April New Release Feature Author: Meredith Jaffe
The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison
Meredith audio_only
meredith: [00:00:00] I didn't know how I was going to write a novel that had so many characters, with so many voices, not only technically to pull it off as in, to not have the readers head hopping like crazy but I really did want to create that sense of an ensemble cast. Hopefully it does look a lot easier on the page that it is to actually do.
Pamela: [00:00:20] Welcome to Writes4Women a podcast all about celebrating women's voices and supporting women writers. I'm Pamela Cook women's fiction author writing teacher, mentor, and podcaster. Each week on the Convo Couch, I'll be chatting to a wide range of women writers focusing on the heart, craft and business of writing, along with a new release feature author each month. You can listen to the episodes on any of the major podcasting platforms or directly from the Writes4Women website, where you'll also find the transcript of each chat and the extensive Writes4Women backlist.
On a personal writing note my current release is All We Dream. If you'd like to know more about it or any of my books, you can check out my website at pamelacook.com.au for more information.
Before beginning today's chat I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Dharawal people, the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is being recorded along with the traditional owners of the land throughout Australia and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
And a quick reminder that there could be strong language and adult concepts discussed in this podcast. So please be aware of this if you have children around.
Now Let's relax on the Convo Couch and chat to this week's guest.
My guest today on the Convo Couch at Writes4Women is Meredith Jaffé. Meredith is the author of three novels for adults, The Fence, The Making of Christina and her new novel, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison. Horse Warrior, the first in a children's series, was published in 2019 and Meredith also contributed a short story Emergency Undies to the 2019 Funny Bones anthology.
She is the festival director of Storyfest held on the NSW South Coast and regularly facilitates at other writers' festivals and author events. Previously Meredith wrote the weekly literary column for the online women's magazine, The Hoopla. Her feature articles, reviews, and opinion pieces have also appeared in The Guardian Australia, The Huffington Post and Mammamia.
Meredith became a writer via the "scenic route," she says in her bio on her website, which I'm going to be asking her about today. Her new novel, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison, which I've been very fortunate to have a sneak peek of, is a funny dark and moving novel about finding humanity, friendship, and redemption in unexpected places. And Meredith is here to tell us all about it today. As our new release feature author for April.
So Meredith, welcome to the Writes4Women Convo Couch.
meredith: [00:03:04] And lovely to be here, Pamela, at last, I can be on this, this side of the screen and not listening!
Pamela: [00:03:10] That's right, because you spend quite a bit of your professional life doing facilitating, and we're going to get onto talking about that later. But of course, right now your book's about to come out, I know you're working on your next novel. So just for anybody who's listening, we've done a little bit in the intro, but can you talk about this "scenic route" that you took to becoming a writer?
meredith: [00:03:31] Oh, it's always, sometimes I wish it didn't, I have to be honest. But sometimes I'm really glad I did. So, it's like most things in life, it's a double-edged sword. So I was a kid who wrote. I wrote terrible poetry as a teen, I wrote lots of short stories I loved. Remember back in the day, when you used to have to do creative writing as part of the school certificates? I loved all that kind of stuff.
But I was the kid who finished school and had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up. I went to university because I didn't really know what else to do. I did an arts degree, because I didn't know what to do. And I finished the Arts degree and I was like, ‘Oh, I'm going to be a writer’.
And my parents were like, "Don't be so stupid, get a real job." And because I was a good girl, like a lot of only children, I went, "Oh, okay!" So I did, and I fell into the superannuation industry right at the time when it was becoming an industry rather than just a product. And I actually really enjoyed it. I spent 10 years doing that.
Let some great admin skills, which do pay off in the end. And then I moved into recruiting and I did that. So was superannuation recruiting, funds management recruiting. And I did that for about 15 years. So, I guess you could say that I honed my interview skills during that time, which paid off with the facilitating type work. But I also have to say that my favorite part of recruiting was finding out people's stories and gathering their stories and putting their life together as a narrative, rather than, ‘First, I worked at such such, and then I worked at so-and-so.’ I really liked building the story of that. And I guess I should have been listening to myself a bit more shouldn't I?
