[Featured Author] Peter Tomlinson

Pigeon Holes Are For The Birds
by Alexander James

Peter Tomlinson put his literary life on the line when he turned his back on the genre stereotypes agents, publishers and retailers love to slot into their gold-lined pigeonholes – and he’s never looked back.

After bravely ploughing an independent furrow in a field of his own, the first two novels in his Petronicus Legacy series have already been released and the third in the trilogy is under contract and its first draft is complete.

But even with a solid reputation as the author of nearly 300 poems in eighty poetry and short story magazines in the UK and abroad, the path less trodden – avoiding all genre models – was no easy route for Peter.

Mainstream houses turned down flat his first four novels and two one-act plays because they didn’t fit neatly into their well-ordered catalogues.

Only when he submitted his fifth novel to an independent press with a more open mind did he pique interest … and not only interest in that book; the publishers were so impressed that they immediately offered a three-book deal for Peter to get to work on following his 80,000-word The Stones of Petronicus, with The Time of Kadrik and The Voyages of Delticos to make up a series.

And, said Peter at his home in rural Shropshire:

There are heavy hints that the series won’t end with a mere trilogy.

You see, each book is absolutely self-contained; the lead characters in each are different, but descendents of characters past, the time setting is different, but is the result of times past, the situations are different, but are extensions of situations past … there’s a common thread of development that bonds them. Making up history as I go along means that I could tie together as many Petronicus books as life allows me to write.

It’s as though Peter developed a genre of his own when he took his first character, Petronicus the scribe, and placed him in a time and country that, ‘real world’ as it is, can’t be identified … but which is, certainly, a million miles from the land of fantasy.

He said:

There were times when I felt I was getting nowhere as publisher after publisher told me they just weren’t interested in me if I couldn’t produce a book that would fit their lists so that they could easily identify a target readership for the marketing boys and retailers. But I was determined to go my own way.

So I lowered my sights from the major publishing houses and looked around for a reputable small independent. I found BeWrite Books and we just seemed to click. Far from being frightened off by the fact that the book fitted no established genre, they not only went for it, they immediately signed me up for two follow-ups.

Stones of Petronicus came out last year, Time of Kadrik was published in the spring, and I’ve just completed the first draft of Voyages of Delticos for a winter release. Together, they’ll make up the trilogy, The Petronicus Legacy.

The novels are not typecast in the mode of conventional adventure/historical fiction; the location, characters and civilisations described are entirely fictitious. I take readers into places they have never been before and to meet characters they will meet again only in their dreams … or maybe their nightmares, as one reviewer put it.

The first book follows the theme of a perpetual search for truth and the nature of human existence. All the books explore the relationships between old and young as they complement each other through interaction of enquiring and often precocious youth and the steadier, more experienced wisdom of the elder.

There is no conflict between them except, at times, some understandable impatience. Together they face great dangers as horror and wickedness descends on their idyllic world, and here we see how the combination of youthful energy and mature wisdom triumphs.

But never could the work be labelled ‘fantasy’, in spite of a touch of the mystical and the introduction of some pretty fabulous creatures. My characters have no magical powers and they face purely human struggles in an earthly landscape. The result is education in its purest form.

And it couldn’t be written off as ‘adventure’ because so much of the adventure is of the mind. It’s not ‘historical’ because there’s no factual framework. And it couldn’t get by under that vague and confusing ‘literary’ banner because … well, because there’s always a beginning, a middle and an end to the stories.

The books couldn’t even be classified in terms of potential readership; they would appeal as much to young people as to mature adults, as much to a female as a male audience. And if there’s the slightest whiff of ‘coming-of-age’ (another genre these days), you’d be hard pressed to say whether the coming-of-age applies to a young character, an old character or even a whole civilisation.

In Petronicus, for example, we have the young apprentice to life learning at the side of the master craftsman as the two main characters journey through the joys and tragedies of their lives together.

Sure, I can understand why it is my books would confound publishers whose first question is ‘what genre?’ But I wasn’t about to compromise my work to squeeze it into a narrowly defined slot to suit commercial trends.

Although there is conflict and great danger in the lives of the principal characters, Peter avoids falling into the trap of relying on gratuitous violence to carry the story along. The writing creates vivid images in the minds of his readers and he often crafts his writing in terms of acts and scenes in a visual drama.

Perhaps unusually for an author, he is predominantly an ‘imager’ and this visualisation – actually being an eye witness to what he creates – is demonstrated in his writing.

He has often said that reading is better than watching film; the scenery is better.

In his second novel, The Time of Kadrik, which is set in the same fictional landscape, 10 generations later, Peter casts his players onto a much wider canvas. Here we are introduced to different characters in a different time. The principal player is Kadrik who we follow from boyhood into maturity as he is forced by catastrophic circumstance to question the beliefs on which the survival of his community depends.

With only his wife to support and encourage him, Kadrik lives through several lonely years until his fate is decided by an inescapable imperative and a resolve that comes to dominate his life. In order to save his community from complete collapse, the very young Kadrik must embark on a perilous journey both geographical and intellectual. He undertakes this journey in the company of three unlikely companions: a nameless outcast and two members of a mysterious humanoid species known as the Men Half Made.

Peter insists:

Even so, I avoid straying into the realms of fantasy.

The ‘quest’ is a very human endeavour toward human goals. The Men Half Made are not mythological mermaids; they’re merely an earthly breed apart. And, although I draw heavily on a lifetime of historical research, there can be no confusion between the books in this series and a historical novel because of the way I’ve used what I’ve learned to create an entirely new and fictitious historical base.

I’ve travelled widely to research the backdrop to my scenes. But, again, I’ve used what I’ve learned to create a new reality rather than a Neverland.

A reader might occasionally think he’s worked out where in the world the characters are playing out their roles – but he’ll soon find that he’s mistaken.”

BeWrite Books editor, Neil Marr, said:

One of the beauties of being an independent press, driven by factors that are by no means entirely commercial, is that we have the freedom to experiment with work that doesn’t necessarily fit some tried and tested, money-spinning formula.

Peter’s books break new ground – and that’s their problem in the mainstream where genre is all important. Big-business houses – their marketing departments and their retailers – are tied to established best-selling formulas to keep afloat. A small independent like BB is free of those restrictions.

In the end, it’s the reader who benefits.

Peter’s work is consistently at the top of our ‘most reviewed’ lists. Readers who read the first couldn’t wait for the next … and already, we’re getting emails from people desperate to know when the next will be available.

These books are fresh, you see. There’s nothing else like them out there.

Peter’s road to print was long, winding and frequently pot-holed.

Born in a working class district of Merseyside, UK six months before the outbreak of World War II, he retains some hazy memories of the blitz he lived through.

I vaguely remember my mother cradling me in a blanket and telling me that the ‘all clear’ would be heard soon and we would be safe again.

His father joined the Royal Navy and served throughout the war on destroyers and mine-layers, returning home in 1945 a virtual stranger to Peter.

Meanwhile, Peter was evacuated with his mother and elder brother to a remote hill farm in North Wales to escape the blitz, and that is where his vivid memory begins.

I well remember the sheepdog and the farm animals and I have a pictorial recollection of being left on the edge of the field whilst my mother helped the farmers with haymaking.

There is also a recurring infant memory of a distant mountain that seemed very remote and mysterious.

There was no electricity, gas or piped water in the family’s evacuation home so that much time was spent collecting wood for the fire. Whilst in the safety of North Wales they knew that their home town was being heavily bombed and that relatives were in constant danger. It was inevitable that the anxieties their mother felt were inadvertently transmitted to her children.

