Speaker 1 0:00

The Kill City podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands we're on. Here in Melbourne, that's the Wurrundjeri Woi Worong people of the Kulin Nation. We honour their deep connection to storytelling, a tradition carried across more than 2,000 generations. Pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and we extend that acknowledgement to First Nations people listening today. Today we're heading into the world of community secrets, little blowers, and that very specific symbol of intention that makes you look twice at your neighbours. We're talking to Christine Gregory, a writer whose path to crime fiction has been anything but ordinary, and honestly, that is going to be half the fun of talking to her today. Hi, Christine, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:19

Hi, Christine. So lovely to meet you. If it's all right with you, I'll just give listeners a quick version of your bio, because it's a big one, it's a bit to get through. Um so you grew up in Queensland, uh, you've been a traveller and traveled to more than 30 countries, um, including having spent a few years overseas teaching English in Japan and working in Vietnam with an international aid organization. Somewhere in the middle of all that, you did the Curtis Brown Creative Novel Writing Programme, which is a selective UK course that helps writers whip a manuscript into proper shape. And to top it off, you are mentored by the renowned British crime writer William Shaw. Fast forward to now, you're living in Melbourne, the Inner West, with your husband, two kids, and the dusty labrador, and you're running the Innovation Lab at Hour Watch, which is a national independent not-for-profit organization served to prevent violence against women and their children in Australia. On top of all that, you've written two crime novels, The Community, which came out in 2024 after being a runner of it for the Banjo Prize. Um that's the national award for an underpublished manuscript. And the informant, which landed just last month. That is amazing. And thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker 2 2:24

Thank you for having me. As I said, um my my daughter loves that I name our dog in my bio, but none of the but neither of my kids. Like, well, I'm just trying to keep your privacy in mind, you know. And to be honest, you know, he's a great inspiration in both my books, so I feel credit where credit's due.

Speaker 1 2:46

I think Dusty, now is his full name happened to be Dustin Martin?

Speaker 2 2:51

It is Dustin Martin, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 2:53

Right. So are you a mad Richmond fan then?

Speaker 2 2:56

My husband has been a long-suffering Richmond fan for many, many years, and my kids now are Richmond supporters. I mean, I grew up in Queensland, so I've come fairly late to AFL. But um, yeah, we're Tigers supporters, so Dustin Martin was.

Speaker 1 3:13

He does have one of the, well, he had one of the best haircuts in AFL history. But I was gonna say, as a Queenslander myself, you do have the Brisbane Lions that you can go for, you know, you don't have to.

Speaker 2 3:22

Yeah, yeah. And when I when I first moved to Melbourne, the Lions were, this is many years ago, when they had that incredible run. So I was a mad lions supporter, and they're still sort of my, you know, they're still sort of my team, but I I can't go against, you know, the rest of the family. And if I live in the inner west, um, as we were saying before, if you live in the inner west, everyone, the Western Bulldogs is everybody's second team. If it's not your first team, you've got to support the Bulldogs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 3:51

That's true. No, that makes sense. Now look, I was I was exhausted just reading your um your bio, Christine, because I think you know, while the rest of us are sort of trying to get the kids to school and ourselves to work on time, you you're out there, you're basically what running a domestic violence innovation lab, writing crime novels, raising two human children and your fur baby. We just got to know like what's your secret? Is it caffeine? Is it wine? Is it something stronger?

Speaker 2 4:15

Oh, it's chaos, I think. Um I don't um so in terms of raising the two children, so they are a bit older. My eldest finished school last year, my youngest is 16, and no, they're not fully independent or anything, but I'm not in those early years where you're really, you know, um where it's where it's fairly relentless, so it's it's a different kind of parenting. And I don't know, I mean everyone's juggling things in modern life, aren't they? Like I don't do everything all at once, um, and I think I just uh like everyone else struggle to find the balance. Uh don't think that I really have the answer to that yet. But most Australian writers, like the vast majority of us, are working as well. So um that's just what you have to do if you want if you want to write.

