A Women’s History Month Special: Lauren Willig’s latest book, A Summer Country, is an epic family saga simmering with secrets, set in 19th century Barbados.

It’s quite a departure from her World War I and II historical fiction and the Napoleonic era “Pink Carnation” mysteries that are so popular. But Lauren – author of more than 30 award-winning bestselling books – says being adaptable is a key if you want to have a long-standing career as an author.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading podcast Lauren talks about how a resort holiday that was meant to be all about lying in the sun sipping fruity drinks, sparked an idea that would not let her go.

She talks about her successful collaboration with two very close friends, both of them also bestselling historical authors, and why she thinks reading tastes have been changing during the pandemic.

And we’ve got three E-book copies of her popular mystery – The Secret History of the Pink Carnation to giveaway to three lucky listeners/readers.

Enter the draw on the link below. Offer closes March 12.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Where to find Lauren Willig: 

Website: https://laurenwillig.com/

Facebook @Laurenwillig

Twitter: @Laurenwillig

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenwillig/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14469.Lauren_Willig

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

But now, here’s Lauren.

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Lauren, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Lauren Willig: I am so delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: Lauren, you’ve got 30 or more books published to your credit now, mainly historical mysteries and historical fiction. You’ve won all sorts of awards and made it onto numerous bestseller lists – things like the New York Times list, the Booksellers lists, you’ve got RITAs. Wonderful career you’ve had, but how did you get started on this road?

Jenny Wheeler: That’s amazing. It’s remarkable that you’d have such a sense of confidence and destiny so young.

Lauren Willig: I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I made the decision when I was six that I was going to write fiction when I grew up. It was largely out of frustration.

I had wanted to be either a ballerina or a princess, and it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t dance, and no one was offering me a kingdom, which was very inconsiderate of them. So I figured I would go with my third option and be a novelist instead. Having decided that and telling everyone in the first grade, I had to stick with it.

Lauren Willig: It’s one of those things where when you keep at something, it self-perpetuates. I sent my first manuscript off to Simon & Schuster when I was nine, and of course they sent back a form letter. I was gutted but having gone down that road I had to keep cracking away at it.

The truth is I adore historical fiction, all kinds of fiction, really. I have never wanted to do anything more than I’ve wanted to live in stories, both my own and other people’s.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Now I know you’ve got a book that’s very soon going to be out, Band of Sisters. We will talk about that a little later on in our chat together, but the one we are focusing on today is The Summer Country, which is your most recent book as we’re speaking.

It’s been described as an epic family saga simmering with secrets, just the sort of story I love. It’s a book you’ve said just begged to be written. You almost tried to keep it quiet and not do it, but it wouldn’t let you alone. Tell us about that.

Lauren Willig: This was a book that grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. It’s a departure for me, both geographically and in subject matter. Most of my books are set in England and although there’s a great deal of drama in some of them, the drama is usually of the domestic variety. I certainly never meant to tackle slavery or racism or really big heartbreaking topics.

But about 11 years ago now I went on a girls’ trip with my two best friends from grad school. We had decided we were just going to lie on a warm beach with fruity drinks in our hands and do nothing, but this did not work very well for us. We all spent most of our lives in libraries.

One of them was a Medievalist, another did Renaissance Europe and I was an early modernist who was already writing novels, and so we were used to spending most of our time in libraries. We really weren’t used to direct sunlight, so we burned rather badly that first day, and then decided to look for indoor activities.

We found a plantation tour where we were told a story about how the plantation had burned down in a fire and the owner’s Portuguese ward had died. Except that she was neither Portuguese nor his ward, she was his daughter by an enslaved woman.

The rest of the story we were told that day was about the plantation owner, how he was gutted by his daughter’s death and spent the rest of his life rocking on the veranda, chasing the shade.

You could still hear that rocking chair creaking on the veranda, which was a great Gothic ghost story. I love a Gothic ghost story, but what really caught my imagination at the time and what I really wondered about was, where was the child’s mother?

Was she there too on the night of the fire? Had she agreed to have her child enter the household as a Portuguese ward or had the child been torn for her?

Of course, being that horrible person in the group, I asked the tour guide, who couldn’t tell me. All they knew was that the mother had been an unnamed enslaved woman. They had no idea who she was, what happened to her, what the story was. And that was meant to be that.

I went back to New York. I was writing a book set during the Napoleonic Wars, light and flippant with lots of antics with Napoleon behaving badly, but I couldn’t get that missing mother out of my head, that nameless enslaved woman whose child died in the fire.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes.

Lauren Willig: For years this story haunted me, particularly when, years later, I had children of my own and the full impact of what that meant came to me.

But it was a story that almost didn’t get written because when I first came back and my editor asked me what I wanted to write next I said, I have this Barbados idea.

She was like, no, no, no, you cannot write a book set in the Caribbean. I thought, maybe that’s for the best, my background is in English history, not in Caribbean history, I don’t know what I’m doing, these are big topics, maybe it’s fate.

Every now and then I would take that file and dust it off and then stick it away again. It took about eight years after that initial trip before my agent finally said to me, you have to write the Barbados book or else you will never stop talking about it to me.

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Jenny Wheeler: It’s peculiar, isn’t it? It’s one of those things that certain time periods and settings dominate the best seller list. You would know that well, because some of your books are set in those periods, like World War I and World War II currently, while others, like your Caribbean story, as you mentioned, find it a little harder to gain acceptance, certainly with publishers, but even with readers as well. Why do you think this is, and is there a way of breaking through?

Lauren Willig: This is something I’ve thought about a lot. It’s very funny because when I had that discussion with my editor at the time, she said, you know what? You can write anything you like, as long as it’s set in England. Then she paused for a moment, thought very seriously and added, you can write anything you like, as long as it’s set in 19th century England.

My academic background is in the English Civil War, so whenever I want to scare my agent, I tell her I’m finally going to write my big English Civil War saga, and the thought of my going 17th century just scares her speechless.

I do have some theories about why this is. I think for some reason, although I can’t quite put my finger on it, there are synergies between certain time periods. I mean, I grew up in the eighties which was the era of the Victorian saga – both Victoria and England – and a lot of American Civil War novels and movies. For some reason, the era of big hoop skirts appealed to the era of big hair.

Then when I came of age and graduated from college in 1999, that .com era was the era of the Jane Austen reboot. Suddenly it was all chick lit and comedies of manners, and the two dovetailed very, very well. It was different from the earlier Victoriana Gothic stage of the eighties.

Now I think the reason that World War II has such appeal is that it’s the ultimate battle of good and evil. Right now, we don’t want subtlety, we don’t want wise-cracking banter. We want good prevailing; we want evil being very obvious and being crushed. There is certainly an appeal to that, but I do find it fascinating because a decade ago you could not sell a World War II novel.

What it took was Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale breaking out for suddenly publishers to wake up and say, wow, there’s an appetite for this and such an appetite, and it shows no sign of abating.

Jenny Wheeler: Your book The Summer Country has got quite a degree of historic basis, as you’ve already mentioned, and there’s a very touching quote in the beginning. You took the title from a quote written by a man called Joshua Steele, a Londoner who did have slaves in Barbados in the early 1800s.

He said that Barbados was like “the eternal Summer Country”. When you think of the life and conditions of some of the people there, it seems remarkably “rose tinted”, but he was one of the models for your characters, wasn’t he?

Lauren Willig: Yes. I was fascinated by Joshua Steele because to me he embodied the contradictions in the Enlightenment Project. There was Steele, he was a reformer who inherited an estate in Barbados and came over with these grand ideas of all the things he was going to change.

He believed strongly in the fundamental dignity of all men, a very unpopular opinion at the time among his fellow plantation owners – that there was really no difference between Afro-Caribbeans and the descendants of Englishmen except for the fact that one group had been deliberately kept in ignorance.

He compared the enslaved people to the Saxons under the Norman yoke and said that like the Saxons, with proper education, they were going to become good sturdy yeoman and British citizens. This was not popular with his fellow plantation owners.

He had these grand ideas for improvement and all of that, but at the same time, there’s also a certain callousness. For him, it’s an intellectual game. The reason I chose the quote from him that I did, to start the book, and I don’t have it in front of me so I’ll paraphrase, but basically he talks about how improving the lives of his enslaved people has provided years of entertainment for him.

And for him, it is entertainment. It never really occurs to him that this could come back to bite him personally, because he is a white Englishman. He can always just walk away.

Again, the reason Joshua Steele became one of the models for my characters and I am so fascinated by him is it does bite him personally because he fell in love with his enslaved housekeeper. We know he loved her; we have no idea how she felt about him. That’s a whole other story. But they lived together as man and wife and they had two children together.

The wrinkle was that he turned on her. She was owned by a neighboring slave holder and he leased her. For whatever reason, the neighboring slave holder was not interested in selling. When he died, he left his fortune to their two children and his sister back in England sued on the grounds that property could not own property and the estate should be hers.

The courts in England did not want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. This was not a popular sort of thing in England at the time, so they bounced it back to Barbados where the court said yes, property can’t own property and they disinherited the kids.

I don’t believe it ever would have occurred to Joshua Steele that his last testament would have been disregarded, that his children would have been disinherited, that the system, which he thought he could somehow change or mold, would, in the end, come back to destroy his family.

 In the end, the children get away to England. His executor takes them to England where the son is raised at the same school as the executor’s son, the daughter goes to a young ladies academy and marries into the English upper upper-middle-class and it’s all sort of okay, but that really caught my attention. The fact that as powerful as this man was, as well connected, he couldn’t even protect his own children.

That very much informed one of the main male characters in this book, Charles Davenant, who is also a young man who inherits a plantation in Barbados with ideas about all these grand enlightenment schemes he’s going to implement, but who quickly discovers that he can’t even protect or free the woman he loves, and he can’t prevent their child from being enslaved.

Jenny Wheeler:  In the next generation down, because this is a dual timeline story, there is a female character – we will be vague about how this happens, but a female character who inherits a sugar plantation from her grandfather. I wondered how likely it would be that a woman could inherit property like that at this time.

It’s the 1850s by now and the slaves have been freed. You interweave between the two, but in the earlier part of the dual timeline, the slaves are still enslaved, and then later they’ve been freed. Would Emily in that period have been able to inherit the plantation, like the book says?

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Lauren Willig: Absolutely, because the way property law worked at the time was women could in fact hold property so long as they weren’t married. That’s always the wrinkle and there has been some excellent work done on female plantation owners on Barbados, more in the 18th century than the 19th century, frankly.

I think that has more to do with social norms than it does with legal restrictions, because in the 18th century you have a lot of female entrepreneurs and businesswomen and so it’s less of a fraught proposition, although it’s always a fraught proposition, but less of a fraught proposition for a woman to be running her own plantation.

Whereas by the mid-19th century, the 1850s, we are at the height of the ideal of the angel of the hearth, where women are meant to be sweet and timid and exuding good moral influence from the comfort of the home while the men go out and do all the hard stuff.

So I think in some ways, although the legal situation is unchanged, it’s much harder for Emily in 1854 to inherit a plantation than it would have been for an equivalent character a century earlier. Not because of any actual restrictions, but because of social pressures.

Of course, the real wrinkle is as soon as you marry, your property by law becomes your husband’s. It’s a legal principle called couverture where the legal body of the male literally covers that of the woman and eclipses her, which is quite an image there for you.

There were all sorts of fascinating workarounds that heiresses on Barbados used to try to retain some control of their property, some of which worked better than others. But the bottom line is yes, in 1854 a young woman from Bristol like Emily could absolutely have inherited a plantation. Whether she could hold onto it and manage it is another story entirely.

Jenny Wheeler: You have got an impressive list of sources that you refer to at the end of the book, and it’s obvious that getting the history right is very important to you. Looking over other books as well, have there been instances when maintaining a happy balance between the historical record and your own fictional characters has been difficult or tricky?

Lauren Willig: I will say that with The Summer Country, more than any of my other books, I felt a great deal of pressure to make sure I had triple checked everything and read everything I could possibly read, because the Caribbean is not my academic background and I wanted to make sure, especially with the sorts of topics this book deals with, that I was doing justice to the time period, the place and the characters.

So I did triple the amount of research I would normally do on this book, and I called in favors from all of my friends who are still in academia. Back in my academic days, I used to run the History Department Social Club, and I have some very embarrassing pictures of people, so everyone was very, very helpful.

The funny thing is I actually have not had that much difficulty in maintaining a balance between the history and the fiction because years and years ago, when I was a teenager, misspending my teenage years by reading writers magazines, I read an article by John Jakes talking about his research and writing process.

He talked about how before he began a book, he would spend a year just reading. Not taking notes. Not plotting, just reading everything available on the topic and letting it all sink in.

There have been times in my life when I’ve been writing two books a year. I certainly don’t have a year to spend doing nothing but reading, but I always try to block off at least a few months to do nothing but read and let it sink in.

By the time I sit down and try to plot my story, the characters and the situations are so informed by what I’ve already read, that it’s not the history is getting in my way. It’s more the history becomes the scaffolding on which my story is built, or even better than scaffolding, it’s a part of the weft. I like them to work together.

Jenny Wheeler: You started your career – you’ve made allusion to it already – with a mystery series, the Pink Carnation series, a dozen mysteries set in France, England and Portugal during the Napoleonic era. They are a take on the fictional aristocratic spy the Scarlet Pimpernel, except this one turns out to be a woman.

I presume that was your first book. Did you launch your career with the Pink Carnation series?

Lauren Willig: I did, although it was never the book that was meant to be published. The funny thing was I had gone off to grad school to do a PhD in English history with the idea that I was going to write the kind of vast historical epics I had devoured in my youth – Karleen Koen’s Through A Glass Darkly or Colleen McCulloch’s The Thorn Birds.

I wanted to write the thousand-page doorstop of a novel that would be described in reviews as a “rich historical tapestry”, because it’s always a tapestry. But when I finished my general exams in grad school, I was thinking in footnotes.

I was utterly burned out on the English Civil War and I needed to do something for a break, something that was far enough away from my actual academic work that it felt like a vacation, but close enough that would be something I knew.

I settled on the Napoleonic Wars, which dovetailed with my academic work because I was writing my dissertation on Royalist Conspiracies during the English Civil War, so royalist conspiracy during the Napoleonic Wars was an easy step for me. It was meant to be just for fun.

It was a mix of Blackadder and Regency romance novels, and old-fashioned swashbucklers and the Scarlet Pimpernel with a chick lit frame story about a disgruntled American grad student doing her dissertation research in England.

You can see where that one came from! That character finds a never before found cache of family papers that gives her all the materials she needs, which was total wish fulfilment on my part because there I was trudging back and forth between the British Library and the Public Records Office and not finding anything of the sort. When people write letters with “burn this letter”, most of the time they actually burn it.

Anyway, that book I wrote for fun and the crazy thing is I gave it to a friend who happened to give it to her friend who was an agent who at that point was looking to move from representing serious literary fiction to something lighter. My manuscript happened to be the something lighter that crossed his desk at that critical moment.

The next thing I knew, I got a call saying, I’m an agent and I want to represent you. I spilled coffee all over myself. It’s funny how these things happen. Twelve books later, it became a whole world of its own. But it was the book I never meant to write and having written it, never meant to have published.

Jenny Wheeler: Are you still writing those now?

Lauren Willig: I wound up the series back in 2015 with the 12th book for a couple of reasons. One was that I had also started writing standalone novels and I was trying to balance a standalone novel and a Pink Carnation novel a year, around the same time I had my first child and also started co-writing with two good friends.

The combination of two personal books a year, a book with friends and an infant who believed that naps were something that happened to other people, unfortunately wasn’t sustainable. I decided it was time to wrap up the series before it became stale and before I had a nervous breakdown. Although I still miss those characters a lot, I lived with them for such a long time.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned that collaboration, and maybe we should move on to talking about that. That’s with a couple of other very well-known historical fiction writers in their own right – Beatriz Williams and Karen White.

