Final Draft - Great Conversations 2SER 107.3FM

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She has published both fiction and nonfiction; Thunderhead is her fifth book.
Across a single day we are thrown into the life of Winona Dalloway. From the moment she wakes, stealing a few precious moments before her time is not her own, to the dinner party that looms over her calendar, the reader follows Winona as she tries simply to be herself…
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!
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Miranda is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. Her latest novel is Thunderhead.
Across a single day we are thrown into the life of Winona Dalloway. From the moment she wakes, stealing a few precious moments before her time is not her own, to the dinner party that looms over her calendar, the reader follows Winona as she tries simply to be herself…
Stepping out into the streets of Sydney, Winona has her lists and her responsibilities, all punctuated by the incessant buzzing of texts and reminders from her husband lest she stray from the day’s purpose. 
Winona wonders, perhaps suspects that she is looking at the world differently to everyone else. That might explain how they seem to navigate it so effortlessly while she only manages to muddle through.
The Thunderhead of the title looms large over the narrative, threatening to burst, drenching the fragile balance of Winona’s life.
Winona Dalloway is a wonderfully original character for the sharpness of her insights and the myriad of voices she offers on the minutiae of her day to day.
Throughout the novel the reader is confronted, as is Winona, by the specter of mental health. Within the novel it is both the reality of Winona’s experience of the world and a cudgel used to beat her into some semblance of the everyday. As we travel alongside Winona it becomes apparent that the way she looks at the world is not the problem so much as the voices that tell her she needs to be other or more than they perceive her to be.
Within the world of Thunderhead Winona is in fact a guiding light and even as we shift back and forth between her contradictory views of the world, we are certain that her fresh take on the everyday must be more wonderful than simply blindly living it.
There is a lyricism to Darling’s rendering of the inner world of Winona. Images float in and out of view as she encounters her world both as its surface and its potential.
We are introduced to the Transcendence Project; Winona’s search, perhaps striving to make an authentic connection with another person. Something that could lift them both out of the humdrum and confirm that there is a point to this existence.
As the day passes and Winona moves toward the inevitable, we learn that she is not simply one person struggling with the pressures of her world. Winona is subject to something more sinister, something threatening to strip her of her very essence.
But… I’ve said too much.
Thunderhead is a tremendous evocation of life lived on the edge of a threatened if perhaps not enacted violence. A study in control and escape that offers the reader a glimpse into a world of expectation imposed and shattered.

The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.
These are the stories that make us who we are.
Sharlene Allsop is the debut author of The Great Undoing which through its journey to publication was shortlisted for a 2019 Overland writing residency, and Highly Commended for the 2020 Boundless Indigenous Writers’ Mentorship.
Scarlet Friday is a truth teller in a hyper connected world. Even as everyone hurtles towards the future Scarlet delves into the past to understand our place, her place.
While Scarlet weaves the threads of her past, discovering her Great-Grandfather’s military service and the hostile reception he received as an Aboriginal man returning to a country that wouldn’t recognise his humanity, the rest of the world is teetering on the brink.
As systems shut down around the world, Scarlet finds herself on the run. Far from home she is a refugee seeking safe passage back to Australia.
Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!
Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser 
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/ 
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/ 

Final Draft has been invited by the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia to join its Community Radio Network.
This means that we've been working hard to develop episodes that will be shared across Australia on the hundreds of community radio stations that contribute to the diverse media landscape of this country.
In this special news update Andrew talks about the process and let's you know when the podcast will get back to its regular scheduling!

