Meet Jackie French
In The Tomorrow Book, Jackie French, with the help of illustrator Sue deGennaro, shows how, with a little bit of imagination and determination, tomorrow can be exciting, and that if you think about your problems with creativity and help from your friends, they don’t seem so bad.
In fact, the solution might even be better than what we’ve got now! Jackie lives in the bush, surrounded by wild animals (especially wombats). She has a solar-powered oven and a solar-powered computer and she waters her garden with moisture captured from the night air.
What is your full name?
Jacqueline French. I officially became a ‘Jackie’ after the name was changed on my first three books - it seemed easier to use the name they gave me.
What was your favorite book as a child?
Karalta, by Mary Grant Bruce. Also Winnie the Pooh by A A Milne.
What's your favourite colour?
Dunno, it depends. Very fond of purple but not purple cows or purple skies. Also blue.
What sort of car do you drive?
A dusty one. (We live on a dirt road called 'The Goat Track'.)
Why did you become a writer?
I was broke. I needed $106.44 to register the car, and sending off a story was the only way I could think to do it. (I was living in a shed in the bush with a baby at the time). The story was accepted, and I went on from there.
But I had always wanted to be a writer. Just hadn't the courage to do anything about it ... or the desperation that made me really work at my story, to make it the best that I possibly could. I think that bit is what really did it ...
What it's like to be an author?
Wonderful. You get to just sit at your computer making up stories ... and then get paid for it. One day I’ll wake up and find I am back in Miss Morrison’s maths class, with the ruler over my knuckles for daydreaming.
Do you have any pets?
No ... just the chooks and the wombats and the lyrebirds and the wallabies and the echidnas and the forty thousand other odd species we live with (most of them microscopic). I'd rather live with wild animals than pets. Wild animals don't need you, and don't have to suck up to you to get their dinner ... it's an extraordinary privilege to have a wild animal as a friend.
How do you get your ideas?
From music, walking and chocolate (not necessarily in that order). (A kid gave me half a Mars Bar few years ago. They said they didn’t think I’d mind sharing.) And from the land, of course. At least half of every book comes from the land around me.
It's a bit like making compost. When you make compost you throw in anything you can find – dead dogs, old doormats, last night's dinner – and if you've made it properly what comes out the other end is quite different – lovely, rich, fertile muck. When you write stories you throw in everything you've ever known, but what comes out at the end is different from the original ingredients.
I love older people’s stories, about the time the flood covered the valley for six weeks or when Ben Hall held up the gold coach just above our gate and the driver slipped over the edge of the mountain and ran down to get help. Everyone from the pub, where our guest cottage is now, marched up the road, carrying spades and mattocks and the odd mug of beer. The bushrangers were gone when they got there.
I've never met anyone who didn't have stories, though sometimes they think they aren't interesting because they happened to themselves.
What other jobs have you had?
Sugar packer, cook, journalist, chambermaid, echidna milker, gopher for a private detective, farmer ...
Where do you live?
We live deep at the end of a gorge, cliffs and mountains above us so it's dark here in the late afternoons in mid winter, with wallabies eating the rose bushes and roos and possums and about wombats four wombats to the hectare, Mothball, who stars in Diary of a Wombat and Baby Wombat’s Week, Bruiser, Bounce, Rikki the Wrestler, Bad Bart the Biter, Pudge and Megabyte and Chocolate, and about fifty others. Mothball tries to boss Bruiser and Bounce, and chews the doormat or jumps out from behind the rose bushes and bites your knee.
Mothball also bashes up the rubbish bin. She was a hand-reared orphan, but then ignored us for about ten years till a month ago, when she decided she as hot and hungry and it was all our fault. She's eating all the celery in the garden at the moment – she's the only wombat I know who likes celery. I suppose it's good for her (she does look very healthy) but it would be good to have some for us too. She likes parsley roots too.
Brusier is our latest orphan. This is the third place he’s been released: the other wombats bashed him up in the other two places, and he had to be rescued again, starved and scarred. He’s just starting to learn to really be a wombat. Mothball still bosses him (Mothball bites any wallaby that approaches too) but he’s worked up the courage to snarl at bower birds that try to steal his oats and lucerne chaff and gossips with some of the other wombats in the moonlight. He’s a gentle little wombat – he won’t even nip your hand. Biting is one of the ways that wombats communicate.
We live in a house we built ourselves out of stone from the creek, with fruit trees and gardens all around us (Fudge the wombat helped dig the holes – wombats are good at that – but it can be difficult to get them out again). Power comes from solar panels, water from the tanks, eggs from the chooks, inspiration from the seasons and the wombats.
There’s a possum who dances on the roof every morning at 4am, two wedgetail eagles who live in nests on the cliffs above us, nine chooks, and a handsome rooster called Rodney with long black and green tail feathers (they look like he's brushed them with hair gel) and a loud voice and another called Arnold Shwarzenfeather.
What's you favourite animal?
Well, humans. But after that, wombats.
