Final Draft - Great Conversations

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Ernest Price is a transgender man working as a secondary English teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. His writing has been published by Queerstories and Overland.

The Pyramid of Needs is his first novel.

Linda is about to hit the big time. The fact that there aren’t a lot of seventy year olds going viral just means it will be even more sensational when she does, and viral clicks can't help but lead to more sales of her Supreme Self Supplements.

Jack is living his best life as a teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. Or at least he’s trying to when his older sister Alice gives him a call. Their mother has taken a fall while live streaming at their home in Noosa.

Jack hasn’t spoken to Linda since he came out as a trans man more than ten years ago. Alice can talk to him about regret, but why does he have to put himself at risk for the family who rejected him?

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

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The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Yumna Kassab is the author of  novels including Australiana and The Lovers. Her writing has been listed for prizes including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and The Stella Prize. 

Yumna Kassab is also Parramatta’s first laureate in literature

In Politica the reader is transported to conflict engulfing a country. Through glimpses of ordinary life and revolutionary struggle we are shown the cost of war on a people and the tenacity, the fierceness of will required to carry on.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She has published both fiction and nonfiction; Thunderhead is her fifth book.

Across a single day we are thrown into the life of Winona Dalloway. From the moment she wakes, stealing a few precious moments before her time is not her own, to the dinner party that looms over her calendar, the reader follows Winona as she tries simply to be herself…

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Miranda is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. Her latest novel is Thunderhead.

Across a single day we are thrown into the life of Winona Dalloway. From the moment she wakes, stealing a few precious moments before her time is not her own, to the dinner party that looms over her calendar, the reader follows Winona as she tries simply to be herself…

Stepping out into the streets of Sydney, Winona has her lists and her responsibilities, all punctuated by the incessant buzzing of texts and reminders from her husband lest she stray from the day’s purpose. 

Winona wonders, perhaps suspects that she is looking at the world differently to everyone else. That might explain how they seem to navigate it so effortlessly while she only manages to muddle through.

The Thunderhead of the title looms large over the narrative, threatening to burst, drenching the fragile balance of Winona’s life.

Winona Dalloway is a wonderfully original character for the sharpness of her insights and the myriad of voices she offers on the minutiae of her day to day.

Throughout the novel the reader is confronted, as is Winona, by the specter of mental health. Within the novel it is both the reality of Winona’s experience of the world and a cudgel used to beat her into some semblance of the everyday. As we travel alongside Winona it becomes apparent that the way she looks at the world is not the problem so much as the voices that tell her she needs to be other or more than they perceive her to be.

Within the world of Thunderhead Winona is in fact a guiding light and even as we shift back and forth between her contradictory views of the world, we are certain that her fresh take on the everyday must be more wonderful than simply blindly living it.

There is a lyricism to Darling’s rendering of the inner world of Winona. Images float in and out of view as she encounters her world both as its surface and its potential.

We are introduced to the Transcendence Project; Winona’s search, perhaps striving to make an authentic connection with another person. Something that could lift them both out of the humdrum and confirm that there is a point to this existence.

As the day passes and Winona moves toward the inevitable, we learn that she is not simply one person struggling with the pressures of her world. Winona is subject to something more sinister, something threatening to strip her of her very essence.

But… I’ve said too much.

Thunderhead is a tremendous evocation of life lived on the edge of a threatened if perhaps not enacted violence. A study in control and escape that offers the reader a glimpse into a world of expectation imposed and shattered.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Sharlene Allsop is the debut author of The Great Undoing which through its journey to publication was shortlisted for a 2019 Overland writing residency, and Highly Commended for the 2020 Boundless Indigenous Writers’ Mentorship.

Scarlet Friday is a truth teller in a hyper connected world. Even as everyone hurtles towards the future Scarlet delves into the past to understand our place, her place.

While Scarlet weaves the threads of her past, discovering her Great-Grandfather’s military service and the hostile reception he received as an Aboriginal man returning to a country that wouldn’t recognise his humanity, the rest of the world is teetering on the brink.

