Author, Sue Saliba, spoke to Reading Time reviewer, Angela Brown about their newly released self-published book.
once, at the edge of the sea, is a story of friendship, love and how relationships can seem to question our identity. Fifteen-year-old Alice perceives her world through her relationship with nature. Can you tell us a little bit about how Alice and the Hooded Plovers came together in the story, and why nature is so present in your writing?
Alice discovers the Hooded Plovers on the beach one day when she should be at school. She comes across the nest of three eggs on the sand with the two adults nearby and is immediately drawn to the little family of birds. There’s something about their vulnerability, it seems, that touches Alice and she is drawn to protecting them. When the eggs hatch, three tiny chicks emerge and Alice learns more about the birds – that the chicks need to feed themselves at the water’s edge from birth, that they cannot fly for five weeks and that the parents are incredibly loving and even self-sacrificing.
This strikes Alice painfully whose own mother is distant and doesn’t provide a nurturing home for her.
It’s true that nature is really present in my writing. When I moved to Phillip Island from Melbourne fourteen years ago, I became passionate about the wildlife and indigenous vegetation around me.
I don’t see nature as separate from us; I’ve come to feel more and more that we are nature. Nature helps us see things in ourselves and hints to us of worlds beyond our usual perception. It tells us there are possibilities beyond our everyday lives and habitual ways of living.
My main characters are always searching for an understanding of themselves and their place in the world and particularly an understanding of relationships in the world.
Nature shows us patterns and teaches us about relationships; it gives us perspective. It shows us loss and renewal and impermanence and beauty, resilience and fragility. The patterns in water or the sky or a leaf or a tiny insect’s wing can evoke a world of meaning, I think, which is relevant to our human lives. Also, nature, to me, invites close observation and reflection, which is very much like that involved in the acts of writing and reading.
In the story, when Alice unpacks her belongings after moving to the city from her island home, she has Mary Oliver’s poems, a copy of The Snow Goose and a portrait of Rachel Carson. What three literary things would take with if you had to leave your home?
I would take my Shaun Tan journal which he kindly signed for me with a bizarre and wonderful creature; part insect, part machine. I love his work which is so full of imagination and compassion.
I’d also take my copy of The Snow Goose. My mother gave it to me just before she died; it was actually her mother’s. It’s a hardcover with lovely illustrations. And, of course, the story itself is so sad and beautiful.
My third literary thing would be Jane Goodall’s Hope for Animals and Their World which details stories of animals saved from the brink of extinction by truly heroic people. I find Jane Goodall such an inspiration and source of hope.
You have written a number of extraordinary novels for Young Adults, including Something in the world called love, Alaska and For the Forest of A Bird. Can you tell us how writing once, at the edge of the sea was different? Did self-publishing change your creative process?
When I decided to self-publish once, at the edge of the sea, I found myself becoming more playful and experimental in the form of the writing. I began breaking up sentences and placing them on the page in what I suppose is a poetic form although I wasn’t thinking of it like that at the time – I was just writing in a way that looked and sounded and felt right to me for the story.
I didn’t think about whether it was prose or poetry or a verse novel – I just wrote instinctively in a way that allowed me to explore and perhaps go in directions and into places I wouldn’t have felt confident to if the book were being traditionally published.
I was also able to include beautiful colour illustrations and make the book a squarish, unusual shape which, again, felt like the right creative choices for the novel but I suspect may not have been approved by a traditional publisher.
I certainly had more freedom, as a self-publisher, to create whatever I wanted but I was also conscious of how, ultimately, I had to rely on my own judgement regarding the final product so I was very careful that that freedom didn’t lead me into a place where I lost touch with reality or my readership.
My choice of people in the team I constructed reflected this balance. I needed talented and imaginative people who could connect with and enhance what I was attempting to do and I also needed these people to have strong experience in traditional publishing. I was really fortunate to find these qualities in my five-woman team of illustrator, editor, designer, typesetter and proof-reader.
If you could choose just three of your favourite words to describe once, at the edge of the sea, what would they be?
Three words that come to mind are: betrayal, tidal and maitri (which means, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism, loving-kindness towards oneself).
Thank you so much Sue, for being kind enough to share more about once at the edge of the sea with the readers of the CBCA’s Reading Time.
Read Angela Brown’s review of once, at the edge of the sea here.