When the war ended, the family was re-housed back on Merseyside in one of the emergency prefabricated houses (prefabs) on a cleared bomb site opposite a pawn shop. Peter received the minimum education and often ran wild with other kids in the wasteland of bombed-out buildings and post-war dereliction.

He has only two clear memories of his junior schooling: fear of being wrong and the embarrassment of a recurring stutter, a disability suffered by many wartime children. Perhaps this early communication difficulty led him to retreat into his own imagination.

It was during his brief secondary schooling that his interest in storytelling began. Often, when the teacher was engaged in administrative tasks, Peter was called out to stand in front and tell the class a story. It was terrifying at first, but he gradually mastered his stutter and enjoyed the task. This happened so often that making up stories on the spur of the moment became second nature to him.

He left school aged 15 and worked briefly in a shipyard before finding a job as a telegraph boy at an American Cable Company’s station in Liverpool. They trained him as an operator and taught him the telegraph man’s economy and precision in the use of language. They also trained him to touch type, a skill useful to an author. In fact he can still type as fast as he can speak.

His main recreational interest at the time was mountaineering and rock climbing. He associated with a group of free-spirited, rebellious young people who regularly hitch-hiked to North Wales, slept in old barns and tents that fell down whenever the wind blew, and involved themselves in poetry, heavy drinking and deep discussions by candlelight.

Peter was a very early member of the Cavern Club in Liverpool. But these carefree years ended at the age of 18 with conscription into the British Army. Peter resented the curtailment of his freedom and the discipline, bull and homesickness played heavily on him. Years later he published a poem recalling those feelings:

Conscription 1958-60

Barracked and confined
in drab wooden huts
with the smoke of cheap cigarettes,
smells of adolescent sweat
and scant privacy.

Tethered to an unfamiliar routine,
a world of harsh discipline,
contrived discomfort
and coarse khaki roughening skin,
chasing any kind word or praise
amidst insults and humiliations
embarrassingly endured.

Cold, always cold
in those slow, homesick,
day-counting weeks
in alien Catterick.

An ache filled the space
where our freedom once was,
where fettered youth could no longer run.

Then ranked in tight marching order
and dispatched as props for a dying empire
with mum’s fears, dad’s knowing eye
and daft words like: ‘It does them good’.

© Peter Tomlinson – first published in Reach Magazine

As a wireless operator, Peter spent 18 months in Cyprus. It was here that his serious interest in poetry really began. It was often too dangerous for young soldiers to venture far from their army camp but he was able to wander freely in the nearby deserted ruins of an ancient Greek city and give his vivid imagination free rein. Often he put his thoughts on paper and years later he worked these into published poems.

Another three or four carefree years passed after demobilisation before he went to college and university and pursued an academic career.

After early retirement, he worked for a few years as a cultural guide overseas, leading tours on foot in Rome, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Verona, Istanbul etc. What he saw and what he learned was to find its way into the fictional land he created for Petronicus and his descendents.

Since achieving his ambition to take time to write, he has published hundreds of poems in scores of magazines. Success came to him when Bluechrome published his first commercially produced poetry collection Tunnels of the Mind, which received favourable reviews.

In an effort to present even more work to readers, his wife, Margaret, suggested self-publishing under their own imprint, Hengist Enterprises. This launched four collections of poetry, two collections of short stories and two collections of original epigrams.

Peter read his poetry at numerous poetry festivals. At the Oxford Poetry Festival he had a chance conversation with a friend, the well known British author and poet, Sam Smith, who suggested submitting work to his own publisher, Bewrite Books.

Neil Marr – who edits both Peter and Sam’s work for BeWrite Books – said:

It was a fortuitous meeting. Sam is another author whose writing refuses to be pigeon-holed. It courageously crosses genre lines or, like Peter’s, absolutely defies all genre definition.

The sheer scope of Peter’s books is breath-taking. He’s the only author I know who can produce an epic in a tight 80,000 words.

Many of Peter’s ideas for poems and novels come to him whilst he roams wild and lonely places; the Shropshire hills and forests, the mountains of North Wales, the Lake District and the Alps. He finds that the restful rhythm of solitary walking removes his thoughts from the futile imperatives of modern life and provides an easy conduit for ideas to flow into his receptive mind.

His wife Margaret acts as an at-home editor, paying meticulous attention to his manuscripts, ensuring clarity, correct use of grammar and making sure a good clean copy is sent to his publishers.

Margaret says:

After we’ve had breakfast and discussed our plans for the day, Peter settles down to the intensive daily writing session. He is very self-disciplined about this and not even the lure of a visit to the supermarket can drag him away. Slips of paper with cryptic words litter the house as ideas enter Peter’s head and he scribbles them down before forgetting them. This can happen at awkward times: I’ve even found messages on the loo roll!

He freely admits to living in a dream world and it can be disconcerting living with a daydreamer. Not only does he forget important things I’ve told him, but he forgets what he’s told me. Is this the onset of senility or the flame of genius burning bright?

Despite these drawbacks, I think that Peter’s writing has drawn us closer. I am full of admiration for his creativity and feel privileged to be involved in the process, especially when we discuss ideas and language, although the dots and commas department is where I really feel important.

Entering into the dream world is the best of all: during our recent travels to Iceland and Greenland we were both fired with delight at recognising scenes from Petronicus – the Land of the Towering Rocks, the Land of the Bubbling Mud, the Mountains that hold up the Sky. Peter had created them in his mind before we saw for ourselves that they actually existed in the real world.

This interview first appeared in Twisted Tongue Magazine

Possibly related books:

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Related articles

• Peter Tomlinson [Interview], Conversations with Writers, November 19, 2007
• Sam Smith [Interview], Conversations with Writers, November 5, 2007
• Neil Marr [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, November 5, 2009

Elements of a story

An interview with Michael J Hunt
By Alexander James

Michael J Hunt is a very full-time writer … though it took him a lifetime to get there.

These days he has acclaimed published novels to his credit, more books in the pipeline, runs a busy writers’ group, edits work for other authors and publishers, and even organises a hugely successful annual literary festival.

But, unknown to him at the time, his earlier life was a whirl of research and preparation for the many literary hats he now wears; a hectic history of global travel, adventure, study, diverse work -- and a double brush with death.

Now settled in the down-to-earth northern English town of Wigan, he can conjure up memories of scorching desert heat in the depths of a Lancashire winter, of snow-capped mountain peaks as he runs a muddy canal towpath, or of a ten thousand-mile trek around the Australian bush when he’s stuck in a motorway traffic jam.

And at the keyboard in a quiet terraced street, he can re-live days in African hotspots, his time as a policeman during a state of emergency, as a banker, as a tobacco planter, as a probation officer in the tough East End of London … and even has total recall of the vivid and often horrific hallucinations he suffered as he fought months-long battles, paralysed and helpless in hospital beds.

He said:

In a way, my whole life has been one long research project in preparation for my work as an author.

I left school at 15 and went to Africa because my father lived out there. I got jobs that allowed long leaves with pay. I was single and had no responsibilities.

I preferred being in wild country rather than cities and loved desert travel most of all because of the solitude and the luxury of sleeping under the stars. My second book, The African Journals of Petros Amm, is very much a ‘travelling’ book, so I suppose much of what I wrote is taken from those experiences.

When I served in a Rhodesian infantry regiment, we spent time on counter-insurgency manoeuvres and I always seemed to be selected as a ‘guerrilla’ (I suppose because I was pretty useless to the Company). This allowed me lot of freedom, since it was my job to set ambushes and not get caught. I learned about bush-craft from an Afrikaner ‘fellow-guerrilla’, some of which I was able to write into my first book,
Matabele Gold. I also borrowed the river where we’d operated.

