Squidsquatch. A new interview (almost) every day. A single question. The subject one day becomes interviewer the next.

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Mitch: You have recently up and moved with the family from one end of the country to the other. Has the sea change affected your writing in any way, either in how you write, or what you write about? In any way has the change in latitude changed your attitude?

Chris Lawson: Actually, I moved only halfway up the east coast from Melbourne. People tend to forget how big Queensland is. Despite moving 1800 km north, I am still closer to Melbourne than the northern tip of the country. To put it another way, if you were to take a map of Australia and fold it along the southern Queensland border, the tip at Cape York would go past the bottom of Tasmania and well into the Southern Ocean. And I still live an hour and half from Australia’s third largest city, so it’s not been an enormous upheaval culturally.

Having said that, Melbourne is a remarkable city that I miss a lot. The first time I flew back to Melbourne from our new digs, as I was waiting in line to disembark the plane, a young man ahead of me stepped out of the plane into the open air, threw his arms wide, and shouted “Melbourne! Thank God!” I had to look around to make sure I hadn’t accidentally wandered onto a film set. It was one of those things you expect in a movie about New York or Paris. I understood exactly why he was so pleased to be back home. It’s not just nostalgia or homesickness. There really is something special about the culture in Melbourne. It is possibly the only major melting-pot city in the world that has almost entirely avoided ethnic violence, even between the large Serbian and Croatian communities during the NATO intervention years. In fact, the only serious ethnic strife that Melbourne ever experienced was back in the 1880s gold rushes when the Chinese were none too popular with the English settlers.

There are many things I miss, especially the SF community there and the easy availability of great cons and Slow Glass Books. But the move has been much for the better overall and there are many compensations. We now live in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia, only seven minutes from a great surf beach, and the climate is such that there are almost never any days where you don’t want to go outside. Most importantly, my wife’s health has improved considerably this last year.

Has it affected my writing? Not that I’m aware. Apart from research purposes, there is no need for me to travel to any particular place for my stories, and even then I can get away with fudging it most of the time (almost all of my stories are set in places I’ve never been). On the other hand, the move did absorb much energy, and then there was getting into a new workplace, and starting to teach at the University of Queensland. All this has taken a big bite out of my available mental effort. It’s not so much the latitude as the lassitude. But things are improving. I’ve disappointed myself by missing some deadlines and submission opportunities recently, but there is some stuff brewing that I hope to decant soon.

Chris Lawson is a doctor, teacher, and writer. He is one of the few living Australian writers to have a district named after him. Unfortunately, that district is Wonglepong.