Q&A with Stephanie Westwood

Stephanie Westwood is a Naarm-based writer and film producer, interested in speculative fiction that comments on the current state of political doom through intimate relationships and dark humour. Her work has been published in Overland and shortlisted for the Born Writers Award. In 2024 she won the John Hinde award for her queer interactive sci-fi You Can Survive A Rip Current.

‘The Last Physical Arts Festival’ has it all—dystopia, surrealism, and satire so juicy readers will be quenched for days… Can you tell us how you landed on this idea, and what it was like to take aim at The Arts in this piece?

I had wanted to do a fun, dark, sexy something exploring the relationship between a rich arts philanthropist and a funding body worker for a while, and the image of an entire festival hub sinking to the bottom of some impossible ocean popped into my head and felt like a natural fit. While some may see this as taking aim in a critical sense, I wanted it to suck the reader into a whirlpool of lack of perspective. I’ve been on the receiving end of many government grants and investments over the last five years and at the time, it feels like the most important, heaviest thing you’ve ever done, and the end of the world. But it’s also quite funny and trivial when you take a step back. I know working within government funding is the same, but even more heightened. Are we saving the world or destroying it? The answer is neither, but try telling that to your central nervous system on launch day.

‘Last year, Coles did a hilarious partnership—as Margot shopped online, Hannah Gadsby dryly appeared in the banner reminding her of the futility of microwave lasagnas in a post-post-post-Nanette world.’ This piece asks us to look at the world’s (and our own) ridiculousness through the lens of humour. Do you consciously set out to use satire and humour to tackle these concepts? Or is it something that emerges naturally in your writing?

This is the first time I’ve gone to such an extreme with satire, but in the current world we live in, subtleties don’t feel like they’re landing anymore. Reality is more bizarre than fiction. The idea that more eggs are being seized at the Mexican–US border than fentanyl sounds like a detail I’d throw into a dystopia to add texture. Humour is something that I can’t help but include in everything I do; I want to make readers laugh and have always felt there’s more power in comedy. My favourite pieces are the ones that entertain and disarm you before landing the more brutal punches.

Aside from being an accomplished writer, you’re also an award-winning film and television producer. Does writing for the screen influence how you write in other forms? Or vice versa? 

Working in screen development for years led me to consider what is the best form for any story. A narrative will achieve vastly different reactions when it is a web series, a feature film, a short story, an interactive fiction. I like considering who the different audiences could be and how they could encounter this in the wild—will they watch it on TikTok, will they read it online, will they see it on a big screen?

Currently I’m enjoying the freedom of being able to conjure bigger, wilder images in prose than most Australian filmmakers could achieve on screen. There’s also a freedom in the solitude of prose; screen works need to go through so many layers of commissioners, financiers, and yes, government funding bodies, before they can be realised. Screenwriting is inherently collaborative, and a starting point for a team to create something, whereas short fiction is more intimate with just a few editor suggestions, and I get to call it when it’s found its final form.

Alison J Barton

Alison J Barton’s poetry is widely published in Australian and international literary journals. Her work has been recognised in numerous prizes and Best of Australian Poems over several years. She was the inaugural winner of the 2023 University of Cambridge First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, and was granted places in several other residencies around the world. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Not Telling, was published by Puncher & Wattmann. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Suburban Review.