Finding Faith in Fiction

Listen here:
Video
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Why don't you describe what 'Stone Yard Devotional' is about.
A: The book opens with an unnamed narrator who abandons her life in the city, her marriage, her job and her home, and finds herself stumbling into a closed order of Catholic nuns, a sort of cloistered order, set in a place called the Monero Plain, which is an area in the south of New South Wales. And it's where I grew up, and it's also where the narrator grew up. So she goes to this place just for some respite. There's been some kind of unspecified crisis in her personal life and her working life. She's worked as an environmental activist and she hit a wall of despair. She's an atheist. She finds these women in this place faintly ridiculous, but she's also grateful that they offer this kind of guesthouse to a stranger and ask her no questions. So she stays there for a few days, then she leaves to go back to her home. But then there's a narrative gap and we turn the page and we discover that she has now been living in this place for several years. She's still an atheist. She doesn't become a nun, but they just let her stay there. And for a while she finds a strange, uncomfortable comfort in this very ordered life. It's very ritualised. The same thing happens every day. She doesn't have to make any decisions. But then into this life come several disturbing visitations. One of those visitations comes in the form of a mouse plague, which becomes quite overwhelming. And another one is a return of the bones of a nun called Sister Jenny, who once lived in this community. Those bones are being brought back to the monastery by another nun who is unexpectedly known to my narrator from her youth and childhood. And it's a troubled relationship that they once had.

Q: How did you decide upon the title?
A: So a devotional is a day book or a journal, a spiritual journal offering readings and preachings and spiritual observations for each day. And my novel begins as a kind of journal, a diary. My narrator is writing these notes to herself. After that, it becomes an internalised diary. So it's not a religious devotional, it's a kind of secular devotional. She also does a fair bit of complaining about some of the other nuns. But she's also flooded with memories and observations and regrets about her own childhood and the loss of her parents. So in this life of stillness, without the distractions of normal contemporary life, a lot of old experience rises. There's an unearthing of old hurts and experiences that she ruminates on while she's there.

Q: What is it about the infinite possibilities of women's relationships that continues to interest you and you wish to explore?
A: Every book I write I think is completely different from the last one. And then, after a certain period, I realise here I am again, exploring relationships between women, people living side by side with people they don't choose to be. Somebody once said to me, 'you keep writing about these sort of groups of people because you come from a big family'. And I think that there might be something in that. But I think the relationships between women interest me because women of my age, I'm 59, were raised to just be nice, don't speak up too much, never show any aggression or rivalry or any of those things that were quite acceptable for men to have, competitive feelings, rivalries, even violence sometimes. So I think that for a lot of women of my generation and culture, the fact that you were never allowed to express any of these feelings doesn't mean you never had the feelings. But they still come out in other ways. So I'm quite interested in how this silencing of difficult emotions does manifest in certain other ways in groups of women. I'm interested in the power relationships in that sort of grouping.

Q: Contemporary women novelists tend to write out much more about the experiences of what it means to be a woman. Very much in a similar vein to that of women activists or what is considered as a feminist movement. A lot of women writers also say they do not like to be identified as feminists. And yet when you analyse the texts and compare to the requirements and demands of women activists, there are many similarities, and I see that happening in yours. I don't know whether you're espoused to that or not, or it's done consciously.
A: I certainly do see myself as a feminist and a very proud feminist. I need to allow women characters to be all kinds of people, to not be always good and powerful and triumphant, even though that's what I want for women in the world. But it's not the way the world is. And I also want to be able to challenge my perception of myself through my characters. I want to be able to add complexity to say that you can be a feminist and also be really horrible to your fellow women. And that's the kind of fiction that I like to read and that I'm interested in. And so having these groups of women allows me to do that.