What is the title of your latest release?
HONEYEATER
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
A subtropical haunting.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I’d been wanting to tell a story set in a (fictionalized, renamed) version of my city — subtropical, green, heavy with flowers and the memories of floods. I’d had an early half-drafted short story with two of the characters in it, so when I started building Honeyeater, I really leaned into that. And then the lockdowns were happening, so I spent a lot of time wandering my suburb, looking for elements that felt they could be mythic, or enchanted.
Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
There are more-or-less three protagonists / point-of-view characters: Charlie, Grace, and the taxi driver’s daughter. I suspect they all think it would be boring to hang out with them, for very different reasons. But in fact, it might get a bit too exciting — they are variously magnets for trouble, have a compass for it, or are trouble incarnate.
What are three words that describe your protagonist?
The three: Self-effacing, stubborn, tall. Deteriorating, hungry, paranoid. Curious, determined, unsupervised.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
“Mandarines” (as in the fruit) are neither spelled nor pronounced consistently in my state, let alone my country. Also, that the roof-shapes and window-colours in Queenslander houses differ between Brisbane and Gympie — but in both, the old textured glass panes look like boiled sugar candy. (There’s a light blue you rarely see in Brisbane, where mulberry and orange and a lovely deep green dominate, in my experience).
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I wait until I’m totally done, and have an enormous but more-or-less linear mess of good things and adjectives then suffer performatively in a whole new way. I’m sure it makes work, but I also like the moments of realisation. And if I put all the adjectives down, there’s a higher chance the right one will be there when I come back to edit. (Fun fact: Honeyeater was meant to be a novella, but the first draft was 86,000 words! It’s a lot shorter now, but definitely still a novel.)
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Violet cream chocolates. I can only eat them once a year, and friends near that shop offer to ship them to me and I say, you don’t understand, one of these a year is already half a violet cream too many. The violet permeates. But they are so good!
I like good food, but I enjoy writing people having a bad time with it! In Flyaway it was all well-travelled sandwiches and limp shortbread creams. The characters in Honeyeater are by no means foodies — or at least not in that sense. I try to make the food fit the place, which in this case is particular to a certain era of Australian suburbia. I started a list: sherbet cones; [steak &] kidney pies; monstera deliciosa; loquats; mangoes; baked beans; stale bread; loose sugar; tea; peas, lamb and potato; milk; cordial; mandarines; chocolates; coffee; MEAT; and other things that shouldn’t be et!
Describe your writing space/office!
Various locations, but mainly a local café and a local café-second hand-shop! I like to keep an eye on the passing world, and make sure I’m not missing out on too much fun. And my studio space is set up for illustration work so all the desk are too high for comfortable writing. It’s a little former bedroom and has two sit-stand desks with a drawing board on one and a raised monitor and laptop stands on the other on the other. One wall is all bookcases and drawers for reference material, the other corner between the two desks has shelves of art supplies, and the little built-in wardrobe is full of boxes of art and stacks of paper.
Who is an author you admire?
Angela Slatter (aka AG Slatter) — a good friend and mentor, and an excellent and persistent writer. Her most recent Gothic fantasy novels (e.g., The Briar Book of the Dead and The Crimson Road) are wonderfully enchanting and take place in the fairy-tale-Gothic world of her Sourdough, Bitterwood Bible and Tallow Wife collections.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Yes, Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones, which told me that science fiction conventions and the sorts of people you could meet at them existed, and I could go. Also, relevantly for Honeyeater, the dreadful (affectionate) experience of reading John Birmingham’s He Died with a Falafel in his Hand and The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco while still in college, which kept me in college and out of share-housing far too long, but also in a chaotic, very gross way, opened an endearing(?) window on a particular era of Brisbane.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
When my novella Flyway was on the way to publication, my publishers offered me a contract for two more novellas. But with all my best efforts, I could not get Honeyeater down to novella-length! So I was holding my breath and peeking through my fingers waiting to find out if Ellen Datlow (my wonderful editor) would still accept Honeyeater. But she did!
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Hmmm. mythic folkloric fantasy! But arguably that is also now the day-job! This is clearly the best of all possible worlds. But my downtime, hobby genre is early-mid 20thc murder mysteries.
What’s your favorite movie?
I’m not proud but I’m also shameless: Streisand and O’Neal in What’s Up Doc (1972). I can still quote too much of it, and the only deliberate movie tourism I’ve done was trying to find key chase scene settings in San Francisco.
What is your favorite season?
Autumn! I love my city, but I do not love the humidity, and in autumn everything is briefly reasonable — bright and floral and nice to be out in. On the other hand, spring has jacarandas and wattle. Every season is very floral. But I also like autumn in colder climes — berries and mist and frost and friends saving up their old coats because they know I’ll get off a train in Western Massachusetts or Devon in a cotton blouse, jeans, and a leather jacket.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
A series of coffee dates with friends. There are a lot of good cafés in Brisbane. Or movies and dinner with an eclectic group. Last time I made some friends, and my mother go watch the latest Final Destination with me, but then we went to a Korean BBQ restaurant which was full of potential danger.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Usually, the latest Emma Lathen novel to find its way to me, and I’m just about to start another one! But I’m reading Jodie Matthews’ Meet Me At the Surface right now and having a very good time. In TV, I’m still startled and wistful that we even got KAOS and The Decameron, even if we didn’t get to keep them. Such certainty and assuredness and oddity and glorious costumes and mastery at such different points on the spectrum of such things.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
French or Japanese. And also Japanese food in France (I have not tried the other way around). When I was in France people kept arranging dinner and saying “Oh, you must be sick of French food by now,” and I really, really wasn’t.
What do you do when you have free time?
Read! Draw. Roam around a local second-hand/antique shop looking for peculiar objects, alarming books, inexplicable teaspoons, etc — they are also a café, so I spent a lot of free time and working time there! And I like to stare out train windows and describe what I see. Of course, that turned into another book, Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion.
What can readers expect from you next?
Lots of art! I’m working on a couple of maps for fantasy novels. But I’m nearly ready to send a draft to my editor: a novella about a woman who arrives in a house that’s acting haunted but which she knows has no ghosts… It has a lot of little fairytales embedded in it. Oh, and my short story Connorville in Reactor on 20 August!
A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.
Sub-tropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, just as soon as he deals with his dead aunt’s house. Then Grace arrives, desperate, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire — and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy.
But peeling back the rumors and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbors and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be.
Horror | Fantasy Dark [Tor, On Sale: September 2, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781250845887 / eISBN: 9781250845894]
Kathleen Jennings is an author and illustrator from Queensland, Australia.
She grew up on a cattle property in western Queensland, and now lives and works in Brisbane.
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