My story ‘We’re All Travellers Here’ has won the 2014 Carmel Bird Award, announced on January 9.

Award judge, Michael McGirr, said ‘We’re All Travellers Here’ is ‘the story of an older mother and her adult son on tour. The son is buried alive in his own sophistication and self-concern. The mother eclipses him with her open appetite for life. Both portraits are realised with subtlety and understatement. A terrific achievement which makes great use of cultural history to frame its portrait.’

Twelve stories, including mine, will be published from June this year as Michael McGirr Selects, a series of digital eSingles by Spineless Wonders — host of the Carmel Bird Award and a publishing company specialising in Australian short stories.

Publisher, Bronwyn Mehan, said Spineless Wonders’ mission for the 2014 competition was to find the best Australian long stories between 4,000 and 10,000 words. The competition had drawn an unprecedented number of entries, she said, and Mr McGirr told her reading and judging the stories had been ‘a real pleasure’.

He highly commended ‘Rent’ by Anthony Lynch and commended ‘Love Bites’ by Andy Kissane, ‘Flatrock 1979′ by Lukas Jackson and ‘The owl gazes at the moon’ by Claire Aman. The seven other finalists are Rebekah Clarkson, ‘Dancing on Your Bones’, Ron Elliott, ‘The Lake Story’, Erol Engin, ‘A Tintoretto of the Soul’, Jessie Mitchell, ‘Remembering Mardion’, Jane Skelton, ‘Flying Foxes’, Ariella Van Luyn, ‘Bulldozer’ and Mark Vender, ‘Adnarchy’.

Michael McGirr is a well-known Australian writer whose books include Things You Get For Free (Scribe), Bypass: The Story of a Road (Picador) and The Lost Art of Sleep (Picador).

Carmel Bird is one of Australia’s leading authors of short stories with a new collection to be released by Spineless Wonders in August 2015.

My story ‘Shooting Star’ was shortlisted for the Carmel Bird Awards in 2012 and featured by Spineless Wonders in the Amanda Lohrey Selects series released in 2013. It can be purchased here.

Spineless Wonders will be offering a subscription to all 12 Michael McGirr Selects stories. Each eSingle will be released fortnightly from June. Subscribers will be invited to join us for a Q&A discussion of the story, plus a Q&A with the author, each fortnight on the Spineless Wonders online book club.  Join the online club via Facebook here.

About ‘We’re All Travellers Here’

Why does the monster man from Larson’s Far Side cartoons always sit next to me when I’m on a long-haul flight and travelling alone? — Ah, the serendipity and the predictability of travel! We thrive on it don’t we? We want to be there. We want to show that we’ve been there. But we struggle with the strangeness of travel too.

I wanted to write a story that conveyed the way travel can disorient us, expanding and contracting our notions of self. I also wanted to write a story about the love and scratchiness a son can feel towards his mother — the push and pull of the primal bond.

‘We’re All Travellers Here’ had a long gestation period — in fact I almost abandoned it. Then, in mid-2014, it started knocking on the walls. I still wasn’t convinced Eric was my kind of character (did I even like him?) but insights from Australian author Mark O’Flynn in an interview I conducted with him for a bigger brighter world and the international short story forum THRESHOLDS convinced me to persevere.

One of my journal notes from this period says, “Embed myself … The stories that have stalled are asking for this. The work needs to be deep. It needs silence and focus. Tenacity.’ In other words, what I needed in order to complete the story was the opposite of ‘travel’ — to stop flitting and to settle. To watch and listen. To let the characters be who they needed to be in their own context, to act and speak.

Not every son is as neurotic and needy as Eric and I slowly began to understand his quandary and questions: Does seeking closeness always bring intimacy? Will guilt save our planet from travel’s destructiveness? What happens when we are unmoored from the thinking, objects and wellness that have tethered us to the earth? How important is the kindness of strangers?

At its broadest level, the story was inspired by my own overseas travel to Europe and Canada and by some wonderful travel fiction I’d read over the years; fiction by some great writers like Helen Simpson, David Malouf, Colm Toibin, Michelle de Kretser and Robert Dessaix (to name just a few).

I hope you will take the chance to meet Eric and his mother Marguerite on their journey when ‘We’re All Travellers Here’ is published later this year by Spineless Wonders. I’ll post more details here about how to purchase the story closer to its publication date.

In the meantime, why not tell me about your favourite fictional travel stories and why you like them?