And then when I was having my third child, our fourth child combined and my third child, it was right at the time when the GFC hit and I was running my own head-hunting business in financial services. It didn't look pretty. And for once in my life I went, you know what? I think I might just close my little business down.
I think I was like seven months pregnant. I'll just take some time out and we'll just see what this looks like on the other side. And as we all know, it was pretty ugly. But weirdly enough too, considering I had one child doing HSC, another teenager in high school, a 22 month 22-month-old and a newborn, I was really, really worried about what I was going to do with my day.
I think more from the point of view, in all fairness to me, that the boredom of having kids – that sounds so bad, but kids keep it really, really busy and they are great and fun and engaging, but it's not mentally stimulating if you've come from a place where you're constantly using your mind – that probably sounds a bit better!
Pamela: [00:06:00] Yeah. It's a lot of listeners that can relate and I certainly can. Yeah.
meredith: [00:06:04] We love them to pieces, but... So, yeah, I decided to write a book and then as I was writing the first draft of that book – absolutely no idea what I was doing by the way. I didn't even have any, "how to write a book" books. So just kind of writing the story that I had in my head. And we know Wendy Harmer and her husband, Brendan and we'd had them over for lunch wine was involved clearly because I said, Oh, I'm writing a book. And she said, "Oh, well, why didn't you show me the first 2000 words, and I'll tell you if you should bother to continue." And I do remember the "bother" right. But, I'm oblivious. I go, "okay!'
So, I had the 2000 words and she comes back and goes, "actually just keep writing!' So that was my first sort of validation that I might be going somewhere with this, but I think the most important thing about that little story is Wendy had seen my writing. Then fast forward a few months. She came back to me, said, "Oh, we're thinking about starting this online women's magazine. Would you be interested in working for us?" And I was like, yes. And that's the best decision I ever made. The Hoopla, as we all know was around for four years. It came out in sort of 2011. Originally I was just writing opinion pieces. And then about six months into that they asked if I would do the books column. And that was a game changer because not only are you reading within a structured environment week in, week out, which is what you do with the podcast and it really keeps you very disciplined about your reading. But also, as you would also know from the podcast, it makes you read really critically, because if you did love a book, you've got to figure out why he loved it.
And if you hated a book, you've got to figure out why he hated it. And if you kind of sitting on the fence about it, you've got to figure that out as well. And just the words around that in a weekly column for readers. So that discipline, in terms of understanding the sort of journalistic hierarchy of information, writing to deadline every week being edited, sometimes brutally – all those kinds of things come into play so that when you sit down to do your own work, creative, write a blog, whatever that thing is, the blank page holds absolutely no fear for me whatsoever.
It's just a project that hasn't happened yet. And you do learn about writing your way into a scene. You do realize about editing yourself, ruthlessly. If you don't, someone else will kind of thing. So that's kind of how I ended up with writing. And that was sort of sad in a way that around the same time The Hoopla was finishing up in 2014/15. But that was around the time I got my first book contract with my first two books.
So that's the scenic route!
Pamela: [00:08:42] Yeah. Well, I've known you for a while Meredith and there's some news in there for me. So, it's great to actually find out a few more details about how you got to be where you are. And of course, prior to this new book that's come out you've had two adult novels published The Fence and The Making of Christina, and then The Horse Warrior, which was something completely different, a first in a series for children. How do you see this new book sort of fitting into that whole workspace that you've created so far?
meredith: [00:09:11] I think it's interesting because The Fence is a satire and The Making of Christina is a drama. And I think what I've learned through writing is you've got to enjoy the writing process. It's not just the story, but as you know, as a writer, you so immersed in the character's world And what I discovered is that being in Christina's world, in that book's case, was like a nine year. That was the very first book I was writing that Wendy said keep going, but it was the second one published. The nine years I spent with that character was nine years I'll never get back in the sense that, she had a really difficult life and problem to resolve in that novel. So, I really wanted to start to write novels that were more feel-good and more happy places to go and visit on a daily basis and spend a year, two, whatever, with the characters.
