Deeper Water (25 page)

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Australia Council for the Arts who awarded me a Book2 grant in order to complete this manuscript.

Big thanks also to Varuna, The Writers House, where I spent two weeks on a fellowship program, early in the process.

To my writers’ group—Siboney Saavedra-Duff, Lisa Walker, Jane Camens, Helen Burns and Michelle Taylor. I feel so lucky to have landed in your company.

Thanks always to Jan Smith, Varda Shepherd, Louise Nicholls, Michael Elliot, Iris Winter Elliot, Danika Cottrell, Jaali Da Silva, Jacob Cole, Billie Cole, Brett Adamson, Bradley McCann, Luke Wright, Christina Bandini, Nadia Bandini-Peterson, Romy Ash and Anna Krien for friendship, inspiration and support.

To Moya Costello for opening my eyes to so many different texts, my agent Jenny Darling for her straight-shooting, tenacious support, and the wonderful Peter Bishop—always such a wise voice in my ear.

For the beautiful cover photograph, big thanks to Lilli Waters.

Many thanks also to Catherine Milne and the whole team at HarperCollins, who showed such commitment and enthusiasm for this book right from the start. Special thanks to Jo Butler, who brought
Deeper Water
through acquisitions, and to my editor, Mary Rennie, who consistently offers such thoughtful, tender guidance.

And, as always, a very special thanks to my family.

What do you think
Deeper Water
is about?

On the surface, I think
Deeper Water
is a story about awakening. Mema’s awakening to the world outside, but also her sexual awakening—her belated initiation into womanhood and all that it entails.

As a novelist, I’m very interested in infatuation and desire—how easily these feelings can spring up within us, and how often they leave us perplexed and disorientated—as well as how sexual freedom can sometimes play out quite differently for men and women. I’m also curious about what a blossoming sexuality might be like one step removed from popular culture.

But on a deeper level, I see the book as an examination of modern life, of all the ways we’ve invented to disconnect ourselves from nature. Living the way I do, encased in forest on the periphery of modern existence, raises a number of questions. Primarily—how is it that we humans have come to see ourselves as so separate from the natural world? What do we gain by this? And what is the cost?

Tell us a little about Mema. Is she based on anyone you know?

Mema is a combination of influences. Having been home-schooled and living out in the bush, she’s very unworldly, but at the same time she has an innocent knowingness. She grew up in the aftermath of a time and place where there was a lot of social experimentation—‘free love’ and the like—and so, in a sense, she’s seen quite a bit on an emotional level, even though she hasn’t strayed far from home.

She’s not based on anyone I know, but the idea of her came from a teenage girl I used to see about town who had a limp. She was very appealing, in a Peruvian princess kind of way, and had a gentle-seeming self-assurance. I was fascinated by her. I think ‘familiar strangers’ can be really rich sources for the literary imagination. Even though I’d never spoken to this girl, and certainly didn’t know her, I began to wonder about her life. How did she feel about her misshapen foot? Did it change how she moved through the world? I got to wondering if all the boys in town found her as alluring as me—or if her limp made her somehow off limits or damaged-seeming. And once I began pondering all these things, Mema’s voice just seemed to come to me. Clear and unhindered. It’s been a good few years since I’ve seen this girl. She must have moved away, but I still look for her and wonder how she is.

The landscape is beautifully detailed. Is it a depiction of your childhood home?

It is an imagined landscape, but is loosely based on a property I know well—the childhood home of a close friend. It’s not very far from my place, geographically speaking, and there are aspects of the landscape in
Deeper Water
—like the creek system—that certainly occur in my home too, but overall the world of the book really only exists in my mind. I wanted to give the reader an experience of immersion in the natural world. I didn’t want the book to be overtly descriptive—to tell the reader what the landscape was like—I wanted the reader to be in it. To create this experience, I definitely called on how it feels to be inside my own personal landscape, my childhood home and homeland. That said, the towns that are closest to where I live are actually quite culturally vibrant places, which isn’t really reflected in my novels at all. I suppose I use some aspects of these towns and leave out others, and in the end the towns in my novels become utterly fictional places.

What fascinates you about the concept of women living without men?

I don’t really think I’m fascinated by the concept of women living without men. I think it’s more that it’s quite reflective of the world I inhabit. On a day-to-day basis—apart from my sons—I don’t come in contact with too many men. This might be symptomatic of my rural area, which has very high rates of single-parent households, or it might just be my particular circumstances, cloistered away in the forest.

In contrast, as a child in my community I always felt like the only girl among a horde of wild boys. Largely, this was circumstantial—most of my parent’s friends had male children—and I have really strong memories of feeling a deep affinity with these boys, but as I’ve gotten older that sense of closeness and understanding has dissipated. It’s partly that the boys all just moved away, but somehow in that process, masculinity has begun to seem more and more foreign to me. Unfamiliar and exotic. So, I think it’s more that I am fascinated by gender—and masculinity, in particular—and, of course, I have a real stake in understanding it because I’m trying to raise two boys.

Mema discovers throughout the course of the novel that she does not know herself as well as she thought. What are you using Mema to say about how we understand ourselves and our motivations?

One of the big things I was grappling with in this novel is that we don’t always know very much about ourselves. That often we think we are being honest with those around us, but there are things rolling around in the depths of us that we can’t acknowledge. They are like secrets about ourselves that we don’t even know. In a sense, I’m talking about the primal emotions that drive us—instincts and urges that we are often completely unconscious of. I find this stuff confusing, on a personal level. It’s been my experience, in the last few years particularly, that all these things I thought about myself—or ways I defined who I was—were simply not quite right.

