TONTS. - Discovering Magic with Holly Ringland Part One

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Holly Ringland is a writer, storyteller, and television presenter. Her award-winning, bestselling debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, has been published in 31 countries/territories and will stream globally in 2023 as a seven-part series on Amazon Prime, starring Sigourney Weaver. In May 2019, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won The Australian Book Industry Award General Fiction Book of the Year. In February 2020, Holly signed a new two-book deal with HarperCollins Publishers Australia. Her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding has just been published and is a stunning second novel of myth and magic and sisterly love.Throughout 2020, Holly travelled Australia to film Back To Nature, a visually stunning 8-episode series she co-hosted with Aaron Pedersen. Back To Nature aired to critical acclaim on ABC TV in 2021. All episodes are now streaming on ABC iView. Prior to the pandemic, Holly divided her time between Australia and the UK, where she had Australian native flowers growing in both places. In 2020 she bought a 1968 Olympic Riviera caravan, named ‘Frenchie’, her Plan B writing office based on Yugambeh land, southeast Queensland, in which Holly wrote Esther Wilding’s story.For more from Holly you can find her here https://hollyringland.com/For more from Claire you can find her here https://www.clairetonti.com/Show credits:Editing – RAW Collings, Claire TontiMusic – Avocado Junkie Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just before we start the episode, I wanted you to know that during this conversation, we do touch on some themes of trauma and male-based violence. If this brings anything up for you at all, please speak to someone you trust or contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or also 1 800 RESPECT, which is a 24-hour counselling service. Okay, on with the show. I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging,

acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded. Hello, welcome to Taunts, a podcast of in-depth interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Taunty, and I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I speak to writers, activists, experts, thinkers, and deeply feeling humans about their stories. And deep breath. The conversation I'm about to share with you is so special. And I know I say this a lot, but it's so special. It felt like I'd met an old friend. We talked for nearly two hours and I'm going to share the conversation in two halves because I think it's such a special one, which I've

said over and over again, but I really do think it is. It is with writer, storyteller and television presenter, Holly Ringland. Let me tell you about her. Her award-winning bestselling debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, has been published in 31 countries and territories and will stream globally in 2023 as a seven-part series on Amazon Prime starring Sigourney Weaver, who, my goodness, I love. Now, Holly grew up in her mother's tropical garden on Bundjalung Country, the southeast Queensland coast of Australia. When she was nine years old, her love of landscapes, cultures, and stories was deepened by a two-year journey her family took in North America, living in a camper van and traveling

from one national park to another. She now writes her books in a beautiful caravan called Frenchie. And I totally recommend you go to her Instagram account to have a look at the external spaces that she sets up for her internal landscape. They're incredibly beautiful. In May 2019, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Industry Award for General Fiction Book of the Year. And in February 2022, Holly signed a new two-book deal with HarperCollins Publishers Australia. Her second novel, which is out now, is called The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding.

And if you haven't already got a copy, immediately rush out. You can't fail to notice the incredibly beautiful cover art as well. This book is a gift, particularly I think, to our feminine nature and the way that she writes about love and grief and trauma with such honesty and such incredibly beautiful prose but also with such a deep connectedness, is something that I will never forget. Throughout 2022, Holly travelled Australia to film Back to Nature, a visually stunning eight-episode series she co-hosted with Aaron

Pedersen. Back to Nature aired to critical acclaim on ABC TV in 2021, and you can find those episodes on iView. It's such a beautiful call to remember that we are part of nature itself. Okay. That's enough from me. Let's get started. Here she is, Holly Ringland. So I wanted to first up say, I had a very cosmic thing happen to me about you. And I know this is going to sound strange. So I love strange. Oh, great. Excellent. Cause I love strange too. And the world is magical. So I've written an album of music and I've been making the cover art for it and I'm kind of making a world for it. So I'm working with an illustrator to do that. Annabelle, who's just

