Debut Revisited - Ashley Kalagian Blunt breaks down her career from Dark Mode to Like, Follow, Die

It's great.

On the page, as a reader, it's enthralling.

The writer of me tips my hat.

It's my writer brain separating from my reader brain.

They're frequently in clash with one another, but in all the right ways.

I could honestly keep poking you about these three books, but instead, to finish off this incredible discussion, As you mentioned at the top, you've been doing, you've been an author for 11 years now.

And it's taken you everywhere.

And it's been amazing and wonderful.

And it's been exciting to see your star continue to rise.

So I kind of want to ask, what is... writing uh these three books including my name is revenge and um and how to be australian what has it taught you be it ashley the human ashley the writer ashley the human being on this planet oh wow that's a huge question

uh i think that all of my books are about identity and all of my books are about justice and the often frequent lack of justice.

Even in How to Be Australian, which is a very lighthearted book, there's a lot of comedy in it.

But even within that, there's a chapter about the legacy of the Armenian Genocide and migrant policies in Australia, particularly refugee policies.

And I think that as a writer, those questions are the work of a lifetime.

And that's really, really rewarding to have been able to approach these same questions in so many, so many different ways.

And I also, just as a writer, what these books have taught me compared to my unpublished works, because I spent 20 years writing before I got published, The difference is what I started to learn when I started working on my first book that ended up getting published was there's writing and there's story.

And those are like two separate concepts that you have to learn.

unless you're, you know, a natural storyteller, which a lot of us like, oh, like I'm a natural storyteller.

Like I like to tell anecdotes.

That's not what I mean.

I mean, like you understand the patterns of story structure.

And some people do like the Candace Fox, you know, didn't have to sit down and learn story structure.

I did like like some people can just open up a car engine and just figure out how it works.

But most people need to be trained in terms of like how all these pieces function together in order to create propulsion.

And that has been the foundation of my teaching as a writing teacher as well.