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Interview with Dorothy Porter

© Magdalena Ball

Dorothy Porter

Magdalena Ball: Where did the idea for Wild Surmise originate?

Dorothy Porter: From my own interest. It was originally triggered by my own interest in the search for life from elsewhere. I had been watching NASA's Galileo probe for exploring the whole Jupiter system, watching the pictures it was sending back of the moons orbiting Jupiter, and was moved by the speculation and excitement around Europa. I had an honorary fellowship at Melbourne University and they'd set me up with a computer. I spent a lot of time on the web on NASA's site looking at these pictures and I wrote my poem Europa for Other Worlds (link) at the time. While I was writing, my interest in astronomy was ongoing and I was also fiddling with various ideas for my next novel, none of which were productive. One day I just woke up and thought that my next book will be about a woman astronomer. A that point I had no idea where it would lead, it takes a long time to write a verse novel - they are a kind of adventure in themselves, and the character of Daniel only came much later.

Originally I was planning for Alex to find something - that the book would be more like a science fiction - more whiz bang, rather than the grim internal journey it turned out to be.

MB: A lot of the astronomical ideas are prefigured in Other Worlds. I know you did a lot of research for both Other Worlds and Wild Surmise. Have you always had an interest in astronomy?

DP: I've always had it. I'm probably just as obsessional as Alex . I've said this elsewhere, but all of my verse novels in some way or another triggered by some obsession of mine. My interest in astronomy has been much more inflamed the last few years with all of these amazing new discoveries. Astronomy has been flat for a while, there have been no manned trips like the trip to the moon, but now it's all hotting up again, and there are so many readily available extraordinary pictures. I've just become completely obsessed, which you can see from the Comets section in Other Worlds. I realised what an extraordinarily fertile area this is for a poet. I suddenly found myself with an embarrassment of riches. For Wild Surmise I used about two percent of what I wrote - many of the poems which were very science oriented had to go because the narrative became psychological and took this turn.

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