KYD Podcast: First Book Club Finale

November’s the end of the KYD First Book Club for 2017, so for this episode we take a look at the last two titles till 2018. On Halloween, Lois Murphy let us in on the places that inspired Soon, her tale of an almost deserted town in the middle of nowhere. The people might be gone but something’s still trying to get in.

Further down south (and two hundred years earlier), an escaped convict named Bridget Crack fell in with a bad crowd. We asked Rachel Leary about research, Ned Kelly and prickly protagonists.

You can stream the podcast above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app. Let us know what you think by rating and reviewing in your app of choice too!

Read an extract from Soon here, and read Lois Murphy on the writing of the novel here.

Read an extract from Bridget Crack here, and read Ellen Cregan’s review of the novel here.

TRANSCRIPT

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hello and welcome back to the penultimate Kill Your Darlings Podcast for 2017. I’m Meaghan Dew and I’m sorry to break it to you but it is November – that’s right, it’s not long now until the end of the year. But if you’re torn between ‘Oh, a break will be nice!’ and ‘I have too much to do before then!’ I feel you, don’t worry, because your book club reading duties do not apply in December. That’s right November is our last book club month for the year. So before you get stuck into your holiday reads, it seems like the perfect opportunity to highlight Bridget Crack and Soon, which, if you’ve been following along, were the book club titles for October and November.

So we’re going in chronological order in more ways than one by starting with Bridget Crack. We spoke with Rachel Leary, but it was via Skype so do please excuse any blips in the sound quality. 

Rachel Leary: The book is about Bridget Crack, an English convict woman – well, young woman – who gets sent to Van Diemen’s Land and ends up lost in the bush.

KYD: It’s interesting you say young woman, because for the first part of the book I thought she was younger than she was, or more that her life had not been as full as it was, and then it got to later on and I realised that she’d had this whole quite full life before being sent to Australia and it was really fascinating. What sort of research did you do to get a feel for the differences in lifestyle and lifespan in that time?

RL: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been sort of doing some historical research – I mean, for, kind of years really, about, you know, life in England in the early 1800s and convict women, for another project that I was doing which was sort of how I first got interested in convict women. So I’d sort of done quite a bit of reading around that area before I actually started on that book. So I guess I had a little bit of a sense of, yeah differences in, you know, what a life might be like compared to how we live now. But yes and no, I mean, in some ways I don’t know that itR