Romy Ash’s debut novel, Floundering, tells the story of Tom and Jordy, who have been living with their grandparents since their mother disappeared. Heartbreaking, and convincingly told from a child’s perspective, Floundering was shortlisted for last year’s The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, and was recently published by Text Publishing. We spoke to Romy about how to make your characters talk, sibling relationships, ventriloquism and constraints.

Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Subscribe to the Kill Your Darlings podcast via iTunes or the podcast feed.

What makes a story? Is it the structure, the way you tell it, the characters within? Lawrence Leung and I got together to discuss erotic fan fiction, the best way to tell stories, untrue stories and the elusive Ira Glass.

Lawrence Leung is an award-winning Australian comedian and TV writer who has been performing internationally since 2001. You may know him from his stand-up or his television shows on ABC1, Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure and Unbelievable. His 2012 show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is called Lawrence Leung: Beginning Middle End, and explores what makes the perfect story.

Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Subscribe to the Kill Your Darlings podcast via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Truth is often relative, and in no context is it more so – pardon the pun – than when considering family relationships. In the first Kill Your Darlings podcast for 2012, we speak to Michael Sala, author of The Last Thread – a work of fiction that is closely bound to the author’s own past.

Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Subscribe to the Kill Your Darlings podcast via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Steven Amsterdam is the author of acclaimed novel Things We Didn’t See Coming, and his new book, What the Family Needed, has been called ‘a wonderfully fresh perspective on families’, as well as ‘a probing exploration of familial love and forbearance’.

In What the Family Needed, members of a family are granted superpowers: invisibility, the power of flight, and so on. We asked Steven: well, what if you did have superpowers? What would you do? What power would you want to have?

Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Subscribe to the Kill Your Darlings podcast via iTunes or the podcast feed.

No, you haven’t accidentally stumbled into the eighties: the Kill Your Darlings Culture Club podcast is where we get together with some of our favourite people to discuss cultural items, be they books, plays or films.

This time around, we are attacking Miguel de Cervantes’ masterwork Don Quixote – that behemoth of literature, often called the greatest of all novels. It’s the work we can thank for giving us the word ‘quixotic’, and which features one of literature’s greatest characters of all time: Don Quixote himself, a man both wise and mad.

Tilting at windmills with me are two very special guests: Caro Cooper, editor at Text Publishing, and Ronnie Scott, editor of The Lifted Brow.

Sit down with a glass of red or a cup of tea and join us in our discussion. We recommend having read Don Quixote before listening to the podcast – but don’t worry, we don’t spoil the dénouement, so you can also listen along if you haven’t read the book.

Thanks to our friends at Vintage for copies of Don Quixote. Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Subscribe to the Kill Your Darlings podcast via iTunes or the podcast feed.

It’s 1930. Winsome McLintock is a convent girl about to marry a man she barely knows, and she will follow him to Rangoon, the then capital of Burma. Rangoon is a rich and exciting city, but it’s also full of tension – the wealthy British residents live luxurious colonial lifestyles while riots break out on the streets. It’s amongst all this that Winsome is discovering the nature of desire and the complexity of identity.

For this Kill Your Darlings podcast, we speak to Michelle Aung Thin about her debut novel, The Monsoon Bride.

Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Download the podcast here. Subscribe via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has its share of memorable lines – to this day we beware the Ides of March or beseech our friends, Romans and countrymen to hear us. But though it’s sometimes thought of as the Shakespeare’s boring toga story, its absorbing tale of power, friendship and betrayal resurfaces again and again. The politically motivated murder of Caesar has resonated with audiences throughout history, and for Australians the Labor party leadership spill has provided a potent backdrop for the Bell Shakespeare production of Julius Caesar.

For our September podcast, we speak to actor Alex Menglet, who plays Caesar in the Bell Shakespeare production. Julius Caesar is playing in theatres nationally until November 26.

Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Download the podcast here. Subscribe via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Picture this: a young Australian woman is waiting at the traffic lights in East Berlin when a tall man with curly hair asks her if she likes strawberries. She says yes, a seemingly small decision that leads to bigger ones, decisions so big that her life changes forever. This is how Melbourne writer Melanie Joosten’s debut novel Berlin Syndrome begins, and we’re delighted to present our interview with Joosten in our August podcast.

About 17 minutes. Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Download the podcast here. Subscribe via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Simon and his parents are on a family holiday and land in a small town called Reception. The town both lives up to its name and makes a mockery of it; the young boy finds new friends, but his parents go missing. The smaller a town, the more you have to bury your secrets – but not your stories.

Christopher Currie is one of those people you get the sense has always had stories to tell. His novella Dearly Departed was published in 2007, and in March 2008 he started a blog called Furious Horses, where he posted a new short story every day. We spoke with Currie about his debut novel The Ottoman Motel, small towns, what part emotion plays in writing, and balancing poetry and story.

About 20 minutes. Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey and Sam Szoke-Burke. Download the podcast here. Subscribe via iTunes or the podcast feed.

Meg Mundell’s Black Glass envisions a future Melbourne where individuals without official documentation are relegated to the socioeconomic margins and the relationship between the public and private aspects of our lives has been irrevocably blurred. In among all this, two ‘undoc’ sisters, Tally and Grace, have been separated following the death of their father and thrust into the city to fend for themselves. Meg has been published widely in Australian newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, The Best Australian Stories 2010, The Sleepers Almanac, harvest and The Big Issue. Black Glass won the 2007 D.J. (Dinny) O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship and was shortlisted for the 2010 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize.

We spoke to Meg about her vision of a city where everyone is watching.

About 20 minutes. Edited by Sam Szoke-Burke.

Kill Your Darlings podcasts appear monthly. Music is Pompey. Download the podcast here. Subscribe via iTunes or the podcast feed.