Speaker 1 5:11

I want to say that that's what we've heard from a couple of the authors that we've spoken to already. It um, yeah, I think especially in Australia, it's it's um hard for it to be a full-time job. So I think even more kudos to you for for everything you're able to do. Um, look, I'm pretty biased as a Queenslander, um, you know, in terms of where the book was set, but I just want to say off the cuff that I absolutely adored the community. It was such a good read, and I hadn't really known anything about it before. It popped up on our socials because now we have the podcast. I think my socials are just full of um amazing crime um novelists and and and um and books that we haven't heard of, which is great for us to get stuck into. But I just wanted to give people a bit of a praise if they haven't picked it up yet. So um it's basically it's called the community. Um I would consider it sort of a fast-paced thriller. Um I think it's around fatherhood, family ties, it's a redemption story. Um we initially meet the main character, Lars Nilsen, who's an investigative journalist who's trying to outrun his past, I think you'd say. Now he's moved to Steele's Creek, which is a fictional, seemingly idyllic Sunshine Coast Hinterland town. I think he's just quite hoping for a quiet life, but not to be, because a body turns up in a waterhole, and then hours later his best friend's daughter goes missing, and then suddenly poor old Lars is dragged straight back into a world that he was actually trying to escape. And then what he uncovers kind of threatens not just this town, but actually the whole new life that he's been trying to build. Now I just loved it, as I said. I found it a real page turner. I love when you get stuck into a book and you just don't ever want to have it end. I think the world that you created was just so real, and I could actually see myself peering through the curtains like kind of outlaw's neighbours. Um, and then what really struck me is they were actually really grounded. Like I just felt that I could just walk down the street in Steele's Creek and kind of bumped into them. So I kind of wanted to know how do you go about building your characters that actually feel that real?

Speaker 2 7:14

Um, I mean, with the first book with the community, um, so interestingly, I actually wrote that book in over uh mostly over 2020, I I worked on that manuscript, which as we know, for you know, people living in Melbourne, we were in lockdown for a large amount of that of that time. So I couldn't go anywhere. Um, I certainly couldn't just go up to Queensland and have a little wander around to get the feel of the place. I had a note like a cork board on my desk behind my computer screen with pictures, and that was what I had to draw on. But that being said, I grew up in Brisbane, and um the setting of Steele's Creek is based on a real place which is the Starlight community in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. It's um about I don't know, 15 minutes maybe drive inland from Yandina, which is about 20 or 30 minutes inland from Coulomb. And when I was younger, I knew somebody who lived there, so I used to go and stay in that community. Um, and so I have very vivid memories of that location, of that the water hole does exist, the community hall does exist, the people don't exist, like I they're all fictitious characters, they're not based on anybody. Um, but I think having that setting very firm for me in my mind about what it actually did look like helped a lot. Um I consider that I'm quite a character-driven writer, so crime it's a bit of a mixed bag in that regard. Like obviously, crime novels, you know, the good crime novels have very interesting, flawed, uh, complex characters, as does any genre of fiction. You've got to be at least interested in the characters. You don't necessarily have to, I don't believe, like them, but they have to be interesting enough for you to want to go on that journey with them. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the characters before I think about the plot. And so I spent a lot of time sort of thinking through those characters and their family relationships as a starting point for the community before I really got into the the crime aspects of that book. The second book's a bit different because it's a follow-on, so the process was a bit different.

Speaker 1 9:47

That's really interesting, and I think really evident by how well-rounded those characters are. Um, I think for me, um the other thing I really liked that I think to your point about how you need to sort of really understand your characters is you also um what I really enjoyed was we don't just stay with Lars, we also get we get viewpoints from other characters, but in particular, sort of that parallel with Sergeant Neil Davis's perspective, because he's kind of coming at the case but from a completely different angle because he's on sort of the side of the police rather than the journalism piece. But I'm curious to know, sort of writing um sort of for those quite different viewpoints, did that sort of make things trickier for you, or does it actually ape sort of open it up more for you?