beautiful. And I got the illustration back and I was looking at it and it's me kind of just without anything on shoulders and then a drawing of a heart, like an open heart. And then I was on Instagram and something came up about your book and I hadn't accessed your work before. And in the kind of description of the seven skins of Esther Wilding, you talk about living with your heart on your skin. And it just sort of, it made me think, I have to speak to this woman. I have to meet her. Oh, I'm so glad. Oh, that's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. I think those things, those sort of symbols, I think they become messengers for collective conscious ideas, you know,

so that when you get that illustration of you with a heart, that's in your consciousness somewhere. And I think it feels like it becomes like it feels like magic to us but I think it becomes like a magnet you've got that image of you with the heart on the outside in in your subconsciousness and then and then you'll read something or you'll see something that that echoes that back to you like a memory or something. And then it leads you to follow something that we probably all miss if we weren't paying attention. That's so true. It strikes me in reading your work and just looking at the colour and the vibrancy that you live with, that you pay a lot of attention

and you are so deeply connected. Do you want to tell us about how you grew up, the garden you grew up in, your grandmother? I would love people to hear about that story. Oh, I got goosebumps. In many respects, I was such a lucky kid. I grew up with natural outdoor landscapes being part of my house. The gardens of the women who raised me were as much a part of my life as my bedrooms or the lounge room or the kitchen for meals. Both, like from my earliest memories, both my mum and my mum's mum, my granny, they had extraordinary gardens.

And I guess, you know, I guess granny was the queen, if you like, of the gardening. And then, you know, mum was implementing all of that wisdom from granny into her own relationship with her own garden. We lived in the same town. I was born in Gladstone in Queensland and we didn't live far from each other. This is like when I was born to about three or four. And so it was never a very long trip from mum's garden where the kookaburras and the

possums would come and announce themselves on the veranda to ask for scraps, which mum, if mum was sitting here with you, Claire, she'd tell you the story about the time she came out to find me haggling with a possum over, I think it was like, oh God, because I'm a vegetarian. I think it was over like lamb chop scraps that had been left. And this possum and I were having like a tug of war. And so, you know, when I say that out loud it's like what a what a relationship to have with nature as a child how lucky I was to be around trees and flowers and wildlife within a town and then going to whenever we would go to granny's I didn't know this at the time, of course, but I think for both Granny and Mum, particularly Granny at that time, gardens were the place where you could say everything that you couldn't

verbally say. So all of Granny's dreams and frustrations and hopes and grievances, grief and joy, all of that energy, particularly thinking about the generation she grew up in. She was a farmer's wife at 16. I think she was pregnant for like the first 11 to 12 years of her life. She had six kids and three miscarriages. So by the time Granny had her own garden, for me at three

and four years old, it was a tropical paradise. For Granny, it was where she could connect with herself and take agency of her life. And that came out, that manifested, if you like, even though that's such a loaded, like, word, trendy, you know, manifested sort of thing. But I think in the literal translation of it, it was all of Granny's joy and grief was in that garden. And when I was about three, I remember getting very confused about seeing Grandad go off and volunteer in the local church gardens. And he was retired at that

point. He'd been a farmer. And I remember saying to granny, granny, what was God? What's this, what's this God business? And she took me downstairs. They lived in a big Queenslander house that was on stilts. So underneath the house was the garage and the extra fridge for Christmas day and the laundry. And upstairs, she had a sleepout, the old fashioned sleepouts that were just screened so that in the Queensland heat, you could sleep there and not get eaten alive by the mozzies. And outside of the sleepout, there was this alley down the side of the house. And that's where granny, it was protected, it was shady, it was cool. And that's where all of the sleep out there was this alley down the side of the house and that's where granny it was protected it was shady it was cool and that's where all of the most precious

flowers were grown and she called it you know out of the earshot of i guess the men she'd say to all of us grandkids you know that's the that's the fairy garden. And we all knew that it was serious shit. Like the fairy garden, it's, you don't mess with the fairy garden. And so I'd asked granny what God was, and she sort of raised an eyebrow at me and took me downstairs out to the fairy garden. And there was this old crumbly brick barbecue, and there were these little white bell flowers and she looked at me and she said, Holly darling, that's always happening. Holly darling, hello, Holly darling. Like it was a Holly darling thing.

