Saying No! to Fear with Holly Ringland

Holly Ringland

 Saying No! to Fear Transcript

Pam: [00:00:00] 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 podcast each week on the conveyor couch, I'll be chatting to a wide range of women writers. Focusing on the heart craft and business of writing, along with the new release feature author each month, you can listen to the episodes on any of the major podcasting platforms or directly from the rights for women website, where you'll also find the transcript of each chat and the extensive rights for women 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: www.pamelacook.com.au for more information.

Before beginning today's chat. I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Darawahl 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. Let's relax on the couch and chat to this week's guest.

Holly Ringland is an Australian author whose beautiful debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart catapulted her into literary stardom. Having first wanted to be a writer at the age of three, it took another 34 years for her first novel to be published and it soon went on to become an international success.

Publishing rights for Alice Hart have been sold in 30 countries, possibly more now and a TV series adaptation from  Bruna Papandrea, production company Made Up Stories is on the way. Can't wait for that. In May 2019, the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian book industry award general fiction book of the year. And in February, 2020, Holly signed a new two book deal with Harper Collins and is currently writing her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding. Throughout 2020, Holly traveled Australia to film Back to Nature, a new visually stunning eight episode factual lifestyle series she's co-hosting with Aaron Pedersen on the ABC.

Holly posts wonderfully honest posts on Instagram, about her writing life and process, which is what we're going to be talking about today on Writes 4 Women. And it's these posts on with my absolute love of Alice Hart which prompted me to invite Holly back to Writes 4 Women for the second time, and to discuss the writing of her second novel and in particular, this whole heart of writing issue.

Holly, it's so good to have you back on the convo couch. Welcome back to Writes 4 Women.

Holly: [00:02:56] Thank you, Pamela. I remember our first chat. It was I think, 48 hours after the ABIA's and the main thing I remember about talking to you - because I think it was the first time we'd met as well - was just how lovely you were to hold space for me. Because I just remember basically wailing and talking about sounding like Chewbacca the whole time. I don't remember making any sense whatsoever. And you were so kind to me. So thank you. So nice to be back with you again.

Pam: [00:03:25] It was great to talk to you then and I'm really looking forward to talking to you now, because as I said, I've been following you on Instagram and social media and just, I love your posts and I love the way you talk about the whole writing process and the writing life and everything to do with it, with such sort of curiosity and honesty. And I have to say before we start for everybody who may be watching, or if you're not watching, you need to get onto the video of this because Holly is currently sitting in her gorgeous vintage caravan Frenchie, and it looks absolutely amazing.

Holly: [00:04:00] It's a very big occasion. It's Frenchie's first ever podcast. So I will talk about this a little bit later. I'm sure. But I bought her in April 20 is my plan B to write my next novel because I found myself without an office because of the pandemic. And it's just a little slice of heaven to be in here, but I haven't done an interview in here before, or had any public view in here before. So it's very special.

Pam: [00:04:26] I feel very honoured. Okay, let's go onto some questions. So you are currently working on your second novel and I'm really curious to know how that's going and how different that process is for you.  I know that you took quite a while to get Alice Hart to the point where  you felt it was ready to give to a publisher or  to see if it was ready for publication. How is it this time around?

Holly: [00:04:50] I don't even know what this would be like to write the novel following Alice, if it was just writing the novel, but it's been writing the novel in a completely contrary way to the best laid plans that we have. Because apart from the dire tragedy that the pandemic is posing in the world. The disruption is beyond what any of us could have imagined. And what it's meant for me is that I'm in Australia for the foreseeable future, which is glorious, it's also very much not what I was expecting and have prepared for in terms of going into the hibernation state that you sort of go into to devote yourself and commit yourself to the first draft process, because I think I've only done it once before. All I know is that it requires constant attention and immersion from me. And so you have such huge disruption to every part of life and home and that sort of thing. That's of course affected and influenced my writing style, my writing process, my writing life, which is where Frenchie comes in. I was meant to be back in the UK May, 2020

I was meant to have finished filming my first TV series by then,  which is something we'll talk about, but yeah, it's something I still can't get my head around this. Like the best laid plans back in the UK May, 2019, I'm on trips for research in July. I'm in my office where I've gathered two years worth of research. I am just writing this novel with everything I've got and I had fingers crossed that it would be far less painful in terms of self doubt and fear, because what I hoped was that having   done it once, having written a novel once, which was the thing I never thought I could do . I never thought I was good enough or smart enough to do it. But having done it once and it turned out okay, then one thing that my brain couldn't tell me with any conviction is that I couldn't do it again. That's not at all, how things have gone. I've had to do a lot of letting go of the research that I can't recall, like a game of memory. I can't remember all of the books that I gathered and the tidbits that I'd written and  the piles and the net that I'd made in my office in Manchester.

Pam: [00:07:45] So that's all still back in Manchester, Holly?

Holly: [00:07:48] That's all there. My partner, Sam is English. And for anybody who is joining us today, who's wondering the context of what we're talking about. I moved to the UK in 2009 to do my masters in creative writing and to restart my life again, after I'd been almost destroyed by a violent relationship. I had absolutely no interest in meeting anybody. I just wanted to go and rebuild my life. And on my fourth day in Manchester, I met Sam. That was 11 years ago.

