If our animals could speak

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

Dr Laura Jean McKay is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. She is also the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s “Animal Sound Safari.”

Laura Jean McKay recently won Australia’s richest literary prize at the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Victorian Prize for Literature, for “The Animals In That Country,” her debut novel. It’s an apocalyptic and eerily-timed tale about a world in the throes of a pandemic, a fierce and funny exploration of other consciousnesses, and the limits of language.

Dr Laura Jean McKay sat down for a Zoom chat with Dr Andi Horvath.

ANDI HORVATH
This book emerged in really interesting circumstances. Take us back to your interest in animals because I know you studied a PhD at the University of Melbourne.

LAURA JEAN McKAY

I did. I completed my PhD in the creative writing department at the University of Melbourne which if anybody listening knows it is just such an incredible group of really dedicated writers. So, I was really lucky to find a home amongst those people. But as I started to get into the PhD, I also found out that there were some other people around [laughs] who spent most of their time thinking about animals and how they're represented in literature or art or in other areas. I joined this reading group which operates out of the University of Melbourne called 'Knowing Animals'. There I found really like-minded people who were just trying to understand how we are in the world with animals and what we could and should do about it.

But if you really wanted to go back, I guess – I grew up in the country.

 I lived on a farm throughout my childhood and so there were just animals everywhere. I don’t think my family were necessarily animal lovers but just animal obsessed people. We just had animals. They were around all the time. There was no – the horse that – I had a really funny pony called Bubbles who would try to get into the house. There was no real inside and outside. They were just around all the time.

ANDI HORVATH
Laura, your book has this eerie premise. It’s set during a pandemic.



LAURA JEAN McKAY
[Laughs] So the pandemic element in the book – it actually came after my initial idea. So, my initial sort of inspirational or prompting question was, what would happen if we could finally understand what other animals were saying? Not with their mouths but with – and not mind reading but really saying with their bodies and the way they are in the world, what are they saying to us and what are they saying to each other? I needed the human characters in the book to all be able to gain this insight and there’s nothing like a pandemic to really spread very quickly and infect a lot of people and have really intense symptoms. So, one of the symptoms of the pandemic, in my novel, is that people can finally communicate with other animals. So unfortunately, it was a bit of a plot device at first. At first – or for a long time I didn’t actually tell people much – who were asking about the novel – I didn’t tell them much about the pandemic aspect because it sounded a bit science fiction-ey.

It didn’t sound like serious literature. But then, of course, as the novel was about to be published, we were getting reports of this terrible pandemic which was affecting all sorts of people and causing havoc. Then the closer and closer it came to publication time the thing had jumped borders and was really, really causing havoc throughout the world. So, it’s been a very, very strange time to launch this book into that world. On the one hand, it’s been really interesting to see what aspects of the novel [laughs] are similar. There’s the face mask wearing. There’s the isolation. There’s the different ways that – panic buying. The different ways that people react. But on the other hand, it’s really heartbreaking to see people suffering throughout the world and to know that I’ve sort of been thinking about that for a long time but there are aspects playing out.

ANDI HORVATH
Okay. So, the human characters catch zoo flu which gives them this ability to understand and communicate with animals. What are the animals trying to tell us?

LAURA JEAN McKAY

[Laughs] Well, they're definitely not saying what we want them to say. [Laughs] They're not saying feed me or I 'wuv you' or pat me. Sometimes they might be saying that just like humans say that. But they definitely have their own agency. Their own place in the world. That place in the world is very affected by us. As super apex predators we really influence and impact other animals. But also, they have their own lives. I always think about the incredible anthills in the Northern Territory that I saw when I was up there researching and they're almost shaped like tombstones and they’ll often be together in sort of a bare field. There’s all this tombstone-like structures. I always thought there are whole cities in there of ants and unless one of us humans comes and knocks their city over, they can live out their whole lives of very, very complex beings without knowing that we exist or caring that we exist. They don’t need us. So, I guess – I really liked that idea that animals have this place in the world that isn’t really about us.

