Meeting the Shark: Turning Family Stories into Magic Realistic Fiction

Two Steps on the Water is a magic realist novel, inspired by my ex-husband’s family stories. Family stories tend to acquire a mythic quality and this effect is heightened when they are not your family stories, but someone else’s. This paper will discuss how I appropriated their story, weaving a novel from fragments of their oft-told tales, in an attempt to mythologise a contemporary Australian landscape that is often read as ‘banal.’ This is part of a larger project, which is concerned with Australian fiction and its fascination with realism, and how as a writer I might render Australian landscapes fantastic.