I guess I learned that from the writing. And I really enjoyed writing Horse Warrior for kids cause A – it's a lot shorter. 50,000 words feels like a doddle after a hundred thousand words. But equally it also really allowed me to have fun and to not be silly as in ridiculous-silly, but anything goes. You have to do the world building in such a way that everything has its own veracity. But equally you can make a mushroom talk, you can make a rock walk, you can do whatever you darn well please, as long as it fits the context of the world that you've created. And I think that is a really valuable tool or really valuable lesson that I took out of writing Horse Warrior.
And in between all of that too, I also did a short story for the Funny Bones anthology. So that was also a really great exercise in silliness. But still using comedy as a way of really underscoring important points. And I think all of that comes together in The Dressmakers.
Pamela: [00:11:02] Yeah, I would totally agree, having read an early copy of it and loved it. And I've just finished reading the final version and it's fantastic. But could you tell listeners what it's about – The Dressmakers?
meredith: [00:11:14] I actually really liked my publisher's pitch. This is how she pitched it to the acquisitions meeting as well. She said it was The Full Monty meets Orange is the New Black. The Full Monty in the sense that it's an ensemble piece, as you know, and Orange is the New Black, because it's set in a prison environment. I've never seen Orange is the New Black, so I just take the word that that's a really great, brilliant drama and that therefore the association is really valid.
So, The Dressmakers …is about a group of prisoners who are in a fictitious jail that I created – Yarrandarra. And Derek who is the main character has been there for some time. He's in jail because he embezzled funds from his local golf club to fund his poker machine addiction. And he doesn't really consider himself an addict, or that his crime is all that bad because he didn't kill anyone.
And he's estranged from his family. They've had nothing to do with him since he's been to jail. He's one sort of highlight of his week is the sewing group. Connecting Threads, the charity, runs a sewing group called The Backtackers, and he goes to sewing every week and he does tapestry and needle point and makes cushions and things like that.
But he's a bit of a loner. So that's kind of the main thread where The Dressmakers element comes into it. And then around Derek, our other characters, like The Doc, who's the prisoner librarian, and a new guy who comes into the jail called Joey Maloney. It's about how these men all come together, I guess, and about never giving up hope.
Some of it's just about basically just having a laugh. Yeah, it's a feel-good story that just happens to be set in a world that hopefully for most of us we don't know.
Pamela: [00:12:55] Which brings me to my next question. Meredith, where did you get the initial idea for the story, this idea of having a story set in a men's prison?
meredith: [00:13:04] I know – somewhere I know nothing about. So when I was at The Hoopla, I used to interview writers all the time. And this particular time I was preparing to interview Esther Freud, and the book at that time was Mr. Mac and Me which is a great little book.
And she also did a lot of freelance journalism for the Guardian and this particular piece – so I don't know about you, but when I research people, I just dive into the internet and go fishing and see what I find. And I found this article, she'd written about a group called Fine Cell Work, and Fine Cell Work is a charity and they go into prisons in person and they teach men because it is predominantly men, like Australia, 93 per cent of the prison population there. And I think it's 93 or 94 per cent here as well. So they go into prisons and it's not just necessarily minimum security. It could be maximum security as well.
And the volunteers teach these men how to do fine needlework and quilting. And I thought wow! Oh, and you're looking at the beautiful tapestry cushions and there's this beautiful quilt. And I should also mention another author is Tracy Chevallier and she's quite highly engaged with them as well now. Both her and Esther Freud are now patrons of Fine Cell Work. They weren't at this particular point in time. And Tracy worked with them on the book about the sleep quilt, which hangs in the Victoria and Albert museum in the UK. But I saw this article Esther had written about Fine Cell Work and my immediate reaction was, wow!
Imagine if you were a guy in prison who wanted to make his daughter's wedding dress. I have no idea where that thought came from, because they don't make wedding dresses in jail. They don't make any dresses. In the manufacturing part they might make hospital scrubs. But in the sort of Fine Cell Work area, it's all tapestry, cushions, needle-point and quilting.