And she put her hand behind a bell flower and she said, this is God. And I was like, like very literal at three and four and so so that that all went in somewhere and that reverence with the natural world and colors and textures and and i guess a sense of magic not necessarily in a disney abracadabra hocus pocus way, though we love those, but more in terms of what is completely outside of human control. And, I mean, you watch a flower grow. How is that not magic? You watch a tree, you watch a 600-year-old gum tree come from us, you know.

So that was the beginning. And we left, Granny was my first true love. And my parents moved from Gladstone to the Gold Coast in the 80s when it was sleepy and nobody was really there. And I think they did that for work opportunities and life opportunities. But for me at the time, it was just sort of wailing for days. You took me away from my granny. And our life on the Gold Coast sort of started at the southern end near Burley, which is such an incredible seascape. And we moved to the northern end eventually of the Gold Coast

where I grew up by the Broadwater and we were a block from the sea. And I think that was probably the salt cure for my little four-year-old heart was that everything that I'd learned in Granny's garden and in close proximity to Granny transferred to the garden mum made a block from the sea. And then the coastal landscape on Bundjalung country on that coast, everything that washed up from the ocean, the seabirds, dolphins. It was an incredible natural childhood that I had. I was embedded in the outdoors. Gosh, you can tell. You can tell. I used to be a primary school teacher and I so believe in those first five years. I think they just imprint on us in an incredibly deep way.

I had an experience over the weekend. I went with some women to do some tree therapy, like a little tree therapy course at the Botanical Gardens. And there was a session where we got to meet a tree and they asked us to walk and just really connect and think about and basically just that a tree will speak to you and get your little mat and sit and lean on it. And a friend of mine who is not very, I guess, into that kind of vibe, openly weeped because she felt like her father who'd passed away was kind of present with her while she's leaning

against this solid trunk and it it just occurred to me that we're all longing for that connection right we're all longing for that depth longing for it because and this is like this is such a big juicy conversation topic to to unpack and it's so complex as well in terms of layering. But for so many of us who have perhaps European ancestry, and then you trace that back and bring in the history of religion imposed over paganism, which is really talking about a sensory relationship to nature. And this is a very simplistic way. That's why I said it's like, this is, it's such a big historical conversation to have. But in terms of longing for and being disconnected from, something happened in our lineage and in our ancestry through the industrial revolution and progress and process where our relationship with nature was severed from the relationship that our ancestors had with the natural world. particularly for settler Australians that are here, all of us who have descended from ancestors

who sailed here, who are not of this land. It seems something very common that people will talk with or that I'll hear in conversations or that I myself will think about, that we never learned about the land that we're on in a connected to country kind of way again just saying speaking very generally and simply here because we descended from people who came here and brought the lands that they'd left behind with them like landscaped scottish garden architecture around areas on non-owal country, like Canberra, for example, or brought Hans Christian Andersen and brothers Grimm and Enid Blyton. And we read those stories growing up, reading about buttercups and bluebells, rather than learning about the

natural world that we were on on this continent. So something or all of this I guess has been really prominent in my mind too since making the series Back to Nature for ABC TV where Aaron Pedersen and I and our little crew, we travelled Australia, eight different locations, and sat and talked to First Nations people and non-Indigenous people about connection to country and land. And the biggest message that I took away from it is that sitting with a tree is not something that's hippy-dippy or lofty or new age. Species of trees are no different to the species of human we are nature we are not

something aside nature we are nature and that's something that in that severance in our culture of of broadly speaking sort of descendants of, as one example, you know, European people. I don't know about you, but, you know, we, like I grew up with women who had a reverence for the natural world, but we don't grow up learning that we are the same as a cow, a fish, a flower, a tree, the grass, the clouds clouds that sort of thing and when we when your friend who is not necessarily integrated into that way of thinking maybe in her everyday life when she sits with a tree and finds herself weeping because of how it how connected it feels for her like you were saying with her dad she was feeling her dad it i think it's it goes beyond the front thinking brain it goes into the fabric of who we are and

something primal and we recognize that i think that's why you know oliver sacks did so much research into the the green medicine of what putting patients and prescribing patients time in nature, the equitable effect that that had to chemical medication in a neuroscientist kind of way. Oh, I completely agree. I know in Japan it's now funded by the government, tree therapy, and also in South Korea as well. I couldn't agree more.