I worked on tobacco estates, in a bank, became a Reserve Police Officer during the State of Emergency in Nyasaland, and I witnessed independence and the birth of Malawi; all the time, laying down knowledge of and a deep respect for Africa.

I made overland journeys through the Middle-East three times. I travelled once
through India. I trekked around Australia -- 11,000 miles up through the centre and over to the east coast. And I went from South Africa to London in a Bedford truck. That trip took four months … and we climbed Kilimanjaro and Nyiragongo in Rwanda, a very active, fourteen thousand-foot volcano, on the way.

I was stranded in the middle of the Sahara because the Algerians decided to arrest my German and Dutch companions and put them on trial in Oran on trumped up charges. They wouldn’t let us buy petrol and we couldn’t move, so we spent three weeks sleeping rough in the desert until they came to their senses and released them.

But the time came to cool his heels. Michael applied for university and won a place on the strength of his experience, in spite of not having the A-levels usually necessary.

He said:

I struggled academically. I was competing against youngsters straight out of sixth form college, and I’d left school with no exams at all, although I’d gone back to school in Rhodesia for a few months when I was 17 and got some O-level equivalents.

After four years at Keele University, I scraped a third-class honours degree. It was a terrific course, which included a Foundation Year, where you experienced every department in a series of lectures, tutorials and essays. The experiment has now been abandoned; I suppose it cost too much.

By now, Michael had met Jo in London, the girl who was to become his wife. He’d qualified as a probation officer and had begun his career in Stepney in the East End of London.

He said:

It was a great place to start. I was thrown in at the deep-end. But it turned out to be no tougher than County Durham and Wigan, where I recently finished my career after 33 years.

Perhaps I learned the basics of writing by doing so many court reports. I always believed in being as concise and precise as possible, and it’s these habits that I’ve carried forward into my fiction writing. My motto is ‘less is more’. Kind of Orwellian, eh?

My two books were mostly written at night, at weekends and on holidays. They never clashed with my daytime job because, as a probation officer, you learn not to bring your work home with you -- either in a brief-case or in your head -- otherwise you’d become a gibbering wreck.

That’s probably why I’ve never ever considered writing anything based around my time in the probation service and the people I met through it.

But Michael had not nursed a lifelong love affair with fiction writing. That dream was sparked by misfortune in 1986 when he was turned overnight from a keen sportsman to a bed-ridden, paralysed hospital patient fighting for life against the horrific, neurological illness, Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS).

Michael said:

My main interest had been sport. I’d been a rugby player up to when I was 26, when I took up squash. Then the illness struck. It came out of the blue, just as I was recovering from a bout of ’flu, as is often the case.

One moment I was fit, the next I was in an intensive care unit for six weeks -- tubes and everything -- although I was unconscious and I don’t remember a thing. Then, I came to and lay inert for several months.

And this happened to me twice -- it was put down as the opposite of being a double-winner in the national lottery. There’s nothing like having to learn to walk three times in a single lifetime to put things into perspective.

It’s so difficult to remember what I was actually feeling when I was going through it. I tried to piece my life together, but I’d done so many long journeys that they always seemed to blend into a hotch-potch, especially my earlier African travels.

I hallucinated all the time I was in intensive care. The difference between hallucinations and dreams is that you know when you’ve been dreaming. Hallucinations are all too real and, because I never woke, I suffered from them continuously … they became as real as true life memories.

I was being hunted … and I was killed three times. Once, I was executed in a giant cheese wire by North Korean terrorists and cut into cubes. I actually watched my body being sliced up. The guy next to me in the hallucination was also cubed. He said: ‘For God’s sake, don’t move, else they won’t be able to sort us out when they put us together again!’ You don’t forget something like that.

My friends were my enemies and my sister was plotting to kill me. It was all pretty frightening.

When I had a character in my first book blasted unconscious by a German mortar in the First World War, I had him hallucinating … no experience should ever be wasted.

It took me a while, when I was conscious again, to work out that none of it had really happened. It couldn’t have, since I was totally paralysed. They even had to close my eyes for me at night. The only thing I could do for weeks during my recovery was to curl a little finger a millimetre by rubbing my tongue on the roof of my mouth. That was my sole entertainment for about three weeks. I can’t do it now, though.

Michael shares his GBS with Catch 22 author, Joseph Heller.

He remembers:

I saw Heller being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg and Melvyn asked him: ‘How much did the illness cost?’ (In America, of course, absolutely everything has to be paid for as you receive it, neurologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, day nurses, night nurses, treatment, drugs -- the lot.) There was a long pause, and then the great Joe gave a wry smile and said: ‘Quite a bit more than my divorce.’

I was lucky. Because of the British National Health Service, I was able to have [treatment for] GBS free of charge … twice! And now I’m about 90% recovered.

When I felt steady enough, I started to run the Wigan canals -- yes, right over George Orwell’s famous Wigan Pier -- and the surrounding countryside. During the last nine years I’ve covered over six and a half thousand miles. I know because I keep a record of every run. I started with half-marathons, did just about every one in the North West, and I’ve also managed two full Marathons; the last being New York at the millennium.

It was when the illness put paid to Mike’s squash ambitions that he discovered his new aim in life … to become an author and full time writer.

He said:

When it became apparent that I’d never play squash again, I realised I’d have to do something to exercise my mind, if not my body, and a chance meeting with a friend, who was about to start on a creative writing course, was the trigger that turned me into a compulsive writer.

Spurred on by his ambitions, I tried poetry and short stories, but I had a strong urge to do some more long-distance stuff, and I wrote two plays, which led on to novels.

There was only one subject that would interest me for such a long haul, and that was African history. I’d lived and worked in Central Africa for 14 years and I had numerous reference books, so I didn’t have to do any research away from home. I used my knowledge and imagination to create two lost worlds; the first in Southern Rhodesia shortly after the First World War and the second beginning in South East Africa in 1814.

Michael’s first two novels were published by BeWrite Books.

Currently, he is working on two more; the first, Two Days in Tehran (BeWrite Books, April 2008), about the problems faced by a group of travellers stranded in Iran during the overthrow of the Shah in 1978/9, and the second, The Tea Time War, about the Second Boer War, which is loosely based on his grandfather’s experiences in the Manchester Regiment at the siege of Ladysmith and beyond.

Much like his own colourful early life, Michael writes in freefall rather than slavishly following blueprints.

He explained:

I didn’t outline either of my successful books before I wrote them. I tried that once, and by the time I’d planned it through to the end, I’d lost interest in actually writing it. So, I always write now without knowing where I’m going from one day, or even one scene, to the next.

I started my 140,000-word African saga with a title and a blank sheet. Originally I was going to write a humorous book (it was going to be ever so funny) about a sleepy little mythical Central African country in the back-of-beyond. My character was to be called ‘Amm’ and the country he creates, ‘Ammnesia’ … and after the first page I
couldn’t think of any more funny things to write.

I scrapped the idea the same day, but kept the name, forgot about the humour, and started a 'What if?' story. What if a white man was stranded in South East Africa at the time when Shaka, the future Zulu king, was just beginning to impress himself on the continent. What if they met?

But although a story may develop itself, Michael advises anyone setting out to write historical fiction to have a sound grounding in what he or she needs to know to make the manuscript credible.

He said:

Get to know the country and its history. If you can’t visit the country, read as much as you can about it. Fashion your story around some actual historical event or events. Research before you sit down to write -- a research-led story -- or research as you go along -- an events-led story. I do the latter. But, whatever you do, pay close attention to sound research. Get your dates right and your factual actors behaving in character.

But as well as vast world-experience, imagination plays a vital part in important part in Michael’s work.

