Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing.
This ought to be an easy question. Surely I know myself? However, I find it really difficult to describe myself.
Starting with the history side, my first doctorate was in Medieval history, and I write about it and teach it and still research it, but it's a secondary element of my ethnohistorian self, these days. Over my lifetime, what has held all my research together is story. I used to research chansons de geste and romans and chronicles (the research from my 20s) and now (in my early sixties) I research modern genre. In that research I include the worlds built for those narratives, where they come from, and how those worlds are communicated. My two books from my research self are History and Fiction (how writers use history, especially the Middle Ages), and Story Matrices (how story transmits culture). Right now I'm looking at these things from a literary approach, because it's really handy to slide into different disciplines and learn. The more I understand how different scholars approach similar topics, the happier I am, just as the more I understand how different fiction writers use similar material, the happier I am. Learning is the core of my life. Writing stories is the natural balance to the learning, because I like to do things with my learning. I love teaching, but I love writing even more.
So... I am also a fiction writer. And non-fiction writer. And an essayist. And a blogger. I also talk too much.
I'll never be famous for my fiction, but my work has been short-listed for awards a number of times and has even won a couple. This is how I know I can write. My fiction is, for the most part, science fiction and fantasy, but possibly towards the literary end.
I didn't begin all this with the Middle Ages. I chose to do an undergraduate Medieval thesis because I had a burning question to answer about how culture changed in a time of significant technological change. I wanted to know, in short, how chansons de geste changed at a time when literacy was causing them to be written down. This was a burning question because the year was 1982, and computers were doing to Australia what increased literacy was doing to France and England. I probably would have moved on, if everyone hadn't been so very interested. The Middle Ages and food history are subjects I took on at a point for very particular reasons, and they've become major part s of my life because so many people love to hear about them. I swore, however, that the only time I would use the Middle Ages in fiction was in my first novel, and that was because I began it when I was doing my PhD and I had this terrible desire to gently satirise some things I knew too well. I've always wanted to apologise to Brain Merrilees for what I did to the Voyage of St Brendan in that novel. He was an outstanding teacher and I took foul advantage of this.
When I was about to start my second PhD, I was told that the ghost train novel I was yearning to write wouldn't get me the supervisor I most wanted. I drafted a half-joke time travel topic and sent it to Van Ikin with a "How about this? Can you supervise this?" And thus I wrote an actual novel set in a fictional Middle Ages that is very close to what we know. Langue[dot]doc 1305 has been approved by scientists, as well as historians, but some readers find it slow. There is a definite gap between the history we want to tell (as historians) and the history most readers expect to read.
I wrote one Medieval story quite on purpose. I was asked to write it for an anthology, and Sherwood Smith is someone I find it hard to say 'no' to. The anthology is called It Happened at the Ball. The story was set a year after the Great Plague. It came out before the pandemic, and when I re-read it recently I was surprised at what I wrote. Not unpleasantly surprised, but most definitely surprised.
Who would you say your biggest literary influences are?
When someone asks another writer this question, I listen avidly. When I am asked, I flinch. I have so many influences that it's hard to pick just a few and what influences me and why is hard to describe. Once I took a leap of faith when asked and named Tristram Shandy, but that was because I'd re-read it recently and all the reasons I love it were new in my mind again. You can tell exactly when that naming was, too, because I slipped the novel into one of my novels (Langue[dot]doc 1305, the Medieval time travel one).
In other words, any answer to my biggest literary influences depends on when I am and where I am and whether I'm thinking about that author. For example, Nevil Shute's On the Beach was very influential when I was 22. I was doing my MA in Toronto and it was midwinter and I'd just found the Australian section at Robarts Library. I worked my way through it, having already read every 18th century female novelist in their collection. When I reached On the Beach I stopped. I was born in Melbourne and would have been about the age of the baby in the book, if we had lived in that world. It was so much the Melbourne of my childhood... and it was the last big city in the world to die. I still call on it from time to time, when I need such everyday bleakness in my fiction.
