The Story Beneath: ’Encounter’

The events in Encounter are based on an actual experience I had while travelling through Europe many years earlier. A girlfriend and I were spending a couple of nights in Bruge, a beautiful little town in Flemish Belgium, in the north-west of the country. Originally a port city, Bruge has been careful to preserve its architectural and cultural treasures. The Lonely Planet guide, which we referred to at the time, described the city along the lines of being a ’museum turned inside out’.

Being a very Australian girl, for whom any building over one hundred and fifty years old is ancient, I found the city to be almost surreal, like stepping into a dreamscape where anything might be possible.

Like Tina in the story, my friend and I were also in a lace shop when we met up with a couple of girls, one of whom we had vaguely known at university. As is often the case when one encounters virtual strangers from a previous life, we were thrilled to see each other, acting almost like long-lost friends.

We arranged to meet up for a few drinks that night (very strong Belgium beers rather than coffee!) where for hours we excitedly trawled over any friends or experiences we’d had in common at university. The four of us really clicked, we leant in close together, finished each other’s sentences and generally acted like people who had known each other for years and would continue to do so, even though I have never again seen the two girls and can’t now even remember their names.

Towards the end of the night, we mentioned that our next stop was Paris. One of our new friends said that they had just come from there. They’d had a wonderful time and had even met an Australian man there who’d shown them around. As they described this person, my friend and I realised it was the exact person, a friend of ours, who was now working in Paris and with whom we had arranged to stay while there!

Of course this coincidence just made us laugh and feel even closer, unlike Tina in the story for whom the revelations of her new friend have a special, tragic significance.

Hopefully ’Encounter’ captures for you some of the feelings that Bruge aroused in me and maybe you will consider some of the amazing coincidences which your own life has no doubt also thrown at you.

The Story Beneath: ’Cicada Song’

Cicada Song is a story very close to my heart. It was first conceived of in a very hot December 2003 when there was a proliferation of Cicadas. Everyone was commenting on how noisy they were. Living among the gum trees as we do, we couldn’t even watch television without shutting all the windows.

For some reason, the lead-up to Christmas is always an emotional time of the year for me. There are the pressures of end-of-school activities and end-of-year parties; there are the expectations of Christmas, always high when one has children; and in our case there is generally the additional need to ready ourselves to travel to visit family during the period. All exciting, but draining as well!

This particular year I found the extra burden of the Cicada song to be oppressive. I felt as if I couldn’t get away from their sound, it seemed to follow me everywhere.

Being a naturally curious person I did a bit of research. What I discovered was that different types of Cicadas have different natural rhythms. They spend a certain amount of time in the ground living as ’Nymphs’ before they emerge for their brief life as Cicadas. This period of time in the ground differs between Cicada species, but at certain years there will be an overlap. This is when the numbers of Cicadas are so huge that their sound is almost overwhelming.

After learning about how many years Cicadas spend underground as Nymphs – at least six to seven years and in some cases much longer – I began to understand why they are so noisy when they emerge. Not only do they have such a short time to find a mate and reproduce, but let’s face it, if you’ve been living in the dark for years and years, wouldn’t you want to sing a bit when you were finally free?

From that thought, it wasn’t such a long stretch to imagine how such an image might apply to the life of an individual. And so my main character was born.

The apartment the main character inhabits in the story reflects the very first place I lived in when I moved away from home to attend university at seventeen. It was in a reasonably poor area. When the local kids befriended us (one of them, a convicted car thief, falling desperately in love with one of my friends) they used to bring us gifts of things we needed, like garden hoses, which they had somehow just "found". Overall it was a great place to live – at least it was when the wind blew the smell of the meatworks in the other direction!

The Story Beneath: ’Groom or no Groom’

Groom or no Groom grew from a dream. In my dream I imagined a beautiful, tall, wraith-like woman in a red dress coming down a stairway. She was almost spirit-like, completely independent and possibly just a little odd. That was pretty much all that the dream gave me, but the image of this wonderful woman stayed in my head for so long that finally, I had to write her a story.

I imagined that Layrin lived in a very small town. Perhaps she came from an old, established, wealthy and slightly eccentric family. She was so confident in her own eccentricities that people had come to accept them – not that she had ever cared what people thought of her.

In a small town, Layrin’s wedding would be one of the social events of the year. If you weren’t invited you might be hesitant to admit it, no matter how odd the wedding might end up being.

In this sense, Groom or no Groom is, of course, having a gentle dig at social convention. What constitutes a good wedding? The food? The band? The speeches or lack thereof? Is in fact, a groom really necessary at all?

I’m sure there is more than one groom who has had at least the fleeting wonder about this last fact, particularly when so much time is spent on choosing food and flowers and bridesmaids’ dresses when the groom is able to make his own preparations in little more than an afternoon!

And perhaps, after reading Groom or no Groom, you may never view a wedding ceremony in quite the same way again…