I have admired Kaaron Warren and Cat Sparks as writers for years, so when I got the opportunity to interview them for this blog, I jumped at the chance! Their new book, Calvaria Fell, is a collection of short fiction (and one novella) presents a deliciously dark future, filled with invasive plastic, faux paradises, abandoned malls, spy networks tucked amongst citizen enclaves, and manipulative experimentation, all wrapped up in the kindness and cruelty humanity has to offer to itself. Swinging from tender to horrifying, there’s a story here for anyone whose reading tastes lean towards the dark, the dystopian, and the weird, with a healthy serving of contemplative speculation that will leave you thinking long after you leave the pages.
What does Calvaria mean, you ask?
The title of the collection tethers these stories to a shared space. The calvaria is the top part of the skull, comprising five plates that fuse together in the first few years of life. Story collections work like this; disparate parts melding together to make a robust and sturdy whole. The calvaria tree, also known as the dodo tree, adapted to being eaten by the now-extinct dodo bird; its seeds need to pass through the bird’ s digestive tract in order to germinate. In a similar way, the stories in Calvaria Fell reflect the idea of adaptation and the consequences of our actions in a changing world.
–Meerkat Press
Pick up your copy of Calvaria Fell at Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon and enter Meerkat Press’ $25 Gift Card Giveaway contest here! In the meantime, please enjoy this interview with Cat and Kaaron!
QUESTIONS ABOUT CALVARIA FELL
Thank you so much for participating in this interview! First off, I’d love to know more about how this project came about. A dual-author collection of short stories is such a unique and fun idea, and your styles blend so beautifully. What was the spark that made you take on this project together?
We’ve been reading and editing each other’s work for as long as we’ve known each other. We met when Cat bought a story from Kaaron, and while we’ve often worked in different genres and arenas, at heart our stories explore similar themes of human behaviour and consequences.
A couple of years ago, we both had stories we considered complete, set in self-contained worlds but with questions raised about what happens outside these worlds. We realised that Cat’s short story “Some Kind of Indescribable”, and Kaaron’s novella “The Emporium” somehow seemed to inhabit that ‘outside’ space, answering those questions to a certain degree.
We talked about some of the new stories Cat was working on, and realised that we’d somehow over the years been working at times in the same kind of near future, with similar landscapes and projected futures, with at the same time a kind hope running through it relying on humanity to look after its own.
We were working in a second-hand shop together, a wonderful place where hundreds of interesting and unusual items came in every week, all of them bringing a past and a possible future. Many of these items ended up in our stories, because we believe that many items hold a lot of community weight and significance even if they have lost their history. We explored these items in detail, because it is in the detail where people are at their best. Focusing on the smaller picture.
When you were writing the stories for CALVARIA FELL, did you work explicitly on your own stories or did you edit each other’s work or plan them together? What kind of things are considered and weighted to create cohesion between the stories?
We wrote them separately and stitched them together as a whole, although Cat wrote “Doll Face” with the rest of the collection in mind.
It was in the selection of stories where the consideration and weight took place. For Kaaron, it was choosing those of her stories that were more SF than horror, and for Cat it was selecting stories that leaned towards the horror end of SF. The ‘meeting of the minds’ is what brings cohesiveness to the collection.
Climate destruction runs through it all, and that is intentional.
Placement was organic, in that one story seemed to flow into the next.
One of the things I appreciated about this collection was how all the stories managed to create this deep sense of dread and distrust, particularly regarding giant corporations, new tech run amok, climate change, and inequality. It’s a feeling I think a lot of people are having these days. Given the state of the world today, what scares you the most right now?
All of it. Humanity’s own inertia in response to scientific advice is terrifying. Current catastrophic threats to life on this planet include: global heating, environmental decline and extinction, nuclear weapons, resource scarcity, food insecurity, dangerous new technologies, chemical pollution, pandemic disease, and denial and misinformation – all of which are happening at once. Humanity is utterly failing in its self-appointed stewardship of the only planet so far proven to support any form of life, let alone the complex or sentient. Yet here we are, cranking out new coal and gas fired power stations, despite scientists assuring us we have to switch to renewables asap or else suffer dire consequences – such as the actual end of our civilisations.
Do you each have a favorite story from the collection, or a scene in a story that you found particularly resonant? Since it’s a dual collection, which was your favorite contribution to the book and which story is your favorite of your co-author’s?
Cat: My favourite story of Kaaron’s is ‘Witnessing’, with its use of gang members as low-tech surveillance devices. Her stories are riddled with small scale domestic grade horrors. Reading them is like being stabbed randomly with a fork throughout an otherwise civilized dinner party.
My favourite of my own is ‘Hacking Santorini’, written in response to a visit there a few years back. When the friend I stayed with read the story she said something along the lines of how the hell did you make this thing out of that place?
Kaaron: It’s hard to choose a favourite from a group of stories selected so carefully! But the novella The Emporium is one of those that sang out to me and demanded to be written. Set in part in the shopping mall in the suburb I grew up in, and inspired deeply by my work at the second-hand shop, I’m really happy with the end result and with the characters I filled that mall with. I love all of Cat’s stories, too, but my favourite is “Hacking Santorini” because of its obsessive attention to object detail and the way those things are absorbed and inform the story. The underlying humorous tone lends a positive feel to a dark SF story, and the story itself takes me by surprise every time I read it.