You’ve done several together that have been very prominent sellers – The Glass Ocean set around the sinking of the Lusitania during World War I, and All the Ways We Said Goodbye, which is a three generational story stretching from World War I to the 1960s. It seems incredibly complicated to have these very highly plotted books worked on by three people. How do you do it?

Lauren Willig: It’s because we’re really, really, good friends. The whole thing started one night because we were drinking together and started drunkenly going on about how much fun it would be if our publishers would pay for our girls trip or our bar bill so we could spend more time together.

And we came up with a brilliant idea of, oh my God, if we wrote a book together, they would send us on book tour together and pay all the bills. Hooray, let’s do it.

It’s amazing to me that it actually works. What we usually do is, we all live in different places. I’m in New York, Karen is in Georgia and Beatriz is up in the way tippy top North of Connecticut.

We get together to plot out the book and we spend three days downing red wine and gin and tonics and plotting out the whole book chapter by chapter, which is something we do not do with our own books. It only somehow works when we’re together. We plot out the entire book and then we each claim a character.

We all write multi timeline books in our own private lives and so what we do is – usually there are three time periods, or in a couple of our books we’ve had two characters in one period and another character in another time period, so there are always three main viewpoint, female characters.

After we plot the whole book together, we each claim a character and then we go back to our little writing holes and we write round robin. The first person will write her chapter, send it to the next one. We’ll read it, then send it on.

That person will read the previous two chapters and write hers and send it on. What we found is because we write round robin like that, and you’re always reading the other two people’s chapters before you start writing your own, our voices magically meld into something that’s not quite our normal voices at all. It also keeps themes and imagery and so on consistent because you’re always reading the others first.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s terrific. It sounds a very creative way to do it.

Lauren Willig:  We stumbled into it because this whole thing we did by accident. Our agents did not like the idea at all, the publisher was skeptical, but it worked!

People kept saying, three authors, it must be an anthology, and we kept saying, no, it’s a novel written by three people. They were like that, but you can’t do that. Then the book came out and people are like, oh, actually you can do that.

We have been so amused by the fact that you’ve suddenly started to see more and more writing teams popping up, once we’ve proved that three authors can write a book that’s a book and not an anthology. 

Jenny Wheeler:  Was the first one you did The Glass Ocean?

Lauren Willig: Our first one was The Forgotten Room, which was about three generations of women in a gilded age New York mansion.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, I haven’t seen that one. I must look it out.

You had quite a strong academic career before turning to full-time writing. I think you even did law at one stage. Tell us something about that experience and how has it fed back into your writing?

Lauren Willig: It generally has always been the writing that has come first. I decided as a senior in college that I was going to go to grad school with the idea that it would help me write absolutely accurate historical novels. And of course, in grad school, the first thing you learn is there is no absolute historical accuracy, which is very frustrating.

My other reason for it was I figured if I were an academic, I would have these great three-month long summer vacations when I could write my novels, and then I discovered academics work very hard over the summer and this whole three-month long summer vacation idea was not what I thought it was. Between that and grading student papers, about four years into my PhD I decided that maybe this wasn’t the career for me.

I was at the Harvard History Department at the time and since my whole family are lapsed academics who became lawyers, I decided I would succumb to the family curse and lob in an application to Harvard Law, and if I got in I would finish my PhD while doing a JD and be a lawyer, and if not, I would stick out with academia and be the best possible English Civil War historian I could be.

Anyway, I got in. The crazy thing was, my first month at Harvard Law I got that first book contract for The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, and it was a two-book contract.

They wanted a second book, which absolutely blew my mind – that they were going to let me write another one. I wound up juggling my Law School years with writing a Pink Carnation book a year.

I practiced for a year and a half as a litigator at a large New York law firm while also continuing to write Pink Carnation novels before finally leaving. So my experience in both academia and law was very much shaded by the fact that the books were always there and came first.

Jenny Wheeler: Is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career, more than any other, that you would see as the secret of your success?

Lauren Willig: I’m never actually sure I’m that much of a success. I’m still not where I would like to be as a writer, which I think most writers probably feel.

We are always striving to write a better book and you never quite feel like any of them have done it just yet. I guess there must be competent writers out there who really adore the sound of their own voice, but I always feel like I’m still striving to get to the book I want to write somehow.

But I will say that I think the main secret to success for any author who wants a long career is to be adaptable. You have to be willing to change because you change and the times change, and you have to be willing to change along with them.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. This is The Joys of Binge Reading, so turning to Lauren as reader – I don’t know if you have much time to read with all your writing and still being a mother of a young family, but what have you, in the past anyway, liked to binge read when you’ve had the chance, and what do you think about this concept of binge reading?

I think genre fiction, the more escapist fiction, is becoming more and more mainstream and acceptable although the literary books probably still dominate. What’s your taste in genre fiction or binge reading fiction?

Lauren Willig: Oh, goodness. There’s so much there to answer. I can’t function unless I’m reading other people’s books. Having a book gap is one of the scariest things in the world to me. I always need to know what I’m going to be reading next and I usually read about three or four novels a week.

But my children are driving me crazy right now because my older one is a night owl, which was always great because she would sleep in and then I could read in the morning before she woke up.

But now I have a younger one who is three, who’s an early bird, so he has killed my early morning reading time, so I’ve had to find time to read in the margins. I’ve actually found that children being traumatized by COVID-19 is very good, because if they make you sit by their bedside, you can read in the dark on your Kindle for hours and it’s great reading time, which is a silver lining so I binge read like crazy.

I’ve always binge read all forms of genre fiction. I used to joke that the only genre I didn’t read was science fiction because I hate technology and technology hates me. But then my college roommate pointed out that Lois McMaster Bujold writes very good science fiction, so now I read that too, as long as it doesn’t get too technical.

I’ve found that the pandemic has changed my reading habits as it has with so many people. I have kept myself sane by binge reading mid-century British mystery novels, particularly Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series. Most people have never heard of her.

She’s sort of a lesser Miss Marple, another omniscient knitting spinster who will come in and solve the crime. I find her so deeply reassuring because you know that no matter what happens, there will be scones at the vicarage and Miss Silver will find the guilty party. There are, mercifully, like 50 in this series so I’ve been reading through those, but I’ve now run out, so I’ve had to revert to Miss Marple.

I adore Dorothy Sayers, but for some reason I found her harder to read during the pandemic, maybe because I loved her so much pre-pandemic. The other thing I’ve been binge reading in these dark days is I have turned to British chick lit, especially Trisha Ashley’s older books, which I love. They are also a reassuring English village world.

Jenny Wheeler: Tricia Ashley, I must look those out, I haven’t come across her. That’s fantastic. I’m really impressed that you could read three or four books a week with everything else you’ve got on. That’s remarkable.

Lauren Willig: Well, my older one, my seven-year-old, likes me to sit by her bed until she falls asleep, but unfortunately, she inherited my insomniac tendencies so that can take a very long time. The good thing is I sit there with my Kindle in the dark and whenever she tries to talk to me, I go, shhh, go to sleep, while I keep reading. So I get to pretend to be a good mother while actually going through books.

Jenny Wheeler: We are starting to come to the end of our time together, so circling around, looking back down the tunnel of time, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change?

Lauren Willig: I think everyone looks back and has points where they say, if I’d only done X, Y, or Z, or if I’d done this differently or that differently. The problem is, I fundamentally don’t believe you can do counterfactual history, that everything is so interwoven that you can’t just pick one thread and say, I’ll pull that one, because you don’t know what it actually might change.

I have a very fatalistic view towards life. I used to call myself an optimistic fatalist because I believed everything had to happen the way it happened, but generally it happened for the best. The one thing I would change is, if I could go back to the writer I was before I had children, because I was a professional writer for 10 years before I started having small people, I would go tell that previous self of mine to write more while I still have the time.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve mentioned Band of Sisters, the book that’s going to be coming out in the next couple of months and I’m sure you’ve got other projects on the way as well. What is next for Lauren the writer, and tell us about Band of Sisters in particular.

Lauren Willig: Band of Sisters comes out on March 2nd, in time for Women’s History Month. It’s based on the true story of the Smith College Relief Unit, 18 alumni of Smith College, who went off to France at the height of World War I to bring humanitarian aid to French villagers right behind the front lines.

They wound up contending with German shells, French bureaucracy, recalcitrant livestock, and a British army who firmly believed that women did not belong in a war zone. It’s one of those incredible stories. I stumbled on it by accident when we were researching one of the Team W’s books, All the Ways We Said Goodbye, and we were looking into occupied France in World War I.

I was looking for Christmas customs in Picardy and found this memoir by a Smith woman talking about throwing Christmas parties for French villagers right behind the front lines in 1917. I thought that’s crazy. She can’t be there. How are they there?

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I started reading and next thing I knew I was totally sucked in by the story of these plucky women who went abroad to help total strangers in deplorable conditions. It’s the most amazing story. I feel so honored to have gotten to unearth it and bring it back to life for people.

 I’m also right now working on the fourth Team W collaboration. That one is going to come out in Autumn 2022, and it is set around three generations of women in Newport, Rhode Island in the Gilded Age, the 1950’s and the present day when a Gilded Age mansion is being made over in one of those crazy make-over programs.

Also, in my own writing life, I am working on a prequel to the Smith book. I had not really intended to have a prequel of Band of Sisters, but I was fascinated by the founder of the Smith College Relief Unit. The real founder was a woman named Harriet Boyd Hawes who was a pioneering archeologist. At a time when women were discouraged from excavation, she fought to be allowed to excavate and wound up excavating in Crete and doing groundbreaking work.

She also periodically dropped everything to go do nursing in war zones, and there’s this bit in her real life, before she goes and excavates Crete, where she gets caught up as a student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, in the Greco Turkish War.

She winds up nursing there despite failing her Red Cross exam, is decorated by the Queen of Greece and then for some reason drops everything and goes and nurses in the Spanish American War before going back, resuming her archeological career, excavating Crete and becoming famous in archeological circles. I thought, why did she do that?

I’m certainly not going to opine on why the real woman did that, but my fictional version of her, Mrs. Rutherford, as I was writing Band of Sisters, the Mrs. Rutherford character kept revealing little insights into her past.

What I’m writing is basically the story of my Harriet Boyd Hawes equivalent, Betsy Hayes, later Mrs. Rutherford, who goes to Greece in the 1890s to become an archaeologist and finds herself suffering these life-changing events during the Greco-Turkish War which then drive her to go and nurse in the Spanish American War and eventually make her the person she’s going to be.

It’s this big sweeping coming of age story, and I am having such a blast researching both the Spanish American War and the Greco-Turkish War. It’s a lot of drama.

That book was going to come out in March 2022, but with the pandemic and being home with two small children, we’ve wound up pushing that back to March 2023.

Jenny Wheeler: At the moment, you are doing one book a year or one and a half books a year by the sound of it, with your collaborative work. Is that what’s going on?

Lauren Willig: It is supposed to be one and a half books a year, but right now, because we had to push back the Band of Sisters prequel by a full year, it’s going to be a personal book every other year and a group book every other year.

Jenny Wheeler: Which is still a huge amount of work. Do you enjoy hearing from your readers and where can they find you online?

Lauren Willig: I adore hearing from my readers. They can find me at my website, www.laurenwillig.com, which has this bizarre accumulation of material I’ve added as a whim struck me over the past 15 years or so. It’s apparently a webmaster’s nightmare. I spend a lot of time wasting time on my Facebook author page, which is Facebook/Lauren Willig and over on Instagram, where I’m @laurenwillig.

 So basically, I’m Lauren Willig on all things. I’m also on Twitter, but I stop by there once in a blue moon. I still haven’t quite figured out how it works so occasionally I will stop by when I get yelled at by my publisher and I’ll retweet things or change my cover, but I don’t really interact there. I interact a lot on Facebook and on Instagram.

 Also, speaking of interacting, I am launching a Pink Carnation read along because it occurred to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve read my own Pink Carnation series and because I’ve also been doing comfort binge reading during the pandemic, I decided this would be a good time to comfort binge read myself, because it’s been long enough since I wrote them.

We’re going to be reading a Pink Carnation book a month starting with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. There will be a monthly Zoom book club meeting with a special guest co-host every month. Sarah McLean is going to be joining me on February 24th to kick it off with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation.

Jenny Wheeler: That sounds wonderful. I’ll get the links from you for that. We will have links for all of these social media and your books in the show notes for this episode, but we’ll make sure we get that Zoom meeting link in for people who might be interested in taking part.

That sounds like a wonderful idea because so many people still are looking for light, escapist fiction in this time. Over and over, people say their reading habits have changed during the pandemic.

Lauren Willig: It’s funny because for a while everything went very dark and I’ve always written funny. My natural métier is humor. The darker the situation, the more tempted I am to snark about it.

For a while, everything went very serious and I have to admit I found it very hard to maintain that air of seriousness for long enough, although in Summer Country the seriousness of the subject matter helped a bit in terms of not giving in to dark humor.

I found it a tremendous relief that one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we do want to laugh again and be entertained again. It may be because our everyday lives are so grim right now that we need to escape elsewhere, rather than because our lives are comfortable, we need to test grimness in fiction.

Jenny Wheeler:  Yes, I absolutely agree with you there. Lauren, we have run out of time together now, but it has been wonderful talking. I could definitely be a candidate for the read along, although where I’d fit in the time I don’t know, because with these podcasts I’m reading one book a week at least for each of the authors that I’m talking to, apart from anything else, but it would be great to take part. Thanks so much.

Lauren Willig: Thank you so much for having me here. This has been such a joy.

If you enjoyed Lauren Willig you might also enjoy Christine Trent’s addictive Victorian Gothic historical fiction.

Thanks To Our Technical Support:

The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.

Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]

Rachael Treasure is one of Australia’s most popular authors of women’s fiction, credited with sparking a whole new sub-genre of rural fiction with her groundbreaking romance, Jillaroo, a book that opened the flood gates for dozens more authors and readers of rural romance and country fiction to follow.

In her latest book, White Horses, nearly 20 years later, Rachael continues to smash conventions, blending her vision for a vital and thriving Australian agricultural sector with a young woman’s mystical and romantic quest for identity.

Hi there, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s binge reading episode Rachael talks about dealing with life’s curve balls – and she’s had a few, the boom in Australian women’s fiction, and why she sees her role of mother as more important than any of the other titles like ‘author’ and ‘farmer’ that she wears with pride.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Where to find Rachael Treasure: 

Website: http://www.rachaeltreasure.com/

Facebook: @rach.treasure

Twitter: @rachaeltreasure

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Rachael. Hello there, Rachael, and welcome to the show. It’s wonderful that you could be here.

Rachael Treasure: Brilliant to be with you also Jenny. Thank you for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: You are in Tasmania and I’m in New Zealand. We’ll get that clear for the people listening around the world. We’ve got listeners in Australia and the States, so it’s good to know.

Rachael Treasure: That’s brilliant. We say we’re ‘over the ditch’ from you, for those of you who live internationally. We are just over the ditch from New Zealand.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. You have had the kudos of having kick-started a whole new sub-genre in fiction, and not many authors can say something like this.

That was Australian rural romance with your first novel, Jillaroo, back in 2002. Many of the women authors I’ve spoken to over the last 18 months or so all credit you with starting the boom that there’s been in women’s fiction.

It’s been nearly 20 years now, and you’ve come a long way since then. The work you’re doing now has gone a long way on past Jillaroo, but tell us about that first iconic book. How did you come to crack that?

Rachael Treasure: That goes back to childhood in the sense that my grandmother was a farmer, but she was also a writer. She had radio plays published, I think by the BBC. She wrote children’s books, so when I was growing up, I would see her clunking away on a typewriter.

Her name was Joan Wise. Books and indigenous story were a big part of her life, and she imparted that to me back before that was really a thing, so I had this connection between land and writing and the ancient wisdom that comes with indigenous dream stories. Jillaroo was a step along from that.

I went to an agricultural college and I’d been raised in Tasmania where the farming system was all integrated, so the bees played a part with the orchards, and the orchards played a part with feeding the pigs, and the pigs played a part with the milk coming from the dairy, and the wool.

