books

Breakfast with the birds

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Newcastle is blessed with a wonderful Wetlands Centre redeemed by the dedication of many from what in the 60s we dismissed as The Dump and The Swamp. I am fortunate to be able to launch my new book in this great setting, over Breakfast with the Birds on Mothers’ Day.

Love to see you there!

breakfast1
Enjoy a leisurely stroll around the wetlands with an experienced guide and encounter dozens of different birds and animal species. 

Return to the tranquility of Nourish Café @ Hunter Wetlands for a perfect start to Sunday — and then be entertained at the launch of Mountain Tails.
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Welcome to life on the wild side!! 
Sharyn Munro is The Woman on the Mountain and Mountain Tails is the truth about the wilder side of her life — that of her animal neighbours. 

Come and take a walk in Sharyn’s gumboots, and discover the humorous, intriguing and sometimes poignant world of life on the wild side.

Breakfast with the Birds Tour 7.30am; Adults $30 Children $15 – bookings essential.

Book launch and readings of Sharyn Munro’s Mountain Tails – 9.30am FREE
Off the roundabout Sandgate Road, Shortland NSW 2307 
BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL Phone: (02) 4951 6466 or by email

Download a PDF guide here.

wetlands

See you at Parramatta

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For any of my readers who live in Sydney, I will be speaking about my new book, Mountain Tails, at Parramatta City Library on Tuesday 5th May, from 1-2 pm.

Part of their Lunchtime Author Talks programme, the event is free, but bookings are required (9806 5159). The Library is in Civic Place, off Macquarie Street.

Mountain Tails has arrived

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mt-200I have been told that my new book, Mountain Tails,  has arrived!  It is probably at my post office right now, for me to collect next week when the road dries out and the creek level drops!

I can hardly wait, even though I have of course read it – the real book is quite a different matter from an on-screen or A4 manuscript.

What will it feel and smell like? Will I cry as I did when I first held ‘The Woman on the Mountain’? Will my drawings look OK in actual print? Will I find any missing commas?

It is also heading for bookshops all round the country, but Exisle, my publishers, have made a special arrangement for my web site visitors — you can buy Mountain Tails at a special 20 per cent discount by ordering from the Exisle website here and quoting the coupon number MT2009; you can use that coupon any number of times.

This collection of short pieces about my wild animal neighbours here in my wildlife refuge is accompanied by my black and white drawings, and hopefully it will amuse, intrigue and educate readers as much as the critters themselves do for me.

In raising awareness of their uniqueness, it also aims to raise awareness of the plight of our threatened and endangered species, and at the end I have included lists of ways to get involved for those who want to help, and contacts for doing so.

I will be giving talks at various places and as Exisle arranges them I’ll put up posts to let you know. Always good to meet my readers, such as Kez at East Maitland last year.

Many events wlll be before Mother’s Day, as Exisle think it will make a great Mother’s Day gift.

PS: I have it! A dear little book, but the only time I felt like crying was at the dedication to my Dad, whom I still miss terribly. Exisle have again done a beautiful job of production – designer Nanette is so attuned to the tone of a work that I can’t imagine a different cover now.

Yes, I’d like to redo one or two drawings that don’t look so good at the reduced size; but mostly I just wanted to add all the other animal events that have happened since, dozens of postscripts needed – or a second collection in a year or so? I had forgotten that, for example, the whole python saga was after the manuscript had been sent off!

Kikuyu punishment

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kikuyu grass stops mower

A month away from the mountain is a long time. The bush itself requires no attention from me, but my domesticated area does, and the 350mm of rain in February has effected a great deal of green growth. Not all is welcome.

I continually apologise to the environment for my ignorant crime of introducing kikuyu grass here thirty years ago. As punishment, its runners are the scourge of my garden, but until lately the horses kept its main expanse munched very short, its patches the first thing they headed for whenever I let them into the house yard.

With the horses gone, that munching is much missed now after my month’s absence. Mowing is the only answer, and with these dewy autumn mornings that has to wait until the sun is hotter than I like for outdoor work.

Thick and tall kikuyu is a hard task for a mower and when wet it is an impossible one, a sudden choked capital green full stop.

