Cate Kennedy’s luminous short story collection, Like a House on Fire, was recently shortlisted for the Stella Prize. In this Q&A, Kennedy casts light on what fuels her imagination and guides her creative instinct as she writes.

A number of the stories in Like a House on Fire are about children relating to parents and vice versa. The son in “Ashes”, for example, resists the narrative he thinks his parents want him to conform to. How do you create a character that has this sort of nuance? What’s the spark that gets you started and the fuel that keeps you going?

Well, I think every child needs to go through a stage of “resisting the narrative” of parental control, so that character trait seems quite universal to me — in fact I’m sure you’d see yourself many, many examples of adult children who never seem to get past this stage and have shaped their lives around sabotaging, resisting or subverting the expectations of their parents, so much so that it’s become a kind of script for them. At what point do our failures cease to be our parents’ “fault”? After they’ve raised us and we’ve moved out, how much longer should we blame them for our own perceived grievances and shortcomings? Or do we sometimes never get over the way we’ve been conditioned and made to conform?

That’s the spark that gets me started with a character like the son in “Ashes”; the sense that we become an adult the day it dawns on us that our parents are flawed and fallible other adults, usually just doing their best with what they’ve got. I like the idea that a tiny measure of compassion and insight might start to melt that seething unresolved rage that’s keeping this character arrested. As you can probably tell from the themes in the stories (and in my novel as well) I’m very drawn to characters who are stalled like this. In the parent/child dynamic, I’m interested in the moments where the roles are unexpectedly reversed, so that we really see what people are made of. Putting aside your own unresolved grievances and doing what needs to be done anyway, even though you feel you’ve been bent out of shape by the weakness or denial of others, and swallowing your pride/narcissism/anger and drawing on some deeper reserve of tolerance and forgiveness … to me, that’s how to test your integrity and character. Finding a way to show this through small, recognisable and plausible moments is the fuel that keeps me wanting to finish the story, until this is made manifest in the character.

In writing these children/parent stories were you revisiting your own childhood, observing your own children or examining your own parenting style — or did the stories stem from a different alchemy altogether?

If anything’s going to show us our shortcomings as adults, it’s becoming a parent! I guess the children/parent stories are a rueful acknowledgement of this. The way you vow you’ll do everything different to your own parents, the way you flatter yourself you’re unselfish, patient, generous and just generally better-equipped … it’s a perfect analogy, really, for the “arc” you’re encouraged to map in a fictional story, the idea that here’s a character on a collision course with something which is going to change them, some obstacle or resistance they need to encounter and somehow engage with and possibly overcome.

I’ve found, in short fiction at least (as in life, really!), that this trajectory doesn’t have to be anything too momentous, plot-wise. Just reality itself is enough to knock us off course, in terms of what we expect and what we get. If a character requires resistance, just put the truth in their path, and watch what happens. If there’s an alchemy there, it’s not something I engineer; I just start with the rueful acceptance that people don’t change voluntarily or gain self-insight without a struggle. What we’re struggling with is our own limitation and some things arrive in life to make that crystal clear for us. Mortality, obviously, and loss of control of the “narrative” are great examples of this. A child arriving in your life is going to illustrate your own limitations to you like nothing else. A character seems much easier to draw when they’re confronted with something so tangible and clarifying.

In writing the story “Like a House on Fire” was it first-hand experience that helped you understand and depict how long-term pain — and not being able to work or clean or to provide because of it — can amplify difficulty so life seems perpetually on the brink of collapse?

No, I just made it up. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced chronic pain in this way, unless you count writer’s block. But I was interested in this story how the mysterious cramping and seizing of his back allowed him plenty of thinking time to start to understand how it might be a metaphor for something entirely emotional or spiritual. Again, here’s a character who’s “immobilised” — arrested — who’s treading water in a kind of stasis. I really wanted to get this narrative voice right, to create somebody who has to touch rock bottom in order to recover. He keeps talking about “humiliation” in terms of bitterness and loss of pride but I hope the imagery works to show that humility can be a very different thing.

In the same story, when Ben asks his father how Mrs Clause is, it’s a delicate and humorous touch. How do such insights come to you? How much editing and tweaking is needed to ensure scenes like this one sound right rather than twee or forced?