My uncle and auntie would spin wool by hand. When I went to what we call the mainland in Australia, and I started seeing corporate, commercial, industrial agriculture on a massive scale, it would sit so uncomfortably with me, so when I went to study both agriculture and journalism, I knew I had to tell the feminine story of contemporary rural women.

My first character, Rebecca Saunders, was born. She was a messenger to say that women need to be left land – not just the men on the land title, and women need to be driving forward this integrated system. It wasn’t as clear cut back then. I wanted to write a rollicking tale.

Anyway, I worked at my craft for 10 years as a rural journalist, and I joined writing groups back before email was a thing. I persisted and I studied a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing as well. Everything was leading me towards this one novel, which was picked up off a slush pile, would you believe?

Jenny Wheeler: That is remarkable because as we’ve agreed, traditional publishers are usually not very willing to explore a new thing. I guess there must have been enough that was recognizable in Jillaroo as a rollicking romance to make them think, we’ll do this one even though it’s set in the country. Is that what happened?

Rachael Treasure: Yes, it was. I had gained a writer’s mentorship through the Tasmanian Writers Center and a wonderful poet called Robyn Friend had guided me through story arc and story structure. When I did hand the manuscript in, it was quite sharp, but the publisher – it was Clare Forster back in the day – and Clare said Rebecca Saunders was one of the most refreshing heroines she’d ever read, but could we do something about the swearing?

Farm girls can cuss. I don’t think Penguin recognized what they had in their hands at the time, and I begged them to put a cover quote on by a now very famous Australian country musician called Lee Kernaghan.

That is not heard of in literary circles – you normally put other author quotes on the cover – but because I was a nobody, they said sure, put Lee Kernaghan on the front cover. That named it up to my readership who are authentic country people. On the original cover of Jillaroo I also requested a real horse and a real farmer and real mountains and a real woman, not the photoshop version of the romantic notion.

Since Jillaroo, the genre has almost consumed itself with that romance theme, and I’ve almost written myself outside of the genre 20 years on, which is kind of exciting.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s really interesting. Your website these days makes it very clear up front how you see yourself. It’s not a traditional author website because you’ve got it there really bold, right in front of you. You say you’re a mother, regenerative agriculturalist, and author. I wondered if you really do see author as the third string in your bow.

Rachael Treasure: I love this question, Jenny. I was pondering it today and I believe that motherhood is the most under-revered role a woman can take. I wanted to name motherhood up first because if we were celebrated first and foremost by our culture as mothers, we wouldn’t be at war with mother nature and putting chemicals on our babies’ food in the paddock. We wouldn’t be sending our babies off to war.

For me, motherhood is the most important role. Not to have a perfect house, but to have that innate wisdom that says I am one part in a long, long chain of the future. I want to impart that to my children. The other thing about motherhood is it links in perfectly with agriculture. The earth is our mother. At the moment we are destroying and cannibalizing our mother, so again I wanted to put regenerative agriculture, which is all about partnering with mother nature.

It’s not about turning hippie and doing away with all the technology we’ve managed to create. Some of the stuff out there is wonderful, but I wanted to say let’s regenerate our mother. All of that experience I have – hands-on on the farm and with my children, goes into the writing aspect. It’s all integrated, but it was a very deliberate move to put mother up there first.

Jenny Wheeler: Your most recent novel, White Horses, your seventh novel, brings out that regenerative agriculture theme incredibly clearly. You couldn’t read the book and not know that it’s there, but it weaves beautifully into the story. I don’t believe you feel you’re being preached at, but it seems as if you’ve always perhaps had that sense of a deeper social and generational concern with the stories you’ve been framing. Would that be fair comment?

Rachael Treasure: That is an absolutely accurate comment. I always wanted to write stories that were challenging, but by the end of it uplifting and transformative. Even though I put my readers through some very tough scenes, that’s life. Life throws us some huge curve balls, and it’s how we respond rather than react to those.

It has been a very deliberate move to challenge my readers with every book. I could just write a book a year that comes out for Christmas that makes people feel tingly, but I wanted women in particular to pick up these books and feel they can transcend themselves as women, because our culture isn’t teaching us how to do this.

I know some readers may turn away and go and read something that’s less challenging, but at the end of the day, you always know with a Rachael Treasure that it’s going to uplift you by the end of it. I’ve even had farmers now who have read White Horses and they’ve come up to me – males – and they’ve said they’re going home to change their land management.

I think story is such a powerful tool to transcend what is in the cognitive brain that churns over every day, and if I can make my readers really feel emotion, it may change their actions in their day to day.

Jenny Wheeler: The central character of White Horses is a young woman called Drift, raised by her father in remote parts of Western Australia, so she’s grown up outside the normal social norms and she probably doesn’t have a very good grip on what is expected of a young woman.

You give us a vision of a vibrant and thriving rural Australia, but you don’t dodge some of the more brutal aspects of farm culture as it is. She has to face up to two nasty sexual assaults quite unprotected, and in the environment, it seems fairly hopeless at first that she is going to find justice.

I won’t give away any storylines, but there is a sense, at the beginning, that the forces against her are rather too big for her to overcome. Tell us a bit about that. Did you see that kind of thing yourself as a young woman in farming?

Rachael Treasure: I think it’s not just in farming. I had a childhood in Hobart as well, which is a major city in Tasmania. Alcohol is the legal drug of choice for many Australians. We self-medicate on that, and I saw a lot of young women putting themselves at risk in really vulnerable situations.

When you dovetail that with a lack of self-esteem – because you have a culture that brings down your power as a female due to media and advertising and pornography. I saw that as a young woman.

Without going into details, let’s just say most of my experience and my friends’ – men don’t get. These sorts of situations that Drift encounters never go through a judicial system. It doesn’t get to a legal system because it’s kind of part of the culture. I wanted to showcase that in my character Drift.

Drift is a young woman, she doesn’t have access to a mobile phone until much later on in her life. I see the young women in the world now who have these mobile phones and screens that are almost marketing to them what it means to be a woman.

That means appealing to men, rather than uplifting and enjoying pleasure and beauty for beauty’s sake. Drift has this wonderful connection with mother nature, and she can get as high as a kite looking at a sunset or looking into the eyes of her working dog. She feels beautiful within the landscape.

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I wanted to impart that in her character and at the same time say to my readers, if you’re a female and you’ve been through these gruesome things that most women, unfortunately, encounter at some point – misogyny and sexism – you can transcend it. I do put Drift through some grueling stuff, but it’s a transcendent moment.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it is. It ends up really well. There’s a strong, mystical element which people probably have already picked up on. There’s a sense that nature and the spiritual world has its own wisdom, which we can discover if we open ourselves to it. Even the name of the book – I didn’t understand at the beginning what White Horses was going to refer to, but it has quite an evocative, deeper meaning for Drift in terms of her life.

I don’t know if it’s something we want to talk about because it might be giving away a storyline, but she’s a motherless girl being raised in a situation where her mum disappeared at some stage in her life, didn’t she, and white horses have a special meaning for her.

Rachael Treasure: Yes, absolutely. So white horses – we’ve always named the ocean, the white caps on the waves, white horses, and I guess when Drift looks out to those white horses, it evokes this kind of mystery of what’s happened in her world.

But also, when you talk about spirituality, I’m studying a Bachelor of Science of Regenerative Agriculture part-time. It’s the first of its kind in the world with a university in New South Wales. I love science. Science is now looking at holism and marrying up with spirituality.

Effectively, we are made of carbon. We are made of the same stuff as stars. White Horses refers to the fact that we are all in one ocean. You may be one wave, Jenny, across there in New Zealand, but I’m part of that same ocean as another wave.

Drift, being motherless, represents we’re all feeling motherless because we’re disconnected from the earth. Her connection with the sea, to her mother, and of course to the spiritual mother of the land, and then the other wise women, Charlie Weatherbourne and Wilma the traveling librarian – we have these wise women come into the story – they are a representation of how women can transform the earth.

There are very subtle messages in there, particularly about cycles of the moon, representations of color. I studied the thirteen clan mothers in Native American teaching of what each moon of thirteen moons of the year represents to women – when they would go into their lodges and seek wisdom.

You don’t actually feel any of that or see any of that in the storyline of White Horses, right in your face, but it is all embedded there in the research.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s what makes it so heartening that White Horses was voted one of Booktopia’s top 20 favorite books of 2019. Booktopia, for people who might not know, is a very big Australian book site, probably the biggest Australian book site, and readers vote for those books. So with these things we have been talking about – the regenerative agriculture, the spiritual aspect – for your book to come out in the top 20, that’s quite a vote of confidence from readers, isn’t it?

Rachael Treasure: Yes, and I am so grateful for my readers who are ready to get this, because I think our media like to keep us hooked on junk, the same as our junk food systems. They like to keep us hooked on the junk, so we keep spending and buying all the stuff that has served us well until we were about to become extinct.

For my readers to have voted me into that bandwidth of commercialism, I am extraordinarily grateful, and honor my readers for going along with me, because like you say, it’s been a 20-year journey and I’ve grown up as a woman in that time. I feel like I’ve had nearly three generations of women growing with me, which has been such a special thing.

Jenny Wheeler: The other thing that fascinates me about this whole topic of the Australian fiction market and the rural element is that the vast majority of your readers would be urban, wouldn’t they, because that reflects the population in Australia. It’s vastly urban compared with rural, so you’re educating the rural population.

Rachael Treasure: Yes. I get emails from people who are using this chemical on their land, or they’re grazing their animals differently, or they’re even being kinder to their husband because they can see it will benefit them.

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There’s that, but the urban readers say that I take them on a journey, and I’ve had people say they now shop differently as a result. They don’t just go into the massive corporate supermarket and buy a carrot that is nutritionally deficient. I’ve changed their awareness around shopping, which again comes down to the power of storytelling.

In the sites I’ve been studying and the soil people I work with – I work with a not-for-profit called Carbon8 – it talks about farmers putting 8% carbon into the soil, and if we all did that, we would sequester and stabilize all the industrial emissions we’ve put out.

One of the devices the scientist is coming up with is a handheld app and you can wave it over a piece of fruit or vegetable, and it can tell you the nutrient density. In the study he did recently, he compared a supermarket carrot with a market garden carrot. You would have to eat 200 supermarket carrots to get the same nutritional value out of the one carrot that was grown in healthy soil.

So in talking about books, I always veer off into soil, and I apologize to my beautiful interviewers like you, Jenny, but this is what underpins all of it. For me to be able to get my book into an urban person’s hand to say, go to a local farmer’s market and ask if the soil was alive that this food was grown in, then that is powerful, it really is.

 Jenny Wheeler: You’re preaching to the converted here, I must admit! You referred to the fact that life delivers some nasty curly things now and then, and you had a particular experience of that which has been very generously shared with your readers.

You had a divorce, you lost the farm you were working on, you spent a couple of years in deep soul work as a result of that experience, and out the other end came a painfully honest memoir, a wonderful book called Down the Dirt Roads, which was long listed for the Tasmanian Premier’s Award.

Once again, it attracted a lot of attention. It’s a personal story which gave a really transparent insight into what rural women are facing up to. Can you tell us a little bit about that? It must have been an extremely painful thing to open up and talk about it in public.

Rachael Treasure: Yes, it certainly was. I wanted to do it with love because I believe everybody that comes into our life is our teacher. I didn’t want to make anybody else wrong in the process of what happened, but, because of my gender, my father opted to keep my ex-husband on the land.

I effectively had to leave what I feel was my spirit place, my childhood home, where I used to ride my pony and go for runs and hug trees. I’ve had to rebuild my life with my children away from that place, and I wanted to share that story to say to other women, if you are cast out because of your gender, it’s a chance to grow and it’s a chance to find your power – not in an angry and aggressive way, but really find your power.

In that 10-year journey, it’s still painful, I still miss that land, I still feel disconnect from where I ought to be in the world, but it’s given me such, what I would call a post-traumatic growth phase of regenerating land elsewhere and knowing that I am exactly where I need to be at the exact right moment and everything that’s happened to me up to this point is meant to be.

So there is surrender and acceptance, and also the gift that I can tell story again, to help other people heal.

Jenny Wheeler: Over the period you’ve been engaged in your writing, have you noticed any change in how things are for women “down on the farm”? How would you measure your progress, and generically, as a woman, measure that change?

Rachael Treasure: I’ve been fortunate enough, in the process of having the trauma in my life, to seek a new tribe, and I’ve discovered the regenerative agricultural tribe. Before, when I was a rural journalist, you’d go into a farmers’ meeting and it was all men – majority of men – and they’d be sitting with that kind of closed off body language.

Whoever was presenting that – they’re tough nuts to crack, and farmers who go to war every day, which is what farmers do, generally, they put on their boots and they go out and spray and kill everything to grow one monocrop.  Of course you’re going to be hardened like that.

What I’ve noticed by stepping into the regenerative ag world, it’s usually 50/50. There are men, there are women, gender isn’t even an issue. We are so excited by what we’re discovering. Regenerative agriculture regenerates the individual, the family, the farm, the profit margins, it regenerates the ecology. I’ve noticed huge change in the last 10 years, and it’s been such a godsend that I found my tribe in that.

Jenny Wheeler: I think now is the time for you to tell us about your own regenerative agriculture project. You are rejuvenating a hundred acres of what you describe as brutalized land in Richmond, Tasmania. Tell us about that, and what is your dream for that land?

Rachael Treasure: I have to admit to my beautiful partner, Daniel. He is one of those men who is very masculine, but he’s also balanced in his energy, so much so that all the animals we have on that land come running to him because he has such a beautiful energy.

With our land, we took it on three years ago now. It is the longest continuously farmed land since white fella turned up in Australia. It’s in an area where grain was shipped out to Sydney to get them through the famine years in the late 1700’s-early 1800s. The land we walked onto had been leased, it had been cropped, it had been sprayed. The soil was dead. It took us three years to find an earthworm.

Using regenerative holistic principles, we have used Aloeburn Poll Merinos, which are a lovely merino sheep that are suited to the Australian environment. Our friends bred those, and we brought thirty down from what we call mainland Australia.

We have those, and then we have our cow ladies – they are Dexters and they’re light, smaller-framed cattle. These animals are being mob grazed, so we’re moving them daily, and in the space of moving them daily, we’re also using that grazing to regenerate the soil and the soil biology is coming back to life.

The only input we’ve used is a product called Nutrisoil, which is like a worm juice and a friend of mine, that’s her family product. We’re following the advice of a New Zealand woman called Nicole Masters who has written a book called For the Love of Soil. She is a master in regenerating soil and she’s doing that on a global scale with farmers all around the world.

Our dream for Ripple Farm Partners – we call it that because we want to ripple the ideas out – is to convert a huge shearing shed into an information space so we can have field days and we can showcase not only what the profits look like for farming this way, but also how the land feels. When you nurture a diverse ecology, you can actually feel it in your body.

We’re hoping we can restore the wetland, we’re planting thousands of trees, and this all has to happen in and around caring for kids and writing a novel. But it’s happening slowly and it’s happening synergistically and beautifully.

Jenny Wheeler: I’ve been fascinated by the no dig organic market garden thing that’s happening now, where they turn over, say, eight different crops over a growing season without any chemical fertilizers.

There’s quite a bit of that going on in New Zealand and I’ve become aware of it over the last couple of years. It’s one of those things that I think, oh, if I was 40 years younger! It sounds like this is a similar thing on a bigger scale. Would you be able to make a living out of a hundred acres if it was farmed right?

Rachael Treasure: Definitely. You could make a living out of one acre, you really could, if you’re vertically stacking and if you’re working within the principles of mother nature. Mother nature is so abundant. People often say, this wouldn’t work on a broad scale or this wouldn’t work in my garden, but it does.