More examples? I can do that. George Gissing's The Whirlpool I've only read the once, but that was enough to give me a different way of thinking about women's lives and I'm pretty sure I called on that for The Year of the Fruit Cake. Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home taught me that, just because many writers don't use their academic brains in their fiction, didn't mean I had to stop thinking in my own peculiar way when i write. Patricia Wrightson and Oodgeroo Noonuccal (who I read when everyone still called her Kath Walker) and Elyne Mitchel left a clear view of the need to write about Australia, and that it had to be my Australia and not a mass-market view. Guibert de Mez (and, in fact, the whole Mez cycle of chansons de geste) left the imprint that families who don't get on make good story.. but it's not going to be comfortable. These were books I thought of within five minutes, at a time when I don't have any single overarching influence. Give me a day and that list will be very, very long. Choose a time when I've read something disquieting or exciting and the list will reduce to that single work.
How has the history of the middle ages impacted/influenced your work?
Initially, it gave me a safe way to explore cultural difference, to understand how profound the effect of Christianity is on our culture, and to understand how societies work and what stories they tell to explain themselves to themselves. Now I use it as a longue duree... to know where we come from and how we got here, so that I can try to understand how our society works and what stories we tell to explain ourselves to ourselves.
These days it's also a wonderful tool for communication. People who don't care about ethnohistory or about understanding literature or about how they tell stories and what they take from there are always up for hearing about Medieval food, or epic battles. I use it to open doors to the things I want others to understand, I suspect. And recent media productions that use the Middle Ages area never-ending source of entertainment. I can be sarcastic without effort when I pull TV shows to pieces. How did they get on that horse with that armour when they are alone in the wilderness? And did they really gallop for hours and the horse is fresh as a daisy? Did they really cook a stew in that same wilderness with no equipment and not enough ingredients (and where did that water magically appear from)? Some of my friends admit that they do not want me to watch their favourite pseudo-history TV. Others want to share the sarcasm.
Do you feel like your writing has been impacted/influenced by Tolkien? If so, in what way(s)?
Tolkien's essays are important to me. I read his novels a s a child and still love them. Farmer Giles of Ham and his translation of Sir Gawain were my favourites when I was in my early twenties. His world building fascinated me so much that I bought the Silmarillion when it first came out. My hardback first edition was also loved by silverfish and is not really readable these days, but it helped me think about the Middle Ages and how we see them, a bout how world building was traditionally done for fantasy and, in the long term, how fiction is such an important aspect of cultural transmission. Then I read his essays. I still return to them, for the style he uses in them teaches me more about writing every time, and his arguments are a clear foundation I can question and use to see where I am and where I am going. His cauldron of story is particularly useful right now, but his work (along with the work of many others, let me admit - I am consistent in this) has helped me travel my intellectual path and my path as a writer.
What do you think the current innovations in your genre(s) are?
The most interesting one from my perspective is the celebration of #ownvoices. Most readers look mainly for writers with quite specific backgrounds, but I'd love to see a realisation that all writers are #own voices.
What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see more of?
We tell the same stories over and over partly because there are so many ways of telling them - I would like to see the voice of the writer acknowledged and discussed for its role in genre work. In a way, this can be seen as an extension of #ownvoices. It recognises that each tale teller is unique and emerges from a quite particular background. In novels that are firmly within genre, this is often obscured, as the genre traits are more important for sales and it's easier to amrket work from, a background readers think they are familiar with. This means that the actual voices of novelists who come from more normative backgrounds are often obscured and their work is usually looked at for plot and characterisation rather than for voice, and that voices who are less majority are often not heard at all ie are not of interest to major publishing houses.
What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see less of?
I would very much like to see less of the "This is the way we have always told things and so the violence and racism and misogyny stay" attitude. We can change the way we tell stories, and trails that promote hurt and hate are not those we should be arguing for, even passively.
Is there anything else related I didn't ask a question about that you'd like to add?
I don't think so. I'll think of something at an unholy hour and have to decide between going back to sleep and emailing you. I think I shall decide, right now, on going back to sleep. There will be other times I can talk about the things I forget are important right now.
Where online can our readers find you and your work?
The easiest starting place if you want basic information is my web page https://gillianpolack.com/
My favourite place to send people who want to obtain my books is a bookshop-comparison site. Adjust it for your own country and it includes shipping costs in the comparison, which makes things very easy: https://booko.com.au/search?query_type=1&q=Gillian+Polack
You can join me in my research and writing journey (and suffer bad jokes and food history along the way) through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/GillianPolack
I blog most weeks on the Treehouse writers' blog https://treehousewriters.com/wp53/ and once every six months with The History Girls https://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/
Gillian, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts on Post-Tolkien and Post-Middle Ages influence!
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