Fans of speculative fiction may know her as Kim Wilkins, but author Kimberley Freeman is also making a name for herself in commercial women’s fiction. She spoke to Bookseller+Publisher reviewer Kate Cuthbert.

You started out in speculative fiction—what prompted the move to commercial women’s fiction? What is the appeal of this genre? And the challenges?

When I was little and imagined growing up to be an author, I never imagined that I would be limited to one genre. I wrote 10 books before I had anything published, and only a couple of them were spec fic. But then I began publishing in the dark fantasy genre and, the market operating as it does, I continued to publish in that genre. After Rosa and the Veil of Gold, I felt that I had exhausted what I wanted to say in spec fic (for a while, not forever). I was sitting on the couch at my agent’s house and we were talking about books we used to love in the 80s—like Lace and A Woman of Substance. And we both sort of looked at each other and went, hey that’s not a bad idea. Why don’t I write something like that? I had such enormous fun with it. I’ve always liked writing about strong women who are faced with difficult choices, and this gave me free rein to imagine big glamorous story ideas. The challenges were all about narrative interest. I’d been so used to thinking, ‘oh, the story’s getting boring, I’ll stick in a ghost’. I definitely learned a lot more about my craft when I became Kimberley Freeman.

How do you feel about the term ‘women’s fiction’? What are your thoughts on its usefulness as a descriptor or marketing tool?

While it seems a little broad, I think that it’s apt. My spec fic books, despite being about women, attract readers of both sexes. My Kimberley Freeman books have largely had a female audience. I think ‘women’s fiction’ just means fiction that privileges the female experience of the real world: fiction that gives women centre stage and allows them to be complex and conflicted and so on. My only misgiving would be if ‘women’s fiction’ became a term of derision. But I think the term is offered and accepted in good spirit as far as I can see.

There is a strong emphasis in Wildflower Hill on traditional ways of communication—letters, diaries, photos, paper records, body language, dance—even your modern-day heroine is uninterested in her mobile phone. Is this an ode, a lament, or merely a useful plot device?

I was recently up at the Fryer Library at University of Queensland, looking through old manuscript boxes full of notes and correspondence and so on and I was thinking about the incredible romance of traditional forms of communication. I’m particularly fascinated by old diaries. One of the most interesting that I read was a diary of an 11th century Japanese woman (in translation, of course). That she could touch me across so many years and across that East-West cultural divide was amazing and humbling. Even though I love the internet and I blog and you can’t keep me off Facebook, I do sometimes feel that we connect with each other too superficially (and perhaps too often). I can’t reconcile these two things about myself—my desire to be right in the thick of web 2.0 technology and my desire to receive letters written on parchment—but I do think that tension might have worked its way into the story unconsciously. Continue reading →

Pictured: Jon Bauer (photo by Natasha Blankfield)

Rocks in the Belly (Scribe) is the story of a young boy who is overcome by jealously after his mother fosters another child, and the man he becomes as he returns to face his now chronically ill mother. The book was officially launched last night by Cate Kennedy.

Bookseller+Publisher Reviewer B Owen Baxter interviewed first-time novelist Bauer for our July issue.

What inspired you to write this book?

This book began as far back as 1998, way before I began writing. I was visiting family friends in England with my mum at a time when she was showing the first signs of her illness. I saw a photograph on the mantelpiece of a wonderful 13-year-old girl with an intellectual disability. I asked about her and it was clear that this girl meant a lot to the family, that they’d fostered her but she’d died. I must have carried that image because in 2007 it returned in the form of a first line: I used to tell people I was a foster child.

To what extent did you draw on real-life experiences (whether they’re your own or from somebody you know)?

This is fiction but of course there are parallels with my own life. My mother dying of brain cancer is the clearest link although her illness is more a cameo than a central feature of the book. But I made sure I put real emotion into the fiction so that the book’s heart is my heart, even if the events are not mine. If you want to move people you have to risk your own truth. If you want to do anything well I think you have to give of yourself.

The main character (particularly as a child) has quite a disturbing combination of naivety and sociopathy. What (if any) research did you do in order to portray this?

I researched fostering through a friend who works in the field, but I’ve long been an avid observer of the human condition. I believe that we all contain every element of humanity, which is why history is so repetitive. None of us is all good or all bad. We’re often simultaneously both.

What is the significance of not revealing the main character’s real name?

This was an instinctive choice but I struggled with it during editing because it made things hard at times—to avoid the name without if being a conspicuous avoidance. I think a nameless character can add power. It’s more personal for the reader somehow, and the writer. Perhaps it was also about my own need to keep the character inside of me. I’d tremble sometimes while he was up to his ‘sociopathy’. Especially because, in my mind, he was doing it to the memory of my dying mother.

Do you have any plans for a sequel/prequel? If not, what do you think your next project will be?

I am returning to a novel I wrote prior to this—The Prophet of Loss, a story I spent 18 months researching in Morocco. I’ve also started looking into blindness (including plans to be blind myself for two weeks) for another book I want to write about an older man losing his sight: Winter Solstice. Continue reading →