In 2014 – 2015, a high school friend and I went on a six week tour of the US. We went to LA, Disneyland (best. day. ever), San Diego, San Francisco, then separated for Christmas (I went to Chicago and Detroit to meet relatives for Christmas), New York for New Years, DC, New Orleans and Texas (where we stayed on a real Dude Ranch and felt like we were in a Harlequin Romance novel).

It wouldn’t have been a real experience without a brush with Broadway, especially as my friend and I made friends in high school through ‘this one time on band camp’ (and no I am not joking). We got cheap tickets to see Phantom of the Opera live and it was one of the most amazing nights of my life. I hated the shitty film, but love the music in Phantom. Somehow I just knew that a live play was the perfect format for the Phantom story. We were in a side balcony, which made the night extra special, as the chandelier and The Phantom lowered near us!

Keen for the full Broadway experience, we also saw a less traditional musical called Motown, which was boppy and fun.

One night, we also faced the brutal, cold and snowy line to get inside Ellen’s Stardust Diner, a restaurant in New York where the waiters and waitresses work at this restaurant by night, and try to make it big on the stage by day. All of them sing and dance on the tables and other bits of furniture as you order, making this one of the best musical experiences around New York if you’re into kitsch fun.

What’s a 50 in 50 list?

A list of things I want to do or achieve by the time I hit the youthful age of 50! I have tried to divide mine by type of thing. Let’s just say I’ll be busy for awhile!

Maureen’s List:

Writing:

1. Finish a full length novel manuscript
2. Do a script-writing course at NIDA
3. Submit a script to the BBC Writers Room
4. Get a drama commissioned by the ABC or BBC
5. Write a Doctor Who audio for Big Finish
6. Write an episode of TV Doctor Who
7. Publish novels through a mainstream publisher
8. Do a Writers Residency overseas
9. Do a Writers Residency in Australia
10. Collaborate on a writing project with another author
11. Sell 10 000 books
12. Record my overseas cousins life stories and make it into novels

Careers:

13. Run my own kick-ass NGO
14. Work for Community Catalyst UK
15. Work inside Westminster
16. Make my own inclusive tour company all about pop culture themes
17. Create my own cafe and secondhand bookstore micro business

Cons/Festivals:

18. Go to the Agatha Christie Festival in the UK
19. Go to the UK CrimeFest
20. Go to World Fantasy Con at least once
21. Go to San Diego Comic Con

Travel:

22. Go to Broadway and see a musical
23. Design and do own self-tour of Cornwall/Wales around ‘the historical’ Merlin and King Arthur
24. See the Aurora Borealis ie Northern Lights
25. Make like Kiera Knightley on a cruise in the Carribean ie a pirate’s life for me!
26. Go to Cambodia/Laos/Vietnam
27. Walk Macchu Pichu
28. See The Sphinx and the Pyramids and do a Nile cruise
29. See Paris and the French countryside
30. Ride the Orient Express and read Murder on the Orient Express as I do it
31. Go to PEI and do the whole Anne of Green Gables thing
32. Bike ride across Europe

In My Community:
33. Learn to sing
34. Be in an amateur play
35. Take German lessons at Community College
36. Learn to dance ‘the Tango Maureen’

Celebrities:

37. Meet Helena Bonham Carter and tell her that she’s awesome
38. “I’ll be there, I’ll be seen/having tea with the Queen/I’ll forget everything/That I’ve ever, ever been” but only the once
39. Meet The Eleventh Doctor
40. Have a conversation with Phillip Pullman
41. Work on a project with Neil Gaiman or Amanda Palmer OR BOTH
42. Have an actor read my poetry onto audio beautifully

Miscellaneous:

43. Fall passionately in love
44. Have a library in my house with the words ‘The World is Quiet Here’ on the door frame
45. Have a classic Disney DVD library
46. Have a TV drama library
47. Dye my hair a crazy colour/s
48. Take part in a mass historical re-enactment
49. Join the circus
50. Re-live ‘If Life Were a Musical’ with a flash mob!

As I read Metro Winds, it was the personal element that caught me the most; Isobelle’s focus on travel and metamorphisis, change and growth. My initial reaction was to remember my own special travel memories and apply them to the stories I was reading. This post incorporates relevent quotes from Metro Winds with my own travel photography. Metro Winds is copyright Isobelle Carmody and Allen and Unwin Publishers. Photography copyright InkAshlings 2012. Please do not repost any of these photos without credit. Quotes from Metro Winds should not be republished without author/publisher permission. If you have any concerns about this post please contact me at inkashlings@gmail.com

… this girl who had lived on a remote coast of a remote land in a solitary yellow house listening to the chilly grey sea that rushed straight from the ice pole to pound on the shore beside her bedroom window.