To tell you the truth, it doesn’t need much editing or tweaking. I try to remember moments from real life that have moved me with that inexplicable tender shift between laughter and tears (you’re right, they are “delicate” moments) and bestow those onto characters and situations. I’ve learned to pay attention to just how those shifts occur and operate, without over-thinking them too much — for example, it didn’t occur to me when I wrote that exchange that it could also illustrate how Ben might feel about the difficult state of his parents’ marriage, or how his father’s responses, as he strives for lightness, mirror in reverse the night-time shiftwork his wife is doing. I just tried to write an exchange between these two characters that was full of aching, unsaid things, and which worked to show that everything’s going to be alright for this family if they just hang on.

There is a pivotal moment in “Flexion” when the man who had the accident is crying in bed and his wife gains insight into his suffering and how she needs to act in the face of it. How do you judge when to shift a character’s understanding like this so a story can flow satisfactorily to its conclusion?

You describe this as a pivotal moment and that’s how I see it too. A pivot goes in deep and holds the material fast while you shift it to change direction. Again, thinking about how narrative works in a story has made me more aware of how to judge moments like this. In a classical story structure we’re taught to think of the “climax” of a story in terms of the high point of drama. But I’ve come to see it more as something taking place on a much more subtextual level, where the reader has to watch characters in action to understand how their internal conflicts are driving the story.

What if the climax isn’t exactly a dramatic high point, but a point of no return, or a point where everything a character is fighting to keep hidden suddenly cracks through to the surface regardless? What if it’s the point of exhaustion, or giving in, or losing the desire for subterfuge? What does that ask of other characters witnessing this turning point, and what do they do with what they know now? This is where it seems all-important to create a dimensional, plausible character, even if you risk critics finding them banal or too “ordinary”. If they’re stuck, something has to crack open to allow the story to flow, usually in quite a different direction. Something has to happen. There’s a breaking point. Sometimes, as you say, it is just a shift of understanding, but it’s what characters do that matters, confronted with this new shift. I don’t think we’re reading to see plot concluded so much as character revealed.

“Five dollar family” is a fabulous story and I’m wondering: Did you actually see a sign for a $5 family portrait or was the story prompted by something else — perhaps something more visceral?

Thank you — I’m really pleased you liked it. And I really saw a sign on the noticeboard in the maternity wing of a hospital advertising the prices of various portraits which said “$5 family”, which gave me the idea for the story.

“Whirlpool” captured for me the long, hot Australian summer where swimming in the backyard pool is the most natural place for a child to want to be. Your poem “How to play Marineboy” also has that great moment where the father is netting leaves off the surface/in a gesture children do not yet recognise as love. How important were pools in your youth and what part might they have played in helping to shape your imaginative process?

I wrote “How to Play Marineboy” quite a while before I wrote “Whirlpool” and I could feel myself returning to images from my own childhood which I felt I hadn’t quite finished with when I wrote the poem. We had a pool just like the one I describe, as I’m sure hundreds of thousands of other Aussie kids had in the 1970s; bright blue, over-chlorinated, something to lie next to on a towel spread on the hot concrete while you burned yourself to a crisp over and over through the summer school holidays.

There was actually a big section I cut out of the original story where the girls and their mother visit someone with a much bigger built-in pool and the narrator longs to be back in the one in her backyard, which is small enough to let the kids thresh around and create a whirlpool in — a small arena of play-acting control in a pretty circumscribed life. There’s lots of details in the story which come directly from my own experience, which I found myself conjuring up to convey the dreamy, compromised state of childhood.

In the poem I think it’s probably a bit more explicit that the pool becomes a small oasis of freedom and fantasy, remembered with nostalgia for how oblivious childhood can be. In the story, nobody’s allowed to be oblivious; everyone’s caught up in this current of compliance and stress. I’m not sure how pools have played a role in developing my imaginative process, unless I recall the hours spent alone, practising weightlessness and conscious somehow that in suburban backyards all over the country, other kids just like me who I’d never meet were doing the same.

I read recently that you live on a farm on the Broken River and this seemed to me a near-perfect confluence, so poetic! Have you ever set any stories or poems of yours on this river or would that be too obvious?

