11. A portrait: Madelaine Lucas
Madelaine Lucas is the author of the debut novel Thirst For Salt, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON. Born in 1990, she was raised in Melbourne and Sydney as the daughter of a visual artist and a rock ‘n’ roll musician. In 2015, she moved to New York to complete her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she taught for several years in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs. Her essays and interviews have appeared in The Guardian, Paris Review Daily, The Believer, Literary Hub, Kill Your Darlings, BOMB and elsewhere, and her fiction has been awarded the Elizabeth Jolley Prize and the Overland/Victoria University Emerging Writer’s Prize. She is currently based in Sydney.
Before we get into the story itself, I’d love to start by hearing about your novel’s development. I know Thirst for Salt began in fragments – some of which were published as stand-alone short stories and went on to win awards. Did that kind of early recognition give you the confidence to keep going with these characters in a longer form? Or had you always envisioned reworking the narrative into a novel?
It wasn’t my intention to write a novel. I’m a big admirer of linked story collections – like Sara Majka’s Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Alice Munro’s Runaway, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light – and that’s what I thought I was working towards. But eventually I realised that this form was compromising the story I wanted to tell, which really did have one long arc following the course of the central love affair. By trying to break it into pieces, I had given myself an excuse to pivot away from moments of tension instead of escalating them (which, of course, is not what successful short fiction does, and there is a reason many of those earlier drafts seemed to flatline). I say this now like the solution was obvious, but at the time it was very painful to realise that the thing I had spent the two years of my MFA working on wasn’t going to work, and I had to start again. ‘Ruins’, which won the Elizabeth Jolley prize in 2018, was written at this turning point, when I was experimenting with turning pieces of the original stories into chapters that might still be able to stand alone – Rachel Cusk’s Outline, and the way it was serialised, was an inspiring example. Winning the Jolley was incredibly affirming and felt like a sign I was moving in the right direction. In a way, I think I had to trick myself into writing a novel. I didn’t have the confidence when I first started writing to stake a claim at a larger story.
Once you had reached that point, your central figures and tensions were already alive on the page. What more did the story need? What does a larger story even require?
The characters were coming into focus, and I had a sense of the novel’s emotional arc, but I still wasn’t sure where to begin or where to end, as the stories hadn’t been written with a larger chronology in mind. Because I had written them over a period of years, they were also quite uneven, and I wanted the novel to feel cohesive. It was only when I began rewriting with the idea of weaving all these pieces together that I found the right voice – my voice. It surprised me that this process (which often involved literally retyping my drafts from the beginning, or at least the previous chapter) was so generative, and pleasurable! Realist writers don’t often talk about ‘world-building’, but that’s basically what I was doing – picking the right details to bring the scenes and landscapes to life – as well as rewriting sentences and reading them back to myself out loud to make sure the rhythm carried through. We often talk about revision or editing as ‘killing your darlings’ but this process felt much more gentle and intuitive. Revision, for me, was more about wading down deeper.
In Thirst for Salt memory and regret seem to circle your characters, shaping who they are without always dictating the story’s events. I found the distance of this style moving, it being so intimate with the unsaid. How did you approach showing the textures of the past, of love and pain, in the narration and the dialogue?
So much of writing, for me, is about striking the balance between intimacy and distance. I knew that the heart of the story lay in the past, and I wanted that time in the narrator’s life to have an immediacy for the reader and for the book to feel incredibly tactile. But without some distance between the events of the novel and their narration, I felt there could be no perspective. It’s difficult to reflect in the present tense. In a lot of ways, the novel is about attempting to reclaim something that is lost through memory (or memory articulated in the form of writing), so the retrospective voice was essential to evoking that feeling of longing. Without that gap in time, there’d be nothing to reach towards. And for me at least, my experience of things is sometimes more vivid in memory than it is in real time. Writing can be a way of sort of setting things in amber, and even though Thirst for Salt is not autobiographical, I did want to preserve some of my own experiences of living in Sydney as a young woman and falling in love for the first time.
With age and life-experience clashes central to the novel’s two primary relationships, what got you so interested in exploring these power dynamics in both romantic and familial love?
I think what the characters in Thirst for Salt are struggling against most is the passage of time, and I was interested in the way the younger woman/older man dynamic might be employed as a metaphor – for the imbalance between youth and experience, or between men and women in a patriarchal world, or the kind of unevenness that can crop up in any romantic entanglement. In terms of the parallels between the narrator and her mother’s experiences and certain ages being charged with meaning in both their lives, I was trying to work out how much generational patterns shape the choices we make when it comes to love and family, and whether it is possible to break them.