We are seeing whole buildings converted in cities to growing food. I think the key to it is soil, that universe of soil. Obviously, you’re a gardener, but they say there are 6 billion living organisms in one teaspoon of healthy soil. If you get that balance right, then we sequester carbon, we put nutrients back into our food, we support other life, not just to feed humans, but other creatures as well.

The beauty of the internet now is we are able to share this information and we’re not attached to somebody trying to sell us something. Farmers are sharing with other farmers.

For example, in White Horses the property, The Planet – which readers will discover is the most beautiful place on the planet – was inspired by Ian and Di Haggerty who are large grain croppers over in WA and they are farming regeneratively. They’re restoring salt-affected land that had been locked up and left. It was marginal land that farmers had given up on, and so when you read about The Planet, you can know that there are people actually doing that in the harshest climates of Western Australia.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely, and with the show notes that go with this podcast episode, we put links into all those sorts of reference points for people who want to follow through, so I’ll make sure we get the link for them and put that in. That is fascinating to me – I didn’t know it was a real farm that you’d based it on.

Rachael Treasure: With The Planet, that’s more looking at holistic systems about renewable energy and food supply and urban farming, but if people think what I’m writing about is fanciful or fictional, the Haggertys are actually a grassroots movement – a loving, beautiful couple that are honoring the earth, but also producing grain that is so much more nutrient dense than the grain that’s coming out of other farming systems. It’s a case of watch this space and I’m committed to telling story around it.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to your wider career away from the books, is there one thing you’ve done with your writing career, the writing side of it, more than any other, that you’d credit with being the secret of your success?

Rachael Treasure: Success can be measured in so many ways, but I think success is when your children adore you and they are comfortable telling you everything, particularly when mine are teenagers now.  And you are peaceful in your space, from the cows right through to the chickens.

For me as a writer, I think Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way transforms. I do the morning pages. The other thing that transformed my awareness around the process of writing was Dr Joe Dispenza.

He’s into neuroscience. Once you understand brainwave states, you can start to understand where you go as a writer and then you don’t have to push so hard, you can just become in a brainwave state that channels what you need to know without knowing it, if that makes sense.

Also Dr. Bruce Lipton wrote a book called The Biology of Belief. If you believe you’re going to get writer’s block, you will get writer’s block, but if you believe there’s a creative vortex out there – I think Elizabeth Gilbert refers to it as Big Magic – but if you know there’s this creative vortex out there that is abundant and you’re still in your mind enough to tap it into your heart, then your writing world is your oyster.

Jenny Wheeler: What were your expectations when you started out as an author with Jillaroo and, when you look back, have they been fulfilled or is there something completely different that’s happened?

Rachael Treasure: When you’re in it, you can’t see it, but looking back, I think, wow, what a journey, and what an incredible push through to keep writing, no matter what. It’s almost like my novels have been my therapy at the same time, a healthy kind of therapy. It’s better than becoming an alcoholic.

What I would most love to do next is crack the United States market, which is something I haven’t done. I think I’ve put that tag of ‘mother first’ so much that I’ve not pushed myself out into the marketplace. I’d love to reach the U S because I think there are so many farmers who are suffering right now and their chemical farming system with the genetically modified crops that will cope with Roundup – they are destroying their whole systems faster than we are.

That’s why. Not to become a best seller in the U S. I want to crack the United States so I can find some farmers who are willing and ready to change.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Rachael as reader, because we are starting to come to the end of our time together, tell us about your reading habits. Do you binge read? We are focusing a bit more on the binge reading side of things because we are people who enjoy genre fiction. What are your reading tastes, and have you got things you’d like to recommend?

Rachael Treasure: I don’t read fiction while I’m writing my own fiction because the narrative voice interferes, and if I’m reading really wonderful fiction, you get an inferiority complex.

I cannot stop with an Alexander McCall Smith book – The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I love his work. My daughter has reading delays because she has cerebral palsy, so her eye muscles aren’t so good. She read me one of his children’s books and it was so good I wanted to read more, from his children’s books right through. I would binge read him.

I find that I mostly read nonfiction. I mentioned For the Love of Soil. I’m reading Tara Westover’s Educated which is a memoir, an American girl growing up in a very fundamentalist family, which is fascinating, and I read for research. I’m reading Raising the Skirt: The Unsung Power of the Vagina, so there you go, I’ve said that word out loud, which is what ladies need to do, according to this book.

I’m reading a lot of feminist literature, in the ‘God is good, let’s celebrate harvest sense.’ I binge on nonfiction while I’m writing fiction. My go-to is Alexander McCall Smith and Kayte Nunn. I really enjoy Kayte Nunn’s work as well. She’s put some lovely books out that I’ve enjoyed.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned the name Joe Dispenza. Is that a he or a she, and have they written anything?

Rachael Treasure: Yes. Dr Joe Dispenza. He has written numerous books and he’s got loads of YouTube clips that he’s put forward.

Jenny Wheeler: Okay. If people want to follow up with that, we’ll be able to point them in the right direction. That’s great. Having looked back over this wonderful arc that you’ve been on, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you’d change and if so, what?

Rachael Treasure: That is a very wonderful question. I would have been less hard on myself. I think I was trying to be a brilliantly perfect mummy. I was trying to be everything to everyone. I probably would have stood my ground and said, you know what, you’re bringing me a cup of tea. I’m getting fresh flowers.

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These are things I do now because I’ve found my voice enough to say, time out for mother, but I had very little self-esteem left after the experience I had with the chiefs of my tribe who didn’t protect me. I was very hard on myself and I think a lot of women do it, I blamed myself for what happened. Coming through that, I now see it’s a cultural flaw. I would have been much kinder to myself.

Jenny Wheeler: I think we can probably all identify with that a little bit. Looking over the next 12 months, what’s happening for Rachael the writer? I think you’ve got a new book you’re just finishing now, aren’t you? What have you got under development for the next 12 or 18 months?

Rachael Treasure: We’ve always got the farm. We’ve got some multi-species feeding going in there. In terms of writing, it was due today, delivered, a manuscript called Milking Time. It’s about a Tasmanian girl in the dairy industry, her family are dairy farmers, and she’s so angry with them she becomes a vegan.

It’s wonderful, the use of humor to showcase how, if we polarize one another and exist on opposite ends of the scale – I’m a animal product eater, and I’m a vegan or I’m a vegetarian and we clash heads – we are not serving ourselves.

This next book is about the divine feminine, the raising of the skirts, because that’s how the ancients blessed their harvest – the women would go in the field and raise their skirts. That kind of book, to deliver that kind of message, needs to be very nuanced so I think I’m going to have 12 to 18 months of trying to soften that.

Like you say with White Horses, there’s a big message in there, but it has to be done with love and heart and humor rather than preaching. It’s going to be a big challenge, but there’s that mindset again, that it’s all doable.

Jenny Wheeler: When are we likely to see that one published?

Rachael Treasure: I’m not sure. I’m yet to speak to the publishers. COVID did such a log jam with the cycling of books through the system, they’re going to have to read it. They may think this is far too full on for a reader just yet, so it may need 12 months of editing. I’ve pushed the bar on this one again. I really want to bring my readers with me on it. Hopefully this time next year, Christmas 2021. Watch this space. It could be earlier. It could have just landed perfectly. I know it hasn’t.

Jenny Wheeler: I get the impression that you do like to hear from your readers. Tell us where they can find you online and how you like to interact with them.

Rachael Treasure: I call the social media a black hole. I think it can absorb far too much of our time, so I try not to go on social media. I usually try and post one thing a day on Facebook.

For the Twitterers and the other platforms, I’m very lax and I don’t understand it, but my Rachael Treasure Facebook page has day to day stuff about how much washing I’ve let pile up and how unclean my floors are, but it also has me interacting with the animals and what Daniel’s doing on the farm, even my son getting in the football grand finals. It’s a lovely way of having a family of readers around me. I’ve had people who interact there with me.

Jenny Wheeler: We haven’t mentioned it at all, but I think that in the past you’ve been very hot on training dogs, haven’t you? You’ve done quite a bit of dog training. Do you still do any of that today?

Rachael Treasure: Yes, I do. I’ve just got myself a little short-haired border collie who has New Zealand bloodlines, the dearest little thing. On my website I’ve got a self-published book called Dog Speak. I documented the journey of my dear old Australian Kelpie Rousie and how I trained him.

We prescribe low stress stock handling, so everything we do around our livestock is very quiet and very gentle. The dog training is ongoing. I don’t do it on a large scale to sell dogs, I do it because I love it. This dear little dog is only six months, but she’s coming along.

Jenny Wheeler: You do use her to help control the animals, but you do it in a very quiet way.

Rachael Treasure: We will do. To send her on a job now would be like asking a kindergarten kid to move a car. I don’t start my dogs until they’re fully mature, but she comes with me. Imagine tapping a balloon and keeping it in the air. That’s all the working dog needs to do – keep the bubble that is the livestock kind of in the air and guiding where you’re going.

We are using her energy from a very large distance rather than force, and our animals will follow Daniel anywhere. He just has to walk ahead and they go.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Rachael, it’s been fantastic talking, it really has.

Rachael Treasure: Thanks Jenny.

If you enjoyed Rachael Treasure you might also enjoy. Rachael Johns’ “Entertaining Life Lit ‘- Australian stories originally inspired by Rachael Treasure’s Jillaroo…

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Roselle Lim’s first fabulist-romcom, called Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune, was picked up for TV and it looks like the second, just out, Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop, could well find its way to the small screen as well. That’s wonderful success for a writer early in her career, but Roselle put in a dedicated apprenticeship to achieve her “overnight success”.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading podcast Roselle talks about what it took to strike success with her first novel, how she kept going when even her teachers told her that her English wasn’t good enough to be a writer, and the delights of eating out in Paris – all in the interests of research for her book, of course.

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Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Where to find Roselle Lim: 

Website: https://www.rosellelim.com/

Instagram: @rosellewriter

Twitter: @rosellewriter

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39754733-natalie-tan-s-book-of-luck-and-fortune

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. But now, here’s Roselle.

Jenny Wheeler: Hi there, Roselle and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. 

Roselle Lim: Thank you for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve been chatting before we went on air, and you tell me that you’re in the depths of a Canadian winter. We are in the middle of our summer here, so we’re right at opposite ends of the Pole.

Your debut romcom was called Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune and it sold straight through to TV I believe. That’s a very big success for a debut author.

Then I noticed that the second book, the one we’re going to be discussing today, which is Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop, has already been picked by one of the Shondaland editors.

Shondaland, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a company that is doing a tremendous amount of popular TV. They have just had the Bridgerton series on Netflix, so you have to conclude that the second book has got a good chance of continuing to head for the small screen as well.

From that, people might assume that it’s been a very straightforward and easy road for you, but in fact it wasn’t quite that simple was it? Can you tell us what preceded what people might see as an “overnight success?”

Roselle Lim: Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune was my, I think, eighth manuscript that I’ve written, and the ones I had written before were not good in that I had to get them out of my system to be able to write this book. It took me a little under two years to revise this book with my agent too.

Jenny Wheeler: When you say you had to get them out of your system, were they in this same fabulist-romcom genre?

Roselle Lim: The other books I’ve written were fantasy, some were romance. I find that with Natalie Tan, it’s more women’s fiction because it doesn’t have the amount of kissing and all of that, that you would categorize as a traditional romance.

As for the magical realism and the fabulism, I decided to incorporate that because I find that, culturally, it makes a lot of sense because there’s so much superstition in my culture.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. How did you keep going during those eight manuscripts? People listening who think they might like to write a book probably don’t feel they’re going to write eight before they get published. How did you keep yourself going during that period?

Roselle Lim: Sheer stubbornness. You can accomplish so much if you’re stubborn enough to think you will eventually get there. That is the one piece of advice – you can call it perseverance, you can call it stubbornness or bullheadedness, but it’s this idea that you will eventually get there if you try hard enough and just keep writing.

Jenny Wheeler: When you were at the beginning stage, what did that phrase “get there” mean for you? Was it simply to get one book published? What were your expectations at the beginning?

Roselle Lim: It’s small steps. First, get a literary agent, then eventually get a book. For me, when I started, that was the goal – get an agent and get a book deal. Now I think more long-term, as in, have a career. My dream now is to have first a bookshelf, then a bookcase full of my published books and hopefully different editions in different languages.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Both of these stories are anchored in an Asian family dynamic. It’s fascinating stuff. It happens in all cultures but is perhaps slightly more pronounced in Asian families – inter-generational loyalties and obligations, the affection and conflict that arises from those things, and also a very strong, fabulist theme, as we’ve discussed, as well as food and sweet light romance.

This is territory you know well. Tell us how your own background interweaves with the Yu family, for example, in Paris Teashop.

Roselle Lim: That is a very meddling, loud, extended family, which I would say is loosely based on my family. They love, they love hard, they love big, they will smother you with love, and you know their intentions are that they want the best for you. It’s just what they think is the best for you may not necessarily be the best for you, but you know they are coming at it from a position of love.

Jenny Wheeler: Vanessa has inherited this gift of prophetic sayings and she doesn’t really want it because it’s interfering with her life. She’s in this very difficult position where she’s trying to reject something that everybody else in the family thinks is an absolute blessing and boon, isn’t she?

Roselle Lim: It is again kind of a – I wouldn’t say a metaphor, but it symbolizes Asian parents, my parents in general. Their expectations for what I should be or where I should be versus what I want for myself could differ, in that they would expect you to be a doctor, be a lawyer, somewhere along that line.

My sister followed that to a ‘t’. She became a really good accountant, a corporate accountant. She’s followed that. Then you have me, where I wanted to be a writer and an artist, and that’s not at all in line with what they are hoping for or expecting. It’s the same with Vanessa.

Jenny Wheeler: That must have been a very difficult transition for you in earlier years.

Roselle Lim: It is, because now that I’m older, I feel bad for my parents who had to parent me in that I was such a different kind of child. They are like, okay, go take piano lessons or take organ lessons, and I’m like, I don’t really want that.

I want painting lessons, I want art lessons, which was completely not what they were used to. There weren’t artists in my family. They’re all a bunch of bankers, they worked in banks and some were entrepreneurs, but this kind of creativity, having a job or a career in the creative field, was completely foreign to them.

Jenny Wheeler: How do they feel about it today?

Roselle Lim: I don’t think they still realize how hard it is to carve a place for yourself in the creative field and how many obstacles you go through to succeed in it. I think they look at it as, oh, that’s really a nice thing she has right now, but I don’t know if they know the true extent of what it took to get a book out and how many rejections it took from editors and from agents to even get to this point.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you think maybe when Natalie Tan finally appears on Netflix that they might then think, oh wow, she’s made it.

Roselle Lim: I don’t know. My dad wants a cameo. At this point it’s not with Netflix, but the production company John Wells. He’s more known for Shameless and Animal Kingdom and West Wing. That’s what his company has developed. We are at the pilot stage where we have a writer and I think we’re trying to secure a director as well. So it’s not with Netflix, but it’s getting close.

The thing with Hollywood is that it moves really fast or it can move really slow. I feel publishing in general is a very slow industry.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve mentioned that food is part of it, and it’s obvious that you absolutely adore food, there is food pretty well on every page. I was left wondering whether you like to cook yourself or whether you make it your business to find great chefs and eat out a lot.

Roselle Lim: A little of column A and a little of column B, in that when I was younger, my dad is the cook in the family. That’s why the Natalie Tan was dedicated to him. He’s the one who would cook, and he would tell me in the morning, I’m making this for dinner, make sure you take this out from the freezer and do the prep work ahead of time, so that by the time he gets home from work, everything will be ready to cook.

I’ve learned how to cook from him in that I’ve always wanted to see how food gets prepared and how it’s made. Given the preference though, I prefer to eat than to put the effort into making something, because there’s a formula. It takes two hours of toil and labor to present a meal that will be eaten in under 10 minutes, and that inequality doesn’t sit well with me. I would prefer to be the one consuming it.

When we went to Paris, I made sure I ate everything I could. Like everything. We walked everywhere. I looked like that child with my grubby little hands against the clear glass windows, staring inside to see what is going on in there – for bakeries, for patisseries, everything. I just wanted to go in and it helped that I could speak a bit of French and I can understand and read.

