Time and place play a role in every novel, but few play with the concepts so drastically as Berlin-based writer Siouxzi Connor’s new release, Your Body of Water. A love story in four acts, Connor’s dark autofictional novel traces past romances, lives and loves through the lens of mythological retelling and hydrofeminism. The novel takes place in four distinct places, next to four distinct rivers located in the Blue Mountains of Australia (where she grew up), Berlin, Lisbon and Paxos in Greece. Connor weaves notions of desire, trauma, sex, beauty and most of all, love, through genre, time and space, bringing readers an enthralling story that’s both symbolically and emotionally rich. We speak to Connor about the role of location and landscape in her work, the play between autofiction and mythology in Your Body of Water and what it was like reliving and healing past traumas during the process of writing her book.
Your Body of Water is a lot of different things at once: a work of autofiction, a love story, an exploration of mythologies. What did your process look like when writing it?
In a nutshell, it’s a piece of creative therapy. The whole process started as a PhD thesis, moved into little vignettes that were pieces of literary fiction and then I realised that a lot of those literary fiction pieces were actually kind of autofictional. The autobiographical stories were very thinly veiled through the use of some mythology. Once I realised what I was actually doing underneath the surface, it basically became my way of trying to process a lot of life events that have happened since I moved away from Australia. There have been a lot of different chapters, and it seems like my brain kind of compartmentalised them into these different time periods and settings, all centred around rivers.
Water plays a huge role in the book, not only as an important part of the setting, but even as a main character. How did that come about?
In my first book that came out, also from the same publisher, the focus, or the sort of proverbial setting, was a dark forest. That also came out of a bit of research, especially into German mythology, fables and folklore that have to do with the forest. The water in this book actually came through because I grew up by a river. When I started the first piece for the book, it was actually just meant to be a short story. The premise of it was a teenage version of myself growing up by this river and falling in love with it – actually having this sense of limerence, longing, even lust for this body of water. The setting then became a character of its own. And then I realised all of the cities I’ve lived in have been around rivers. I built characters around the rivers after that.
Other than anchoring the sections of the book around bodies of water, you also placed the stories in different cities. How did you locate each section?
That was actually part of the autofictional component of the book. Each setting being located by a river is sort of a key. They’ve formed very key emotional geographic points in my life. There’s a river in the Blue Mountains in Australia. There’s also a river in the Outback where some of my ancestors lived where I also, by coincidence, shot a film years ago. Then there’s the Spree in Berlin, which has been an epicentre of a lot of huge life changes. There’s also the river in Lisbon, which is a city I’ve gone back and forth to for various reasons. I finished writing the book there by that river. The other setting is in Paxos in Greece. When I was writing, there was this really beautiful moment of serendipity, because I was thinking, ‘Okay, there’s no river in Paxos, there’s just some kind of vague underground stream that has some links to some goddesses’. And I was thinking, ‘How am I going to tie that into a river?’ Then I did a bit of research, and apparently the mouth of the river Styx, like the physical river that’s obviously linked to the mythological one; the ferry port that’s there now, in the present day, directly links to Paxos. That was a very nice moment of serendipity. And the Greek idea of the Okeanos River, which circles the whole globe, is actually physically located near Paxos as well, so there were a lot of nice little coincidences.
You were also writing the book in a lot of the different settings. Did the location of where you were writing have an impact on the story?
Yes they did, and it’s something that I noticed that I had to push a bit. When I was writing the Berlin sections, for example – they’re quite chaotic. There’s a lot of darkness in them. Those were really the heaviest parts that I wrote emotionally, and I noticed that I couldn’t just sit in the studio and have this sort of peaceful desk and nice people sitting around. I had to actually go somewhere that was also very hectic and chaotic. I sort of had to position myself in settings that were somehow conducive to writing the different parts. The time of day also made a big difference. The Berlin parts – in that whole section, the sun just doesn’t come up the whole time, so I was also writing it very late at night. I did mostly write the Lisbon sections in Berlin, but then I tidied them up in Lisbon. It did help to refresh myself on the setting – just hearing the accents again, and hearing all the streetscape. It really did.
We’ve been talking about how the book is a work of autofiction, but there’s also a strong tie to mythology. How did you play with that dynamic?
When I was writing the Berlin sections, for example, they’re quite chaotic. There’s a lot of darkness in them.
