YA (youth adult fiction) is a strange world, full of strange worlds.
Perhaps I am revealing my own reading biases here, but when I think of YA, I think of the fantasy and dystopian novels that dominated my own adolescence. For many of us, the ‘genre’, if you can call it that, was dominated by far-flung futures or parallel dimensions that exist so close, and yet so far away from anything any of us can see from the scuffed-up windows of a train at Central station.
But despite the feast of allegorical dragons and stark, stylised futures on display, realism holds its ground. Even the most familiar places, the ones we’ve grown to feel like we can understand, are filled with mystery and meaning by the works of Australian YA authors.
As part of the 2022 Sydney Writers’ Festival All-Day-YA programme, I was lucky enough to catch the There’s No Place Like Home panel, hosted by Curator Litia Taulawakeiaho, and hear from authors Felicity Castagna, Zach Jones and Jared Thomas about their processes of incorporating space and place into their fictional prose.
Zach Jones’ new novel Growing Up In Flames follows the story of the teenage Kenna, and her return to the small country town where her deceased mother grew up. By exploring this familiar yet unfamiliar place and listening to the stories of the townsfolk, she is able to rediscover her lost mother, and reconnect to her legacy.
To Jones, a life in the Australian countryside is inextricably linked to its environment; these towns’ proximity and vulnerability to natural disasters such as bushfires presents an existential connection deeply entrenched within the community, fostering a close-knit environment where escape, or anonymity, is impossible.
There was a profound shift away from the impacts of space upon us, toward the impact of us upon space – through natural disasters and land mismanagement, to climate change, and the underlying awareness of the land’s unceded sovereignty.
In My Spare Heart, Jared Thomas also explores regional Australia, as his protagonist Phoebe moves to the country with her father and tries to start afresh. This mother-daughter relationship is placed under stress by the distance between the two women, which begins to bleed into their day-to-day lives. In harnessing the power of space and place, Thomas tells a unique story of belonging, and finding yourself within a new world while navigating the ties to your past.
In Felicity Castagna’s Girls in Boys’ Cars, however, she approaches this issue from the opposite end of the spectrum. When two girls escape their hometown in search of the world beyond, they are confronted with the challenges posed by unfamiliar spaces, and forced to reconcile with the formation of their own identities in the face of these spatial threats.
As the discussion continued, however, there was a profound shift away from the impacts of space upon us, toward the impact of us upon space – through natural disasters and land mismanagement, to climate change, and the underlying awareness of the land’s unceded sovereignty.
Thomas, as the sole Indigenous panel member, referenced the work of Viktor Stephenson and his own passion for cultural burns as a means of not just preventing disaster, but for giving back and healing the damage done by European colonisation. This unique and profound insight drove home the point at the centre of the discussion; that land and humanity are inextricably tied in a complex mesh of learning, and sharing stories.
These stories, moulded and carved by space and place, are a testament to the significance of belonging and the ways in which reality, often, is stranger than fiction.
Main image of Jared Thomas supplied by Sydney Writer’s Festival.
