Jennifer Mills is an author, editor and critic based on Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide). Her novel  The Airways (2021) was longlisted for the Miles Franklin award and shortlisted for an Aurealis Award for Horror Dyschronia (2018) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Aurealis (for Science Fiction), and Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Mills is a widely published essayist, an advocate for the rights of writers and artists, a MEAA freelance delegate and a current Director of the Australian Society of Authors. Her next novel, Salvage, will be published by Picador Australia in 2025.

Tell us about your experience with ANAT SPECTRA.

I was first involved with ANAT as part of an experimental sleep-study residency with three other artists (Thom Buchanan, Fee Plumley and Sean Williams) at the Appleton Institute in 2013. We were kept awake for extended periods and tested for the effects of sleep deprivation on our creativity. It was great fun, a very mind-bending experience. The best part was how quickly we bonded with each other; those friendships continue to spawn collaborations, even now.

I was invited to SPECTRA in 2022 as part of the featured project, A Ministry for Multiple Futures (created by ANAT SPECTRA curator David Pledger). I have been involved with this project, Assembly for the Future, in a few different ways over the years. It’s a socially-engaged process for imagining collective futures, and it mutates with each iteration. The mix of small-group facilitation and high-concept creative play is highly enjoyable for me. 

Heading to Naarm for SPECTRA was a wonderful experience. I feel a kinship with people who work at intersections and in liminal zones. ANAT creates good habitats for lots of us weirdos.

What or who inspires you in the realm of interdisciplinary practice, and why?

Recently, I’ve been working on a story as part of Slingsby Theatre Company’s triptych, A Concise Compendium of Wonder. The whole approach to the project, involving becoming a net zero company and inventing ways of ‘green touring’, is completely inspiring and acts as a model for a more optimistic future. I’m really happy to be involved. The whole triptych will debut at the Adelaide Festival in 2026 but you can catch the second part of it, The Giants Garden, this year. 

I am encouraged by the anti-disciplinary approach of Vitalstatistix, which supports exciting work in development. I was writer in residence in 2022, and I worked on issues of labour in the arts; that residency expanded my capacity for activism and supported me creatively, too. I live in Yartapuulti (Port Adelaide) now and it’s such an asset to have that hub of experimental practice and radical history on my doorstep. Seeing work in development is particularly nourishing. Vitals has been a great source of creative friendship.

Writing can be an incredibly solitary craft, particularly the marathon demands of a novel. I try to balance that work with projects that are more engaged with the world around me. Sometimes that looks like collaboration, sometimes journalism, sometimes it’s organising work. Quite often these categories blur. 

When I think about ‘interdisciplinary practice,’ I actually think about the way that art and activism can flow into and nourish each other. The two practices are so often described as being in conflict, taking energy away from each other, but at its best, making art is praxis as well as poiesis. I am inspired by the artists I see around me that are standing up for Palestine, or against fossil fuel sponsorship, or working in the union and other collectives and organisations for fairness in our own workplaces. 

Name a cultural work (film, book, music etc) that inspired or challenged your creative perspective, and tell us why.

A book that blew me away recently was Pip Adam’s novel Audition. It’s an abolitionist work of speculative fiction, and it’s brilliant on so many levels. Adam is playful, formally experimental, and at the same time deeply engaged in real-world social concerns. Audition is the kind of book that expands your sense of what fiction can do and who it is for.  

If you could collaborate with any figure from history or contemporary culture, who would it be and why?

Instead of the usual dinner party scenario, I daydream about spending a few months as artist in residence on the International Space Station, tasked with thinking up weird solutions to problems on Earth. The guest list changes regularly, but today it includes Pip Adam, Laurie Anderson, Xu Bing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K Le Guin, Ali Smith, and Rebecca Solnit. 

What’s next? Tell us about your next project, collaboration or thinking.

My next novel, Salvage, will be released in the middle of this year. It’s an epic near-future speculative fiction story about escape, survival and mutual care. It has space billionaires in it. Most people are pleased to hear that it doesn’t end well for them.

Jokes aside, the world can seem pretty dystopian right now: extreme inequality, rising fascism, the climate emergency, etc etc. It does make you wonder about the purpose of future-oriented fiction. Is it enough for dystopian sci-fi to play its traditional role of sounding a warning?

In recent years I’ve been thinking a lot about the foundations of my own creative practice and what gives me a sense of purpose. A lot of it comes down to friendship and a sense of shared destiny. I wrote the first draft of Salvage during pandemic lockdown in northern Italy, and was filled with a conviction that art should help, though not necessarily in a didactic or direct way. I was conscious that by writing about survival and care, the book also had to function in the service of those things in order to have value. I want my work to help people get through whatever they’re going through, because we’re all going through a lot. So with this book, it was about finding a balance between usefulness and good, escapist fun.

I worry about the future every day, but I’m not afraid of it – I feel a responsibility towards it, towards some kind of life-sustaining collective imagination. In order to be creative, we need to consciously work against death-drive capitalism. It’s kind of advantageous to be working in this period when the distinctions between science fiction and reality are collapsing, and change is so urgent; none of us are working alone, and all of us are needed.