He said:

It’s really not too difficult for me to write desert scenes of 100F plus whilst wrapped in a duvet and wearing a woolly hat with my feet on a hot-water bottle at 1.30 am, in a very draughty, top-of-the landing study. The real secret is to be totally wrapped up in the characters you create.

The longer you live with them, the more real they become. I lived with mine for years during the creative process … writing every day -- without fail! So, I guess characterisation is the most important single element in fiction writing. If you don’t get the people right, no matter how brilliant your story and scene setting is, you lose your reader’s interest.

There were times when my characters actually lived in my head. We’d have conversations and arguments. Once I woke up in a sweat. My female character was saying: ‘No way would I do that.’ She was right, of course, and I was able to take a much more interesting route.

Michael J Hunt is no stranger to offering such sage advice to developing authors. He is chairman of his thriving local authors’ circle and, nine years ago, helped create a co-operative community press, Towpath, to paperback publish the work of budding writers.

He admits:

I’m particularly proud of that. We started off with a £300 grant and when I left, two years ago, Towpath had £2,500 in the bank -- enough to produce a book and a half.

It’s a simple model; everyone mucks in to help everyone else and all surpluses, after costs of production are covered, go into the next production. Towpath Press meets every fortnight for two hours in various places. We established good relations with printers and illustrators from the local College. Towpath has done about 30 books at the last count -- all for a total outlay of a mere £300.

Now that he’s officially retired from the very last and longest-lasting of many day jobs to become a full-time writer, Michael is busier than ever.

He continues to help run the annual literary festival in Wigan and Leigh as chairman of its committee, and also chairs the local writers’ group in nearby Ashton-in-Makerfield.

And as if that and completing his two books-in-progress isn’t enough, he also holds novel writers’ workshops at the festival and a novel writers’ support group that he’s recently started.

On top of all that, he’s now in demand as a freelance fiction and non-fiction editor with a webpage on Google and Yahoo.

He explained:

I offer a service for students or professionals who are writing in English as their second and sometimes third language. But I’ve also been approached by a publishing house to work on some of their novel titles.

Michael is also secretary of the North West GBS Support Group, which offers personal contact to sufferers and carers during and after the illness.

So how does he keep all these balls in the air?

He says:

Simple. I’ve got a great backup team. Every writer should have one. In my case, undoubtedly, my wife, Jo, and my four children -- now grown up, but not exactly gone.

Writing can be a very solitary occupation, even with a full house, and there must have been times when Jo felt that she and the kids were being neglected. But we’ve never had a single argument over it … although I’ve just had the thought that she might have been only too glad that I was otherwise occupied.

This interview was first published in Twisted Tongue Magazine

Possibly related books:

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Related interview:

Medieval Life & the Supernatural: An interview with Hunter Taylor, By Alexander James, Conversations with Writers, March 24, 2010

[Featured Author] Hunter Taylor

Medieval Life & the Supernatural
By Alexander James

Publishers, with their obsessive desire to pigeon-hole novels, see a clear distinction between historical fiction and fantasy … but author Hunter Taylor thinks they’re missing a vital point.

In her book, ancient history is where fact and fancy meet on equal terms.

Hunter’s firm belief is that the supernatural must be accepted as an integral part of early medieval life to accurately recreate the times of which she writes and the mindset of those who populated the forests, villages and towns of a bygone era.

Before the line between reality and myth had been drawn, war raged between the new religion and the old -- and she calls on her own rich heritage as well as painstaking historical research to bring to life times of bloodstained reality and magical legend in her remarkable debut novel, Insatiate Archer.

Hunter’s family heritage is rich in ages old Celtic and Native American tradition and a store of folklore and intimacy with nature helped create the book’s unforgettable heroine, Susanna.

In her extensive and unfettered research, she found that the deeds of the mighty were carefully written down on parchment and calfskin, but the lives of everyday folk were recorded in poem, song and fireside stories that rang with their own truth.

Reality lay somewhere between documented history and magical legend in the misty past when witches and their public burnings were both equal facts of life.

This realisation led to the development of her complex and unforgettable lead character Susanna, whose startling, differently coloured eyes mark her as a sorceress, and who is a high priestess of the secret and sacred druidic groves, struggling to embrace the best of Christianity. And the deep-rooted superstitions and unholy terrors of those dark times also created the monstrous Yellow Curate who will stop at no evil to rid the world of Susanna and her kind.

Hunter’s seamless blend of 14th Century fact and myth produces a breathtaking odyssey through a land in the birth pangs of change, where Susanna is never more than a footstep ahead of the sadistic cleric obsessed with her destruction.

But the book’s mirror-true reflection of life in a cruel age where illiteracy and misunderstanding ruled is not the result of insightful and open-minded research alone; much is instinctive and drawn from the author’s inherited feeling for the times and people recreated in Insatiate Archer.

As a former military journalist, Hunter -- who is now a full-time author and lives with her husband in Texas -- also weaves into her work personal family folklore and a closeness to nature inherited from ancestors rich in the wisdom of ages.

She said:

I am on every page in my own right, but I am there in the presence of everyone who nourished or influenced me. My grandmothers are there with their store of homegrown remedies and old family tales. My Celtic father, with his never-ending humor and great creativity, is there. The people with whom I trained in the Army are there. My travels around the country and the globe are there. All the experiences of a lifetime -- and the lifetimes of those close to me -- come together.

My childhood was filled with the kind of history in which the story is set, with a strong oral tradition in tales of adventure and mystery. My father was Celtic Scots, and family lineage also includes direct ancestors who were Native American as well as old Germanic and Irish blood lines

This heritage of folklore and harmony with nature was a tremendous source of
inspiration as I wrote of times shrouded in myth and of people close to the earth, independent in their ancient beliefs and facing a changing world. Although my story is set six hundred years in the past, the circumstances and characters felt very close to home. I could feel part of them.

I could understand that, in their world, there was little if any distinction between the real and the supernatural. For the book to recreate this (what is to us) strange balance, it must honour fantasy as well as cold fact and include elements of both forms of the prevailing reality.

The result is that Insatiate Archer’s mystic heroine, Susanna, is a flesh-and-blood woman of her time, but one who readers can understand and identify with in the materialistic 21st Century.

Hunter said:

Susanna first came to me in the early 1980s while I was serving with the Army in Germany. Through the years, she evolved from a slightly fairy-tale being into a real presence, strong-willed and adventurous.

In the early 1990s, while living in New York City, I saw a revival of the musical, Camelot. It occurred to me then that of all the people in the Arthurian legends, the character of Nimue was largely unexplored. She is usually portrayed as conniving, a thief of Merlin’s magic who seals him in a cave and leaves him there. She did not seem so to me. I saw her as a highly intelligent young woman, assertive and independent. She became the ancestor of Susanna.

So the character of Susanna is original, although it has been said that all writing, no matter how the author may deny it, is to some degree autobiographical. I confess I did not see this as I was writing the novel. When it was completed and had sat the shelf for a time, I took it down and read it again. And it was there -- me and my family ghosts.

Hunter’s title is taken from poet Edward Young’s 18th Century Night Thoughts: “Insatiate Archer! could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain.”

Hunter explained:

When I saw the quote on an old gravestone in Norfolk, Virginia, marking the resting place of a mother and her two children, it seemed to sum up the losses suffered by Susanna in the book. The harsh impersonal randomness of life itself.

The intertwining of historical fiction and setting with elements of fantasy came about as a result of my reading King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the King James Bible, and Playboy magazine. These may appear to be wildly divergent sources, but they all played a role in the conceptualization. Our modern lives tend to become bogged down in mundane detail. I believe that real life today -- as well as in days of old -- is something of a combination of fact and fancy, of the ordinary and the extraordinary. So even in the 21st Century, we can understand the touches of fantasy that make my book a more accurate mirror of life in the medieval times of which I write.

