Helena Fox is an author, poet and creative writing mentor living by the sea on Dharawal Country in Wollongong.
Helena’s debut novel, How It Feels To Float, published in Australia and internationally, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Writing for Young Adults in 2020. Helena’s second novel, The Quiet and The Loud, came out in March 2023. Her poetry has been published by Red Room Poetry and in Admissions, an anthology of writing on mental health. Helena received her MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in the US.
Helena is also the mentor of the Young Writers Collective for the South Coast Writers Centre.
In the lead-up to the 2023 South Coast Writers Festival – which will be back at Wollongong Town Hall from 18-20 August – we asked Helena about her new book and her involvement in this year's program.
What is your latest project?
My latest project is my second novel, The Quiet And The Loud, published in April of this year. It is a contemporary YA (Young Adult) novel, set in Sydney in the summer of 2019.
It tells the story of Georgia (George), who, at 18 years old, is trying to navigate the perpetual, murmuring noise of her childhood. Complex trauma and the cacophonic noise of her current life – which includes a demanding pregnant best friend, another friend dealing with profound climate grief, her estranged father getting in touch with impossible news, and the effects of the apocalyptic bushfires of 2019.
George has spent a lifetime compulsively people-pleasing and endlessly searching for quiet. Now, she begins to learn that the better path through the tumult might actually be to face it, find her voice in all the noise, and speak it.
Why this work?
I am a huge advocate of writing the stories that help us find and speak our voice and set us on a path to healing. I wrote this work because I live with both childhood and adult Complex PTSD. I wanted to talk about the affects and symptoms of such trauma, and how to keep going while carrying grief, debilitating mental health issues and a pervasively difficult past. In my new novel – as in my first novel, How It Feels To Float – I have woven many elements of my own life into my fictional worlds, as a way to empower myself, speak my truth, and understand what has happened to me.
I also hope to give readers a story they might be able to relate to, and one that might give them handholds to get through their own difficult times.
What do you love about it?
I believe in being very open in talking about mental health, and about the obstacles and challenges people face when living with trauma and mental health disorders. The more open we are, the more we reduce stigma about mental health issues, and the more heard, supported and validated people feel who live with those issues.
I am very glad to be part of an ongoing and important conversation about mental health. I am also deeply grateful that I get to speak to and connect with some of the most passionate, bright, valuable, and vulnerable members of our community – young adults – about these issues.
What challenges have you run into?
It has been very hard to write while navigating the challenging symptoms of my adult Complex PTSD. The symptoms I deal with are multiple and, when activated, can be quite destabilising and take a while to recover from. I am proud of the fact that I kept writing, despite the significant difficulties I faced during the writing of this novel.
What are you most excited about for your events at the South Coast Writers Festival?
I’m equally excited for both of my events! I look forward to discussing mental health issues with the Admissions crew on their panel, as well as talking about the vitality of young adult voices, and the incredibly rewarding work of writing for young adults, with Will Kostakis in my YA panel. It will be a beautiful festival – I am really looking forward to it.
You can see Helena in "Humour and Heart: Bringing Teens to Life" at Wollongong Art Gallery on 19 August, 11.15am and in "Admissions" on 19 August at 12.30pm as part of the South Coast Writers Festival. Helena will also be at the Emerging Writers Reading event at UOW on 17 August at 7pm, introducing upcoming writers.
