Beneath the Wild Fig Tree received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Fiona Preston.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
It’s had many titles, but I published it as Beneath the Wild Fig Tree on 27 September 2024, my husband’s birthday, so hopefully an auspicious date! I love Banyan trees (which these are). They still the world about them. They have massive buttresses and create huge pools of shade. In Asia they’re the ones you see at places like Angkor Watt, they’re the genus of tree the Buddha attained enlightenment under, and in Australia they grow up and down the east coast providing generous habitat for a range of different species – fruit for bats, birds and people, and shade for cattle.
What’s the book’s first line?
‘I was born beneath a wild fig tree.’
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
It’s about Nicky, who as a child is closely bound to her restless parents, but is also wrestling with decisions they’ve made in the past and are making in the present. It interweaves two transformational years in her life: 1984 and the year 2000.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
I was inspired by Tasmania’s landscape, America’s nature writing movement and by three characters I had loitering in my head, who were stuck on an island and I didn’t know why.
I wanted to explore literary devices that would help me incorporate place as a character and pace a novel that didn’t treat nature just as a backdrop to human events, but recognised its presence and all that we’ve lost by not treating it with the reverence it deserves.
One motivator for actually publishing was the referendum Australia had last year to do with Aboriginal rights. The country voted ‘No’ for the wrong reasons. In 2000 it said ‘Yes’ with its feet in huge marches across the country. This novel lightly touches on that event.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
I’d love the reader to come away from this novel recognising how transient and beautiful life really is. I’d love reader’s overseas, in particular, to feel immersed in Australia’s magnificence for a short while. I’ve told a story in a non-judgemental way, I hope, that speaks to the ways people hurt the ones they love and the damage caused by the gap between what people say and how they act. I wanted to allow readers to draw their own conclusions and I wanted it to be thought-provoking.
For myself as a reader, this novel went through many drafts before the term ‘gaslighting’ came to my attention and frankly, it was only on reading the last draft that I was able to see that this lay at the heart of the novel and that, I think, speaks to the revealing and clarifying power of words.
Most importantly, at this point in time, we have an existential need for new ways (that are paradoxically also ancient ways) of relating to the planet and that’s something the novel explores through Nicky’s experiences and shifts in understanding.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
I hope the way Nicky matures and the way she returns to experiences she’d had while living on an island.
A slightly different question was put to me by Aunty Patsy Cameron, an Aboriginal Elder. She asked which of the characters I was most like. I had to think about that because when you’ve been living with your characters as long as I have – this novel takes the slow art of novel writing to an extreme – a kind of synergy happens, where you lend them some of your interests and they in turn gift you some of theirs. I gave Freya archaeology and Nicky got my reading. Two characters led me to sailing. Another two returned me to tidal pools. They’re very much their own people, completely fabricated, and I think writing must be rather like acting, in that you have to listen to your characters with single-pointed attentiveness and really feel what it’s like to be other than your own self in order to write them well.
When did you first decide to become an author?
I remember as a toddler being absolutely fascinated by books and creative writing was by far my favourite subject at school. I loved the idea of writing novels and sending them out across the world from my ivory tower, seventies style, no author photograph, no interviews, a story having to stand on its own two feet. I’m one of those many people who were told they couldn’t be a writer and both believed in and doubted their ability. Huge cognitive dissonance! Paralysing! It was the thing I thought I’d be most comfortable being but at the same time didn’t deserve to be or couldn’t afford to be, and in that I was ridiculously self-defeating, to the extent that I threw every obstacle possible into the structuring of this book and its progress into print.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
Yes, although my writing history is littered with unfinished drafts across a range of genres.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
I’m financially free of the workplace. My family would say I spend far too much time on rocky reefs observing rock pools, hoping an octopus is in the mood to engage with me. I tell them I’m monitoring the beach and that one day, just maybe, I’ll write about it.
How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
Not nearly enough since I decided to self-publish. That process has felt like a 24/7 venture. Ask me in November when I plan to get started again! (But on this novel I’d lose huge chunks of time and be absent to the world even when I wasn’t writing, so it comes at quite a cost, especially to family,)
What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
The best is the absolute freedom to learn and master the complete publishing process to the extent that you wish to, as well as the ability to choose who you collaborate with and the timeframe. The worst is making every conceivable error and the impossibility of rectifying some of them and the high dollar cost of fastidiousness. But it’s been a literary adventure of a different kind and I’m so glad I chose to take it.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
This may sound contrary to all things creative, but I’d recommend to anyone wanting to write that they wise up on investing, do it regularly, no matter if they have spare cents rather than dollars. That money will compound and ultimately give a writer more control of their time and the freedom to luxuriate in writing.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
Apparently there’s only a 1% chance of being published traditionally or rather a 99% chance of not been published, so actually being approached would take a miracle. I’m independently minded and indie publishing is carving new territory for writers. It’s an innovative space, so what’s not to like about that? The turf I’m standing on looks abundant enough for me!
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
I love crafting a fine sentence. The downside is that it means I keep tweaking words for far too long. The big motivator is to write something that transforms the way a reader perceives the world or I perceive the world. Fame – horrible! Fortune – no! I’m all for a simple, beautiful life surrounded by nature.
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
I feel I’ve been brought up by so many wonderful writers in terms of leading a thinking, meaningful life and although I love the classics, it’s not always a well-known writer who has a profound effect on me. Sometimes those writers are poets, journalists or non-fiction writers, or people like Emerson, with a knack for a perceptive phrase that can shift one’s thinking. It’s hard to go past Virginia Woolf or Annie Dillard, but I admire any writer who shifts my thinking or writes a line so fine I have to pause and read it again.
Which book do you wish you could have written?
Actually, only the shapely, meaningful novels I intended to write and never did. Otherwise I have only gratitude for the authors who wrote books that have meant the world to me. I mention the Tao te Ching in my novel and I’d be incredibly enlightened if I’d written that. Or alternatively a book like A Star to Guide Her By – a little-known boating classic by an Australian woman, Ann Gash, who sailed a tiny Volk boat to England to attend a music workshop, because if I’d been that writer I’d be brave, adventurous and deliciously eccentric.
I think as a reader you have a role in the experience of every book you read, because you’re investing it with meaning and colouring it with your own unique life experience, and in doing that you’re adding layers and hidden seams to the collage of a book’s existence. Just because that’s intangible it doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the bigger life of the novel. It’s simply that your contribution has been written in the ether.