Cassie McCullough

I'm Cassie McGuller here with Kate Evans and our guests today, the writer Chrissy Neen and documentary maker and podcaster Mike Williams.

And we're moving away from octopuses, Kate, and to earwax.

Great.

All right, Mike, I'm getting ready for that.

But before we do turn to ear canals, we should just say that Jamie Marina Lau is a multidisciplinary artist and a writer whose first book, Pink Mountain on Lotus Island, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize back in 2019.

And that one had a kind of fragmentary experimental flavour.

So I wonder, is it in this one too?

It is not going very well.

How's the earwax trade?

And get to the bit about the dry bit and the crumbly bit.

Yes, my time's now so valuable.

I need this thing that's going to save me time and cost me money.

There's some weird algorithm that we've all started using.

But so what's fascinating to me is that the shopping mall locale has such strength in it because I think of it as a really sort of late 80s, early 90s thing, you know,

Clark's, that film, Mall Rats.

I think I've once read an article in The Guardian by someone saying, you know, my favourite 10 novels set in malls.

It's so used and overused that it's even sort of comical.

There's that great film called Bait, which Kate, I know you love.

It's set in a supermarket that's been submerged during a tsunami.

And so there's all these sharks in the flooded supermarket that everyone's trying to get away from, you know,