“Not a Dream, but a Harrowing”: Writing a Colonial Fairy Tale

Abstract:This article reflects on two key aspects of the writing process for the short story “A Void and a Chasm and a Ruin.” It describes two key strategies the writer uses to think with fairy tales about Australian whiteness and womanhood. First, experimenting with interlacing various traditional narrative forms in ways that draw attention to the ways in which narratives obscure as much as they reveal and preserve while also exploring how the ongoing and iterative processes of storytelling (thinking with stories) can be as destructive as they are productive. Second, extending Jane Tolmie’s critical analysis of “exceptional” female protagonists to the figure of the white woman in Australian colonial narratives.