Janet Gover – Aussie Country Life

Janet Gover’s fictional country town of Coorah Creek is Robyn Carr’s Virgin River set in The Outback – with the stories of love and loss, flights and fights, that fans love. Hi there, I’m your host Jenny wheeler, and today on the Joys of Binge Reading  Janet talks about her latest book, The Lawson Sisters, a contemporary story of family guilt and estranged siblings, and exciting new projects – like her recreation of Bronte stories in the 20th century. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: Why Australia appeals as a setting Warm & uplifting? Or angry and dark? Real people who inspired stories Heathcliff? Fascinating but not a hero Two writers she binge reads Why she loves where she is right now Where to find Janet Gover:  Website:  www.janetgover.com Twitter: @janet_gover Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/janetgoverbooks/ Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/janetgoverauthor/ What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny: But now, here’s Janet. .  Hello there Janet and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us. Janet Gover: Well. Thank you, Jenny. It’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Jenny Wheeler: You’ve had an outstanding career as a journalist, and we’ll get to that a little later in the chat, but the obvious question for us is, what drew you to fiction? Was that something you always had there simmering under the surface, or was there a sort of Once Upon A Time moment, an epiphany when you thought, I just got to write some make believe? Janet Gover – Australian Coorah Creek series a winner Janet Gover: Well, I think it came out of being a successful journalist. When I started in journalism I was writing stories every day and there were a lot of them. They were stories about people, factual stories, true stories, new stories. But then I got promoted and I became more management and I wasn’t actually writing stories anymore about people, and that was not good. Nostalgia for Australia I think there’s something in me that really wants to write. So I thought, well, if I’m not writing factual stories, maybe I could write a bit of fiction. And I’ve always been a big reader since I was very young, so I thought I might have a go at this. “It can’t be that hard.” I was wrong. Jenny Wheeler: Yes.  You’ve been based in England for quite a few years now, but a lot of your books are set in Australia. Is there a sort of nostalgia for the past operating there? Janet Gover: Oh, definitely. It’s a strange thing. I came to England because – I was actually living in Hong Kong at the time, and I fell in love with an Englishman was green eyes and a guitar. And a very, very cute bum. Am I allowed to say that?  When I came to England, I expected England and Australia to be very similar because there are obviously historic ties between the two countries. ‘Rose-Colored Glasses’ And in fact, I found that they are very, very different. I think to a large extent, being away from Australia, I was looking at it from the outside and seeing things that I had thought were every day, that that’s what the world is like, but I started to realize that actually that’s not true. Some of those things are just what Australia is like, and nowhere else in the world is quite like that. So yes, I might have had a certain amount of “rose colored glasses,” I’m sure, but it does help me stay connected with my roots back there. Jenny Wheeler: Yes, sure. And do you find that internationally readers enjoy that Australian regionalism? Janet Gover: I think they do. I’ve got quite a lot of readers here in the UK who send me messages saying things like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Australia and now I want to go even more.’ Coorah Creek favorite fantasy And I had one lovely email from someone who said, “please tell me the Coorah Creek, which is where one of my series of set, please tell me the Coorah Creeks is real, because I want to go there and live there. I had to disappoint her, sadly. The Farmer Needs A Wife – Janet Gover’s “breakthrough” book Jenny Wheeler: You began very strongly in romance with, I think your debut novel was The Farmer Needs A Wife, and you went onto that award winning Coorah Creek series that you’ve referred to, but your latest one, The Lawson Sisters, is set in the Hunter Valley, which is a real place and it’s more widely focused. It’s a story of guilty family secrets and estranged sisters that verges more into the area of woman’s fiction or family life fiction. doesn’t it?   Janet Gover: Yes, it does. There’s still romance in there. I think there will always be romance, a degree of romance in my books, because so much of our life is wrapped around the person you choose to be your life partner. And that formulates your whole life. Strong woman – you can do this But I think I’m exploring now some wider issues.  