– Metro Winds, p. 8.

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

“Tell me where you have come from, that you seek audience with the Dove Princess.” 

The Dove Game, p. 79.

Christmas markets and fair, Edinburgh, Scotland

“Then I looked around at the glowing white snow, radiant in the sun whose light reached us but not its heat. The pine trees wore shapeless hoods of glistening snow, and the black-trunked trees were sugar frosted.”

The Girl Who Saw The Wind, p. 144.

Edinburgh, Scotland

“A seed was planted,” she said. “Many seeds were planted, but only one will summon the stranger who will be the way and the gate.”

The Stranger, p. 203.

Inside St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

“Yet few who travel to that city, which is fantasy made real, discover that it is the gateway to this labyrinthine land of islands and canals it merely mirrors imprecisely.”

The Wolf Prince, p. 210

On a gondola in Venice, Italy

“I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk, and if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have admitted it. But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping void its absence left that it is we who need our shadows, not they us.”

The Man Who lost his Shadow, p. 359.

My flatmate and I skating with shadows outside the Natural History Museum, London.

Intrigued? You should be! You can purchase Metro Winds from Booktopia here: http://www.booktopia.com.au/metro-winds/prod9781865084442.html

RRP: $24.99 Australian.

Metro Winds is beloved Australian fantasy author, Isobelle Carmody’s second major short story outing. A collection of 6 short stories, unified by common themes of travel, metamorphosis, identity, love, loss and transformation, this collection is an adult read for those who like their realism with a dash of fantasy, and their speculative fiction, literary. From the blurb:

In these stories anything is possible. A young man travels across the world to fufill a dying wish. A girl discovers her destiny in the dark tunnels of the metro. Another seeks her lost sister in a park where winter lasts forever. A writer pursues an ending for his story. A mother works magic to summon a true princess for her son. A lost man searches for his shadow.

Copyright Isobelle Carmody and Allen and Unwin Publishers

I am not usually a fan of short stories- especially speculative fiction ones. I usually feel like the story ends just when I start to get interested, or that the ideas are too weak to carry the shorter pieces. The last decent short story collection I’ve read is Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. I enjoyed it, but the lack of unifying theme bugged me, and the story quality varied. When the collection was good it was very good, but when it was bad, it was forgettable. 

Short story issues and all, such is my love for all things Carmody, I asked my brother to get Metro Winds for my birthday. It was a risk that definitely paid off. Not only is Metro Winds the perfect entry point for readers new to Carmody’s imaginative pull, it is also refreshingly different, adult, complex, and I don’t know if I am reading far too much into this, deeply personal.

There has always been an element of the personal in Isobelle’s work, as there is of course, in any other authors works; the difference being that our world views and perhaps even experiences are similar, and this means I have always identified with her characters and felt a connection with her chosen themes. Carmody has always been interested in reality’s intersection with imagination and parable; the challenge of modern society, and thus, the moral and ethical questions our modern lives pose, the philosophy of compassion. She has always had a strong sense of place bound up in Australian identity, a strong tie to the environmental movement, to humanist traditions. These are all things I am deeply interested in, and heartily endorse.

The difference in Metro Winds is the sense of confession, of an imparting of life’s hard knock lessons. This, if you like, is Isobelle’s wisdom, Isobelle’s “truth” gifted to us, her readers. I often have thought that if Isobelle ever wrote a biography, it would turn out something like Burton’s Big Fish; a life story where reality and imagination are impossible to untangle, conveying a greater truth through the power of interrelated stories of fantastical joy and sorrow. In the same way, Metro Winds felt truthful, it felt honest, and it felt wise. Admittedly, I have not yet read Green Monkey Dreams or The Gathering, but I have never had the same reading experience with any other Carmody book.

But enough biographical conjecture. So what exactly can be found in Metro Winds? There are 6 stories; three with female, and three with male protagonists. The three female stories all relate to life stages; Child, Young Woman, and Mature Adult; or if you wanted to get whimsical, the transformation from princess to queen. Metro Winds tells of an unusual young girl discovering her identity in the aftermath of divorce. The Girl Who Could See The Wind tells of a teenage girls growth to womanhood as she discovers the truth about both family tragedy and secrets, as well as love. It also serves as an account of Australia’s complex history. The conflict between the velvet people with their attitude to wondering the red, dusty land, heeding the earth’s music, and the white land owners who want the country at “the ends of the earth” to remain static, a vision of the presumably British imperial land they had left behind, clearly reflects race relations between Indigenous Australians and white land owners in our own too recent colonial history. The Wolf Prince, perhaps my favourite story in this entire collection, works as both a complex fairy tale novella, and a story of relationships and the nature of love. It is a mature story that deals seriously with marriage, what happens after the initial honeymoon glow wears off, and when passion between husband and wife fades. It is about a mother’s love for her child, friendship between two older women, and emancipation from the constraints of duty and bonds of memory. I felt that this story was perhaps the most personal of all six, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much Isobelle’s relationship with her own daughter had helped to colour the way this story was written.