Speaker 2 10:32

Uh it's it was actually necessary to write from different viewpoints in both of my books. So the first one has three point of view characters and the second has four. Um because um the way that the unvit the investigation in both books unfolds, it's not possible for one person to have all of that information. So you need to have, I mean, it's part of the plotting is to have those layers, I guess, of different bits of information get revealed as the those characters within their you know their lives, their roles, their jobs uncover that. Um, and so you're sort of it's sort of this sequencing thing. Um and for the community, I also included the character, the perspective of Skye, who was um who is um the daughter of Lars's friend, and because that book for me, the themes that I was you know thinking about when I was writing it were about those uh dynamics, those intergenerational sort of dynamics between the parents and the kids. And I I I really enjoyed writing her character actually, having that um you know, the perspective of of a young woman, and I found her easier to write because I've been an 18-year-old girl, you know, I haven't been a middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis, uh, although I've met a few, so you know, I'm drawing on experience. Um, you know, like it's different when you're write when you can sort of really walk in the shoes of a character thinking, yeah, I remember feel those feelings when I was that age, as opposed to sort of trying to inhabit a point of view of a person who is quite different to you and um whose life experience is also quite different. Yeah, but um I don't think it's uncommon, like I yeah, it's it's it can be hard to wrangle, I guess, the different perspectives, but um I don't know any other way, I guess. I mean the my current the book I'm currently working on has a first person point of view perspective, but also again has more than one point of view um protagonist.

Speaker 1 12:57

No, that's great. Look, and we might we might come back to a new one later, and we will spend more time talking about the um inform it as well. Um just wanted to follow up, um, yes, so the story with Sky, super important, and then I think also um kind of the way you spoke about the young women sort of more broader than Sky. So Amber, Annika, um, there was really high stakes for the women in this sort of the centre of the story. And um and for myself, I'm a mum of an almost 21-year-old daughter, so I think um for me, my perspective reading it was around kind of I could really feel that sort of mixture of fear and pride when you're kind of ready to launch your newbie adult out into the world. And so when you talk about writing the community from those um perspectives of the the young women, you also mentioned you're a adult of a sort of a newbie, you're a parent of a newbie adult. Did you um kind of bring that sort of real life fear that sort of parents have for their kids going into the world to sort of honestly?

Speaker 2 14:04

I think I was, as I say, drawing on some of my own experiences and my friendships at that age, which are quite intense, you know, it can be quite intense, your friendships um in those years, those teenage years, adolescence, and then going into your early 20s. Um, and because my daughter would have been 15 when I was initially working on it, or even possibly younger. Um yes, there's the fear factor, of course. Like I could absolutely relate to and tap into the character of Jules, who was the who was Skye's mother. Um and um just that you know, I could imagine that horror and fear if you if your daughter has gone uh missing and you don't know if they're alive or dead or where they are. So yes, I was I certainly, but I also I think um like the character of Annika, for example, and that kind of relationship she has with Lars, with her father, which is complicated, and it's um it's a loving relationship, but she holds a lot of anger towards him, and no matter what he tries to do to make it right, he always seems to make it even worse. So um, yeah, I I I think I had these female characters, and they were all grappling with different sets of problems, and so to try to keep track of that and make sure that that flows through the narrative in a consistent way is um was was part of the challenge as well with that first book, I think. Yeah, tricky, definitely.