I get angry sometimes when I see things in the news or I’ll meet somebody who has been going through something or experienced something or I’ll go somewhere where,  I see a side of life that I haven’t seen before and I think increasingly this is informing what it is that I want to write. I still want to write happy endings. I still want to write books that say “Strong women get out there. You can do this, you can take control of your life.” But I think I’m delving a little bit more into the things we have to overcome to do this now. Jenny Wheeler: Yes, so The Lawson Girls, the sisters become a estranged over, a family tragedy, and they grow up quite a long time with an underlying misunderstanding about  what’s going on between them, which results in the fact that as they get into early adulthood, they really split apart. The joys of sisterhood One has a very successful career in the city and the other stays on the farm, and I think you capture that rift very well. That way that sisters can get a divide between them, even when neither of them really want that to happen. Have you been a sister to yourself? Janet Gover:  I didn’t have a sister growing up. I had a brother and I’m very close to my brother, but when you’re a teenage girl, a brother’s not much good to you. You can’t talk about clothes and makeup with a teenage boy, and you certainly can’t talk about boys with your brother, particularly when the boys you might want to talk about are actually his friends. But when I was in my twenties, my father had been widowed and he remarried and I got a stepsister. And it was wonderful to have another girl in the family, someone I could talk to about these things. And we both a little bit crafty. Picking winners not easy By that I mean I knit, she embroiders and despite the fact that we grew up in different countries – Actually, she was born in Zimbabwe – we’re so very alike. We could actually be real sisters and that’s a really nice feeling. Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Look, as we mentioned, Coorah Creek has evolved into a series, and you’ve done a number of other standalone books as well. You’ve picked up a lot of awards with your writing. Which of your books have you got the fondest attachment to? Is there one that stands out? Janet Gover: Oh, everybody asks that. It’s, it’s one of those questions. It’s a good question, but we always worry as writers when we get this.  Our book, babies are supposed to be like real children. We’re not supposed to have favorites, but we really do and any writer who says they haven’t got a favorite is probably telling a little fib.  A special sort of hero I love them all, in different ways. I love my first novel because it was the breakthrough. It achieved this goal that I’d been after.  I’m particularly fond, I have to say of the second Coorah Creek book, it’s a book called The Wild One. A favorite hero – back from Iraq military service – Coorah Creek Book Two The hero in that is a former serviceman suffering from PTSD, and he’s possibly my favorite hero of many of my books, but I usually like the last book best until the next book comes out. I’m very, very fond of The Lawson Sisters. But having said that, I’m currently in the final stages of writing the next book, and I’m just loving that one of the characters in that is just wonderful. Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Janet, you haven’t mentioned Marrying The Rebel Prince, and we have to talk about that because it’s a 21st century Cinderella story that was timed beautifully to come out just about the time of Prince Harry’s wedding Meghan Markle. I wondered if that was journalistic canniness or just happy coincidence? 21st century Cinderella story Janet Gover: Oh, I wish I could say that I was that smart, but I’m not. What actually happened with that?  When I decided to start writing fiction, it took me a little while to figure it all out.  I’m sure a lot of other writers have said the same thing to you. And Marrying The Rebel Prince was a book that I wrote more than 10 years ago, and it was only the third book that I wrote and it wasn’t very good. I made a lot of mistakes in it. And one of the people who, who was mentoring me at the time, we went through the walk and they pointed out all the mistakes, and I went, ‘Oh dear.’ And then went on to write The Farmer Needs A Wife, which was the next book. But when I saw Harry and Meghan had got engaged, I was actually traveling for my day job and I was I think in Belgium. And I thought, Oh, I’ve got a book about the second son of a Royal family, a rebel second son of a Royal family.  Sold before they’d seen it He used to be in the military and he marries a creative young woman who’s not at all aristocratic. I emailed my agent and said, I’ve got this book. Do you think you could sell it? And she’d actually sold it before either she or the editor who bought it had read one word of it because they just knew the time was right for that book. Jenny Wheeler: And I guess you then went back and did quite a bit of a rewrite on it all. Janet Gover: Yes, because when I wrote it, there was no Twitter, there was no Facebook, there were no smart phones and you can’t really write a Royal romance without a little bit of that sort of thing creeping into it. Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely.  Social media has become a life line hasn’t it?  Janet Gover: Yes. It has many things in its favor. Many things against it sometimes. But yes, it is a part of our life now. And one of the things that I try to do with all of my books is make them real. I want to make the characters real. I want to make their lives real. Bronte-inspired novels I want people to believe in these characters, so I just wouldn’t occur to me, now I’m to write a character who didn’t have a mobile phone or internet access. All those things that are such a huge part of our lives now. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And then you’ve got another writer name altogether and a completely different sort of book. And that is with your friend Alison May, you co-write under the joint name of Juliet Bell doing a wonderful series, two of them so far, of Bronte-inspired novels where you take Bronte heroines and place them in an entirely different time and setting. The most recent one, The Other Wife, you take Charlotte Bronte’s heroine Jane Eyre and set her in contemporary life. Tell us about the inspiration for these books. The Other Wife – Juliet Bell – Jane Eyre given a 21st century voice Janet Gover: The Heights  (based on Wuthering Heights) was the first of the Bronte books that we did, and I’ve always really liked this book. It’s dark, it’s passionate. I get a little bit upset when people talk about it as a romance and about Heathcliff as a hero, because he’s really not. Heathcliff – not a ‘romance’ hero He’s really a nasty piece of work. It’s a love story an intense and passionate love story, but it’s not exactly a romance. And certainly Heathcliff and Cathy don’t get a happy ending. I’ve always wanted to work with that book and to set it against the Thatcher years here in the UK, against the miner’s strike and the dissolution of the pits and all that social upheaval that happened in Yorkshire at that time. Because one of the things about The Heights, it’s a story of disillusionment. And that’s what was happening during the Thatcher years. And you know, I was writing stories about Margaret Thatcher and what was going on in the miner’s strike. Anyway, I was at a writer’s conference and I did a workshop there on location and how important location is when you’re writing a book. I used Wuthering Heights as an example, and then I attended a workshop that Alison had given because she was doing Shakespearean adaptations at the time. A collaborative effort She talked about adaptations and then afterwards we didn’t really know each other, but afterwards in the bar, we had several glasses of wine went, yes, we should write this book together. I said I don’t know anything about Yorkshire. And she said, Oh, I grew up in Yorkshire. We had another glass of wine and thought it was a really good idea. And about a week later she emailed me and said, you know, when we’re in the bar and we said, we should write a book together, were you serious? And I said, possibly. So that was an excuse for a long lunch and pizza and another couple of glasses of wine. And it resulted in The Heights and most recently, The Other Wife, which of course is Jane Eyre, because in both cases, the heroines in those books are different when you look at them through modern eyes and also the heroes. ‘Self-centered bullies’ Neither Heathcliff nor Rochester fit today’s standards of a guy you’re going to fall in love with. Not really. They both self-centered. They’re both bullies, so it was really interesting looking at those characters with 21st century eyes. Jenny Wheeler:  I’m so glad you say that because it’s always occurred to me that Heathcliff was almost misogynistic. Janet Gover: Yes. He’s a fascinating character. I read the book, I don’t know how many times,  I have a paperback copy of it here and it falls apart every time I pick it up. He’s a fascinating, fascinating character. But he is not a romantic hero. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. I’m left with the feeling that with the variety of things that you tackle, that you certainly like to give yourself challenges and keep life interesting. Would that be a fair assumption? Enjoying the challenge Janet Gover: Ohh yeah. I also teach creative writing, but even just as a writer. I want to challenge myself with every book that I write. And in a lot of cases, the challenge is as structural as it is. Anything else? I write a book called Bring Me Sunshine which is set on board a cruise ship going to Antarctica. I hasten to say I’ve never been to Antarctica on a cruise ship, but my lucky sister-in-law has, I spent a lot of time pestering her with questions, but the challenge for that one was the, the cruise lasted two weeks. Could I make this couple fall in love in two weeks? The challenge with The Heights was, could I move these characters into the 21st century and still maintain the passion and the intensity of the story.  