As systems shut down around the world, Scarlet finds herself on the run. Far from home she is a refugee seeking safe passage back to Australia.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Final Draft has been invited by the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia to join its Community Radio Network.

This means that we've been working hard to develop episodes that will be shared across Australia on the hundreds of community radio stations that contribute to the diverse media landscape of this country.

In this special news update Andrew talks about the process and let's you know when the podcast will get back to its regular scheduling!

Ernest Price is a transgender man working as a secondary English teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. His writing has been published by Queerstories and Overland. The Pyramid of Needs is his first novel.

Linda is ready to hit the big time. The fact that there aren’t a lot of seventy year olds going viral just means it will be even more sensational when she does. She’s a young seventy anyway, barely even sixty really and tik tok takes off ten years. The fame is important and viral clicks can't help but lead to more sales of her Supreme Self Supplements.

Yes, Linda is just one livestream away from fame and fortune and nothing can stand in her way.

Jack is living his best life as a teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. Or at least he’s trying to when his older sister Alice gives him a call. Alice and Jack’s mother has taken a fall, apparently she was live streaming at their home in Noosa and tripped over a garden rake?!

Alice insists they fly up to Queensland and look after their parents but Jack hasn’t spoken to Linda since he came out as a trans man more than ten years ago. Alice can talk to him about regret, but why does he have to put himself at risk for the family who rejected him?

The Pyramid of Needs is a dark and insightful comedy about family dynamics that takes an unflinching look at what it means to be trans in a world where your very humanity can be leveraged for clicks and hate online.

The novel throws us immediately into Linda’s delusion that she will make it; fame, fortune the whole shebang is only she can leverage her downline to maximise subscribers before m month end. See Linda is into pyramid schemes (at least that’s what the haters call them).

In Linda we are presented with the triumph of individualism about to breathe its last gasp. Linda has been manifesting success for so long she has not only ignored her son for ten years, she might even be leveraging Jack’s transition for clout.

We are not meant to love Linda, probably not even meant to like her. But we are meant to understand what Jack has gone through to be who he is.

The novel counterpoints Linda’s narrative with Jack’s more balanced, albeit anxious storytelling. Jack knows the trip is a bad idea but like so many a Shakespearean tragic hero before him he must go along for the ride.

The action of The Pyramid of Needs is in the brilliant interplay between the Kelly family as they try, or perhaps fumble towards family unity. Even as Alice tries to negotiate some sort of detente, Linda maneuvers the siblings to become props in her next big livestream event.

The parallels between Linda’s Pyramid scheme fetish and her life as a Noosa influencer in all its smoke and mirrors glory are clear. What the novel also cleverly shows us is how Linda tries to marshall that same level of self delusion to reshape Jack’s reality and his life since his transition.

The novel shows us the personal pain and struggle as Jack faces his mother misgendering and dead naming him. We get to see inside Jack’s world, where he works to be a good person, the sort of teacher he never had, but also must deal with the loneliness and difficulty of the damage from his youth.

I loved The Pyramid of Needs in its darkness and its light. It has an ending I won’t quickly forget and in Jack we have a character who grabs your heart almost as quickly as Linda tries to poison it with vitriol.

Vikki Wakefield is an author of fiction for young adults and adults. Her novel This Is How We Change the Ending was a Book of the Year in the 2020 CBCA Awards. Vikki’s new novel is To the River.

Twelve Years ago a fire in a remote town rocked the country, killing nine people. The Caravan Murders, as they came to be known, were never solved. The suspect, seventeen year old Sabine Kelly went on the run and has remained hidden.

To the authorities it was an open and shut case. Sabine and her family were bad news and it was only a matter of time before something happened; that a group of innocents and a police officer were killed made it a tragedy.

Journalist Rachel Weidermann investigated the case years ago to no avail. Sabine was a ghost and no one was talking. In a world saturated with true crime she couldn’t make the story work.

Now divorced and made redundant from her job, Rachel lives on the river, a long expanse of bush and perhaps just the perfect place to hide.