The male protagonist stories are all shorter, shaped by travel and airports, cataloguing the wonder and fear of new places and a widening universal perspective, in stories of personal growth and discovery. I can’t actually decide which was my favourite male protagonist story out of The Dove Game and The Man Who Lost His Shadow. Both stories resonated with me. I travelled around Europe when I was twenty, and Isobelle captured the feeling of leaping into the unknown perfectly for me in these two tales. The only weak story in the whole collection was The Stranger. I loved the way it was written, and I loved the descriptions of Santorini, but I felt the story ended too abruptly for me to get into its groove. I am also well and truly over vampires. But that’s nit picking.

From the length of this review, it should be obvious that I absolutely loved this book. It was well written, it spoke to me on multiple personal levels (my parents are divorced, my Mum was in a bad car crash in November last year and has still not recovered, and maybe never will, I have gone off backpacking in Europe, I study history like the historian in The Wolf Prince etc etc), and the way that Isobelle handled complex family and relationship issues spoke of both personal experience and the kind of wisdom that can only be gained by going out and living a full and passionate life. I found this honesty about personal trials, tribulations and joys absolutely refreshing.

Fans who were perhaps disappointed in The Sending, run to the store and buy Metro Winds as soon as you finish this review. Shoot me down if reading Metro Winds does not reassure you of Isobelle’s considerable storytelling power. For those who have never read Isobelle before, Metro Winds is the perfect place to start, covering as it does, so many of the themes Isobelle explores individually in other stories, whilst introducing you to both her considerable writing ability, and vast imagination.

So without further ado, it is my pleasure to award, and for the first time ever on this blog,

Metro Winds: 5/5 inky stars!

A NeverEnding Story was facilitated by freelance reviewer and interviewer, Joy Lawn. Isobelle Carmody is the author of multiple speculative fiction novels and short stories for young adults and adult readers. She is most famous for her Obernewtyn Chronicles, but she has received many awards for her other work, most recently, for her children’s book The Red Wind, also illustrated by Isobelle. Justine Larbarlestier is author of the Magic or Madness trilogy, and debuted with her realist novel, Liar. Scott Westerfeld has written Uglies, Midnighters, and more recently a trilogy of steampunk novels beginning with Leviathan.

Joy: What is speculative fiction and which sub genres have you chosen to write in?

Justine: Everything that isn’t boring- world’s that I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve written Team Human with Irish author, Sarah Rees Brennan.

Scott: World’s with new rules- alternative world’s which really captivate the reader. My latest book, Leviathan, is steampunk.

Isobelle: As a kid I didn’t have tv, or travel, and I lived on housing commission. For me, speculative fiction was anything set in new locations that were unfamiliar to me, like Peru or somewhere, but I also don’t like to label with specific genres.

I like to think that I use certain tools and utensils when I write a story, and for me, speculative fiction embodies the tools and utensils I always come back to.

Travel is really important as a writer. It takes you out of your comfort zone and strips you back to who you really are. My new collection of short stories, Metro Winds, is about mental journey’s, and the metamorphosis caused by travel. You reinvent, and reintepret yourself and your worldview when you’re travelling. Speculative fiction really suits exploring these ideas.

For me, speculative fiction is really about personal philsophical questions. Speculative fiction is speculative.

Joy: What are some key themes in your books?

Isobelle: In Obernewtyn, it’s about why human beings are both so great, and capable of so much greatness, and yet so terrible? What makes humanity the way it is?

Scott: In Leviathan, I wanted to write about airships and tanks, and once I knew that, my setting kind of defined both my genre, and even themes to some extent. Life is super, super messy as it is, and I wanted to explore people’s responsibilities to the world and each other, in terms of the social class and hierachy of World War One, and relationships between poorer and wealthier people.

Justine: My books kind of just grow. I don’t have an outline, they happen. My books are about appearance vs. true personality, and about how people are raised, with the grandmother/granddaughter relationship explored in one of my books. It’s about generational difference.

Joy: Do you toy with realism?

Justine: Yeah, in Liar.

Scott: In So Yesterday, but I found it difficult.