Speaker 15:50

It's it's interesting, and and I absolutely loved the community. I think um uh it it sort of blew me away how much I I really enjoyed it. Um my delivery of uh The Informa took a little bit longer to to get here than I was hoping, so I'm a little haven't quite finished yet, but uh I'm I'm loving that as well. But um it's interesting just talking about those the the Sky and the Annika and the Amber and the relationship. Um you've got three you write fathers and daughters really well, and you've got three really sort of different versions of that. So Annika's relationship with Lars, you know, dro Joe trying to be that sort of steady stepdad to Skye, and then you've got the John Schultz character who's got that um suffocatingly protective of Amber. What what drew you to exploring those different dynamics? Because the three are quite different.

Speaker 2 16:44

Yeah, and the whole book is about fathers and daughters, like to me. Now like people will read it, of course, you read the story, the plot, and it's a crime novel. But underneath that it was a story about the relationship between fathers and daughters, and that the um I think yeah, that the these different men who um in a way there's commonalities with with all of them that they in their minds they're wanting to be the best father they can be. Um in reality, Jo, whose daughter is not in fact his biological daughter, is probably the best father, the most consistent, steady of them all. Um and so I found that sort of an interesting thing to examine. Um but even John Schultz, who's you know, got a lot of flaws as a character, in his mind I think he would consider that he just wants the best thing for his daughter. And in fact, as you say, he's very very controlling, which is very problematic. And there's hints of it that go through the book, and you only realise later on really how much that control does extend, and that uh Amber's been actually quite good at probably hiding that fact from most of the people in in her lives, and in it's interesting to look at as well in family relationships what people sort of think they're hiding from one another but clearly aren't, because it's sort of revealed that um her mother, um Tam, she's she's quite aware, I think, of her father of her husband's style of parenting and his shortcomings, but she uh is willfully ignorant of it because it doesn't serve her to um to reveal that to herself as much as anyone else. So they're all living a lie amongst themselves in this close-knit family. Um so I think I when I initially was thinking about that book, I was thinking about the concept of community and what that meant in a family, and then within a broader close community like Steel's Creek, and then you've got the community of Hopeville on its doorstep, which is completely different. And that the other family relationship and father father-son slash daughter relationship that I am looking at was the character of Gary Shepherd and Damon Shepherd, and I that one was really interesting, and they reappear in my second book, um, and then there's that Sarah the the daughter as well. And Gary isn't um not a particularly nice character, and Damon initially doesn't come across as a particularly nice character either, and I can remember when I shared some of the work, like when I was workshopping the community with other people, um, and a couple of people had a really strong reaction to Damon, and they're like, Oh, he's such a little shit, he's so awful. And I was like, Yeah, that's interesting you say that because I don't see him that way. I kind of see Damon as much as a victim of his circumstance as anything. Um, and I think there was a line that I actually wanted to use in my first book, and I cut it out, um, which was about Gary Shepherd and um a conversation that Lars and Joe were having, where um, you know, Lars was talking about um what a terrible person he was, and Joe kind of said, Look, he's obviously not going to win Father of the Year, but he could have put his kids in like foster care when their mother left, and he didn't. So, you know, it's it's it's not defending him because he's not um he's quite a terrible father, actually. Um, but in his own way, maybe he's just trying to do his best with the skills that he has.

Speaker 21:01

Talking about your writing process, I'm always always curious about the starting point. Um when you sit down with a fresh idea, what's the first bit that grabs you? Is it the character situation or is it something else?

