KBR welcomes Claire Zorn, author of The Sky So Heavy, a gripping new novel for Young Adults that is released this month.
Can you describe The Sky So
Heavy in ten words or less?
A group of teenagers struggles to survive a nuclear
winter. Or … A bit like The Road but with more jokes.
How did the idea for the book
come to you?
I
started thinking about the story roughly two years before I even wrote a word.
I remember I was sitting on the train — I find train travel strangely inspiring — and I saw a scene in my mind: a teenager in a dark, cold place, trying to
protect a group of people and feeling way out of his depth. I also got a line
in my head: 'I’m sixteen years old and this is the first time anyone’s held a
gun to my head.' With a little tweaking this ended up being the opening line of
The
Sky So Heavy.
I
kept turning those ingredients
over in my mind for a couple of years. Then the debate over Australia’s
treatment of asylum seekers flared again and I was struck by the way a person’s
life — their access to food, shelter, medical care and education — is decided
by a line on a map. I’ve always really struggled to understand the fear of
asylum seekers; I feel that if people could imagine themselves and their
families in those circumstances, there would be so much more compassion. So I
imagined what it would take to put the average, middle-class Australian in that
situation.
Is there a message in the book
that you would like readers to grasp?
I
hope that the story can contribute in a small way to the debate over asylum
seekers and perhaps reflect the complexities of the issue. I also wanted to
engage with the idea of a generation inheriting the stuff-ups of their
predecessors, especially global warming. I didn’t set out to allude to that with
the climate change in the book — but I like the way it is a sort of inverse
global warming.
Why did you choose to write in this genre?
I
like the immediacy of Young Adult fiction. I’m a very impatient reader — I want
to get to the meat of a story as soon as possible — and I think that translates
to my own writing. I tend to have no trouble ruthlessly pruning my stories to
get to their core, which suits YA. Young readers have such a strong, shall we
say, 'crap detector'. You have to work to hold their attention. There’s nowhere
to hide and I like that challenge.
I
also find teenagers to be the most fascinating characters. They’re so savvy,
yet there’s such vulnerability to them as well. Those years on the edge of
adulthood are so complex and I really like stories that push their characters
over the edge from childhood into adulthood. All my favourite books are about
characters taking that journey.
Your manuscript was picked
from the slush pile! Did you have the manuscript professionally edited before
you sent it out to publishers?
It
was picked from the slush pile in a round-about way. I reached a point with The Sky So Heavy — which I think every
writer gets to — where I couldn’t keep working on it without some quality
feedback. Which was when I paid to have a structural report done on it. I chose
someone with lots of experience in YA, who was very well regarded in publishing
circles and it was the best thing I could have done. The feedback she gave me
really helped me get the manuscript to a standard it couldn’t have reached
without fresh eyes. I re-drafted the whole thing after I got that report back
and then submitted it to agents.
While
that was happening UQP put out a call for YA manuscripts. They stipulated that
they weren’t looking for speculative fiction, so I didn’t submit The Sky So Heavy, but
another manuscript. They were interested in this other story, but it wasn’t
quite ready enough for them to offer me a contract. By this time I had signed The Sky So Heavy to an agent and she
suggested that they have a read of it. I think I submitted it to about four
agents before it was picked up.
Read our review of The Sky So Heavy.
Read our review of The Sky So Heavy.
The Sky So Heavy, UQP, $19.95 RRP