ANDI HORVATH
So, Laura, you're not anthropomorphising as such. You're giving the animals a voice. So how did you tackle anthropomorphic dialogue?

LAURA JEAN McKAY
Yeah. I was really horrified by the idea of anthropomorphism for a long time in writing the book. I really avoided it. I didn’t really know how to get around it. It’s something we’re not supposed to do. Then – I guess through my research I realised that anthropomorphism isn’t the problem. Anthropomorphism to me is just our basic way of trying to relate to other animals. We’re very, very limited creatures, us humans. We speak and therefore we think we are superior. But we rely so much on that and so much on what we can see and we forget about the other powers that we have. The non-verbal body language that animals really, really use. So, once I got over that I realised that it’s actually anthropocentrism that is the real problem for me. So, anthropocentrism being the centring of humans as the be all, end all of everything in the world. We are at the centre and animals are here for our use and want. So that’s really what drives the book.

Once I came into that then the animal voices really started emerging. It started with the insects. I realised that when I see a fly fling itself across the room it seems an expression of joy to me and so of course, the insects in the book speak in all caps. They [laughs] fling themselves around the page, literally. The birds tend to speak in italics. They're slightly nuanced in that way. The mammals speak in a sort of off brand poetry [laughs]. So, it was very much a place – it was very much them owning the dialogue and in that way with them really, really speaking on the page and owning the page and using the page in a very different way, almost in a poetic way, that meant that the human characters were automatically decentred.

ANDI HORVATH
How did you decide on your main character, the protagonist, Jean, which is a human that would take us through this journey and dialogue with the animals?

LAURA JEAN McKAY
So the main human character, Jean, took a long time to find. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words [laughs] in search of Jean. At one point she was a cat. That didn’t last for long. Then she was a middle-aged man who just wouldn’t move from a couch. For quite a while she was a young woman who worked in a laboratory. Then she was a farmer who didn’t really do much. Then I – well, a few things happened. I went up to the Northern Territory and spent some time researching there in a wildlife park and really sort of was amazed by the people and culture up there and just the general astonishment that is the Northern Territory. Another thing that happened was that I read a short story by Ottessa Moshfegh – I think it’s called Bettering Oneself. In it there’s a really drunken school teacher and I just thought the main character of this novel really has to be able to carry a lot. They're basically carrying the animal apocalypse.

Who is strong enough to be able to bear the weight of this novel? I thought, a middle-aged woman, of course. In Australia, a middle-aged woman is someone who is disrespected by the media, by most of – most youth, by older men, and even by other women and she’s strong. She can go through life without any help. That was the sort of character who I wanted in this novel. But I also wanted her to have certain faults. She couldn’t be the classic hero because she was carrying and going through a very unusual journey. So, she’s a drinker. She’s a smoker. She loves a road trip. She loves animals more than she loves people.

ANDI HORVATH
You have a dingo called Sue that is her companion.



LAURA JEAN McKAY
Sue is one of those characters who just – she sort of appeared on the page and once she was there, she really opened the novel up. She really helped to make sense of Jean and what Jean was doing. She helped to make sense of the animal characters in the novel. So, when I was living up in the Northern Territory, on this wildlife park there were a pack of three dingoes in captivity. There were two male dingoes and they would put on a show whenever I came near. They’d yelp and grind their paws into the ground and do their thing. Then there was this dingo called Elsie and she just wanted nothing to do with me. She had her own thing going on in that enclosure and I was just totally captivated by her. I guess she really influenced my idea of who Sue was.

The funny thing about Sue as a character is that I don’t feel that I ever totally got to know her. I never really captured her in the text. I wanted to leave it that way. It’s quite a scary place to write from. To have this character who has a wonderment about her that you’ll never really understand. But it was very important to me that she retained some of that mystery for me in the hope that she would also retain a mystery for the reader.