And another writer I spoke to, Clara Rourke, in her book, Together We Can, talks about the idea of the coloniser mind that we've come from. And I'd never heard that term before but it so succinctly describes exactly what you're talking about, that we've come from colonisers with, well, not all of us, but a lot of us have. And then that brings with it this disconnect. And for First Nations people, it's so complex because there's so much that's happened to them

too in that history. But I worked with First Nations people in the Kimberleys, I taught up there. And one of the things I noticed when I arrived was that there were all these chairs overturned under trees everywhere. And I thought, can someone just pack these chairs up? What's going on? And it turned out that that was because they moved with the sun and sat together under trees, you know, as a part of their daily ritual. And I come from Melbourne, you know, with my data and my spreadsheets

and my hurry, hurry, hurry. I wanted to ask you about the mango tree for your family because that was a big part of your childhood too, right? Yeah. I wasn't expecting it. I'm like, okay, we've talked about granny. Good. Yes, I know.

That's how my brain works. I jump around and then I pop out with these. I have all my list of questions and then I end up popping out with other things. Totally. But also, like, what a brilliant mind. Like, you know, I forget sometimes that when you do interviews, the person or have conversations,

the person that you're having the conversation with who's asking the questions might know more about you than you think they do. So I'm like, Claire, the mango tree? So in this house, in this house in Gladstone on the stilts, this Queenslander on the stilts, there was a giant mango tree in the backyard and I am talking like a trunk that you couldn't fit your arms around that would take three cousins to fit your arms around,

arms that, you know, it was old and grandmotherly in its stature. And it, it gave fruit every summer and it gave so many mangoes every summer that granny would pick them, slice them and fill the two, the two litre square bucket ice cream containers and then stock all of those in an extra, you know, those freezers that you see in crime TV shows that always has the body in them. They're so big. Granny had one of those. But Granny's freezer was filled with ice cream containers of frozen mango off the mango tree. And so summertime was going home and going up,

running up the steps to the kitchen, running up the stairs to the kitchen of the house and flinging open the screen door. And granny would be there with a fork and a frozen ice cream container bucket of partially defrosted icy mango. And that's sort of what we lived on. I think I was made of mango for the first 12 summers of my life. The mango trees, we climbed it. There was a swing that swung from the branches. Whenever the Queensland weather was too stifling, all of us were under it. We were there for Christmases, birthdays. We were there after funerals for wakes.

We were there when it was just maybe four of us, not 16 of us. If life was hard, you know, I remember sitting under the tree with my mum and granny at sort of one of the hardest points, you know, in my childhood where life was really hard and sitting in the shade of the tree and looking up, it was a gathering place. It was a being. It was an energy, a feeling. Everyone was always bettered somehow by being together around and underneath that mango tree. And it has taken on a meaning in my adult life that feels very similar. My brain must have attached it actually because it's what I pined for when I was a little kid reading Enid Blyton, you know, the magical faraway tree.

So in my adult life it's taken on that impossibly beautiful meaning to it in that it's mysteries and everything that it held of us and our lives, we sort of can't even conceive. And I think as we all are lucky enough to live longer and get older, but also bear the grief, the eco grief and despair of helplessness with an awareness that grows around what's happening to our climate and trees and environment. A memory of growing up around a giant tree like that becomes almost painfully beautiful, painfully precious and important and one that I hold really, really dear with great reverence. I want to say thank you now for the storytelling that you gift everyone because you are a gifted storyteller and the connection just moves

through everything you write. Even the way you speak about a tree. I know people listening to this will agree with me, but you weren't always a writer. What was the path that you kind of took to write that first incredible book, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, I should say? Oh, I don't know. Do we need a cup of tea or like shots of whiskey? I feel like we do. Shots of whiskey at this point.

