BOOKLOOSE Author Special: Ella Baxter
Greetings, bookworms, and welcome to a first for this humble little newsletter. An author interview!
Ella Baxter is a writer and visual artist based in Melbourne. Her first book, New Animal, told the gothic tale of a grief-stricken cosmetic mortician working in her family’s funeral parlour in the Northern Rivers. Her new novel, Woo Woo, follows performance artist Sabine in the lead-up to her next exhibition, whose head and world is crowded by the intense Melbourne/Naarm social scene, the ghost of Carolee Schneeman and a vicious stalker.
Woo Woo is a step up from New Animal — mostly in craft and technique, but also in ideas. It’s about obsession, creativity, power and self-editing: whether talking about art is as critical as making it, what it means to engorge your soul with the creative muse, and the constant tension between obsessive control and inarticulate release. It’s a sensory and intellectual onslaught, but one that never actually feels overwhelming. It drenches you, this book, but doesn’t quite drown you.
It’s also really funny. It’s funny in the way people fighting on Reddit is funny, or when children dress up like adults. The absurdity of bare discourse is, often, hilarious. Baxter’s style is like if Ottessa Moshfegh, Olga Tokarczuk and Leonora Carrington had a seance and conjured up their Australian counterpart.
Ella and I talk exactly a week before Woo Woo’s publication date and she is feeling stressed. I point out that when the reader first meets Sabine she is a week out from the opening of her new art exhibition and is also very stressed. This makes Ella throw back her head of long dark hair and laugh, a lot. If you’ve read the book then you would know why it’s funny. I guess now you’ll have to.
Here is an edited version of our conversation:
SG: This is such a charged book, there's so much going on. There's critiques of art making, the Melbourne social scene, power, decadence, performance, language, violence. Where did the idea for this story come from?
EB: I was being stalked. I received anonymous letters by someone who was really trying to terrify me, and I was just so frightened. And I remember saying to my friend, what do I do? And she's said: things on paper have weight, write your own letter. So it started as a 20,000 word letter back to this stalker — that I wanted to print out and post to the front of the house.
I think I was just so angry that I was being stalked. I was so sick of men's violence against women, so sick of being frightened of men and having this continual threat of sexual violence. I had really had it: I was in my mid 30s, and I just had this rage built up over 20 years. Woo Woo became a place where I could just push all that rage into and it was so cathartic.
So then I had this really nutty manuscript, and I didn't have the guts to publish it. But a year or two later, once I'd had a baby and gone through birth, I had the guts to publish it, because birth was its own horror. After that ordeal, I suddenly had no fear.
Carolee Schneemann is obviously a central artistic figure for Sabine. Who are your artistic inspirations?
My whole life it has definitely been Tracey Emin. I feel like anytime I look at any piece of her work, I feel profoundly moved by it. She just fucking gets it. She's not ashamed of herself or her work. What I love most about her is that she's unedited. A lot of visual artists and writers and creatives in general are very edited. And it's really hard not to be because you have to do the marketing thing and talk about your work and make a narrative. But she just doesn't buy into it. And I really liked that about her. She's got, like, a cat energy, she just shirks off any expectation.
One of the most striking parts of the book for me was how much of artistry is performance and artifice. All the people around Sabine articulate their art in this very specific language, they are really fluent in art speak. And she doesn’t really know what her art is about. It shows this breakdown between language and expression, but also this really primal, opaque, insecure stage of creativity. We rarely see that portrayal of art-making. Is she just making bad art?
It's an interesting question but to me it doesn't matter if she's a good artist or bad artist, it’s that she's two-feet-in. I really enjoy art from people who are completely in that space, they're not reserving any part of themselves or saving a bit for later or keeping something hidden. The conceit of the novel is that she's making art but she is the art. It's her, it’s not separate. She is the embodiment of her own artistic expression.
She's such a drama queen and I'm obsessed. She feels like a very first-person narrator - very self-conscious and self-absorbed. But the book is written in close third person. Did you consider doing it another way?
I actually wrote the first draft in first person but the feedback I got was that it was claustrophobic and didn’t allow the story to breathe. As soon as I changed it to third, close it became the novel I had envisaged.
What it is like being a young novelist in Melbourne in 2024?
I don't really know, I don't really think about it. The older I get, the less easy it becomes; when I was younger (I wrote New Animal in my 20s) I really didn't mind working on a novel and having a day job and sharehouses and balancing it all. But now I feel, sometimes, a bit more resentful at having to balance so many huge tasks. A novel takes me three to four years, and that's working on at least 20 hours a week. So it's a huge undertaking.
