Exploring Dark Short Fiction #2: A Primer to Kaaron Warren

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BY ERIC J. GUIGNARD

ABOUT KAARON WARREN

GUARDING THE MOUND

GUARDING THE MOUND: A COMMENTARY

BORN AND BREAD

BORN AND BREAD: A COMMENTARY

DEATH’S DOOR CAFÉ

DEATH’S DOOR CAFÉ: A COMMENTARY

THE WRONG SEAT

THE WRONG SEAT: A COMMENTARY

SINS OF THE ANCESTORS

SINS OF THE ANCESTORS: A COMMENTARY

CRISIS APPARITION

CRISIS APPARITION: A COMMENTARY

WHY KAARON WARREN MATTERS

BY MICHAEL ARNZEN, PhD

IN CONVERSATION WITH KAARON WARREN

TIPS FOR FINALIZING YOUR SHORT STORY: AN ESSAY

BY KAARON WARREN

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE FICTION FOR KAARON WARREN

ABOUT EDITOR, ERIC J. GUIGNARD

ABOUT ACADEMIC, MICHAEL ARNZEN, PHD

ABOUT ILLUSTRATOR, MICHELLE PREBICH

INTRODUCTION

BY ERIC J. GUIGNARD

THE COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA IS AN exercise in disparities, a country both bleak and beautiful, rugged while idealized, urbane yet still untamed, and has produced some of the greatest literary authors of the 20th and 21st centuries, with names coming to mind such as Mary Gilmore, Patrick White, Thomas Keneally, Tim Winton, and Peter Carey, amongst others, and notwithstanding the subject of this book: Kaaron Warren.

Kaaron’s writing, like her native homeland, is filled with similar seeming disparate affectivities: rich passion turning to cruel heartache, bitter catastrophe preceding joyful triumph, ebullience until emotional devastation, all in storylines that wend, at their leisure, along a path of subtle life hues, often set in domestications from which a character is thrust or encounters those vagaries of fate that are to be most feared.

And she seems oft to manage it all within the span of only a few brief pages.

Widely hailed as one of Australia’s—and the world’s—premiere writers today of speculative and dark fiction, Kaaron Warren has published four novels, multiple novellas, five collections, essays, and well over one hundred heart-rending tales of horror, science fiction, and beautiful fantasy, and is the first author ever to simultaneously win all three of Australia’s top speculative fiction writing awards (Ditmar, Shadows, and Aurealis awards for The Grief Hole).

Her award-winning short fiction regularly appears in anthologies, magazines, and other publications across the U.S., Europe, and Australia as well as being reprinted routinely in Year’s Best compilations. Her short story A Positive has been made into the short film, Patience, and her first-ever published short story White Bed was dramatized for the stage.

And, for all she has accomplished, Kaaron is still easily accessible to fans, willing to help others, and, quite simply, a joy to work with, particularly that she was kind enough to participate in this project, the second Primer designed to showcase diverse modern voices around the world of leading dark fiction short stories.

Author and journalist Lucius Shepard, in his introduction to Dead Sea Fruit (2010), regaled Kaaron also as spanning of disparities, a foremost example of those who can bridge the constrictive labels between Stylist and Storyteller, describing her prose as holding a profound sway over his emotions. For lack of expressing anything more eloquently, I repeat his sentiment; this because I love great stories and, more, I love great stores that are unique in the way they’re told, and, even more than that, I love great and unique stories that can make me feel.

Although Kaaron Warren has been writing published fiction for over a quarter century, it wasn’t until about 2010 or 2011 that I encountered her work. One of her first short stories I read was in a second-hand science fiction anthology that was given to me by an ex-felon acquaintance who was in rehab for drug addiction. He used both substance abuse and science fiction as escapes from life, but while one means gave him hope toward something invigorating in the future, the other ultimately killed him. That book contained Kaaron’s tale, Ghost Jail, and perhaps because of its subject—tortured ghosts and those tortured living who can see them, along with the search for redemption, for peace—and who the book came from, the writing struck me very deeply. It was surreal and meaningful, multi-voiced and, ultimately, about that very struggle to escape poor circumstances, to find freedom, peace.

Shortly thereafter I read All You Can Do Is Breathe, which is emotionally wrecking, yet the trauma comes subtly, by the loss of the ability to find joy in life, in this narrative by something out of the protagonist’s control: a haunting, sucking creature. Much the same for The Edge of a Thing, which by its ending, a wealthy and loved father is promised to lose all by a wronged ghost: Your son’s seed will be poison. Your daughter will be barren. We wish great unhappiness to your family. Your wife will come to hate you as the mongoose hates the snake. You will not be an ancestor.

Passages such as those bring me bitter despair.

And yet there are joyful stories by Kaaron too, beautiful reflections, such as the hopeful and compassionate The Speaker of Heaven, the sweet fairy tale-esque Born and Bread, and the beautifully redemptive Death’s Door Café.

So it is that the disparities in our surrounds, in our lives, in ourselves, are able—at their best and their worst—to be captured by Kaaron Warren.

Midnight cheers,

—Eric J. Guignard

Chino Hills, California

January 29, 2018

ABOUT KAARON WARREN

MY SHADOW EXISTENCE:

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I’VE CARRIED ALONG A shadow existence. Many of us do: that other self, the one most people don’t see. We present a public face to the world, that is the public existence.

Then there is the face most people don’t see. Sometimes those secrets are large and never to be revealed. Sometimes, we realize people knew the truth all along.

My shadow existence as a child was twofold. I lied every single day about my religious background, and I wanted to be a writer. I did write, novels and short stories I told no one about, confessed to no one, scrawling them by hand onto scavenged paper, scraps, and notes I still have, or had, until a rat died in a box stored in the shed.

