About the author

Q&A with the author

When did you start writing?

I enjoyed writing at school, and had to do it as part of my first degree where I majored in English. Then I started teaching, married, raised children and studied—so really did no creative writing as such, but plenty of academic writing. I did a lot of story-building in my head.

I read The Lord of the Rings when I was about nineteen, and like a lot of people, was blown away by it. I read it once a year for the next sixteen years, as a sort of mental holiday, and have read it numerous times since. But it had one major flaw: as a nineteen year old female reader of The Lord of the Rings, I was hungry for more romance. So, in typical fan-fic style, I created my own (mental) story based on Eowyn and Aragorn, involving them having adventures together and of course, romance. I enjoyed this mental story over a number of years, then slowly these characters morphed into early versions of Kira and Caledon (the latter appears in The Song of the Silvercades—Book 2 of The Kira Chronicles).

I didn't start writing (as opposed to imagining) until the mid 1980's. Then it was picture story books, which I also illustrated. The first version of what has become Book 2 of the Kira Chronicles was written in about 1986, followed quickly by what is to become Book 3. In about 2003, I decided to use what I knew of the back story to make the two into a trilogy by writing The Whisper of Leaves.

Who or what was the biggest inspiration for you to become a writer?

The Lord of the Rings alerted me to the potential of world creation—including landscapes, languages, religions, histories and quasi-human forms. This fitted with my interest in landscape as an active rather than passive agent, and with my studies (I have a sub-major in Geography in my first degree and headed a Geography Department in a Secondary College for four years). Mary Stewart's Merlin series (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment) added to my interest in narratives where landscape becomes character, rather than backdrop.

When you're not writing what do you do?

I work full time in a job that has an infinite capacity to expand into every hour of every day of the week. Presently, I am doing this job and writing The Song of the Silvercades (Book 2), thinking about Book 3 in The Kira Chronicles, and what I want to write after the trilogy is published. I enjoy camping and long car trips. There is something magnificently simple about being a nomad. Stripping away the physical baggage finally strips away the mental baggage. I particularly like the redness of central Australia. In my view, no Australian should die without walking the Valley of the Winds in Kata Tjuta.

What are you reading at the moment?

I've just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, as well as The Power of Myth—which are transcripts of interviews Bill Moyers did with Joseph Campbell (the famous mythologer), and an article in New Scientist on synaesthesia (which is where the senses 'leak' into each other, and people 'see' music, or 'smell' words—and which I think is what Jane Yolen used in her Heart's Blood dragon books series). I'm interested in other ways of seeing—hence this motley collection of reading.

Who are your three favourite authors and why?

I don't have favorite authors because I can read two books by the same person and only like one. Books which have affected me profoundly are: The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien, the first four books in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, the first three books in Mary Stewart's Merlin series, Natalie Babbit's Tuck Everlasting and for sheer mastery of language, anything by Sonia Hartnett.

You have a PhD in fantasy fiction, and now you are a published author of a fantasy novel – have you always been interested in this genre?

My Ph.D explores the female hero in the context of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, which is a narrative structure he identified as being universal in hero myths. In his exploration of it, he mainly uses male heroes as examples but he argues that the monomyth applies to both male and female heroes. So, my own writing is fundamentally about female heroes—as opposed to what I call, male heroes in drag, that is, women who act like men.

I wasn't especially interested in fantasy when I read The Lord of the Rings, but that led me to read more fantasy—especially works by Ursula Le Guin and Mary Stewart. Then when I was on family leave from teaching, I decided to improve my knowledge of children's and young adult literature by reading widely. I was struck by the number of dragons occurring in all categories of literature, and completed my M.Ed in this area. This in turn led to an interest in fantasy more broadly, and myth in particular, and then Joseph Campbell and the psychologist Carl Jung—whose works help give explanation for myth and fantasy. I attended a series of lectures on Jung, then wrote the first version of Book 2 in The Kira Chronicles in about six weeks. The work had been gestating for many years and was obviously ready to be written. This sequence of events will make sense to anyone who knows anything about Carl Jung.

What inspired you to write The Whisper of Leaves?

The seeds of The Whisper of Leaves are in Eowyn and Aragorn, but the finished book doesn't bear much, if any, relationship to them now. It's had a very long gestation and many incarnations. As Kira grew as a character, and I came to understand how and why Allogrenia came into being, the whole story shifted. The nature of female heroism has become more important in the series too. How are women such as Kira (and Palansa) to survive in a society increasingly ruled by the sword—without becoming male heroes in drag?

Where do your ideas come from?

For me, single words and images can prompt whole stories. My novel Snowmelt (not yet published) was initiated by a single word—sceadu, which is the (old) Anglo-Saxon form of the (modern) word shadow. The first thing I thought was that it would make a great name for a tribe—whether pronounced skee-ar-doo, or shardoo. Being a geographer, I also immediately thought of a rain-shadow—the area on the landward side of a mountain range that is drier due to air shedding its moisture on the seaward side of a mountain range. Thus, drought or climate change could be a plot-driver. Having knowledge of Carl Jung's work, I also thought of the shadow in a psychological sense—the part in the unconscious where we hide things we don't like about ourselves. Men will hide their feminine aspects there, women their masculine aspects.

With a bit of playful mix and matching, I created an instinctive female hunter on the ice-bound, dry side of the mountains, and a rational male gardener on the fertile side of the mountains. The quest of both is to become whole, by integrating their opposite aspects, that is, by coming together.

Are any of the characters taken from real life?

I rarely take characters from real life, although Kandor is based on my son (who's about to turn 19). I try to crystallise the one or two things that might drive a character, and then their thoughts and actions flow from this. For instance, Kira is driven by a need to heal and a hatred of constraint. How she behaves is thus explicable in these terms. Having said this, I did make fundamental changes to Tierken (who appears in Book 2), simply because I found an edgy, broody picture of a black-haired man in a magazine—a picture which is now stuck on the wall above my desk. Before I saw the picture, Tierken was fair and a lot more considered. He is now more violent, more passionate and more mercurial.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am working on Book 2 – The Song of the Silvercades, at the moment, and a short story prompted by an image from the Cirque de Soleil, where a writhing, broken-winged angel falls to earth. I also have another novel in my head, with a non-human main character, waiting for the trilogy to finish.

 

 

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