Speaker 2 21:14

With the community, um I was uh I I think I had written a couple of chapters already as almost like short stories, and it was the character of Lars and Annika. And I sort of had the their character and I had Jo and Jules and their daughter Skye. And I was I don't know what I I didn't really know what I was writing. I was just sort of the first thing I wrote actually appears in the book about a third of the way through, which was the, or maybe it's nearly halfway through, which was the um the community event um at the community hall. That was the first thing I wrote of the community um as a short story. And um I've been grappling with these characters and thinking, oh you know, is there Is there a story in this? Like what is this about? And then I was in a creative writing class in 2019. We had to write a scene which tapped into all of the senses. And I sat down and I just wrote that scene of the trapper out at dawn checking his fox traps. And you know, in my mind I could see the water hole and the bushland and you know the sun rising, and um, and then he comes across a body. And as soon as I wrote it, I was like, oh, that's what this is. This is actually going to have to be a crime novel. I think it's the start of my book. Then I had to work out the whole plot. I mean, I wrote half the community not knowing how it ended, so I sort of wrote quite a lot before I mapped out a plot. Now with the informant, um, I was working on something else. I wasn't planning a follow-up initially, and I just kept getting this thing in my mind about this character of Ashley and the girlfriend of a bikey who um ends up in this pretty um dire circumstance that she can't see a way out of, and I had that vision of the sort of the the road next to the cane fields, and that then the whole plot. I think I went into the State Library on a Friday and went, I need to plot this out, and I sat down and I wrote the whole thing in one go, like the from start to finish, like you know, very basic, what the scenes were going to be and what the story was going to be. And I never do that. Like my most of my other writing is like me sitting there for months and months going, what is the story? Where's this gonna go? But I just I had that one for some reason. That was the one that um where the heat was, and I had to put the other work aside and say, I think I need to write this book now. And then we pitched that to my publisher, and they said, Yes, go and write that book. So um I don't know, it's not necessarily the same thing every time, the same starting point. But I think the through line is character. Like I'll have a like I don't tend to go, gee, what if what if this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then develop characters around that? That doesn't work for me.

Speaker 24:23

It's such a this that scene you're just talking about with the canefields is really um it was when she was scary. Yeah. She's in there and you mentioned the snakes, and we talked about snakes with January Gilchrist a couple a couple of weeks ago. Um the snakes, and I it just I really had that in my head how um how dire that situation was.

Speaker 2 24:44

So that this cover actually, um this is based on a photo that I took. So it's very like I mean it's Christabel Designs does the covers and she's fantastic. Um, but they asked me to send some inspo for you know what would the cover kind of look like, and I sent a few pictures and this was one of them because after I um wrote the first half, I went to the Sunshine Coast for 10 days last year to just on my own self-imposed retreat to work on it, and um I stayed somewhere which um was between Yandina and Coulomb that that photo like it was the road up towards where I was staying. So as I was driving in, there's these cane, like I knew there were sugarcane fields up there, but but exactly how I pictured it, like the just kilometres of sugarcane fields and nothing. And I had to get out of the car and take a photo, and then I was I sent a message to a good friend of mine and said, I've if I ever need to bury a body, I've just found the perfect place. Um so it's this weird thing, like sometimes with me, it's not like I've gone somewhere and then gone away and written a story around it. It's like I write the story and then I've gone to the place and seen the place that I've already written about, and it looks exactly how I pictured it. And it's wild.

Speaker 1 26:18

I'm actually a bit worried that you've put in writing that you know a place that we can barrel about. That's okay. You can edit it out.

Speaker 2 26:24

You know, crime writers are all weird, you know. If we want to take our laptop and check our search history, it would be yeah, we'd probably get arrested.

Speaker 26:34

So from a research point of view and thinking about um there's obviously a lot to do with uh the outlaw gang or outlaw motorcycle gangs. Um how how do you handle research um when it comes to your books? Are you diving in early to get a really, really good understanding of that or do you kind of um do it more as the story grows?