I have been interested for some time in the idea and the history of the manner in which women were persecuted as witches. This goes hand-in-glove with the struggle between the old religions and Christianity.

The unicorn has a part to play in the book; a creature that’s been associated with Christ and the early Christian church, the older nature-based religions, and belief in gods and goddesses. The image of the unicorn has been found in such widely divergent localities as ancient China and on the royal seal of England. You may have noticed that even in cyberspace, it’s one of the most popular avatars in chatrooms and forums. It’s almost like a genetic memory.

But to ensure historical correctness I researched histories of religions, witchcraft, ancient myths and legends. For instance, one seemingly fantastic episode in my book is based on an event actually documented in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain.

As between forms of religion, I have no doubt about this blurred line between fact and fantasy in history. I feel that recognizing this in a novel accurately reflects the mindset of those who populated our world in olden days. I’m sure my ancestors would agree.

Hunter’s passion for writing goes back to early childhood and, ever since, she has always translated her thoughts into words on a page. She said:

I cannot remember a time when I was not serious about writing. I believe it would be truly traumatic for me if some circumstance should keep me from it.

My earliest memories are of a love of words; reading, and the enchanting experience of writing. As a child, I haunted the public libraries and read incessantly.

I remember reading the same lyrical passages again and again, savoring the way the words were constructed to evoke an emotion, a scene, or a thought. I loved John Steinbeck, and Jack London; Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Hardy; and later, Tony Hilllerman. And I cannot read enough of Erica Jong.

So I have always known I wanted to be a writer. It was a question of arranging my life to allow me to write; family responsibilities had to come first for many years. I don’t believe I had early successes or failures in writing, just in getting to a point in my life where I could devote myself to writing.

Even in uniform, Hunter was armed with a pen. She said:

I trained as a military journalist and wrote for military newspapers, magazines, radio and television for more than 20 years. I also read as much literature as possible, and took every writing, poetry, literature and English class I could find at nights and on weekends, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles.

I even took leave to attend longer courses. I once camped at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and lived in a tent to study [William] Shakespeare. I also commuted weekly from Germany to England over a period of several weeks to attend another Shakespeare course, and from Germany to Spain to complete a creative writing workshop.

I think the way to hone writing skills is simply to write as much as possible, trying different styles, subjects and venues. And it helps to have really good editors interested in your work, such as my editor at Fort Carson, Colorado, Sam Sears, and the people at BeWrite Books who helped me to fine tune Insatiate Archer.

My training as a soldier gave me the background and discipline necessary to focus on my mission and to develop an attitude of ‘failure is not an option’. These are things that serve me well in all areas of my life. All writers need a sense of discipline and mission to complete the long and arduous task of completing a novel.

One thing I have learned that Iwill share: you cannot write after all your work is done; your work is never done. If you try to write in your so-called ‘free time’ you will never write. You have to learn that the dishes will wait, the laundry is patient, dust is non-toxic and sandwiches are nutritious. All else can wait, but your Muse cannot. If you ignore her, she will become bored and desert you.

Life revolves around writing for Hunter, but it doesn’t fill every waking hour. She said:

I stay very busy, which I like; I have a low boredom threshold. I am an instructor at Central Texas College, I am pursuing doctoral studies at Union Institute & University, I write every day, I design and conduct writing workshops for disadvantaged populations, I am involved in animal rescue efforts and I am active in my church.

In my free time I say hello to my husband … seriously, I’m blessed with a life-mate who understands my drive, and helps me to find time for all I feel I must do. Soldiers don’t have a lot of opportunity to make lasting friends in the Army, because of the frequent moves. But the friends I have made have always known that I write; for me, writing is a normal state -- and my husband and my family have always been there as an inspiration.

I have traveled a long and often bumpy path, and each hardship has made me stronger. Many years ago my Celtic grandmother said that when people find happiness in their lives they feel a need to give something back, and that each of us has been endowed with our own special gift, one that we can share. It may not seem to us a very special blessing; we are accustomed to it, and we may take it for granted.

Writing is my gift and my passion, and is what I want to share. Writing is my way of honoring the many blessings in my life.

Insatiate Archer is the first in a trilogy of linked novels. Hunter is currently at work on the second, set two centuries later with a descendent of Susanna’s as protagonist. Again deeply researched hard fact and documented myth and magic will be interwoven to recreate a lost age in which reality had a less rigidly defined definition.

This interview was first published by Twisted Tongue Magazine

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Ghosts, a Haunting and an Exorcism, Conversations with Writers, March 3, 2010

[Featured Author] Joe Bright

Ghosts, a haunting and an exorcism
By Alexander James

Author Joe Bright’s newly published novel is about murder. But the fiction has lain to rest the ghost of a brutal, real life killing that had haunted him all his adult life.

Joe was still a high school teenager when the quiet town where he lived was rocked after the body of a missing schoolgirl was discovered in a pond near the railway tracks. She had been raped and strangled to death.

The killer later turned out to be an intimate friend of Joe’s family.

The whole town was in shock. But I was more deeply affected than most. The young killer was my brother’s best friend. I’d often laughed and joked with him around the Sunday dinner table and had gone out shooting rifles with him.

One day soon after the murder, while police were still hunting for clues, this good pal passed me in his truck when I was on the way back from a run along the same road where the body had been found. He gave me an odd look, as though he was worried about where I’d been.

Something about that look made me think for a moment that he might be the killer of that little girl. But … c’mon … he was a friend. I dismissed the thought and didn’t tell anyone about the encounter. Later, of course, I realized it had been a look of guilt. Our instincts are often more in tune with the world than we give them credit for, but when the instinct suggests something frightening, we often allow ourselves to push it aside.

I’d have been glad to see the killer hanged … until he turned out to be my friend. Then, I just felt sick. If he hadn’t confessed, I would have sworn they had the wrong guy. Why? Simply because I knew him, and we often choose sides based on association rather than on the facts of the situation.

The horrible knowledge that someone we trust completely can be so secretly dark inside scarred me. I could never shake the dreadful feeling that people -- even those I knew well -- might conceal something awful and dark in their hearts.

But writing The Black Garden served as a catharsis for me -- a kind of exorcism of a haunting. Using what I learned about murder, murderers and the difference their crime makes to those around them as a backdrop to the main story was therapeutic. I projected all my fears -- how little we actually know even our closest friends -- onto characters in my book. It helped me work through the inner conflicts that had dogged me since youth.

The Black Garden -- released this month by Europe-based publishers BeWrite Books -- is set in a small town in Vermont, far from where the real life murder took place in Evanston, Wyoming. And it is also set in the fifties, long before the actual murder took place in 1979.

A few years after the murder, Joe -- one of a family of eight brothers and sisters -- left Wyoming and received his BA in English from Utah State University.

He began his career as a technical writer for Thiokol, the manufacturer of space shuttle rocket boosters. He later taught English in Honolulu, Hawaii and Berkeley, California.

He currently lives in Studio City, California, and works as a graphic designer.

Joe always had an interest in the arts and attended college on a fine arts scholarship, yet spent much of his time playing the guitar, writing songs and performing with a band. He did a lot of short story writing in high school, but didn’t get serious about it until 1994, while teaching English in Hawaii.

This was when I wrote my first novel, and I’ve been writing consistently ever since. Five novels in 15 years; three are out on audio cassette, two have been self-published, but The Black Garden is the first so far to have hit the spot with a traditional publisher and been released internationally.

The Black Garden is set in a small town in Vermont.