I feel like we do. I feel like for women, and I know this about myself, there are so many layers of stuff that we have to break through to get to the point where we have, as you put it, the courage to write and the ability to be vulnerable enough to share the stories that are living inside of us. Yeah. Yeah. When I was, I haven't always been a writer. I've been, I've been lucky enough to be an author for four and a half years now. I'm 42. I, I told my mum when I was three, I wanted to be a writer. Mum taught me to read. She read to me from the day I was born. She labelled everything in our house, chair, couch, television, tree, fridge, book, mama, cake. She labelled everything in our house. She made me an exercise book. It was purple and I read it so many times that the spine fell apart.

So she bound the spine in like purple gift ribbon so that it would hold together. And the book was a version of all of the labels around the house. So she'd cut out a picture of a whale and write the word whale and so on. Flower, shell. And I just had this full book with pictures out of magazines and National Geographic and the words opposite them. So by the time I was three, I was reading along with my finger to, you know, my favourite bedtime story was Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. And the reason was because I can't really remember what any of the stories were about other than Banksy and Men

Were Terrifying, but the illustrations were a world I recognised outside of my window. There was Mrs Kookaburra, there was flannel flowers, there was Gumtree, you know, Snugglepup, the gum blossom babies. And I would read along with mum with my finger when I was three and again if mum had the airpods in at the moment she would be like and Claire she walked out to me when she was and hand on the hip and she was like mama like it just gets hammier every time mum tells the story but apparently I just dragged a book out of my room one day and just said to mum, because I had asked mum where do books come from? You know, that constant, where do babies come from? Where do books come from? That constant curiosity about

how does this exist? And mum told me that people wrote books and then other people made the books and then they were in bookshops and libraries. And once I realised that a book wasn't something that kind of grew out of the ground like a flower or it actually came from human beings and Mum said to me, and that person's called an author, and I said to Mum, Mum, when I, like I want to be an author when I grow up, that's what I want to be. And I was three. And that's the, sitting at 42 now talking to you and I look back over the, all the life that came after that, that I've been lucky enough to have after that. It's the one

thing about myself and my life and my sense of identity that has never been damaged or broken or thrown off course. And that's not to say that I didn't shove it deep down and far away from me, but it's a knowing about myself that every time I filled out a new job application or I got a new job or I went to a new place, there was always this tiny voice that I wouldn't or couldn't listen to that was saying, you know, is this writing, is this getting us any closer to the thing we've known about ourself? Since, I mean, I don't know, like I do the mutual, are we, it's a very royal we conversation inside of my head Holly is this decision serving us like are we I feel like there's multiple people in my head so it's not just it's a

collective we of about seven to eight people and right and then after you see the after you see the Pixar film inside out it's like yes I'm talking to all of my emotional range and versions of self so I've I mean in terms of jobs I've kind of I've done retail hospitality secretarial public service I've I was a park ranger I was a media wrangler uh in the western desert on Ananuland. But I always knew inside of myself that I wasn't pursuing writing because I didn't know how. And I didn't know how to try because it was the most vulnerable part of me and the most vulnerable part of me that I could probably try and face and focus on. And what and, and what I'm saying will, the context of what I'm saying that will make it, you know, land much better is that

I didn't try to, I didn't try, well, not even try, I didn't write Lost, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart until I was 34. And the reason why is because, and I've been open about this since Lost Flowers came out, but I lived most of my life in the shadows and all of their entrappings of living in cycles of male perpetrated violence. And I say male because I have not experienced physically violent behavior from women or non-binary people. It was specifically male-perpetrated violence in relationships in my life for much of my life up until I was 29. And that's when I decided that I would not suffer a violent man

ever again in my life. And I had the financial privilege, I had life savings from all of my adult work that I had saved. And I used that money to get myself away. My life was kind of leveled by the trauma and everything changed to make the decision to save myself. And when I was faced with what do I do now, the three-year-old was like, are you going to pay attention to me now? Like, am I going to get any airtime now? And I was 29 and I was driven by, I've read many times before, many smart thinkers say the same thing in different ways, which is basically that as human beings, we're driven by two forces, love and fear. And in that time in my life at 29, I was driven by the fear of staying in Australia. Nowhere in this country felt safe.

