Meet Raeden Richardson | Novelist

In my early twenties, I bought a one-way flight to New York City with a suitcase crammed with books, making money by bartending in Lower Manhattan, or posing for life-drawing classes in Harlem, or carrying almond-milk lattes and dog-eared manuscripts around the Flatiron building when I was assisting an old-school literary agent—all the while trying to write a novel. I didn’t have much of a plan, other than to sit at a desk and write every day, and read whatever I could, and see what came out of a few years of living like that. I told myself that to write a novel you had to live in novel ways. I see now it was all so enchantingly risky, so romantic—but necessarily risky; risk feeds the spirit, it shows you that you’re really alive, it propels you to create, and I wouldn’t have written my first novel if I’d chosen to live comfortably and perish.

I’m a writer of novels and short stories. My debut novel, The Degenerates, is forthcoming at the end of this year. The novel is my attempt to understand anicca, or ‘impermanence’, and how we learn to live with letting go—of our homes, and families, and the lives we thought we ought to lead. The novel hovers over Mumbai and Brooklyn before settling in Melbourne, a means of imbuing the far-flung Australian shopping malls and train lines of my childhood with the mythos of cities like Los Angeles, Paris or Lagos.

I’ve been working on the novel for seven years. Early on, I had to learn to elongate my sense of time. When you’re writing in university, or even graduate school, you keep deadlines of a semester or a year; to write a novel, you have to orient your life around it. You start out writing the novel but, at some indefinable point, the novel begins to write you. It tells you where to live, who to love, how to structure your days.

Last month, while at the La Napoule Art Foundation residency, I was lucky to collaborate with artist duo Emalohi Iruobe and Adey Omotade, learning about their process of creation, particularly their development of The EDOY Company, where they curate and celebrate the eclectic, the spiritual, the earth and the ancestors through art, music, and objects that push unconventional ideas. There are so many ties between writing, filmmaking and designing. Artists should never forget this. Celebrate each other’s success. Don’t fear it.

In this way, I’m reminding myself that you have to find your tribe—hold other artists close, stay loyal, share your work, support their journey, because they too know how to be patient and how to welcome risks. They know what it means when the rejections come, or that relationship ends, or when you don’t know how to live with yourself.

When I’m in LA, I always get my close mate out to Brothers Cousins Tacos in Westdale. The burritos are something else entirely. We’re well-fed for days. There’s nothing ostentatious about the set-up—cash only, plastic awning, lining up by the road sometimes for an hour or more. But the food is delicious and the guys behind the grill know exactly what they’re doing.

I’m grateful for the literary magazine Voiceworks—really an institution nowadays after having nurtured so many young writers through its pages. The magazine exclusively publishes the work of writers under-25. Remarkably, they personalize a response for every single submission they receive. This is an incredible act of generosity, particularly for a staff working mostly on a volunteer basis. I can’t think of any literary journal in the world that demands such dedication and grace from its editors.