Final Draft - Great Conversations

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Jessie Stephens discussing her new book Heartsick

Today on the show...

Heartsick weaves together three stories of love and loss.

Claire has returned from London, only to realise something is wrong with her partner Maggie.

Patrick is a lonely uni student, until he meets Caitlin - but does she feel as connected as he does?

Ana is happily married with three children. Then, one night, she falls in love with someone else.

Today’s conversation is presented by 2ser producer Briannah Devlin

Join me as we discover Jessie Stephens’ Heartsick...

Last week I teased a sequel to 2019’s The Nancys and today I have come to deliver.

First some background…

The Nancy’s is the debut novel from RWR McDonald. Set in the fictional South Otago town of Riverstone the story follows eleven year old Tippy Chan, her Uncle Pike and his boyfriend Devon as they band together in homage to their favourite girl detective Nancy Drew to solve the brutal murder of Tippy’s teacher.

Yeah, you thought this might be a middle grade book based on the protagonist right? Think again.

The Nancy’s won the Ngaio Marsh award for a debut novel and garnered a slew of shortlistings, because, quite frankly, it is gorgeous.

Jump forward to now and Tippy, Pike and Devon return in Nancy Business. The stakes are higher, the tone is darker, Tippy has a new haircut and don’t even think of going near Devon with green!

Get ready for a cosy mystery, with a queer heart and some real questions about what it means to be a part of a community.

In Nancy Business Riverstone is rocked by an explosion at the Town Hall. Three people are killed and it looks like a local is the bomber. Straight away things feel darker than the last novel. The bombing happens on the anniversary of Tippy’s father’s death and this has brought back so much for her. She is now constantly in fear of more violence and of losing more people close to her.

Pike and Devon are triumphant in their return to Riverstone but they two are hiding a darkness. Growing up Riverstone was never a place Pike could safe as a young gay man. Despite a level of fabulous acceptance with Devon by his side, the two are struggling to navigate the growth and maturing of their relationship. Could they really settle down in Riverstone?

The undercurrent of Nancy Business is that communities have secrets and those secrets have consequences. Tippy is single minded in uncovering the truth but she’s also twelve years old. As she navigates the various stories of her town she is learning that some secrets are not hers to tell.

RWR McDonald’s expanding Nancys universe is an absolute delight. The first thing I want to say is start with The Nancys. Nancy Business is a stand alone story but there is so much to both why not start at the beginning.

Riding along with Tippy you’ll find yourself wondering at the mix of genres McDonald is working (actually to be fair you probably won’t - his writing is seamless and you’ll likely be buckled in for the ride). The story feels like it should be YA and why not. I’m not going to stop any YA or other acronym for a loosely defined age demographic. But many of the themes of Nancy Business also feel like maybe a twelve year shouldn’t be… but then that’s the point; young adults always have and always will have to deal with these (scare quotes) adult themes. As much as Pike and Devon check in with Tippy it’s also them as so-called adults who need a hug and a bit of a moment to deal with the trauma.

Nancy Business is terrific - the dialogue is tighter than Devon’s hot pants and the characters are the sort that make you want to move to their town (just as soon as they sort out all the death)

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Michael Mohammed Ahmad discussing his new novel The Other Half of You

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Bani Adam knows that his family expect him to do the Tribe proud. To marry the right kind of girl and grow their family. But Bani knows this is not the only way to be a good son, a good man.

The Other Half of You is Bani telling the story of this life and this love to his son Khalil. To help Khalil understand the complexity of his identity as a Muslim, an Australian and a man Bani must tell both halves of his story.

In Part two we explore the damage that media depictions of young lebanese men has done and the ways that Mohammed has worked in his writing to tell more nuanced stories. We also get into the heart of the novel and discover a humorous side to Mohammed.

Join me as we discover Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You...

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Michael Mohammed Ahmad discussing his new novel The Other Half of You

Today on the show...

Bani Adam knows that his family expect him to do the Tribe proud. To marry the right kind of girl and grow their family. But Bani knows this is not the only way to be a good son, a good man.

The Other Half of You is Bani telling the story of this life and this love to his son Khalil. To help Khalil understand the complexity of his identity as a Muslim, an Australian and a man Bani must tell both halves of his story.