Ernest Price is a transgender man working as a secondary English teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. His writing has been published by Queerstories and Overland. The Pyramid of Needs is his first novel.
Linda is ready to hit the big time. The fact that there aren’t a lot of seventy year olds going viral just means it will be even more sensational when she does. She’s a young seventy anyway, barely even sixty really and tik tok takes off ten years. The fame is important and viral clicks can't help but lead to more sales of her Supreme Self Supplements.
Yes, Linda is just one livestream away from fame and fortune and nothing can stand in her way.
Jack is living his best life as a teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. Or at least he’s trying to when his older sister Alice gives him a call. Alice and Jack’s mother has taken a fall, apparently she was live streaming at their home in Noosa and tripped over a garden rake?!
Alice insists they fly up to Queensland and look after their parents but Jack hasn’t spoken to Linda since he came out as a trans man more than ten years ago. Alice can talk to him about regret, but why does he have to put himself at risk for the family who rejected him?
The Pyramid of Needs is a dark and insightful comedy about family dynamics that takes an unflinching look at what it means to be trans in a world where your very humanity can be leveraged for clicks and hate online.
The novel throws us immediately into Linda’s delusion that she will make it; fame, fortune the whole shebang is only she can leverage her downline to maximise subscribers before m month end. See Linda is into pyramid schemes (at least that’s what the haters call them).
In Linda we are presented with the triumph of individualism about to breathe its last gasp. Linda has been manifesting success for so long she has not only ignored her son for ten years, she might even be leveraging Jack’s transition for clout.
We are not meant to love Linda, probably not even meant to like her. But we are meant to understand what Jack has gone through to be who he is.
The novel counterpoints Linda’s narrative with Jack’s more balanced, albeit anxious storytelling. Jack knows the trip is a bad idea but like so many a Shakespearean tragic hero before him he must go along for the ride.
The action of The Pyramid of Needs is in the brilliant interplay between the Kelly family as they try, or perhaps fumble towards family unity. Even as Alice tries to negotiate some sort of detente, Linda maneuvers the siblings to become props in her next big livestream event.
The parallels between Linda’s Pyramid scheme fetish and her life as a Noosa influencer in all its smoke and mirrors glory are clear. What the novel also cleverly shows us is how Linda tries to marshall that same level of self delusion to reshape Jack’s reality and his life since his transition.
The novel shows us the personal pain and struggle as Jack faces his mother misgendering and dead naming him. We get to see inside Jack’s world, where he works to be a good person, the sort of teacher he never had, but also must deal with the loneliness and difficulty of the damage from his youth.
I loved The Pyramid of Needs in its darkness and its light. It has an ending I won’t quickly forget and in Jack we have a character who grabs your heart almost as quickly as Linda tries to poison it with vitriol.

Vikki Wakefield is an author of fiction for young adults and adults. Her novel This Is How We Change the Ending was a Book of the Year in the 2020 CBCA Awards. Vikki’s new novel is To the River.
Twelve Years ago a fire in a remote town rocked the country, killing nine people. The Caravan Murders, as they came to be known, were never solved. The suspect, seventeen year old Sabine Kelly went on the run and has remained hidden.
To the authorities it was an open and shut case. Sabine and her family were bad news and it was only a matter of time before something happened; that a group of innocents and a police officer were killed made it a tragedy.
Journalist Rachel Weidermann investigated the case years ago to no avail. Sabine was a ghost and no one was talking. In a world saturated with true crime she couldn’t make the story work.
Now divorced and made redundant from her job, Rachel lives on the river, a long expanse of bush and perhaps just the perfect place to hide.
The first thing to say about To the River is that its setting is immaculate. Wakefield based the long expanse on sections of the Murray in South Australia. The novel’s eponymous river is a site of both beauty and danger and onto its shores we find Rachel and Sabine.
The novel’s narration alternates between the two women as the navigate lives that seem to be held in limbo. Rachel is struggling to redefine herself having lost her job and her marriage. Sabine has lived for twelve years as a fugitive and is now threatened with losing her last living relative, her pop Ray.
Whilst seemingly as different as they could possibly be, Rachel and Sabine are thrown together by circumstance. Sabine has lived too long on the run and needs someone to tell her story. Rachel wants this story but is unsure whether she is willing to follow it into the past and a truth she might never be able to verify.
To the River is pacy and thrilling with overlapping points of view promising quick cuts between the action. The story pits a race to find the truth against our modern sense of fake news. Rachel’s journey into Sabine’s life threatens to offer up more questions than answers and hovering over it all is the question; can she trust this woman who may have murdered her family.
At the heart of it all is a big question; who gets to be heard, who gets to be believed?
To the River is a tremendous page turner of a novel. The kind you’ll read in a weekend and then wish you’d taken it a little slower just so you had more to enjoy.