The Stella Interviews: Adriane Howell

Congratulations on being longlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize! What does it mean to you to be included on the list?

It’s the encouragement telling me I’m not deluded. It’s someone else – a panel, in fact – perceiving the work as of value. I’ve stopped reading Goodreads! It’s ridiculous that a longlisting should endow me with confidence in my writing, but it’s owing to Stella’s revered list of brilliant women and non-binary writers who challenge literary conventions.

What was the first thing you ever wrote?

I had two cats, Blue and Felix, who would spend their nights prowling the row of terrace roofs in my street, creeping home at dawn. I longed to join them, so my first stories were cat adventures.

Your longlisted novel, Hydra, has been described by Elena Perse (ArtsHub) as a “suspenseful debut that explores loneliness, self-destruction, and female agency”. What would you say are some of the central ambitions or themes of your work?

Hydra explores mythology, storytelling, the supernatural: people, places and objects we imbue with narrative in our search for meaning. I wanted to unpick and disrupt my characters’ understandings of their realities, while simultaneously doing the same to the reader – if only in their literary preconceptions – and I hope that I achieved this in a thoroughly creepy manner.

Perhaps the most challenging theme in the book to write was that of personal responsibility as I didn’t want to slide into didacticism. There exists, however, a relationship between mythos and accountability, and I wanted to allow the reader to decide for themselves where blame – if any – lies. And, ideally, for them never to be certain. These aspects were especially fun to write through an unmoored and unreliable narrator.

Can you tell us a bit about your artistic process? How do you write, where, when, and on what? 

Much of Hydra was written before my son was born. When not at work, those luxurious hours would stretch out in front of me and I’d write in an extra-large Moleskine to 1,200 words a day. This may have extended into the night or wrapped in a matter of hours, but I wasn’t to finish until those pages were complete. These days, time is scarce and I find writing is best done in the early morning when it’s still dark outside, and my partner and child are asleep.

When it comes to the novel’s structure, I love a colour-coded spreadsheet. I like to visually scrutinise my narrative, my characters’ development and the reader’s understanding of the text at different stages. If there are certain plot notes I want to hit – inciting incident, various turning points – I like to massage the writing into these Excel markers, step back and appraise it as one may do a sheet of music: tempo, tension, repetition, layers, the ebb and flow of emotion, the relief.

I don’t, however, plot the story before it’s been written. For me, the joy and entire point of writing are in the discovery and the surprise. I’ll even avoid writing an ending for as long as possible so as not to ruin the story for myself. Though once I do know the ending, I’ll go back to the beginning and ensure that its inevitability is hidden throughout.

What’s on your reading pile at the moment?

Let’s call it my reading box as I’m moving to France and am in the process of packing a bunch of books to send ahead of me. So far packed is Chilean Poet (Alejandro Zambra), Supper Club (Lara Williams) and Nobody is Ever Missing (Catherine Lacey), all recommended to me by Jaclyn Crupi at Hill of Content Bookshop. Representing my fellow Aussie writers, I have Laura McPhee-Browne’s Little Plum and Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light. I’ve unexpectedly become quite mad for poetry so I’ve packed Leonard Cohen’s The Flame, Eileen Myles’ I Must be Living Twice and Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar. Finally, into the box is my stained and battered copy of DBC Pierre’s Release the Bats, it’s the only writing guide that has made sense to me.

Find out more about Adriane Howell’s 2023 Stella Prize longlisted book, Hydra.