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 The author of Sibyl's Cave talks in delightful detail about the creation of her first novel, the relationship between her PhD and the novel, her use of mythology, her most challenging moments, the cyclical female creative cycle, the intimate connection between nonfiction and fiction, a solid hint at her next book, and lots more.
Photo by Matthew van Hasselt
Interview by Magdalena Ball
In your novel notes you say that Sibyl’s Cave started as a short story. At what point did you realise it would be suitable for a full length novel?
The novel began as a short story called ‘Harbour’, workshopped in Alex Miller’s second-year fiction writing class at La Trobe University. Looking back, there is little resemblance between that story and the novel in its final form–in style and content they differ wildly. What connects them are some of the overarching themes (rites of passage, a girl afraid of the water, a sense of loss) and a particular kind of creative energy that I feel in my gut, what I now think of as my writer’s intuition. That sounds terribly mystical, I know, but I am intrigued by the idea that sometimes the rest of my body understands what is important before my conscious brain twigs.
This tremulous feeling in my belly drove me to write the story in the first place. Then, when I thought it was finished, the little flutters remained. Unsure what this meant, but trusting the feeling anyway, I gathered up snippets of information that gave me the same tremor and stored them in my journal. Over time I noticed that several parallel threads of obsession were emerging, including: the mythical figure of the Sibyl; an old and partly apocryphal story about my great aunt drowning in mud; autumn leaves; a cave-like space; a boy called Tomorrow; and a woman who had lost her mother. Eventually I typed up these fragments and grouped them together. As the pages multiplied I realised that the story contained within them needed more space, that a few thousands words wouldn’t be enough. It seemed to be growing into a novel. Between university classes and work, over the summer holidays, I kept working with these fragments until, one day, there it was beside my printer – the first draft of my first novel. A slim volume, about twenty thousands words, but it was the longest thing I’d written at that stage, and it made me smile to see it.
I workshopped the first chapter of this draft in another of Alex’s classes, at honours level, so pleased with myself for having the first draft of a novel. But … Alex told me he thought that in the drafting I’d lost the reader, that I was using abstract language without any concrete elements to ground the story. At first I was gutted–a friend sat and talked me through that wobbly afternoon–but in the weeks that followed I realised Alex’s words were exactly what I needed to hear. The old draft fell away. I began again, with a blank page, but with every scratch of my pen informed by what had gone before. Billie’s tale, as it now stands, grew from that moment.
What made you decide to do a PhD in writing?
At the end of my honours degree I knew I wanted to go on and do postgraduate study. I had two choices: continue the academic investigations I’d been undertaking; or continue the creative ones, through the relatively rare option of a creative PhD. A number of universities in Australia offer creative doctorates now, but at the time it sounded quite unorthodox and risky. Only one Victorian university offered it at the time (Deakin). There were creative MAs aplenty, but they would have given me only a year and a half with the project, and I knew that wasn’t long enough. It seemed more practical to continue the academic investigations, but something in me leapt when I thought of being able to keep writing, for fiction to be my main occupation for the next three years. So I took a leap too, of hope, and signed up for the creative PhD.
How did the PhD program help, and hinder the novel writing process?
I found the process of working within a PhD program incredibly rewarding. For a start I had time (and money, thanks to a scholarship!) to devote myself wholly to this book, rather than squeeze it in between everything else. It gave me the luxury of a 9-5 writing gig, which is rare these days!
As well as time, the PhD provided supervisors who worked with me as the novel progressed. I was lucky to have a writer (Kevin Brophy) and an editor (Jenny Lee) as my supervisors, and they both brought different but valuable skills and experience to my book. My supervisors both acted as mentors for the process, but also gave me a professional taste of what it was like to work with editors, which made for a smooth transition when the book came to be published through Allen and Unwin.
The PhD program also gave me a community of writers, all at varying stages of long projects but likely to encounter similar issues. Even when I moved to Sydney (my partner got a job there), I kept in contact through regular seminars and workshops. Writing can be a solitary process, and often needs to be, but this group of fellow writers broke down some of that isolation.
The PhD program also offered me some financial help, providing a grant that helped get me to England and Italy for a research trip. With this money I was able to visit Cuma, Naples and the island of Ischia, and re-visit England, gathering first-hand tactile details my earlier book-work hadn’t provided.