I did another book, which hasn’t been published yet. Making Heathcliff understandable I haven’t quite finished it, it’s going to my agent, hopefully in a few weeks where there’s two concurrent timelines running, and I felt that was a bit of a challenge. So yes, every book I write, I want it to be different. I want my readers to get something different out of it. I never want to get predictable.  I want to challenge myself all the time. Jenny Wheeler: How did you make Heathcliff acceptable to a 21st century audience? Janet Gover: I probably didn’t?   (Laughs) )  I think the thing about Heathcliff is, and you know, I’m not a Bronte scholar by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but part of what made Heathcliff who he was, was the brutal treatment he received. Now Cathy’s father, the old man, just picked him up off his mother and dragged him away from the only home he’d ever known and set him down in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors. ‘Not a nice character’ That must’ve been terrifying for the child that he was at the time. And then, you know, Hindley brutalized him all the way through the book. Heathcliff is not a nice character and I think anybody who tried to make him a nice character wouldn’t be true to Bronte’s vision. But maybe by exploring a bit more of his background and by putting that into a 21st century setting in a place where the whole community was falling apart and there was violence on the streets, and this is how he grew up. I think it makes him understandable. If not likable. Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley as Heathcliff and Cathy in the BBC TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights – ‘Not a romance hero’ Jenny Wheeler: Yes. So how do you and Alison approach the collaboration in terms of straight, practical working? Fuelled by red wine and pizza Janet Gover: It involves a lot of pizza and red wine. Well, we actually lived some distance apart. She lives in Midlands and I live in London. When we decide on a project, we have a long lunch, and talk it through and try and decide what it is we going to do with this project and how we’re going to approach writing it. Then we both went away and read the books analytically and wrote notes and did a chapter outline and all of this. The approach varied a little between the two books. In The Heights, we were actually writing – she’d write a bit and I’d write the next bit, and then she’d write a bit and I’d write a bit – following on from each other. But then we ran out of time. We had a deadline, so. She wrote a whole slab and then I wrote a whole slab and we blended them later. For The Other Wife, it was a little bit different. One thing we wanted to do with that was give the mad wife a voice, because all she is in the original, is this mad wife locked in the attic. Giving the ‘mad wife’ a voice And that seems to cheat her out of saying, well, hang on, this is my story. So I wrote Jane, and Alison wrote, the “mad wife” – we called her Betty to give her a slightly more modern name. So that way we’ve got two distinct voices because they are two very different and distinct characters. And we just have a Dropbox online where we store stuff so we can see what each other is doing. It does require working in collaboration, that you do not get precious.  I write very tight first draft. She writes very loose first draft, and I’d get her first draft  of a section, and I’d very tentatively email and say, ‘Oh look, I’m really sorry and don’t be mad at me, but I really want to change this.’ And she’d go back and say “Yep, fair enough.”  Then she’d ring me or she would write to me and she would say ‘in Yorkshire, we don’t say creek, that’s an Australian word.’ So I ended up with a list of Australian words that I was not permitted to use in the book. Working in a men’s world Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Turning to your wider career, focusing away from the specific books we’ve referred in passing to your journalistic career. You’ve had a lot of very exciting events to cover. I’ve just seen a hint of one or two of them online. Can you tell us a little bit, a quick encapsulated version of what you did with your journalism. Janet Gover: Oh, wow. Well I got I started working in television more years ago than I am going to admit to, but it was a time when there were no female television journalists.  Maybe one or two, but we were certainly a rarity. I spent a fair bit of time then not arguing, but fighting to be accepted as a serious television journalist in a world that was predominantly male. I started off as a general reporter and then I did police rounds and I did courts and I did politics. Working with emerging nations I was actually doing politics in Queensland at the time of the form of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government, which was fascinating. And then once I moved away from day to day journalism, I got involved in the technology for producing news. The last few years I’ve spent wandering around the world installing high-end computer systems and television stations in all sorts of places and helping a lot of emerging nations and places.  