I had no problems going in and out, checking everything out, going into chocolate shops and candy shops and being able to order and ask for what I wanted. And yes, I tried to eat everything I could, that was listed in that book.

Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like there’s another book there of your guide to Paris food.

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Roselle Lim: I made sure that we booked the reservation at a Michelin star restaurant while we were in Paris. I had to. I don’t buy fancy purses or designer stuff, but I will save money to make sure that I tasted it. We had a dinner at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in St. Germaine, and the food there was just incredible. It’s one of those things where if I have to write about food, and I want to write about food, I should be able to try everything and convey that on the page.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I think you do, so that’s wonderful. For those of us who probably won’t ever get to go there, it’s a lovely little bit of armchair travel in itself.

There’s a strong sense of other realms as well, as we’ve mentioned with Vanessa – the fabulist side, and she’s got this prophetic gift. You say that growing up in a household where Chinese superstition was infused with Filipino Catholicism gave you this sense of another realm. Is that an accurate way of describing it?

Roselle Lim: It is, because when I grew up, I would have my mom telling me these things that are not at all rooted in actual medicine or science. My mom would be like, you want to get taller? That’s easy. Just jump up and down and your body will stretch.

And I’m like, huh, really mom? Or things like, if you’re ever sleeping, not in your house or somewhere else, or even in your house, make sure that when you’re asleep your feet are not facing the window.

And I’m like, why? And she’s like, because the bad spirit will come, pluck you by your toes and pull you out of the window and gobble you up eventually. And I’m like, okay, I don’t really believe in that. It’s little things like that. How could you not think that there was magic and there’s magic in the ordinary world.

Jenny Wheeler: These books are both about young Asian women finding their own paths, honoring their own stories while still fulfilling family obligations, as much as they can. I think that’s reflected in a wider area for you in that you’re also passionate about diversity and equity in publishing as well, aren’t you? Tell us what it was like coming to Canada as a young child and having to integrate into a completely different culture.

Roselle Lim: I was lucky in that in the Philippines, because it was colonized by the US, English was definitely present. I wouldn’t say it’s the first language, but it’s present. I have written it in my bio and it is true, I grew up watching Hulk Hogan and the WWF wrestlers on TV, and that taught me a bit of English.

By the time I came here, a lot of my cousins ended up having to take ESL classes. When I got here, the first thing I had to figure out was be more confident in English and also start learning French. That’s the other thing. Growing up, going through the school system, being an immigrant, I had been told many times by my English teachers that writing is not something I can do because my English isn’t good enough.

To this day, I’m still tripping up a little bit when it comes to tenses, because there are no tenses in Tagalog or Chinese. The date or time is framed in a different way. Instead of saying I walked to the store, you would say I walk to the store yesterday, so it would give you a timeframe when it happened. Tenses still trip me up a little bit.

It’s one of those things where if you get told ‘no’ so many times, that whatever you’re writing won’t be interesting or whatever – people will tell you all these things, and if you get told enough times, they’ll either break you or make you more stubborn to prove them wrong. I am in the stubborn to prove them wrong group.

Jenny Wheeler: Very obviously. You expressed this desire to write even when you were at school, did you?

Roselle Lim: I did. I was that girl in my all-girls Catholic high school that slipped my friends pages of my saucy romance novel in Math class. Yes, that was me.

Jenny Wheeler: What a gorgeous picture in itself. Tell us something about your creative process. Has it changed? You have now written 10 manuscripts, haven’t you, you’re probably in your 11th, we’ll get onto that in a moment, but you’ve probably completed at least 10 manuscripts. Has your creative process changed during that period of writing?

Roselle Lim: It has, because before I thought writing is easy. You just sit and you write whatever you want. You don’t need a plan to sit in front of the computer and just type, type, type. You’ll figure it out later. I didn’t realize that this wasn’t a good method for me until I signed with Jenny, my current agent.

She taught me that if you outline now and plan things, you don’t have to spend so much time revising it later. I’m like, wow, this is more efficient, I think I should start doing this.

So I’ve started writing outlines. I’ve started writing a query letter of a novel I haven’t written yet before I even start writing it, because that way it teaches me to get to the core of the novel quickly and to have a very concise pitch of what the novel is about. I find that really helpful. And lately, for the past few novels, I’ve started bullet journaling which helps me plan everything out even more.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell me about bullet journaling. I haven’t heard that expression before.

Roselle Lim: It’s using a journal, and basically it’s a dotted journal and I would print out photos of what my characters look like, so it makes it so much easier having it there on the page for when I’m describing them. All their character bios would be on there, the chronological order, even plotting.

One of the methods I use now that I find really helpful is after every chapter I’ve written, while drafting, I write down what subplots are occurring in that chapter. The tension level changes and writing down one or two lines of what happened in that chapter so that when I’m revising, I could easily find the places I need to address.

Jenny Wheeler: That is very organized. Were you ever tempted to indie publish any of those earlier manuscripts, and what about indie publishing generally for the future? Are you very much happy with the trad publishing process?

Roselle Lim: I see how much work friends of mine who self-publish put into everything. Again, I go back to my cooking and consuming. I see how much work they put into it. They have to hire a cover designer, they have to hire a layout – all the stuff traditional publishing would do. And I understand, yes for them it’s wonderful because they get all of the measure of control for marketing, what they need to do for the search terms and all of that.

I think of it as too much work for me. I prefer to be the one who that is eating in 10 minutes versus the one who’s preparing the food for two hours.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve got a very efficient process, haven’t you? Has it been tough launching this book, the Vanessa Yu Paris Teashop book, in the year of Covid? Has it mucked things up for you at all or affected your writing process? How have you been going there?

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Roselle Lim: It hasn’t affected my writing process in that I’ve always been the type of person who is comfortable staying home, though now, during the pandemic, I’m yearning to go out, even though we’re in a lockdown, and I normally am fine with being home. For Vanessa, its publishing hasn’t quite adapted to how they’re supposed to do things during a pandemic, so it’s affected that in the publicity and the marketing side.

Jenny Wheeler: I think I read somewhere that you missed out on going to a book conference you really wanted to go to.

Roselle Lim: It’s the first one I was invited to in the US and I couldn’t go. It was canceled. I also missed my book launch. I already had the baker picked out. She was going to bake madeleines dipped in chocolate with pistachio bits on it to serve at the book launch. I had all these things planned out and all of that went out the window.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, what a shame. Turning from the specific books to talking a little of your wider career – you’ve mentioned about that tension there was in the family because your own ambitions didn’t quite match up with what your family thought for you. I think you also are still very interested in art as well. Tell us about your life before you became a full-time author. How did you make that transition?

Roselle Lim: I was an artist, a full-time artist selling artwork, before I became an author. This is how, when I write, I try to paint the scenery for my readers. It’s with that artistic eye I use for my writing. I do illustration now and everything more as a hobby in that I don’t want to monetize it at all because I feel that if I do that again, it would suck the joy out of it.

Jenny Wheeler: But you very much write with an artist’s eye.

Roselle Lim: Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: Are you guilty of being a workaholic?

Roselle Lim: I’m trying to balance it because I always feel guilty. Like right now, I just turned in book three to my editor, which won’t be out until September 2022. That one is called Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club. It’s about a matchmaker who returns to her hometown in Toronto and ends up having to match seven old grumpy men.

Jenny Wheeler: It sounds wonderful. You’ve just turned that in.

Roselle Lim: That’s turned in. Book Four is not due until next March. I have a vague idea of what I want. I have the pitch all ready and I’ve got a vague synopsis of what I want to tell my editor, what I want to write for that. I haven’t started yet. I’m working on a YA fantasy right now that I’m revising for my agent.

I always feel guilty of not working. In a sense I think it’s because I was published later in life. A lot of people think the most ideal thing is to be published when you’re in your twenties, when you’re young, because this is great. But I didn’t get my first book out until Natalie. Natalie came out in 2019. I was 39. The fact that my first book came out close to my forties, I feel like I’ve missed out on so much, that I should be consistently working to catch up.

Jenny Wheeler: You have to catch up lost ground. Yes, I can understand that.

Turning to Roselle as reader, this is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to focus on books that people can read for entertainment, as well as other things, but books that bring fun into their lives. Do you like to read much and are you a binge reader? If so, what do you do read?

Roselle Lim: I try not to read when I’m drafting because I don’t want anything to seep in while I’m trying to write something. I love romance. I would buy anything, read anything, Helen Hoang writes. She’s written The Kiss Quotient and The Bride Test. I love those books.

The last thing I read that I absolutely adored that had me laughing so much – and she’s a friend of mine and also one of my favorite authors – is Sonia Hartl’s debut called Heartbreak for Hire. That’s coming out in the Spring by Simon and Schuster Gallery. It’s a fantastic, funny book.

Sonia writes these funny books that make you laugh, and this one is about a woman who works at an agency where her job is to create heartbreak for women who hire her to break the hearts of the men who have broken theirs.

Jenny Wheeler: That sounds fun. At this of your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change and if so, what would it be?

Roselle Lim: I’m not really a person who goes back and tries to have many regrets in my life in that I know I got into art school and I could have pursued art, but I decided not to. I guess some people would say, what would your life have been like if you had pursued that full-time?

For my career, the only thing I keep telling myself is that it took you this long to get to where you are and given how everything unfolded, I would do everything the same again because it turned out the way I wanted it to unfold. Maybe not in the timeframe I wanted it to unfold, but it happened the way I’ve always hoped for.

Jenny Wheeler: Why did you decide not to do art as a full-time career?

Roselle Lim: Because when I was in art school, I said I miss writing. Which is the funniest thing, because I miss writing and I’m like, so let’s go to university. I went to York University in Toronto and decided to take history and humanities.

And I’m like, this is great. Then while I’m writing all the essays, I’m like, I miss drawing naked people in art school. You can never be happy thinking of greener pastures situations.

It’s like when I’m writing too. When I’m drafting, I’m like, this is great, it’s drafting, but I miss revising because it means the thing is done and I’m just fixing it. And when I’m revising, I’m like, I really miss drafting, when I’m sitting here in my own world and creating everything.

It’s always going to be that situation, so I try to tell myself, try to enjoy where you’re at. I know you always want to be doing something else but try to enjoy the thing you’re doing at the time you’re doing it.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve talked a little bit about what your next plans are. Tell us again – I didn’t quite catch the full name of the book you’ve just turned in.

Roselle Lim: Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club.

Jenny Wheeler: I think Vanessa in this book has shown a penchant for matchmaking, hasn’t she, so it’s continuing on with that theme a little, but not Vanessa doing it.

Roselle Lim: No, this is why it’s a little bit tricky with Vanessa having film and TV rights because Evelyn appears in both books. John Wells owns the rights to Evelyn, so it makes it a little bit trickier. He has said that if he had the right people who are passionate about the project enough approach him and say, we want to develop this, he would let the rights go. But it’s finding the right person who feels passionate enough about the project.

Jenny Wheeler: That means you can’t have Aunt Evelyn in any of your new books. It stops anyone but him from having the right to film them. Is that what you’re saying?

Roselle Lim: Yes. With Sophie they are all new characters. Nobody is mentioned from the other books that are in this one. The title is an allusion to the Beatles because Sophie loves the Beatles. That’s where you get the play on words of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But it’s Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s funny, isn’t it, how a writer today needs to take these kinds of things into consideration.

Roselle Lim: It is. I had to make sure that I tried to find the sensitivity reader for some of the rep in this book. It was fun to write because it’s a love letter to my grandfathers, the ones I loved spending time with that have passed and being able to portray people who are in their seventies as very happy and fulfilled in their lives instead of what society says, that they’re lonely people living in homes who don’t really talk to anybody. You know what I mean?

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I do know what you mean. It’s that sensitivity of yours towards diversity and equality, isn’t it, extending to the generations?

Roselle Lim: It is because I’m writing what my grandfathers were like. One of the characters is loosely based on my father-in-law who has passed recently, and it made it all the more difficult and poignant to be looking at the book and turning it over, knowing that.

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Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Roselle. That one is obviously still in the same kind of genre, the slightly fabulist, lovely poetic writing that you do. Is book four going to be a change of pace at all, or is it also in that framework?

Roselle Lim: I want it to be different. It will still have the fabulism, but I want to push it closer to where fantasy is. I still have to pitch my editor and say, I really want to write this, can I please write it, thank you very much.

Jenny Wheeler: You obviously are attracted to fantasy because I think you mentioned some of your earlier books were also fantasy. Do you read fantasy yourself?

Roselle Lim: I read it. I consume it in media. I love watching fantasy shows. It’s something I’ve always loved. It’s not that I don’t love writing women’s fiction or fabulism. I do, I enjoy it, but I also really love fantasy and I want to be able to move closer towards that eventually.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. We are coming to the end of our time together, so I’m wondering, do you enjoy hearing from your readers and where can they find you online?

Roselle Lim: I do, especially when they have such wonderful things to say. I say that with all sincerity in that there are notes I’ve received from readers who write me and tell me, I’m Chinese or I’m Chinese Filipino and it’s wonderful to discover your books and see myself in these stories.

It was something I always wanted to do as a kid, I wanted to read books when I was younger that showed mirrors of me, and there weren’t that many available.

Jenny Wheeler: No, there wouldn’t have been. I saw your blog about Crazy Rich Asians, the movie, and you had a sense of excitement about seeing that movie on the mainstream cinema, didn’t you?

Roselle Lim: It is because the last time I saw an all-Asian cast that was a blockbuster was The Joy Luck Club, and that was in the nineties.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right.

Roselle Lim: Readers can find me – I’m most active on Twitter @rosellewriter and it’s the same handle for Instagram that I’m also on. My website is rosellelim.com and if they ever want to reach me, there is a contact form there.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. It’s been great talking today, it really has. Thank you so much. It’s given us a definite sense of seeing into your world, which has been marvellous.

Roselle Lim: Thank you so much for having me, Jenny.

Jenny Wheeler: Have a good day.

Roselle Lim: You too.

If you like Roselle you might like another Canadian author – Ian Hamilton’s Ava Lee mystery series... Think Jackie Chan meets Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Ian makes forensic accounting sexy with his feisty hero Ava Lee who tracks down white collar fraud and retrieves ill gotten gains with an ancient and deadly form of martial arts. And if the going gets a little rough sometimes, well Ava and her mentor Uncle like to think of themselves as the guardian angels of investors, restoring lives.

Thanks To Our Technical Support:

The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.

Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]

Attorney turned mystery writer Robert McCaw credits an ability to reinvent himself for his successful transition from a defender of justice to a storyteller with a fascination for how our past sins affect the way we behave now.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading episode Robert talks about the enduring love affair he’s had with Hawaii that led to his Koa Kane detective series and how a New York attorney transitioned into a new career as a mystery writer.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Where to find Robert McCaw: 

Website: https://robertbmccaw.com/

Facebook: @Writerrobertbmccaw

Twitter: @RobertBMcCaw

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

But now, here’s Robert.

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Robert and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.detective series author

Robert McCaw: It’s so nice to be here and it’s nice of you to make this opportunity available and let me chat with you and your listeners.

Jenny Wheeler: You have had a successful career in law and we’ll go into that a little bit later, but then you turned your hand to mystery writing, and that’s what we’re interested in today – a police series with Chief Detective Koa Kane set in Hawaii.

Was there some moment in your life when you thought, if I don’t get to write some fiction, I’ll feel as if my life hasn’t been complete? If so, was there a catalyst for it?

Robert McCaw: Well, it didn’t happen quite that way. While I was practicing law, I went to an American Bar Association Conference in Hawaii and Honolulu, and after that I went and spent some time on the Big Island. I fell in love with the place. It is one of the most culturally and geographically diverse places I’ve ever been, climate wise as well.

As I fell in love with it, I began to do more and more research, began to talk to people on the Island, went back over and over again. So it was Hawaii first, and I felt this compulsion to share with others my discovery of Hawaii and its culture and its history and its language.  Then the question was how to do that.

