Emerging Writers Series: Mykaela Saunders
“Spec fic is just so much fun to read and write, and on a macro level, I think the more that ‘serious’ writers engage with it, including critics, and the more it’s accepted by mainstream readers, the flow on effect is that new writers will have less hang-ups about writing it. They can and do just write what they like.”
Dr Mykaela Saunders is no stranger to celebrating the multitude of opportunities that speculative fiction can offer readers and writers alike.
Editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis award-winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022), Saunders’ own collection of speculative fiction short stories Always Will Be (2024) has just been published through UQP – read our review here.
We caught up on the role of speculative fiction in contemporary literature, what it means to write about place and home, and why winning literary prizes offers so much more than simply recognition.
I like to start these interviews win a way that helps readers get to know you! Could you share a little about yourself and your journey as a writer?
I began writing fiction in 2017 as part of my Doctor of Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Sydney. It was a huge change of field for me. Before that, I studied education and history and worked in Aboriginal education since 2003 in various capacities.
In 2016, I became obsessed with futurism and read and watched a lot of Australian futurism. I found the genre as a whole sorely lacking – Aboriginal people were either completely absent in these futures, or we were just a token lone wolf character, part of the stage set. I decided to write my own stories where we were front and centre of the world, which is how I’ve always experienced it in my family and community. So, I hustled hard to get into this degree.
As I hadn’t published anything creative before, nor had I studied creative writing before, I had to take a few workshop classes. In these, I wrote what became the foundational stories of Always Will Be—‘Terranora’ and ‘River Story’. Once the training wheels were off, I kept writing stories, and there are 16 stories in my book, plus an introductory note.
Your debut book, Always Will Be (UQP, 2024), is an incredible thought-provoking collection of speculative short stories exploring the question: what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty? It takes readers on an expansive journey even though we’re focused in terms of location. I wanted to ask how you developed the collection and the importance of contemplating country in these ways?
This book began as the creative component of my Doctor of Arts thesis. I spent 2017-2021 reading and writing about Indigenous speculative fiction, especially Indigenous futurism, and thinking about how my community might live, give or take any tweak of the current reality.
Each of my stories is a thought experiment that asks how the Tweed Goori community might live given different climate and political scenarios and, most importantly, how my people would assert their sovereignty in each version of these futures.
With this comes contemplations of country through climate, of course, but also in how people live with each other in cultural ways on the lands and waters of Bundjalung country. In this sense, country isn’t just a setting but the main character in the whole book, which shows different sides of its personality depending on the story.
Always Will Be won the David Unaipon Award, recognised as Australia's most coveted First Nations writing prize. What does winning the award mean to you as an emerging writer?
Winning the Unaipon Award was an incredible honour. I get to join the ranks of some of my favourite writers, many of whom I now call my friends and colleagues – Jeanine Leane, Ellen van Neerven, Samuel Wagan Watson, Jazz Money and Lisa Fuller, to name a few.
The prize money bought me some breathing space from the eternal hustle of freelance writing, which gave me time to polish my manuscript to a higher standard, and I am lucky to be published by UQP who have a solid track record of bringing out some of the best of Indigenous literature year after year.
Your writing has been widely recognised and has previously won several prizes, including the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, and the National Indigenous Story Award. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the role of these types of awards in Australian literature. Are there any insights you might offer other emerging writers considering but uncertain about entering similar awards?
Winning these prizes opened up many doors in the literary world, which led to more and more open doors. Often, these doors are new commissions or fellowships, but sometimes, they are new friends and wonderful colleagues in the business, which is so important in this solitary business of writing. The prize money, too, has always been a huge help.
I was studying full-time while writing these works, so while many of my friends were out in the world there earning money and getting on with life, I was losing money in the form of study debt and having less time and energy to earn money working. Winning lump sums of money kept me afloat and kept me writing, especially through the pandemic when I lost so much work.
My advice is to always submit if you’re happy with what you’ve got. Even if you don’t place in a comp, you’ve now got a good draft you can keep on working on for the next opportunity.
You’re also the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis award-winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022). I feel like we’re seeing more publishers engage with spec-fic as a genre (which is fantastic to see). Why do you think the genre is picking up more energy, and in particular, why is it a genre you’re drawn to?
Spec fic is just so much fun to read and write, and on a macro level, I think the more that ‘serious’ writers engage with it, including critics, and the more it’s accepted by mainstream readers, the flow on effect is that new writers will have less hang-ups about writing it. They can and do just write what they like.
Reading, writing, critiquing – it’s all part of the same ecosystem. I’ve particularly noticed an exponential explosion in First Nations spec fic over the last few years. It started slow and small in the 1990s with Samuel Watson, Archie Weller and Eric Willmott, and in the last five to ten years, the field exploded, with many women and nonbinary writers telling their stories.
Our writers are thinking a lot about the future of our countries, cultures, and communities, including climate change and political structures. I was drawn to writing speculative fiction for these reasons—as a way to work through my anxieties and grief, as well as my hopes and wishful thinking for the future.
Always Will Be challenges ideologies of colonial binaries through the unique power of robust storytelling and hope. I like what Jeanine Leane commented about the book as “a reappraisal of the binary between what is real and what is speculative”. Can you speak more to the role of storytelling as an enactor of change?
I don’t know that storytelling can drastically change much in the material sense—at least, maybe not in an immediate and measurable way. But it can influence the way we think as individuals, and so this is often slow and part of other, broader changes.
Spec fic has certainly influenced technology and social change, say in the case of computing and queer and feminist theory, but these changes were part of the social movements that they came from rather than standalone enactors of change.
I love what Bundjalung poet and editor Evelyn Araluen said at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2021, and I think about it often. “Literature has power, it absolutely does, but for that power to alter, we also need time,” she said. And then, “I come to my work through immemorial time. Time which was given to me by those who have come before, who have created paths and teachings and ways of being in a world I might not always understand, but which I am always responsible to. It is my work to give that time in turn to those who are coming next: to carry it carefully from the past into futurity, to enrich the soil and plant seeds that will grow for the next gathering. We are running out of time.”
This is grim but true. We don’t have the luxury of time when it comes to climate health or stopping Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people, for example.
And lastly, can you tell us more about what’s next for you and where we can engage with more of your work? (Feel free to mention any book launches or reading events to which readers can get along!)
My book launch at Avid Reader in West End is on Wednesday, March 20th. I’m excited to talk with Bundjalung editor Grace Lucas-Pennington about Always Will Be and celebrate with family, friends, and the community. I’ve been doing a lot of podcast and radio interviews, and my wonderful publisher, UQP, has been sharing everything on their social media.
I also have a research blog where I’m documenting my work in First Nations spec fic, including publications and other stuff I get to do as part of this amazing job.
Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher, researcher, and the author of Always Will Be, which won the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Mykaela is the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award–winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022). Mykaela’s novel manuscript, Last Rites of Spring, was also shortlisted for the Unaipon Award in 2020 and received a Next Chapter Fellowship in 2021. Mykaela has won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for creative non-fiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003 and at the tertiary level since 2012. She’s a postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, researching First Nations speculative fiction.
Website: https://mykaelasaunders.com/
Instagram: @this_all_come_back_now
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