The most difficult thing was juggling the two aspects of the PhD–the novel and its theoretical exegesis, a requirement of creative PhD programs. They vary from university to university, but mine was broken down into an 80% creative section (the novel) and a 20% theoretical section. It took me a long time to work out the relationship between these two pieces of writing, and I had a number of false starts. I was reluctant to do a meta-analysis of my own work, so ended up defining the exegesis as a ‘companion’ text to the novel, with both hinging on the figure of the Sibyl. The fiction gave me one way to look at the Sibyl, and I used the theoretical chapters to see her differently–a kind of parallax vision. Moving between the two kinds of writing was also difficult–I’d have to take off my ‘fiction’ head and put on my ‘theory’ one, which was at times disorienting. I found it useful to devote a great chunk of time to each–a month on the fiction, then, while my supervisor was reading that, work for a sustained time on the theory. Otherwise I felt too split. In the end I enjoyed the dynamics of the two pieces immensely, but they gave me quite some grief in the early stages.
Talk to me about the mythology behind the novel. There’s the Sibyl of course, but also Afrodite, Lorelei, Didóne, Scylla & Charybdis, many other images from ancient Greece. Did the story begin with the mythology or with the modern painter character? (or did they evolve together?)
I’m very interested in how ancient myths still matter to us today. One that caught my attention was that of the Sibyl. I’d heard about a woman who told the future on leaves, which intrigued me. At first I thought it was the Delphic Sibyl (so the book was almost set in Greece), but later I discovered that the leaf-dealing oracle appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, and that she was based in southern Italy. This woman fascinated me because she is so influential in the heroic story arc (she takes Aeneas into the Underworld so he can speak with the spirit of his dead father), yet we hear so little of her own life. Her role is functional. I found myself wondering, what happens to oracles like these after the heroes and politicians have obtained their crucial prophecies? What would her life contain? What would happen if she was alive now?
I became determined to write one version of this life in fiction, to explore the narrative gap in the old tales. In the first draft she is an otherworldly figure, a mystery to me and to the other characters in that version. Interestingly, though, in the these drafts of the novel, I used the Sibyl in the same functional way as she had been used traditionally–she provided key information to the woman who was my main character at the time, while her own life was a secret. In later drafts the Sibyl character became the main one (although there is another Sibyl, one functioning in the traditional way, in the old woman in the cave at Cuma–these tendencies are hard to shake!). And it became more complicated than that–she turned into a combination of the oracle and the wandering hero who consults her, transported into a modern context, as if the Sibyl and Aeneas had merged in the Underworld and emerged in our time.
The idea of prophecy fascinated me as well. I didn’t want someone with actual prophetic abilities, but someone who struggled to make a future from the fragments of her past, a seer who didn’t see clearly. The idea that her art might allow her to create a future by assembling scraps of her lost memories moved me.
Sibyl’s Cave isn’t the only cave in the novel. There is also the aboriginal cave that Eli discovers later. The story ends with Billie holding a party invitation from one of the islander’s in her hand. Did you intend for this thread to be another, albeit subtle, mythology lurking quietly within the novel?
One of the earlier drafts was called Vena Cava (catchy title, I know!), after the vein that takes deoxygenated blood to the heart. I was interested in these hollow places in the heart, which resonated strongly with me, symbolically, in terms of the hurts suffered by the characters in the story. Although the heart imagery was lost in successive drafts, some link to this ‘cava’ remains in the caves Billie explores. For me they function both as places where secrets are hidden but also hidden places that allow a kind of transformation. In Billie’s case it was a slow movement from a self ossified and petrified by the past to someone slightly more fluid (flagged by the invitation she doesn’t throw away). The elemental relationship between rock and water in the novel was crucial for me in thinking of Billie’s transformation, that over time water is able to erode and soften rock’s hard edges.
What was the hardest part of writing Sibyl’s Cave?
Letting it go! From the initial short story to publication the story had been a part of my life for the bulk of a decade. I’d come to know Billie as if she was part of my family, and I found myself very attached to her. I’d done numerous re-writes, but had always returned to the material. Suddenly, as I worked on the final proofs, it hit me that this process was ending, that I would no longer be able to return to this story. I was overjoyed that it was being published, but yet I found the manuscript hard to part with. Some of this was attachment; some my own perfectionism–I wanted the story to be the very best it could be, I wanted to do it justice.