ANDI HORVATH
Laura, you wrote this novel, The Animals In That Country, which explores what if animals could talk, under extraordinary circumstances. You weren’t a well woman.



LAURA JEAN McKAY

I was very sick. So, I’d just finished the final proofs to a short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia, and I immediately wanted to start writing this new novel. I’d been thinking about it for a few years and also, I needed to fill that deep dark well that comes after you send a major work out. I’d just started writing this book and I – I was lucky enough to be invited over to Bali to a writer’s festival and there was a little bit of time afterwards, a weekend, for a holiday. On that holiday I went for a very ill-fated dawn walk and met the wrong mosquito who bit me and gave me a disease called chikungunya which – I’ve heard aid workers describe chikungunya as dengue on crack. So, it’s not as – it’s not actually as deadly but it – the impacts of it last a very, very long time. You develop polyarthritis, barely able to move, raging fever. I turned bright red. One of the really odd [laughs] aspects of that disease was that my skin started peeling off and I became quite delirious.

Within that delirium I thought – the only thing that could possibly be happening to me is that I’m actually turning into a mosquito. That’s the only possible explanation. I wrote a story about that. About a woman transforming into a mosquito. But it also really started to infect the characters in the novel that I was writing. So, Jean was still very unformed then. Sue hadn’t even appeared. But these characters in the novel became sick and as I became sicker, they became sicker until I was barely able to move to write. My family bought me a copy of Dragon Dictate which is a dictation software so I could record some of the book that way. So, it had this very intense beginning, this novel, and I think some of that was retained because even though I don’t have chikungunya anymore it did have long lasting chronic illness effects and really affected my immune system. Including small things like I couldn’t really drink any more after that. I was – I had chronic migraines and I was really – my immune system was fairly shot. So, I always feel like Jean has drinks for me in the novel [laughs]. I was sort of living through her. Also, her ability to just move around the world.

ANDI HORVATH
That’s extraordinary. Are you okay now? Have you got over this mosquito bite?



LAURA JEAN McKAY
I mostly have but I – I do have migraine disease. It’s a chronic, very regular thing so that’s a bummer [laughs]. But I always think that people with chronic illness – as long as it’s not completely debilitating, there’s the advantage of just working really hard because you don’t know when you're next going to get sick. So, you actually just take the opportunity to work when you can and you can get a lot done.

ANDI HORVATH
Creative writing is an interesting process, what are some of the misconceptions that perhaps some of your students or people trying their hand at creative writing have about creative writing?



LAURA JEAN McKAY
I think a lot of people go into creative writing with this idea of a muse [laughs] and that inspiration will strike around 2 am after you’ve been to a party and then you’ll write your novel and then you’ll be discovered [laughs] and you’ll become very, very rich. For some people maybe it happens that way. Good on them. It must have been a very good party. But it’s just a lot of hard work and especially when you're working in prose it just takes so long to get that many words down especially when you're working on a novel. As I said earlier, I’m just terrible at writing drafts over and over again so I wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words to every 80,000 words that finally get printed. So, it’s just hard work and tenacity and realising that there is no muse. The romance is in getting up and working especially when you don’t feel like doing it. That’s going to be really disappointing [laughs] to a few people.

ANDI HORVATH
So, what surprised you about the creative writing process?

LAURA JEAN McKAY

I think that writing can be a very lonely activity. When you're doing it, you need to be alone. It’s quite lonely in that often people don’t know what you're working on or why you would be working on that for such a long period of time. So, there can be a sense of isolation in creating a new work and something very big and something you really believe in but that nobody else really cares about until you publish it and hopefully it’s read. I think the really surprising thing is the incredible connection that you can have with other people who read your work or who write work that really inspires you. It’s been really, really lovely with the publication of The Animals In That Country to hear from other writers who are working in a similar area who – or who have published books like this a few years ago and want to get in touch.



