Q&A with Erica Louise

ERICA LOUISE is a freelance writer specialising in entertainment reviews and community-led stories with a strong focus on sustainability. While Erica’s number one passion is to write, she has recently moved into the education sector. Erica lives by the beach in Southeast Melbourne, with her husband, two sons, and two felines.

Our Associate Editor, Panda Wong, talks to Erica Louise about her fiction piece ‘The Sky Thing’ published in #23: Puncture.

This piece is a really interesting interpretation of the theme ‘PUNCTURE’—in a way, the puncture represents this rupture between the world of the dead and the living. How did this theme inspire ‘The Sky Thing’?

I wanted to write a piece that was quite far removed from a typical story about a puncture. Rather than a punctured tire, bubble, boat or any other tangible object, my initial thoughts raced towards black holes and the way they resemble punctures or portals in the huge expanse of space.

Being that sci-fi and horror are two of my favourite genres, I thought about a portal in the sky that could be a gateway between the land of the living and the afterlife.

‘The Sky Thing’ uses horror elements to slowly build up a sensation of suspense around the main character, Sarah, and the seemingly ordinary event of her birthday. Can you expand on Sarah, how you went about her characterisation and how she contrasts to Tom?

Sarah is not what one might consider a ‘typical’ teen. She finds it hard to connect with others of her age. She is sensitive and very intelligent. Some might call her an ‘old soul’, yet she dreads the thought of getting older because her childhood is filled with fond family memories. The older she gets, the more she worries she will lose those memories; the only connection she has left with her mother.

Tom is a happy-go-lucky boy, with a contrasting personality to Sarah’s. Tom was much younger than Sarah when their mother, Elsie, passed; therefore, while Tom remembers and misses his mother, his grief is a little different to Sarah’s. He is a social character and prefers to be surrounded by other people, which is why he doesn’t like the emptiness and isolated feeling of the Great Lake.

Do you have any projects coming up on the horizon that we can look forward to?

Prose fiction is a new avenue for me, as I usually write non-fiction articles. Now I have launched into creative writing, I sense there will be more short stories on the horizon.