It was mostly quiet, except for the avalanche sirens. My studio in Iceland was small and white, tucked away at the back of the artists’ residency. I hardly noticed the bare walls because my eyes were constantly on the window. Mountains surrounded the fjord, black volcanic dirt always dusted with snow. One night someone in the house shouted: ‘The aurora! Everyone outside, NOW!’ I threw down my pen and ran, skidding on the ice. By the time my month-long residency was finished the snow was thigh-high, piled so thick against the front door that we couldn’t get out. 

I didn’t mind. I never wanted to leave, anyway. 

My studio in Finland was enormous. Taxidermy and turpentine on desktops, easel legs standing open on paint-splattered linoleum. Three house cats, named after Finnish artists, would nudge the door open and climb into my lap. I often sat cross-legged scrawling scenes in charcoal on butcher’s paper, listening to Big Mama Thornton and Howlin’ Wolf sing the blues. As I wrote, I snacked on reindeer and drank cloudberry wine, sticky and golden in the bottom of my glass. 

The bones of Fed to Red Birds were slowly being fleshed out, one year after my Icelandic residency.

My writing space now is in Melbourne’s industrial west, in Footscray. The West Gate Bridge is visible from my balcony and at night, the giraffe-like gantries on the docks are lit up as they lift and shift containers from cargo ships. It’s a very different view to Icelandic mountains criss-crossed with avalanche barriers, or the silver trunks of a Finnish birch forest, but the writing spaces of both my residencies have folded themselves into the manuscript of Fed to Red Birds in different ways. When you have a dedicated space to write in – and two of my favourites of life’s riches, solitude and silence – then the words can flow.
It was in Melbourne that I began to gather my menagerie as I wrote in Elva’s shoes. Framed snake and bat skeletons, a deer skull with antlers, a kingfisher skull with a long curved beak, bell jars of snake skins, and a huge white snow goose, wings open wide above my bookcase. 

My own taxidermy attempts are less impressive, but no less important. They pose in front of Plath, Carver and Kafka, with lush devil’s ivy trailing between their glass domes. My three-legged rescue cat watches my efforts with sleepy eyes, but hasn’t pounced, yet. 

I’ve been building my own Cabinet of Curiosities, I see now. Elva collects creatures, croons to them while no-one is looking, strokes their feathers and fangs. I do the same. The tenderness I feel is a lovely thing, but in touching them I still feel connected to Elva, and that’s where the real joy lies.