In part one of our conversation Mohammad explores Love and the necessity of telling stories that represent, engage and transform the communities they represent.

I’ve got a bit of a weird book club this week...

An absolutely incredible sequel to a stunningly fun book was released last week. It’s called Nancy Business and is the sequel to 2019’s The Nancys from RWR McDonald. I’ve only just started Nancy Business and rather than revisiting my book club on The Nancys, I thought we’d go back further still to a piece I wrote on the history of what would become one of RWR McDonald’s inspirations Nancy Drew.

Our tale starts one hundred years ago...

So Nancy Drew is best known as an unassuming, always ready, teen detective from River Heights. Her father Carson Drew is a crime fighting lawyer and her asexual boyfriend is Ned Nickerson. She’s the star of hundreds of novels and several screen adaptations, but she’s also been around for close to a hundred years and has gone through numerous iterations.

So right now it may sound like Nancy Drew is one of the undead and we need to call in one of the various iterations of Buffy to slay her. In fact Nancy is the product of an extremely successful, if highly exploitative publishing syndicate that was able to turn the methods of mass production to teen literature.

Nancy Drew, along with her male teen detective counterparts The Hardy Boys, were the brainchild of the publishing empire of Edward Stratemeyer (b.1862). Stratemeyer grew his empire over the early decades of the twentieth century using a shrewd understanding of what children want and how to market it to their tiny allowances. Yay Capitalism!

Stratemeyer was capitalising on a confluence of social and cultural changes including an increase in childhood literacy, the popularising of assembly line techniques and a growing appetite for entertainment. This created the audience that would devour series aimed at younger readers for 10-50 cents a pop.

Stratemeyer knew what the public wanted and he created characters that would resonate with their ideal lives. He created every-person type characters (at least if you were white and middle class) and employed marketing and cross promoting techniques that would do Amazon proud!

Seeking titles for a slightly older audience Stratemeyer launched The Hardy Boys in 1926 and the first Nancy Drew books followed in 1930 written under the pen name Carolyn Keene. These books were incredibly popular and overturned the maxim of the time that girls would happily read boys books.

The original writer of Nancy Drew was Mildred Wirt, but there were many more to come over the years. The books were penned by a team of writers working under a pseudonym (so it looked all wholesome and consistent). Much like the comic book industry to come, the Stratemeyer syndicate knew how to screw over its bullpen of writers; with many struggling to survive.

Nancy Drew has had many updates over the years but the basic concept was formulaic. Nancy Drew lived in River Heights. Her boyfriend was Ned Nickerson. They had a sunny white-bread relationship and were not particularly troubled by diversity. Each book saw a mystery emerge that was solved by hard work, a bump on the head that never seemed to cause concussion and a whole lot of pluck, luck and coincidence.

So across the years and her many faces Nancy became a publishing powerhouse that despite her extremely American origins even penetrated publishing in the antipodes.

Nancy Drew’s popularity makes her a troubling feminist icon; her freedom and independence offered one vision of equality and in the 1930’s and through the war years you can see how she might have inspired the minds of some young girls to dream. However her white suburban privilege firmly situates her freedom as the domain of her dominant culture status and does nothing for a world coming to understand that intersectionality was never a choice but an inevitability.

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features A.W. Hammond discussing his new novel The Paris Collaborator

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It’s Paris. August 1944.

Auguste Duchene is renowned for his ability to find missing people. Now he finds himself in an impossible situation; as the Allies close in on Paris Duchene must find a missing priest and a German soldier.

Working both sides against the other he must somehow satisfy two masters to protect his family.

In part two we get deeper into the mystery of The Paris Collaborator as well as exploring the ways that ideologies clash. Intriguingly we discover that the denouement may have as much to with how Duchene survives as with the solution to the mystery.

Join us as we discover The Paris Collaborator

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features A.W. Hammond discussing his new novel The Paris Collaborator

Today on the show...

It’s Paris. August 1944.

Auguste Duchene is renowned for his ability to find missing people. Now he finds himself in an impossible situation; as the Allies close in on Paris Duchene must find a missing priest and a German soldier.

Working both sides against the other he must somehow satisfy two masters to protect his family.