Isobelle: My partner gave me a story for Metro Winds as a birthday gift. He found a miniture circus, and I was so jealous that I wasn’t… only he would find that kind of thing. I used that in one of my short stories in Metro Winds [InkAshlings: The Dove Game]

Well- fantasy comes out of reality- it always leads back to us personally. Speculative fiction isn’t fact, but it IS truth, and they are two different things.

[InkAshlings: Such an interesting point raised by Isobelle here. I had an argument with my history lecturer once about history as a form of story telling which tells the same sort of ‘truth’ as a fiction writer, based off the fact/truth difference. Essentially, don’t historians and authors do the same thing, in revealing truths about the human experience, but using different tools? I would have liked to have heard more on this from the panel]

Scott: In the Ugly Series, eveyone turns beautiful at 16. That story came from a friend who lived in LA after New York, and emailed us about a trip to the dentist. The dentist asked him in all seriousness about a 5 year dental plan, with appearance the emphasis, not health. What if everything was about appearance? was my central question for that series, but that came out of realism, out of reality.

Justine: I’ve used biographical stuff in my stories too, facts from my childhood. I used to live near an Aboriginal settlement, and that has crept into my writing. You can’t write out of nothing. That’s the fun aspect of being a writer. It’s a constant surprise.

Isobelle:  You can also get revenge. I got revenge on a teacher I hated in school, I was so scared of him. I used his name, and described him as bald and ugly, and then one day I actually bumped into him! I tried to avoid him, but he came over and told me how proud everyone was of me!!! He even mentioned how happy he was that I’d used his name, even if the character wasn’t like him at all!!!

Joy: Is that the teacher in The Gathering?

Isobelle: Yes. The Gathering.

Justine: I hated a girl from school, and wrote her into my book.

Joy: Can you tell us a bit about your individual writing process?

Isobelle: Scott sounds organised- you know, perfect histories, languages, maps, charts. Are you?

Scott: Yeah- well… kind of…

Isobelle: I didn’t even have a map for Obernewtyn. The publishers told me I needed one and I had to go back and figure one out. Anyone in the audience who has read Obernewtyn will know how sketchy that map is.

I’m chaos, I don’t take notes, in my mind it’s fluid. Writing it down in plans ruins that fluid creativity.  Sucking the world up is natural, and I do that. It’s like fly paper, you suck things up and it sticks in your brain till you need it.

Scott: The little details had to be correct for a World War One steampunk setting. I did loads of research. In writing, you find out what you don’t know. Like zippers? When were they invented? Wikipedia tells you that, but not when zippers were filtered down to Scottish orphans, did orphans wear zippers in WW1? and I needed to know that. Wikipedia didn’t tell me that.

Research can give narrative. I went on a zeppelin ride as research in Germany, and I found out important minor details, like how balanced the craft has to be, and how carefully people have to move on and off a zeppelin. I needed to know that for Leviathan.

Justine: [InkAshlings: Justine talked about the difficulty of working with another author but I didn’t catch all of this or get it down] Sarah plans everything, she knows the entire plot of novel’s she hasn’t even written yet. It’s mind blowing, and I can’t work like that.

Isobelle: Yeah… but has she written these books yet?

Justine: No… but she has used this method to publish books before.

[Isobelle looked pretty incredulous here. It was quite funny.]

Justine: We had to use a rough outline to compromise. We set ourselves a challenge. I wrote a chapter, and then Sarah discussed it with me, and reworked it, and then we switched and did the same thing forwards and backwards for every chapter. We even kept a catalogue of how many times we laughed reading each others chapters [InkAshlings: Sarah and Justine wrote the paranormal romance comedy, Team Human, together]

Isobelle: [Pulling all kinds of faces] That would kill me. That would absolutely unravel me as a writer.

Justine: Yeah, but it wasn’t my book. It was unique. I’m not sure I would ever do it again. Liar was carefully structured after I wrote the entire manuscript. I used a new program, I hate word… if I ever met Bill Gates… I’m joking. Anyway, I used scriptnet, because I wrote small sections at a time, and replaced sections. I could move index cards around on the computer using scriptnet.

Isobelle: I typed my first book on a type writer. You’re young. I hand write with an ink pen and paper. [to the audience] who here does that still?

[Joy asked for a show of hands on who used scriptnet, word, and wrote by hand from the audience here]

Isobelle: This is really showing my age [upon the lack of handwriting hands in the air]. Actually, I have this funny story. I met a young fan once, and he actually asked me, when was the world black and white? He actually thought the world was literally black and white in the olden days.

