In March, we celebrated the launch of Andrew Roff’s debut short-story collection, The Teeth of a Slow Machine. Launched by Patrick Allington at the fantastic Wheatsheaf Hotel, the event was a roaring success, and a great way to welcome Andrew’s dreamlike collection into the world.

We’re pleased now to be able to share Andrew’s launch speech from the event. It’s a wonderful insight into what Andrew has put into his collection, and it also shows just how many moving parts were required to bring The Teeth of a Slow Machine to life.

Read on for Andrew’s wonderfully funny and interesting speech.

Thanks Michael and Patrick for your kind words.

I’d also like to acknowledge that we are meeting tonight on the lands of the Kaurna people, whose country was never ceded.

Now: I’ve been informed that due to a scheduling oversight, this launch is happening at the same time as an important boxing match between two sportspeople named Barry Hall and Sonny Bill Williams. So I’d like to commend all of you here at the Wheaty for choosing literature over violence. And for those here who love both words and punching (and I know there are a few of you), apologies, and next time, we’ll clear our preferred launch date with Sonny Bill’s people first.

It’s a real thrill and a pleasure to be launching my debut short story collection – my debut book! –  with you all tonight. It’s something I’ve dreamed about for a long time. It’s also slightly unsettling to think that these words, which have existed for so long only in my own head, are now out there in the world.

There are stories in this collection that are fantastic, weird, grim. Some, I’ve been told, are funny – hopefully the ones that I intended to be funny. Some are inspired by intensely personal events, others are figments of my over-active imagination, most are blends of these – and given the audience tonight, and because I can’t help my background in the law, I want to state for the record that these are works of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead, is purely coincidental. Everyone will read these stories in their own ways, and I’m curious and a bit terrified to see what you all make of them.

Being a writer can be solitary. It certainly is when you’re starting out. But as you progress, and work with editors and publishers, and connect with fellow writers, and become conscious of the influence of other writers on what you do, you come to understand that no one in this industry works in a vacuum, and that a book like this can only exist because of the efforts of many, many people. There are writers centres, and festivals, and literary journals, and competitions, and judges, and editors and anthologies and first readers, who have all lifted me and my work up so I can stand here tonight. So I will try and keep the thank-yous short, and necessarily incomplete, but there are truly lots of people to thank.

To Patrick Allington: thank you for launching my book. I’ve been a huge admirer of Patrick’s writing for a long time, and if you haven’t picked up a copy of his most recent novel, Rise and Shine, then do yourself a favour and track one down.

When you are starting out as a writer, you don’t know what you don’t know. It takes a thoughtful mentor to help you find ways to improve, without completely destroying the vital sense of overconfidence that insulates you from the realities of the writing game. Over the course of the last five years, Patrick has given me his time, his perceptive critical eye, and his experience and wisdom. He treated me like a fellow working writer, long before I had a right to that label.

Jo Case was the editor of this collection. Unfortunately Jo can’t be here tonight, and so this would be the perfect opportunity to whinge about how difficult it was to undergo this edit – but I can’t. It was a pleasure working with Jo, and from the start she had a deep understanding of the stories and how they related to one another. Her astute and careful editing has improved the book immensely. It was a joy to work with someone who cared about the book we were making every bit as much as I did.

Also absent tonight, but essential to this book, is my literary agent, Martin Shaw. Martin is based in Germany but visited Adelaide during Writers Week, and was disappointed that he couldn’t stay on for this launch. Without Martin backing these stories, they would not have found their way to the right publisher, or perhaps any publisher. He is a champion of Australian writers.

Thank you to Michael Bollen for his words and his belief in this project, and to all of the team at Wakefield Press, including Poppy Nwosu and Maddy Sexton. You don’t publish an Australian short story collection by a debut author for the fat profits – you only do it for love of the written word. As a first timer, I’ve felt supported every step of the way through the publishing process. The team at Wakefield are dedicated, friendly, and they make fantastic books. If you haven’t been to their bookshop and HQ a few streets over in Mile End, then I highly recommend you pay them a visit.

Given how hard the Wakefield team have worked to bring this book, Teeth, into being I ask you to support them, and me, by being advocates for this book. Read it, talk about it, ask for it at the library, buy it from bookshops and give it as a gift to friends and enemies.

I take a few swipes at capitalism in these stories, so I want to redress the balance by being mercantile and focussing on sales here. If we’ve learned anything from the history of the early 21st century, it’s that we are no longer people so much as units of consumption. But, if we’re lucky, we can also aspire to be influencers! Sales matter, so just think about this: if every person here convinces a mere 100 people to buy this book, and then each of those people convinces 100 of their friends to buy the book, then my humble collection will be an all-time Australian bestseller!

I need to stress that what I’ve just described is NOT a pyramid scheme. In a pyramid scheme, a small group of people near the top also share in the benefits. But in this case, only the publisher and the writer stand to gain from your marketing and sales efforts. So rest assured that your work is entirely lawful, and will also advance the cause of Australian literature generally, so go out there with a clean conscience, and spread the word!

I would not be here tonight without the support of my friends and family – in other words, without your support. For the writers here tonight, your companionship and encouragement have meant more than you probably know. I’ve recently joined a small gang of writers who share work with each other. The first rule of our gang is to subvert the dominant mode of lyrical realism prevalent in Australian fiction. The second rule is not to talk about the gang, and I guess I’ve broken that rule now, but there are a couple of fellow gang members circulating tonight, so keep an eye on your valuables.

I want to thank my parents, who taught me how to read, and to love reading, and how to write. Seems relevant somehow.

To my wife, Sarah: thank you for enabling me in this weird endeavour. Back when I started out writing, we had zero children. Now that we have two, and it’s no exaggeration to say that every single word I am able to write, I owe to you. Thank you.

A shout out also to the Harding Family, who are providing babysitting services tonight. To my children, who are pleasingly absent from this event: I really hope you guys are behaving.

Short stories are experiments. Most fail, a few succeed. A short story writer can take risks; can be bolder than they might if they were writing a novel. And there have been many excellent, experimental story collections published in Australia and New Zealand over the past couple of years, so if you enjoy my book, I’d encourage you to cast off the cultural dominance of the novel, ignore non-fiction completely, and explore the wonderful world of short fiction instead.

The path to publication for me, as for most writers, has been littered with false starts and failures. While putting this book together, my stories have been rejected literally hundreds of times, and I’ve written many more stories that do not appear in this collection than those that do. I’d like to think that this history has only made the book stronger. And I’m proud of these stories, proud of this book.

So, everyone here tonight – thank you for coming out, and now is a chance to celebrate, so please stick around for a drink, come up and have a chat, and I will sign books, body parts, whatever you want, although books are the conventional choice. Thank you.

The Teeth of a Slow Machine

This daring, irreverent short-story collection dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human, through a world very like our own.

A corporate satire follows a pair of dark operatives working for a chicken franchise as they take careful revenge on counterfeiters. A coder calculates the odds of her husband’s cold developing complications and killing him, in a story told in code. A relationship at breaking point is told via a scrambled timeline of events that works like a puzzle. A man spends his inheritance on technology that will allow him to fly. And an archeologist working for mining companies against the interests of Indigenous communities develops a mysterious psychological condition that causes her to black out and commit extreme acts of generosity.