constant tension between wanting to write your community as a perfect kind of place because you love it, and also feeling like you should be honest about it and also write about the more negative aspects. It’s particularly hard when you are writing an area like Western Sydney that is so heavily represented in the media, in often negative ways. There is a temptation to write a book that responds to, or writes back to a particular image of a place rather than just letting the depiction of place grow organically from its original source.

DJ: For the majority of Australian writers, and writers in general, $80,000 prize money is a huge, virtually unthinkable sum - what does winning mean for you and your writing practice?

FC: I still find it hard to believe that I won all that money. It seems really unreal. Winning it means that I can concentrate primarily on being a writer for the next two or three years.

DJ: How significant do you think award recognition is to raising your and your novel's profile? We know awards often result in a jump in sales – how engaged are you with the commercial side of things? I'm wondering if you're actively capitalising on winning such a high profile award and to what extent this kind of PR/market savvy work is a valuable (or onerous!) part of being a successful writer these days.

FC: I’ve had a lot of discussions lately with people working in the publishing industry about the significance of these awards in terms of sales. The general consensus seems to be that there are some particular awards that equate to large sales but that most do not. I was really fortunate to be shortlisted for The Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award earlier this year. Getting shortlisted for this award has meant a huge amount of sales because every library and school and most bookshops carry the shortlist, so winning doesn’t matter so much, but being shortlisted is really important for a YA author.

The PM’s Award is actually relatively new and even though it is the most lucrative in Australia, it doesn’t have the prestige behind it because it isn’t well known enough. I have to say, though, the media coverage and even the controversy around it this year have raised the profile of the award significantly. At this stage in my career, I never say no to an interview or any PR opportunity. I had several interviews in the week after but that has all died down now.

DJ: Tell us about your relationship with Varuna and how it has influenced and/or assisted your development as a writer.

FC: Varuna has always been very supportive of my work and I’ve been lucky to have a few quiet spells there, working intensely on my writing and having some great late-night discussions about craft with other resident writers. I received a Varuna Fellowship to work on my first book, Small Indiscretions: Stories of Travel in Asia (2011) in 2010.

In 2012 I received a [spot in the] Varuna Publisher Introduction Program to work on The Incredible Here and Now (2013). The publisher I was placed with for this fellowship rejected my book, but it was still a really invaluable experience as I got to be mentored by the wonderful Deb Westbury. It really got me going on the book, as it was the first time I thought that just maybe it would eventually be publishable.

DJ: You are a teacher and doctoral candidate; to what extent does the collegiality of academic life support and/or restrict your creative writing?

FC: Having somewhere to go like a job or university gets me out of my own head and lets me learn about and engage with the world in a way that I think is incredibly important. The University of Western Sydney is full of so many people with new and interesting ways of looking at the world.

DJ: You have an excellent author site which includes workshop questions and teaching resources - is The Incredible Here and Now on the NSW English syllabus or how does that all work? Is it designed for students, teachers or both?

FC: I wrote the website and the curriculum for my book myself and I really love the idea that it is being taught. When I was a high school English teacher I found it really difficult to find YA books that were very literary or that engaged with Western Sydney. I like the idea that this book plugs both those important holes, but I didn’t write it specifically for teachers or students, just young people in general.

The only texts that are prescribed in NSW are for Year 12 and they change every 4-5 years. They’ve just changed the syllabus and I’m not there this time around. I do know, however, that there are quite a few schools using the book with their year 9 and 10 classes.

DJ: Your first book, Small Indiscretions: Stories of Travel in Asia, was a collection of twenty stories published by Transit Lounge. The Incredible Here and Now is a change of pace, form and genre – how consciously did you shift gear and what lessons from the first book came to bear on the second?

FC: For me there is no shifting gears. I write to play with the ideas and forms that are interesting me at the time. At the moment I am finishing off a novel for adults, researching my next YA novel and writing a couple of academic essays. I just want to write. I don’t want to be a ‘type’ of writer. I think the lesson to learn is that you should always write the kinds of books you want to read.

DJ: Two books, two publishers - tell us about those different paths to publication.

FC: There weren’t huge differences. Both of my publishers are fairly small and independent, which means that I got a lot of support and editing. They have invested a lot in promoting and supporting my work; they publish very few books, so [their lists are] very important to them.

DJ: How much YA did/do you read? Any favourites you care to share?

FC: I have always read very widely. I read adult and YA and a lot of poetry, short story collections and non-fiction. My favourite Australian YA writer is Sonya Hartnett because her books are so well-crafted and sophisticated and she never talks down to her audience. I also really love a lot of Mexican-American Young Adult like Sandra Cisneros because their work is so tinged with Spanish surrealism.