[Lots of audience laughter]

Joy: Have you ever created a fantasy world that failed? And what did you do about that?

Justine: I got fired on a ghost writing job once- too many cooks. There was the publisher, the packaging house, the author, the ghost writer, and then me. There were too many contradictary instructions. The world building rules got hopelessly confused.

Scott: I’ve had bad ideas- For example in The Extra’s, I wanted to write from a male perspective, and the book was due in a month. I realised that the male protagonist’s sister was experiencing the entire story, so I asked my editor if I should rewrite the story from her POV. I had to rewrite the world from her perspective in a month because I was seeing my world from the wrong place.

Isobelle: Perfect people are boring in stories. You need them to have flaws.

Joy: You’ve all written about vampires. What makes yours stand out?

Justine: I’ve read loads on vampires- I love and hate them. Dead people walking around freaks me out, it would be so cold, and creepy and horrible, touching a vampire isn’t sexy. The romance aspect repels and compels me. I mean, wouldn’t the vampire smell? They’re dead!

We [Sarah and Justine] wanted to explore the real cost of becoming a vampire, of losing your humanity. In this book [Team Human], vampires can’t laugh or cry.

Scott: I used research on cats. My take was the idea of cats/rats/bats as familiars, but also as carriers of vampirism in Peeps. It spreads to us, to cat lovers, that way. Vampires were parasites. It was the case of a cool book of science becoming an accessable story.

Isobelle: I hate horror. When I was 14, I was so scared of vampires. I used to wrap a towel around my neck, so that the vampire couldn’t bite me, and I shared a bed with my sister, so I used to push her to the outside, so the vampire would get her first. I’d pull the covers right up. There was no way that vampire was getting me!

I’m not a fan of horror, so I didn’t plan to write it. I got inspired by a sentence from an old battered guide book I found on Santorini. “Bringing vampires to Santorini is the same as bringing coal to Newcastle.”  I wrote a vampire short story inspired by that, and by the island setting. [Story in Metro Winds, called, The Stranger- IA] When I sent the story to my editor, it was really strange, because they got another story from a British author inspired by the exact same quote!

Well- the thing I do like about vampires is immortality. I like that idea. I like the idea of being around to see things happen. I don’t like the idea of everyone going on without me, without having any kind of impact [InkAshlings: Ha Isobelle! You have your own massive wikipedia page and published books. Stop worrying on this front] So yeah- I wrote a horror short story… but I don’t think I’d be likely to write in that genre again.

Three questions were solicited from the audience now, and I was first up.

InkAshlings: Do you think that because fantasy is removed in setting from reality, it allows you to talk with more ease about difficult issues in society, that maybe people wouldn’t normally want to talk about, or wouldn’t feel comfortable dealing with, in a realist novel?

Justine: Yes. I mean, especially in America, where there is a small, but very vocal book banning minority. I know so many people who wouldn’t have been banned if they had been writing in the speculative fiction genre. It’s less confronting maybe? Sad but true. I know someone who was banned for depicting a very G rated lesbian relationship. I guarantee if that had been fantasy, it would have been ok.

[InkAshlings: I didn’t actually intend the question to go down the censorship route but it was interesting anyway. I was more asking about the way that imagination allows for uncomfortable truths to be aired in ways that challenge a reader, in a way that maybe can’t happen in realist novels.]

The second audience question was directed at Isobelle, and asked about her series Little Fur, and its relation to fairy story traditions.

Isobelle: I wrote the Little Fur series after a big flood in Prague, and there were things everywhere, all the debris, and cracks in the pavement. I was walking with my daughter, and she asked me what was in the cracks, so I told her trolls, and she asked, ‘what kind?’ so I said, ‘big, scary trolls.’ It went from there.

Metro Winds is realist, but I use the ornate language of fairy stories to tell these realist stories.

Justine: Fairy stories are a huge influence on fantasy authors. Myths and legends, and fairy stories…

Isobelle: They use rich symbols that are repeated over and over again. When I asked (with Nan McNab) various authors to contribute fairy stories to our Tales from the Tower compilation [InkAshlings: The Wilful Eye, and The Wild Wood] they all said yes, without even asking about money and stuff. It’s just… they… fairy stories tap into something that resonates with the human psyche.

Joy: Any questions for Scott?

Audience Question: Where do you go visually for world building ideas and perceptions? How do you visualise a world?

Scott: I really learnt about the value of illustrations and designs. The collaborative value of working with artists really means… the story happens with those extra dimensions.

Thanks to all three authors, and to Joy, for such a great event! If you want to support Australian fantasy, and you liked what these authors discussed, why not check out their websites, and grab a book?