My religious background was unusual and not something anyone would understand in suburban Melbourne, where I grew up. It was weird enough we were vegetarians, something I couldn’t hide. That alone got me noticed. But the other stuff?

I didn’t tell a soul.

Things I remember: A first kiss in the Bay at South Melbourne while my family were chanting Hare Krishna in the ashram a few blocks away. This boy saying, "Are you one of those vegitaryists? when I told him I didn’t eat meat, and, when he saw two Hare Krishna women walk past in saris, he said, I hate those people." Me saying nothing because I didn’t feel I belonged to them. They were in my shadow existence. I started writing my first novel around this time. Red ink in exercise books, about prejudice and teen gangs and violence. I used everything I saw, translated into story on the page, but not the stuff that was actually happening. Not the huge feasts and the chants, the hours spent making flower necklaces for the gods (and that smell still makes me sleepy, the smell of chrysanthemums, because I was so tired making those necklaces). All of this annoying, more than anything else, let me be clear. None of it abusive.

Soon after I spent time in New Zealand on a Hare Krishna farm. They had me collecting money for them on the streets of Auckland but we didn’t say that, we said we were collecting for teenagers on drugs or something, so there was a shadow self within my shadow self. I kept a diary at the time for my best friend, every last bit of it a lie. I lied about where I was staying, what I did all day. While my friends were swimming in the lake or sleeping all day, I was getting up at 4 a.m., dressing in a sari, being told that I was disturbing the bachelors so I needed to cover up even more. I was eating delicious food, sleeping on the floor of a caravan, writing letters homes to friends that didn’t describe the filthy unemptied portable toilets, left for days past the time they should be collected because the contractor didn’t like the Hare Krishnas.

I was being called a prostitute by a man who worked on the top floor of one of the offices. Apparently watching me collect money made him very angry, although why he was staring down at a fourteen-year-old on the street he didn’t say.

All of it grist for the mill. All of it stories in the making. I still get caught sometimes using shadow existence terminology in life and in my stories. Words like take rest and isn’t it. Words stick with me, like the guru telling us that the only pure pleasure was passing stool.

I wrote a story called The Animodes Revolt at this time, inspired by a piece of equipment at my grandmother’s house. When I was at her house I was myself; no shadow required. My absolute self. She knew about the religion. She knew I wanted to be a writer.

Before the Hare Krishnas there was Transcendental Meditation. Lots of blessed-out, very kind adults. What I remember: The apple crumble they all brought to Pot Luck Suppers. The stink of one of the women, who wore a particular kind of shirt, nylon, flowery. Whenever I see a shirt like that at a second-hand clothing shop I think of her and her stink.

The tedium of meditation. It was boring, as an eight-year-old, sitting still for twenty minutes, so I wrote stories in my head.

The night I remember the most, although I may have dreamt it, is the night after the day my bedroom was used to initiate a record number of people. Thirty, maybe? Forty? A lot. My room was full of incense, and cleaner that it had ever been, and white cover on the bed that was new for me. But that night, I was riven with nightmares. Dreams and visions of things flying. And I wonder, I really do, if all of that poured out of the people being initiated. All their stories floating around and entering me. When people ask me where my stories come from, sometimes I’m tempted to tell them there. In that room. I’m writing the stories of all of those people, which is why my characters can seem alive. They are alive. They were.

For a while I stopped thinking I was a writer. No, I always wrote, but I stopped thinking I’d ever succeed. I wrote dozens of stories in this time, all typed up on an electronic typewriter.

My shadow self, believing in itself even when I didn’t.

I moved with my family from Melbourne to Sydney. I thought at the time I wanted to work in advertising, and I did for a while. I thought I wanted to be a copy writer but realized quickly that it would take all my ideas, all of my fictional thoughts. So I edited video tape in a studio in the basement of the agency, and I wrote stories there, novels, snippets, notes, and ideas, all of it on scraps of paper, scrounged notebooks, many thousands of words.

I met the man who’d become my husband, who still is my husband, and we moved to Canberra together.

You find that when you move to a new place, you are the person you are at the moment you arrive. You aren’t the old person, the other person, you are that person. So when I arrived in Canberra, I decided I’d be a writer. We moved for my husband’s job, so I had to be sure I had an identity of my own or be lost in it all. So I was a writer, and soon I sold my first short story (1993, White Bed, in Shrieks: A Horror Anthology, Women’s Redress Press). We travelled back to Sydney for the book launch and I read the opening to the story, my knees shaking so much the hem of my dress vibrated.

Then children came along and the writer self sank into the shadows again. People wanted to talk about babies and sleep and feeding and mashed pumpkin, about which school and where on holidays. I did write during those early years, though, snatching moments when I could. Using the many hours we spent watching trucks to think, to observe, to fill myself with images and ideas. I published during this time and won my first award, the Aurealis Award for Short Horror Fiction (A Positive first published in Bloodsongs magazine). This kept me going through it all. I love the ‘mother’ part of my existence, but the importance of maintaining the ‘writer’ part of my existence can’t be underestimated.

In Fiji there was a new kind of shadow existence. We went for three years for my husband’s job, so we were in the diplomatic corps. I was a ‘trailing spouse,’ so-called. But I was a writer, too. I explored the town of Suva, I spoke to people, and I wrote and wrote and wrote. I finished two novels there and dozens of short stories. I sold my first three novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification, to Angry Robot Books). I hosted dinners for people from many countries, I made abiding friendships with fascinating people, and I listened, observed, absorbed.

We’re back in Canberra now. Life isn’t always an adventure but I try to find adventure in small things. In my interactions and observations of people. In finding treasures like a small box of bus tickets from 1993, collected by someone. Each journey a note of this person’s existence.

When my husband got very sick a