Janine Mikosza is a writer with a background in visual art and a PhD in sociology. Her essays and short stories have appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, The Best Australian Essays, and Meanjin. She lives in Melbourne.
Today, to celebrate the recent release of her book Homesickness, Janine Mikosza is on the blog to take on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on …
Janine Mikosza
1. To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in a small maternity hospital by the Indian Ocean in Western Australia to immigrant parents, and was raised in many different towns and cities across Australia and in England. Moved house and changed schools regularly, occasionally once a year, and constantly felt displaced. I was forced to quickly adapt to new situations and environments, which made me resilient in some ways, but as an adult I carry around the perpetual feeling of being unsettled, of not quite belonging to any place.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
At twelve, I wanted to be a vet or marine biologist, and artist. Loved drawing and loved animals and thought I could somehow combine the two.
At eighteen, an artist. Creating and making art seemed like my thing, it felt too important not to do it. I went to art school and majored in sculpture and photomedia and practiced for a decade.
At thirty, an academic. Finished a doctorate in sociology then decided I didn’t want to work as an academic. Instead, I became a research assistant and supported research projects at universities. I also returned to my art and then writing.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you don’t have now?
That I didn’t have much of a future. Took me a long while to realise I did.
4. What are three works of art – this could be a book, painting, piece of music, film, etc – that influenced your development as a writer?
Beloved by Toni Morrison. The most dog-eared and annotated book in my library. The haunting weight of history, the futile attempt to repress the memory of slavery, to forget the past and the crimes committed, and the psychological effects of slavery (fragmentation of self) in a house and family, combined with Morrison’s lyrical writing blew me away when I was in my early twenties. The titular character resists a singular interpretation, and Morrison created a space where history can speak in many and varied ways. The story, the characters, the complexity of grief, the rich ideas, and the beauty of the prose stick with me still.
Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. My romantic Berlin phase. I wanted to live there in my late teens for the music and art scene, and even studied German for a year, but then became ill with glandular fever that floored me for years. Still haven’t been to Berlin. Wings of Desire was shot almost two years before the fall of the Wall. A cool, stylish film about isolation, estrangement, and angels who see history from the beginning to the end but cannot interact with the physical world. It is filled with the whispering monologues of humans that only the angels can hear. I’m yet to re-visit the film in case it hasn’t stood the test of time.
Also, while the co-writer on Wings of Desire, Peter Handke, has written some excellent books (the representation of alienation in a domestic house in The Left-Handed Woman and his stark book on the life and death of his mother and the ‘dull speechlessness’ of grief — A Sorrow Beyond Dreams — influenced my early writing), his support for Slobodan Milošević has stopped me from appreciating his work as much as I once did. I’m one of those people who finds it tricky to separate history and the biography of a writer from their work.
After finishing high school, I lived in Sydney. Late 1980s. During the day I went to art school and every night I watched and listened to bands in pubs and clubs. This was before the gentrification and Olympification of Sydney devastated inner-city music venues. Hoodoo Gurus, The Triffids, The Laughing Clowns, Go-Betweens, Warumpi Band, Sunnyboys, Ups and Downs, Died Pretty, et al. The dynamism of the Sydney music scene influenced my development as a writer/artist and gave me a lifelong appreciation of music as art. It also gave me tinnitus.
5. Considering the many artistic forms out there, what appeals to you about writing a memoir?
I started writing Homesickness around the end of 2013, taking notes, writing memories and drawing floor plans of my childhood homes. This was the beginning of something — an exploration of how people remember the rooms and houses they once lived in and the language they use as adults to describe their childhoods. It wasn’t overtly personal at this point even though I was working directly from my memories. My ideas always tend to dictate form but for a long time I wasn’t sure what this work would be — I certainly didn’t think it would be memoir. And I didn’t want to write memoir. So I decided not to label it as anything. Eventually I worked out that the ideal form would use conversation as a device to interrogate a person and their memories. That person and their memories just happened to be me. As it turns out, Homesickness has ‘a memoir’ as descriptor on the cover, so I guess that’s what it is now.
‘This was the beginning of something — an exploration of how people remember the rooms and houses they once lived in and the language they use as adults to describe their childhoods.’
6. Please tell us about your latest book!
In Homesickness I return to the rooms of my childhood homes, both literally and in my imagination. My book is about the fallibility of memory, what the act of remembering (or attempting to forget) the past does to the mind and body, and how childhood lives on in an adult self.
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
My hope (if it is a hope, perhaps it’s more of a wish) is that what I’ve written might hang around in a reader’s imagination for a while, or slightly alter their perceptions of how another person might live a life.
8. Who do you most admire in the writing world and why?
Writers with a strong focus on and commitment to ideas and who use whatever form best serves them: Claudia Rankine, Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School was my grand teenage literary influence) and the graphic novelists Art Spiegelman, Richard McGuire and Phoebe Gloeckner. I also admire writers who continue to write despite resistance to and denigration of intellectual and creative work by certain sectors of society that refuse to see its worth except in blunt economic terms.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
I have more book ideas (currently one fiction, one non-fiction) churning away that are in notes/drafting stage. Since I take the long way round when making work, I suspect these ideas might duke it out for a while to see who gets finished first.
10. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
This is stuff that worked for me: Patience, more redrafting than you think you can bear, allowing yourself plenty of time to think, imagine and experiment, finding a job to support your work that leaves you with enough space and energy to create. Be generous with others and work hard to find good people who will have your back. They’re out there.
Thank you for playing!
—Homesickness by Janine Mikosza (Ultimo Press) is out now.
Homesickness.
A memoir
The past, she says, it kind of owns me. I want permission to write her life while she lives it. I want to know why she is returning to the past and why she can’t escape memories from decades ago. I want to know many things.
But nobody writes a nobody’s life, she says.
In this memoir, through both her words and illustrations, Janine Mikosza revisits the fourteen houses she lived in before turning eighteen. Homesickness explores how we...
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