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What inspired you to start writing?
I've always been inspired to write, but have only acted on the inspiration consistently in the last 7 or 8 years. But I've always loved writing. As a kid I loved poems, to learn and recite them, so writing my own was a logical progression. As an adult, teaching creative drama meant that I needed to produce a constant stream of material for the kids - plays and films for them to make. Then ten years ago I directed some plays for a theatre group and started writing material for them and just went on writing plays, mainly for radio.
When I had the idea for The Bread with Seven Crusts, I knew it needed to be a novel. So I took my portfolio to UTS to see if they would have me in the Masters in Writing course. I had written a novel ten years before on a portable typewriter in the middle of nights between teaching and looking after small children, but just put it in a box and left it in the corner of the shed. Needless to say I did not include my shed novel in the portfolio. I wrote 7 Crusts while I was doing the masters.
And what inspired The Bread with Seven Crusts?
The place. I wanted to write about a place that has never been seen as elegant, or romantic or worthy of being written about. A place I love, but haven't lived in except for brief holidays, since I was a child. I wanted to look at it's early years after European settlement with a fresh eye.
A prisoner of war from Italy was ideal. Especially one who came from the mountains on the Swiss border. A geography of verticals to contrast the horizontals of the Wheatbelt. Being a prisoner he could not get away until the war ended. He had to try to make the best of it. Although he could never see it as beautiful in conventional terms, he learned about it's qualities.
Which writers do you most admire?
There are many. I was an ambitious reader as a kid. I loved all the usual kids' books and I also liked to read things from my parents' book shelves. My mother started me on the Brontes fairly early and Dickens and although I read Austen, I went back to her in my twenties and it felt like I was reading her for the first time. Tolstoy was important at that time as well.
At University, Shakespeare, Blake and Keats had the most impact. Then I found myself in England with a degree in Eng Lit not having read any 20th century English so had to catch up on Waugh, Forster, Huxley, Bowen, T.S Eliot, Auden.
Back in Australia I've loved at various times Wright, Hazzard, White, Stowe, Malouf, Astley. Now I admire the Canadians; Ondaatje and Michaels, the Indians; Rushdie, Seth, and Roy's ‘God of Small Things’, the English; Gardam, Carter, Winterson, Zadie Smith's ‘White Teeth’. Austalians; Winton, Garner,& Les Murray. Americans; Bellow, Stegner, Roth, McCarthy, Morrison.
I am currently admiring the Australian writer Eva Sallis' City of Sea Lions.
If I had to choose three I think it would be Shakespeare, Austen and Winton.
Which of your characters do you most hate and why?
I don't hate my characters, even the horrible ones. I feel a loyalty.
Do you suffer from writers block? How do you overcome it?
I find that if I think about an audience, a reader, then I'll become critical of my work even before I do it. So I tend to just write for myself.
What's the most adventurous thing you've ever done?
Let my visa run out in Belarus.
If the world was to end tomorrow, how would you spend your last 24 hours?
I'd go back to where I grew up, which is the setting of 7 Crusts and just sit on a hill.
What's your favourite quote?
"The joy of the spirit is a measure of it's power" - can't remember who said it.
If you could go back in time to change any event in history, what would it be?
I would redo the last 200 years and have a benevolent occupation of Australia without violent invasions, massacres and exploitation of Aboriginal people.
What could you not survive without?
The bush.
Describe your Utopia.
No exploitation, no oppression - that is, no greed.
What are you writing next?
A novel that moves between New South Wales, Belarus and Germany, called The Watchmaker. About the son of a displaced person who arrived in Australia in 1954.
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