S2E3: Jock Serong
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In our first guest interview for Season 2 of Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny chats with Jock Serong on a chilly Victorian night. They talk diaries, rituals, the writing life, and what Jock does with his old Blundstones.
Jock was one of five writers – alongside Rochelle Siemienowicz, Marlee Jane Ward, Rose Mulready and Jennifer Down, with MC Jenny Ackland – who read at the second-ever Bad Diaries Salon, back in September 2017 at Cam’s Kiosk in Abbotsford, Melbourne. In this interview, Jenny and Jock look back at that salon. The theme was TRIPS, and Jock read from a travel journal he kept in his 20s; in this episode of the podcast, Jock reads again from his travel journal, and it’s beautiful and unmissable.
Jock Serong is a prolific writer, multiple award winner and a thoroughly nice man. He is the founding editor of Great Ocean Quarterly – a journal of art, ideas and the sea – and is a director of Melbourne’s The Wheeler Centre. He lives in Port Fairy in far western Victoria.
Jock has six novels published and the seventh – Cherrywood – is a ‘history of things that never happened’ and will be published in September this year. Publishers Harper Collins / 4th Estate describe Cherrywood as “A complex puzzlebox of a novel, […] delicious, rich storytelling, with a dark unusual charm. Cherrywood brings to mind the delicate, witty, character-driven storytelling of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda; the daring of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas […] it is haunting, magical and a true original.” We can’t wait!
Join us on the podcast each month, for more diaries (and diary-adjacent) content. Catch you next time!
In this episode:
Jock’s trajectory from school > law ? writing
writing for surf magazine, then tinkering with fiction
writing groups including member Jo Canham, of Blarney Books (Jo hosted us for a fabulous Bad Diaries Salon at Blarney Books in 2018 – Jock was in the audience for that one!)
the importance of editors and of supportive partners
submitting mss
how he manages to find time
taking the big punt to quit job to write/edit full time
where Jock writes
writing historical fiction v other fiction
research
Jocks upcoming novel (late 2024) Cherrywood ‘a history of things that never happened’
two of Jock’s earlier books used diaries: Preservation (2018) and The Settlement (2023)
the nitty-gritty of note-taking from other sources
the idea of resisting being too caught up in ‘efficiency’ as a writer
notebooks
‘the little manual rituals’ (with pencil stubs); Jock ‘doesn’t own an eraser’
‘You wouldn’t want to go any softer than an HB’
archiving work
Bad Diaries Salon #TRIPS in September 2017, at which Jock read from travel journal
Jock was also a reader at Bad Diaries Salon #FIRST in July 2018 in Geelong
diary-keeping practices
Jock does a reading, beautiful
six of the best
what winter means to Jock
what he does with his old Blundstones
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.
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