As a lawyer, I’ve always pieced together facts and arguments. I’ve loved puzzles and so it was kind of natural to do it as a mystery.  But then I had one of the really difficult choices to make. Because I wanted this book to speak, almost as though Hawaii is a character in the book, which is the way I think about it, I wanted my protagonist to be a Hawaiian.

Of course, I’m not Hawaiian, so that required a lot of work, and I was busy at that time with an active practice of law, so it literally took me twenty years to put the first book together. It wasn’t until after I slowed down in the law practice that I actually managed to get it out and into the hands of readers.

Jenny Wheeler: Before that moment, you’d never really considered writing fiction?

Robert McCaw: Well, I’d considered it, but I was talking to one of my partners one day and I said I was thinking about writing a book. He looked at me and said, if you were really serious, it would come out of you. That was the moment at which it became really serious – that compulsion to tell the Hawaiian story.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that challenge from someone else. You have three books published so far, but the most recent one is called Death of a Messenger, (republished from 2015 – editor note.) and it places Koa on the trail of a murder involving ancient rituals, cultural artifacts, and some background in the history of Hawaiian rights activism.

Tell us a little about how you conceived that whole series. You fell in love with Hawaii, how did you get to a murder mystery as distinct from something else, something like maybe James A. Michener might have written?

Robert McCaw: As I said before, it is this idea of telling the Hawaii story. I wanted to do it ultimately in a mystery because in a sense that’s what I had done as a lawyer. You walk into a new case, whether you’re on the plaintiff’s side or the defendant’s side, and you have to figure out the facts. It’s a detective experience, so I thought I’ll be a little bit of myself here in the protagonist and I’ll be a detective.

I then went to the top of Mauna Kea, which is a 14,000-foot extinct – at least they think it’s extinct – volcano. It is the largest volcano on the Island, and I came across this extraordinary contrast at the top of Mauna Kea. On the one hand, at about 11-12,000 feet, there was a stone quarry, and it’s gigantic. It covers about seven miles.

It was used by the ancient Hawaiians. Remember, we’re talking about people who don’t have the wheel and who don’t have a written language and who didn’t have winter clothes, who climbed Mauna Kea and mined this very hard lava. If you’ve been around lava, you know that it crumbles, you can’t make tools out of it. But this lava, because of its particular formation, was hard like granite and so the Hawaiians mined it for tools – for adzes and other tools, knives, and hammers.

Then at the top of the mountain, there are a dozen or so observatories, including the Keck observatories, which are among the most modern, the most innovative facilities in the world, these huge, huge computer-controlled telescopes. I thought, wow, here is an industrial site from the 1400s right next to these technical marvels of the 21st or maybe even the 22nd century. And I thought, this contrast, there’s got to be a great story here.

That’s where you get the story of the adze makers. I once read a piece by clearly an armchair archeologist, who guessed that these adze workers had walked up the mountain every day, worked and walked back down at night. All you have to do is drive to the top of Mauna Kea to know it’s preposterous to think that anybody could walk up in a day. It’s 14,000 feet. It’s some of the most rugged terrain in the world.

They lived up there. They lived up there for at least the summer months and worked just as the astronomers live up there and work today. And I got very curious about where they went in the wintertime and there are some theories that they went back to their villages. I created this huge lava cave in a lava tube, which are very common in Hawaii, as their winter workshop. The rest of it is all built around that initial premise.

Jenny Wheeler: I’m glad you’ve mentioned the observatory because the astronomers also feature in the story. As you’ve so nicely put it, you’ve got that ancient culture as against the most modern of human technology and science.

I gather that astronomy is quite a personal fascination of yours as well. Tell us about that. I read somewhere that you said if you hadn’t been a lawyer, you would have liked to be an astronomer.

Robert McCaw: It was the career I didn’t pursue in college. I had a very good friend in college who was an astronomy major and he and I spent lots of time together. In some senses, during that period of time, I guess I was probably jealous of him. I then went on to go into the military and it was the military that got me to go to Law School. I went to Law School and had a fabulous career, but I never gave up my interest in astronomy and I have followed it throughout my career – read lots of astronomy books, subscribed to some astronomy magazines.

After I got to Hawaii and to meeting people, I was fortunate enough to meet some of the astronomers. Indeed, Hilton Lewis, the man who is now the Director of the Keck telescopes, he and I became friends, and we’re still friends even after I wrote Death of a Messenger. I’ve had the privilege of standing at a prime focus of the Keck I telescope, and I have to tell you, it is an awesome experience, just an awesome experience.

Ed note: In Death of A Messenger Thurston Masters is the fictional director of the Alice Telescope (Robert’s fictional name for telescopes in the book). The fictional Alice Telescopes are modelled on the real Keck Telescopes.)

Jenny Wheeler: That is wonderful. The series is strong not just in those natural aspects of Hawaiian culture, but it does delve into spirituality and creation stories as well. That could have been a bit of a sensitive area for a non-Hawaiian to get into. How close did you get to that side of things and did you find it hard to research? Were people happy to talk?

Robert McCaw: Two things. One, I did an enormous amount of research. There’s a wonderful library and a museum in Honolulu called the Bishop Museum, put together by the Bishop Trust which is a huge financial institution in Hawaii.

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They have a wonderful library with lots of original materials going back to the missionaries who first brought the written language to Hawaii, and with many artifacts that precede that. Then also there is a fabulous library at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and I would go and stay in a bed and breakfast and spend a week in the library.

I got a lot of it that way, but I also met ranchers on the Big Island who told stories about the graves on their property, and about the kapa which is a form of bark cloth that the Hawaiians used.

We had some very close Hawaiian friends who shared stories with me, and there are books of Hawaiian legends – and I’ve read many of them – that go back to the very early missionary days, when the missionaries first heard many of these stories. That’s really where it comes from.

In terms of getting close, I’ve never been much for the supernatural, but the volcanoes on this Island are just awesome and they have this awesome and unpredictable power, which is kind of great for a mystery writer. They’ve shaped the land and they continue to do that.

The geography fascinated the Polynesians, and it actually shaped Hawaiian history. When Kamehameha was struggling with other warlords on the Island, there was Kamehameha on one side and a Hawaiian King on the other side. Ali’i is the way the Hawaiians refer to them. He walked his troops by the Kilauea volcano, it exploded, covered them in ash and killed most of them. That is one of the reasons that Kamehameha was successful in uniting the islands, so this land just reaches out and grabs you.

Jenny Wheeler: When I was doing a bit of research for this chat we’re having, I saw that in Hilo, the biggest city on the Big Island, the volcanoes have interrupted life a couple of times in modern times, that the lava has got right down as far as the Bay.

Robert McCaw: In 1984 Hilo’s existence was threatened by lava flows from Mauna Loa and all kinds of things were done to try to save the city. They dug trenches and did other things. Actually, if you go back to World War II, the military was afraid the volcanic lights from the mountain would lead Japanese submarines and vessels to Hawaii, and they tried to bomb the volcano into submission. Didn’t work very well.

There are all kinds of stories, but yes, Hilo was threatened in 1984 and may well be threatened again, because Mauna Loa is still active, and they monitor it all the time.

Jenny Wheeler: Your hero of the series, Koa, has a career threatening secret of his own. He’s a man seeking redemption for past misdeeds and the series raises, and is still answering the question at this stage, of – can we ever escape our past? Have you yet decided on how that question is going to be answered?

Robert McCaw: In the first place, my own view is that escape is a little too much to hope for. Maybe mitigation, maybe restitution, maybe you leave your place in this world, whether it’s a big place or a small place, better for those who follow. That I think is achievable. But I’m not sure that escape from our misdeeds is possible.

In another of the books, Fire and Vengeance, that theme is played out, not just with Koa but with multiple other characters whose reaction to their past misdeeds is quite different from each other.

It’s almost a little experiment, so readers can see how this question of “can you escape your misdeeds” works out for a number of different characters. That is also going to be – or is, because it’s written – a major theme of the unpublished book that comes out next year, Treachery Times Two. I think the answer is that even to get mitigation and restitution, it takes a bit of luck.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you have a full story planned when you began the series? I mean, do you at this stage have a feeling for how many books Koa’s going to finally end up in?

Robert McCaw: I did not. I struggled with the first book as I explained for over 20 years, and at the end of that time I couldn’t find a publisher, and so I self-published that book. It’s only because I self-published it in a very professional way, with good editing and good proofreading, good cover design, good layout, that it enabled me to find the agent I now work with and has led to a really terrific relationship with Ocean View Publishing. I didn’t have the whole series planned at the outset and indeed, each of the books stands on its own.

I can’t say that, when I wrote Off The Grid, I had a notion of what I would do with Fire and Vengeance, but from my days in Hawaii and my love and exploration of the place, I do have a number of sites, or a number of circumstances, that are unique to Hawaii in mind as potential themes for a book. One of those was always  Hualalai, a mountain which is featured in Fire and Vengeance.

 I think the answer to the question is, I don’t know now how many there will be. There will be at least four for sure. My guess is I’m not done with Koa. He’s an interesting character, and the other characters around him – Nalani his love interest, Zeke Brown the County prosecutor, the crazy obstetrician who serves as the County coroner – they are interesting characters and I really enjoy entering their world and sharing a few months with them as I create another story.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a bit about your creative process. How much of the actual scene outline would you have when you start writing? Do you flesh it out quite fully, or do you have an idea in mind and start writing?

Robert McCaw: It’s more the latter. I almost always know where I’m going to start, and I almost always know where I’m going to end. I may have way points that I know I’m going to use, but I then write and in that writing process, for me, it’s very iterative. As I write the later chapters, I will often go back and rewrite the earlier chapters in light of the choices I’ve made in the later parts of the story.

There’s a lot of editing involved in my writing process as I refine the story. If you’re a mystery writer, or writing murder mysteries, if you put an event in chapter 20, most of the time you need some clues in earlier chapters that won’t give away the event but won’t cause it to come as a total surprise to readers. That process takes a lot of editing and a lot of going back and forth.

Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Moving away from the specific books to your wider career, you mentioned that you had time in the military and you’ve also had this very successful and long career in law. Tell us how that experience feeds into your books. What mark has it left on you that is now translated into fiction?

Robert McCaw: Both the military and the law have greatly influenced my writing and greatly influenced the books. I’ll pick up on an earlier question and say that’s because I cannot escape my past. I think you need to write what you know. I think you need to write with a real command of the substance.

Both the military and the law have created interests for me that I pursue. They’re like astronomy and archeology which are two other subjects – I hardly ever miss an article about either one of them and dig in. That’s stuff that over time I’ve gotten to know.

You put that together with my belief that you have to master your material and you have to write what you know, and you can see the influence of the military in characters like Lieutenant Zeigler who is the military police commander of the Pohakuloa training area, which is the largest military installation in the Pacific for the U S and it happens to be in Hawaii.

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And you can see some of that in Koa himself. Koa has a military background as well. Similarly, you can see the legal side in Zeke Brown, the Hawaii County prosecutor, who is one of my favorite characters and who is a composite of prosecutors that I met and dealt with extensively when I was in private practice.

Once again, I own that material. I’ve seen how they operate. I’ve seen when I think they cut corners, I’ve seen when they do things that are in the interest of justice and I’ve seen how they try to make cases, so you get some of that in Zeke Brown.

 Jenny Wheeler: Starting this new career in later life – do you think that’s presented any extra challenges for you? Tell us a bit more about your path to publication. You have alluded to it already, I know.

Robert McCaw: First, if you’re a lawyer, you have to learn to avoid legalese and to write in a much more casual, much more fluid style than most lawyers do. I will tell you that there’s this funny reaction. When you’re a lawyer, you are tied to the provable facts. If you deviate too far from the provable facts, you lose credibility. Whether you’re trying a case to the jury or to the judge, if they think you have made it up, you’re not going to be successful.

And so when I first started writing, everything had to be provable, but of course that’s not what fiction is all about, and it took me a while to make that adjustment. It also took me a while to give characters the depth I think they need, and in many ways your character can’t be too deep. Those were challenges. Finding the way to an agent and a published book and a publisher – that was all very challenging.

The other aspect, which I think most people who aspire to write books don’t fully appreciate, is that in today’s world, even if you have a topflight publisher, you’re expected to market the books. The big marketing burden falls on authors.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right, and it’s probably getting more challenging in that area every day, isn’t it, as more people join in the self-publishing side of things. Is there one thing more than any other that you would see as the reason for your breaking through, as you have?

I consider anybody who gets three books published is a success as an author, because getting past that first book and the discouragement is a big plus in itself. What do you think has been the thing that has seen you through, if there is just one thing?

Robert McCaw: If I had to pick one thing, it would be perseverance.  I believe that people learn much more from their failures than they do from their successes. On the other hand, you have to be able to pick yourself up off the floor when you get knocked down.

You have to get back in the fight. The fact that you weren’t successful with some particular book or with some particular agent or with some particular publisher, it’s just like being in a fight. You’ve gotten knocked down. You need to get back up and back in the game and keep fighting.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Robert as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and we focus on books that are going to be fun and entertainment and not too navel gazing. What do you like to binge read, and have you got anything you’d like to recommend to other listeners?

Robert McCaw: I am a voracious reader. For series authors I like Daniel Silva, Michael Connelly, Barry Eisner, Joe Ellis, Jane Harper, who comes from your section of the world and who’s fabulous, I think. Craig Johnson, who’s written Western stories, is great. I’m right now reading The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. It’s fabulous. It is a very intimate portrait of Churchill during the Blitz or leading up to and during the Blitz and boy, it’s a tale of leadership that we need today.

Jenny Wheeler: I haven’t come across that.

Robert McCaw: He also wrote Devil in the White City, which is a fun mystery about the Chicago World Fair period. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is brilliant.  I loved it. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is a wonderful, brief history of mankind, and Watchers by Dean Koontz is extraordinarily creative. It’s one of the most creative pieces I’ve ever seen. So those would be recommendations I’d make for your readers.

Jenny Wheeler: They all sound great. Circling around, because we are coming to the end of our time together, looking back down the tunnel of time, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change?

Robert McCaw: I thought quite a little bit about this topic. I had a wonderful career. I’ve had great mentors, I’ve had a lot of fun. But I also reinvented myself a few times.  I practiced in Washington for a very long time and then opened the firm’s office in New York, and it was like reinventing myself.

When I ultimately turned to writing mysteries, I reinvented myself.  So, on the one hand I would say to people, pursue your interests, but in my own life I think I’ve been very fortunate and very lucky and there’s very little I would change.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. You have also lived in Hawaii. As well as loving Hawaii you did live there for a while, didn’t you?

Robert McCaw: We had a house out there for 20 years and spent a lot of time out there. That’s how I got to know so many Hawaiian people. I talked story with cops, I talked story with friends. I have a friend in Hawaii now and we do a FaceTime call every Wednesday morning to catch up with each other and see what’s going on. It’s one of the ways I keep up with Madam Pele, (the goddess of volcanoes) who is back being active again.

Jenny Wheeler: I guess, sadly, with Covid that you haven’t been able to so easily travel. Have you promoted the books in Hawaii?

Robert McCaw: I’ve done a lot of work through an absolutely wonderful publicist, which is Fauzia Burke at FSB Associates and her associate Michelle Fitzgerald, who I think you know, and they have been fabulous in getting the opportunities for podcasts and written interviews and reviews of the book.

When I was first self-publishing, I tried a whole bunch of these internet author assist programs and I found them to be, in general, completely worthless. But Fauzia and FSB are on the other end of the spectrum. They’re a little bit on the expensive side, but they very much produce. It’s been a great relationship.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Looking ahead into 2021, which we now are in, what’s next for you as a writer this year, and what do your next 12 months look like?