What do you feel is the most important thing for readers of CALVARIA FELL to bring away from the book with them? What do you hope they see or take with them to continue thinking about?
The human experience is an intricate weave of macro and micro events with random elements scattershot throughout. As individuals, few of us have power to fight for or against major catastrophe – it’s how we respond that matters. Our true strength lies in community and the bonds we make within. Ten thousand years of agricultural settlement have left us in a precarious global position. Survival depends upon us embracing the ecosystems of which we are a part rather than just attempting to profit from them.
QUESTIONS ABOUT WRITING IN GENERAL
Building dread is such an artform, and you do it so well in CALVARIA FELL. Each story has an underlying tension of uncertainty about the future and the secrets we keep, both to protect others and to protect ourselves. What do you think about or need to be aware of when you’re conjuring dread in your prose? What do you think makes for the best evocation of that emotion in readers?
Kaaron: One of the most important things about building dread for me is that it shouldn’t be unrelenting. If a story is only dark and dread-filled, the reader will turn off. You need lighter moments, and you need to ensure your characters are real on the page. This is what makes the best evocation. If the reader can relate to, understand, or sympathise with the characters, the emotion will be stronger.
Most people will want moments of relief, even in the worst of circumstances. In a way I see it as a release valve, to stop pressure building up and keep heads clearer. Dread in story is the same; you need to release the pressure every now and then.
Cat: For me, dread is best evoked through hint and tone, then maintained through rhythm. Less is definitely more. The author plants seeds and the reader experiences things sprouting uncomfortably in their peripheral vision.
Finding the time and motivation to get one’s writing done can be a challenge for writers, so I’m curious about your writing routines. Do you have a typical routine for getting your work done, or not so much? How has your approach to making time for your art changed over the years?
Cat: Back when I was in full-time employment with very little free time, I wrote heaps because I had to fight for writing time and space, making every sentence expensive and therefore valuable in terms of emotional labour. Theoretically I have buckets of ‘free time’ now – the challenge has become about stealing precious hours away from domestic responsibilities and visual arts, my other hardcore area of interest. For me, writing has always been challenging and it’s not getting any easier as I get older. No routines that seem to stick, just a burning urge to be part of the global speculative conversation.
Kaaron: I’ve had so many variations in my writing practice! From typing on an electric typewriter while hour-long tapes copied when I ran an editing studio in an advertising agency, to working part time and writing in the afternoons, to having my children and snatching ten minutes here and there to work, to living in Fiji for three years and devoting most of my time there to completing three novels, to working part time again and writing the rest of the time, to writing full time again! Throughout it all what has driven me is a need to get words on the page. To explore the ideas that press forward, and to interpret the things that upset me or terrify me into a story.
Now that CALVARIA FELL is out in the world, what’s next for the both of you? What project is calling your name (if you can talk about it)?
Kaaron: I have a novel out called The Underhistory, a home-invasion meets haunted house story. I’m working on my next novel, another crime novel, inspired by the hundreds of magazine articles and newspaper clippings I’ve collected over the years.
Cat: I’m working on a new novel, as yet untitled, set in London, Berlin, Australia and a swathe of no man’s land at the point where climate crisis and AI Singularity slam up against each other. Loads of research going into this one – my protagonist is a climate activist. We need more stories about activism as antidote to apathy and despair.
A COUPLE FUN QUESTIONS
I’m always looking for new things to read, so I’ve got to ask: what are you currently reading? What novel or short story has really excited you recently? Any nonfiction books really blown your mind lately?
Cat: I recently finished The Mountain in the Sea and The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler and loved them both. Currently reading The Future We Choose – The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac & I’m looking forward to Deep Water: The World in the Ocean by James Bradley next.
Kaaron: I’m reading up for some crime conventions in the UK in May, so discovering writers like Syd Moore, Natalie Marlow and Caroline England.
A non-fiction book that is blowing my mind is “Gilles de Rais, The Authentic Bluebeard” by Jean Benedetti. I’ve always quoted the fairy tale Bluebeard as an early inspiration for me as a horror writer, so reading this biography of a mass murderer, starting from his life as a child, is utterly fascinating.
If you could choose one fictional character to spend an afternoon with, who would you choose and what would you spend your time doing?
Cat: Rather than pick a character, I’d like to pick a world – the fantastically tweaked landscapes of Les Coureurs in Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence. What would I be doing? It’s complicated…
Kaaron: I’m going to cheat a bit and name Pera Sinclair, the main character in my novel The Underhistory. She would be great fun to hang out with and have lots of stories to tell. She also makes a good scone.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning Australian author, editor and artist. Career highlights include a PhD in science fiction and climate fiction, five years as Fiction Editor of Cosmos Magazine, running Agog! Press, working as an archaeological dig photographer in Jordan, studying with Margaret Atwood, 78 published short stories, two collections— The Bride Price (2013) and Dark Harvest (2020) and a far future novel, Lotus Blue. She directed two speculative fiction festivals for Writing NSW and is a regular panelist & speaker at speculative fiction and other literary events.
Kaaron Warren has been publishing ground-breaking fiction for over twenty years. Her novels and short stories have won over 20 awards, from local literary to international genre. She writes horror steeped in awful reality, with ghosts, hauntings, guilt, loss, love, crime, punishment and a lack of hope.