Month: April 2018

1 Comment Posted on Authors, Book clubs, Book talk, Creative life, Creative work, Food, Interviews, TV shows

Word of Mouth TV: an interview with Kate Forsyth and Sarah Mills

Today I’m delighted to bring you a great interview I recently conducted with writers–and now TV presenters!–Kate Forsyth and Sarah Mills, who very recently launched a book show with a difference. The Word of Mouth TV concept combines some of Kate’s and Sarah’s favourite things: food, books and friendship, to create lively, engaging TV, delicious in terms both of body and mind! The first episode, with authors and husband and wife writing team Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, was most enjoyable, featuring great conversation, yummy food, and great literary–and cooking!-insights. I loved it, and am looking forward very much to the next episode. But while I’m waiting, I thought it would be great to talk to Kate and Sarah about why and how they’ve put together this excellent show with film-maker Claire Absolum. Enjoy! (And subscribe to Word of Mouth TV You Tube channel and website–it’s free!)

Photograph of Kate Forsyth and Sarah Mills by Claire Absolum.

Kate and Sarah, congratulations on the launch of Word of Mouth TV and the show’s first episode! It’s a fabulous concept–innovative and appealing, with so much scope for fun and warmth, and a great title too! How did you first come up with the idea?

Sarah: It was one of those ideas that took a long time to manifest. The idea struck me about six years ago when I was in one of my aimless dreaming phases. The idea kept revisiting me and I asked Kate about three years ago if she would be interested in doing it. We agreed it was something that the book industry desperately needed because there is so little good news and content serving this industry.

Kate: I thought it was such a brilliant idea, but I didn’t know how we would ever find the time to do it when we had such busy schedules. But we kept talking about it and tossing ideas around. We agreed we wanted it to have really good production values but we didn’t know how we would achieve that when we had no skills or experience in that area. Slowly the idea took hold of our imaginations, though. Once we had our title, it really seemed to come to life.

Sarah: We decided upon Word of Mouth as the title because the Sound Bites that accompany the show involve authors recommending the best books they’ve read lately and their favourite cookbooks – so viewers get their reading tips straight from the author’s mouth.

 Coming up with a great idea is one thing of course: bringing it to fruition quite another!  There must have been a lot of work involved in getting to the launch of the show. How did you get from concept to reality?

Sarah: Yes, well, the idea lay nascent for years because we were both writers and neither of us had camera or video-editing skills. Then former SBS and ABC producer Claire Absolum moved into my neighbourhood and we met through mutual friends. Claire was sitting with me on the day I called Kate: “Remember that idea we were talking about a few years ago about interviewing and cooking with authors? Are you still interested?” And to our relief, she said yes.

Kate: It was complete madness! I had such an intense workload and had sworn I would take on no new projects. But Sarah finding Claire just seemed like a sign from the universe. And I’d actually been thinking about how sad it was that there was no great book chat show anymore.

 Sarah: From there it was just a matter of putting everything together. We all have very complimentary skill sets. Claire obviously has the video production skills, I have creative direction and website production skills (I was a journalist for decades at Fairfax), and public relations, branding and marketing skills, and Kate had the contacts within the industry and styling skills from her time freelancing on magazines. And we are all reasonable cooks. We really liked the idea of three women working together to create the show – there is something magic about the number three. Perhaps we’ll be “Charmed”.

Kate: It just seemed to come together so well – I feel that we’ve found the sweet spot between people who love to watch cooking and lifestyle shows, and people who love to read. We’ve certainly had a great early reception!

The show has very high production values and works really well within its time frame. Not surprising, as you have such a skilled and experienced producer as Claire Absolum on board! Tell us what it’s like actually filming the show.

 Sarah: It’s fun and very tiring. It is only a 10-minute Youtube show but so much ends up on the cutting room floor. Particularly for the first episodes because we were a bit nervous and if it wasn’t one of us making bloopers, it was the other. Or the dog would start whining, or the neighbour would start up with a drill. It seemed a process of endless takes. We are still trying to hone the process.