Robert McCaw: As I mentioned a couple of times, there’s a fourth book, Treachery Times Two, which comes out in January 2022. I’m still reading galleys and finalizing that, so Koa Kane fans will have another book to look forward to. It has a unique plot and delves far more deeply into Koa’s history, with a whole other perspective on the question you asked earlier – can you escape your past misdeeds? As you’ve guessed, the connection between what we’ve done in the past and who we are and how it shapes us, is one of the aspects of life that fascinates me. I represented a lot of people when I was in practice, and I always found it fascinating how we have this compulsion to cover up even the slightest misdeeds.

My father once told me that he went to a cocktail party and he was talking to somebody and he made a stupid remark. He said, I spent the rest of the evening worrying about that stupid remark I made.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized I was the only person in the room that even remembered it. That’s a trivial example, but when people do things that are seriously wrong, it affects who they are and it affects how they live their lives and what happens to them in the end. I find that fascinating.

Jenny Wheeler: All the time we’ve been talking, that’s been in the back of my mind, if there were any experiences you had as a lawyer. I guess a lot of the people you defended, you don’t know how their life turned out, you don’t keep in touch with them, but were there any examples of either redemption or people being totally sunk by a single ill-advised act? Is there anything that left its mark on you in terms of the people you dealt with over those years?

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Robert McCaw: We could spend an hour on that question, but there are a couple of examples. There was one man who got in very serious financial trouble and wound up spending some time in jail. I followed him for a long time. In many ways he became a sort of quasi friend, and he once said, and I thought it was one of the most cogent remarks I’ve ever heard, he said my biggest mistake was I surrounded myself with people who couldn’t say no.

You know, all of us think and maybe even start to act at times in ways that we shouldn’t. Most of us have spouses or friends or advisors, and if we’re smart, we consult with them and you know that question: Are you crazy? Are you really going to do that?

Do you understand what the consequences are? Those are some of the most wonderful, useful questions that people can ask you and you should never be offended when somebody asks you that, because what they’re saying is look in the mirror, take another look, look at it from another perspective. I thought that was some of the best advice I’ve ever heard, which is don’t surround yourself with people who can’t do anything but be sycophants.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I’m afraid that I can’t resist commenting that perhaps things would be different on the national stage in your country if a few people had followed that advice.

Robert McCaw: I’m with you on that.

Jenny Wheeler: We are coming to the end of our time together now, Robert. It’s been a fabulous chat. I’m sure that you enjoy hearing from your readers. How do you go about keeping in touch with your readers? Do you communicate with them online? How can they reach you?

Robert McCaw: The best place to reach me to learn more about Koa and the series and anything else I’m doing, and even to read some blogs that I do or communicate with me, is www.robertbmccaw.com. That’s the best way. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter although I’m not particularly fond of social media.

Jenny Wheeler: They can email you through your website, can they?

Robert McCaw: Absolutely. If they do, I will respond.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. I think Koa is such an interesting and complicated character that your readers will definitely be looking forward to Treachery Times Two.

Robert McCaw: Great. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and, through you, to talk to your readers. I’ve never been to New Zealand, but I would very much like to come and maybe after the pandemic, I will.

Jenny Wheeler: If you do then look me up. That would be wonderful. Thanks so much.

Robert McCaw: Thank you.

Jenny Wheeler: Bye now.

Robert McCaw: Bye-bye.

If you enjoy Robert McCaw’s Hawaiian detective mysteries you might also enjoy Jo Spain’s best selling Irish thrillers.

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Di Morrissey is the out and out Queen of Australian popular fiction, with 3.5 million books sold and her latest, 28th novel – Before the Storm – recently debuting at number 1.

She’s published one of her page-turners every October for 28 of the last 29 years, but she’s so much more than Australia’s top novelist. She’s a dedicated local newspaper editor and a committed environmentalist who in 2019 was awarded Australia’s top honor, made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to literature, conservation and the environment.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and in today’s episode Di talks about getting the last laugh on the critics who once described her books as “hair spray on a page,” and why she’s made it her life’s work to write books with an enduring sense of Australian location and identity.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Where to find Di Morrissey: 

Website: https://dimorrissey.com.au/

Facebook: @Dimorrissey

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/dimorrisseyauthor/

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Di. Hello there, Di, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Di Morrissey: Thank you Jenny. It’s fun to do this and catch up.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s wonderful. You are out and out the queen of Aussie fiction. You’re billed as Australia’s favorite storyteller and the proof is in the pudding. Your latest book, Before the Storm, I believe it debuted at number one in the seller list, didn’t it?

Di Morrissey: Australian fiction, yes. I’m still up there in the top five or something, but there are so many wonderful books coming out this year and all in October, so we all have to take our turn. I think Covid has been extraordinary for encouraging people to read books again. It’s wonderful.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s good news. Before the Storm is your 28th novel in 29 years – a remarkable record in itself – and you’ve clocked up something like 3.5 million book sales in the time you’ve been writing.German readers love Aussie stories

Di Morrissey: In Australia, yes.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you sell anywhere else?

Di Morrissey: I’m very big in Germany. The Germans love Australia. They didn’t want to buy The Last Paradise because it was partly set in Bali, they want the great Australian landscape.

Often when I go out to places like Broome or the Kimberley or the middle of a desert, there’ll be some strapping blonde-headed bloke with a knapsack and boots, striding out of the desert, out of nowhere, and he’s always German.

Jenny Wheeler: With the record you’ve got, this fantastic number of sales, and every October you’re producing a page-turner – when you started out, what were your expectations as a writer? What did you have in mind as a goal?

Di Morrissey: Get published. We all write, but getting a book published, that’s what I wanted to do. That was my childhood ambition from age seven. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I was very fortunate in that I met a very elderly Dorothea Mackellar.

She lived down in Pittwater in the bush where I was living as a seven-year-old and she invited me in for tea and a biscuit. We were quite poor, and I’d never seen so many books because I adored books, and I said I had to make up stories in my own head because I only got a book at Christmas and birthday. She very seriously said, well, my dear, you put your stories down in a book one day for other people to enjoy.

And I went oh, what a good idea, okay. But I discovered you don’t leave school and become a novelist.

Jenny Wheeler: You didn’t do it in quite that order in those days, did you?

Di Morrissey: No, but what I did do was, I was struggling and I was modeling and I was doing a bit of acting and floundering because my mother couldn’t afford to send me to university. My very wise uncle who was an ABC foreign correspondent said the best thing you can do is go and work on a newspaper or magazine.

He took me into ACP and I got a job as a copy girl and then a cadet on the Women’s Weekly. The best thing I could have done.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic, and it does introduce the theme of Before the Storm because there’s a very strong theme about the importance of the local media. That is a very personal cause for you. You are currently running a monthly independent newspaper in your own community called The Manning Community News and it’s all funded out of love and your bank account. 

Di Morrissey: And a few brave advertisers. For one thing, the demise of local media is shocking. When News Limited sold all their regional newspapers and then Fairfax was taken over by ACM – Australian Community Media – they swallowed everything up like big corporates who are only interested in advertising and selling newspapers.

They are like zombie papers. The same stuff is in all of them all over the country. Local news is what communities and even suburban communities need. You want to know what’s going on in your backyard and what your Council is doing. What’s happened to my rates and rubbish and bloody roads, you know?

That applies even more so in isolated regional communities. The local newspaper is really important. Also, a lot of aging population, they don’t want to go online and read a newspaper. They want to walk up the street and have a cup of tea, see their mates and pick up a paper and sit down and read it.

I’m online, but the majority of newspapers circulate way out of our area. I have general news and international news and stuff I find interesting, which apparently other people do, plus holding the local Council to account.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve got a lot of listeners who aren’t in Australia, they’re either in Europe or the U S so can you tell them a little bit about the Manning? What sort of a community is it? And the key issues – are they also things that would be affecting your own readers? Is that one way of keeping in touch with the people who are going to be reading your books?

Di Morrissey: Yes. The books are basically all set in Australia, and they’ve got Australian themes. Sometimes I go to countries, and I do literally go there and live and research, that have links with Australia, be it the UK or Hawaii has a lot of links.

But there are a lot of Europeans like the Germans who absolutely love Australia, and people from overseas, before the current situation of Covid, and the same in Australia, who would read my book and think, Broome sounds amazing, I must go there. 

For a lot of readers who can’t travel, they have armchair traveling and they feel they go to the place because in doing the research I go and spend a month in Broome or in Mandalay or wherever, to soak up the atmosphere and, being a journalist, do all the research and get the background right.

But essentially the issues are really what concern all of us in many ways. The environment is a massive issue for me.  Up here, we have these terrible bush fires. We’ve lost millions of wildlife, particularly koalas. I have koalas in my garden.

With the corridors we’re fighting developers and greed. If we’ve learned anything from Covid, it’s how important nature is and family and taking time to smell the roses and grow veggies and stuff like that. Hopefully, we won’t go back to the way it was. We have to protect nature and stop these awful housing developments that are like a cancer.

Where I live is a very old dairy country of rolling green plains and beautiful rivers and beautiful old mountains that was the cedar industry.

Jenny Wheeler: Bringing it back to Before the Storm, your key character, heroine, Ellie, quits her job in the big city and goes back to a small town and her grandfather is running the local independent newspaper.

It rolls into a story about a big money family who is trying to trick people into having this development without declaring what’s really going on, as well as corrupt local body politicians. It’s very much the kind of thing you’re talking about. If they can’t do it by overt means, they try it by covert means.

Di Morrissey: Yes. Well, I’m beginning to suspect highly that the countries and the politicians are all being run by developers. Money rules and it’s wrong, and particularly when it’s not what the community wants.

The acknowledgement of climate change is a bit thin on the ground, but people know, farmers know, we all know, and we all worry about our kids and our grandchildren and what they’re going to inherit. So in a fictional way, I try to introduce issues within a normal family or quirky people or whatever. It raises things without preaching so that the message gets across. I think that’s what people resonate with. 

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They are books that still have adventure. I’m not a romance writer. I write about relationships and my readers don’t care about sex, whether they’re 20 or 95. I have a lot of men and women that read my books. I get more to the heart and the head, and people always want to go to the place, they want to do the same things, and they get riled up about things. That’s the journalist in me, but also, if you can do it in a way that’s entertaining, it’s far more effective.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. The foreword for the book makes it clear where you stand. It’s quite touching. A little community newspaper in the Manning, you might not think it had that kind of grand level significance, but you devote the book to those who lost their lives seeking to tell the truth and shine light in dark corners.

We know from the international news that there are journalists still losing their lives. What do you see in our world that most concerns you in relation to media?

Di Morrissey: Climate change, I would think, it has to be. The way we grow and sell our food, mine land, where our priorities are and the corporate greed that funds politicians who then have to go along with ridiculous gas and coal, when so many European countries are jumping ahead and embracing renewables. We need to change everybody’s thinking.

I grew up in a family of journalists. Phillip Knightley, who wrote The First Casualty, was a wonderful journalist. He lived in London of course for so many years, but he said truth is the first casualty and that unfortunately still applies.

Jenny Wheeler: Your books are the sort that originally might have had trouble being taken seriously. Very recently there was a Weekend Australian magazine story, and for those who aren’t aware of it, the Australian is a major national newspaper in Australia.

Di Morrissey: Even if it’s a Murdoch paper. 

Jenny Wheeler: A Murdoch Flagship. There was this sneaky little thing that was said in that article that caught my eye. They called your books “mass market catnip,” and I thought, what a way to describe your books!

Di Morrissey: I don’t know what that means. I mean, catnip either turns cats on, and I don’t have any sex in my books because readers don’t particularly want it, or puts them to sleep, which is the absolute opposite. People sit up all night reading my books. So I don’t quite know where the catnip came from, but in the beginning, that was a very big issue.

I had two things going against me. I was blonde and I’d worked in television. I was a breakfast television host. I have wanted to write books since I was seven. I’ve now had a big career as a journalist, a big career as a diplomat’s wife, living all over the world. I’ve raised a family,

I’ve been in breakfast television. I got that job because I thought you start at 2:00am and you’re on air from seven to nine, and then you go home. But of course, I was there all day and had to go and see movies and interview people at 11 o’clock at night.

After eight years I went, you know what? I’m going to be 40 in a couple of years. This is ridiculous. What happened to the dream of the seven-year-old? So, I just quit. Then in the press it’s like, oh well, she’s too old for television now, the poor girl is going to try and write a novel. At that point, Australia was and to a certain extent still is, quite literary snobs and serious writers from Patrick White (a Nobel Prize winner – ed note) on were not taken very seriously.

My friend Bryce Courtney – we were Mr and Mrs Popular Fiction as Bryce used to call us, and we were never invited to the literary festivals to speak. We did sell ten times or more what a literary writer might sell, so there was another reason to be viewed with some suspicion and envy, I suppose. It can’t be any good if it sells a lot of books. It was very outrageous.

There is a wonderful agent here called Selwa Anthony, still going on. Selwa had some wonderful clients, she looked after Colleen McCullough for example. She started a campaign with my first book of trying to bring down the barriers from popular fiction. The first one I went to was so uncomfortable, I mean, people were frankly downright rude. So I ignored that and said I’m never doing one again.

But after a number of years, I think I was earning my stripes and I did get to go to the very impressive, popular, wonderful, literary festival in Adelaide, and I’m standing on the stage next to Margaret Atwood and Isabel Allende. Take that, folks!

Jenny Wheeler: I have arrived.

Di Morrissey: Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Your friend Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize winner, says of you that you know you only live once and so you’re packing two lives into it. Do you think that’s fair comment, and have you always lived life at full tilt?

Di Morrissey: I don’t think so, I just take every day as it comes. I grew up very poor. My father and baby brother drowned in a tragic accident when I was nine, nearly 10. We had no money and my mother had never worked. She had driven a truck in the war or something, but she was a great example.

I was working as a journalist and then I married an American diplomat, and we were posted all over the world. I had that life, and then I came back and had the breakfast television life and then the novelist life. I’m now grandmother and I’ve got this life.

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I’m running a newspaper, I’m publishing and editor of a newspaper. It’s free because that’s how it reaches lots of people, and it goes all the way up the mid coast of New South Wales from Port Macquarie down to Bulahdelah, so 8,000-10,000 copies. That’s a lot every month.

(There is a great video on Di’s website about the newspaper but Facebook has made the decision to block the sharing of videos on website posts like this one so I can’t show it to you. If you are interested here is the link…. https://www.facebook.com/DiMorrissey/videos/436993284126752/)

And I’m making serious inroads with being an investigative reporter and I’m holding a few people to account. I’m doing that, plus I’m trying to get my books on television and we’re moving in that direction. I don’t know what I’ll do next.

Jenny Wheeler: That raises a couple of things. You do like to travel around the country and sometimes overseas. How has the pandemic affected you in that regard?

Di Morrissey: I normally go and do my research. My books come out in October every year or November for Christmas. I generally tend to have it finished by July, so there’s a bit of a gap there. August, September, I normally know where I’m going because a place chooses me, I don’t choose the place. Off I go to live there and research and my partner Boris and I spend time there and we wander around, talk to people. You get the atmosphere, the history – you have to be in a place. 

Anyway, this year as I was about to set off to go into the small coastal town on the south coast of Victoria – it’s one state I haven’t set a book in, so I was going down there – but the bushfires started, those tragic, awful months and months.

We are still suffering from the bushfires. I didn’t go to do my research until February-March and then Covid hit just as I was leaving, so I had that little tiny window. Now I should be researching next year’s book, but I can’t go anywhere.

I sit in this room, still writing and doing a bit of gardening and not going anywhere, which is fine. My life hasn’t changed, but what I’m doing is I’m going mentally, I’m traveling back to a place I know and love very much, which is the area of Pittwater outside Sydney, very extraordinary area where I grew up. I’m trying to marry it then and now.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s going to be the next book, is it?

Di Morrissey: Yes. Well, it’s the setting for the next book.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned about trying to get your books on TV and I did read somewhere that you were working on a TV version of one of the Broome Trilogy books, Tears of the Moon. How is that coming along?