He and I came home for Christmas 2019, and we haven't gotten back   because of COVID. So in terms of what writing The Wilding is like, those are all of the things that I've just had to sit with and take stock of whilst being just incredibly grateful that I'm lucky enough to be at home while this has happened and to not spend too much time getting caught up on how wily our minds are, and how tricky fear can be when it's like, "Oh, I can't - how can I, I haven't got my research? I can't do this. I'll be so bad at this. I can't possibly write this because I don't have my research."  I just didn't want to pay any mind to that pied piper, because that's an evocative song. And instead I just started thinking, "Okay I want to do this. How can I do this? I've signed a book deal to do this. Let's make a plan B - that's where Frenchie, the caravan came from."

We're installed on my mum's property in Southeast Queensland. And I sit in here most days to work. It's been stop and start and on and off because around hitting my stride, I then had to uproot from here and go and keep making Back to Nature and then come back.

So Back to Nature is the ABC TV show that you mentioned. We were meant to make it from March wrapped by May. It was meant to take kind of 10 weeks. It took 10 months to get everything made because we were filming around colleges and restrictions and plus their outbreaks and all of that sort of thing. And so in between filming episodes, I would come home to mum's. I would start to work again and start to get my mind in novel space again, and then a border would open. So then I would have to shut up Frenchie, kiss mum and my stepdad and the dogs goodbye, go and use a different set of skills in a way in my mind, and then come home.

So it's been really stop and start and stop and start. And the whole time it has felt like Esther has been in a crowded room looking at me, through people and just drumming her fingers on the countertop and just looking at me , and I don't mean that to sound airy fairy either, because what I mean when I talk about Esther is the commitment that I've made to myself through her as her story.

I'm the one that's going to bring this story to life. And so when I feel her looking at me, it's like those versions of ourselves we hold, I feel that commitment made. And the one thing that the stop and starting has really brought home to me again, that I learned writing The Lost Flowers, but that I've really, really picked up this time, is that writing - the physical act of putting my hands on the keyboard and prose on the page - that's almost the very last part of the process. The thing that the stopping and the starting of the disruptions of the last 14 months have really brought home to me is that the daydreaming and the thinking about the points that you're going to connect in the story and the cause and effect and the why we care, and the personal foibles, and the desires of characters. That's the little  stuff that you do staring out of car windows, and when we've  been lucky, plane windows, waiting around in the grocery lines, in hotel rooms while we were filming. So my mind never switched off. But it's all of this is this is to say, I guess, that I almost can't compare the two variances.

Pam: [00:12:29] So it's almost like this whole experience has taught you a completely different process in producing the novel. 

Holly: [00:12:36] Yes. And if we can hold a sense of humor close which I think  wherever we can, we must, because it's how we survive. It's kind of hilarious to think about 2019 Holly, who was like, "Oh, I'm going to buy this notebook in Manchester, and I've got this research book." And I almost look at her sort of from the other side of the trenches. And I feel so battle weary and exhausted as I'm sure we all do for various reasons. And I look back at her and I'm like, you didn't know,

It's extraordinary, what you can adapt to.  And the one thing I haven't done, which is the thing that feels the nicest, is that in all this disruption, I haven't abandoned myself.   It's a really nice feeling.

Pam: [00:13:23] Fantastic. So let's keep moving because there's so much I want to talk to you about, and all these things are of course connected.

 So Alice Hart was your debut novel, and within those beautiful pages, there were some very personal experiences for you. In terms of you drawing on those experiences to create Alice and to create her story, and you did write it over quite a long period of time. 

Because this is such a different process for you this time around and because Alice Hart was your debut novel - and every novel has its own story and its own emotions, but the debut one is, is a particular thing - could you talk a little bit about how you manage those emotional difficulties and complexities as you are writing Alice just in terms of getting through those, those things in the writing?

Holly: [00:14:06] Yes, it was a very hard and yet completely necessary story that I had to write because nothing had worked up until that point. I had tried writing novels before and they always felt like I was not in their skin. They always felt like they were stories that were at the end of my hand, an arm's length from me, they weren't in and of my body. And at the time that I wrote this novel, at the time that I wrote Lost Flowers, to write a story from my body, it had to come from the story that I think my body had never told, which is that before I wrote Lost Flowers, I'd never said the words "male perpetrated violence" out loud. And I'd never really talked about them about that violence from a man in your life. I'd never talked about experiencing that with anybody outside of a few close friends, through different eras in my life. And so I had spent years and years working up to writing Lost Flowers. When I look back now, I'd been trying for years to write it, but it wasn't coming because it wasn't coming from a true place.

And it was bereavement. It was the grief of watching somebody in my family die, being with them in hospital. And being with them and seeing them take their last breath.  I'd never been with anybody who had died before. They took their last breath, and then there wasn't another one - another breath didn't come.

