 |
It's been a while since we've heard from Carrie Tiffany. In fact it's been seven years since she published her first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, to widespread acclaim, including being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and Orange Prize. Now she's back with her new novel, Mateship with Birds, and Susan Wyndham interviewed her for "The Sydney Morning Herald" and "The Age". |
''I don't go round making up stories,'' she says. ''There's so much narrative in our lives.'' For her, writing is ''an act of collage, free association, memory, noticing and putting things together. I don't write in a particularly linear way. When I've amassed a certain amount of material I print it out, put it on the floor, move the furniture, walk around it and think, where are the connections?''
With a masters degree in creative writing and success as a fiction writer, she still works full-time as a journalist for an income but also for ideas and a love of the land and its people. She has written for "The Victorian Landcare Magazine" for 15 years and when we talk she is working on a government white paper on biodiversity and ''a weeds thing''.
''It takes me into a world that is interesting,'' Tiffany says.
''I'm not sure about a career as a writer. I'm not interested in novels set in coffee shops.''
