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Hope in chaos: Asphyxia on ‘Future Girl’

Writer and artist Asphyxia’s illustrated YA novel Future Girl (A&U, October) is set in an ‘eerily plausible’ dystopian Melbourne, and follows a Deaf teen Piper as she learns to embrace her identity and figure out what kind of future she wants for herself. Reviewer Bec Kavanagh says Future Girl is ‘art activism—a call for community and connection when we desperately need it’. She spoke to the author.

You’ve written widely about sustainable living and food growing. How important was it for you to build that into Future Girl?

Sustainable living has been an integral part of my life since I was 22 and built a mudbrick eco-cottage—which included solar power, a homemade composting toilet and water tanks—with my own hands. I started growing food at the same time but had limited success until my 30s, at which time I figured out how to produce 80% of my family’s veggies and meat from our suburban block. People who visited frequently told me how inspired they were to make changes in their own lives. I realised that many of us lack models for living well while having a minimal footprint on the earth, and I wanted to offer up that inspiration in a form that would be accessible to many.

It’s easy to fall into thinking traps like, What I do is insignificant and it’s the job of the government to solve our environmental crisis, but I believe very strongly that individuals can make a huge difference, not just through using fewer resources themselves but through the ripple effect that occurs when others see what they are doing and decide to have a go too. Many of the greatest changes in history have been wrought by passionate individuals who ended up part of grass roots movements.

I hope that through Future Girl, readers will get to feel the sheer pleasure that comes with growing your own, becoming more resilient in terms of potential future crises, and knowing they are contributing less to the damage we are doing to our planet.

At what point during the process of writing the novel did you realise it would be released into a world changed by a pandemic (which you reference in the book)? How did that shape your thinking around the story?

The manuscript was finalised and I was working on my final burst of the artwork when coronavirus landed in Australia and we all went into lockdown. My editor and I looked at each other (metaphorically because of course we could not be in the same room!) with simultaneous bursts of goosebumps at how eerily the world I had created within Future Girl seemed to be coming to fruition. At that point I sought permission to make some changes to the manuscript to reflect our new world.

I have long believed that it would not take much to tip our world into chaos because of the non-localised way we handle production of food and goods, which is resource intensive, environmentally damaging and fundamentally insecure for all of us. This is why I have focused so much of my own life on learning skills to cover as many of my own basic needs as possible, including producing my own food and clothing. (I even got a rabbit and learned how to make clothes from the trimmings of her fur—this was remarkably successful!) My parents’ generation in the developed world is possibly the first in history to have never known the stress of hunger or war. My generation has grown up with perfect safety and security, but history tells us that this is more a fluke than an entitlement.

I wanted Future Girl to serve as a warning, to encourage people to wake up and see how dangerous it is to depend wholly on essentials produced far away, and to encourage them to make changes—which would be easier to do it before chaos hits. My publishers initially felt the scenario I had painted was too far-fetched and were worried it would not be believable. But now I think we can all see how precarious our society is, how easily we can tip into chaos, and how important it is to prepare for greater resilience.

The novel, as with your earlier series for younger readers, ‘The Grimstones’, is as much a work of art as it is a book. Are the processes of writing and visual art interconnected for you? What makes the art such an integral element of your work?

Since I was a child I have embraced almost every kind of creativity I came across—writing, drawing, painting, sewing, felting, metalwork, woodwork, knitting, crochet and more. As my repertoire of skills has widened, I have enjoyed incorporating multiple forms of creativity into a single piece. It feels natural to me to draw on what I have available to me to combine in pleasing ways. For example, right now on my small farm I am making use of food-growing as an aesthetic and incorporating it into a functional visual artwork. Before I plant a tomato I consider the size, colours and placement of surrounding plants, fences, arbours, rocks and so on, and picture how they will all work together. I have written song lyrics about my artistic vision for the farm and intend to paint the words onto the fences along with paintings of images and found objects, which will all be integrated with plants.

My point is that for me, every form of art can be combined to make something that is more magnificent than a simple sum of its parts. Writing and visual art have been an intrinsic combination for me for many years. I have kept art journals in which text and images were ways for me to express my emotions as well as pour out my experiences. It felt natural to develop this further by creating an art journal that belonged to a fictional character and told her story rather than mine. If anything, it seems strange to me that this has not been done before!

