Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:10 Hello and welcome to the Freemantle press podcast in 2022. My name is Brooke Dunnell and I am the author of the glass house, which won the 2021 Fogarty literary award and will be published by Freeman press in November. This year, today, we are recording in wup in wa Noar butcher. This is a place of Bullard, many stories, and I'd like to acknowledge our first storytellers along with Noar elders past, present, and future. My guest is the author of the river mouth. Karen Herbert. Karen spent her childhood in Geraldton before moving to Perth as an adult, she's worked in aged care, disability services, higher education, indigenous land management, social housing, and the public sector. She's president of the fellowship of Australian writers wa and her second book, the castaways of Harewood hall will be released this year. So Karen, can you please tell our listeners what the river mouth is about?
Speaker 2 00:01:05 Oh, the river mouth is set on energy country, which is about 500 kilometers north of Perth in a fictitious town called way. And, um, on the way river one day, a teenage boy shop in chest and his killer is never found. Years later, his mother receives a visit from the police and they give her even more sad news. Her best friend Barbara has been found dead, um, on a remote P road, but Barbara's DNA matches the DNA that was scraped from under Darren's fingernails 10 years ago. And for Sandra, this makes her question, what she knew about her best friend. And as she starts to find out more about her son's death, she questions her community and the secrets it keeps and the secrets her son was keeping as
Speaker 1 00:01:59 Well. And so can you tell us, um, what the origins of this novel were and how it kind of evolved?
Speaker 2 00:02:06 The story started with chapter four, which is the chapter where, um, the three boys, Darren and Tim and co are playing on the side of the river. They've got a rope swing hanging off a tree branch. Um, they're doing bombings. The river is a secluded place. It's the kind of out of sight place, wild place that kids go. When we want to test our boundaries, our physical boundaries, we wanna learn about our relationships with each other. And we wanna do all of that out of sight with our parents. And as I wrote, I got the sense that maybe it wasn't a terribly safe place, but also maybe the kids' lives didn't turn out the way. Maybe everybody would've liked. And I wanted to know what that was. So that was the start of the story was me finding out what happened to those kids on the river.
Speaker 1 00:03:00 Oh, wow. So were you equally as shocked by the gunshot as everyone else then?
Speaker 2 00:03:05 Yeah, it was really one of those stories that evolved as you write them. Amazing. I didn't know who shot Darren until almost the very end. Oh,
Speaker 1 00:03:13 Wow. Um, I just wanted to ask you first while we're on the topic of the river mouth and the fact that as you said, it's set in yame Chi country, north of Perth. And so it's a Cray fishing town. It's this, um, fictional town that you've created. You were brought up in Geraldton. Did you draw on that upbringing in order to create Waymouth?
Speaker 2 00:03:32 So this is something I learned as I wrote the river mouth. Um, it started off being Geraldton, but as I, as I wrote it and I described what I remembered, I embellished and I changed things to, and I shifted stuff around to suit the narrative and it stopped being Geraldton. And it was at that point that I realized I needed to not call it Geraldton. I needed to give it a fictional name because that's what it had become. It had become Waymoth mm-hmm
Speaker 1 00:04:03 <affirmative>. And did you feel that by the end you could picture Waymoth you knew where, where the bank was and the pharmacy was and her house and everything. Cuz the geography's very important where people get to live marginalized, people living east, other people get a view, whether you're north or south of the river is all very important to the social structure in Waymouth.
Speaker 2 00:04:24 I had a very clear mental map and what's been interesting. I found is that readers have come and spoken to me and said, I know exactly where that cave is. I I know exactly what that river is. Um, that's the bank on the corner and it's funny cuz it's people who know Geraldton really well, but it's also people who don't know that Geraldton is the setting mm-hmm <affirmative> so they'll come to me and this is something else I've learned. They'll come to me. And they'll say that was my river. That I, it was exactly like my river and I, at first Brooke, I sat there and I went, no, it's not it's my river <laugh> but then I realized that the advantage of making it fictional river was that it opened up space for a reader to then imagine that river as their own river, where they holiday as children or where they grew up or where they went on a honeymoon. And that's been a really nice thing to learn.
