Issue 4: Gillian Hagenus
“Once, a ghost ran through Dad eleven times trying to find her way out of our front door. He’s been haunted by it ever since, but not in the way that you would think.”
~ Eleven by Gillian Hagenus
Your short story “Eleven” details a very specific type of haunting, while also humorously exploring deeper themes of family, obsession and grief. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind your piece?
My Dad once told me a story about a night in our old house when he and mum woke to the sound of footsteps running up the hallway. The sound came over and over, running up the hallway outside their room and all the way to the front door, but never back down. He knew there had to be a logical explanation for the sound, so he sat in the hallway and listened to the footsteps run past him, inching forwards until he reached the front door, and realised that it was the door rattling within its frame in the wind. Of course, I immediately wanted the footsteps to be a ghost (it’s much more fun for writing), but I was also struck by the image of my dad sitting cross-legged in the hallway in the middle of the night. I wanted to write about that image. The first sentence came to me first, before I really had any of the rest of the story. I wondered why I had chosen the number eleven, and ended up building the rest of the story, the father’s obsession, around that number. When I hit a roadblock, I asked myself why the narrator was telling the story of her father. This is when I knew that the story was really about grief and remembrance.
What draws you to contemporary or suburban Gothic fiction? Who are some of your favourite writers in the genre?
One of the first pieces of advice offered to writers is often to ‘write what you know’. This is generally pretty good advice to follow, but if it means I don’t get to write about ghosts and vampires every so often, then where is the fun in writing only what I know? The suburban gothic is my por que no los dos. It allows me to take what I know intimately – the sometimes-banal suburban experience – and to make it weird and bizarre in a way that still feels very oddly real. Carmel Bird’s short fiction is incredible for this, as well as her 2016 novel Family Skeleton.
You were the winner of the AAWP/UWA Publishing Chapter One Prize 2022 for your unpublished manuscript Ordinariness – congratulations! Can you tell us more about this creative project?
Ordinariness is a collection of short stories which I’ve written over the last three years. Most have come from my current masters thesis, which is attempting to define the suburban gothic in Australia. They are each grounded in domesticity and suburban life, but use techniques from all along the Gothic spectrum, from the magical real to the supernatural, in order to unsettle the reader and interrogate Australian suburban norms.
What books did you particularly enjoy last year?
Last year was a year of comfort reads for me. I returned to a lot of beloved Young Adult series like Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys and Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, books that you can simply escape inside of for a day or two. But through my work with the Australian Short Story Festival, I also read a lot of great short story collections from some of Australia’s best talents in the form. Sean O’Beirne’s A Couple of Things Before the End is a fascinating exercise in the colloquial voice and Wayne Marshall’s Shirl is a beautiful study of masculinity taken to some wonderfully absurd extremes. Both I would highly recommend.
Gillian Hagenus is a writer, fiction editor, and researcher living and working on Kaurna land in South Australia. She is currently an Mphil candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and her short fiction has been published in various journals across the country and internationally. In 2022, she is collecting whale facts for a project unknown even to her and looking after a menagerie of other people's pets.