But that was the idea and it wouldn't go away. And then I said to my husband, "I've got this amazing idea for a book!" And he's like, ‘Oh yeah?’ And when I told him, he went ‘That's really stupid.’ I was like, ‘Come on, it's a great idea, men in prison making dresses. So how would they physically make a dress for a start? How would they know what size she was? How would they measure her?’
And I just sat there and thought, 'Hmm, I'll show you'. And so all those kinds of questions, if you've read the book, you'll know, I've kind of addressed the practical problems that confront them. And then of course, because I had that issue about how to make the dress in prison, I then had to create a character who would be able to carry them in forward. And that's predominantly Joey Maloney and of course facilitated by Jane the sewing teacher. So that's – did I answer the question? That's where it all came from.
Pamela: [00:15:44] So we have Paul to thank for some of that!
meredith: [00:15:46] I'll show the naysayer in the room.
Pamela: [00:15:52] I think that's a fabulous idea. With fiction, of course, anything that's got that sense of friction or tension is automatically going to give you something to start with something to really grab onto. And that whole idea that, ‘well they can't make a wedding dress in prison – well, let's see if they can’. But did you have to then go about, I'm guessing doing a fair bit of research on prison life itself and how a sewing group would operate within the prison system and all that sort of thing?
What was your research process like for all that?
meredith: [00:16:21] Well, my first go-to point was Fine Cell Work itself. And if anyone's interested, I do urge you to go and jump on their website. They have like a blog system, so there are blogs from the prisoners. They have letters from the prisoners about how the sewing has affected their lives, both inside, in the sense of filling time, but also inside in terms of improving their mental health and their sense of wellbeing, as well as outside the prison, once they leave the system. So there was a lot of information that I've found there and then I guess every time I hit a point in the story where I wondered whether that would be true…
For instance, what you have for breakfast is mandated in a prison system. So you have to go looking – well, what do you have for breakfast? And the thing that makes it slightly tricky is that in Australia the States run corrective services. And so there are variations on the theme of how they might address certain issues. But also within the prison system itself, not all prisons are created equal, and by that I mean there could be a prison that has its own dairy. There could be a prison that has its own vegetable gardens. So they're not necessarily all reliant on food coming in from Coles warehouse. Sometimes they are actually actively involved in growing the food or prepping the food as well.
And I must say that in my research, our system in Australia seemed a much more positive experience than it did seem to be in the UK. So there was that kind of thing, but even down to like what toiletries are they allowed? I just assumed they wouldn't be allowed to have a razor, I mean we'd all be assuming that wouldn't we? But they've got to shave, so they do have safety razors and stuff like that. So yeah, really, really down to the detail as well as how prison is a highly structured environment. Knowing how that day unfolds and their day is nothing like our day. I mean, they're in locked down most of their day. So where we might decide we want to go to bed at nine o'clock at night or 10 or whatever, that decision is not yours to make.
Really what I'm saying is it's world-building, so you really have to go into this environment and create the universe in which this story could operate and constantly fact checking yourself because it would never work as a story if it wasn't authentic. And so I had to be really, really careful that I didn't let the story override the reality. And I wasn't trying to make prisons seem like a glossy version, the Vaseline on the screen version, of prison. I was actually trying to still keep it grounded in what life would be like for those men.
Pamela: [00:19:07] Well, you've mentioned Derek, of course, who is the main character. It's his daughter who they're creating the wedding dress for, and there's lots of antics that come from that particular practice. But who are some of the other men in the prison with Derek, because he is quite, as you say, an introvert in the prison. He doesn't really think he is a criminal, but he's in with a group of pretty hardened criminals, isn't he? And it's a really interesting mix of personalities, and just seeing that sense that there's often that little edge to the group, that at any moment, despite the camaraderie and the fun stuff that's going on, you do a great job of having that sense that at any moment something could explode here.
meredith: [00:19:50] I think it's really important to understand that the novel is set in one wing of a prison. What I learned through talking to people who work in the system is like, well what we think of as a prison, say for instance, Long Bay, is actually a whole lot of prisons within that prison. So there's sort of like pods, if you like, within the prison and my novel is set in one pod – C wing of a much larger prison. The other thing that's really important to understand is that the way prisoners are categorized: part of the incentive and privilege scheme that is that they can work their way from the hardcore maximum security through to day-release. Because you need the carrot and stick to get people to behave in the ways that you want them to.