I didn't feel like I could stay here and trust that I would be able to stay away and to actually save myself from that relationship. So I was talking to a beautiful friend about, I think I want to travel, but I feel like now is the time to listen to this voice screaming inside of me to pay attention to it about writing. And she looked at me and said, why don't you do both? Why don't you travel and write? So in order to give myself that structure, because I just constantly felt like I was free-falling through my life and was dealing with the neurological effects of post-traumatic stress and trauma that I wasn't even aware of, I applied to universities in England to do my master's in creative writing.

Not necessarily because I thought that they would give me a magic pill and I would be a novelist, but more that if I had that structure, I maybe wouldn't feel like I was constantly falling off the edge of the world and falling in a heap inside of myself. And starting my life over in England or going to England where everything was different and I was so far away from home, there was something in that time where that felt wildly sort of gut churningly terrifying and full of possibility and safety at the same time. So I moved to England and I got a place in, I got a place at the University of Manchester in their Master of Creative Writing. And that was, that was kind of the biggest transformation maybe I've ever given myself. I moved, I'd never been

to Europe. I didn't know a single soul. I was living in a student flat at 29 on campus with 18 year olds. And I didn't have a job. I was living off a bank account of savings that with the pound conversion rate at that time was like just throwing savings down the toilet. But I'd gotten myself there. And before the pandemic happened, I lived between Australia and England for 10 years. My fourth day in Manchester before classes started, I had absolutely zero interest in ever speaking to a heterosexual man ever again.

We've all been there. We all know. We all know. We all know. I had asked, you know, I was that character in the rom-coms at the party who, like, stands in the corner with her drink clutched to her chest, frowning, giving off vibes of do not come here. Do not come and talk to me. I'm here so that I can pretend I have

a social life and then I'm going home to watch Grey's Anatomy in my pants thank you very much and on my fourth day in Manchester I met the the kindest man on feet and I had zero interest in meeting him and yet there he was and his his name is Sam. And we have been hanging out every day for 13 years now. And meeting Sam and accepting his kindness and goodness, and the way that he treated me, accepting that that is how life could be and that and that I could receive that treatment from somebody combined with getting myself to Manchester combined with underneath all of the wobbles and the trauma events in my brain as I started to work through what I'd left behind, there was a pit of embers in my soul that were constantly waiting to combust to life. And so I did my master's and I was writing and

studying other people, but I still hadn't found my writing voice because I still wasn't looking at what I had left behind. I genuinely thought I could leave Australia and that would be it. I could go to England. I could be in a new place, be a new person, totally unplanned, but accept a new relationship in my life, make new friendships, write new stories, and I could leave everything. I could leave everything up until 29 behind and just be, just start at 29 in England. And, of course, we all know what happened. That shit thundered up behind me and walloped me like so hard. And I got to five years after I started the MA, I felt like

there was something physically lodged in my throat. I felt like I was choking in my life. And it's because I was constantly making myself open enough to write. But everything that I was constantly making myself open enough to write, but everything that I was writing, my coursework, even the first novel and the second novel idea that I tried, which are sitting in drawers in my office in Manchester as we speak, they were all written from arms distance from my heart. And the feedback that I was getting was like on the stupid grading system you know where your where your work gets marked which is so problematic for any artist that's trying to even find the courage to step into their own skin and create and be vulnerable I was getting like so close to this percentage of the,

of the top sort of marks with teachers saying, you know, you're so close to getting high marks because the quality of your writing is good, but, but what's missing from it. And I'm like, fuck off and I think I think I had that attitude because I think I felt that way because I was trying my absolute hardest with everything I had at that point but also because deep down buried somewhere I was like you're not allowed to be right about this. So it was five years later, feeling like I'm choking, so sick of myself, just pissing myself off, just so sick of being afraid, so sick of feeling totally like my imagination was a block of cement and nothing was coming out of it and that cement was also in my throat.