Speaker 1 00:05:19 Yeah, that's fantastic. So I wanna now ask you about the way that you've structured the novel. So as you said, 10 years ago, Sandra's son, Darren has been shot. They don't know who the killer is to this day. Now Sandra gets the news that her best friend Barbara has died in the PRA and they've figured out from DNA that it's her DNA that was under Darren's fingernails when he died. And so the question is, what kind of role might her best friend have played in the death? The way you've structured. It is a chapter from Sandra's perspectives 10 years later. And then it will alternate with a chapter from Colin Barbara's son and also Darren's best friend. And that's leading up to this shooting that we know is going to happen. How did you choose that way of structuring the novel, especially since you said you started with what is now chapter four,
Speaker 2 00:06:10 It happened quite early after I'd written maybe I don't know, half a dozen chapters. I wrote the chapters and I realized that in order to tell the story in the way that I wanted to tell it, I had to have two points of view. I had to have the boys' point of view and Sandra's point of view. And that was important for unfolding the narrative, but also to be able to show the things that children get up to that their parents don't know about. So they were doing stuff that Sandra wouldn't be able to tell us about. And I wanted to show those things and I wanted to show them from the boys' point of view. And then that allowed me to unfold clues and hints and events to what had happened before the shooting,
Speaker 1 00:06:59 Because you're switching back and forth between Sandra and Colin. There's a lot of leaving things on a bit of a cliffhanger where we switched to 10 years, either in the, in the past or in the present, um, and different location, different character, how hard was it to keep track of all those clues that you'd left and to weave everything together.
Speaker 2 00:07:19 I've had 30 years of the corporate life Uhhuh and I had this spreadsheet <laugh> yeah. So across the top of my spreadsheet, I had storylines and down the side I had chapters and then in each little cell I had the things that happened. So I could read down a storyline down the column and go, okay, this is how this unfolded and how it unfolded in relation to the other bits. But I could also read across a chapter and go, all right, what storylines have appeared in that chapter and what chapters have no information about any of the storylines at all? So I could paste it and not overwhelm or read it in one. <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:08:03 Amazing. So who would've known, not only Microsoft word, but we need Excel Excel or something.
Speaker 2 00:08:09 You need Excel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need Excel. <laugh>
Speaker 1 00:08:12 That's a great tip for any riders listening who were like, I can't control my story, get Excel. Amazing. I wanted to ask also about the social issues that are in the novel. So there's family violence, there's homelessness, there's aged care, dementia mistreatment of Aboriginal people by people in authority. There's the stolen generations, sexual violence towards women, teenage pregnancy drug dealing. Can you talk about where your understanding of all of those issues came from and what it was like to write about them? In fiction?
Speaker 2 00:08:45 When I knew that a crime had been committed, it was really apparent to me that the cause was very deeply embedded in the community. The, the community was somehow implicit in what had happened. So I wrote the sea that the kids swam that Sandra swims in. And I tried to write it as honestly as I could. And I drew on my own memories of growing up in a small town where everything is really immediate. Uh it's in your face, you can't ignore it. And I think people who grow up in small towns develop a different sensibility about the complexities of our community in the way that say my kids haven't developed growing up in a very homogeneous neighborhood in the city. So I tried to do that as honestly as I could, which sometimes meant saying things that might not be very flattering to people, but also maybe not expressed in exactly the same way that we would like to hear ourselves expressing things these days.
Speaker 2 00:09:50 And I think the most difficult part of that was talking about stolen generation and connection back to country. Now, obviously I can't talk about that with any authority at all, but I can reflect on the conversations that I hear around me and that I used to hear around me still do hear around me when I go back home and, and those conversations are they're grappling and they're grasping, and they're a journey to the understanding. And often when we are having those conversations, um, particularly when we are having them in a space where we are not overheard by lots of people, we don't quite get it right, but it's a step towards getting it right. So I have a conversation in the book between Sandra and Stewart that I almost took out because I wrote it very fast and I wrote it exactly the same way.
Speaker 2 00:10:44 I heard it being recounted everywhere. It's a desperation to understand it's partly misinformed by a desire to comfort ourselves instead of the person who has actually been harmed and affected, but it's still a step towards. And some people have asked me about perspective that people in the town bring to their understanding of the stolen generation, but it's been a positive thing so far. I don't think I've had anybody say to me, well, that's wrong. You can't say that. So I, I think that's something I would like to explore how people move to an UN understanding of a difficult topic in safety without quite getting it right just yet.
Speaker 1 00:11:34 And there's a difference between the way that Sandra, as an adult understands all these things that are going on and Colin, he's 15 at the time asking his mother questions about family structures and why people have money and other people don't have money and things like that as well. So they're, they are very honest pieces of dialogue. I found
Speaker 2 00:11:58 It's a really interesting age that, that age, um, because we, we seem to move from relating to people with individuals and seeing people just as they present themselves to us towards understanding that society puts people in groups and then kids try and work out how they react to that understanding. And in the book I put Tim in that position where Darren's a friend, he's just a funny friend, who's a bit naughty. Sometimes isn't quite good stuff, right. When he is interacting with them, but he's just Darren. And then, um, there's a point in the book where Tim has obviously worked out that Darren is different and he makes this horrible comment and, and Darren just loses it because he's not equipped to deal with that sort of conversation. But in it, you can see Tim has started to learn that Darren belongs to a group that Tim doesn't belong to. And actually neither does he wanna belong to it. Mm. And he get to work out how to deal with that.