Earlier you spoke about the challenge in short fiction of sustaining tension and resisting the impulse to move away too soon. I find many writers get this wrong, in all forms, but especially when working to a restrained length. I’d love to hear how your years editing the literary annual NOON have shaped your views on the short story, what it asks of a writer, and what it withholds.
I recognise that impulse to pivot away from moments of tension in my own process, but a bigger problem I tend to see in a lot of contemporary fiction is a desire to overwrite, over-explain. Many people have said this before me in one way or another, but I believe writing is a hopeless cause if you don’t believe in the emotional intelligence of your reader. Editorialising kills tension, too. As an editor and a teacher, I often find myself saying “trust yourself, trust the story, and trust the reader”.
My time at NOON has been a masterclass in recognising the power of stripping away everything unessential in a story – which, I think, is one of the things we can learn most clearly from short fiction as a form. A radical edit can be revealing, shocking, illuminating, provocative. Working with Diane Williams has taught me how to stay alive to all the possibilities that exist within a text, or those that might arise by joining pieces of disparate texts together to create new and surprising resonances. We often say that a good sentence is so hard won, and so any powerful passages should be salvaged and made use of, even if the larger story isn’t quite working.
While reading the 2025 edition – wonderful, by the way – I noticed that many of the works are pared down to striking brevity, what some might reductively call flash fiction or even micro fiction, which is in contrast with the longer pieces typically featured in other publications like The Paris Review or Granta. Do you think this compressed form is misread or underestimated? Why this focus in NOON?
You’re right that terms like ‘flash fiction’ or ‘micro fiction’ can feel reductive, as they seem to imply that these works lack scope or gravity or are somehow less substantial than other short stories. At NOON we don’t make such distinctions. If you look at the work of, say, Kathryn Scanlan or Vi Khi Nao, you’ll see that all components you’d expect to find in a classic work of short fiction are present: there is a voice with something urgent to say, a conflict, emotional risk, the promise that something previously unknown will be revealed. But in the compressed form, language takes centre stage, and NOON is most invested in what can be achieved at a sentence level over larger narratives. We do publish longer works on occasion but it’s difficult to sustain that concentrated focus on language when writing at length.
Can you describe the value you see in literary journals and magazines? What are novel-only readers missing?
I think it’s vital to the health of the overall literary eco-system to have publishing spaces that aren’t driven by commercial goals, which means they can take risks on new writers or work that defies easy categorisation or pushes boundaries. And you can’t match the diversity of voices and perspectives on offer in a journal in a single novel – or the thrill of discovering a writer before everybody else does. In the publications I most admire and anticipate, there is also a particular curatorial vision at work in the selection and arrangement of text, artwork, design elements. NOON publishes annually, and the hope is that each year’s edition feels like an event.
I’m interested in how you approach nurturing emerging voices, beyond encouragement. I recall many of my university tutors being either too restrictive – passing on their opinions as fact – or too hands off, requiring us to unpick a complicated text entirely on our own. How do you strike a balance between failing to help break down elements of craft and reducing a young artist’s creativity? And what else do you try to bring to your writing classes?
The way I approach a story as a teacher is very different from the way I operate as an editor at NOON, which involves making decisive recommendations. I’m rarely prescriptive with students, though if an edit occurs to me – like, say, cutting the final paragraph of a story – I’ll always offer it as something to consider. We might then have a conversation about what they’d miss if they cut that paragraph, what would be gained, and how the story would change as the result of that choice. These are the sorts of conversations I have with myself (and my husband Robert, who reads everything) when I’m working on my own fiction.
Usually, a story comes into workshop in an earlier stage of formation and isn’t ready for editorial direction, so I’ll think more about what the story’s big picture aims and intentions might be, and I make sure to highlight the moments that feel most resonant or alive. There are so many different ways to think about writing and craft, and I try to offer these frameworks to my students as tools rather than rules that have to be followed. Like therapy, a lot of teaching is talking, and I love that this work allows me to be in conversation with other artists. When I can reveal something a student hasn’t yet seen in their own work and help them make a connection or feel excited about a story’s possibilities, that feels like a good day’s work. Above all, I try to always remember the essential vulnerability of sharing the creative self with other people, especially when you’re just beginning.
On craft, what do you admire most in the work of other writers? What do you find exciting?
I admire writers who have the courage to do what only they can do, without bucking for trends. Diane Williams is a wonderful example – her career gives me faith. She is celebrated for her short fiction now and her singular editorial sensibility, but for a long time people responded to her work with bafflement and shock and even rage. It takes a lot of gumption to keep going.
And finally, what will we see next from you?
I have a short story that has just appeared in Kill Your Darlings, and I’m slowly chipping away at a new novel manuscript on the mornings I manage to wake up before my daughter.
Ned Lupson is a writer and editor based in Melbourne. He is an editor and co-founder of Varnish.