Kate: We are really learning on the job, aren’t we, Sarah? It took us a while to work out a template for the show, and a balance between the cooking, the eating and the talking. We’ve learnt a huge amount in just a few months.

Sarah: It is also difficult because we all live so far away from each other (about two hours) and we are trying to shoot Word of Mouth TV in our spare time. On the upside, the food is divine and we are collecting recipes for a cookbook at the end of the year. And the champagne … it speaks for itself!

How do you go about choosing books, writers–and recipes? 

Sarah: Kate is plugged into the writing industry so this is her task. We try to interview a mix of authors from all different genres and levels of experience, and Kate is the best positioned to know who are likely to be producing good books.

Kate:  It helps that I have so many friends in the industry, and that I read so much anyway. It means I have a good general knowledge of who is launching new books and whether or not our audience is likely to be interested in it.

Sarah: If we don’t personally like the book, we don’t feature it because we have to review it and we want to be kind in our reviews – we are, after all, authors ourselves. We understand how much heart and soul goes into the production of a novel.

Kate: Our aim is to celebrate books and reading and writing, and to encourage people to read outside their comfort zone. This is after all, one of the great benefits of belonging to a book club.

Sarah: I occasionally suggest books that I think will fit the show too. We also recommend cookbooks on every episode. That process is pretty simple. We both have some well-used and well-loved cookbooks. Then we ask the authors to recommend their favourite books read lately and their favourite cookbooks.

Your motto is ‘food, books and friends’hip: it’s the perfect nurturing combination. What are you hoping viewers will get from it? And what’s the response been so far?

 Sarah: So far everyone who likes books has been really encouraging. We are steadily building a subscription base to the Youtube channel, the website, and to social media feeds such as Twitter and Facebook. The authors have been incredibly supportive as well. Mind you it is fun to be wined and dined and have the opportunity to talk about your book, and the subject of books generally, all at once.

 Kate: We hope to become an integral part of the Australian literary scene, a show that bookworms will love and recommend to their friends to watch. The show comes out every fortnight, so that means we are recommending books twice a month – our hope is that Book Clubs will start watching it together, or using it to help them choose books to read, or simply enjoy what we do on a regular basis.

How many episodes are you hoping to make in the series? 

Sarah: The first season will be 12 episodes, seven of which have already been filmed and the remaining five of which have already been scheduled. Hopefully, by the end of that time, we will have a big enough audience, and sponsorship, to continue filming. We really hope this happens as we’ve had more authors asking to be on the show and they are all so fantastic that we want to interview them all.

Kate: We hope there’ll be many more seasons to come!

 Anything else you’d like to add?

Sarah: Well, towards the end of the season, if we don’t get corporate sponsorship, we might run a crowd-funding campaign. In the meantime, it would be great if readers could subscribe to our Youtube channel www.youtube.com/wordofmouthTV000 because we need 1,000 subscriptions under Youtube’s new rules to be able to earn money from the site. If readers want to hear all the latest news, views and reviews, then they can also subscribe to our website at www.wordofmouthtv.com.au We also have a Facebook and Twitter page that we are having a bit of fun with.

Kate: Every fortnight we give away huge piles of books to our subscribers who help spread the word about the show. We want to foster an atmosphere of joy and excitement about the act of reading, and to support as many other authors as we can.

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Writing about World War One…

Today, April 25, is Anzac Day, and the hundredth anniversary of the battle at Villers Brettoneux in northern France on 25 April 1918, where Australian regiments were instrumental in helping to secure the liberation of that area of France. As someone brought up between Australia and France, it’s made me reflect not only on the joint experiences of French and Australian troops and civilians in that terrible war, but also on how difficult it is to try and convey, as a writer, something about those experiences, especially when you are writing for children.