Like the physical experience of the sensation in my throat, I think is not a coincidence in terms of the way we talk about voice and at using our voice and the connection with imagination and soul and emotions and emotional truth. It's like, it's the place between the diaphragm and the brain, you know, and I just, I drove myself bananas. And yet I still wouldn't write from the sore, tender place. I couldn't do it. And I wish, I wish that the breakthrough moment had been something not as painful, but it took somebody that I loved in my family dying, being with them when they died in hospital,

and it was a somewhat unexpected death as well. It wasn't sudden, but it happened much like it was a possibility. And I had never been with any living being that I loved who had died before, not with any of my dogs. I had sadly not been with them when they passed. And I certainly hadn't been with any person that I loved when they passed. And being with this beloved member of my family when they died and the profundity of watching him breathe and then not breathe again. It was that moment and he was such a massive cheerleader of my storytelling. And the last conscious conversation that we had, he said to me, you will write this novel.

He knew I wanted to write a novel. He knew that all I wanted to do was be a writer, actively engaged in writing. And he said to me, you will write this novel. And he was very rarely ever serious. He had big clown energy, but he was so serious. And he looked at me and he said, and if you won't do it for yourself, you will do it for all of us who are invested in you. And it, it was a, it was a thunderbolt in my chest moment. And being with him when he died, it drove me mad with grief and, and realization of how little is between life and death, literally, like, like so many of us talk about having, if we have a near death experience or if we witness death. And I went home and in the month after he died, I was home alone. Sam was at work and I was just

in that raw, mad grief. And I was thinking about that conversation he and I had had, and I was sitting in my office and it was an unusually clear, bright day in Manchester. And there's a line of silver birch trees at the, at the edge of our back garden. I remember looking out at them and swaying, they were swaying in the, in the wind. And I just heard this thought say, what if you just, what if you just tried for 10 minutes? What if you tried for 10 minutes? What would happen? What if all of the voices and all of the soundtracks and narratives that are choking you and all they have said for the last 10 years is, you can't do this, your novel's not going to be any good, just accept that this is going to be the dream that you wanted to have once, like it's never going to happen.

What if you put all of that in a soundproof box to the side and for just 10 minutes you tried? And up until this point, Claire, I mean, I was doing The Artist's Way, which is an amazing 12-week creative program and a book that you can follow by Julia Cameron, and I had turned to that book as a way to manage the space in my brain that grief was taking up. So I turned to that after this bereavement. So I was in the process of The Artist's Way. And up until this point, I had done everything to be a quote

writer. I'd gone out to a pen shop in Manchester. I'd bought a fountain pen, never used a fountain pen in my life. I read that Hemingway, not that as a woman, I would ever want to mimic Hemingway, but I read that Hemingway like preferred moleskin. So I'm like, well, obviously I can't write in anything else I have to have. So I had stockpiles of moleskins and a fountain pen and ink in my office. And so I remember just so clearly and I've shared this moment a lot over the last four years because I think I still can't quite believe it happened this way, but I just asked myself for kindness in my mind for 10 minutes to try.

And I sat there in that sort of unhinged madness, that floaty madness of presence and grief, and I took the lid off my fountain pen and I cleared my mind and I just thought 10 minutes, 10 minutes of just not telling yourself that you can't. And it was a feeling like dissociation and I watched my hand rest on the notepad and I watched the nib of the fountain pen and I watched my hand as I heard the words and I wrote them down

and I watched my hands write, in the weatherboard house at the end of the lane, nine-year-old Alice Hart sat at her desk by the window and dreamed of ways to set her father on fire. And I kind of dropped my pen. I put the pen down and I sat back and I said out loud, and forgive me, I said out loud, holy fuck. And then I sat there and looked at the paper and I got all emotional sweat and I had tit

sweat, which is saying something in England. And I remember my legs shaking and I thought, what is this? Because this feels like something. What's just happened? And then for the next three months, I hand wrote the first 11,000 words of this nine-year-old who had shown up and looked me square in the eye and kind of said to me it's time here it is and what happened you know i writing that book was like that moment with the 10 minutes was the easiest part that was a hell of a book to write for me but that is that is the we're still on the same question right yeah that's the that is the not neat answer to because to sit here and say to you well Claire you know I decided to just invest in my dreams and go to England and then like that's not gonna do service to anyone is it no so that's the truth of how No. So that's the truth of how I got there.