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Mountain Tails are wagging

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mt-coverAs the advance copies of my second book, Mountain Tails, are about to arrive, anticipation is mounting here on the mountain.  All our tails are wagging!

Just like an expected baby, joy and fear are intermingled for me until I hold the actual book. I cried when I first saw 
The Woman on the Mountain;  I expect I shall do the same with Mountain Tails.

I can’t wait to see it, and stroke it – and read it, as it will look so different from my A4 manuscript! 

It will be even more exciting because I have done a black and white (and  grey!) illustration for each of the 44 short tales — anecdotes and observations, mixed with what I have learnt about these wonderful native creatures with whom I share my place. 

They continue to amaze, amuse, infuriate and educate me. I hope my book will do the same for my readers, and help ensure that no more of our wildlife vanishes into the extinction with which so many are threatened.
 
I keep telling various of my wild animal neighbours that they are in the book, or apologising to those who’ve only moved in since I handed in the manuscript. I haven’t apologised to the python, but it would have made a great tale, and a great subject for drawing.

Perhaps there will need to be a sequel.

Here’s how Chapter One begins:

Welcome to my Mountain
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Short or tall or really small,
Furred or feathered, smooth or scaly —           
I’m the poorest creature here, without a tail at all.

Being the only human resident of a wildlife refuge, on the edge of a national park that is far from any town, I see lots of creatures behaving ‘wildly’. They can be so natural because they ignore me, as they should.

After all, I’m obviously of an inferior and inadequate species: no tail, only two legs, pathetic hearing, poor vision that’s shockingly so at night, no built-in insulation of fur or feathers, and an apparent inability to survive on the local abundance of grass, leaves, roots and other creatures.

To that general picture of modern white Australians, my neighbours might add other deficiencies peculiar to me: knees that can’t be relied on to bend, as knees must, to climb up and down slopes, inappropriate Celtic skin that burns to cancerous spots under our sunshine, and a lack of any singing talent.

and it ends:

I offer my readers, old and new, this illustrated collection of ‘Mountain tails’. Mostly short, a few tall, mostly new, a few classics — to make you smile, chuckle or sniffle, say ‘Oo-oh!’, ‘Aha!’, or, better still, ‘A-a-ah!’.
Come take a walk in my gumboots and meet my neighbours.

Mountain Tails will be in bookshops in early April, or you can order from the publishers, Exisle, online. More information from Exisle here.

Library visits

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I will be speaking about, and reading from, my book, The Woman on the Mountain, at two NSW libraries next week:

Parramatta Library, at 1pm on Tuesday 28th October (02) 9806 5159, and

Tuggerah Library at 10.30 am on Wednesday 29th October (02) 4353 5666.

Admission to the 30-minute talks is free, and they are followed by question times, which are usually quite lively!

Why I live ‘way out here’

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This post is extracted from Chapter 1 of The Woman on the Mountain, with the kind permission of my publisher, Exisle.

Wherever you live you need to feel safe, and in tune with your surroundings. I do.

Yet my place is a 90-minute drive from a post box, police station, shop or mechanic, let alone a Big M or a Big W or whatever other letter is considered crucial to modern survival.

Half of that drive is over a dirt road, partly through a national park which verges on wilderness. I have no neighbours within sight, sound or coo-ee, or not in the accepted sense. My neighbours are the wild creatures who live in the national park.
…

…if I were forced to live again in a city, town or suburb, I certainly wouldn’t feel safe, or in tune with my surroundings. I’d be nervous, draw my curtains at night, lock my doors, lower my voice — and I’d feel like a fish out of water.

I’d pine for the tree-clad mountains stretching forever into the distance, the blue gums and stringybarks and sheoaks just beyond my house fence, the hundreds of infant rainforest trees I’ve planted in the gullies, the wild creatures that are my neighbours — the wallabies and birds, the quolls and koalas, the snakes and lizards — I’d even include the leeches.

I’d miss the sounds of cicada, mad wattlebird and bleating frog chorus, or me yelling ‘Feedo!’ at the top of my voice for the horses to come. When could I yell anything at the top of my voice again?…

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A great review

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Thanks to Margie Jenkin for her review of The Woman on the Mountain in the latest edition of Island, Tasmania’s justly famous magazine of arts and literature.

