I was always interested in books, reading and illustrating things like nursery rhymes. I especially remember the ‘rhymes’ because I was in hospital earnestly engaged in making a book when I had to get up to ask a nurse how to spell ‘rhymes’ and got massively told off for getting out of bed and running around in bare feet when I was supposed to be sick. Later I overheard the nurse telling the story to a colleague and had a flash of insight that ‘there are two stories here!’ and also that there could be a story inside another story. That nursery rhymes could be a story that I wrote about and then I could be the story that a nurse told, and that their conversation could also be another story if I could find a way to illustrate it without getting out of bed. I think I was six or seven. 

And I became hyper-interested in ‘weirdness’ at an early age, which I think sprang from the concept of hidden stories – the one being told, and the others nested within. Given that a notorious church-protected paedophile roamed our primary school playground, I knew instinctively that surfaces were icebergs rather than something we could entirely trust.

Making art became my way of observing the world, and I continued primarily as a painter entitled to use up more than my share of the paint until I had fabulous English and English Literature teachers in Years 11 and 12. King Lear was the turning point in my shift from visual art to words. It was the passion and tragedy that turned me on.

I lost a decade and nearly died twice.

I began writing again in my late twenties. I was madly in love and obsessed; poetry was my chosen form and love my chosen subject. I had poems published in Overland and Island and a short story in Westerly and fully planned on a writing life supported by waitressing until I was persuaded by an older writer/mentor to make sure I had a proper job to pay the bills. I did a post-grad year to qualify as a librarian, met my husband Gary at RMIT, started professional work and my writing time began to seriously taper. Add a baby to full-time work, add a second very premature, very sick baby and a super-stressed family and personal writing began to feel selfish (if I’d had the time to think about it). My son’s early birth was a tremendous shock – we’d both come very close to dying of sepsis – and I felt completely fragmented and overwhelmed. I thought – if he lives, I’ll never ask for anything again.

Gary and I started an online support group for parents of premature babies, and it really took off. The capacity to talk, express fear and dread and compare experience at any time, across the world, met an urgent need for traumatised new parents who had unexpectedly become, in the language of our group, strangers in a strange land. Most of what I wrote in those early years went into the internet and vanished and I was okay with that. But I also organised conferences and collaborated on scientific articles. We saw a shift to family-centred neonatal care during that decade. And gradually the loud ‘morale-boosting’ radios for bored nurses were turned off, the tiny little paper-thin babies became entitled to pain relief (for example, when being intubated with tubes bigger than their nostrils); their bedding became more supportive and comforting so their bodies weren’t splayed out flat on their backs, with their transparent skin and fragile nervous systems exposed to air, fluorescent lighting and constant noise. The ethics of medical care for babies born at the borderlines of viability became urgent and then real.

My family survived those years. I found the best orthopaedic surgeon in the country for my son who needed numerous surgeries. And I started work as Library and Web Manager at the College of Surgeons where I made very good use of the medical databases. I worked there for twelve years and spent much of that time locked into ferocious combat with the IT Manager who found it intolerable that a woman/librarian was running the College website. He had a wife at home which freed him up to focus his efforts on undermining mine. But I never give up and he was sacked before I resigned. All these things take time from family, let alone writing. I was often numb from exhaustion.

An inheritance allowed us to pay out our mortgage and take early retirement. My son was doing Year 12 and I wanted to be as present as possible. I was desperate to start writing again but I didn’t count on being terrible at it. I thought I’d pick up on my early unrealised potential but instead I had to grind my way through a thinly disguised and atrociously written autobiography and then move little by little into fiction, abandon that ‘novel’ after two years and start afresh without the actual freshness. My other problem was that I couldn’t, in good faith, write about my husband, our marriage or our children. So what was I going to write about? 

When I enrolled in Tegan Bennett Daylight’s Short Story Focus Week at Varuna, I found my voice in first person short stories, initially through the perspective of immature girls. And over time I’ve learned to recognise the feelings of laughter, energy building and surprise that are, for me, a true sign of fiction. I’ve learned not to judge what I’m writing and to dive deeper if it’s weird. I applied this knowledge to my novel which I wrote and rewrote until I thought it was finished and polished to a high standard. Just before Covid hit in March 2020, I signed with a dream agent. And while my novel was out on submission, as the publishing industry furloughed staff and closed offices, I wrote short stories which I hoped would form my follow-up publication.

In February 2022, I signed a contract with Scriber for my short story collection. No-one wanted the novel I’d spent five years on. I’m now an almost published author. I’ve had help, I’ve persevered, I’ve had the time to force my focus and I’ve been lucky. Given my increasing age and all that means, I’ve also been driven by the not unrealistic fear that I’d die before I saw my work in print. Was I going to leave my children a giant chest of $2-shop exercise books, slabs of Officeworks printouts and countless USB sticks of disorganised files? Yes, they’re getting it all.