So the novel is set in C wing deliberately because that's a minimal security wing. There's all stuff that happens in that wing that wouldn't necessarily happen in B wing or A wing or that kind of thing. So that's why you've got this real mix of prisoners. I think it's really important to say that you wouldn't necessarily be rubbing shoulders with people who've got multiple life sentences if you were in maximum security. So The Doc who's the prisoner librarian he's in for murdering little old ladies in their beds. His big passion is books. He runs the library. He runs a book club out of the library. He runs the journal writing course. He helps men who are illiterate or functionally illiterate write letters to their lawyers or families or children. And that's a really big issue in the real world that literacy and functional literacy are very high rates amongst prisoner populations.
A large percentage of them have not gone to school past year nine. So The Doc's a great character. He's a murderer and he's not a particularly nice person and he's got Derek's number down pat. He gives Derek a really hard time, but then he's just a bit of a psycho as well, because he will be absolutely cutting and devastating one minute and the next minute he rocks up to Derek's cell with a Scrabble board under his arm and challenges him to a game of Scrabble. Scrabble becomes a motif in the novel, sort of what would be a violent expression in another relationship with Derek and The Doc, it's over the Scrabble board.
Derek's best friend is Parker. He's a very old prisoner. In fact, I guess in one sense his job in the novel is to talk about what happens to people who are ageing in the prison system and how prisons are not designed to be nursing homes or retirement villages. And that causes real problems because if you've got older men who have probably had health issues, their entire life, poor education, poor opportunities, who then get dementia in a prison situation or develop really major health issues, it falls to the guards to have to look after them and that's become a really big issue in prison. So, I really wanted to talk about that a little bit with Parker, but he's also a great comedian.
He's a really good foil for Derek because he's got Derek's number and he just basically encourages Derek. Derek is always telling himself stories really about how nothing's ever his own fault. And then into the jail comes a new guy, Joey Maloney. He's actually at the end of his sentence as a young guy, you don't find out till the end of the novel what he actually did and he is the real larrikin on the outside. He's always got a joke. He's always ribbing people and carrying on. But the thing I like about Joey is as the novel progresses you slowly see the other side of this character and what he's really like. So, they're the main men in the prison.
And I probably should mention there, the guard that Derek calls Young Carl who likes to believe in the better side of the men and likes to try to smooth oil on top of waters. He doesn't want a hard day at work. But he also used to be a chef. So there's a bit of a running gag about food that runs through the book as well.
So that's kind of the main internal prison kind of world. The good guys, shall we say in the prison.
Pamela: [00:24:03] For sure. And we do get quite attached to our characters but obviously they are prisoners, they've committed crimes, so were you conscious of balancing that line between, 'Well, these are criminals, they've done the wrong thing' in terms of how you were presenting them? Because one of the things that I love about the story and about the characters is that nothing is really black and white. There's this sort of sense that ‘okay, they’re criminals, but they're still human beings.’ And there's this idea that most of them are going to come out of the prison system at some point and who were they going to be when they do come out? How much did all those factors play into your writing of those characters?
meredith: [00:24:48] Enormously. My degree was in English literature and sociology. So I've always had a real passion for how humans work as a group rather than individual psychology. And I think prison is a really interesting group environment for human beings. It's not a natural environment. And so you could think of a lot of different environments that are microcosms, but not slightly real. I mean, you used to be a teacher and high schools are an environment unto their own, I'm sure. Working on a space station is an environment unto its own, being in the army, working in a hospital.