And the enormous transformation that that moment had on me in understanding what fear does to us, which is shrink us and reduce us and robs us of our life. Fear is a little death all the time, and part of the way that I went through those first sluggish weeks of bereavement was I read about creativity and I read about it, and I read about it, and I read about it, and I couldn't read fiction and I couldn't read non-fictional memoir. But I could read about people talking about imagination.  I had no idea that I was going to write Lost Flowers. One day, about a month or six weeks after the death in hospital, I was at home in Manchester and I had been handwriting every day for a few weeks doing morning pages through the artist's way program. And I just thought to myself, "What would have happened if I didn't listen to the fear voices I've had for as long as I can remember, remembering what else is in my mind? If the first thing that I'm not listening to is you can't do this. Don't even try because you can't do this."

And I love telling this story because I can't really believe that it's real. And I can't really believe that it's how it happened. But hand on my heart, I took my lid off my pen and I thought, right, 10 minutes, five minutes, one minute, 30 seconds. What happens if I don't listen to the trauma-informed fears in my mind that I've known for as long as I've known anything. And I put my pen to paper and honest to God, Pam, I watched my hand write: 'In the weatherboard house at the end of the lane, nine-year-old Alice Hart sat at the desk by the window and dreamed of ways to set her father on fire.'

 And everybody, please forgive me, but I've got to tell you the truth. I sat back and I said aloud, "Holy fuck.  Here it is. Here she is." 

Pam: [00:18:17] And that sentence is as it appears in the book!

Holly: [00:18:20] That's it.  Like I was talking before about the commitment with Esther through the stopping and stuff. Suddenly in that moment, I was obligated to this nine-year-old child and writing Lost Flowers was incredibly painful and it was incredibly hard. And I've had a really good support network around me because I've had to walk the line between reflecting to draw emotional truth from my memories, rather than reliving them and effectively retraumatising myself in the process.

 So it's incredibly meaningful to me that Alice lives in the world. I don't really have words for it.  It's the story that I was told, as any survivor of violence probably feels, it's the story you are not to tell. And it's the story, you know that won't be believed and will be criticised and your character will be judged.

The novel is not autobiographical in the sense that I haven't lived on a flower farm. God, I wish I had lived at Thornfield. I have lived in other places that inspired the settings in the novel and absolutely everything in the novel is emotionally true for me.

Pam: [00:19:42] So it must've been very freeing then Holly, when you got to the end of that process, was it?

Holly: [00:19:48] You know, ,  fear is clever, right? It was freeing. And then I had new things to be terrified of.  It always comes back, because it's part of being alive. It's never going to get out of the car. It's the family relative that you can't get rid of at Christmas, you know, it's always going to come around.  It's not separate to us, but what I didn't have before I wrote Lost Flowers was liberation of my life from fear and shame and pain. And living  in post-traumatic stress patterns that I didn't know I was living in and what writing the book has done for me is to bring the hidden shame into the light where it can't survive. Shame survives in secrecy; bringing it out into the light, it can't survive.

Pam: [00:20:51] I love that image of  it just shriveling in the light.

Holly: [00:20:54] Isn't it beautiful? Of it just withering. And I read a lot of Brené Brown's work around shame.

Pam: [00:21:02] Fantastic.

Holly: [00:21:03] I've read a lot because it all kind of coincided. She did that Ted Talk that went viral in 2010. And I started writing Lost Flowers in 2014. So I was reading a lot around shame while I was writing it as a way of feeding courage, because my fear didn't need any food. It's been a well-fed beast for my whole life; but to feed courage, I read about shame. And when I did the Lost Flowers book tour, I was constantly moved by the climate and the empathy in strangers and in readers, who would say to me at an event. "You've written it, it's out in the world, are you healed now?"  That moved me every time. And the true answer is, I don't know. And I don't know if we ever heal fully from trauma or if we learn how to manage it and leave with it. So yeah, that it lives around us rather than us living around it.

And instead of that story owning me - and it did own me for decades - I own that story. Now there's no monsters under the bed with that story anymore.

Pam: [00:22:21] Yeah, fantastic. And we of course all get to share in that, by reading it.  We did touch on this the last time we spoke, but you did do some work with Dr. Clarissa Estés who wrote Women Who Run With the Wolves. And how was that experience and did that inform the writing of Alice as well?

Holly: [00:22:40] It was a wild, transformative experience  and coming out of trauma patterns, there are so many things that accompany shame in the tendrils. Scarcity is one of them. You know, scarcity accompanies shame. One of the many things and in 2015, I'd written the first three chapters of Ellis spot. When I hand wrote that first line, I went on to handwrite 11,000 words. And then at that point, it's around the point where Alice is on the wind surfer with her father Clem, and writing that scene, I mean, up against my bereavement from the family death in hospital, it all sort of collided and  I couldn't write anymore. It became really clear that I needed mental head space to grieve.

 I couldn't keep writing through the bereavement and also write Alice's life, even though that's sort of a turning point for her before Thornfield comes into her world. So  I had that three chapters written, that was sort of around July, August, and then I stepped away from it and I daydreamed for a year and thought about Alice for a year and I didn't write anymore. But she was always with me, and I thought about her. And in July, 2015, so this is a roughly a year later from when I'd handwritten the three chapters, one of the first books that I read before I even picked up my pen and wrote that first line was Women Who Run With the Wolves. And one of the first stories that I spent a lot of time with was Bluebeard, which, for anybody who doesn't know, very briefly is about the charismatic, dark-souled man who takes a maiden, and there's  many variations of these old stories, of course.