For example, for the Kurdish people. After the end of the Iraq war, I went to Iraq to try and help the Kurds in the North to set up a TV station to give themself a voice after many, many years of being held under by the old regime. So that’s a lot of fun. A lot of inspiration in that sort of work. Jenny Wheeler:  I was going to say, how does it feed into fiction? Location, location, location Janet Gover: Well, The Wild One, for example, with the soldier with PTSD, he had come back from Iraq. So having been in Iraq and seen what it was like, and almost got arrested at the airport and involved in a shootout with a taxi driver and all this sort of stuff, I felt able to express his fear and response to the violence that he saw there, and I had a feel for the people in the country. Locations as much as anything, and people I meet feed into my stories. In Flight To Coorah Creek, which was the first Coorah Creek book. There’s a character in that, no spoilers here, but it’s a nun, and she was inspired by a nun I met as a journalist. She worked in a specialist burns unit in a hospital that dealt with children. On a day to day basis, she saw children coming into those wards that had been burned horribly in accidents and sometimes sad to say, not in accidents. And as a person, she was so inspiring. She was so calm. The secret of Janet’s success Inspired by a real life person – a nun – Janet Gover met in her work as a journalist. She was so sure in her faith, in her religion, but also in her faith in people. And I thought she was wonderful. I always wanted to eventually write a book with a character like that. I just hope I did her justice. Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s lovely. Is there one thing that you’ve done perhaps more than any other that you’d put down to the secret of your success? Janet Gover: All right. Secret to success. Okay, I’m going to credit my dad with this. I lost my dad some years ago, but he always, always encouraged me. He taught me to love books. He taught me to love reading, and he taught me to think and be analytical about what I’m reading. His mantra was that I could do or be anything I wanted to be if I was prepared to work hard enough for it. Practice makes perfect Now, I think he was wrong. I’m five foot three. I was never going to be a super model or an Olympic gymnast, no matter how much work I put in. But he was right in terms of this, because I think to be a successful writer, the first thing you have today understand is that it’s like any other creative endeavor. You wouldn’t, if you want it to be a concert pianist, you wouldn’t expect to be able to sit down tomorrow and do a performance at the Royal Albert Hall. It takes years to develop your skill and you never stop practicing and you never stop learning. And I think writing is the same. The way to learn how to write is just to sit down and write, but never stop learning. Never stop reading. Never stopped analyzing, because these are tricks to the trade. Learning ways of doing things that work and ways that don’t work, and some things don’t work when you’re starting out, but 10 years later when you’ve got a bit more skill, have another go at it. You might be able to make it work this time. Janet as reader Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Yes. That’s great advice. Turning to Janet as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading. What have you in the past, liked to binge read, and what are you currently reading? Have you got any recommendations for our listeners? Janet Gover: Ah, well here we go. My really big binge read for me was Robyn Carr, who wrote the Virgin River series, which has just recently been made into a series by Netflix. I don’t know if you’d got it out there. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. I’ve watched it because Martin Henderson is actually a Kiwi. Janet Gover: Absolutely. Yes. And he is lovely in that. Jenny Wheeler:  He’s great. I can’t wait for the next series! Netflix Virgin River series – with Alexandra Breckenridge and Martin Henderson Janet Gover: Well, I was actually living in New York at the time and went to a Romance Writers of America conference. And they were handing out free books. It was wonderful. All these free books, and I got given the first Virgin River book and I  got to meet Robyn Carr and get her to sign it for me. And I read the first one and I don’t think I read another author until I had read all the Virgin River books. I just went plowed through them. I just loved them. Games of Thrones addict Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting, because I’ve seen your Coorah Creek series described as being very similar to Virgin River. I thought that was a great compliment. Janet Gover: Oh, that is a huge compliment. I hadn’t seen that. Thank you. But yes, that was in fact, what inspired me to have a go at writing a rural series, because I loved her books so much. My other binge read, I have to say it was George (R.R.) Martin and Game of Thrones. I’m a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy. I think possibly because I don’t write it, I read it, I doesn’t get confused in my head. And when I