Tree change: An interview with Inga Simpson

With achievements in both fiction and non-fiction, Inga Simpson has emerged as one of Australia’s foremost nature writers over the last decade. Rebecca Ryall spoke to her at Byron Writers Festival 2022.

For nature writer Inga Simpson, the Australian landscape is a lead character, whichever genre she is working with. As a non-Indigenous writer of white settler descent, whose family has eked out a living on the same patch of land since invasion, her connections to this Country run deep. Her novels feature characters relating deeply to landscape, and the non-human and the more-than-human place beings they grapple with – whether these be birds, trees or wildfires. Real-life conundrums play out in her novels: the vicissitudes of connection to stolen lands, the fears and turmoil of contested ownership. Simpson seems to use her writing as a way of working through these contemplations, examining her relationships with and through landscapes. She tells me that she sees writing as her activism nowadays, using her skills with weaving words to voice the landscapes she is wanting to rescue from wholesale destruction.

If you’ve ever wondered what there is to know about a tree, I recommend you read one of Simpson’s books. Her oeuvre is wide and varied and offers many ways in for the reader. Her non-fiction includes memoir – told through the metaphor of the forest in Understory; botanical ethnography – beautifully composed in The Book of Australian Trees; and her fiction weaves the natural world into the lives of the human and non-human characters. Nest is a standout for its meditations on the mundanity and beauty of sharing lives in the Australian rural context.

Alongside of her evocative and generous writings, Inga is also an engaging presenter and facilitator of writing workshops and retreats with many organisations. I was privileged to sit in the audience at Byron Writers Festival 2022 as she joined panels discussing climate change and nature writing, and to interview Inga for northerly magazine.

I met Inga Simpson at Byron Writers Festival in August. We had met before virtually at a writers’ workshop, organised through Writers NSW, but never in person. Inga is an activist storyteller who uses the written word to explore her own connection to Country and inspire others to do the same.

I’ve just finished reading Nest. Thank you for writing this book, Inga. I had been pondering the dearth of literature which really unpacks the romantic imagery of living in the bush. Alongside this idyll is the mundanity and the enormous effort it takes to live in the country, especially alone. And until I read this book, I hadn’t encountered the daily realities of my life in print.

Oh, thank you! I’m happy to find a receptive reader. It is unusual to live in this way, but it is my everyday. That book is too quiet for most people. Lots of readers didn’t really get it. I’m glad you did. Books find us when we need them.

I’ve also recently read some of your non-fiction work –Understory: A Life With Trees, which is a memoir of a certain time in your life, told through the imagery of the forest, and The Book of Australian Trees, a book for young people about your favourite native trees, beautifully illustrated by Alicia Rogerson. You seem to be a prolific writer, who is unconcerned about sticking to one genre. Do you prefer to write in fiction or non-fiction, and why?

Fiction gives me the biggest kick. It’s harder, but when you pull it together and finish it you do feel like you have created something with a life of its own. But I also like writing the natural world. Writing fiction gives me the platform to express anger, despair. But there’s a new power in my nature writing, especially now, post fires, floods etc. I have a lot to say so it may as well be non-fiction.

Yes, I love the way you render the natural world on the page. I saw you on a panel yesterday with Rhianna Patrick, who said you ‘write Country like a Blackfella’. How did that comment land with you, and do you think there is any contradiction in writing about a connection to Country as a nonIndigenous person?

Oh, that was a big moment for me! I remember Melissa Lucashenko saying on a panel, about ten years ago, that you don’t have to be Aboriginal to feel a connection to the landscape. That really freed me up to explore. I have my own connection and I’m trying to learn more, to refine my ability to describe that and my experiences. The key is to remain humble and respectful. Even though I have this connection and the capacity to describe it, that is nothing compared to 65,000 years of connection. There are things we can’t conceive of. Spiritual connection, like a genetic memory, layers of knowledge. Knowing that I don’t have that, I appreciate whatever information I get from Indigenous people. The longer I do this, the better I get at not being afraid to express my own experiences, but to do so in a way that’s still open, not too certain.

Language is shifting. Even the government is changing its language. Bruce Pascoe is a mentor of mine. He would say we are in conversation – more talk and language about this being a shared conversation, shared future on this Country and on this planet in a time of crisis. Language makes it easier to contribute to shared conversation. I may be criticised, but I must contribute to move the conversation forward.

I also also heard you mention that, for your first PhD, you wrote a book – a lesbian detective novel set in Brisbane. That sounds like an interesting read! Where can I get a copy?

Oh that! I wish that could be struck off the record! It was published in the USA and is now out of print, thankfully. I went to an interview once and the interviewer pulled out a copy of it and wanted to talk about it, in reference to my new work. She asked what had happened to change my writing? I had a tree change, moved to a cottage in the woods. My life changed, and so the writing changed.

So, fiction requires a plot. Do you start a book with plot in mind, or does the plot coalesce over time? And is plot simply a device which enables you to write about the natural world?

I like plot to come out organically. With Nest, for example, I had ideas but until the very end I didn’t know what happened to Jen’s father. I was sitting at my desk editing one day and watching a male cuckoo out the window. As I sat with it, I realised that Jen’s father was not her father. [Cuckoos throw the eggs out of other birds’ nests and supplant them with their own, leaving the other birds to raise the babies as if they were their own.] So, the birds gave the plot! I enjoy that.

I’m not actually that interested in plot. I see it as just a vehicle to do the kind of writing I enjoy doing. The Last Woman in the World was different though. Plot came first in that, as I was contracted by a UK publisher to write a thriller/horrortype novel, set in Australia and written by an Australian, who knows our landscapes and settings. I found it hard to write that plot. I tried to do it properly, planning it all out, but I just couldn’t get the voice. It was all horror and action. I found the horror aspect hard, much harder than I expected.

The publisher had a character in mind – a woman who had locked herself away from the world, and I had already given her the detail of the glass blowing, so I just did what I always do. I think it’s the connection to nature that sustains the reader through the bleakness of the plot. But yeah, the horror aspect was hard.

I found it interesting that the horror was actually never named. I thought it could be read many ways – as the horror of a plague, such as COVID, or you could even just substitute the horror of depression or anxiety, rampant in modern life.

Yeah, the not naming allows the reader to imagine their own horror. Each person experiences the threat differently. The book is really about fear, and everyone’s fears are different. Fear and depression are on the rise, spreading, exacerbated by social media. And we internalise this idea that our value or self-worth is linked to how busy we are. COVID really gave us all space to step away from productivity, empowered everyone to chill out.

I don’t go anywhere to work now, but in my early work life I was working long days, everyone was, and it was all about being seen to be present and keen and ambitious. But we were not very productive! It seems like the landscape changed when we all had to stay home.

What do you think about the idea that climate change is just an anthropocentric construct?

A construct? No, we did it. No doubt about it, we have wreaked havoc as humans. Changed the planet.

Inga Simpson’s latest book is Willowman, published by Hachette Australia.