Welcome to MAUDE’S BOOK CLUB!!

Our fellow Aussie from Brisbane, Kathleen Jennings, has a brand new novel for you! It’s her sophomore novel, Honeyeater.

Honeyeater has been getting rave reviews from the masterful author T. Kingfisher.

“Lush and atmospheric... Gorgeously written.”

Jennings has focused on the horror fantasy genre and has written a cautionary tale about long-buried secrets in a small town. We are giving away 5 copies of her sophomore novel.

Rules:
-Must be a member of our Discord!
-Book Club Members members get 2x the entries!
-Merch Members get 3x the entries! 📚
-Winners will be contacted through Discord!
- The giveaway starts on August 4th to the 11th.

**About the Author**:

Kathleen Jennings is the British Fantasy Award winning and World Fantasy Award shortlisted author of Flyaway, Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion, and Kindling: Stories. She is also a World Fantasy Award winning and Hugo Award shortlisted illustrator. She holds an MPhil and PhD in creative writing, lives in Brisbane, Australia, and can be found online at tanaudel.wordpress.com.

**Synopsis**

It follows Charlie Wren, the black sheep of his prodigious family tree, who is remarkable only for how many friends have gone missing after meeting him. They’re assumed to have slipped between the twists of Bellworth’s tempestuous landscape or run away from the town altogether, though no one can shake their suspicion of his eerie connection. And one day, something slips out of the town river’s muddy banks and walks right to Charlie’s door. Formed from leaves, vines, and blooming roses, Grace doesn’t know how or why the creek coughed her up, but she and Charlie work together to uncover the mysteries lurking between the branches of jacaranda trees and creeping up the floodplains of this hypnotic neighborhood, even if those mysteries always seem to lead right back to the Wren family itself.

Q&A with Kathleen Jennings

1. Do you find being an illustrator has given you the ability to be more descriptive in your writing in a different way?

KJ: Yes, but indirectly. Being an illustrator — like many creative pursuits — involves a degree of looking wistfully at other people’s techniques and styles! I’m a line-and-silhouette illustrator. My work isn’t painterly. But the light and texture and depth of painted work fills me with deep envy and longing: a little for the skill, but mostly to be able to roll around in it. So when I write, I try to be the painter I’m not. For Flyaway, I’d even study paintings and ‘steal’ vocabulary from them — looking for words to capture that quality of light or movement. In Honeyeater, I took those lessons of surfaces and worked at recreating in ink and paper a street of velvety peeling wood and window-glass like boiled candy, with reference to the works of many Brisbane artists and illustrators (the spindly-legged night-houses of Phoebe Paradise’s sculptures), and to the sensory memories of the times between floods.

2. What are the differences between illustrating and writing that you've noticed between your projects?

KJ: In both cases, I’m telling stories — it makes it tricky to illustrate my own work, because so much of that impetus gets out into the text. While Lindsey Carr created the glorious cover art for Honeyeater, I also cut a set of paper silhouettes, one for each of the parts of the book, but they lean into ornament more than descriptive illustration. However, when I illustrate other people’s books, I’m working in conversation with someone else’s words; it’s crawling into a book and drawing on the walls. And illustrations I do as personal work are often purely musing on a theme, creating the potential for a story, or the context for one. Further, I’ll try to cram as much as possible into a single image (as with the crowded motifs of my fairy-tale repeating patterns and calendar illustrations). When I write, as I mentioned above, I can access visuals I can’t in my own art. My pictureless chapbook Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion, is functionally a written sketchbook. But I also lean into sound: the way words clink and clang together, whether in description or dialogue. I’m following the sounds into the trees.

3. What piqued your interest in the fantasy horror genre? Why have you gravitated towards telling those stories? Would you ever want to write out of those genres?

KJ: I’ve always loved the effect of fairy tales, and they are source texts for so much fantasy — but also for horror and the Gothic (think of Bluebeard). The genres border each other, and along those edge-zones they blend. It’s easy to tip over from one into the other, and I enjoy the potential and challenge of walking that line. There’s a murkiness which is fun, too, for calling things into question: are straw decoy-children along the creek horrific or just the way a certain type of story goes? Is this garden with its monstera deliciosa and fallen mangoes redolent of decadence or decay? This sort of ambiguity is rich ground for story-questions.

When I’ve written out of fantasy-horror or Australian Gothic, at least in short fiction, I’ve tended to stray more into a purely folkloric mode. But I’ve committed steampunk, and baroque phraseology, and a story that had no magic in it at all (those are all in my collection Kindling). In long form, I’m playing with some Regency confections, and a more stately mythic fantasy, but those are still in progress.

4. How has your creative process changed over the years?

KJ: When I was starting, I had few (writing and art) obligations and fewer online distractions. So desire and joy created this vacuum that I was filling with writing. As I worked out what I wanted to do, and what I was doing, naturally some structures started getting built around this — standards and deadlines. I had to guide and push myself, and so I had to adapt my process to that. And as I started working things out, it’s taken more than a few tries to learn to trust what I know — to write in the general knowledge of how stories works, and rely on later drafts to make it work! While Honeyeater benefited from my melodramatic suffering during the edits, I could have had a better time — I’ve followed almost the same process on the next manuscript and had considerably more fun, now that I know it works! However, I’ve also practiced watching what I do, noticing little details of what I do and when ideas spark and how I can effectively play with language and imagery, and how to borrow and adapt and repurpose and reinvent. In the end, I did a whole PhD on my observation journal (I blog about it, too), and the process of productive creative reflection — how it deepens practice and process but also actively produces creative and non-fiction output, of which Honeyeater is only one example.

5. What are you planning to do next? Any new projects in the works?

KJ: I’m currently tidying up a draft of a novella that’s somewhere between haunted(?) house and more (plausibly-deniably) European fairy-tale — with, of course, sub-stories between each chapter. I did that in Honeyeater, with its 21 tiny ghost stories, and Flyway was built out of short stories leaning on each other, until they all came together. But I want to explore more ways to do that — braiding or studding or spangling long tales with other little stories. And I have several fairy-tale maps to draw, and a long-term graphic novel adaptation, while I contemplate the next steps on some longer manuscripts of my own.

Note:

If useful, here are two observation journal sketches of someone going into the trees, and of my drawing board set up on the dining table for filming!