He lures is a maiden into his castle and says, "We will be fine and we will have a perfect life, but you must not open the door upstairs to the chamber at the top of the castle." And there's lots of different variations. Another one is he puts a ribbon around their neck and says, don't ever take the ribbon off. But the version that I studied in Women Who Run With the Wolves is, you know, don't go into the chamber. Of course she does go into the chamber and it's full of all the bloody caucuses of the other women he has devoured. So I had that fairytale and all of its archetypes and mythology in my mind.

And a year after I'd put Alice away to just daydream and grave and think about her, I one day walked into my office and I just looked up Dr. Estés to see if she had a new book coming out, and the other thing that had struck me from the beginning of Women Who Run With the Wolves when I read it with, you know, everything in mind that was coming, it's something I was thinking about when I was handwriting those three chapters with Alice, was this concept. Dr. Estés talks about thinking over the bones  bringing life back to bones and  bringing the bones alive . And that felt like my whole life, lifelessness and how I could bring life back to everything that male violence and trauma had taken from me.

So I was in my office and I Googled Dr. Estés and the first thing I see on her website is, well, the first time ever Dr. Estés is running a facilitation  retreat in Colorado called "Singing over the bones" and we will be studying the fairy tale, Bluebeard. I had no money. I had no money. I had credit cards and it was a few thousand dollars for the airfare and the tuition to get from England.

And Sam my partner was working for a charity.  And I went in and I said to Sam, Oh my God. And we talked about it and he said, "Listen, we can move credit cards and we can do Tetris so this is possible, but you have to make the decision to go. I'm not going to tell you, you should go. I'm going to tell you that we can make this happen, but you have to say yes, and you have to decide whether or not you're going to go."

That process of giving myself the trip to Colorado to sit in a room with a hundred women and one man to learn from Dr. Estés for five days for 12 hours a day and study archetypes and post-traumatic stress and trauma and fairytales; the decision to go was as powerful, it had as powerful an effect on me as those five days being immersed in the teachings of that book. And the experience was life-changing, I'd never been to anything like it. There was this moment at the beginning where Dr. Estés said who's been here before and 90 per cent of the room put their hand up in the air.

So I think for lots of people, it's kind of almost a pilgrimage or gift they give themselves. I had never experienced anything like it. And I had traveled alone from the UK, which I hadn't done, I hadn't traveled internationally alone since I'd kind of fled Australia six years earlier and gone to England on my own knowing no one. So there was lots of daunting layers to it and that's been saying yes, and going, and the experience of going and traveling and the things that I learned at the teachings. They were both on par and it just reminded me of what we miss out on when we convince ourselves that our gut lead instinct is silly and shouldn't be listened to because we've all got pretty good bullshit detectors, you know?

You know when you really are trying to buy something, because it's just going to make you feel momentarily good in that way that retail therapy is glorious.  You can talk to yourself about what's really going on there. And likewise, I mean, I drive Sam mad. It took me nearly a month to figure out I was going to say yes to make that decision.

It was, it was absolutely transformative. And the things that I learned from being in a room with that mind, with Dr. Estés' mind, I think will serve me as a woman and a writer, always. When you find those things that really speak to you, move heaven and earth to say yes to them.

Because even if you went and you didn't get much out of the course, I bet the process of going would be transformative.

Pam: [00:29:36] Yeah, it sounds wonderful.

Holly, one of the things that I noticed in your Instagram recently was a beautiful post you did about adornment. And I just wanted to read a little quote from that Instagram post. There was a beautiful picture of you and it was taken from the back and you had a  gorgeous flowing kimono-type outfit on and your hair was lovely with flowers  and in the post you said:

"Day to day conversations in my closest personal relationships are peppered with the same themes: managing grief, burnout, overwhelm, and anxiety; fighting to keep hope in a surrounding sense of hopelessness; reflecting on gratitude, summoning courage, in spite of fear. Searching for magic, the reprieve of laughter, the medicine of nature and goodness in humans. How to walk the line between continuing to show up and taking the rest we need to continue. Seeking balance, I've lately returned to the ritual of adornment."

And there's lots of things in there we can talk about, but can you talk to us first of all about this idea of adornment and how you feel that enhances your creativity?

Holly: [00:30:43] Yes. And I think comes from meeting myself on my own two feet . When I walked away from what would be the last relationship in which a man was ever violent to me, it will never happen again.  But what I faced at that point when I walked away was I didn't know who I was. I mean, I knew who I was in the core of me. And it's not to say that through my twenties, I wasn't myself, but being under such control and becoming hypervigilant and make sure that your environment is always safe and being super observant all the time of other people's behavior and moods, there's nothing being spent on self. And I had learned over decades how to put myself away so that I wouldn't cause a man to be upset by anything about me that could upset them, which is so outrageous and gives me fire in my throat still.