Maybe it seems like a contradiction in terms, but part of the book was inspired by this Susan Sontag quote where she talks about telling tales and the telling of tall tales – this idea of retelling and also being a storyteller. In some instances, it’s taken as the absolute truth. If you’re a witness to something and you have to tell the story of it, that’s seen as the empirical source of truth. In other situations, the storyteller is absolutely fallible, and there’s a real porousness to the storyteller’s memory and how things have been since the story they’re remembering happened. It also was inspired by the Leda and the Swan myth, which forms part of the Berlin section. There’s this idea of the fallible narrator, and whenever this tale of Leda and the swan is told, whether it’s told through painting, poetry or whatever, it seems that whoever’s telling it shifts the perspective. It goes from being this erotic, Garden of Eden feeling in the pre-Raphaelite paintings to this feeling of it as a sexual assault, and then there’s Yeats that fits somewhere in between. I think this appeals to me because I feel like it reflects how I look back on my life as well. Some days I’ll look back on a certain event and think it was an absolute disaster, and then other days I can look back on it, even though I’m the same person, and think of it as something that was completely worthwhile and something to learn from. I think I just get really excited by this idea of all of us as such complex, often completely contradictory creatures. So yeah, autofiction is also myth, and myth can be autofiction.
And there are many different sides to this book, especially since it’s a romance in four parts. Do you have a favourite section?
Well, it’s not even a full section, rather a section within a section. It’s this autopsy scene at the end of the Paxos section: this transition between Paxos and a return to Australia and the ancestors’ story. It’s a very short moment, but for me, it tied a lot of threads together. Without giving too much away, the protagonist is seeing and feeling her own body getting an autopsy. As the organs are being taken out and prodded and poked, it’s sort of triggering things from her past and reminding her of all the loves that have gone before. For me, it brings all of these love stories together in one bodily way. I think that’s probably my favourite part. It’s visceral and real enough that the emotional resonance comes across, but at the same time, it’s obviously very abstract. I like the playfulness between something that could never happen in reality, and something that feels very much like it has happened on a romantic level.
That’s a pretty intense scene to also pop out as your favourite, and there are a lot of really difficult themes that the book deals with. Since it’s a work of autofiction, you were probably reliving a lot of difficult experiences. What was that like?
I think I just get really excited by this idea of all of us as such complex, often completely contradictory creatures.
I mean, some parts were in the distant past, so it felt quite cathartic bringing them up and then letting them pass again. Others were in the much more recent past. There are a couple of moments just from five years ago that, even though they might seem very far-fetched, they are based on real experiences. The person that I experienced them with has been fictionalised in the book – obviously there are no names being used – but I gave that person a copy of the manuscript before it was published, just out of respect and to be able to navigate the situation. We had a lot of really, really helpful conversations as they were going through it. During that really painful process, it sort of felt like things came full circle and a lot of really unspoken things were finally spoken and felt. So in the end it was pretty healing.
And there’s another non-written aspect to the book…
Yes, it’s purely based on my own fascination, but Marie, this perfumer who runs MISKEO Perfumes, created a perfume for the book. We sort of piped it through the venues at the book launches so people could smell it there. We also perfumed some bookmarks, which I want to do more of to send out with the book. If any readers are interested, we can arrange to send out these perfumed bookmarks, or they can get in touch with a perfumer to smell the perfume. It’s basically a scent she made by trying to combine all of the different settings with all the different notes of the perfume, but with a base note of the muddy river running through it. It really meant a lot to me to have this sort of emotional memory tied to the story – sort of igniting the amygdala at the same time as you’re reading it. I found it really, really cathartic.
And what’s next for you?
I’ve just finished up teaching a five-week course called On the Nature of Writing for The Reader, and in January I’ll teach a new one on autofiction for non-fiction and fiction writers alike who want to bring radical honesty and lived experiences to their writing. I’m also working on my third book, whose working title is The Sea Monsters. It’s set on an unnamed, off-grid island and explores consciousness that goes beyond what our current materialist version of science accepts.
Your Body of Water is stocked in Berlin by Hopscotch Reading Room, Saint George’s, Zabriskie, b_books, Chapters and Ivallans Books. Follow Siouxzi Connor @siouxzisioux. She will be reading at Queer Bar Experience, an event on Wednesday, Feb 11 at STUECK.