DJ: Tell us a bit about your doctoral project.

FC: I’m exploring the way that Australian writers write about place. I’m particularly interested in Peter Carey, Alex Buzo, Luke Carmen and Pat Grant.

DJ: Place is an important concept to you - please share with us what fascinates you most.

FC: All of my work, as different as it may seem, shares the same preoccupation with place and people’s connections to place. I’m fascinated by the way that being in particular places can shape the person you are or who you will become.

DJ: Sydney (and the western suburbs in particular) is a cultural melting pot – what impact do you think that has on the city's identity overall? Do you think Parramatta has its own distinct 'satellite city' identity or do people who live there still identify themselves as being part of greater Sydney? I lived there as a teenager, and went to a public girls' school in North Parramatta from the age of 12 to 16, so really formative years, and I think now of idealised versions of adolescence depicted in something like the TV show Home and Away, which is filmed in Palm Beach. It's an exclusive suburb, home to some of the country's wealthiest people and the location of some of the most expensive real estate, and yet people from all over Sydney do use that beach, they do make the trip and have that picnic and have that beachside experience. It belongs to everyone. My grandparents were in Bondi, so I frequently made the pilgrimage to the water in that direction, plus my friends and I caught the train and took the Manly ferry during school holidays as well, but some people are doing it pretty tough in this town, some have never been to the beach and can't swim, so it's a very different city and different life for them. Is that dislocation from place – or from the mythology of place – part of what you're interested in exploring?

FC: For starters, Western Sydney is Sydney. More than half the population of Sydney lives in the west and it is also Sydney’s greatest land mass. I live in the geographic centre of Sydney, Parramatta. And yet Western Sydney is always depicted as ‘out there’ and ‘on the margins’. I think part of the reason is that it is on the cultural outskirts of Sydney. Most of our literature, art, television shows and most of our cultural institutions are based around the city and the eastern suburbs, which is really more of a reflection of where our cultural producers live than a reflection of the culture of Sydney itself.

In a recent interview, I [was] asked a question which kind of threw me : ‘What made you write a book about multiculturalism?’ My book itself is very multicultural, but that came out of a desire to accurately depict a place which happens to be very diverse, not out of the desire to write about multiculturalism itself. I’ve never lived by the beach. Beach culture itself is kind of alien to me and when I watch those beachside shows, I feel like I’m watching something really foreign. You are right in that lots of Western Sydney people go to the beach and lots of people from all different cultures go to our beaches, which they do feel a collective ownership over, but I can’t ever remember seeing a non-white face on a show like Wonderland or Home and Away, so they don’t really portray that sense of collective ownership.

Western Sydney literature is really taking off at the moment. There are some wonderful writers out here whose books are literally changing our idea of what Sydney (and Australia) is by writing about those places that haven’t made it into our cultural landscape before. Writers like Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Luke Carmen, Sarah Ayoub, Tamar Chnorhokian and Randa Abdel-Fattah. Western Sydney is extremely diverse, not just in terms of cultures but in terms of socio-economics, ideas and beliefs. Liverpool is very different from Penrith, which is very different from Bankstown, which is very different from Parramatta. We need a literature that depicts all this diversity if we are ever going to get towards having a body of Australian literature that truly depicts the people who really live here.

DJ: What's next for you? What can you tell us about your plans for the next manuscript?

FC: I’m currently finishing off an adult novel that is set over a few days of the Tampa Crisis and looks at our evolving attitudes towards migration. I’m also researching a YA novel, which tells the story of young women who were held at the Female Factory in Parramatta right before it was closed in the mid-1970s.

DJ: How many balls/kids/jobs etc are you juggling and how do you manage that mad dance?

FC: I have a lot on my plate. I have a one-year-old, a family to take care of, a PhD to finish, I teach part time and I’m involved in a lot of community arts projects in Western Sydney. I’m tired but I’m also very privileged to be doing so many things I love. I think the key is to set specific hours aside for all those things and to stick to your schedule as much as possible. If you set yourself small tasks, like writing 500 words a day, those words can become a first draft of an entire book pretty quickly. You have to think about what’s really important to accomplish, rather than getting distracted by small things like answering all your emails every day.

DJ: What are some of your interests outside of reading and writing and how do they feed your work and/or offer an escape from it?

FC: I walk a lot. It gives me time to think. I also like watching a lot of corny American TV shows when I want to veg out.

DJ: Any writing superstitions or quirks you care to share?

FC: I like Shaun Tan’s advice that the writer should aim to provide the reader with a perfectly formed question.

DJ: Thanks so much for playing, Felicity. Congratulations once again on your award win. Here’s to a great writing year in 2015.