Dear
readers,
Today I
would like to introduce you to my guest interviewers Rhiannon Mustapic and Braydon Harvey, who
have prepared some questions for well-known Aussie YA writer Justin D’Ath, who
has kindly agreed to answer them here on the Great Raven.
Pool, a
novel published by Melbourne’s Ford Street Publishing and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, is set in New Lourdes, a
small Victorian town where a miracle once took place at the local swimming
pool. In fact, the town was renamed after the miracle happened, to get the
tourist trade, which it does. Wolfgang, a boy who has a summer job at the pool,
meets and befriends blind and nocturnal Audrey, the object of the miracle, in
which she seemed to drown as a toddler, but came back to life. As the summer
goes on, strange things begin to happen and butterfly-loving Wolfgang begins to
see black butterflies unknown to science…
I
reviewed this book when it first came out, so I’ll let you find out more
details from that and let Justin, Rhiannon and Braydon tell you all about it.
Welcome to my blog, everyone!
RM What inspired you to write the book Pool?
JD: Believe it not, I
wrote Pool because I didn’t want to
write another book. Here’s what happened. Fifteen months earlier I applied to
the Australia Arts Council for funding to write a YA novel about a rock band
called Wolf Gang. Eventually, and
much to my surprise, my application was successful and I received a $30,000
grant to write the novel. But by this time I had lost interest in the project
so I turned the would-be title into the name of a character and wrote about him
instead, and the result was Pool.
RM: What
is your favourite line from the book (Ours was when Audrey said “I want to
smell the lions”)
JD:
Good choice. I think that’s my favourite line, too. In fact, the chapter when
Wolfgang takes Audrey to the zoo is my favourite.
RM: Why
did you use butterflies as part of the story?
JD: I
like butterflies. And when I began the first chapter I had this character
called Wolfgang working at the New Lourdes Pool and I needed something to
happen to kick off the plot, so I wrote a butterfly into the scene to see how
he would react, and it turned out he was interested in butterflies, too (but in
a different way than me).
RM: Does the black butterfly represent Audrey’s
soul?
JD: It
wasn’t my intention. On the other hand, when you trust a novel to your readers
it’s their interpretation that matters, and I quite like the idea.
RM: Why
did you choose for there to be a love interest between Audrey and Wolfgang?
JD: I
wanted their lives to come together. Also it presented Wolfgang with some
interesting dilemmas.
RM: Have
you ever known or experienced any of the events that occurred in the book in
real life?
JD:
No. It’s entirely fictional. I come from a strong Catholic background, so drew
on that where it touched the plot and found it interesting to juxtapose Wolfgang’s
beliefs with the extraordinary spiritual contradictions suggested by the
sloping pool and by Audrey.
RM: Why
did you choose for Wolfgang to finally see Audrey’s “special place” near the
end of the story?
JD:
I think Wolfgang needed to understand Audrey as fully as possible, if only to
offer the readers entry into where she came from, or went.
BH: Why
did you make Audrey blind?
JD:
Again, this was purely happenstance. When I write I simply explore ideas, and
it seemed interesting, since I had a butterfly in the story, to see how a blind
person, who couldn’t see one or feel one, might react to it.
JD:
My first book was a novel for adults called ‘The Initiate’. I wrote it after
spending 10 months on an Aborigine mission in Central Australia. Living there
was like being in a novel, so I decided to write one.
BH: What
books have most influenced your life?
Every
book that I have read from beginning to end has influenced me both as a writer
and a person. If they don’t influence me, I don’t finish them. But there are
too many to name.
BH: Why
is Audrey nocturnal?
JD: I
wanted to give this blind girl a reason to be at the pool every day, and since
she was asleep most of the time I wondered why.
BH: Why did you choose for Wolfgang to have
an interest in butterflies?
JD:
See my answer to Rhiannon’s question. Also I wanted to make Wolfgang an
interesting and slightly unusual young man – a misfit, if you like, which gave
him a connection with Audrey.
Thanks for the great interview! One more
thing before I go: last year, some of my students who had read Pool stumbled
across some information on the Internet, about an American girl called Audrey
Santos, who had had the same experience as the girl in the book. I asked Justin
if that was where he’d got his inspiration for his own Audrey and he said he’d
not heard the story. Weird!
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