You make death shrouds as well as sculpture and novels. What are death shrouds?
They are fabric coverings that shroud the deceased during burial or cremation. I make them by cutting pieces of fabric and then stitching designs onto the central sheet. I’ve run the business for seven years and a lot of shrouds I make are for pets. I love it. I think it is my dharma this lifetime to make shrouds. I think it is what I will always do.
How much does your visual art practice inform your writing?
A lot, actually. Having a lot of projects under my belt before I started writing helped me to know the endurance needed to finish a project, because it just takes so long. You have to be really engaged for a really long time. I meet so many writers at events and everyone's working on a book, and a lot of people don't end up finishing because it just takes so much, it’s a huge undertaking. I think it actually does take calcium from your bones. I feel like I'm only now in the rhythm of it. I was raised by an artist, my grandparents met at art school, my last partner was a painter; a lot of people I know and love are artists and I think being around them has taught me that you just need to keep going until it's done. You just can't come up for breath until that project is finished.
Why did you decide to set Woo Woo in Melbourne?
The Melbourne social scene and the Melbourne art world is a very particular cauldron. I've been going to shows here since I came at 18. It’s very familiar. I felt like I could really nail the personalities and the vibe of that subculture.
One of my favourite parts of the book is when Sabine’s best friend is convincing her to come to an art show opening, and Sabine relents but she says, “If everyone’s wearing Tabis and doing nangs, I’m leaving.” I laughed out loud at that line. It’s so specific. Was critiquing a certain social scene part of the point?
I just want to say the finger’s pointed at myself as well here. Sabine says, “Oh, these fools” but she's also turning up in equally foolish garb.
Yeah it was probably so funny to me because I wore Tabis to my wedding.
Right? One night I went to Monty’s and this group of cool kids were taking photos on digital cameras, smoking through their Tabis. Like, putting the cigarette in the toe. And then another time I was at Monty’s and a different group were there at the same table taking exactly the same photos… [laughs] I really struggle to write straight scenes, I tend to go a little bit more in the comedic angle, but it's done with love. I'm not trying to be a bitch about it. I love this subculture. I love the art world. I also have some bitterness towards it, but it is a very precious thing.
It’s really hard to write funny. The way you write social media is also hilarious, with all the comment threads on TikTok and Instagram lives. They felt so real.
I love Gen Z. I find them so addictive and endearing and amazing. I have hope for the world because of Gen Z. But they're just genuinely the funniest generation that's ever walked the planet, they’re so unserious in the comments. And I really tried to get their humour.
Also, I think because I am so online, it felt quite natural. But I also feel like it's impossible to write a current story now without including [social media], and you have to find ways to include it authentically. It's the job of a writer to always be finding ways to portray reality or close to reality or left of reality. And if I had no social media in there, that would be such an oversight. There's so much richness in it. There's so many layers.
The food element of the book was really interesting to me because a lot of what you're attributing to the art world I associate with the hospitality industry. I feel like, especially in the last five years or so, there’s a serious clout culture element attached to food. The way you use food in the book is very carnal, very visceral. Constantine {Sabine’s husband] is a chef and his approach to work is really different to Sabine’s, even though he can be equally as religious about it. Do you feel like, in Melbourne, hospitality is adjacent to art and fashion in the same way?
Well, a lot of artists are working in hospo as well. Most of the creative fabric of Melbourne has worked in hospitality at some point, so there are so many overlaps. But we’re also in this economy now where no one feels like they can be a home owner. So any disposable income you have, you'll go out for a really nice meal or buy an amazing shirt. Amongst me and my friends, even when we were all broke, going out for expensive meals… that's where your money goes, rather than the Boomer view towards property and investments, because we just don't have the same opportunities as that generation.
I could really taste the food through the writing. You really give it a lot of time to sink in.
I had to go through a lot of food blogs and recipe books. I wanted to find the way things were described and at first I thought I'd use those words to describe art, as a way to shuffle the usual language around those practices. But then I had a baby and I while was breastfeeding I was hungry all the time. I was also just thinking about food and that made it’s way into the book. My love of food is right there in the manuscript.
The way Sabine describes it is so loving and luxurious but that’s so consistent with her character, she’s so over the top. The decadence and the luxury of her personality and her language is mirrored in the food. But for Constantine, it's work, it's labor. It’s beautiful, but it’s manual and sweaty and exhausting.