What I guess I'm saying is that in those kinds of environments, you're seeing behavior in a particular context and through a particular lens that may not be the same as if it was on the outside. So because I'm in that environment, I'm not spending my time judging them for their crimes, I'm spending time working with them on their day to day life kind of thing. I didn't want to come as a narrative voice over the top of the story and go, ‘Oh, this is terrible’. There are times in the novel where we do talk about the crimes that are at the centre of why they're there but I also think it's really important to understand that - and I've talked a lot about this with people who've worked in custodial capacities and or teaching in jails – is that they don't even deal with the prisoners on a day to day basis with the big label, tattooed on the forehead kind of thing. You can't function like that. You actually have to deal with them person to person. And so I wasn't trying to write a novel so I could tell people what I thought about people who are murderers, or gambling addicts, or whatever. I was writing a story that I wanted to use the fact that they were misfits, if you like to put it in that context. To put them in a situation where they were doing something like sewing a dress and when you talking about tension and friction, there is that friction around these guys: how they're going to work together when they're not used to working together to create something which is sort of the antithesis of how they spend the rest of their time.
Pamela: [00:27:04] Which makes for some really great reading. And of course, it's not just the men. We have Debbie, who features a little bit in the story as well of course, the bride-to-be, and Derrick's ex-wife, Lorraine, who is an interesting character, and Jane who runs the sewing circle.
So can you give us a little insight into the women in the novel?
meredith: [00:27:27] So Jane is the sewing teacher who comes into the jail every Thursday for three hours at runs The Backtackers. She, works for the Australian sewing charity called Connecting Threads, which is the equivalent of Fine Cell Work in the UK. So one's real ones not, and they call this group The Backtackers, and I guess that's partly to make them more masculine sounding than a sewing circle. And she comes in every Thursday and teaches the men the fine art of stitching and she also supervises. So the prisoners build their skills and they're starting to then teach other prisoners who join the group.
It's a select group, so only 13 stitchers at any one time. So that's her job, to come in and basically teach them stitching skills. She takes their finished work out of the prison with her, but the men are paid to do the stitching and she has to keep track of who did what and make sure they've got something to do and make sure they get paid.
So she's there, if you like, to facilitate how they spend their time outside of The Backtackers as well, so there's something to do in their cells at night. Jane is a real softie in many, many ways, but she's also very stubborn and she chooses to make a decision which has almost dire consequences for everybody else.And that is also a wonderful source of tension because the reader is aware of the decision and no one else is. So, she was great fun.
And then there’s Debbie, the daughter and the bride. She has not seen her father since he was sentenced, so for over five years. She is very influenced by her mother's opinion of her dad, and that is not a very good opinion. Debbie is a really interesting linchpin, but I don't want to give too much away. So I'm just going to leave Debbie at that.
But Lorraine…now Lorraine was so much fun to write. Lorraine and her sister Sharon were really good fun to write. Originally when I wrote Lorraine she wasn't that bad. And then on a whim one day I jumped on the Chat 10 Looks 3 Facebook page and said I was looking for wedding stories and I will steal your idea, so don't tell me anything that you don't want me to put in a book. And I had some fantastic stories. Some of them were sent to me privately and I had to promise I wouldn't use them. But what became crystal clear was that a mild Lorraine (at that time) was nowhere near as awful as some mothers had been at their daughter's weddings. So I just had to ramp her up a fair bit.
And I think we'd all agree that Lorraine is so much fun because she so appalling.
Pamela: [00:30:15] Yeah. That whole mother of the bride thing and the whole background with Derek makes for some really funny moments. So Meredith you mentioned before about the library and The Doc running the library and the book club and all that sort of thing, and that's connected to the library that is in the town where the prison is situated. And I know that you live in a sort of small town. How much did your experience of living in a rural community or a small town community, how much of that did you draw on to write those aspects of the book?
meredith: [00:30:51] I think it’s a little bit more than that, to be honest. As a writer, one of the great joys and pleasures is to go around touring. And as a consequence I've been to quite a lot of small town country libraries, and done all the talks. And so often they’re these adorable little old buildings that used to be the bank or used to be the town hall, or the CWA hall or whatever.
