Meet Sarah-Jane Collins

​There is no question in your ability to produce a scene so terrifying the reader experiences it along with the character—Alison, lying on her bathroom floor covered in a wet blanket, waiting to die in the bushfire. How were you able to write the scene, keeping the description of what was happening equally balanced with her fear?
At the time of the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, I was working as a court reporter for The Age newspaper, and the courts round is one of those collaborative kinds of rounds, where journos from all the publications work out of the same office, and help each other out. Of course, if you’ve got an exclusive you keep it to yourself, but the big trials and crimes, we’re all in there together. One of those journalists nearly died on Black Saturday, and he wrote a searing, visceral account of his experience for his newspaper. After the fires, I was transferred to the State Politics round and I went out on a lot of stories where I met people who had survived Black Saturday, or saw the ruins of the towns and bush. I drew on all of that when writing that scene, and I think if you can marry description with emotion, it is far more powerful, and that’s what I tried to do the whole way through the book.
Radiant Heat, defined at the beginning of the novel, becomes a major theme. Why did you decide to use this as the title?
I  love this question because it allows me to do something I love to do and talk about how writing a novel is both an incredibly solitary thing, but also, it takes a village. When I began working on Radiant Heat it had a working title—After the Fire—and I didn’t love it, but titles are not my forte, so I just went with it. In my first workshop for Columbia’s Fiction MFA I submitted the draft first chapter of this book, and when my friend Michael handed me back his draft with markups, he had circled the words ‘radiant heat’ in the dialogue between Jim and Alison and written “Title?”. As soon as I saw it I knew he was right. Because Radiant Heat is the silent killer of a fire. You can’t see it or anticipate it, and it’s not the danger you’re paying attention to. There’s a lot of that in Alison’s life, it just fits. 
How did you create and plot the minor themes using this major theme?
I think there’s obviously a lot of symbolism in fire, and I wanted to write a book that considered that the lives of the people who are devastated by natural disasters had befores, and they have afters. How do you deal with catastrophe and manage your life? How does something so extreme change us, and how does it affect everything else we’ve got going on? For Alison, fire or not, there was something coming to shake her up and put her in danger, but the fire changed the game, turned it into something else. And that’s what I was interested in. How does that change how you behave. I think Alison would have reacted very differently to what was coming had there been no fire. So without the fire, there’s no book—but the fire isn’t the story here, and so while it’s an anchor, it also inspired me to find those other threads, and bring together a world around it. A world that felt true to Australia, and to the other things I’ve seen as a reporter that I wanted to unpack.
The fire reflects the 2009 Black Saturday fire in Australia. How were you affected?
I lived in Melbourne at that time, and I’m lucky that my family is pretty much all in Queensland, very far from those conditions, and so I wasn’t personally affected by the fires directly. I remember that day so well. It was so so hot, but also really dry, and the sky was dark and orange and you could smell the smoke on the wind. No one knew how bad it was. The fire moved so fast—it was days before we understood the extent of it. I remember I was out for breakfast with my friends on the Sunday morning, and the late edition of the paper had it as front page news, with a horrible death toll of—I think—around 40. That number would quadruple in the coming days. I think we were all in shock. I wanted to go out and cover the fires like so many of my colleagues at the paper, but there was a huge trial in the Supreme Court, and another one in the County, someone had to stay and write them up. When I talked to my friends after they came back, they were all so quietly shaken by what they had seen. I read all the coverage, every story of survival, every list of names. It was devastating, and consuming, and profoundly sad. On the one year anniversary, I was sent to talk to a family who had survived about their year. They were still living in a shipping container on their land, waiting to rebuild. Their two children had a menagerie of pets the little girl wanted me to meet. I was so struck by their stoicism, their optimism. I think about them, and about everyone I met during that time a lot. I admire them greatly.
The bushfire almost becomes a character in itself. What advice do you have not to let your event take over the story? And was this even more difficult since it was an event you experienced?
I think landscape and place are always characters in our lives and stories, so it is important to me to bring that into my fiction. Having been in Melbourne for Black Saturday made me perhaps more cautious about how to write about something like it. I didn’t want to sell it short, or to exploit it salaciously. I hope that’s a line I’ve managed to walk, and that the bushfire is respected for what it is, a terrible, awesome force of nature that we have absolutely no control over.
This is your debut book after a career as a journalist. How hard was it to transition? What tricks did you learn to help?
A lot of great journalists also write novels, and for those of us who became journalists to write (which is why I did it), it makes sense. The parts of the transition that are hard are really also, I think, made easier by the experiences of being a reporter on a newspaper. Writing to deadline every day, whether you want to or not. Finding the human interest in a boring political announcement or a dry report. Observing details of places and people so you can bring them to life on the page. Journalism teaches you a lot about people, and a lot about writing if you’re paying attention. And I don’t see it so much as a transition, but more of an extension of my skills, a meandering maybe.
Writing for a job and taking on a second career as a novelist, advice?
You have to have space to write the book. That sounds obvious, but it’s actually really hard to use your words all day at work and then come home and find new ones for your novel. I was really lucky that while I was writing Radiant Heat I was, largely, not doing much outside work. I was studying for my MFA full time, and then I was doing some freelance work that didn’t take up a lot of my time. I know a lot of other novelists who have completely unrelated jobs, and some who teach writing, and some who do PR or grant writing or work in offices… the only thing that matters is making space for your personal writing work and finding a way to  prioritize getting it done.
What are you working on now, and when can readers seek it out?
I’m deep in the first third of a new book—it's about a lot of things—friendship, destructive love, late-stage capitalism to name some of them—and like Radiant Heat it uses a disaster as an entry point, but it’s a man-made one. There’s murder, a lot of madness, and a deeply destructive friendship at the core of the narrative. I’m excited to get it on the page—and then to readers, as soon as I can!

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