Does the recent rash of Very Long Books somehow relate to economic recovery? Could a proliferation of those slim volumes called novellas be a sign of austere times? And as for short story collections, well … one shudders to think.

Nigel Featherstone wasn't thinking about any of this when he travelled to Tasmania in 2010 to be a writer-in-residence in Cataract Gorge. Relishing the thought of time alone in a remote cottage courtesy of the Launceston City Council, he wanted only to lose himself in writing some short stories.

He had just spent four years on a novel, a follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut novel in 2005, Remnants, published by Pandanus Books. But the manuscript, after being read twice by an agent and twice by a publisher, had ultimately been rejected.

"I do think in hindsight that was absolutely correct," says Featherstone. It's now 2014, an early spring morning in the courtyard of Gorman House, and Featherstone - writer, arts advocate and regular Canberra Times contributor - has thoughtfully brought us a plate of caramel slice. Everything, not least the vision afforded by hindsight, looks pretty good on a day like this, and all is right with the world.

But back in 2010, he just needed to get away, even just for a month on this residency, in a picturesque and much-photographed cottage.

"I didn't actually expect to totally forget about that other project, but I thought, I'll put that aside, and just write short stories again…get a few published and I'll feel good about being a writer again," he says.

He arrived armed with the journal he'd been using for years to record story ideas, and began flipping through.

"I thought to myself, don't care about commercial publishing, don't care about what's happening in the literary world, write what I want to write but also be brave," he says.

"If I need to go and do weird stuff, if it needs to be dark and everyone dies, that's fine. If everyone falls in love that's fine as well."

But there was a caveat: he decided to write by hand, to see what would flow out if he set his mind to actually putting pen to paper.

"What's really interesting is that when you type, you type. When you write by hand, you compose," he says.

"My handwriting is really bad – like, illegible - and it actually hurts to write so I'll actually think about the words to write and put down on a page. It was completely different. I just let myself go."

By the end of the first week, he had a writing pad filled with a mad, messy scrawl, but in amongst the mess – roughly 30,000 words – he realised he had the kernel of a story. And not just a story, but a novella.

For any writer serious about getting published, writing a novella is not a something to be proud of, at least not in this day and age. Despite some of modern literature's most famous works coming under the rubric – The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea, Metamorphosis, Heart of Darkness – market pressures have prevailed, and the death of the form has often been described as imminent. Not long enough to be a novel, nor short enough to be a short story, a novella, the reasoning goes, costs as much to produce as a novel, but can't be priced as high because, well, it's too short.

It is, of course, an absurd logic. Novellas are an art form, and have the potential to be every bit as challenging – and satisfying – as a novel. Small, perfect worlds are contained within the slimline vessel. Think of E. Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, originally published as a very long short story in the New Yorker, but also released as a novella. Such works are considered an important – even supreme – art form, not attainable for just any writer, no matter how hard they try. Even the towering British novelist Ian McEwan has described the novella as "the perfect form of prose fiction…the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant".

A novella is dense enough to allow the reader to fully inhabit another world, but short enough to be read in one sitting. What's not to love?

But again, Featherstone wasn't thinking along those terms when he realised what he'd done. He arrived in Launceston on a mission, one he meant to accomplish.

"I love writing in an absolute mad storm of writing, where all you think about day and night is the book, and it just completely takes over," he says.

"And when you're dreaming, you're thinking about the work, walking the dog, thinking about the work. So I loved doing that, but in the second week I thought, just write a frigging short story."

He set to work again – at times his nose so close to the paper that the sunlight bouncing off the glass-topped desk actually damaged his eyes – and emerged at the end of the second week with another messy scrawl containing that would one day be a perfectly realised novella.

"In the third week, I did write a short story and it ended up getting published in the United States, and then in the fourth week I thought well I've written two of these novellas, I might as well write a third one," he says.

To anyone else, this would seem to have been an undeniably productive month, but Featherstone left Launceston feeling annoyed with himself.

"I distinctly remember getting on the plane and going, great, I've written one short story and I've written three novellas which will never be published," he says.

The month had been a waste, then, and he was surprised, because he had always considered himself to be quite ambitious. The novellas – or, more accurately, the heavily scrawled pages – went into a drawer to wait.

Soon enough, he heard about a new Canberra-based independent publishers, Blemish Books, looking for manuscripts of around 40,000 words.

"I thought well, I'll just send them two and they may be interested in one," Featherstone says.

"They wrote back and said, 'We'd love two', and I actually dropped into the conversation that there was a third."

Ultimately, Blemish agreed to publish the novellas one after the other, with each contingent on the success of the first. While all are essentially based around the concept of family, they are three standalone stories.

Featherstone has long been interested in the family as a motif in his writing, and is constantly frustrated by the accepted notions of traditional family, when the real deal is so often much more interesting, messy and complex. The youngest of three brothers, he now lives between Goulburn and Queanbeyan with his partner of 18 years, Tim Phillips.

Fall On Me was published first, in 2011, a father-son story inspired by a photograph he once saw at the graduating exhibition of the ANU School of Art.

"I was looking at this most amazing photo of a drag queen, a beautiful, beautiful drag queen in a really old house," he says, and he made up a story about the work, and the artist, while riding home on his pushbike.

"I thought, imagine if you did have a son who did really full-on, weird stuff. I don't have children, obviously, but would I be supportive or not? And I'd like to think that I'd be very supportive. But what if that guy started putting pictures of himself naked on an art wall, would I appreciate that?"

This was one of the ideas he found when flipping through his journal, and by week's end, he a story about a teenager using his own body as the focus of an art installation.

The second one, I'm Ready Now, shortlisted for the 2013 ACT Book of the Year, is a mother-son story with shifting viewpoints.

"The mother is basically grieving the loss of her husband, and the son is in Sydney completely running amok," he says.

"He's having his year of living ridiculously, gay as well, sex and drugs and rock and roll, but she's got a secret and he's got a secret. And they just spend two weeks together in Sydney."

And now the third instalment, The Beach Volcano, is out. Its protagonist is a burnt-out rock star who is confronting his estranged family for the first time in 25 years. The story takes place over a weekend, but the past – ugly and menacing and growing ever clearer – keeps rearing up, and the story's climax is perfectly encapsulated in the metaphor of the title.

With all three books out, his voice firmly in the world, Featherstone can barely remember why he felt so frustrated with himself back when he was faced with three sprawling, seemingly unpublishable, small (but underneath it all, perfectly formed) beasts.

After all, on a personal level, he has always loved and admired the novella as an art form.

"You can read it in an afternoon, you can re-read it and then hopefully, with a good novella, you can say, 'That was lovely', and then go back and re-read it and see all these other layers," he says.

"A novella is still a novel, it's got the complexity and all the relationships and the all the subplots, but I also love the form because I think we all read to experience other lives, and so I actually do go to the novella to experience something that's completely outside my general experience.

I have no interest in fishing, I have no interest in being out on the ocean, I have no interest in boats, but I do read and re-read The Old and Man and the Sea every year because I think it's extraordinary."

And his three books have also heralded a change in the wind: the Griffith Review is about to publish an entire edition devoted to the novella, and all the reasons why it may well be entering its golden age.

The Beach Volcano is published by Blemish Books.