About the Author:
A novelist, songwriter, singer-guitarist, born in Wilcania, outback Australia. “I was inspired by my father’s poetry. At 14 I dropped out to work as a stockman. It was a tough time. I bought a motorbike because I dreamed of being Easy Rider. These days I write, diverse subjects such as science, mysticism, the sociology of family, psychology and the search for personal identity. I enjoy multiple viewpoints, inter-texting literary with pulp, poetry and lyrics. Writing, is a process of sifting through the clues of daily experience, reading its texts and recording subjective transactions. Readers need to interpret stories in terms of their own phenomenology and characters demand the right to control their own destiny, freed from some of the constrains of authorial intent.”
“I spent my early years in physical and social isolation. School left me mortified. It was a violent shock that took years to negotiate without the deflective power of externalized speech. Later, front lining several bands, writing the material, became a form of reply to the past. Actualisation carried over naturally into fiction writing and resulted in the novel Kissing Point, which took some five years to finish while teaching in tough public secondary schools. I had no real desire to publish, and the fact that it was soundly rejected by the publishing galleries is partly a reflection of my own ambivalence at the time, to pursuing this for the work.
At university, the author majored in English, History and Sociology. “Reading Marx, Adorno, Baumann, I don’t know if they had an effect on the way I write, but I do know I was interested in their arguments about the limitations of capitalism, positivism, the formations of post-modernity and the struggles over identity politics and the social construction of reality. Fiction writing though, seemed a more powerful form than the quasi science I encountered and maybe that was a consequence of some quality of the writers, or, of the restrictions enforced through the disciplines. For me, the novel encourages freedom like no other kind of writing I know in terms of offering something to a reader. And in the end, it seems to me that writers can at best hope that a story will find meaning through its audience, who after all breathe life into our scribbling, for better or worse.