A good review is always gratifying, but this is the best of the lot by a long way and it makes the hard work of writing worthwhile.

Margie Jenkin is another mountain woman: she lives on Mount Wellington, the huge, brooding dolerite massif that dominates the landscape around Hobart. And she works as a ranger on the Maria Island National Park off the south-east coast of Tasmania.

There couldn’t have been a better choice of reviewer: her studies at the University of Tasmania’s School of Geography and Environmental Studies included an Honours thesis exploring sense of place through the stories of Tasmanian lighthouse-keepers and their families — so she was very much in tune with my own feelings about the the importance of place in our physical and emotional lives.

I can’t resist a couple of quotes from her sensitive and beautifully written review:

“Munro’s writing emanates strength and courage, and thoughtfulness for tomorrow. Reading her words, you are urged to reconnect with home to nurture a sense of care…”

“A complete treat, this book is daring and heroic. Munro’s narrative provides the habitat to re-visit your own ideologies and unfulfilled dreams. She reminds you that it is never too late, but warns that you must plant your seedlings soon to see them grow in your lifetime.”

You can read the full review in Island No. 113, out now, and I urge you to subscribe if you can — our literary magazines deserve everyone’s support, so visit the Island website now.

Or you can download the review as a PDF here,

My thanks to Margie once again and to Island’s editor Gina Mercer for permission to re-publish the review.

New Voices in Eltham

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This month I’m heading back down to the cultural haven of Eltham in Victoria.

The Eltham Bookshop is presenting their annual New Voices Festival and I’ve been invited to take part.

My panel session, ‘A cat among the pigeons,’ chaired by Professor Catherine Cole of RMIT’s School of Creative Media, is at 1.30-3.00 pm on Sunday 20th July.

Bookings essential: email the Eltham Bookshop or download the full programme here: new-voices-2008

I’ll also be speaking at Belgrave Library at 12.30 on Thursday 24th.

Remarkable women

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Recently my publisher, Exisle, arranged a few joint talks at libraries, by myself and two other of their female authors. One talk was accompanied by supper, the other by a high morning tea. All very civilised.

They titled the talks, ‘True stories of remarkable women’. We were all as different as our stories.

Cheryl Koenig had written the very personal Paper Cranes, a journey of renewal and courage as she and her husband helped her son Jonathan recover from a serious car accident and brain damage.

Jane Mundy had told of her impulsive leap into adventure and romance as she travelled around Bolivia with a newly met potential partner. Cholas in Bowlers is funny and informative.

And me, well, I just spoke about my mountain life as usual.

Library nursery

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wasp nest
My little cabin is lined where possible with bookshelves, unfortunately only one of which has glazed doors. They are all tightly packed. I need more house for more walls for more bookshelves.

If I haven’t disturbed a section of the open shelves for a while, it often happens that when I go to extract a book, it resists.

More determined tugging brings forth not only the book but a shower of dried mud and small spiders – or perhaps fat grubs.

For wasps like books too. They sandwich the tops together with a mud honeycomb of egg chambers, sealing within each a stunned spider for the larvae to eat when they hatch.

Clever, yes, but pretty disgusting for the would-be reader.

eBook Treasure

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treasure ebookAs a lover of the physical fact of books—their weight and feel, their look and smell, and their cumulative presence as they cover my walls—I have not been in favour of eBooks.

But I have just downloaded my first eBook, a collection of short stories by Rachael Treasure, and appropriately called Treasure’s Tales. It seems I had forgotten that what’s inside the book is after all the greatest pleasure.

As a keen short story writer and reader, I think this is a lovely collection of a writer’s progression, with finely observed details so that characters and settings are vividly real.

The stories themselves are surprising, quirky, perceptive, funny or moving, and whether set in rural or urban Australia, their human truths are universal. I thought the personal intro to each one was a great idea too.

The good plain prose makes them very accessible, as does this instant and inexpensive e-method of delivery from writer to reader. Terrific for isolated bushies like me. I can now see there’s a place for both types of publishing.

The A4 format means I’ll store Treasure’s Tales vertically, as I do magazines, and I won’t be re-reading them in bed—but I’ll certainly be re-reading them!

You can buy Rachael Treasure’s eBook here.