So, in Mema’s case, she thinks she’s relatively emotionally self-sufficient, not prone to passion or being in love, not especially sexually alert, but all of a sudden she realises that in many ways she is exactly the opposite. And she wasn’t lying to those around her, or hiding things, she just wasn’t aware of them herself. I think we unconsciously shield ourselves from the parts of ourselves we find hard to manage or accept. And so, in some ways, Mema is ambushed by this incredible surge of feeling-eroticism-passion that she wasn’t aware she was even capable of.

In a wider sense, I’m interested in how sometimes that unacknowledged underbelly of feeling can propel us in directions completely in opposition to our own moral code. I think as humans we tend to overestimate our rational selves. We believe we’ve overcome our animalness, but I suspect that’s less than true.

Was the writing process for
Deeper Water
influenced by the success of your first novel,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
?

Darkness on the Edge of Town
was written at a time when I believed publication was an impossibility. This belief was partly fuelled by my geographic isolation—I knew no writers, I had no contact with that part of the world. But it was also informed by the prominent myth that ‘aspiring writers never get published’. I’d been hearing that phrase so long I had absolutely accepted it. Because of these two things, I wrote with a sense of absolute privacy. I believed no one would ever read it. I made no attempt to censor myself, and didn’t judge the writing either. I just experienced it. It was an incredibly invigorating way to write. Joyful, even though the text itself was quite dark.

But when it came to starting the next book, I was in a predicament. My whole way of writing was built on the premise of privacy—how could I write knowing others would read it? I pottered and procrastinated. Finally, I spoke about it to a friend, who offered some very simple advice: ‘Write, and you can choose later if you want to share it. The process of writing is still private.’ And that is absolutely true. I knew it was up to me to decide if and when I wanted a story to be read, and once I understood that, I was off and running.

Which authors were you reading while writing
Deeper Water
?

I live in my childhood home in amongst my parents’ book collection. They were both avid readers, but over the years the influx of new novels into the house has considerably slowed. As a result, the bookshelves are something of a living time capsule. It’s an eclectic mix of things, but lots of Herman Hesse and Franz Kafka. Since having
Darkness on the Edge of Town
published, I really wanted to catch up with the fiction of my contemporaries, so I read Carrie Tiffany, Romy Ash, Tony Birch, and many others. What a rich writing culture Australia has! In terms of inspiration, I read a lot of non-fiction when I’m writing. Early on in the process I found a book called
The Secret World of Doing Nothing
by Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren an oddly rejuvenating read. Just recently I read Jay Griffiths’
Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape
, which was completely mesmerising.

What is next for you?

I often have a bit of a spell from writing fiction after completing a novel, but I have been tinkering with the first manuscript I completed. It is a much more autobiographical tale, and though it hasn’t been published yet, it’s still very close to my heart. But I’m still trying to work out how it should be. Apart from that, I’m really not sure!

1. Deeper Water
   is not only a story of sexual awakening, but of discovering secret unknowns. What does Mema learn about herself and her family?
   
2. Mema is named by her mother for Artemis, the goddess of wild animals, the moon and fertility. How does this naming foreshadow her character and journey?
   
3. The creek is an important character in
   Deeper Water
   . How does nature, in its cycles of destruction and creation, reflect or impact Mema’s life?
   
4. Mema is emotionally and physically connected with the land. Do you feel similar connections? Can you identify with Mema’s relationship?
   
5. When Hamish is confined to Mema’s place during the flood, he loses almost all contact with the modern world. How would you cope without the internet or a mobile phone in a stranger’s house for days?
   
6. When we look at our lives through the eyes of others, we see ourselves in a new light. What does Mema learn from this experience? What do you think Hamish sees?
   
7. Anja is wild, provocative and impulsive, the opposite of Mema at the beginning of the novel. Does Mema show any of Anja’s characteristics over the course of the novel?
   
8. What did you make of Mema and Anja’s intimate relationship? Have you had relationships yourself that defy normal classification?
   
9. What is your opinion of the quality of loyalty in the context of the novel?
   
10. Hamish’s behaviour towards Mema is ambiguous. Do you think he plays with her? How responsible are we for the feelings of others?
    
11. Mema’s mother is a dichotomy of hard and soft, nurturing and yet cold. Is her dual nature recognisable? Did you understand her frustrations?
    
12. How did you feel about Mema not yet being ready to leave home at the end of the novel?
    

Jessie Cole was born in 1977 and grew up in an isolated valley in northern New South Wales. Her debut novel,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
, was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal and longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award. Her work has appeared in
Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Island
magazine,
Big Issue, Daily Life
and
The Guardian
. Nowadays, she lives in her childhood home with her two sons.

jessiecolewriter.wordpress.com

‘It’s exquisite writing. Graceful, revealing, pitch perfect. Cole is an author who pays sharp attention to the world around her. And she deserves to have the world pay her some attention in return.’

Ed Wright,
Weekend Australian

‘Jessie Cole writes with the most deceptively simple language. She pulls you into the story and along its threads until bam! She hits you right between the eyes. This is great storytelling.’

Meredith Jaffé,
Hoopla

‘Cole captures the joys and menace of small-town life and human relationships that are never black and white but always grey.’

MX

‘Jessie Cole’s writing has the clarity of good modern novels, words that aren’t fancy and full of complex sentences, just a measured quietness that makes the story sing.’

Brittany Vonow, Brisbane
Courier-Mail

‘This work operates at deeply engaging and emotional levels while excellent story-telling drives it.’

Nigel Krauth,
Westerly

‘
Darkness on the Edge of Town
proves difficult to put down as it hurtles towards its confronting conclusion.’

Who Weekly

‘… it’s an accomplished portrayal of how seemingly random events can trigger life-changing outcomes.’

Sunday
Canberra Times