Until a few years ago, I never expected to write about World War One. In both France and Australia, as a child I’d seen, in churches and memorials, the staggeringly long rollcalls of the dead in World War One; a war that seemed not only horrible and tragic but absolutely incomprehensible. World War Two seemed more understandable by comparison, in part because my parents were children during the German occupation of France. I could imagine myself writing about World War Two (though I didn’t, in fact until very recently) ) but not World War One. Partly, perhaps it was because in Australia, Gallipoli loomed large, of course, and I did not feel able to write about it, but also could hardly begin to understand, let alone depict, the ghastly long years of trench warfare on the Western Front.

What changed that was, first, a brief visit many years ago to the heartbreakingly big and neat Commonwealth war cemetery just outside Villers-Brettoneux. In the back of my mind, a seed was being planted–and years later, in 2010, it sprouted, inspired by a longer visit–a stay of a few days, in fact, in the pretty, and war-haunted, cathedral city of Amiens and the countryside beyond. Being on the spot, in the quiet streets of the city and the green and pleasant Somme countryside which yet saw so many deaths, looking at memorials and the French Australian museum’s collections of touching photographs of both Australian and French soldiers and the local civilian population, made me change my mind. And also I read about the last year of the war–the way in which in 1918, trench warfare, at least in northern France, gave way not to the pitched open battles of the very beginning of the war, but to a more ‘guerrilla’ style campaign, on both sides, with ambushes and surprise attacks and street-by-street battles in devastated villages. I began to see how I could perhaps tell a story, through the eyes of a young French-Australian character .

So that’s how my first World War One novel, My Father’s War(Scholastic Australia 2011), began. Set in 1918, it is told in the voice of eleven year old Annie, whose Australian soldier father, fighting on the Somme, goes missing, and who goes with her French mother to Amiens to try and find him. Through Annie’s diary unfolds the story of that last year in the war and the experiences of both soldiers and civilians in northern France. It was a story that both flowed naturally from having been in the areas I was writing about and being immersed in pictures and documents of the time, but was also very hard to write. This was a work of fiction so it had to work as an engaging story, especially given the age of my readers, but I also felt a great responsibility to tell it in a way that would not trivialise or falsify. It was a very delicate balance to strike and at times felt almost impossible(and saddening; I found myself weeping several times over scenes) but in the end it worked. Or at least, readers seem to think so–seven years after its release, it is still finding its way into libraries, schools, and homes.

Writing My Father’s War had made me see I could tell a story set in that time. Three years later, my second World War One novel was published. This was 1914 (Scholastic Australia 2014), which from the point of view of Louis Jullian, teenage son of a French diplomat and his Australian wife, told the story of the beginning of that ‘war to end all wars’. It was a very different book, because it was set in a very different time to that of My Father’s War. In 1918, four years of dreadful stalemate and horrendous slaughter had changed the face of Europe, destroying the old order forever.  In 1914, the old order was still there, sleepwalking towards disaster, and even by the end of that year, people imagined that the war might soon be over and things go back to what they’d been before. And my characters might both be French Australian, but they came from very different backgrounds and experiences. Annie had a difficult childhood dominated by war and her father’s absence; Louis, whose childhood was cosmopolitan and carefree, was coming of age at a time when everything would be thrown into question by a conflict that would engulf the world and truth itself. It was just as hard to write this novel as the first; harder even in a way, precisely because it was the beginning: reading about the causes of the war and the chain of events in those fateful few weeks from June 28 1914, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, you get a sense both of the so-called ‘inevitability’ of the war but also the fact that it need not have been so. There were times when the momentum could have been halted–but it was not. I chose to tell that story, and the way in which a carefree summer turned into a deadly winter, through Louis’ eyes as he goes from helpless witness of the attack in Sarajevo to scarred and determined young war correspondent on both the Western and Eastern fronts.