Yes, the raw materials are beautiful to him but for her, it’s the whole experience of eating and decadence and, almost, the visual element of food.
Sabine’s creative process is very murky. She doesn’t really know why she’s making the art she’s making. That seems like a pretty radical position in the current climate of “process” and creative labour, where the conversation is much more about doing the reps and having a discipline and a “practice”.
The internalisation of that feeling… it’s not “the patriarchy”, but it’s the idea that everything is commerce, everything is work.
It’s capitalism.
Yeah, and I just feel like art and creativity has always been something else. It is work, when you get down to it, you have to work for it. But to me, it's never been a conveyor belt or a job like that. It's something far more whimsical, and I really prefer to leave it in that space.
What is your creative process?
My process is that I'm always fishing for the muse, I almost find it a spiritual quest. I take it very seriously. And I worry I frighten away the muse if I call for it too much; I try to pretend I'm distracted so it comes and taps me on the shoulder. I see it as this like God-like entity. I'm always waiting for inspiration, it's this daily, hourly engagement with ideas. But when I've hooked onto it, I feel very addicted and I have to finish it. I feel a roaring fire energy to eat it and fuck it and destroy it. I really like to be completely bewitched, possessed, even, by it. I just have a lot of respect for the creative process.
I have to do this thing where I submerge myself in other voices. I have to read like, two or three things to get myself in zone. It feels like being underwater, and that’s the only place I can start. I can't just sit down and start doing stuff.
Do you feel like it calls you sometimes if you're not doing it?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Really weird.
It's scary, though. I get scared.
It's very demanding.
That's the the woo-woo element of it all. That was another line that made me laugh out loud in the book when the ghost of Carolee Schneemann first appears and Sabine's like, “Are you are you haunting me?” And Carolee says, “No, I'm here to guide you.” And Sabine’s like, “Oh okay, so a mentorship?” That was so funny to me.
There’s not much of a line between those two things. But the idea of that language coming in over the top of it is, no… it can just be a haunting. It doesn't have to be a metaphor.
But with woo-woo… I love that shit so much. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love like the divine femininity that resides in that space of ritual and routine; that witchy element. I mean, I'm not a witch. I don't really get into that, but I just love that it's even in the world.
There are a lot of power dynamics going on in the book. There's Sabine and Constantine Sabine and Cecily, the the stalker, the institution of art galleries against, like, art itself. How much of this book was about writing about control?
I knew there had to be a confrontation between her and her stalker. You can't put a loaded gun on the table and then it not go off. But every time I imagined it, it wasn't her as the victim, and I couldn't quite work out what could ever happen for that to be real, because the reality of a woman confronting a stalker is just so grim.
And when I wrote this, I was opposite the park where Eurydice Dixon was stalked, raped, murdered; I was on the same street where Jill Maher was stalked, raped and murdered. My whole landscape was just embedded with violence against women. And I knew that I couldn't just write this fantasy where the woman had the power in the end, that it was in her all along, because it just isn't actually accurate. The woo-woo element enabled that to happen, the umbrella of woo-woo made the woman powerful. When I looked into the history around witchcraft, the more I read these accounts of unmarried women who would help other women poison their abusive husbands. Witchcraft was actually more a protective banner, because it was hard to write power dynamics when the power dynamic in that situation is often so grim.
Have you ever studied writing?
No, but now I kind of study it myself. I read about craft a lot. I think people would be surprised by how much I try and be better. I'm always reading and rereading books I've loved and circling sentences, and then working out how the writer has done something. I’m really trying to understand the technique used for that sentence to be so effective. I knew I wanted Woo Woo to be miles better than New Animal, technically, but also, I wanted to know more about how to craft a paragraph and a chapter and just understand what I was doing.
It is definitely a really big step up from New Animal, it feels like you've like arrived at your style.
I think New Animal had a lot to improve on but I was 26, I don't even think I could have worked on technique. Even if you'd told me to, I just didn't have the frontal lobe. But now it's ten years on so there's way more effort I can put into those things. Second books and notoriously rough as guts, too, I didn't want to fall into that trap of just kicking something through. Because I could, but there’s no artistic integrity in that.
New Animal was quite gothic and now Woo Woo has elements of the surreal. Are you consciously working in those literary styles?
Yes. I love the darkness; I love the foreboding. I like bleakness and the threat of madness. I think it is partly aesthetic, partly also habit, perhaps it is just now my style. I am unsure.
What are you working on next?
I need a break. The muse is not touching me at the minute, even though I'm here. But I'm going to wait for that… just wait until the time is right.