Courtney Collins’ novel, The Burial, has been described as a breathtakingly brilliant debut in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy. In this Q & A she tells ABBW about the female bushranger, Jessie Hickman, who inspired the book; how the question “Can a woman be free?” lies at the heart of her first novel; and how landscape can make history more present and more real.

No other person I know describes herself as “Writer, Pugilist, Grave Digger”. Please tell ABBW readers more. A couple of sentences per title should do it!

It sounds like I’m itching for a fight, doesn’t it?

When I was researching Jessie Hickman’s life (the female bushranger who inspired The Burial), I took a diversion and began researching some of my own family history. On my biological father’s side, I found gravediggers. I also learnt that my mother’s great, great grandfather came to Australia as a professional boxer to perform on those country touring circuits.

Facing off with The Burial, I felt that, with that peculiar lineage, I could continue.

How did you choose Jessie (inspired by Australia’s last bushranger Jessie Hickman) as the subject of your first novel? At what point during the writing process did you definitely know you were on a winner with her?

I was aware of Jessie’s story as a teenager. I grew up not far from where she roamed and hid out in a cave in the 1920s. Her story stayed with me although it wasn’t always front of mind.

I took my time warming up to writing my first novel. I wrote plays and a novella. When I felt that I knew enough about structure, how to build a novel, Jessie’s story resurfaced in my life. Added to that, as a heroine, she collided with the burning questions I had at the time, questions I wanted to explore in this realm of fiction.

Jessie is an ex-convict renowned for rustling; a gritty and visceral creature who co-exists easily with animals and nature. What was fun and exciting about creating such a feisty female character?

I love this term “feisty female character”. I’ve only ever heard “feisty” used to describe a woman.

Jessie’s feistiness comes from the fact that she values her freedom, above all else. It is intrinsic to her character.

In terms of actually writing her, that thing of getting her down on the page, most days I felt like her kid waiting for her to return, desperate to know her. Or the character of Jack Brown, the Aboriginal/Irish tracker, who was just always riding a little way behind her. She was definitely in the lead.

Jessie’s horse is called Houdini and this points to the fact that the novel is one of capture and escape. You began writing the book prompted by the question Can a woman be free? What discoveries did you make about women’s freedom and captivity during the course of your writing?

I feel like I’m putting my hand up to answer a question that everybody else already knows the answer to. I don’t know why but I had to write a novel to get it.

I think a woman, or anyone, can only know and enjoy unbounded freedom as long as she has no competing desire to love or be loved. Loving someone or something does make you captive. Hopefully, it is a captivity of your own design.

Since I finished The Burial, that question, Can a woman be free? is no longer the dominating question of my life. In the period of writing the book, and since, I have experienced limitless freedoms and then I suppose I turned around and said, “That was fun but now what?”

So my prevailing question has changed and, coincidentally, it is the core question of my next book, The Walkman Mix. To try to boil it down, the question is How do you love?

Again, I know many people have figured this out. But there is something for me in this experiment of fiction that allows me to see it from a few different angles and stretch my own understanding.

At times during the writing process you found Jessie elusive — not wanting to be captured or conjured. Did you learn any tricks you can share with other writers about how to lure such a slippery character out into the open, so she can keep on propelling the story?

I tried to turn that tension into a creative tension. So my feeling of going after her, that longing for her, is in the book. I believe that no genuine feeling you have for a character (even if it is frustration) is ever wasted. You are creating out of your imagination but you’re also doing your best to open your ears, eyes, heart and mind to the messages and data that is being fed to you in the act of living. In a sense, you have designed a really big conversation with yourself and the universe.

Thank goodness for full stops.

To me the “burial” of the book’s title refers to what Jessie and Jack must do about their affections, how Jessie tries to “blot out” the paternity of her child, and how she buries an actual body. Other characters bury things too. What happens, in life, to buried things? Do they often live on in some way and “speak”?

Some years ago I read Julia Kristeva’s book The Powers of Horror (1982). To describe it in a very non-academic way: all that shit that we give so much energy to keeping away from us, or keeping down, will rise up with an equal force and swamp us eventually. Like death.

My personal approach is to try to make friends with my demons, to begin the conversation now. To hear them out.

The writer and walker Robert Macfarlane talks about history issuing from geography. In The Burial, Jack Brown is trying to erase Jessie from his thoughts but finds it impossible because there are “memories inked all over the landscape itself”. What role do you think landscape plays in your novel?

I’m a walker and the main character in my new novel is a walker. In fact, soon I think I will change the description on my website from “Writer, Pugilist, Gravedigger” to just “Writer. Walker”. Because I think narrative, walking and landscape are so bound up it’s impossible to separate them. One can’t exist without the other. As Macfarlane says, it’s about openness and encounter.

When I was in the UK for the release of The Burial a couple of months ago, I took some time off and went for a walk along the South Downs Way, which is Virginia Woolf country. I set off with a friend from London with our backpacks. First we took the train to Glynde and then we walked to Charleston, Vanessa’s Bell’s house (Virginia Woolf’s sister), which was a haven for those writers and painters known as the Bloomsbury set. From Bell’s house the walk took on the feeling of a pilgrimage. We were walking the same path that Woolf had walked from her summer house in Rodmell to visit her sister.

The image of Woolf walking over those bare hills, in her uncomfortable shoes and long skirt, did seem to be a part of the landscape itself. And the inevitable story of her death was there too. From the top of the Downs you can see the river Ouse winding around, that same river where in 1941 Woolf drowned herself.

