“Breaching” by Eva Lomski appeared in Issue 30 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about “Breaching.”
I wish I could say the inspiration for the story was a whale sighting of my own, although I’ve several times traipsed around Logans Beach lookout as a soft-shoed tourist. This story was always about the place though. Warrnambool lies toward one end of one of the world’s most scenic coastal drives – the Great Ocean Road – along the clifftops of southern Victoria overlooking the Southern Ocean at the bottom of mainland Australia. It’s a coastline of giant limestone pillars, national parks, lighthouses, and shipwrecks. We’d drive along and I’d take notes about little things, like the twin fireplaces.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story?
I always intended the story to be about the healing power of nature, but it took several revisions to discover why Alice and Jerry needed healing. In the end, it was the detail about how whales give birth that provided the clue.
Recommend a book for us?
They say read outside your genre. I read a lot of crime, and Australian writer Emma Viskic’s Resurrection Bay (2015) is fresh, exceptionally well-written and noir-edgy with an intriguing protagonist – investigator Caleb Zelic, who is profoundly deaf, which makes for a ton of added suspense. In relation to your theme of ‘place’, it’s exciting to read Australian settings in a crime book, when so often the novels are U.S. or U.K. based. Viskic does a fantastic job with her vivid descriptions of city and town life. A lot of the action takes place in a small coastal town not unlike Warrnambool.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
For a quiet beer – David Malouf, one of Australia’s greatest writers. Every Move You Make was one of the first short story collections I ever read. I saw him speak once. He was thoughtful and humble. And for cocktails – Robert Olen Butler, whose Tabloid Dreams was a short story genre inventive eye-opener, and who responded to a fan-tweet of mine years ago.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
For too long I’ve been writing a novel about a woman who untangles jewelry as a business. Yes, it’s a metaphor. Also working on short stories and poetry.
Our thanks to Eva for taking the time to answer a few questions and share “Breaching.” Read Lomski’s story here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-empty-eyes.
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