And adornments is the act that I've come into over 11 years of sitting with myself and figuring out what my desires are, what my pleasures are, what makes me feel lush and excited in my imagination the way a new box of crayons did when I was seven. And as an adult, those emotions were answered by my senses. So everything started to change for me.  So it was through my senses that adornment began. I started taking myself to the cinema on my own if I did that, also that I couldn't go alone because what if people are looking at me, there is a great thing that starts to happen. When, as a woman, we say to those thoughts, "shut the fuck up. I'm doing it anyway."

So it started with my senses. I would take better care of what I was eating. And then these things come also with the privilege of having the money to be able to eat well and to be able to live.  So these things do come with a degree of financial privilege and that sort of thing with what I had, I made sure that I was feeding myself well. Instead of buying the quickest thing, I would think about what a really tasty thing would be because cooking for one is really grim, or it and can be, and cooking for one when you're traumatized and you think you're not worth much, it's a disaster, you know, eating almonds out of the packet and having a cup of tea and that's dinner.

So I would start to pay attention and  if I cooked enough for six people, then I had lunch the whole week. And future me would love me at work for having created lunch and that sort of thing. And it was through my senses that it started. I started going to art galleries and sitting and staring at the first piece of art that made me feel. And I would sit there for as long as I wanted without worrying about whether or not the man beside me was having a good time. It was this real reconnecting my imagination. Because as senses are connected to our imagination, it's why when we hear a song; we relive that summer  afternoon; we smell a smell and all of a sudden way back in that person's kitchen; or the sky or the feel of the air, and I'm back in the desert on a winter day. I went through the senses as a way of trying to put life back into myself.

And it happens slowly and now sort of the living is lighter. It's about noticing what narrative runs through my mind. If I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling pretty buggy and murky, but I think, you know, what a pair of bright yellow trousers are going to make me feel amazing. And then I reach to put them on and I notice a voice in my head says, "Oh, but what if someone like, looks at you?!" or  "Oh my God,have you eaten too much pasta?!" or something like, "Can you wear these pants?"

Like, shut the fuck up, I'm doing it anyway. I'm putting them on.

And it's the minute I noticed that, "Oh what if someone...?" it's that awful, shoulder curling inwards feeling that anchors us all to being kids at school and trying to find our place in the world or being kids in any overwhelming situation. Cause we're all just running around four years old, inside.

Adornment is the way that I honor my imagination and bring my mind constantly to life. And now it's about tattoos and it's about lipstick and it's about jewellery and it's about learning what to do with my hair  and having my own income now, years down the line and being able to look after Sam as he looked after me and to be able to give myself and my family things, because I actually have an income. That's all a level of adornment. 

That duster coat or kimono I I'm wearing in that photo and Instagram, we just finished filming Back to Nature. It was done against all odds. And I'd been wearing like boots running around Australia for a month, which is fine. Boots are great. Love boots, have many pairs. I walk into a shop with one of my favorite people and Sam, and there was this pink, multi-coloured dream. And I was like, I've got a credit card! And it's just, it's just those little moments of constantly breaking through scarcity to where pleasure and desire and imagination leaves.

Pam: [00:37:11] I love that. And I love the way you were linking there, the senses and the imagination too, and just developing that sensory experience and how that can feed your imagination.

Holly: [00:37:20] Yes. Cause sometimes writing is so above the neck, we're all in our heads and I need to bring it into my body. So people have been really beautiful, friends have been really beautiful to me over the last few years, shining mirrors back to me in the way that people that we love do for us when we don't arrive at understandings about ourselves, on our own,  I remember once it was the incredibly beautiful human Ashley Hay the novelist, and she wrote to me once and she said, "I love how you embody your stories. Like how many pairs of Australian native flower earrings do you have?" And I was like, nobody needs to know that answer.

I'd never thought about it that way. I didn't know that was what I was doing while I was writing Lost Flowers. I was constantly putting Thornfield and Alice's flowers on my body, in my hair, in my skin, jewellery. It's like this bowerbirding and embodying it and going for walks and putting myself in those landscapes. And that was a real gift that Ash gave me because I didn't know consciously that that's what I was doing.

And another friend  in the UK, a writer named Jane Bradley, who is extraordinary and runs a network for women writers, women and non binary folk in Manchester, and she came over to my house for lunch one day, and  I was excited I'd adorned head to toe and she came over and we were having lunch. And  we were talking about the feminine and we were talking about any things that happen when you publish a novel with flowers on the cover, in terms of it becomes gendered then , it's a woman's book. It's got flowers on the cover - and, side note: some of the best comments I've had are about men or are from men who have read Lost Flowers.

And Jane said to me, she was so kind and so generous and gave me this gift of understanding myself that I didn't have when she said, "Do you know how political what you're doing is?" And I said, "Sorry, what do you mean?" And she said, "That you dress, or you do whatever you like with your body.  Because this is precisely the thing that for so many years you couldn't do and you shouldn't be. And that gift that she gave me of that insight with the world, the way it is, how extraordinary for all of us who have the courage to be who we are and have love and compassion for others to do the same.

