Rite of Spring #author Kris Kneen

'And here you are. You, who might feel the itch of an uncomfortable identity hanging heavy on your shoulders like a hair shirt. It is you I sing to. You who are tempted by the possibility of something more.'

In the hope of salvaging their relationship, Miranda and Richard become caretakers of a remote island lighthouse off the coast of Tasmania. Richard wants to shake up the malaise that had him falling into an affair, Miranda wants to understand what has changed and to recover from a diving accident that almost took her life. Both are excited about the renewal and adventure that the mysterious lighthouse promises. But what begins as a reuniting, quickly turns for Miranda in to an untamed journey back to the ocean that swirls at the core of her being.

Few write so vividly about bodily intimacy and spirit as Kneen. Rite of Spring beautifully fuses place, psychological drama, the primordial nature of the ocean and the personal search for a centre. It is a mind-blowing novel about a woman on the cusp of menopause that transcends our expectations about who and what we can be.

Author Kris Kneen is a f fiction, poetry, and non-fiction writer whose work is praised for its fearless honesty and lyrical, transgressive style. Their books include the Stella Prize–shortlisted An Uncertain Grace, the Thomas Shapcott Prize–winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother, and memoirs such as Affection, The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, and Fat Girl Dancing. Kneen’s writing spans erotica, literary fiction, and deeply personal memoir.

To connect with Kris ....
https://www.krissykneen.com/about
https://www.facebook.com/krissykneenauthor 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

It's good afternoon, Chris Keene. Welcome to Yellow Shelf.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Chris, oh, I'm so privileged to have you here. And I have a copy of your book. Congratulations, Rite of Spring. Chris, tell us all about your latest book.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Look, it's a book about a couple that go to an island, an isolated island off the coast of Tasmania to caretake the island. But it's really about Miranda and her journey. She's in a transitional place in her life. She's at menopause. She's, you know, she's been cut, she's been working as a marine biologist her whole life, and then she has an accident and can't go in the water anymore. So she's at a place in her life where everything's changing, nothing's the same. She doesn't feel like she knows herself anymore. So this is really a book about Miranda's transition to something new, the new part of her life, as she goes into this isolation with her husband and is on the island just with her husband for six months. No one else is supposed to be there. And she starts to see somebody else on the island. And she doesn't know whether to trust her eyes or whether there's something going on with her neurological damage or what's going on. But there's definitely someone there that she sees on the island that should not be there.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Yeah. And Chris, I mean, the book's removed from my daily life, but I felt like I couldn't really put it down. Was that? I'm sure it's not the intent why you write a book, but I just felt like I just kept wanting to know more and more about these characters.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

I really did um want it. Eventually, I wanted to be writing a page turner. And so I think that that's what I was kind of aiming for because I wanted there to be an element of mystery, um, an element of the unusual, the strange, the real world is slipping away, and the surreal world, the dream world is kind of butting up against the real world. And I just wanted it to be about, you know, you you're not quite sure what is going on, so you really want to find out what goes on. So I'm glad I had that reaction to it.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Yeah. I was like, when is it when is it bedtime? I need to go back and read this. Uh Chris, do you, you know, you've written lots of uh novels and and and poetry, lots of um did you do you box your work into certain genres? And the reason I ask is, do you like does did yeah, do you do you specifically like this this genre or are you diverse genre? How how as an author do you yeah?

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Look, I I don't actually think about what genre I'm writing when I'm writing it. Um and genre is a kind of a really useful tool for a bookseller. It's a bookshop to kind of put your book on the shelf in the right place.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

That's right. And like, so for me, I never quite know what I'm writing. I just know it's got to be right for the book. So I never think about it until the end. But I do I think that there's a consistency to everything that I do. All of my books are really um, they're very embodied. So it's all about the kind of body and it's all about it's pushing boundaries. They all push boundaries. And so I I follow my instincts in terms of you know, going to spaces that maybe are a little bit taboo and um a little bit off-center. Um, whether it's, you know, memoir or poetry or fiction, I'm always drawn to those kind of those dark corners that we don't normally look at. So that's kind of where I'm always going to go. I think that's just my personality.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Okay, great. And um, do you want to tell us about what? I mean, like I mentioned, there's lots of books that you've written previously, lots of work. Um, what inspired you to write this one? Like, where do you get your inspiration around locations and like yeah, what what was the inspiration for this one?

