Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker

“Find friends and community to share your creative practice with. Writing doesn’t need to be a solitary experience, and I find the trope of the lone genius kind of dull.”

Heartlines explores what it means to write – from the heart and soul – and where that writing takes us. Every writers’ journey is different, so we invite you to take a moment to read, pause and reflect on what it means to shape stories for the page.

Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker is a Nyungar technologist, writer, digital rights activist living on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar. Their creative practice explores the intersection of activism, science-fiction, and technology in imagining radical futures and ushering them into existence. Kat’s work has appeared in Cordite, Running Dog, Red Room Poetry, and the short story ‘Protocols of Transference’ can be found in the blak speculative fiction anthology This All Come Back Now, published by UQP in 2022.

Centre for Stories: What do you do outside of writing? What is your most surprising passion?

Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker: I am very drawn to computers and the history of technology, which comes up in my creative work. Like most writers, I love reading, but I also enjoy creative coding, video games with challenging puzzles, analog synthesisers, and 8-bit computers. (Although I don’t think any of those are particularly surprising.) 

CFS: Why do you write?

KGT: Writing helps me think and make sense of the world. There is a deep satisfaction that comes with finding the right way to articulate something complicated. 

CFS: When did you decide to pursue writing and what triggered that decision?

KGT: I wrote a lot as a child but dropped it after high school because I didn’t think I was any good at it (I’ve since learned this is a terrible reason to stop doing something you love). I wrote my first piece of fiction ‘Protocols of Transference’ when I saw the call out for submissions to the anthology that became This All Come Back Now, had a wonderfully encouraging editing experience with Mykaela Saunders, and have kept going since then. 

CFS: What are you currently reading and why?  

KGT: I like to have a mix of fiction and non-fiction on the go: I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’, which is a memoir that talks a lot about conspiracy theories and misinformation, as well as the Indigenous dark fiction anthology ‘Never Whistle at Night’. 

CFS: Is that also an inspiration for your current work?

KGT: Yes, I suppose everything is inspiration. I am always seeking out books (or films or artworks or poetry or comics etc etc) about technology and computing, or that do interesting things in the speculative fiction genre.

CFS: Walk us through an ‘aha’ moment while you were on the hot desk. 

KGT: I spent a good chunk of my hot desk researching and reflecting and thinking about the Country the Centre for Stories lives on. I read about the wetlands that became swamps over a period of colonisation, and the connection between Country and memory. At one point, Luisa (who works at the Centre) said she’d just had a conversation with somebody on the theme of wetlands too. Wetlands kept coming up again and again, and became a major theme in one of the short stories I wrote for my hot desk. It also added this extra dimension of connection to this Country we were working on, to wander the streets from the Centre to the Re-Store imagining your knees deep in water and bullrushes. 

CFS: Based on your experiences in the writing industry, including your hot desk at Centre for Stories, what advice would you give to writers who are starting out or are unsure where to start? 

KGT: Find friends and community to share your creative practice with. Writing doesn’t need to be a solitary experience, and I find the trope of the lone genius kind of dull. My work is always so much richer when I can bounce ideas off other people and get honest feedback. 

CFS: Centre for Stories is about taking things at your own pace, working with others, and providing a safe place for all. How has this space enabled you to think and explore your work? 

KGT: The First Nations Write Night has been a huge gift, and I am so grateful for the creative guidance from Luisa and Casey, as well as the incredible company of other blak writers. I often struggle to find my place inside the traditionally Western and male-dominated genre of science fiction, so the spaces created by the Centre provide an enormous amount of strength and grounding for me to feel confident in my writing. 

CFS: What will you be working on next? 

KGT: More poetry, more short stories, and a post-collapse speculative fiction novel set in Boorloo/Perth. 

Writing Change, Writing Inclusion is Centre for Stories’ signature writing program for 2021 to 2024. Generously funded by The Ian Potter Foundation, Australia Council for the Arts, My Place, and Centre for Stories Founders Circle, this writing program features mentoring, hot desk, and publication opportunities for emerging writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and/or Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander backgrounds.

These stories have been licensed to the Centre for Stories by the Storyteller. For reproduction and distribution of these stories, please contact the Centre for Stories.

This interview was published on 6 March 2024.