Speaker 1 00:13:07 Yeah. And I thought it's very clever how, because as you say that the kids are just like, oh, this is just what things are like, except now they're starting to question. And Sandra is like, oh, well, that's what, this is what things are like, because she knows. And so we don't actually learn certain facts about the characters until quite late in the novel because neither Sandra or Colin needs to reflect on them because they're just what things are like. You don't come out and say, everyone's biographical details because the characters already know,
Speaker 2 00:13:36 People surprised me with, with the things they've asked about that I haven't reflected on at all. Somebody asked me about motherhood and she said, what does motherhood mean to you? You've got different models of motherhood in this book here. You've got a woman who has an adopted child. You've got a woman who was brought up in care is discovering her cultural roots. And we see her interacting with her son. Um, both women are a particular generation and in the town where they could let their kids roam, where did you get your models of motherhood from? And I hadn't intended that to be a part of the book, but it's been an interesting thing to reflect on, I suppose, mostly because we did roam when we were kids and, and I let my kids roam here in the city, much more than other parents let their kids roam. And I've often looked at my best friend and one of my sisters and the way their mothered, their children, and, and thought, why do you do that? Um, <laugh> let it go. It's certainly an interesting thing to go back and look at and go, okay, what is mothering? Like, how do we all differ? And how much does that even matter?
Speaker 1 00:14:59 Mm. It just reminds me when you talk about motherhood, there's an interesting reflection by Colin. When he's talking about a different family where there's three children living in a house with a father and a grandfather, and he specifically says, there's no mothers in that house. The differing mothering is one thing, but also just having a mother, if you don't, it's notable. And it means that that's a different environment to his environment where Barbara's really a wonderful mother, I think. Yeah. Um, so you came to writing fiction after a long career working in government and with corporations. So there's lots of people, I think who dream of one day writing a novel, but they're not really sure if, if they can make it work with their day jobs that they've got going on. And so what would you say to people in, in a similar position? What can you tell us about your experience with that?
Speaker 2 00:15:50 I meet so many young people now who are writing. I look at them and I think, wow, it's wonderful that you are doing this so early in life, but then they turn around over a glass of wine or a beer. And they say to me, I don't get time to write. I have to fit it in between getting the kids to school and my part-time job or a full time job, or, you know, I only wrote a thousand words this week and my heart just breaks because I remember what it was like trying to juggle those things. And you are so exhausted all the time. And I wanna just hug them and say, I think you're wonderful for writing it all. Don't beat yourself up because life is so long, there will be time. Um, you don't have to do it all at once for, for me, coming into writing has been wonderful. My life is lovely. My children are grown up and, and yes, I was made redundant. I didn't actually make the choice to stop work, but once I had started writing, we were in a financial position where we could say, okay, well maybe I'll just work parttime and write part time. So very fortunate in that regard. But what I didn't expect to find out about myself was that it's hard to let go of that state. I, I feel a sense of loss and I did not expect that at all.
Speaker 1 00:17:10 Yeah. That's a really interesting perspective because you've been able to, you know, shack the nine to five and you get to be a freewheeling writer. And actually there are things that are, you know, lost in that process as well.
Speaker 2 00:17:22 I've got a degree in psychology. I should <inaudible> this stuff, but when you spend 30 years building an identity and that identity becomes very important to you. Obviously, obviously it's going to be, um, a difficult thing to shake off.
Speaker 1 00:17:38 I'm sure you're gonna have people who are knocking at your door for completely different reasons. Karen, give us your writing expertise. Now we don't want the business expertise anymore. <laugh> um, and speaking of your writing expertise, is there anything else that you wish you'd known when you were starting out on your journey to be a writer and to write this book?
Speaker 2 00:17:57 A lovely thing that I've found out is just how beautiful the writing community is. All of these lovely people book that are so interested in invested in helping each other and supporting each other and holding each other up and giving each other time. People who work in age care are really good people, really kind to people, but gee, the writing community is, is something else again. And that's been a lovely thing to discover.
Speaker 1 00:18:26 Yeah, I had that experience when I won the Fogarty and the number of people who, you know, were aware of it and was, were congratulating me and saying lovely things. It is really supportive. There's not that cutthroat kind of thing that we hear about. And what about getting your manuscript published? What was that process like? And, and whether any surprises along the way?