I heard from someone in France the other day who was – had pretty much published a book about animals talking. It was a very different sort of book but it was so lovely to have that connection. Also just being able to get in touch with authors that I really love and who’ve really, really helped me, just to say, thank you and I really, really like your work. There’s sort of this series of notes that go through the world where people just get in touch and say, hey, I really like your work. Thanks so much for that. That’s one of the most exciting things when you receive something like that or if you send a note like that out and get a response back from an author.

ANDI HORVATH
I’m interested in inspirations for writers. Do you see them out? Do they strangle you from behind unexpectedly? How does it work?

LAURA JEAN McKAY
I actually have a photography degree from the Queensland College of Art that I got in the 90s before there was Photoshop. So, we were working in film, in darkrooms, and I’m about the worst photographer in the whole world. [Laughs] I don't know how I got through that degree. But it really did do something to my understanding of visual communication and visual narrative. I think it changed my brain a little or maybe my brain was a little like that already which is why I was attracted to such a degree before I started really delving into writing. When I get an idea, it comes to me as a still image. It’s quite similar to if – I’m not sure if you’ve seen Cindy Sherman’s work. She’s a photographer who does this work called Film Stills. She sort of makes up these fake movies and takes stills where she’s frozen in time and just about to do something or something’s just happened.

I always feel like that when – when the idea comes to me, I get this very clear image and it’s my job to build up to that image and then work out what happens afterwards. Usually – even – this novel took seven years to write. That image is very, very clear and stays very, very true the whole way and it really keeps me going through the whole writing process. As I’m writing, other images come - these really, really sort of clear strong moments. Sometimes they seem very disconnected to the original image and I have to try and work out how to connect them again.

ANDI HORVATH
Laura, next time we’re in a bookshop wondering what books to buy, what would you like us to think about?

LAURA JEAN McKAY

I’d love for people to think about the incredible local authors who have published books into the pandemic. There are so many amazing books out there by Melbourne authors alone, let alone Australia, let alone New Zealand, where I am now, that were published – people were building up to that publication date and then the pandemic happened and their events have been cancelled and these are brilliant, brilliant books. I’ve just been absolutely astounded by the quality of literature that’s just come out in the last year. So, go up to your local bookseller and ask them for a good recommendation and you will absolutely not be disappointed.

ANDI HORVATH
Okay, Laura, I’ve got a hypothetical for you. I’ve just caught zoo flu and all of a sudden, I’m looking at my pet dog here and I can hear her talking to me but I know you’ve got zoo flu, what is she telling us?

LAURA JEAN McKAY

[Laughs] She’s definitely not saying what we think she’s saying. So, first of all, Andi, you would probably get a muddle of messages. So, when you're – what's your dog called?

ANDI HORVATH
Motzi

LAURA JEAN McKAY

Motzi.

ANDI HORVATH
Motzi. Yeah. It’s Hungarian for teddy bear.

LAURA JEAN McKAY

[Laughs] That’s really good. So when you're looking at Motzi – when you first – as you would know because you have zoo flu you’ll be getting all these random messages. Motzi’s tail will flick and words will emerge from there. Motzi will let out a little smell from her glands and there’ll be words there. It will be quite confusing. So, what you need to do is step back because as humans we don’t often do that. We’re always putting ourselves in animals’ faces. Do you love me? What are you saying? Take a step back and look at Motzi’s whole body. What is Motzi actually saying when you give this animal some space? You’ll probably have your answer there.

ANDI HORVATH
Dr Laura Jean McKay, thank you. And congratulations on winning the Victorian Literature Prize for 2021.

LAURA JEAN McKAY
Thank you so much.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Dr Laura Jean McKay, lecturer in creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. And thanks to Dr Andi Horvath.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on February 16, 2021. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Production, audio engineering and editing by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2021, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this episode, review us on Apple Podcasts and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.