For years, the residents of Winter Haven have speculated about George O’Brien’s misdeeds; however, during the summer of 1958, when Mitchell Sanders arrives to help the O’Briens renovate their home, he discovers that not all of their skeletons are in the closet where they belong.

Joe said:

Since the story is set in 1958, I had to do a lot of research about the era to make the setting authentic. I wanted to make sure the dialog didn’t contain slang or technical terms that didn’t exist at the time. I also needed to know how the police investigated a crime prior to the advent of DNA testing. Fortunately, one of my older brothers works in law enforcement, and I was able to pick his brain on procedures and protocol.

Most of my stories fall within the gothic suspense category. The Black Garden, though, is more of a drama/mystery. With its rural setting and dark theme, it still fits in the American Gothic slot, but without the supernatural elements often associated with the genre.

Murder is a small part of The Black Garden; but the theme of judgment runs through the story. Who’s right, the Hatfields or McCoys? Depends if you’re a Hatfield or a McCoy. I hope the novel gives readers a different perspective on events, and entertains them at the same time.

My protagonist is Mitchell Sanders, the outsider who moves to the small town of Winter Haven for a summer job. He doesn’t care about his employers or the community. He’s a coward who has run away from his problems in Boston and then finds himself entrenched in even bigger problems. He’s not comfortable speaking his mind while in the company of people he knows will disagree with him. Yet as the conflict mounts, he’s forced to take a stand and to grow as a person.

The black garden from which Joe’s new book takes its title rests behind the house of George and Candice O’Brien, a grandfather and granddaughter with dark secrets. The residents of Winter Haven have speculated for years about the deeds of the O’Briens, but in 1958, Mitchell Sanders discovers the horrifying truth.

Mitch has come to Winter Haven for the summer, hired by the O’Briens to renovate their home. Unaware of the controversy surrounding the family, he moves into the studio at the back of the eclectic garden, where he has a rare view of the lives of George and his granddaughter. He notes how George spies on his neighbors through his binoculars, how they refuse to speak of Candice’s parents, and how they never leave the house. Especially troubling is the way the townspeople turn cold whenever he mentions that he’s working for the O’Briens.

Their bad reputation stems back 20 years to when George’s daughter Carolyn was raped and subsequently gave birth to Candice. The accused rapist, Grant Baxter, is from one of Winter Haven’s more prominent families and, true to the unbiased nature of American justice, the verdict favors the wealthy. Rubbing salt into the wound, Baxter’s lawyer casts suspicion on George by inferring that he was the one who impregnated his own daughter.

Infuriated by the verdict, George managed to alienate himself and his family from the townspeople, who have grown more convinced that George is the guilty one. As the slander intensified, Carolyn broke down and took her own life. A few weeks later, Grant Baxter vanished, never to be seen again. Howard Baxter, Grant’s father, is convinced that George O’Brien had everything to do with his son’s disappearance, yet is unable to present a shred of evidence.

Joe said:

I chose Vermont for the setting mainly because when I visited there I was taken by its beauty and felt it would make a great backdrop for the story. The town of Winter Haven is fictitious; however, I drew a lot on my own hometown of Evanston, Wyoming, when describing the layout.

With a first traditional release under his belt, Joe can now take time to reflect on the years that went into its accomplishment.

He said:

It’s such a great feeling to finish a novel. I also write songs, and I remember how proud I was when I wrote my first, which took a few days.

A novel, on the other hand, takes much, much longer. Thus, the feeling of pride is that much greater. I wrote the first draft of The Black Garden, for instance, 10 years ago. Then it was a work-in-progress while I revised, adjusted, wrote a screenplay version, launched on the long and difficult search for a publisher, and eventually went into months of fine-tuning with my editor at BeWrite Books, Hugh McCracken.

The most rewarding part of it is having other people read and enjoy it. It’s a nice boost of confidence and encourages me to continue developing my writing skills and to work on the next novel.

The hardest part about writing is the blank page. It’s a lot like creating a sculpture out of clay. In the first draft, you are creating the clay. That’s the hard part. Molding it is the fun part. To help me through this process, I first write an outline, plotting out the story. Through this, I come up with my characters, establishing their backgrounds, their likes and dislikes, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Once I know my characters, it’s much easier to know how they will react in a given situation.

Often I’ll write anything that comes to mind, just to get the writing going and to fill up that daunting blank page. I also tend to keep other novels around so I can pick one up and read a little to get me in the right frame of mind.

The first novel I ever wrote, I took the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach. That is, I just delved in without really knowing where the story would take me. Many writers work that way and do a splendid job. Not me. I ended up doing a lot of editing that I could have avoided if I’d have thought things out better.

Now I always outline. First, I write a brief synopsis of the story. Second, I figure out who my characters are. This often takes a month or more, because I really need to know who these people are so I can work with them. Third, I write an outline. My outlines include most of the dialogue and brief sketches of the action. So they tend to be around a hundred pages long. Fourth, I start writing the novel. It never follows the outline completely, since I discover new things while writing and often encounter flaws that I’d overlooked before.

I’m a graphic designer during the day and a writer in the evenings, so I’m at the computer all day long. The tragic part of that is that I have very little social life. I can be quite obsessive and have to force myself to take a break and go do something fun. I’m still trying to find the balance.

My parents and brothers and sisters have always encouraged me. It’s vital to have someone believe in you … especially when you’re having trouble getting agents and publishers to read your work. I’m very fortunate to have such a supportive family.

The Black Garden is published by BeWrite Books and is available from all major online book stores or can be ordered at any local high street book shop.

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[Interview] Bernadette Steele, Conversations with Writers, March 29, 2008

[Featured Author] Magdalena Ball

A Voice in the Wilderness
By Alexander James

Author and poet Magdalena Ball left behind the concrete canyons of New York and the sleepy spires of Oxford to find her voice in the rural mountains of Australia.

And with wombats and kangaroos for neighbours, she’s producing the best work of her life.

In the past five years alone, she’s seen wide publication of short fiction and poetry, non-fiction book, The Art of Assessment, her Quark Soup poetry anthology and, her debut novel, Sleep Before Evening.

With work underway on two other books, 42-year old Magdalena even finds time to run her bustling review site, The Compulsive Reader -- and look after her children, Dominic (10), Oliver (7) and Genevieve (4).

She said:

It’s hard to believe that we’re only an hour’s drive from Sydney. It’s very rural here and, as I type, the lyrebirds are singing, kookaburras laughing, bellbirds tinkling. Chickens are tearing up the lawn looking for grubs, and I really do need to follow-up on those fox baits

It couldn’t be more different from the New York I grew up in. There’s anonymity in the country that is actually similar to that in a big city. You’re surrounded by sound and bustling activity, but completely unnoticed. I like that. It makes me feel both ‘in the midst of’ and yet absolutely alone.

In some ways Sleep Before Evening is an extended love letter to a city I can never go back to except as a tourist. What I looked for when I came here, with my British husband, Martin, and we grew into a family, was Ithaca (in the Homeric sense of the word). And I’m not entirely sure why I had to be so far away from my roots to find it. To a certain extent a door just opened and, young an unencumbered, I walked through it.

The home I have here is exactly what I always wanted as a child: stable, rooted, safe: two parents, strong ideals, three regular meals on the table -- stability.

Magdalena Ball’s critically acclaimed new novel -- released by BeWrite Books -- tells the story of a middle class teenager cast adrift by the sudden death of her brilliant grandfather-mentor and her struggle against a self-centred artist mother, a succession of drive-by stepfathers and her desperate escape into a nightmare of drugs and sexual degradation.