The first thing to say about To the River is that its setting is immaculate. Wakefield based the long expanse on sections of the Murray in South Australia. The novel’s eponymous river is a site of both beauty and danger and onto its shores we find Rachel and Sabine.

The novel’s narration alternates between the two women as the navigate lives that seem to be held in limbo. Rachel is struggling to redefine herself having lost her job and her marriage. Sabine has lived for twelve years as a fugitive and is now threatened with losing her last living relative, her pop Ray.

Whilst seemingly as different as they could possibly be, Rachel and Sabine are thrown together by circumstance. Sabine has lived too long on the run and needs someone to tell her story. Rachel wants this story but is unsure whether she is willing to follow it into the past and a truth she might never be able to verify.

To the River is pacy and thrilling with overlapping points of view promising quick cuts between the action. The story pits a race to find the truth against our modern sense of fake news. Rachel’s journey into Sabine’s life threatens to offer up more questions than answers and hovering over it all is the question; can she trust this woman who may have murdered her family.

At the heart of it all is a big question; who gets to be heard, who gets to be believed?

To the River is a tremendous page turner of a novel. The kind you’ll read in a weekend and then wish you’d taken it a little slower just so you had more to enjoy.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Elizabeth Coleman is a screenwriter and playwright. Her play Secret Bridesmaids Business has been adapted into a tv series and she’s also written for Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Today Elizabeth is joining us with her new novel, the second in her Ted Bristol Mystery series; A Dance With Murder.

Ted Bristol is trying to balance the personal and the private. Her latest case, protecting a ballerina from a stalker, is complicated by her burgeoning relationship with the ballerina’s ex. Meanwhile there are complicated couplings everywhere and while Ted definitely wants to grow her PI business she’s hoping to avoid the body count!

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. Her novels include Australiana and The Lovers. Yumna’s writing has been listed for prizes including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and The Stella Prize. 

Yumna Kassab is also Parramatta’s first laureate in literature

In Politica the reader is transported to conflict engulfing a country. Through glimpses of ordinary life and revolutionary struggle we are shown the cost of war on a people and the tenacity, the fierceness of will required to carry on.

I’d like to begin this review with the tremendous narrative style that guides this storytelling. Kassab weaves voices together to reveal a story that is both grounded in these people’s everyday lives and allowed to float through the passions, concerns and petty jealousies that guide us all, whether we acknowledge them or not.

This style was also in evidence in Kassab’s early novel Australiana. In that work the reader found the voices of an Australian town laid bare and the perspectives of the townsfolk, often at odds, found a cohesion in their shared geographic and historical journey.

Politica weaves together these voices to chronicle the history of the conflict from its early days, through the height of the violence and into a strange liminal zone where people question whether they ever knew another way of life.

The power of these competing and complementary voices is to keep the reader constantly shifting between space, time and perspective and so while we may not ever have the first hand knowledge of Politica’s contested ground, we are forced to look at it from every angle. In a way we both feel alienated from the action but also cannot fail but to resonate with some of those we hear from.

The narrative is divided across five sections. In each we discover aspects of life through the conflict; a father and son’s relationship, a dynasty of resistance fighters, or a woman’s struggle to eke out a space for herself.   

Politica is not a linear narrative and in this we find another impact and power of Kassab’s style. As we work through the novel we may be rocketed backwards or forwards through events or memories. The conflict is both fresh and seemingly endless and in this we discover something of the horror that is carried by all who are touched by the violence. Life in the conflict may seem to age prematurely whilst also leaving individuals in stasis. After years the people may wonder if they have really lived at all outside of the conflict. 

Be careful though. I want to avoid trying to draw too easy a conclusion from Politica; about its purpose, or inspiration, or the message it may have for our world right now. What seems apparent to me is that the novel offers a chance to explore something of the violence that I have never had in my life, but that I know exists in the world. This violence is a real part of people’s lives and their shared histories. It’s not that a novel like Politica can necessarily bridge that gap in my understanding (if anything can), rather it is another nod to the power of narrative to reach out across one groups ignorance and misunderstanding and offer stories that might help us be better.