 It was a real gift. It's a gift that other people can give you understanding yourself. 

Pam: [00:40:14] Beautiful insight.  So this, I guess it also overlaps with this whole idea  of nature as a source of inspiration for you as well, Holly. Because you have got, of course this beautiful Thornfield in Alice Hart, and I'm not sure about Esther Wilding, but I'm thinking there could be some sort of elements of the natural world coming in there as well. 

How  healing and inspirational is nature for you and, and I'm thinking also of your experience in filming Back to Nature and what that might've been like for you?

Holly: [00:40:44] I was really lucky growing up to be constantly encouraged to be in the natural world. So it was a formative part of my life, understanding that we are not a species that is separate to the species of trees. We are not separate to the natural world. We are part of it. I was really lucky to have that knowledge instilled in me as a child and growing up. And if I don't get time outside in with trees and in the outdoors, like so many people feel, even if we don't know it, it feels like something is wrong.

It's like if we live in the city, there will be a time where it's like, "Oh, let's just go to the sea; let's just go to the country." Being in nature calls to us. And it's because we are nature. We are not separate. We are unique in that we have emotional intelligence and imaginations in that sense and innovation and the ability to create and dream.

We are animals on this planet. We are one of the species and to be disconnected from the natural world that we come from. We are all the same interconnected ecosystem. We're all one in the same. So to be disconnected from nature, we suffer. If we are out of green space for too long, we suffer because what happens when we are ingrained space, just shows what it does for our psyche and being, and there's nothing in nature. That's not disconnected from something else. So when we are disconnected from nature, it would only go to show that we'll feel a severance in ourselves. 

Pam: [00:42:47] Apart from the Back to Nature thing, has being back in Queensland been a special time for you as well, in that sense?

Holly: [00:42:55] Oh, my god extraordinary. Cause when I come back here, I can visit the trees that have watched me grow up. Like I go up to London to national park or Springbrook or Mount Tamborine and there are trees there that I've known since I was five. And I can remember them on the trail. And when you go into a forest that's still standing with the way that the climate crisis is in the world and the way that corporate companies hold sway over decisions made on the preservation of the earth's treasures - to see a tree that you've known all your life that has been growing every single minute that you've been living and breathing, it's really a motive.  You have grown and so has the tree - and it's really meaningful. And  if you open your mind to thinking about it that way, you start to have a relationship with nature around you, rather than thinking that it's scrappy or that it's just a bunch of trees.

Pam: [00:44:07] I know. We've lived on this property that we're on now for the last five years, and part of it is protected sort of bushland and it's got a creek running through and it's got some beautiful old gum trees,  I don't know how old they are. And I just feel really protective of them. And I think to myself sometimes, I can't ever sell this place because who will have them then, you know? So I understand what you're saying about that idea of connecting with particular pieces of nature, too.

Holly: [00:44:34] Yes. And for any white Australians or settler Australians of any other culture, all of this information, all of these lessons about connecting to country - Aboriginal Australians are telling us and teaching us and talking about what this land means all the time. And it's an honor to listen and learn, and it's a privilege to be able to learn. And here I am talking to you on Yugambeh land. Aboriginal people are talking all the time about why country is so important and how to look after it. Going around Australia and having the Back to Nature experience, I mean, you and I could do a whole podcast on making your first TV show. That was like for me individually. In every location that we filmed, I had the great privilege and honor of meeting somebody from that country who shared ancestral stories and modern stories. The land we're on in Australia is alive and it's always talking.

That's the great thing about being human is that we can always learn.

Pam: [00:45:46] It's lifelong, isn't it? And I just wanted to talk a little bit more about this idea around fear. When you're writing, we have all this fear around are we saying too little? Are we saying too much? Are we saying it in the right way? What are people gonna think when they read this? Will they think I'm an idiot? Or they think they shouldn't have bothered.

You're very open, Holly, with your social media posts  talking about fear and  when we were talking a little while ago about this whole idea of things shriveling in the light for you, it's almost like talking about those things and exposing them does make them less potent, I guess.

Would you say that's right? And what would you say to writers out there who might be struggling with fear, or around any of those issues to do with their writing?

Holly: [00:46:35] You are not alone. Fear is pounding everyone. The easy thing for you to listen to is that you can't do it.  The hardest thing for you to listen to is you're the only one that can tell this story. All fear's going to do is tell you to stop. Don't. Put it away. That's all fear is going to do. The chain is never going to change. It's never going to sing us a different song, but you are the only one that has that song in your head. There is nobody else that can sing it to life like you can. And so I think we each have to make a decision about what is worth more to us - listening to fear and stopping, or pushing through and bringing the song of our story to life.

When I was writing Lost Flowers,  I would get to the point where I had put so much pressure on myself on some days to write something that it would feel like I was physically choking. I would feel like there was something lodged in my throat. The anxiety would be so high that I would be tight across the chest and then it would just launch in my throat and I would feel like my airways were blocked. And I remember in particular, one day in Manchester, I was in my bathrobe. I was in my office. It wasn't working, I just was wildly fed up. And I walked out of my office and into our bedroom.