Set in and about New York, the gritty, relentless tale unfolds with the same cool detachment that motivates the central character to peel back the layers of her life and expose the painful scalding within. There are lonely vigils in city parks and subway journeys to oblivion. In the city she meets Miles, a hip musician busking the streets and playing seedy venues with a rock band.

Her new, exciting, dissolute world challenges Marianne’s preconceptions about art and life. Here, in contrast to her prescribed upbringing, she finds anarchic squalor, home-grown music and poetry, substance abuse, sex and crushing disappointment and fear; but above all, exhilarating personal freedom.

Addictions -- of all kinds -- and the redemptive power of art and music, love, loss and beauty are all explored in a young girl’s difficult journey from sleep to awakening. The book draws on Magdalena’s own rich life-experience, as a daughter and a mother, to bring Marianne startlingly to life.

Magdalena said:

But Sleep isn’t autobiographical at all -- I’m happy to say! It’s pure fiction. It’s set in a real time and place where I lived when I was Marianne’s age, and there are flashes of characterisation, dialogue and situations that came from memory rather than pure imagination. There are many reasons for that -- the key one being my lack of inventiveness. I need something clear and visual to work with as a writer, and it helped to ground the characterisation in a specific place and time where it seemed to fit.

The other reasons are that, like Marianne, my mother and stepfather were going through an ugly break-up during that period of my life and there was tamped tension and unresolved pain that I was able to use for verisimilitude by setting the book in that particular time and place.

And, of course, like most writers, I do tend to be a magpie and have taken all sorts of observations, memories and experiences to put into the fictional situation. For example, I did like to go into NYC from Long Island when I was a teen, and like Marianne, could never find someone brave enough to come along, so tended to go alone.

I also attended a few of those poetry sessions Marianne goes to, including a gorgeous all-nighter on New Year’s Eve with [Allen] Ginsburg, Jim Carroll, Lou Reed, Anne Waldman, Richard Hell, etc, at the St Marks Church.

I even remember listening to a harmonica player under the arch at Washington Square Park and talking to him afterwards, but I never ended up in Marianne’s situation, falling in love with him. There was a little bit of my brother’s mother, an artist and writer, in Marianne’s mother, Lily, and a little bit of my stepfather in Marianne’s stepfather, Russell. And there are plenty of places in the book I remember being in myself and things I remember seeing, but the overall story is completely made up.

Having said that, I was worried that my mother would see herself in Lily but instead she identified with Marianne, and reminding me that she lived through something very similar indeed, as she did have a brief dalliance with heroin addiction. So perhaps instinctively, because I never really knew my mother’s full story -- it all happened when I was a baby and I was mostly out of the situation, safe with my grandmother -- I knew and understood something of my mother’s pain and put it in there. She tells me it’s uncanny, but it was entirely unintentional.

I think there are aspects of me in every character, from Grandfather Eric to stepfather Russell, to mother Lily and to Miles, to the boy in the park. They all have something of me in them and something of other people I knew in them, but ultimately the resemblance to both people and places was only a starting point. Once the story became strong, it took on its own life, and the characters developed their own imperative which was completely unique to this particular story and these particular characters.

The road from New York to the outback and writing success was a winding one.

She said:

When I was an English major at CCNY, a counsellor suggested I apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. I didn’t get it, but in the process, I became enamoured of the idea of going to Oxford, especially since I’d just finished studying Jude the Obscure and those spires were as appealing and seemingly distant to me as they were to Jude, so I applied anyway and got in. I went, but the college I got into (St Cross) didn’t have any permanent accommodation for me so I had to find a place to live.

I did find something at Crowley; a cute house which was being sublet by an even cuter guy with round glasses like John Lennon, and who, despite his gentle demeanour, was wearing black leather trousers and had some amazing looking motorbikes parked outside the door. It didn’t take us too long to fall in love. When I moved in, Martin had just quit his DPhil in Philosophy to do a PGCE teaching certificate and then did some teaching of French and History. His BA was in French and Philosophy.

I was totally awed by Oxford and had the silly idea that I could write something new about James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and W. B. Yeats. The bulging bookshelves already full of theses on these authors, as well as my own lack of linguistic capability made it quickly clear to me that I was off-track. But I knew I wanted strongly to write about the limits of language and how these three authors were able to move beyond those limits. Although I passed my qualifying exams and a VIVA -- the little thesis I wrote for that was pretty much all I was able to do on the topic using academic prose. I tried a few different supervisors but it was clear that I had nothing more to add to an already bulging canon so I left.

I was also working at a language school, waitressing (research for Sleep perhaps, though I didn’t know it at the time) at a restaurant called The Crypt, and eventually got a secretarial position at a biotechnology company. And there was my advancing relationship with Martin, who was an active member of Oxford University Motorcycle Club. We had a reasonably strong social life, so leaving the university wasn’t that difficult. It just began to assume less and less of a role in my day-to-day life until I decided there was no point continuing to pay fees.

Though I hate not finishing something I’ve started -- my thesis topic is, in a way, covered by the themes in Sleep, so I feel like I’ve now finished it. I even sent a note to my old supervisor telling him. Being a Yank, I’ve never had much notion of protocol.

So we were bumbling around in Oxford. Martin was teaching and I was doing secretarial work, both no longer tied to the university, and we decided to get married. After the wedding and a wonderful honeymoon in Brittany, we knew we wanted to buy a house, but house prices in the UK were high.

As Martin’s folks had migrated to Australia some eight years prior, and Martin had just returned from a long visit when I met him, and loved the place, we decided to apply for migration. I had never been to Australia, but what the heck -- I was young and adventurous. It sounded remote and exciting.

It took over a year, though, for the application to be processed, points tallied, qualifications assessed, so we decided to try our luck in the US for a bit first, ending up in North Carolina, which completely cured me of any desire to return to the US permanently. It’s hard to go back. When the Australian migration came through, we went, staying initially with Martin’s parents who are still within walking distance from where we currently live.

And now this is home and our three children were born here. They’re all gifted; charming, gorgeous, challenging, and outrageously and sometimes terrifyingly intelligent (I’m not exactly objective). My daughter, for example, yesterday asked me to explain to her how liquid nitrogen could be ‘boiling cold’ -- and she was only satisfied when I looked it up on the Internet and gave her the appropriately specific scientific answer. My eldest son has been reading her passages from Sophie’s World and he asked her if she understood it. She said, ‘I understand all the words you’re saying and can picture the scene and the girl, but I don’t quite get all the rubbish about existence.’

My children are certainly my biggest inspiration as a writer. Dom is a pianist and he was practising Dvorak’s Largo while I was writing Sleep -- which is exactly why I used the music in the book.

One of the things I love about Martin is how engaged in the family he is because my parents were divorced so early in my life; before I was one year old. The whole missing father thing in the novel is a key element in my life, although my own dad has always been around -- seeing me on weekends, taking me to the zoo, planetarium, etc -- all that paternal stuff Marianne’s grandfather took her to.

But Martin has, on occasion, criticised me for being a wee bit secretive about my writing -- doing it on the sly and not talking about it much. I guess I’m conscious of it being something of an indulgence (maybe having a novel out will change that -- giving me a mandate), and also conscious of the juggling act in my life. I try to focus on whatever I’m doing at the time and not let anything suffer too much from the diversity of my roles. And I’m still turning a buck at a steady day job. I kind of like to hedge my bets on the Hopeville thing -- doing it while earning at something that has no element of hope in it.

I do have to combine writing heart wrenching life or death scenes with ironing. I do sometimes burn dinner because I’ve had to write something down. My typical afternoon could easily involve the following simultaneous activities: breaking up fights between my children, making dinner, writing a scene from novel number two, working on a poem for a competition, fixing up a spreadsheet error for my day job, assessing someone’s manuscript, and talking on the phone to the rural lands department about the fox that keeps eating the chickens.