And the sort of sense of connectedness that comes to the library in a small town is very different to what it is in a big city library, or a big suburban library. It is much more intimate. And so definitely there was seeing that in play on a day-to-day basis, in my own library, in my little town was part of that. And that library had been under threat at one point in time. So that feeds into the story, but I guess the larger part of that was driven by what was happening in the UK. People might remember, particularly around 2014, 15, 16, the British government and various councils closed libraries across the country, and authors were coming out (and I remember Catlin Moran being one of them in particular) and saying ‘I came from a working class background and the library was my refuge. And I escaped a violent family, I escaped boredom, I escaped all sorts, the only way I could get any study done was if I went to the library and that's the only reason I'm now a professional writer, journalist, or whatever the case may be. So there was quite a lot of conversation around the time I was at The Hoopla. And so I think that was also really playing on my mind: the importance of literacy generally. And you’re reading ambassador yourself. So, that's something that we all talk about as writers: what an immense privilege it is to be able to read and write. That's easy to forget and I really wanted to look at the literacy issue in jails from that lens, rather than banging the table top and going, ‘All these poor prisoners or illiterate tralala’. I wanted to look at what the importance of books beyond the physical book itself, beyond the reading.
And that is the sense of community, that sense of connectedness, which of course then ties back into another theme in the book, which is about addiction. And I draw on Johann Hari's book, Chasing the Scream where he posits that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connectedness.
And that really resonates with me. And so I saw the library also talking to that idea of the opposite of addiction is connectedness.
Pamela: [00:33:35] And, pardon the pun, but all these different threads in the story do come together. You do end up with this really great sort of quilt-like feel, of iissues around friendship, connectedness, addiction, family, relationships
So obviously you're drawing on all these things as you're writing the book, was there anything unexpected that came up in the writing of the story for you?
meredith: [00:34:01] I think this will sound really silly, but the unexpectedness wasn't the story so much as I didn't know how I was going to write a novel that had so many characters, with so many voices. Not only technically to pull it off as in to not have the readers head hopping like crazy, but I really did want to create that sense of an ensemble cast.
And I didn't know how to do that particularly. But I did interview Rosalie Ham about her book, The Year of the Farmer and I asked her, ‘How do you do this? You've got all these different characters and all this stuff is going on and there's all these different plot lines…? And she said, ‘Well, that's just how my brain works. I just think like that’. I suppose you just have to take that leap and trust yourself that you can actually pull that off. And it is a challenge.
Hopefully it does look a lot easier on the page that it is to actually do. And I think the other big surprise for me was, there were some unexpected plot twists that were even unexpected to me. But you know what it's like as a writer, you go, ‘Oh my God, duh…why didn't I think of that before those kinds of moments?’
I can be quite kind of abrupt at the end of all. It just finishes and it's up to you as the reader to figure out what would happen next. And I do have writing friends that say, ‘No, no, you need to sew it up more neatly.’ Pardon the pun. And so this is my first novel where I challenged myself to tie it all up in a neat bow at the end. That was a challenge too.
Pamela: [00:35:56] Well, it is wrapped up in a beautiful bow. And while we're talking about that, of course, the gorgeous cover that was specially prepared for you. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
meredith: [00:36:08] This is the sort of thing that when you're an aspiring writer or you're just starting out, you're like, ‘This is so cool.’ In a frame on my wall over there is the Holly Ringland poster for The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, the artwork that they had commissioned that was up there before I was with this publisher. So this is the same publisher and I've just loved the artwork in that poster and that someone actually drew all those beautiful flowers and then the graphic design people designed that lush cover and did all the artwork.
And then my editor comes back to me and she says, ‘Oh, well, the designer's mum is a stitcher, so they've decided they're going to stitch the cover’. And I was like, ‘What?’ And so she gave that image to her mum, and her mum with a blank canvas literally sewed that cover onto a canvas. It wasn't coloring in between the lines. I've seen the pictures and I've put them up on my newsletter, but I'll probably put them up on my website now the cover reveal’s been done.
So yeah, then they photographed the stitched cover to create the book cover. And then embossed a bit so it's pretty cool. I feel incredibly privileged that anyone would go to that much effort for my book.
And you and I were talking earlier about how much we love the new Emily Maguire cover with Love Objects. I mean, wow, that is an amazing cover. So, it's really lovely to see publishers can go out and make something that's a work of art in in and of itself, I think.