Sam was lying on the bed reading, and I just erupted. I was like, "I can't do this. Why would I think I can do this?  What am I doing? I'm pissing about." I mean, the foul mouth fairy was filling the room with wonders and Sam has such a dry and quick sense of humor and he's like, "Cool, babe, just quit. Yeah no, you're right. You're right. Absolutely. Just throw it in. Just don't write another word."

And I was like back into my office and  we had a really good giggle and he said, "Just write for two minutes, just take all this pressure off yourself. Nobody can do anything under that amount of pressure, you know?"

 So this is something that I - cause I have it all right now, like writing Esther I'm in knots all the time. The only thing I had now that I didn't have before,  when I wrote Lost Flowers is this is my job. This is my life. This is what I've wanted to do since I was three. And I did it once and telling stories is the only thing I've ever been good at at school. It's the only thing that I've ever been good at really ever. This is my life and my job. Now I can do this.

But like we've been talking about fear is a shape-shifter, and it will change faces and skins and dress up as everything or anything that will get your attention. And so something I've been reading around a lot lately, which I'm really fascinated about, is I read the psychology journal article about how very thin the line is in our minds between a brain being able to differentiate fear and anxiety from nerves and excitement.  It blew my mind, Pam.

So all of this time, what if we are so excited about getting to our writing desk because we are following the heart-led, childlike instinct of our imagination firing? What if we're so excited and nervous in the same way that we were before we went out on stage in a school pantomime, but our brains, our adult brains don't have an extraordinary amount of experience in folding excitement and nerves as being safe emotions?

But bet your bottom dollar, that what our brains have really deep experience in is fear and anxiety. I've been running a lot lately and while I'm running and listening to podcasts, and I'm thinking deeply about how my mind does not know how to hold excitement as a safe space to write from. But holy shit does it know how to hold anxiety as a familiar and therefore known and therefore safe space to write from.

So lately I've been trying some reframing. What if it's not fear? What if it's nerves? What if it's the nervous energy of holding this idea that, you know, means something 'cause you can feel it in your belly? What if it's nerves? What if this anxiety that feels like it's going to eat me to death with its hungry claws is actually wild, childlike excitement about the act of creating something that didn't exist before you brought it to life in the woeful shithouse things that first drafts are. The first draft of anything is perfect because it just needs to exist. That's it's job is to exist and then we can edit it. The first draft wins by existing 10 out of 10.

So those are the things I've been thinking about a lot lately around fear because I'm feeling it hugely with Esther Wilding. I got into such a beautiful flow writing the first like 25,000 words before we got yanked back onto the road for six weeks to bring home the last of Back to Nature and then coming home and Christmas and New Year's and family and all the trauma that goes with it for all of us around Christmas time and New Years for the people that aren't there or the people that are there, or, you know, It's the light and time, plus COVID plus the U S election and the fear around what was going to happen there for the world. And it's a really hard time to be creating.  And I think it's really essential that we're creating it's impossible and it's essential because creating cultivates joy. And joy cultivates creativity. They go hand in hand.

I'm terrified every minute of every day, Pam, I am. You know, I love talking to you right now. This is so lovely. And I'm terrified. I'm terrified of being stained. I'm terrified of making no sense. I'm terrified of someone saying I hate her headband. Like every single thing!  

Georgia O'Keeffe the painter, I have this pinned up on the wall in Frenchie. She said, "I have been terrified every single moment of my life and I've not let it stop me from doing one single thing." I could be paraphrasing a bit there. What I have figured out is fear is never going to go away. Like we were saying before it's in the cards. It's that presence you cannot settle unless we realize that fear is not in control of us. It is something we can manage. And when I'm too afraid to sit at my keyboard and write prose, I make it fun.  The tactile act of writing down an idea for a scene or thinking about a moment in the chapter that is way down the line. And I don't know exactly what it's going to look like yet, but there is a moment between Esther and surface, and I know what that needs to be. Right. I'm going to write that down and the fear starts the shrivel in the light because I'm creating.

And joy starts to creep in sometimes going to the keyboard for me, everybody writes differently, but for me, if I don't know what I'm at the computer and at my desk and the keyboard to write, if I haven't done the handwriting and the daydreaming, I am ripe for fear and anxiety to knock me off my feet. So I take the nerves and the excitement into that daydreaming space.

Like the favorite part of your class, when someone used to say to you, when you were a wee thing, now we're going to spend an hour and a half drawing elephants and it was like, how could this be school? I couldn't even draw, I can't draw for anything - but the fact that you got to spend time imagining possibility. And when I do that, it lives . I can follow Esther and think, okay, well that will happen. And then that person's going there. So then she'll go here. And then I have this frame, which is like protection for myself against the worst parts of myself that are in my mind, the worst behavioral habits that I am constantly training myself out of that come from post-traumatic stress, fear, everything.

So for example, in this chapter that I'm writing at the moment, I know that Esther is going to meet her dad, and then they're going to go home and she's going to see her mum and then there'll be a going away dinner. And then there's an airport thing. I know that those are my things that are happening in this chapter.