Nearly all the poems in “The Taste of River Water” are set in the landscape I live in, and the title poem is a sort of awkward love poem to the Broken River — the taste of it, all the traces of things it carries along with it.

How easy is it to pick a metaphor that is apt but not heavy handed?

Not easy. I would love, for example, to use the Broken River as a metaphor of human endeavour: struggling against drought, fighting to keep flowing, breaking its banks in times of plenty … and there you go, already it’s tipped into inspirational poster territory. There’s a kind of state of mind or reverie it’s good to be in where you’re not labouring to find a metaphor but one just kind of appears in the corner of your eye or arrives in the story once you push over a certain horizon, and you feel a quiet surge of excitement at finding how much richer your story seems as a result. It’s an instinctive process, though, not something you can retrofit or graft on afterwards. The American poet Mark Doty said once, “Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.” I really can’t put it better than that. If I’m in the right frame of mind I can be out of my own way and just trust the image itself.

You’ve been quoted as saying that you love “the snick of the door shutting” when the story is all done. How do you know when the last sentence has been snared effectively and the story is pitch-perfect?

Well, you don’t, really. Any more than a singer standing on stage really knows how good their pitch is going to be before they open their mouth to sing. You just have to trust that you’ve written the kind of story you’d like to read yourself and leave it alone for a while, and come back to it and try to re-immerse yourself into the world you’ve tried to create in that ten or twelve pages. Writing poems has given me a very acute sense of trying for precision in language and being conscious of how the sound and shape of a word might affect a reader.

This is especially true when you’ve zoomed right in on something in the story, and are trying to create an emotional surge of understanding in your reader. You become extremely attuned to what’s in the frame and why you’ve chosen this frame to allow your reader a glimpse which tells them everything they need to know about the people in this world you’ve created. I guess if I was to employ a metaphor here — or at least an analogy! I would say you build that world as carefully as a builder constructs a room; you get all the framing square and all the dimensions right, to control how a reader’s eye passes over that room, and takes in its details. The door should close smoothly with a satisfying click when you’ve shown them enough; you closing the door is the final sign of your authority and their confidence in you.

In “Seventy-two Derwents” Tyler’s mother, Mrs Carlyle, Ellie, Shane and Aunty Jacinta are all well drawn characters yet seem conjured from just a few brushstrokes. Tyler’s voice holds the story together. How hard is it to find the right level when you are writing from a child’s eye view?

Kids are great noticers, in my experience, but what they notice is often conveyed ingenuously. I wanted to create a sense of dread in this story for a child in jeopardy, by using a limited point of view for suspense. The narrator is innocent but we’re not; we can interpret the actions of the adults around her in a way she can’t. So I tried to find just a few salient details which betrayed what was happening under the surface for adults, remarked upon by Tyler but only really understood by the adult reader.

What was your favourite Derwent colour?

I loved that teal blue colour between blue and green, like the sea in certain patches of sunlight.

In this book and in Dark Roots you make writing short stories look easy. What’s the hardest part about writing a short story?

Well, I’m flattered you think it looks easy — maybe I should answer that the hardest part is trying to make it look seamless and organic. I remember reading somewhere once that the aim is to write a story in which the narrative feels unpredictable but inevitable, so the real discipline is finding the balance between making the story happen and letting it happen, wondering how much description to use, how each element serves the story, how things subtly unfold in a way which feels satisfying and memorable. There’s a strong element of trust between writer and reader I think — establishing the understanding that, whatever I’m showing you, it’s for a reason, so stay tuned as I lay out a trail for you. The hardest part is trusting in imagery and nuance, hoping the reader is reading with the same care and attention that you’ve tried to bring to the writing.

Which three short stories and/or short story writers do you turn to most frequently for inspiration and why?

There’s hundreds of writers I admire but, just to name a few: Elizabeth Strout’s linked collection Olive Kitteridge is a terrific inspirational read, as is Alice Munro, of course — she always calms me down and makes me remember how much can be achieved with simple language and punctuation and keeping your heart in the right place. I love crime writer Elmore Leonard and Peter Temple for their extraordinary control of dialogue and I’m a big fan of the Canadian writer Lisa Moore.

Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy is published by Scribe, 2012, $27.95

Read ABBW’s review of Like a House on Fire.