“In search of reassurance…”: Reflections on connectedness through ‘of boughs and birdsong’
Recently I was delighted to see a new short story, ‘of boughs and birdsong‘, published in the Australian Gothic issue of Emerging Possibilities. Here, I reflect on the process of crafting this piece and how connectedness arose as a key theme.
The first traces of this story came to me during a holiday in the south-west, in a house that felt like a world unto itself. It was set at the end of a long, winding driveway marked by potholes left by heavy rains. Looking out the windows, all I could see were trees, and when gazing through the bedroom window, it felt like I was amongst the treetops. More than anything else, I remember the sprawl of the trees, the chill in the air, and the presence of the land and the greenery. This propelled me into the earliest stages of writing.
During a long drive through flourishing forest, then along a razor-thin road daggered by hairpin bends, Camille took mental snapshots of as many trees as possible. The ones so drastically windswept that their boughs were bent. The ones standing like columns, so tall that they might be holding up the sky.
I soon landed on ‘treetops’ as a working title for what would become ‘of boughs and birdsong’. I began to imagine what a life would look like amongst the trees. The early writing process was vague but hopeful. I was pulling at threads that I found a way to weave together much later in the process. Mostly, I wrote about the trees and the peacefulness, and my own yearning for solitude, filtered through the lens of the main character, Camille.
Situating this piece in the Australian Gothic genre helped it come together more fully. It allowed me to grapple with the connection and the divide between isolation and solitude, and the wonderful and the sinister. Inherent in all of this is wondering about connectedness to nature, its importance in our lives, and what it can promise in terms of comfort. I wanted the flora to exist in the story in multiple intersecting forms: in the cast of characters, as a setting, and on a symbolic level. I wanted its presence to be vivid and variable. More than anything else, I found myself reflecting on the significance of caring for our natural world, and the care – and perhaps the companionship – it extends to us, if we take the time to be present and to lean into attunement and connection.
I found Camille and Lucie along the way, and with them, Billie. This story only ever made sense as one about queerness, though that is never explicitly named. What with the story being told through Camille’s point of view, I couldn’t put words to her identity or Lucie and Billie’s in any concrete way. Camille is in a state of flux, emerging from a closeted childhood and into a more liberated adulthood. When we meet her, that liberation is coloured by grief and complicated by Camille’s uncertainty about her connectedness to the world.
They connected over a crackling phone line and in messy strokes of ink on precious pages: Lucie’s from a proper letter-writing kit, each crisp piece of paper trimmed with daisy chains, and Camille’s torn from whatever notebook she could find.
She can count on one hand how many times they were together. Her fourth birthday, when she first came to adore her Auntie Lucie, who came marching into the party, her hair a magnificent shade of fuchsia. Her tenth, when Lucie’s friend Billie delighted in painting everyone’s faces. A kindness unappreciated by the other grown-ups.
Camille tries not to think about how she begged to keep the facepaint on, nor how hard her mother scrubbed to do away with those glorious arcs of colourful glitter.
Camille’s connection to Lucie endures through the house, its garden, and the sprawling forest that morphs from menacing to marvellous. I wanted to spend some time dwelling with connections that endure in different forms, and with the hope of connections that may yet come to be. A lot of this is left unfinished and in the hands of readers to interpret. There are clues to how I conceive of what Lucie and Billie’s story was, and what Camille’s story might yet be, but I felt some comfort when leaning into the subjective.
If I’m being honest, a bulk of this story was written in a moment where solitude took a sharp turn into loneliness: a rare occurrence, and all the more pointed for it. I tend to take comfort in my own company. I spent a lot of that day with my own thoughts and found solace in transforming those into the context of Camille and her world.
Nightfall (…) devours the forest in a single bite, and with it, the house. Camille has always been alone in one way or another, but never like this.
Often in this story, Camille and the trees and the flowers are in motion, and often joyful motion. It may take on an eerie note at times given the Gothic nature of it all, but at the heart of it, I wanted to lean into this recurring motion as a playful, expressive way of being. They dance, they sway. There is life and love and reassurance in this, particularly in terms of how the dancing carries across time and habitats.
[Camille’s] ribs feel more likely to rumble with laughter as she remembers dancing with Lucie around this very garden.
When I was going through the review process, a question arose around the casing of the title: why ‘of boughs and birdsong’ and not ‘Of Boughs and Birdsong’? I stayed with the lower-case version for a few reasons. In part, I wanted to signal the feminist thought that informed this work. I wrote it through a feminist lens, and more specifically, a feminist lens integrating queer and more-than-human elements. Beyond that, I felt that the lower-case version of the title might place this story into some sort of relationship with other works I have published: for example, ‘lost in the lair’ and ‘re-assembling’, two quite different poetic works. I can see traces of the fantastical and the sinister existing between ‘lost in the lair’ and ‘of boughs and birdsong’, while ‘re-assembling’ speaks to a process of healing and transformation. I hold out hope that Camille lives through a kindred journey.
I think if she maintains a connection to the worlds upon worlds she finds and may yet still discover through Lucie, she will.
‘of boughs and birdsong’ was published in the Australian Gothic issue of Emerging Possibilities in July 2026. It is available open-access here.