read the first book, which was a good five or six years before the television series started – I read the first book and went, wow. And so what I do now, because he hasn’t finished the series in terms of books, is every time there’s another book coming out, I go back to book one and read all the full story again and then move onto the new book at the end. I think I’ve read Book One six, maybe seven times. A grumpy, surly cuteness Jenny Wheeler: Amazing. Did you watch the show as well? Jon Snow in Game of Thrones – George RR Martin saga Janet Gover: Oh, I did. I thought they did a really, really good job. They diverted from the books quite a bit, but these books are the size of a house brick, so there’s really not room to put all that on television. But I thought they did really well, and I thought Jon Snow was quite sort of cute in a grumpy, surly, sort of slightly grubby sweary sort of a way. Jenny Wheeler: Sounds very appealing. We’re coming to the end of our time together, Janet. Circling around, imagining that you’re looking back down the time tunnel at this stage of your career. If you were doing it all again, is there anything you would change. Janet Gover: No, I don’t think so, and that’s not to say that everything’s been perfect. I started out writing short stories for women’s magazines, which I still do occasionally. I learned a lot from that.  Works in progress for year There may be career steps that I have taken that in 2020 hindsight, there might have been a better thing to do at the time. But having said that, every decision I’ve made in my writing career has brought me to the point that I am at now, and I like where I am now. I’m very excited about where I am. I’m really excited. I’ve got four books in my head. Two are part-written and two just scribbled notes, on a piece of paper. But I’m very excited about them. I think that every decision I’ve made, everything that’s happened to me during this writing career has led me to the point where I am now. And I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. Jenny Wheeler: That leads very beautifully into the penultimate question, and that is, what is next for Janet? What works in progress? Is there any more Coorah Creek coming? A new series closer to town Janet Gover: I never say never, but I’m just writing a book now in a new town.  Still in Australia, but it’s a little closer to the East coast. The problem with Coorah – well not problem, but from a writing point of view, is it so far into the Outback, it gets hard to find a reason for somebody to move there and people to come in. Janet Gover’s Coorah Creek series – inspired by Virgin River I’m going away next week, I’m spending a week in a hotel in Devon, and I’m just going to finish this book because it has to go to my editor Monday week. It’s another rural and another family story. Can’t say too much, but it does have two wonderful,  wonderful matriarchs who are glaring at each other, basically across the aisle of the church for half the book, hating each other without realizing that actually they’ve got a lot more in common than they think they have and they have been a joy to write. A darker strain And I’ve also got quite a darker novel, which is based on my years living in New York, and a little more issues driven perhaps. As a former political reporter, I do watch the politics a lot. And when something makes me angry, it tends to inspire me to write a book. I can see over the next few years, I’m hopefully going to have two strands of my writing. One of the rural stories, the women’s fiction that are warm happy stories about strong women overcoming their problems, uplifting stories, if you like, on one side and on the other side, my “I’m angry at this” darker stories. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Yes. Look, it’s been fantastic talking. We have come to the end of our time together, so give us a few clues as to where readers can find you online. Do you like to interact with your readers? Where to reach Janet online Janet Gover: I love hearing from readers. I have a website, www.janetgover.com You can find me on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and please, drop in and drop me a line. Let me know what you think of the books. Whenever I hear from reader is I’ll let you into a secret – don’t tell anyone, but quite often when I get a letter from a reader, I have a little cry. Jenny Wheeler: That’s so sweet. Well, look, Janet, thank you so much, you’ve been a great guest, most lovely to talk to you. You’ve had such a fascinating life, and it’s coming through in your work, so thank you so much. Janet Gover: Well, thank you very much for having me Jenny. I really appreciate it and everybody out there. If you enjoyed Janet you may also enjoy Alissa Callen’s Australian romance or Sarah Barrie’s Australian Rural Mysteries. Alissa Callen’s Australian romance on the Joys of Binge Reading Podcast. Sarah Barrie’s Australian Rural Mysteries. on the Joys of Binge Reading podcast. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. 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