My writing endeavour

Avondale lecturer awarded a fellowship for next novel

The quality of an Avondale lecturer’s new novel has earned her something about which authors can only dream—two weeks to do nothing but write.

Lynnette Lounsbury is one of only four recipients of the 2016 Varuna Second Book Fellowship. The fellowship, open to writers completing their second book, offers accommodation, food and independent writing time at the Varuna Writers House in Katoomba, New South Wales. “I’ve never had this much writing time, ever,” says Lounsbury, a lecturer in history and communication at Avondale College of Higher Education who returned from the Blue Mountains this past Monday (February 29). “The silence was magnificent.”

The fortnight proved productive, with Lounsbury completing not one but two novels. The first, Endeavour, the novel on which Lounsbury based her application, is “a sci-fi reversioning of the Australian colonisation story.” Lounsbury is writing the novel for her Doctor of Philosophy degree, in which she is examining the use of history in the fantastical fiction genre. The second, tentatively called The Anarchist, is about teenagers rejecting the status quo.

“Both novels were well entrenched in my mind so I wasn’t spending any time searching for ideas or plot arcs,” says Lounsbury. She did spend some time in professional development—a half-day mentorship with Varuna’s founding creative director Peter Bishop, and “enriching and encouraging” dinner conversations about character and style with other writers. “But the time and space to get words out onto paper is what really counts. A kind of detox of the mind.”

Allen & Unwin became the major contributing cause to this “incurable disease” when it published Lounsbury’s debut novel, Afterworld, in 2014. The young adult fantasy received good reviews. Kids’ Book Review described it as “an astonishing debut by a brilliant new talent.” Chris Lynch, a former honour recipient of the American Library Association’s Michael L Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature, wondered “how such an adventure managed to work in philosophy, theology, physics, metaphysics, the ties that bind beyond this life, addictions, devotions and some subtly lovely adolescent romance to boot.” The ending, he added, “might be the most comprehensively hopeful thing you’ll ever encounter.”

Lounsbury adopts the beatniks’ energy and adventurous spirit as she experiments with language and character in her first novel for an adult audience. Published by Inkerman & Blunt, We Ate the Road Like Vultures launches on April 4.