Both the novels have had unexpected offshoots: minor characters from My Father’s War inspired a short story of mine, The Other Anzac Day (set during the battle in Villers Brettoneux on 25 April 1918) which was published in a UK collection, Stories of World War One, edited by Tony Bradman(Orchard Books, UK, 2014). This story, told in the voice of Archie, a tough but troubled young Australian soldier, both echoes and contrasts with Annie’s own view of that ‘other Anzac Day’ in My Father’s War. And Louis’ daughter as well as the son of one of his pre-war Austrian friends will be featuring in a novel I’ve been writing, set at the beginning of World War 2 this time, to appear in 2019. In the novel, the experiences of World War One, which transformed the lives of Louis and his friends, haunt the lives of their families too–and of course, by extension, their communities and nations, as the drums of war beat yet again.

 

More about My Father’s War and 1914:

My Father’s War

By Sophie Masson

(My Australian Story, Scholastic Australia 2011)

ISBN 9781741698282

It scares me a lot, thinking of Dad out there, far away in that dangerous, terrible place, wondering how it will be when he comes back-if he comes back, that is . . .

Annie’s dad has been away for two years, fighting on the Somme battlefields in northern France. For months there has been no word from him, no letters or postcards. Annie and her mother are sick with worry, so they decide to stop waiting-and instead travel to France, to try to find out what has happened to him. There she experiences first-hand what war is like, as she tries to piece together the clues behind her dad’s disappearance. Will Annie ever see her father again?

Teacher’s Notes My Father’s War: http://resource.scholastic.com.au/resourcefiles/8005439_228.pdf

1914

By Sophie Masson

(Australia’s Great War, Scholastic Australia 2014)

ISBN 9781743622476

A small black bottle or a torch came sailing through the air, and landed on the side of the car, close to the Archduke. An instant later came a terrific bang, the road exploded in a shower of dust and stones, and tiny sharp things went flying through the air like angry bees.

In June 1914, Louis and his brother Thomas are enjoying the European summer in a small town near Sarajevo. In the shadow of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, the world erupts into war and Louis’ life changes forever. Old Europe is torn apart and Louis finds himself in the midst of his own battle – and fighting for the truth in war means that sometimes even your own side is against you.

Teacher’s Notes 1914: http://resource.scholastic.com.au/resourcefiles/8284239_24164.pdf

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The Spanish Wife: a short story

Today I’m republishing another story of mine–rather Gothic in feel, with a real twist in the tail. It was inspired by a very strange dream, in which I actually heard a voice saying, ‘He was such a grey man, till he came back with a Spanish wife” I woke on those words, intrigued: who was speaking? Who was the ‘grey man’? And what was it about the ‘Spanish wife’? This story was the result of answering those questions. Enjoy!

The Spanish Wife

by Sophie Masson

You’d never have credited it, of Moffat. He was such a grey, precise little man. The sort who is always at his desk a full fifteen minutes before anyone else. The kind whose desk ressembles some general’s abstract plan of attack—never the messy reality of the battlefield. The type of irreproachable bachelor who’s just that—not playing for the other side or anything, but a man who lived a blameless, virtuous, dull life, first with his widowed mother, then when she died, by himself, in a small Holborn flat as neat and grey as his person. He appeared to have no ambitions, no dreams, no hopes, no fears. He had risen in the company only in small steps but did not appear to be resentful of the fact that chaps like Jones or Carey, who’d come in at the same time as he, with pretty much the same qualifications, were streets ahead of him now. He had no enemies, but no friends, either. At least, unless you count me. I took an interest in the funny little chap, for no reason I can really explain, because he is a good deal older than I and not really interested in the same things as I am. My last lady friend, Cora, told me that it was because Moffat made me look good—that his greyness made me look much more sparkling, witty and charming than I really was. But as she said it just before saying I was the most immoral, most selfish man she’d ever met, and slamming the door in my face, we can probably discount that as an explanation. I suppose, if I was to be pushed for an explanation, I was intrigued by him, in a strange way. He seemed to live life in a kind of dream. No, not really a dream; he was like a shadow amongst the solid. Not like a ghost, mind you; ghosts are unexpected things, producing disturbance, fright, an upending of order, what have you. Moffat was the very soul of the expected; the very epitome of unchanging order, always there, never noticed. A nobody, in short.

