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Author Q&A with Carmel Bird – Thurs 14 Dec, 8pm AEDT

We'll be chatting with award-winning Australian author Carmel Bird on from 8pm AEDT on Thursday 14 December to celebrate a new award for digital short stories and the launch of Bird's new digital collection, The dead aviatrix: eight short stories.

Is there anything you'd like to know about writing short stories or publishing online? Don't miss this chance to put your questions to an experienced and talented writer. No need to wait until 14 December either – post them as they come to you.

If you'd like a bit of inspiration, have a read of some of Carmel's work:

The Dead Aviatrix, a story from her new collection: https://tablo.io/carmel-bird/the-dead-aviatrix-and-the-stratemeyer-syndicate
An essay on her new collection: https://tablo.io/carmel-bird/the-dead-aviatrix-the-story-of-the-stories

Carmel Bird has written novels, short stories, essays and books on the art of writing, in addition to editing anthologies of essays and stories. She was awarded the Patrick White Award in 2016.

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And to add to my question above, how do you come up with your story titles?

Well, Jordan, new writers and students often seem to be uncertain about how to name their stories. I am always amazed that they can’t see and hear the titles in their own narratives. They are always there. I don’t know why it is, but I have always known the title of any story of mine – sometimes before the story is formed, sometimes as soon as the story is written. Occasionally the publisher’s marketing department has stepped in and said I had to change it. They have sometimes won the battle, and have invariably made a bit of a mess of things. But that isn’t what you asked about.
Take the title of ‘The Dead Aviatrix and the Stratemeyer Syndicate’. The story was nine years in the making.
It was inspired by something that happened to me as the writer of a novel some years ago. It was an awful and troubling thing, and I wondered for a long time about how to write about it in a useful and interesting way. The narrative involved my surname Bird and the surname of an Australian woman flier, also Bird. It was a story about publishing. Then one day I was reading online about the phenomenon of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the first book-packager for children, and I found there a story with a woman flier in it, and I was captivated by the sentence:
The aviatrix sat looking on through all this tumult with a happy smile.
Something went Ping! and suddenly I had the story. Maybe the use of the term ‘aviatrix’ was what did it. A word very much of its time. Female aviator. Not a word that is safe to use seriously any more because it is unfashionable to characterize women workers as being separate from men workers. You are not supposed to say, for instance, ‘actress’. So ‘aviatrix’ was horribly un-PC. In particular I loved the ‘trix’ part of it; I just liked saying it. The story, fermenting for about nine years, just ‘wrote itself’ as writers sometimes say – so annoying – and the title did too. I loved it when the character of the intern invented herself.
Now you may wonder why the title of the story is longer than the title of the collection – well – I believe that book titles often benefit from being very short. Easy to say, easy for people to remember. I wanted to have the word Aviatrix on the cover, and it so happens that people seem to really love the word. So I shortened the title of the story when I used it on the cover. But I retained the longer title for the story itself. The Stratemeyer Syndicate was a very important part of the narrative.
The title of a story sometimes wells up out of the story; sometimes the title comes first, and will not go away. I think that in Dear Writer Revisited I suggest that the writer might talk TO the story, ask it what its title is. Nuts you see.

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