It was an experience of walking, narrative and landscape combining to make history more present, more real.

To your question, what role does the landscape play in The Burial? The landscape is the most pervasive character in the book, present in every scene. But it’s the other characters, especially Jessie and Jack Brown, that give it meaning. They connect to it deeply. They surrender to it.

How important is it for you to have conjured the place(s) in which a story will be set before a story can unfold in your writing? How did you imaginatively explore the places and their contours that feature in The Burial?

My confidence to tell the story of The Burial mainly rested on my knowledge of the place where it is set. I grew up in the Hunter Valley and rode horses around my friend’s place on the weekends. So I spent a lot of imaginative time looking out on those cliffs and mountains. I haven’t lived in that area for a long time but while I was writing the book I took trips back there to get the feel for it again, driving around and bushwalking. And then it wasn’t so difficult to conjure at all.

A winemaker friend of yours allowed you to use her cellar door while you were writing The Burial. What tangible characteristics of this space helped you to create the atmosphere in which Jessie’s story could spring into life?

It was dusty and you know there’s a lot of dust and dirt in The Burial. The book is dirt obsessed actually so I was reluctant to sweep or tidy. Added to that, I was surrounded by wine rather than books, so that freed me up. The place used to be a general store in the 1920s and it still has that feel about it.

The closing paragraph of the novel is a beautiful hymn to the longing of a daughter for her mother and a mother for her daughter — a near-universal song. What is it about mother-daughter relationships that so often seems to make them hum with melancholy?

MLJ, what a question! The kind of question that I think we would need many long nights and comfortable chairs to try to answer.

Really, I think The Burial is the best response I can offer it. But I will say, I dedicated the book to my own mother because my own story started with us. Her and me.

I was glad to see that the line “My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her” as one of the epigraphs — as I love Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write” (from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). When did you discover this poem? What alchemy was involved in choosing The Burial’s epigraphs?

Do you know, I can’t even remember discovering it? I can’t recall not loving Neruda. One day, I just laid his lines down at the front of a very rough draft and hoped to hell I could improve on what followed, to honour the beauty and feeling of his words.

Your book has been optioned for a feature film by Pure Pictures and will be published in 2014 in the US and Spain. Did you have any sense, as you were writing, of the book’s cinematic possibilities or the breadth of audience your very Australian story would reach?

When I first started working on it, I began writing it as a screenplay. Jessie’s story is so inherently cinematic and I could see it in that Western genre. But then I just wanted to get closer to the characters and to the landscape, to immerse myself in it. So it had to be a novel.

At the time, I only really thought about people in Australia reading it because it just seemed like a missing piece in the stories that we know and tell about our bushranging mythology.

It took you seven years to write The Burial. What sorts of peaks and troughs occur during the writing of a novel over such a length of time and what most helped you to battle on through these and not give up?

Peaks and troughs says it best, I think. And drawing on some of that grit of the gravedigger and the pugilist. I kept returning to it because I thought it was a story worth telling.

From Scotland … to Moree … to Sri Lanka … What’s your tally of places visited to promote the book? What was your best-ever book-tour moment and why?

I know, for my book tour in regional New South Wales and Victoria, it was 33 stops in the first three months. But I haven’t done the tally since.

A best-ever moment was having Warren Ellis from the Dirty Three turn up to my first bi-lingual book reading in Paris. Ellis very generously wrote a blurb for the book, which is on the cover of the Australian and UK versions. The music of the Dirty Three was on high rotation while I was writing it. Their music and performance is a major inspiration. So having him there, looking like Rasputin, made me feel like things had come full circle and that there’s magic in it — when things that begin in your inner life become real.

You grew up in Hunter Valley and now live in an old postmaster’s cottage on the Goulburn River in regional Victoria — and this sounds like a magical place to write. Since you’ve been travelling so much what are some of the rituals you’ve adopted to help you to create good writing spaces wherever you go?

I’m in Sri Lanka at the moment on a self-made writing retreat. I’ve been here for almost two months and I have one month to go. I know it sounds like I’m doing time. I would say that solitude is the ritual in this case.

When I’m at home, it’s quite simple really. I try to get up before anybody else does, practice a short meditation, make a pot of tea and then I’m away. It becomes more difficult if I miss out on any of those steps.

When I’m travelling, I do always carry a few props for the novel, a few postcards and that sort of thing that I can set up around myself. And music is always transporting.

The new novel you’ve been working on, The Walkman Mix, is set in 1992. Can you give ABBW readers a sneak preview? A few sentences? What are three songs from the mix tape you listen to that gets you in the mood to write?

I can only give you one song at the moment, because I’m listening to it over and over. Actually, it’s the epitaph and the plot all in one:

You are shining in perfect love
My world lives in these jars
Downward, downward we’ll cast ourselves
He’ll call, “This blade here is my best friend”
Sweetheart – It’s down to the shakes I feel
Sweetheart – But she never cries out
Sweetheart – Plainfield is “home-sweet-home”
Sweetheart – Will they ever find out?

It’s a song by the Australian band Died Pretty, written and sung by the legendary Ron Peno. It’s called “Sweetheart” from the album Doughboy Hollow, which came out in 1992. Just in time.

The Burial
Courtney Collins
Allen & Unwin, $27.99

Author photo credit: Lisa Madden.

Read more on Courtney Collins’ website.