Father’s rave about how our self-talk can be misconstrued as being the voice of god is contentious. And yes, I deliberately used a lowercase ‘g’. I took that rave out of the book and reinserted it at least a dozen times. But it’s got to the point where it’s important we start talking about the …
Dang, I love Akiva! Little spitfire. Her partial nudity is interesting. She’s exposes the tattooes her parents gave her as a form of self-defense. Being naked since a child it’s completely natural to her. Most indigenous cultures have less puritanism than we do around exposing the female breast. Akiva’s possibly the start of reverting to …
I started writing Eat My Shadow in 2013 as part of a Professional Writing Degree through Curtin University. Just a couple of chapters. In 2018 I stumbled across the chapters, re-read them and knew I had to write the book. But I was no less short on time. It haunted me. I’d go to bed, …
I have a soft spot for Hog. He’s one of my favourite characters, though he and Piper are already dead by the time this book starts and, as with Eamon, known only by the stories their survivors tell. Hog deepens the Father/Son theme. We don’t need to be related to people to form strong bonds …
What did you love, hate? Did anything get shaken loose you hadn’t been consciously aware of before? Is there an observation, thought, connection you’d like to share?
Finn cuts his finger and decides to hide the wound from Father – thinking it a small ‘cutting away of the child from the man.’ Such an insignificant wound in the scheme of things, and a moment he returns to throughout the book. When he returns to in Chapter 38, it’s with potentially fatal wounds. …
I recall writing the section about Recoinciliation in the middle of the night (lucid dreaming and then forcing myself to pull back out before I fall asleep) and thinking, oh how wonderful, imagine using our currency to incentivise peace rather than competitiveness, which creates distrust, acrimony, jealousy and fuels war. When someone is given a …
Did you spot that Hairy Man was the unknown man on the exodus from Hobart who handed the grieving Dan the nail gun to attach his grandmother’s body to the tree? That was the most disturbing scene I wrote. I came unstuck over it. It’s fiction, but it may be that our descendants will be …
Finn meets the residents of the Huon Settlement. They’ve created a new way of being and I find it fascinating to compare them to the Hobart Mob (an Australian Indigenous people word use). In the absence of paper/pens the Huon Settlement has reduced the importance of them and increased their skill at remembering prodigious amounts …
Last year I read Roman Krzarnic’s book The Good Ancestor, it confirmed for me why I wrote Eat My Shadow. I want it to help reconnect people to the concept of being one people, not divided by time into generations of unknown others. They are not ‘the people in the past‘ masses of unknown people, …