Pamela: [00:38:08]. Are you a sewer yourself, Meredith?
meredith: [00:38:12] Yes. At the moment I've got so many things going on, it's like I basically get to post dinner and it's like, why where's the bed? Take me to it. But yes, I’m in the middle of doing a tapestry which is a William Morris design. And I've got a whole lot of tapestries that I've got to get turned into throw cushions. This is what happens when you're a single mum for 10 years and you've got no social life. You've got a lot of time for stitching.
So I recently uncovered this whole box of all this stuff I'd forgotten I'd even made over the years. I found all these artichoke tapestries. There's six of them. Because originally I was doing them to be drop seats into dining chairs. And so I went, ‘Oh, golly. They’re really expensive now’. And I went into the local upholsterer, who's a mate of ours and said, ‘Can you turn them into throw cushions anyway?’
So they're going to have a second life. But yeah, I'd probably say I'm a slightly better stitcher than I am a knitter. I'm self-taught because I'm left-handed and it's really hard for anyone to teach you how to do stuff like that when you're a lefty. It's all been out of books and stuff, but I’m no Joey Maloney let's put it that way.
Pamela: [00:39:36] Right. But you could draw on your experience of stitching in describing that in the book. And of course, one of the big things that's been keeping you very busy is your work with Storyfest, which is coming up very soon. So could you tell us a little bit that?
meredith: [00:39:51] So it’s a lovely festival we started down in my part of the world on the South coast of New South Wales. It's kind of already bigger than we anticipated, but it's a great team of people. It's a writer's reader's festival meets film festival kind of thing, and it's got a bit of drama going on. It's called Storyfest because it is a storytelling festival. So that's going to be on the weekend of June the 18th to the 20th this year, not far off, and we've got something like 40 artists coming to visit the area.
Everything from filmmakers - we're actually going to be showing The Dressmaker and talking to Rosalie Ham and Sue Maslen who produced the movie. So I'm looking forward to that conversation around which is better, the book or the movie. That'll be fun, but there's a whole lot of people - and many people who have been on your, on your podcast as well. So there'll be some real familiar faces and new faces, and it's just a wonderful weekend. And the locals come out in absolute droves to support it. Like most things that you put your heart and soul into, it's exhausting, but when you get to see it happen, it's kind of like, ‘Whoa, that is so cool’.
Pamela: [00:41:12] And I'm really looking forward to it. But in the meantime, of course, your beautiful book is going to be out in time for Mother's Day. So is it available in different formats and where do you suggest people go to find it?
meredith: [00:41:28] Well, it is an ebook and it is a print book, and it's also an audio book. And the guy who recorded the audio book messaged me on Instagram to say, ‘I've just finished recording the audio book of your novel with an actor who's doing the voiceover. And we’re both in tears, andI've never had that happen to me when I've recorded a book before. And I just wanted to tell you. And I went, ‘Wow’. I haven't heard the audio book, but I reckon that they probably did a pretty good audio. So it's out in all those formats and it's available all over the place, in all the usual places that people buy their books and audio books and stuff.
Pamela: [00:42:15] Well, congratulations on it Meredith. It's a fabulous book and I know it's going to just strike so many chords with so well done.
meredith: [00:42:36] And, that's the exciting bit, isn't it.? As writers, you start to hear the reaction and how the book makes people feel…I am excited that it’s going to be out in the world. I am really keen to hear what people have to say and what resonates with people. It's sort like you release it into the world and you see if it flies and how it flies. It's an exciting time.
Pamela: [00:43:03] If people want to find out more about you and your other books, Meredith, where's the best place to find that online?
meredith: [00:43:09] Well, pretty easy. If you go to my website meredithjaffe.com, and you'll find me there with all sorts of comments and there's reader's notes going up and stuff as well for people who are interested for book club, I think I've written 12 questions as well. So there'll be heaps of support material for people to really delve into the book.
Pamela: [00:43:31] Well, I'm going to be seeing you very soon at the launch of the book and also then at Storyfest so thank you for joining us today on The Convo Couch and all the best with it.
meredith: [00:43:40] Thank you so much for having me, Pam and thank you for everyone who's listening in today.