This is a seven-minute podcast of a discussion between myself and Erin Kyan of http://erinkyan.com, talking about my queer fantasy novella Incandescent Girl and how the queer YA fantasy community of Melbourne, and Australian publishing more generally, have used social media as a tool for activism against homophobia and transphobia – a particularly important topic to discuss, considering how British children’s fantasy writer JK Rowling consistently uses social media in order to push transphobic rhetoric.
The queer Melbourne creative scene is a community where everyone’s path is overlapping with everyone else’s all the time. You can see that from the blurb quotes used by different authors – Lili Wilkinson and Lisa Tirreno are both blurbed by CS Pacat, Lisa Tirreno and Erin Kyan blurbed me, and so on. So it was important to me to highlight the contributions by other Melbourne creatives in the creation of my own media. Incandescent Girl, though set in a fantasy world, is very much a Melbourne novel of the Melbourne milieu, and this is the reason why I highlighted on my Bluesky the work of Erin Kyan, who helped me create the short podcast, and Lili Wilkinson, who made the most overt rebuttal against fantasy YA that isn’t queer-friendly.
Ideally, I’d love for my Bluesky posts, blog entries, and podcast to reach people who might not be aware of the vibrant array of queer fantasy YA being created by Melbourne writers. By sharing the names of other creators in my posts, I hope to spread the word in some small way. My audience is limited, but as I discuss in the podcast, where one person doing something small may be slacktivism, many people each doing something small creates a movement, which can direct discourse.
As my view of the queer fantasy YA scene in Melbourne is so community-focused, I felt a key skill to bring to the creation of my podcast was that of conversation – better to have multiple voices in discussion about the subject, bringing different ideas with them, than one person offering solo opinions. This was a key reason why I chose to involve Erin: podcasts are just more interesting when it’s more than one person talking.
I’ve been a guest on literary podcasts in the past over the years, so I think it was really valuable for me to go behind the curtain on this one and do the technical work as well as the talking – it taught me skills I may well need again someday about how to stitch a coherent podcast product together out of the raw material of a casual discussion.
In the end, the most important thing to me is that this podcast gave me the chance to contextualize my work within the wider scope of YA literature, both the queer fantasy YA books being written in Melbourne specifically and the national and international discourse around queer representation within the genre more broadly.