Sending the absolutely-no-more-drafting-for-you-girlie-this-is-the-last-version to the publisher took great courage. After that, once the book itself hit the shelves, it took time for me to adjust to the idea that it was no longer my story, that it belonged to other people. Conversely, this has also been one of the most rewarding parts of the process–when people make the story their own. A woman I know told me she gave the book to a friend, who promptly fell in love with the Troy character, which warmed the cockles of my heart!
There’s also a strong masculine/feminine theme running through the book. Tell me more about the female energy, and the way it drives the story.
I’ve always been fascinated by the female creative cycle, that we can make something within ourselves. In fact, the short story from which Billie’s story grew was structured on the cycle from conception to birth–cyclical rather than linear. I’ve got these old diagrams that map out the story’s arc in these terms. Part of this is carried through in the novel, in Billie’s art, which allows her to continually re-invent herself, to make a new self in a new place (or at least to try).
Have you finished with Billie/Sibyl/Cibelle/Bella, or do you feel you might go back to her world in another novel?
It’s funny you should ask, because a number of people have wanted to know what happens next! Others were curious about the times in Billie’s life that I had to leave out to make the novel a manageable length. But saying that, I don’t think I’ll be visiting her world again. The little gut-flutter that led me through her story is spent–I love her dearly, but another story is pulling me now.
There has been much talk about the difficulty of getting literary fiction published and the public/publisher obsession with the "true life" story over well crafted fiction (perhaps even tempting writers to craft phony sensational nonfiction like Frey's). What are your thoughts about this?
I’ve been intrigued by the waves of literary scandals recently, and by the pull that the idea of ‘true’ experience exerts–demonstrated by non-fiction tending to outsell fiction (note to readers–please buy more novels!). The idea of the real does seem to give books extra impact, which is completely understandable. It’s hard not to think of Alice Sebold’s own rape experiences (described in her memoir, Lucky) while reading her novel about the rape and murder of a young girl, The Lovely Bones.
It interests me how genuinely hurt readers are when they find out that an experience they have believed in is completely made-up. Perhaps because we have invested so much emotion in the tale, in believing in the tale. But even the most explicitly autobiographical works are never unmediated truth but are always one person’s subjective and constructed account, and not necessarily a reliable account at that. The best fiction I’ve read makes me believe in the characters as if they were real anyway, and I’ve often been caught out when reading on buses as I’m moved to tears (most recently at the end of Peter Carey’s Bliss)–thank you to those strangers who have offered me tissues!
I’m also fascinated by the varying ways that personal experience works its way into fiction. Sibyl’s Cave is certainly not autobiographical–it’s a story of Billie’s life, not mine–but when I think back I’m surprised by how much personal experience has appeared in there, including my own reactions to arriving in Australia and looking at the landscape, my fear of being underwater, one New Year’s Eve in the emergency ward, my partner’s first car (Troy drives it!), descriptions of Dangar Island (I lived there for three months) … These experiences gave me a chance to add specific and concrete detail to Billie’s life, in the hope that it would flesh her out for readers, and make her ‘live’ in their minds as she does in mine.
Tell me a little more about your new novel “based on the lives of Elizabethan women.” What are some of the interesting threads you’re pursuing in it.
I was talking to my old writing teacher about the new book, saying that it’s about a woman sidelined and brutalised by history, a telling of a tale that’s often neglected and it’s my attempt to create that tale through fiction, that it will require a great deal of historical research and a fusion of that research into the text, and he said, ‘That sounds familiar. You’re doing what we always do, telling the same story over again.’ And I think he may be right! It seems to weave some of the same threads, but with the story moved further back in time, to the sixteenth century. It means I’ll get to fossick through libraries and museums again, which was one of the great pleasures of the last book–doing all that research and then trying to create a believable world. And, ironically, the character that I’m interested in was born only a few miles from when Billie lived in Norfolk, so it seems I’m destined to walk over the same ground again, literally … It’s all still embryonic, so I’ll just let the little flutter in my gut lead me onwards.
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