Until the day when he returned from Spain, with a Spanish wife. The going to Spain was odd enough: the country was in the middle of a bitter civil war, with Reds and Brownshirts and I don’t know what other dismal colours battling it out for control. Why Moffat of all people would go there was a mystery big enough in itself. He was not political in any sense of the word—he’d no more have dreamed of joining one of those hotheaded foreign militias rushing over to drape themselves in the warring colours, than he’d have thought of dancing naked around the office. (The mind boggles!) He had no sense of romance either, none that I’d been able to discern, at least—and certainly the image of sultry senoritas with roses in their teeth and clicking heels and bullfights and all that sort of thing would, I’d have sworn it, simply failed to register with him. He had not, so far as I knew, ever travelled before beyond the various seaside resorts of the South of England. Oh, and once to Cornwall, I believe, but he hadn’t much liked that. Too foreign I suppose. And yet there it was—Moffat had not only gone to Spain, but he’d come back with a Spanish wife. A wife at his age—he was by then in his mid-fifties—was surprising enough. But a Spanish wife—that really took the biscuit. A real revolution, you might say.

Rather to my chagrin, I wasn’t the first to find out. Mrs Evans, the tea-lady, made the discovery. On the day Moffat returned from holidays, Mrs Evans had come in early, at the same time as Moffat himself, and had seen him sitting at his desk, gazing at a photograph. In the deft way of her kind, she had managed to contrive a glimpse.

‘And that’s when I saw her. Gave me quite a turn, I can tell you! Never would’ve thought Mr Moffat had it in him.’

Dolores, her name was, Moffat said. He did not seem at all put out at being caught by Mrs Evans. Indeed, she said, he seemed to positively relish the opportunity to talk about his sudden spouse. He’d met Dolores while on holiday in Spain. They’d ”clicked”, as the saying has it, at once. They married within the fortnight. Yes, he smilingly told the gaping Mrs Evans, she had come back with him to England. He was very happy. Everything was perfect.

‘I am sure it will all end in tears. It isn’t natural, ‘ said Mrs Evans, sagely, as we crowded around her, agog at her story. Moffat was out of the office, on some errand—rumour had it he’d gone to check on his Spanish wife, make sure she was still real, and not a dream. Some of the others in the office were inclined, despite the evidence of the photograph and Moffat’s words—the man had never spun a fantasy in his whole life—to believe that it couldn’t be true, that Moffat had somehow gone a bit senile or, for reasons of his own, was pulling the wool over our collective eyes. But I knew that it must be true—Moffat had no imagination, no mischief, no romance, as I said, in him. Continue reading →

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Dreamer–a short story

Today I thought I’d republish one of my short stories with a real twist, Dreamer.  Hope you enjoy!

Dreamer

by Sophie Masson

‘So what seems to be the trouble?’ The psychologist spoke rather briskly. He was a busy man, harassed, there weren’t enough hours to the day dealing with trouble such as you wouldn’t read about, and there was something about the woman and boy facing him that made him feel slightly uncomfortable. For a start, they didn’t look like his usual clients. They were very neatly dressed. The woman was mildly pretty, with dark hair and eyes and a soft voice underlaid with the trace of a foreign accent. The boy was thin, nervous, with dark hair and large, pale brown eyes, and he was small for his age, which the woman said was fourteen.  It was more than the sum of these impressions, though that disconcerted the psychologist: mother and son gave off something odd, some unstable mixture of feelings he couldn’t put a name to.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he repeated, impatiently.

The woman looked at him, then at her son. Hesitantly, she said, ‘It’s the dream, Doctor. He keeps having the dream, you see.’

The psychologist stared. ‘I beg your pardon?’

The woman shot another look at her child. He didn’t look up, but the psychologist thought he saw a tremor running from the child’s thin shoulders to his folded hands. The woman said, even more hesitantly, ‘It’s the third time he’s had it. I..I thought we must come and see you. It’s not..well, you see, each time has been worse than the last. ‘

‘A recurring nightmare?’ said the psychologist, relieved at being in somewhat familiar territory. Many of his clients had nightmares.

