Congratulations to Charlotte!

Charlotte got all the quiz questions right, and made her Dad send them in just in time for the deadline... well done Charlotte, and I hope you enjoy the art work by xoum's talented cover designer, Roy Chen! I  think it's a beautiful image of Irina and Durrell embarking on an adventure, riding through the snow on their way to the Crystal Sea....

"Irina's elation grew. She embraced her father, said goodbye, then climbed onto Durrell's back and pushed her gloved hands into his fur. Astride the mighty wolf, she gave King Harmon such a radiant smile that he had to smile in return. Irina put her head down and the pair sped off, leaving tracks in the white snow, Amicus flying high above." 

​                                                       p 67 Irina and The White Wolf.

I remember vividly writing about Irina's first encounter with Raizel, the old wise-woman of the South.  As  in many fairytales, the crone is there at the beginning,  when Irina is a baby... but I really felt Raizel's power when Irina meets her in the forest. Running through my mind was the word 'interest' -- Raizel has a deep and profound interest in Irina. The wolf-girl is being looked on by wise and ancient eyes,  and she is both warmed by it, and in awe of it. To hold the interest of someone older, who poseses a profound intelligence, can be quite an experience:


      "There, behind the hare, was an old crone. Her skin was as withered as a
      fallen apple...and she wore a floor length wrap made of furs, and held a           basket of stones over one arm. Her eyes were partly obscured by the folds       of her eyelids, and they gleamed darkly, like wet stones in a river. 
                 The crone was studying Irina with such concentration that it                      seemed to pour from her in waves, wrapping Irina warmly and firmly.             Irina had never seen the woman before, and yet she felt she had always           known her.
                  Instinctively, barely conscious of what she was doing, Irina knelt."
                                                                               
                                                                                  p118, Irina The Wolf Queen.


Have you ever had this kind of experience, this feeling of interest from an older person, a teacher, a mentor,  or grandparent perhaps, someone who helped you grow into who you are?

 "...she was in the grip of a plan, possibly an insane one. She'd spent nights fantasising about painting an icon of Mary some place it where it coudn't be ignored. And now here she was, walking along the railway tracks as night deepened.... An act of rebellion, a drop of beauty, a site of defiance...
         'Hey, what are you doing?' came a voice from the dark.
         She yelped and lurched sideways, knocking over her paints. A Maglite moved across her face..." 

All of us who love to read have those spine-tingling moments where something extraordinary is expressed. One of my favourites is from Remembering Babylon, by David Malouf, when a character called Janet is swarmed by bees:

"Suddenly there was the sound of a wind getting up in the grove, though she did not feel the touch of it, and before she could complete the breath she had taken, or expel it in a cry, the swarm was on her, thickening so fast about her that it was as if night had fallen, just like that, in a single cloud. She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her whole body crusted over and she was  blazingly gathered into the single sound they made, the single mind.
           Her own mind closed in on her. She lost all sense of where her feet might be, or her dreamy wrists, or whether she was still standing, as she had been a moment before, in the shadowy grove, or had been lifted from the face of the earth...
          ... You are our bride, her new and separate mind told her as it drummed and swayed above the earth. Ah, so that is it! They have smelled her sticky blood flow! They think it is honey. It is."


In a story I'm currently working on, a character gets stung to death by bees, and I  remembered and re-read this exquisite piece of Malouf's prose.

What's one of your favourite moments from a book?

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When I was writing The Ragnor Trilogy, a dragon appeared in the story. I was not so much inventing -- the inventiveness comes later -- as transcribing the story I was seeing in my mind, a version of a bed time story I'd told my children. I never intended to write about a dragon... But there he was, the Venerated Dragon of the Narrowlands.

 For the first two books, Irina The Wolf Queen and Irina and The White Wolf, no-one sees this Dragon.  When I was writing the third volume it became clear that Irina would have to confront him... she is chained to a rock in his lair, and it’s a terrifying moment. But I did wonder, why am I writing about a dragon? Have dragons been reduced to clichés through overuse?

I kept writing, thinking that perhaps I'd replace the dragon with some  monster of my own devising later; but when I was editing, I found that 
 nothing else could stand in for the Venerated Dragon. He was astonishing to me, he was real. Part of his reality was his deep falseness, his layers of lies. This made him a worthy foe for Irina, who has taken on 'the Junsong', Ragnor's creed of truth, as her own personal creed. 

According to the late myth expert, Joseph Campbell, dragons are part of “the agony of spiritual growth.”  The hero must cross threshold after threshold , conquering dragon after dragon, until “the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form ...”

A cliché is something that’s become hackneyed or trite. There’s nothing trite about a dragon. Children understand dragons; they know intuitively what they represent, and they have their own private dragons, real or imagined. This is the dragon’s archetypal power, and it transcends cliché. It’s good, even essential,  to read that dragons can be slain. Storytelling shows us how we can become more truly our best selves.  