I court busyness and I do suffer from guilt when anything goes wrong or if I feel I’ve been neglecting the children by working too much. There are a lot of balls in the air. I chose to be a juggler so I’m not complaining. But sometimes someone throws one extra in there and they all fall.

I could build my Ithaca anywhere now -- having my family with me makes anywhere a home. Australia feels safe -- clean air, space, peace -- I can let my children go out and play and not fear for them (except for the snakes and spiders -- another story!).

Even out in the wilds, Maggie feels part of a sophisticated literary community.

She said:

I’ve been surprised at the support, both emotionally and financially that I’ve received from The Hunter Writers Centre -- a local committee of writers which has a reasonable amount of government funding. People still complain about the low level of arts funding here, but the truth is that it is higher than in the US, and there are many opportunities for writers and artists to do some fairly avant garde things with their work that aren’t at all about commercialism.

Of course writing isn’t the only thing I do, and it may be true that most of the other mothers who I meet while taking my kids to soccer or attending the parents’ meetings at school are not literary. But the mother in me has plenty in common with those people too, and I find all character interesting -- god knows where the next victim (I mean protagonist or antagonist) might come from. Most of the people I know are intelligent, generally well-educated, interesting, and insightful. So I’m not a fish out of water.

My oldest boy, Dom, reads very well indeed. Once, being the little poseur that he is, he took my copy of Finnegans Wake to school with him. He had no trouble reading it at all, at least until he became bored. And he very much wants to read Sleep. It’s a bit of an issue for me as I don’t think it’s suitable for anyone under about 17. I just don’t want him to have to go where Marianne goes -- even virtually -- so I’ve discussed it quite candidly with him and told him I’d give him a copy but wouldn’t let him read it until he was much older. He seemed to understand.

My other son, Oliver, likes Harry Potter but isn’t nearly so obsessive about reading as my older son is, so I don’t have to keep as close an eye on his reading matter. He likes Jackie French books, funny stuff like Terry Denton and anything about chickens.

My daughter has a steady stream of picture book review copies, but lately she’s been into longer books like Enid Blyton and Emily Rodda’s The Fairy Realm. We’re both partial to anything by Dr Seuss, Tohby Riddle and Pamela Allen.

My husband, being English, tends to be more private than I am. I don’t have much input into his work as a lawyer, other than to keep him as sane as possible. I often have no idea what he does at the office and although I find it reasonably interesting, I can understand that, at the end of the day, it isn’t something he likes to talk about much. I’m fairly calm, mostly, and I think I help him keep perspective.

He has plenty of input into my work. but I’m not sure he always wants to. I’m the kind of awful wife that, in the midst of an argument, will say something like, ‘Oh, that’s good -- I can use that. Can you say that again?’ Actually though, he’s unbelievably clear thinking and his editorial input is something that I both fear (I don’t like to show him work too early) and admire greatly (he never misses an error and his aesthetic sense is pretty close to perfect). He keeps my feet on the ground. And he’s an absolutely wonderful, committed father, who will do things like take the kids out for the day to let me get on with the mountain of stuff waiting my attention.

Magdalena’s aunt, Susan Gordon Lydon, was the well-known author of Take the Long Way Home. Her story of heroin addiction helped Magdalena get under an addict's skin for Sleep Before Evening. Uncle Ricky Ian Gordon, who read her angst ridden but powerful poetry before she could put together a sentence, is a famous composer; his recent opera of The Grapes of Wrath is receiving serious critical attention. Also Audible founder, Don Katz' Home Fires was written about Maggie’s family.

She said:

I'm in it -- real names used -- my maiden name is Magdalena Shapiro and Katz was taken with the unusual combination, so cites the name in full every time he mentions me.

Her mother plays both piano and guitar, and her father plays mandolin, guitar and a mean game of chess.

Magdalena opened her popular Compulsive Reader website five years ago to provide the kind of in-depth serious reviews found in top review sources like The Observer or SMH, but online and for a mixture of books including small presses and new authors, primarily literary fiction.

She said:

I've been writing for as long as I've been reading, which is roughly from age four. In many ways, reading and writing are flip sides of a coin to me, especially with things like reviews, where the process of writing is almost like a second, more in-depth and more analytical reading.

When I need a break from the big, bloodletting that writing a novel is, I turn to nonfiction like reviews, articles, and even parenting pieces fairly regularly.

Prolific Magdalena’s advice to developing authors is:

First and foremost, to turn up. That may sound trite, but like any other art/craft/skill, writers need to work at their craft. Inspiration hardly comes into it. If you aren't putting words on the paper, you aren't growing as a writer, no matter how bright you may be and no matter how much potential you have. You just have to get to work -- give yourself a real goal like pulling together a chapbook, writing a story for a particular deadline or competition, or even writing a novel, and then get on with it.

Secondly, a good writer is a good reader. It’s instantly apparently to me as a manuscript assessor when a writer hasn't read much in the area they are writing in. Being a good reader doesn’t necessarily make you a good writer, but if you don't read, you won’t have that all critical writer’s ear, where you know what works and what doesn’t, and you know what quality work sounds like. Good writers have to read a lot in whatever genre they want to work in. It not only expands your vocabulary, it expands your sense of what you can and might be able to do with language. It's key.

Although my website isn’t specifically related to my creative writing work as such, what it has done for me is to build a following of like-minded readers. In other words, I have a ready market of ideal readers who know me like a friend. In a way, this is ideal because people visit me because they share my enthusiasm, and therefore will very likely want to read the kind of book I write. I have 7,000 subscribers to my monthly newsletter and these are all heavy readers who will hopefully have similar tastes to me.

I also write and publish on other sites on the Internet quite a lot so I have a strong Google presence and think a reasonably good name recognition. Living in such a rural area of Australia, my market without the Internet would be small. Now it’s huge, so I see the Internet as critical. I think in future that multimedia, ebooks, audio books and network sites like myspace and Book Place will be increasingly important and interesting for writers and their careers.

Right now, I’m working on my second novel, Black Cow, about a seachange; The Good Life set in Double Bay Sydney and Tasmania, and I also want to pull together another full length poetry book. Then there’s that literary cookbook I want to finish up, a million more reviews, articles, and stories, a novel about my grandmother set in the Catskills during the 1940s, and hopefully a few interesting collaborations on the way. I'm not great at saying no, so anything can happen!

I’m also just starting a new radio show of my own at Blog Talk Radio. The Compulsive Reader radio show will feature reviews, author interviews, readings and book talk (kind of like an audio blog), and is going to be an extension of what we do at The Compulsive Reader. I’m looking forward to playing with multimedia a little.

I also do a lot of online and in-person networking (I’m a member of the Hunter Writers Group) and it helps to hear what others are doing and what does, and doesn’t work. I get to interview a lot of writers, which also helps but probably the biggest source of learning for me is in reading the best of what others are doing in my genres. I’m always reading poetry and fiction, and great writers tend to keep the synopses firing. They expand the limits of what’s possible. The more I read the more I realise just what words can do.

Related resources:

• Author's website
• Author's blog

Possibly related books:

,,

Related articles:

• Twitterview with Gary Eby, Magdalena Ball, February 18, 2010
• Restless days of life for an author in a New York state of mind, By Michelle Harris, The Herald, January 9, 2008
• Interview with Magdalena Ball, by Lucille P. Robinson, Alternative-Read.com
• Interview with Magdalena Ball, by Sarah Cook, aussieauthors.com, July 2007
• [Interview] Magdalena Ball, Conversations with Writers, September 3, 2007