A spotlight on Future Girl by Asphyxia
Future Girl is one of the six books shortlisted for this year’s Readings Young Adult Book Prize.
Future Girl is a remarkable illustrated story about Piper, a Deaf girl, who lives in a near-future inner-city Melbourne where food security is under threat. Our judges described it as ‘thought-provoking and hopeful.’
We asked author Asphyxia about her inspiration, writing advice and balancing text and illustrations.
What was the initial inspiration for this story?
For a long time I have believed it wouldn’t take much for the world as we know it to change dramatically in the face of a crisis, and the starting seed for Future Girl was to highlight how very possible this is and the need for us to develop resilience and to prepare for such scenarios. Strangely, just as the book was about to go to print, the pandemic hit and life did change dramatically, in many of the ways I had imagined. Future Girl is an eerie mirror, in some ways, of the world we find ourselves in today.
In the book, the crisis is caused by peak oil. We all know about the dangers involved with climate change, but few people know about the risks we face due to peak oil, which could be just as serious. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is to show what could happen if we don’t prepare for peak oil.
For those who are fuzzy on what peak oil is, it’s the point at which the demand for oil becomes greater than our ability to supply it. Why is this important? Because we use oil for every part of our lives - to make petrol for transport, to make plastics and fabric. Every year we use more and more oil for our lifestyles, but the amount of oil in the ground is finite. When our demand for oil becomes greater than the amount of oil available, the price will shoot up, and we’ll all start fighting over it. Peak oil is about oil becoming so expensive that we can’t afford to use it any more for petrol and everyday basics. When that happens, it could happen suddenly, and if we haven’t prepared for it, we could face severe shortages. That’s what happens in Future Girl.
In Future Girl, I wrote the book I wanted to read. Piper, the main character, is Deaf. I was hungry to read books and watch movies about Deaf people. As a Deaf person, it is deeply disappointing to me how rarely we are represented in the media. I almost never get to read stories that depict my own language (Auslan), my culture (the Deaf community) and in which characters go through the same struggles and tribulations as I do. I am frustrated by media that send poor messages about us, such as the picture book Boy which features a Deaf child who is routinely excluded from his community and yet somehow magically becomes a hero for completely unrealistic reasons. Another example is the movie MVP: Most Valuable Primate which features a little girl and chimp who sign to each other… using gibberish! Yes - made up sign language! These portrayals of us and our language suggest that it is fine to make a mockery of our language. Imagine a kids’ movie in which all the spoken language was pure gibberish and it was promoted as being an example of English.
We need authentic, accurate portrayals of Deafness so that hearing people develop realistic insight into what it means to be Deaf, and to validate the lived experience of Deaf people, so that we can see ourselves reflected in the media. It is easy to take for granted the privilege of having yourself and your lifestyle reflected back to you in movies and books, but when you don’t have that, it’s very painful, it creates a huge hunger and appetite within that community. In Future Girl, I set out to satiate some of that appetite.
What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
I hope the book will inspire people to make changes to the way they live: to search for work that is meaningful to them, to build resilience so we are better prepared for crises, to learn to grow food. I hope it will inspire people to develop creative forms of self-expression through art journaling. Most of all I hope it will provide an insight into Deafness for hearing people, and validation of Deafness for d/Deaf people.
I hope that readers who are unaware of Deaf culture will find out that it exists. Most people have no idea. Parents whose baby is diagnosed as deaf by medical professionals do not realise that there is a Deaf community out there. If they knew, it could transform their grief about their child’s ‘defectiveness’ into delight that their child will receive an automatic passport to this wonderful community.
The most striking difference between the Deaf community and the hearing world is that we celebrate Deafness, while the hearing world tends to view it as a ‘defect’. We love our language, as it is expressive and poetic and delightful. We are so direct - there is no need for the euphemisms and careful politeness that is needed to navigate hearing culture - we just say it like it is and that’s ok. While in the hearing world, people feel sorry for me when they realise I am Deaf, in the Deaf community I have a high status and no-one would dream of feeling sorry for me - instead people want some of what I have. Readers of Future Girl will go with Piper on her journey as she meets the Deaf community.
On the environmental front, as well as raising awareness about the risks associated with peak oil, I want to inspire hope and a path of action. It’s easy to fall into thinking traps such as that what I do is insignificant and it’s the job of the government to solve our environmental crisis, but I believe that individuals can make a huge difference, not just through using fewer resources themselves but through the ripple effect that occurs when others see what they are doing and decide to have a go too. Many of the greatest changes in history have been wrought by passionate individuals who ended up part of grass roots movements. I hope that through Future Girl, readers will get to feel the sheer pleasure that comes with growing your own food, becoming more resilient in terms of potential future crises, and knowing they are contributing less to the damage we are doing to our planet.
What has been the best writing advice you’ve received?
Margo Lanagan joined a Facebook writing group I created while I was writing Future Girl. I love her books, which are so rich and evocative. She said that in her first draft she never tries to ’show not tell’. Instead, she simply gets down the story as it occurs to her. Then in later drafts she’ll go back and look at the emotions, and find ways to show them instead of simply saying what they were. This affected me profoundly and also freed me up to work very loosely. I found that it was much easier to work following her process. Future Girl was written from scratch five times, and with each draft it became so much stronger as I was able to build on the rougher and less sophisticated writing of the earlier drafts.
Asphyxia, Future Girl is such an incredible, immersive experience for the reader. What came first: the illustrations or the story?
They were both developed together. Since I was a young child I have embraced almost every kind of creativity I came across - writing, drawing, painting, sewing, felting, metal-work, woodwork, knitting, crochet and more. As my repertoire of skills has widened, I have enjoyed incorporating multiple forms of creativity into a single piece. It feels natural to me to draw on what I have available to me and combine and mix in pleasing ways. For example, on my small farm I am making use of food growing as an aesthetic and incorpating it into a functional visual artwork. Before I plant a tomato I consider the size, colours and placement of surrounding plants, fences, arbours, rocks and so on, and picture how they will all work together. I have written song lyrics about my artistic vision for the farm and intend to paint the words onto the fences along with paintings of images and found objects, which will all be integrated with plants.
My point is that for me, every form of art can be combined to make something that is more magnificent than a simple sum of its parts. Writing and visual art have been an intrinsic combination for me for many years. I have kept art journals in which text and images were ways for me to express my emotions as well as pour out my experiences. It felt natural to develop this further by creating an art journal that belonged to a fictional character and told her story rather than mine. If anything, it seems strange to me that this has not been done before!
I created the artworks as I wrote the story. As the story changed and was redrafted, some artworks got tossed out, and others were added. It was a very amorphous process, as the book could not be laid out until we knew how many pages there were, but we couldn’t know how many pages there would be until the artworks had been developed!
As I immersed myself in Piper’s story, I found myself naturally expressing elements of her experience through art journaling, just as I express my own life through my art journals.