Submit your answers by Friday November 27 to my contact form to go in the running to win the cover art for Irina and the White wolf, printed on canvas.  Click here
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Back in 1977, in the dark ages before the internet and Facebook, Susan Sontag wrote in  her long essay "On Photography" that we live in an 'image choked world'. (I wonder what she'd say now, when our appetite for images seems insatiable?) 

Do images steal from our imagination? Or do they inspire? When I was writing Irina The Wolf Queen, I described the appearance of some characters, but omitted details about Irina, and her friend, Prince Andor. My hope was that young readers would imagine them how they wanted; even project themselves into those characters. 

And then, there came the book cover. Decisions had to be made. The designer drew Irina blonde, and the image was attractive and eyecatching enough, we hoped, for readers to choose it from the bookstore shelf. Commercial imperatives intruded on the pure innocence of imagining.

I still wonder whether it is possible to imagine Irina in some other way, or whether the cover has made that impossible? What do you think?


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​Sharon Thompson: Stunning image. Yes, the competitive nature of the market place and the paucity of time (few long, leisurely, loiterings browsing in book shops today) demand work be represented visually and appeal instantly. Gosh, was there really a time before the internet???


Lachie Swann: Images steal from our imagination in the same way that in-articulation prevents us from shaping reality.

View 1 more reply

Leah Swann: Yes, both rob us of the chance to bring out something, however small, that is unique.

Joanne Kyrkilis: Unfortunately I think the image sticks. While I understand the commercial imperative...it does impose on our ability to imagine our own Irina and identify with her.


Anne Hadley: I think when we read no matter the cover our own imagination takes over The cover at first glance maybe important but as I read I confess I shape my own visions.


Leah Swann:  Yes, I'm the same, but I find if I've seen the film of a book the actor tends take over from my imagined character.

Irina: the Trilogy  is now available in print and as an ebook (perfect Christmas gift for 8-13 year olds!)
​Watch the book trailer:  here 

This beautiful canvas poster has Roy Chen's cover art for Irina and The White Wolf, the second adventure in The Ragnor Trilogy. To be in the running to win, answer the questions below, and submit them to the contact form. 

(Clue: all the questions come from the first adventure, Irina The Wolf Queen)

​1/ Who was in the painting that Vilmos brings to show Queen Chloe?

2/ What is the name of Vilmos's rat?

3/On Ragnor, is the realm of Pavel in the North, South, East or West?

4/Where do Prince Andor and King Niklas get trapped?

5/ What is the 'lost book' that outlines the creed of Ragnor?

Submit your answers by Friday, November 27 here: Quiz Answers 

Good luck!

​Recently, I came across this lovely quote from Rumi:

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”

I love the word 'unfold';  that we each have a myth curled up within us, complete with our own symbols, motifs and ideas. (I also like that 'unfold' is almost a command -- this is part of our essential work.) 

One individual who has unfolded his own myth is the London/Nigerian writer, and Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri. Read a short interview with him below. 
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​Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. He has published ten novels, three volumes of short stories, two books of essays, and three collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than 26 languages. He has been awarded the OBE, numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London, and was kind enough to be interviewed when he visited Australia earlier this year. His latest novel, The Age of Magic, is a stunning, profoundly considered work of fiction.
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1/  Much of your work has a quality of dreaminess, and yet you have no problem sustaining a narrative. What would you say to writers about the craft of telling a story?

“That what was what I learned first, fortunately. In my first novel, Flowers and Shadows, which I wrote when I was seventeen or eighteen, I had masters such as Maupassant, Ibsen, Chekhov. I had to teach myself formal storytelling. I went from classical to experimental, and now to classical experimental.

“It’s very important that anyone who wants to write should you learn to do that first, because it is much harder to do it later on if you’ve acquired some bad habits of experimentation or innovation. Storytelling should, as the writer’s career advances, become an instinct. It’s not something you can graft back on. I always want to tell young novelists,  leave out all the clever stuff and fancy ideas, and learn the humility of telling a story first.”
 

2/ Where do novels like Starbook, The Age of Magic and Astonishing the Gods come from?


“Astonishing the Gods was a haunting idea that I had from when I was a kid in Nigeria. I carried it with me through all the books I was writing, The Famished Road and all that, and then one day in the summer I just started it. It just turned up. But then a tremendous amount of work goes into getting it right.
           It’s not that ‘anything goes’ in my writing, but I have a logic in each of my books which I follow and I let it lift to its natural place. I follow the logic of each work rigorously, and I follow it in every sentence of that work. So there’s great rigor, but there’s great freedom at the same time. It’s a very strange combination.”

3/What’s your advice for writers and artists?

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“It’s all here. It’s all in the quality of looking. A simple kind of story in the hands of a popular thriller writer is one kind of story. That same simple story in the hands of a master becomes a gateway to a greater understanding of the human condition. It’s not the thing itself. It’s the mind that looks. It’s the mind that sees. That’s what I mean by it’s all here.”