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Well, I wrote a book called Wintering in 2017, I think it was. Um, and it was a book set in the south of Tasmania. I'd been, I go to write in Tasmania all the time because my dad lives there, and I want to spend as much time as I can around him. And so I I used to go right down south, often in winter, um, and it was freezing cold. And so I I wrote wintering, and that really made me think, gee, the seasons are so important down here, the kind of seasonality of Tasmania, as opposed to where I live in Brisbane, where it's kind of all one season, really all year. And I wanted to write a seasonal quartet of books. So I started with wintering, and then I'd always wanted to write, you know, the rest. And so this is spring, bright of spring is spring, and I'm just finishing autumn at the moment, but they're all set in Tasmania in that incredibly lush, natural environment, and they all deal with the line between um science and the supernatural. And um, I really just like pushing between those two areas with these books. Um, and yeah, that so that was something that I wanted to do. And I actually was writing trying to write autumn, which was proving really difficult, when I just someone sent me an ad for um caretaking this island off the coast of Tasmania for six months. Um why don't you go there, you and your partner, you can go there for six months, spend that time alive. No way, but a great idea for a story. Yeah, I'll put autumn aside and I'll go to the spring and go to the island and start writing that.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Great journey story, Chris. And Chris, if anyone's watching, do you want to tell us a bit about you? Anything as an author, anything, you know, if we're curious about your work. Tell us what what we should know about you.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Well, I suppose um one of the major things that's inspired this book is that um I've in the last five years I've started to identify as non-binary um and as a trans person. And that really only happened with the writing of my last book, which was um Fat Girl Dancing, where I wanted to kind of, I was writing about, you know, fatness and being a woman and um menopause. And then I suddenly started to try and just define my terms, and the whole idea of woman just fell apart for me when I started trying to define it. I was like, I just don't fit, I don't fit this definition. And so it led me to a journey of of kind of going, well, there is an alternative. I can kind of decide to be non-binary, and I know that I'm I'm quite old for that kind of a big, big life change, but you know, it's never too late. And so uh started to kind of um, you know, I started to experiment with hormones because my body certainly wasn't producing any. Let's have a little cocktail and see what happens. Um, and I also um really found myself by um walking on the idea of woman, and that's where this book's come from, really, because it's a book about transition um of all sorts, and um that my own kind of gender transition has been a really big um a really big thing for me. And so I wanted to kind of somehow encapsulate that in a way that everyone could get, because everybody is in some kind of state flux, you know, you're always moving away from who you were into someone new. You're never the right person. And at menopause, particularly, it's like everything is off the table. You kind of throw the old you out because your body has completely changed, your hormone profile has completely changed. And you know, I I really felt like this was a way I could explore all those things I was going through in my real life.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Oh, Chris, thank you for sharing. I think that's yeah, a really powerful journey story to get, you know, to as you go along as an author and your in your work, you deliver your work. Chris, do you want to tell us if we're curious about you, the book, your back catalogue of work? You've got a fabulous website. Do you want to point us in the direction? I know that you've been doing book launches and you've got Writers Festivals. So tell us how do we connect to you and the book?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Yeah, there's a website, it's Chrissyneen.com. Um, so K-R-I-W-S-Y-K-N-W-N.com, which I I call myself Chrissy for my first eight, nine books. Um books, and so these are the only two, the last two of the two that have been published under Chris. So um ChrissyNeen.com and it's got all my upcoming events there and um all the backlist of books there. But um, yeah, it's been 10 books, so it's been quite a journey for me.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Congratulations, like well done, amazing. Uh look, I'll put those links in the show notes to make it easy for anyone watching or listening anywhere in the world to connect with you and the book. Uh, Chris, the plan will it be to keep writing? Is there more?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yeah, I'm just about finished now. So the the the quartet will definitely be um the next, you know, that's the next books that I'm looking at autumn and then summer. But but I do have another book that I'm dabbling with that isn't related to the seasonal quartet and um that I'm I'm really playing with, which is much more a literary fiction novel. Um about sort of contemporary issue. So that's something that I just keep coming back to and writing, and I'm sure that will turn up in the next few years as well. So yeah, I've got a I've got a slate of things that I'm working on.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

So good to hear, Chris. You're you're always welcome back on Yellow Shelf for any future work. It has been a delight to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Thank you so much. It's been really fun.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Thanks for joining me.