‘Yes. He’s woken up—oh Doctor, he’s woken up scared out of his mind, I’ve had to comfort him for ages, you must help him—help us. You must stop him dreaming..’

The psychologist sighed. ‘I am not a magician,’ he said, gently. ‘And besides, nightmares can be a way of coping with bad things. They can rehearse, in our minds, a trauma which has afflicted us, and attempt to change it so that..’

‘You don’t understand,’ broke in the woman. ‘It’s not like that at all. There’s no trauma in my child’s life. None! The dream..’

‘Perhaps we should let him speak for himself,’ said the psychologist, quietly. He felt he could place the woman now—one of those anxious mothers, either single parents or estranged somehow from the child’s father, devoting herself to the care and protection of her only child. She would not want to believe anything bad had happened to him which might cause him to have nightmares. He’d met people like that before. They didn’t understand what harm they did by their stifling protectiveness. So he ignored her, gently, but firmly. He leant towards the child, and said, ‘Is the dream very bad?’

For the first time, the boy looked up. His eyes were expressionless. For an instant, he looked into the psychologist’s face; then he dropped his gaze again and whispered, ‘Yes.’

‘Will you tell me about it?’ the psychologist said.

The woman made a sudden movement. The boy looked at her, briefly. Then he turned to the psychologist and said, indifferently, ‘If you like.’

It was an unusual dream, there was no doubt about that, thought the psychologist, as he listened to the boy. It had started with the boy dreaming he had arrived in a place he didn’t know but that was somehow familiar to him. It was a large city, but not busy, like a city normally is. Instead, it was very quiet. There were few vehicles about, and though the streets were neat and clean, there was little sign of life. Doors and windows were closed, though you could sense, said the boy, that eyes were looking out at you behind closed shutters. The first time, he’d just stood there in the street in the dream, looking around, not sure where he was but feeling that nagging sense of familiarity. Then, he said, he felt a dread growing on him, a sudden nameless dread that made his heart pound and his skin feel clammy. He was being watched, and not just by the eyes behind the shutters. Something was going to happen, he felt sure of it..

But he’d woken before anything did. He’d woken, very frightened and disturbed, but glad to be awake. The next night, he’d not dreamt at all; but the night after that, the dream had come back..

‘The same dream?’ interrupted the psychologist.

The boy nodded; then shook his head.

‘It’s not quite the same,’ said his mother, anxiously. ‘You see, he..’

‘Let him speak,’ said the psychologist, sternly. She subsided.

The second dream had not been the same as the first, though it had started in the same place, in the streets of that silent city. The boy said that it had begun with him walking away from the place he’d arrived, with the dread still on him, the feeling of being watched. He’d come to a large square, which was dominated by the statue of a man on horseback. He couldn’t see the man’s face, because the statue had its back to him, and before he could go round to have a look, suddenly a crowd began filing into the square, a vast, silent crowd. It was eerie, horrible, that silence; and then as they filed past him, seeming not to see him at all, he saw something even more horrible. Some of them had their mouths open—and he saw they had no tongues! But it was clear that once they’d had them; for there were ragged wounds where their tongues should have been. Oh, it was horrible, said the boy in his flat, precise little voice, and just to see it made my dread come back so strongly I thought I would faint. I wanted to run away, but I could not move;  my limbs were made of lead. Besides, I was being watched; I knew I was being watched, and that if I made a false move, something dreadful would happen to me..And then I woke up.

The psychologist steepled his fingers. It was an unusual case indeed, he thought. He hadn’t come across one quite like it before. Recurring nightmares yes, but not ones that changed—well, progressed, really—in this way. He said, ‘I can see it must have been frightening. What happened in the third dream? ‘

‘That was last night,’ said the woman, breaking in. ‘It was the worst—the very worst. I don’t think he can recount it. It will make him live it all over again. Let me tell you..’ Continue reading →