Does writing run in your family?
All the family tell stories ... and don't let the facts get in the way of a good anecdote. My sister wrote books on sex education and Mum is a journalist, though she wasn't when I was growing up, and Grandpa wrote a book about his experiences as a psychiatrist, and Dad writes decent doggerel and more serious pieces on management ... we all love books, and are all expert with words, but in very different ways. We're all good public speakers too, and that has been useful. I grew up with stories, from history to religion to remembrances of our family to stories that illustrated a piece of philosophy or psychology.
Were you good at writing at school?
Yes, very. (She says modestly). My first book was called Tresses and the Unghostly Ghost. I wrote it when I was six and the headmistress liked it so much she had a copy run off for every kid in the school. It was about a haunted horse. (The ghost noises were particularly good). That was followed by Mary and the Disappearing Fish (they were found in a cave below the sea ... that one had an exploding volcano too, and a tsunami) and then a couple set in ancient Egypt, also with volcanoes, earthquakes, strange tunnels etc …
What were your favourite subjects at school?
English of course, and history and ancient history – maths and art were problems, as I am severely dyslexic. I have the artistic ability of a cane toad, but create gardens and houses and universes, which almost makes up for not being able to draw. I never did finish any of the projects in sewing class.
How has being dyslexic affected your writing?
I doubt I'd be a writer if I wasn't dyslexic. There was a study of road accident victims who had certain sorts of brain injuries in the US back in the 1990s ... can't recall who did it now. After their accident their verbal IQ, or intelligence, went up by an average of 15 points. The study concluded that it's as though the visual part of the brain suppresses the verbal ... in other words, if you are dyslexic you may be much more intelligent with the way you use words than you might have been otherwise.
This doesn't mean that being dyslexic makes you a genius. But it does explain why so many good word spinners are dyslexic.
With my form of dyslexia too (it's a very common form) it's as though the brain goes too fast to process the images in front of it. One way to tell if someone has the form of dyslexia I have is to get them to look at a word. If the word blurs before about 10 seconds is up, they have a problem.
It's much easier for someone with my form of dyslexia to read LOTS of words than to read a single word on the page. (And the sad thing is that so many kids with my problem are still given 'Run Spot Run!' type remedial books that just make the problem worse.)
I can still remember the terror in my first year at school when each kid in the class had to read a single word on the board. I didn't even know what they meant. Luckily I had learnt to read when I was about three, just looking at the page while my mother read to me. The teachers didn't discover I could read till they found me illegally in the library one lunch time, nearly finished Black Beauty. I could read that okay, but not a single word on the blackboard.
Once someone with my form of dyslexia (I won't call it a disability, because I don't think it is) learns to read they are usually a very fast reader. The more books you absorb, the more techniques you absorb to write with, the more data and ideas you have to play with, and the faster your universes coalesce.
But even if dyslexia gives me far more than it takes away, it can be a problem. I spell badly, though I'm improving – I was very bad when I wrote my first book. It's almost impossible for me to pick up mistakes when I type (that's an excuse anyway), and I can never work out which way to unscrew a bottle of honey or find my way out of a carpark, or which way to turn at a crossroads on a duel highway. Never, under any circumstances, ask me to drive in city traffic or add up the bill.
How many drafts do you do of each book?
Dunno. I go over and over the story making changes, rather than separate drafts. Some books like The Night They Stormed Eureka or The Tomorrow Book changed entirely between the first draft and the last, others like A Rose for the Anzac Boys had only about six words changed.
Do you like reading?
I am a reading addict. I'll read the phone book if there is nothing else around. I read about a book a day, and manage to put away a book a week, so there are piles by the bed, the sofa, and under my desk. I have too many ‘favourite’ authors to list. There’s Patrick White, because he has the power to see things clearly, Randolph Stowe, thriller writers like Laurie E King, a lot of sci-fi (not fantasy): Joe Haldeman, Ursula le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Jasper fforde, Terry Pratchett. I suppose both the last four could be classed as ‘fantasy’, but their universes are vivid and individual and speak deeply about humanity, instead of the fantasy cliché.
Never gardening books (they are too often wrong, and I start muttering), and rarely history, except for primary sources: diaries or letters or newspapers written at the time.
What are your favourite foods?
Mangoes, but only those with a balance of tart and sweet; dark chocolate, dark chocolate with mint, dark chocolate with orange zest, iced watermelon, cloud swallows (a steamed dumpling), marinated octopus – which we hardly ever get as our town doesn't have a fish shop – home made ‘muesli’, which is a blend of six kinds of nuts, goji berries (they grow nicely among the chillies) and dried cranberries, roast backyard young rooster with lemon and thyme gravy. Jonathon apples, the old fashioned cultivar with a web of powdery mildew on top of its blush. Fresh bread and butter. Boiled eggs. Vanilla icecream. Roast Tasmanian pink eye potatoes. Also tank water, cold but not iced.
adapted from http://www.jackiefrench.com.au/q&a.htm
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