◊  ◊  ◊

DJ: Hi J. Ashley-Smith! Thanks for stopping by to do this interview!

Please tell us a little about yourself for readers unfamiliar with you.

JAS: Hi, DJ. Thanks for having me.

I’m a British–Australian author of dark speculative fiction. Even though I’ve lived in Australia for coming up on 20 years, I still feel out of place, as though I stepped through a portal into some weird parallel universe. Now, even my old home, when viewed through this lens, seems unrecognisable and unfamiliar—perhaps even more so, now there’s a king on the throne! This kind of wrongness and disorientation, the sense of everyday things just out of true, is something that obsesses me. Another obsession is that inner dark from which the fantastic, the terrifying, and the impossible are born. The collision between the complexities of the modern day-to-day and the invisible or imagined world is another fixation, which I continually explore in my stories.

DJ: What is The Measure of Sorrow about?

JAS: The stories in The Measure of Sorrow are united more by a feeling than a theme: I felt my way into each of them, and I felt my way through their compilation. If a theme emerges it’s as a result of instinct rather than intellect. Children feature strongly. As do parents. There’s thwarted or misguided love. There’s separation, grief and longing. People, all-too human, search for or build islands of meaning, all-too aware they are surrounded by vast oceans of coldness, indifference, or cruelty. At the cusp between these islands and the hard reality outside, there is wonder, horror, awe. People fall victim to their blind spots and weaknesses. Their search for meaning is always rewarded, but never in the way they hoped. The Measure of Sorrow centres on those perimeter moments, the border between one state or condition and another, from which something enters, something small, something strange, something unbidden and unexpected.

DJ: What were some of the inspirations behind The Measure of Sorrow?

JAS: The Australian landscape. The weirdness of dreams. Everyday lives warped by madness. Families tormented by loss. A suburb shrouded in melancholy. Fragmented glimpses of what lies beyond the veil. And, of course, sadness itself. It’s not something that’s really approved of in our culture but there’s a beauty in sadness. To live with your sorrow is to live with sensitivity, receptive to what’s really there. Sadness is an entirely appropriate response to the horrors and wonders of the human condition.

Continue reading “Author Interview: J. Ashley-Smith” →