That's the truth of how I started writing Lost Flowers. And then I wrote it completely alone. I mean, Sam was very obviously we lived together. He was in my life. He was such a massive cheerleader, even through a fantastic sense of humour, like days where I was like, I absolutely cannot do this. And he would look at me with a twinkle in his eye and be like, you're right, give up.

My husband says that to me a lot. He's like, what else are you going to do? I guess, good, give up because it worked so well when you weren't doing it. Yeah, just, yeah, you're right, babe, just give up. And I'd like look at him and I'd be like. But I just, what was that that was 2014 and I didn't have a finished draft that somebody could read until 2016 because I I wrote the first 11,000 words the first three chapters by hand and then I stepped away from it for nearly

a year because I needed to grieve and I couldn't write about Alice I was finding at the same time as trying to grieve my brain didn't seem able but then when I felt like I'd come through the dark woods a little bit I went back to Alice I talked to her the whole time saying I hadn't abandoned her I was coming back and I I would magpie her story the whole time. I just wasn't, you know, I was gathering inspiration and reading bits and pieces the whole time. I just wasn't engaged in the prose, in the act of sitting at my keyboard and writing. And then in 2015, in about three months, I batted out a first draft and it was an absolute piece of like cow poop

because, but it was perfect because that's all the first draft needs to be is cow poop that exists. So, and I loved that cow poop. It was perfect. It was just, oh, my God, it's a whole, there I have 100,000 words of words on paper. And then in 2016, I did my best on my own with everything I knew how to edit it and then I sent it to my agents who signed me and then we worked on it together

and then they sent it out to publishers at the end of that year so I just wanted to share that because there seems to be so much mysticism around how a book comes into being. And for me, it was gut churning and anxiety inducing and occasionally felt like I was flying and joyful. And I don't think I slept for three years. And I hoped just one person would write it, would like it. That's a huge story and I am so grateful for you, to you for sharing that and I know the people listening because as you say about this book and I'll just quote you back to you, although I largely wrote Lost Flowers by convincing myself that no one other than me would ever read it, there were days at my desk when I couldn't fool myself.

I wanted my novel to find its people and I was driven by a deep aching desire for connection. And I think that's the gift that you've given as people, obviously, in the story and the words and the phrases, even in those glorious tattoos that people have responded to your work with then putting tattoos on themselves. And I know that in your next book, and it's gosh, it's just gorgeous. The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding. Oh, tattoos are a big part of that and the mythology. We could talk for another whole two hours. We haven't even got to your latest release. Oh, my God. Or even the fact that you write in a beautiful caravan called Frenchie

and just all of it. I have so much to talk to you about, but I'm so grateful for that story. Dear everyone, welcome to the 12-hour show with Claire and Holly. Exactly. Just do like a 10- series oh my god so i'm strapping strapping there's so much i want to ask you about you go i can try and give you like better rapid fire answers no no don't don't do that no no i don't want to do that no. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Tonte, and this week with Holly Ringland. Oh my goodness. That's the end of the first half of our conversation. I'm going to share the second half next week, as I said. Now, for more from Holly in the meantime, just head to her website, hollyringland.com and over to Instagram where you can

follow her at Holly Goes Lightly. I just think this woman is a beautiful writer, but more than that, an incredibly present and powerful person. And I am so grateful for her in the world. Okay. For more from me, you can go to Claire Tonti on Instagram. You can find Suggestible Podcast, which is a recommendation show for what to watch, read and listen to with my husband, man, James Clement, that comes out every Thursday. And we just give you recommendations for that Netflix time when you're sitting on the couch and not sure what to look at. So that's over there. And it's a whole lot of fun.

He brings his dark sci-fi shows. I bring my mainly female-centric storytelling. And we have a great time. So that's suggestible that comes out every Thursday. If you'd like to contact the show, reach out at tonspod at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. And as well, a big thank you to Raw Collings for editing this week's episode and to Maisie for running our social media. Okay, till next week. Take care.