Speaker 2 00:18:46 I think I grew a couple of inches. I, I didn't, I'm still really short <laugh>. Um, but having another person and I'm sure you've discovered this as well, takes such a deep, intimate interest in your manuscript, think about it and, and help you Polish. It is such an affirming thing. That's really stretched me. It's made my writing so much better.
Speaker 1 00:19:09 Yeah. And people are often quite afraid of that process, but it's yeah, for me as well, it's been much more informative and interesting and exciting than it's been terrifying.
Speaker 2 00:19:20 Yeah. Editors are a breed part. Hey, aren't they,
Speaker 1 00:19:23 They, I don't know how their brains work. They must have many Excel spreadsheets going on in their brains. <laugh> at a time I think. And so once you got to the end of this process, you've got this beautiful book with this magical cover, you know, it's, it looks gorgeous. And now the river mouth gets optioned for film and television. So I think that's a fantastic outcome. That's kind of like the dream for a lot of people. Can you and you look even excited right now, even though you already knew that it happened. Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 2 00:19:55 Gosh, when was it? It was probably two or three months before the river map was released. Lovely. Jane from Freeman press called me on a Friday afternoon. And she said, I'm going to make your weekend. And I sat there and I thought, oh my gosh, no, no, this could only be one thing. And it was, and she said, spark plug films in Melbourne have optioned your book for film and television. And I just thought, can I have ed? And she said, oh no, hang on. It's kind like buying a house subject to finance. So there's a bit of a journey to go on. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be made into a film, but across the table. Um, so we will see how we go, but my gosh, what a lovely thought. Hey,
Speaker 1 00:20:55 Oh yeah. All my toes acrossed as well. I'd love to see it. <laugh> and then I'll be famous by association. So I'll take that too. That'll be good. Um, and so you're not resting on your laurels. You've already got your second novel. The castaways of hair wood hall is gonna be released later this year. Is there anything about it that you can, that you can share with us?
Speaker 2 00:21:15 This book was the one that I wrote first. Oh, oh yeah. I know. Probably makes sense that I sat down and started writing, um, about age care after leaving age care. So in the castaways of Hillwood hall, our hero is Josh and Josh is a part-time university student and a part-time carer. He still lives at home. He is still not quite stable on his adult feet one night. Um, when he's out with his mate, Josh on impulse steals too nice. And he hides them in the basement at the retirement village where he works, which is not a very good idea because he's actually stolen these mice from a research laboratory. So, you know, who knows what they're carrying and older people are, don't have a great immune systems, but also there's something going on in the basement. Um, big bur blokes in white vans are coming and going, and he's not getting a good feeling from them. Josh has to find his little fur friends of forever home, um, before the residents spring him, or he gets carried away in white van. <laugh>, that's what the book is about. How, how Josh solves that problem.
Speaker 1 00:22:29 Yeah. The idea that, that there's these things going on there is very, um, very enticing. I'd love to know what happens with those, those mic. Yeah, definitely. Um, well Karen, thank you so much for being here today. It's been really, really wonderful to talk to you to learn about the river mouth. And also now the castaways of Haywood hall. Other reviewers are unanimous in their assessment of the river mouth as deepening the crime thriller genre through its exploration of social issues, as well as its beautiful depiction of the west Australian landscape. You've got a compelling storyline. You've got really interesting characters, this descriptive, beautiful, vital setting. It all does really make it perfect for the screen. And I personally felt like Waymouth was a real place where I could possibly spend a few relaxing days by the water and, you know, go, go back home to Perth and not realize all the things that had been simmering below the, the surface. And so that's such a real achievement with your first book. Listeners can buy the river mouth in all good bookstores and online. Is there a local bookstore that you go to regularly that you would recommend for picking up the river mouth
Speaker 2 00:23:37 Co caught slow is a lovely place to go. If you wanna go and say hello to and Colleen down there and buy a coffee, open book in, um, Mosman park, which is a gorgeous place to pop in. Especially you've got little kids, they've got a dedicated, um, room for kids to, to play and explore.
Speaker 1 00:23:57 Oh, fantastic.
Speaker 2 00:23:58 And we've got, we've got the lane, which is where I went when I was at university Mont and we've got a Dimi, so you've got lots of choices in my neighborhood.
Speaker 1 00:24:09 Great. Okay. And so that was Karen Herbert talking to us about her novel, the river mouth. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the Freemantle press podcast on your favorite app. I'm Brooke Darnell Fogarty award winner and author of the Glasshouse. I look forward to joining you next time as we talk to yet another fantastic storyteller from the west.