You’re incredibly generous with your activism, including developing and delivering a free online Auslan course. Your work to change hearing people’s attitudes towards Deafness is similarly reflected in Future Girl. What would you most like readers to take away from this novel in their understanding of the Deaf community?

I think that most hearing people have no idea how their behaviour affects those of us who are Deaf, and would be inspired to make changes if they truly understood. I want readers to experience Piper’s Deafness in a visceral way, as if it is happening to them, as I believe this is the best way to develop empathy and hence instigate change. I hope that hearing people will put down the novel and take greater care to be inclusive to the Deaf people they spend time with in their futures.

For Deaf readers, my aim is two-fold. Firstly, I believe we all share an intense hunger for stories through media, books and film which represent our stories. They are confirmation that we exist! They are so validating. I have only once ever seen a film in my own language, Auslan, and that was about 15 years ago and it was a 10-minute short. How I long to see another! I want Deaf readers to sigh with relief that someone else has recognised and acknowledged their experience and shared it with the world. We spend so much time explaining ourselves and our Deafness—to have someone take over and do it in book form is such a relief. I hope that Deaf people will be able to pick up Future Girl, hand it to people they meet, and say, ‘Here, read this, then you’ll understand.’

The other aim for Deaf people is to provide an opportunity to look carefully at the choices we make in responding to the hearing world, and encourage more conscious choices. To explain, when I first tried to write about Piper’s experience, I found myself stuck, as being Deaf is something I don’t think about a lot. I found I didn’t know how to articulate it. So I started jotting down my everyday experiences—the little annoyances, the benefits, confusion, the irritating things people say and do, and the complex feelings that arise when someone has tried to provide access but missed the mark. I began to articulate aspects of Deafness I had never seen described before.

For example, a Deaf dilemma: if you’re standing with a group of hearing people who are laughing, but you have no idea what they are laughing about, should you laugh along to be friendly (and if you do, are you somehow ‘lying’ about having understood?) or stand there with a stony face even though it could seem rude?

I had never realised I was making these difficult decisions on the fly, every day, without analysing how I wanted to approach them. My responses were automatic: I laughed along. But did I really want to do this? Perhaps it would be better to let people know that I felt left out. With this realisation, I began to make more deliberate choices. I hope that Future Girl will provide Deaf people with the material they need to consider automatic responses and turn them into conscious choices.

There is so much hope in Future Girl, despite its setting in a world changing in bleak and frightening ways (much like the one we find ourselves in now). Are you hopeful that we have the capacity to change? What role does storytelling play in this?

Oh absolutely. The Transition Towns movement has taken off worldwide and is evidence of the desire for change so many of us have. I grew up a city girl who was oblivious to environmental issues and preferred being indoors rather than outside in nature. What changed things for me? Stories. I read Backyard Self-sufficiency by Jackie French and her beautiful inspiring writing convinced me that a better life was waiting if I could get outside into the garden and plant some seeds. She was right. I read Depletion and Abundance by Sharon Astyk and she provided delightful and engaging descriptions of life lived well using minimal resources. She, too, argued that we would be happier engaging in the visceral experiences of producing what we need for our own survival, rather than working at a remove to earn money to pay the experts to provide for our survival (at significant environmental cost). I was galvanised to try out her ideas, and it turned out that she, too, was right.

At one point I was feeling fatigued, and now I know that was because I was yet to be diagnosed with arsenic and lead poisoning. But at that time I thought maybe my self-sufficiency efforts could be draining me, and wondered if I should lighten up. But when I looked at which aspects of my life I wanted to change, I could not find any! I didn’t want to go back to shop food because the food from my garden was so mind-blowingly delicious that not even restaurant food could compare. I didn’t want to go back to my car-dependent life because I loved that I had swapped hours behind the wheel on black tarmac for pedalling my bike with the wind and sun on my face and the invigorating energy and fitness that came with the exercise. I didn’t want to start purchasing gifts again as making them myself gave me pleasure and made them so much more special for the recipient.

So yes, I hope that by adding Future Girl to the other inspiring books out there about living well on less, and living well in the face of chaos, people will be galvanised to try out some of the ideas offered. If nothing else, I hope at this difficult time during the pandemic, the book offers hope that we can face societal chaos and still find a good life within it.

 

Category: Features