In part one of the interview Alex helps us establish what’s at stake for Duchene and get some insight into how he recreated the world of wartime Paris, as well as some insights into his detective influences…

Join us as we discover The Paris Collaborator

Emily Spurr is a debut novelist. A Million Things began its life as a manuscript that was ultimately shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award. When I spoke with Emily for Final Draft she told me that that story went through a dramatic evolution to become the thoroughly intriguing novel that I’m here to tell you about today...

Rae is pretty self sufficient for a ten year old. She can get to school lunch packed. Clean the house, although the backyard is a mess. And she’s always got time for her dog Splinter. In fact until the money in her Mum’s back account runs out no one needs to know her Mum’s not around.

Lettie next door could be a problem though. Always on her porch, just sitting and watching. If she notices Rae’s on her own there could be trouble.

But Lettie’s got problems of her own.

A Million Things runs on its extraordinarily realised characters. Rae, Lettie and Splinter the dog are the sort of characters that you find yourself talking about like they’re real people. I don’t mind telling you that at one point Emily had me fully ugly crying over the story. I can’t you what it was, that would be spoilers, but suffice to say these are the sort of people who get under your skin and make you care.

And because you find yourself caring so much in A Million Things the book has this incredible power to pull you into its ideas.

At its heart A Million Things felt to me like an exploration of the ways we need each other. We’ve all learned a little about that in the last year but A Million Things pushes around the edges of the really uncomfortable ways we need each other, especially those times when we’d much rather push the whole world away.

Both Rae and Lettie need someone and both are terribly afraid of what it might mean were someone to find out how badly that need gripped them. Isolation has given them the false sense that if they can just keep controlling their little worlds then everything else will go along for them.

Let’s talk for a minute about the requirement to be palatable in order to be worthy of receiving love. That rule may not be on the books but it definitely exists, particularly for people in marginalised or vulnerable groups.

The reality for older women is that they are at significantly higher risk of poverty, homelessness, neglect and isolation. This is the group that Lettie falls in and as we see in the novel she has created a world that is safe for her in her isolation and is extremely reluctant to have it disturbed.

Because of who she is Lettie is also viewed as eccentric, weird and not desirable in her neighbourhood. She has to take significant risks to both let Rae in and give her support whilst also accepting support herself.

In creating these beautiful characters Emily Spurr has given life to people that we might otherwise not notice, even ignore, and she’s done it in a way that makes us fall in love with them and care.

This is also a book with a huge bombshell just waiting beneath its surface. Oh, how I wanted to tell you more about the big secret hiding in A Million Things, but I couldn’t because I love you all too much and I want you to discover this for yourself. But do me a favour and when you’ve read A MIllion Things get in touch and we can trade notes… trust me, this is a book you’re going to want to talk about!

Great Conversations features interviews with authors and writers, exploring books, writing and literary culture from Australia and the world.

Today's episode features Hugh Breakey discussing his new novel The Beautiful Fall

Today on the show...

If you woke up one day with no memory of who you were, where do you think you would place your trust?

Every 179 days Robbie forgets everything about himself. The last time this happened all he had was a note, written by himself to guide his future.

He keeps himself protected by avoiding the world; shut in, deliveries to the door and very little outside interaction. He can’t risk that the forgetting happens and he is left at the mercy of a stranger. Robbie has a project that structures his days. He’s building an elaborate, record breaking dominoes pattern.

And that’s enough until one day, not long before the next forgetting a new delivery person comes to Robbies door and he feels a spark of something?

Join me as we discover Hugh Breakey’s The Beautiful Fall...

Re[ad]generate aims to regenerate reading by supporting children in fire and flood-affected communities. The campaign will deliver books written and illustrated by First Nations authors and artists, providing children in those communities with educational opportunities that reflect their communities and their daily lives.

It’s now 18 months on from the devastating fires that killed 33 people and burned over 17 million hectares. A lot’s happened since then including a pandemic, floods and a mouse plague. Across Australia communities are still rebuilding and First Nation's communities are disproportionately impacted by these natural disasters.

Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai woman whose writing includes the acclaimed poetry collection Kindred and her latest, Bindi which tells the story of a community facing bushfire and its aftermath. Kirli developed the Re[ad]generate campaign to bring books and stories to affected communities that could show children their resilience and strength.