Di Morrissey: The wonderful producer David Jowsey is doing it. He did Mystery Road and Sweet Country and he’s absolutely wonderful. He’s got a new movie coming out – juggling a lot. He knows Broome and the Kimberley very well – the old pearling industry, incredibly romantic and interesting. It’s the most amazing place. 

Unfortunately, like everywhere else in Australia, they’re putting a cement road that goes all the way to the tip of the Cape. You’ve got that romantic red dust road going into nowhere and now a cement road with truckloads of overseas tourists is going to destroy some of the romance.

But David knows the area well and Tears of the Moon is still my most popular book. I didn’t plan to write a sequel, but it was book number five, and it was my breakout book. 

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I noticed that the Broome Trilogy, which has been very successful in its own right, wasn’t written consecutively, and I wondered if that was because it was either publisher or reader demand that you came back to it.

Di Morrissey: It was readers. Tears of the Moon was so spectacular, it’s sold hugely all around the world. Broome owes me heaps because all the tourists came there. A couple of years down the track the demand was there, so I wrote Kimberley Sun. Some of the main characters but in a different timeframe and setting, so you don’t have to read them in order.

Then more recently, the huge fights over development and mining and the pristine waters of the Kimberley coast.  It was an issue. The Red Coast is set up there. There are such colorful characters, and the country is amazing and so much indigenous history and romance and art. Extraordinary. It’s a wonderful dreaming place.

Jenny Wheeler: You have made it clear that you’re passionate about the environment, and in 2019 you were made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant contributions to literature as a novelist and to conservation and the environment. For listeners outside Australia, give us a very quick resumé of the importance of that honor, and what did it mean to you personally?

Di Morrissey: I was absolutely gob smacked. It is, I think, Australia’s most prestigious award. There is the AO and the AM, which is what I have, a Member of the Order of Australia, and then there’s an OAM, Medal of the Order of Australia. It is a recognition. It is apparently a very extreme process to look at your body of work.

It a huge honor and it is given by the Governor General of Australia. It’s a massive award which meant an awful lot to me, because my publisher had said you are never, ever going to win any award because people are snobby and they only give them to literary people, so don’t ever get your hopes up.

Anyway, two years previously I also got the Lloyd O’Neil Award from the Publishing Association of Australia. Very few women have been presented with that – Ruth Park I think was the last one, so that was a massive honor. I feel I’ve arrived in that I am taken somewhat seriously. I also give talks at the National Library of Australia and it’s very nice to do that, to feel you have something people want to hear.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Turning to your wider career, is there one thing you’ve done more than any other, that’s the secret of your success? Would there be something other people could take the lesson from your experience?

Di Morrissey: When you get knocked down, get up, because women get knocked and mocked and we are still not paid equally. There are still so many issues. When I was a diplomat’s wife, I lived in a lot of Third World countries, and you learn there’s a compassion and a need to help and do things.

In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi had just come out from house arrest and she told me that education was going to be the key to the future. I happened to run into a monk outside Mandalay and he pointed to this hill and said, I want to build a school there. He said, could you help me? I went, yeah, clearing? What? Pick up a spade and start?

Anyway, I did go back and plant trees, I do have to say. But I raised funds and it’s now an incredibly successful village school that is sending children everywhere. That has been a lovely achievement – to know I’ve done that. I watched how my mother suffered so much and we are still too, in a man’s world.

And television. It was a wonderful crew when we started Good Morning Australia, but over the years, because after eight years producers come and go, and in those last years I had a horrible, chauvinistic, misogynistic little bloke – he was little, he would sit on the desk so he could look down on you while you sat on the lower chair.

 I went, why am I doing this? Whatever happened to the dream to write a book one day? So on Friday I said, well, folks, I’m not coming in on Monday. I had no money, I was on my own, I was divorced, and everyone said, what are you going to do? I said, I’m going to write a book. How are you going to live? I don’t know.

I was living with my mum, I had come back home. Then Selwa Anthony saw that I had written a little outline for a television theme a couple of years before. She had a bookshop and she used to bring people in to be interviewed on TV because I would always promote people who were writing.

The producers hated it, they thought they were just talking heads back then. Anyway, I ran into her and she read this, and she rang me up a couple of months later and said, that thing you wrote, I took it into Pan Macmillan. They want you to turn it into a novel. You’ve got a year and $5,000. 

I moved to Byron Bay and rented this little shack and when I ran out of money, I ate the avocados and mangoes and whatever was in people’s backyards. Fortunately, the book worked, but if you don’t take the gamble, you never know. You’ve just got to give it a go.

Jenny Wheeler: That was Heart of the Dreaming, wasn’t it? That was the famous Queenie character who stole people’s hearts.

Di Morrissey: Yes. She’s great.

Jenny Wheeler: 22 years old and her life’s already over, sort of thing.

Di Morrissey: Yes. She starts over running a huge station in the Outback. That came about because I went overseas to become a women’s editor and a journalist in London right after I graduated from the Women’s Weekly.

I had traveled all over the world with an American diplomat husband. I’d never been out of Sydney. I’d never seen my own country, so when I came back to morning television, I asked if I could have a cameraman and a sound man and I’d go around Australia and find fantastic stories, which is what I did. 

At one point I was out with the wonderful, legendary RM Williams. He was raising money to build the Stockman’s Hall of Fame at Longreach.  At one point this very fancy 4-wheel drive Land Cruiser drove up – this was in the eighties, so this was a big, fancy car, they weren’t very common – and out got this amazing woman all in white with her well-worn boots and Akubra hat, in her Broome pearl earrings. She looked amazing. 

I said to RM, who’s that? He gave me the name and said, she’s running a property on her own. She’s a fantastic horse woman and she does this and she does that. He said, do you want to meet her? And suddenly I said, actually, no. I felt like I didn’t want to spoil the image if she had bad breath or was nasty or something. I just kept the image of this wonderful woman and that became Queenie.

Jenny Wheeler: I’ve always wondered whether there was any hint of Sara Henderson from Bullo station in Queenie.

Di Morrissey: No, this was before Sara. Sara’s book came out later. Sara was a generation older and very tough, but she’s another typical strong woman. You find extraordinary women in Outback Australia. The women are amazing. When we look back at the pioneer women, they were the ones who did the work, stayed at home, had the babies on their own, while men were out doing whatever they did.

I think I have a record  of having the women in my books always very interesting and strong. There are no wimps.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Di as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading so we like to promote the sorts of books you like to read, the ones that might be regarded as entertainment, but still very skilled in the way they’re presented and have lots of good messages. If you’re binge reading, who do you like to binge read?

Di Morrissey: I don’t really have anyone, though I’m just starting the Robert Galbraith series of JK Rowling’s. I’m told they’re fabulous so I will start with book one this Christmas. But I read anything and everything. I also read a lot of older books. I’m a great collector of books.

I have a massive library. All my family were readers, from my grandfather who came out as a 14-year-old boy with all his father’s books of Thackeray and Dickens. I grew up with my uncle’s books, the William books, Biggles and all of that.

I love children’s books and I find that I just pick things up and read them. I started to read Shirley Hazzard, I hadn’t read her for years because reading, as much as I love it, I don’t have a lot of time for it. Like a lot of people, that’s my holiday time out because when I’m writing, which takes up so much time, I’m reading maybe research books or stuff like that. 

Then I’ve got all my mates’ books. Tom Keneally and now with Meg. (Thomas Keneally’s daughter is now writing). There are so many Australian books, and my daughter is living in America so she keeps telling me about books she wants to read that I should read.

I’ll read anything. It’s a bit like a movie. I could never walk out of a movie. If I’m not really enjoying a book, I’ll still keep reading. I might skim a bit, but I will finish it. I think that’s only fair because I know the blood, sweat and tears that’s gone into this book.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you read any of the more contemporary Australians like Michael Robotham, for example? (Hear Michael on the Joys of Binge Reading here.)

Di Morrissey: Haven’t ever read Michael. I have his new book because I know he’s good and he seems such a nice guy, so I’d really like to read that. Jock Serong I discovered in Victoria and met him. Gorgeous fellow, fabulous writer. I tend to read my mates’ books – Robert Dessaix and of course Richard Flanagan is amazing. But it’s hard to keep up. 

I’m very happy for recommendations because I have book reviews in my newspaper. I generally get other people to do them, but occasionally I’ll do them too. I read a lot of nonfiction.

Jenny Wheeler: At the latest Auckland Film Festival there was the Ned Kelly movie from Peter Carey, the very famous Australian writer who did the Ned Kelly biography, The True History of the Kelly Gang. That film is just fantastic, it really is.

(Ed note: Carey is a two-time Booker Prize winner, one of only five writers to have this honor, and the most recent in 2001 was for The True History of the Kelly Gang.)

I could recommend that. There is a slight fantasy edge to it. At the beginning when I read about it, I thought, I don’t know if I’d quite like that, but they integrated it into the movie so well that it’s just fantastic.

Di Morrissey: Oh, yes, it worked fabulously. I thought The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Tom Keneally’s novel, was way ahead of its time in the film. It was extraordinary. David Gulpilil has been an amazing force in Australian filmmaking. I think our films have had, and still have, a depth and a quality, and they’re brave. They don’t pander to commercial issues of Americana or whatever. 

I’m very proud of our Australian film industry because Chips Rafferty, the old Australian actor who was our first major Hollywood star in a way, he was an old stockman, and he was my godfather.

Chips always said to me, whatever you do with life kid, you make bloody sure it’s Australian. That’s why I’ve kept my books centered around Australia. Because of my film background, I support the Australian film industry and this government, the cutting of arts funding across the board is appalling. They’re a bunch of Philistines. You’re nodding. I hope.

Jenny Wheeler: I felt like saying, tell it like it is Di.

What is next for Di, the writer? When you look ahead over the next 12 months, can you tell us anything about the book that’s in its conception at the moment?

Di Morrissey: Well, you see, I don’t plan them. They’re inspired by a place, then the characters. I go to the place and a place chooses me. I don’t put a pin in the map and say, I haven’t been to South Australia or somewhere. I just have to wait. My publisher rings up and says, has anything happened yet? Where are you going? I don’t know. Something will happen.

It’s funny how things do happen. For example, one time I walked out of a shopping center on the Gold Coast in Queensland, a very tourist place. I’d been up there visiting my daughter who was living there at the time.

I walked out of the store and passed in the doorway this woman I had interviewed for Good Morning Australia years before, who was like the pastoralist queen of the Kimberley – Susan Bradley. She’s a legend. She’s amazing, she’s wonderful, and she’s the funniest storyteller. She’s just great. 

I said, Susan, what are you doing here? She said, I’ve just got a couple of hours. I’m flying up to Darwin and I had two hours at the airport, so I thought I’d come and shop for a bit. As you do.

We had a quick cup of coffee and I said, what are you doing? She said, funny you ask. One of my elders – this is in the early eighties – wants to find a way for black and white Australians to move forward. 

I want to find a bunch of influential Australians that can sit around the campfire at the summer camp up at Murumbabidi on the Mitchell plateau and we sit down and we work out how we go together, black and white together.

I said to Susan, man, how are you going to find them? She said, well, yeah, that’s what Mowaljarlai said to me. But he says, oh Susan, don’t you worry, they find you. So Susan said, you found me, you coming? A week later I was on a plane to the Kimberley and out of that came The Songmaster.

Jenny Wheeler: How fantastic. I gather you have an unusual relationship with your publisher in that regard, that it’s a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing and discussion, is there?

Di Morrissey: Well, no, he doesn’t interfere. He doesn’t ask where I’m going or what the book is about. Sometimes I tell him, sometimes I don’t. But the system to be able to produce a book a year is a massive undertaking – to do a good book a year. In those early days, every time I brought a book out those girls in the press would go, oh, she’s got another book out – just like hairspray on a paper.

What I do – normally an author sweats over the book and they might get halfway or finish it. Then it goes to their editor at the publisher who will go, you know what? You should have gone in another direction in chapter three, so start all over.

That is part of the process quite often. But what I do is – and I have been a journalist and I’m very disciplined, very conscious of deadlines – I write a chapter and I have an editor, sometimes in-house and sometimes an old friend I have had for years.

She’s not an editor but she’s a teacher and she ran a bookstore. She’s very knowledgeable about all kinds of things, so I write chapter one, and I send it to Liz. Liz starts editing that. I write chapter two and then she sends chapter one back. I send her chapter two. I take in her changes and write chapter three as two comes back.

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We do this backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards process together, so the book is drafted about four times and is finished within the seven months. It has had all of that constant rewriting and pulling apart.

Liz also is my age and has children, whereas a lot of the new editors are awfully nice, sweet 25-year-old girls who won’t say to me, like Liz does, “oh God, this is a pile of shit. What are you doing with this?”

They won’t say that to me, whereas Liz will. You need that. “You don’t need all this research. We don’t want to know how to build a bloody lugger. Just send it out to sea.” Stuff like that.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s gorgeous. We’re starting to run out of time. You obviously have a whole tribe of fans that follow you. How do you keep in touch with your readers and where can they find you online?

Di Morrissey: It’s www.dimorrissey.com and there’s a Facebook page that everybody can contribute to. But most people email me, and the lovely older readers still write. I get this wonderful spidery writing in letters. I’ll tell you an example.

If you look at the cover of Before the Storm, it’s a girl on a lonely beach with thunderclouds and she’s got her black labrador beside her and the black labrador appears in the book. I had given him a name, and he was a very minor character.

I was about two months into the book when I got an email one morning from a gentleman who lives in Port Kembla, which is the old steelworks, very interesting, tough, now terrific area. He was my age, maybe a couple of years younger than me, and he said he was moving his wife’s library and he saw all these books.

He is now retired. He was a garbo, he worked in the steelworks, but he’s always wanted to write, he’s educated, and he started to read one of my books. He was just gob smacked. He emailed me and said, I’ve started to read because I didn’t know anything about you, unfortunately, and girly books.

He said, “I’m over the moon.” Then he emailed me every morning to say, I’m now up to this part and this, that and the other. He was so enthusiastic. He had a black labrador, he walks on the beach with Sam every morning, and then at 5.30 he sends me an email.

Every morning now for the past 18 months, 5.30 in the morning, I sit there with my cup of tea, because I’ve just got up, and read Dan’s email. Now we share stuff that we don’t tell anybody else. It’s a sort of a writing thing, but never met him, never spoken to him, we just bond.

Then halfway through, towards the end of the book, his dear old dog, Sam, who was 15, died. He sent me a photo of his ashes at the pool at the beach where they walked every morning, and I was devastated and I was crying. 

Boris came in and said, what’s the matter? I said, “I’m so worried about Sam.” He’s going, who the hell is Sam?

“He’s my friend’s black labrador.”

What I did was I changed the name of the dog in the book to Sam, and then I asked Dan to send me some photos, sentimental photos. I went through all these photos and we picked out one that we photo-shopped onto the cover of the book. So that is Dan’s dog, Sam, on the cover of the book.

Jenny Wheeler: What a gorgeous story!

Di Morrissey: I didn’t tell him. When he got the book, he just burst into tears. You make wonderful friends through books.

Jenny Wheeler: You are an amazing person, you really are. That story just caps it because most people wouldn’t be bothered taking the time to receive and answer all those emails.

Di Morrissey: Well, it just takes a few minutes and sometimes people share a lot of things, and there are an awful lot of lonely people out there. There are a lot of people who don’t email or Facebook but send heartfelt notes. 

Of course, now with my newspaper I have the whistleblowers. I have all the people who have nowhere to turn when terrible things are happening. We have massive issues with our hospital, and they had to come to me because no one else would do anything about it.

Every morning I never know if it’s going to be, I loved your book, or I know what criminal activity is going on in the whatever. It’s fun.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s a great place to stop. All the very best with the next book, wherever it’s going to take you, and thank you so much for being on the show.

Di Morrissey: My pleasure, Jenny.  It has been lovely and lots of love and good wishes to all your listeners.

Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much. 

If you enjoyed Di’s Down Under fiction you might also enjoy Annie Seaton’s Eco-Adventure Australian mysteries..

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