I'm like I can't get knocked off my balance by fear, because I know that's what's happening, the procrastination that might creep in is because my inner critics just being a whiny little bastard that day and just wants to procrastinate and tell me that I can't do it. And  that's discipline and will, that's now glueing my bum in this seat, putting on whatever music I need in my headphones, and no, you're not getting any snacks. There are no snacks. There is nothing until we write this scene. That's for me self-discipline and will, like those skills I use to meet procrastination, fear and anxiety. I just use a little bit more, actually I use a lot more self-compassion I'm like, okay, well, writing is going to be the very last thing. I'm going to figure out what I do first. 

Remember at the bottom of it all, we do this because we love it. We love it.

Pam: [00:57:30] Yeah. Which brings me, Holly, to my last question for you. What's at the heart of your writing?

Holly: [00:57:39] A complex but a beautiful question.

Transformation. I think at the heart of everything. Cause I'm kind of still meeting myself as a writer, as well - as an author, I guess I should say. And meeting myself as a published author. Like, I didn't know how to do this. I had no idea what to expect from being published. It's a learning while you're on your feet sort of experienced. And what happened with Lost Flowers is the thing that everybody tells you it's not possible. And so for it to happen to yourself is incredible. And really it's constantly like, Oh, this is a new skillset I'm developing. You go from not being seen at all to being seen. And that's an incredible experience.

But at the heart of everything that I have written, even when I think about the four million word, epic saga-mystery-crime-romance, novel that I wrote when I was 14, it is always been about a woman transforming her life. We are never the static things that other people do to us. Or the static things that life deals to us. We can always take agency of our own lives, no matter who or what has told us that we can't. And it's that active transformation, that archetype of someone steals your seal skin? Make yourself a new one. You know, someone takes you away from your homeland in the forest, find your way home to yourself. It's thinking about themes in fairytales that I've been reading. Just to give those things context, I've been reading a lot of fairytales  and myths lately.

 I wrote a short story that came out, my first fiction after The Lost Flowers came out with Griffith review and it was about two sisters. And one sister who transforms grief into candy and feeds it to the town that they lived in and therefore transforms everybody who eats the candy.

And I've got a new short story coming out in a couple of months with the first edition of Wonderground, which is a publication from The Planthunter, Georgie Reid on Instagram. So she's producing a beautiful, hard copy magazine for the first time and I've got my next new fiction in there. And it's about two women who are strangers to each other and transform each other's lives. So thank you for that opportunity and that gift, Pamela, because I don't think I would ever have reflected on what's at the heart of my work, but it's transformation. It's how we, don't have to settle.

Pam: [01:00:49] Beautiful. I could talk to you all day, Holly. I think a lot of the things that we would have talked about, there's so many writers out there, which is why I'm doing these Heart of Writing episodes, because no matter how many books you write or how long you're a writer, these things are things that we always will struggle with. And sometimes we'll be feeling a little bit more on top of them and then something will come out and pull the rug out from under your feet and you'll be back, down in the pit with them again. You do wrestle with these things as we all do. And that's why I really wanted to talk to you about it. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us.

Holly: [01:01:25] Thank you.  And just to put anybody at ease, my inner critic is so good. It's like, do you actually have any wisdom Ringland? Like, what are you even saying? Who are you to say any of this? It's constant all the time.

Pam: [01:01:38] Well, look all the best with Esther Wilding. Do we have any, any sort of idea of when she might be out in the world?

Holly: [01:01:46] So when I signed my book deal for her at the beginning of 2020, I was so eager. And my publisher, Catherine, she was so beautiful in how she handled this moment, because I was like, you know, I really think I could write it this year. Could we have it out in 2021? And she was so gracious and she was like, do you know, everything's possible?

So I'm writing it now. And I'm hoping very much that it will be out next year. That's what I'm working to. So I hope to have a first draft finished soon. We've wrapped Back to Nature. I'm in Frenchie, treading the line between fear and excitement and just remembering that it's my story to tell. And we put our hearts on the page.

Pam: [01:02:34] Beautiful. Thank you so much, Holly, and all the best with it.

Holly: [01:02:38] Thank you so much. You're amazing. Look what arrived today.

Pam: [01:02:44] Oh, yay! All We Dream.

Holly: [01:02:46] Thank you very, very much for that. I've already popped it on my Instagram story saying that you and I were having a chat.

Pam: [01:02:52] Oh, beautiful. And just thank you for hosting us in Frenchie.

Holly: [01:02:56] Thank you!

 Pam: I hope you've enjoyed my chat with this week's guest. If you did, I'd love it if you could add a quick rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, so others can more easily find the episodes. Don't forget to check out the back list on the Writes 4 Women website. There's so much great writing advice in the library there.

And you can find the transcript of today's chat on the website, too. You can find details on the website on how to support the podcast through Patreon and get exclusive access to the extended audio and video of the monthly craft episode. And you can connect with me through the website at writes4women.com.au, on Instagram and Twitter at @w4wpodcast, the Facebook page Writes 4 Women.

You'll find me in my writing at pamelacook.com.au. Thanks for listening. Have a great week. And remember every word you write, you're one word closer to typing the end.

 (c) Pamela Cook, Writes4Women