Speaker 2 27:04

Yeah, I don't spend a lot of time researching at the outset. I tend to write try to write it and then sort of check it. So um, well, so that was the case with my first one. With the second one, I did read a few non-fiction books that I referenced in the acknowledgements, and I had also done some thinking about that and research into Baiky gangs when I wrote the community, and there was some reference in the community that initially I thought the story was going to revolve more around that. So I sort of had it in the back of my mind that it was something that I was interested in. But um, I don't know, research, it's a funny term. I read these these books by Duncan McNabb, who's Australian's sort of foremost expert on outlaw motorcycle gangs, and also has written a lot about police corruption. He worked with Roger Rogerson back in the day. Um he's he wrote this amazing book called Dead Man Running about this guy, Stephen Utah, who was an informant for the Banditos. Um and coincidentally, Duncan and I have the same agent. So he was when he was coming to Melbourne, and I heard he was coming to Melbourne to sit in on the because he was written a book about the mushroom about Aaron Patterson. Uh, he was coming to go down to court for a day because he lives in Sydney, and so we met up and had a coffee, and I asked him quite a lot of questions, and it was a great conversation. But um so it's not true crime and it's not non-fiction, and I have that in my mind that it's got to be very much believable. I don't want anyone picking things out and saying that's just ridiculous, like that's just not possible. But as long as it's it's it's possible and it's um not outright wrong, then I'm comfortable with a little bit of poetic license because we are talking fiction. Like, for example, there is a sort of like a siege scene in my book. Now, in reality, those things can go for days, you know. They have getting a police negotiator and they're um, but no one's gonna read days of it in a book with all of the you know the police sort of procedurals included. Um, and you don't want people bogged down in a lot of detail because it slows it down and makes it boring. Um, I would say I did more research for this book than the first one. Um hopefully it's it's good enough.

Speaker 1 29:39

We will definitely talk a bit more about the informant soon because I have questions, but I'm saving them up. But I actually want to go back in time a bit now. So to Christine Gregory and your younger self, um, can you tell us? Were you sort of a writer or reader from an early age? Was that writing something you always wanted to do?

Speaker 2 30:00

Uh yeah, definitely a big reader as a kid, um, and have always been a big reader. And yeah, I did write when I was a kid. Like I used to write little stories, I remember and staple them together and give them to my mum and dad, and um I kept journals for years, I um did well in English in school. Um like a lot of people in you know my age group, I think, um, the idea that you would become a writer by profession just wasn't it just was completely alien to me. I can remember saying when I was a kid that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, but I didn't know any writers, I didn't even know if you could be a writer. So um I um I did continue to sort of dabble in short stories and things in my twenties, but I never showed people my work, and then I put it aside for a good decade, I think, and just sort of focused on my career, children, all of the rest of it. And then it just got to a point a few years ago where I thought if I don't do this, I'm gonna hate myself for not trying. And and it wasn't even about I want to become a published author, it was just I have to go back to writing because I love it, and even if it's just something you you know that you you work on and try to get better at, and then of course, once I started getting um right into it, I I realized this isn't just something that you want to do as a hobby, you really want to try to get you know your work read. So it's come to me quite late in life, um I guess, but you know, there's still time.

Speaker 1 31:46

Um absolutely, uh better late than never, for sure. Yeah, goodness. Yeah, and look, I think um uh you know you had the passion for it, which is fantastic. So, who was that person that actually took your writing seriously, that kind of changed everything for you and made you realise you could do this?

Speaker 2 32:06

Well, I there were there's not one moment, there are many moments, but I definitely the moment that really made a difference to me in terms of my attitude towards it myself, I think, and and sort of um talking myself into it rather than talking myself out of it, was um when I first had mentoring with William Shaw because I'd done the Curtis Brown course, which is a selective novel writing program, so you have to be able to write fairly well to get into that program, and then your workshopping, so the other students are saying, you know, I really like this or I don't like this about it, but you write well, and the tutor's giving you good feedback and the likes. But I wasn't convinced I could write crime for one. I had never planned to write in that genre. Um, I wasn't convinced that it was necessarily good enough for sort of publication. So I signed up for mentoring with William just to see if it could help me to sort of turn me into a crime writer in in terms of the book that I was working on. How do I turn it into a crime novel? Um, and the fur and after sending him the first 10,000 words, our first conversation, he said to me, Um, uh, so I've read the 10,000 words, um, is the rest of it that good? And I said, Oh no, I don't know, I guess so. Yeah, I guess so. He said, I'm just asking because I just want to know if you've polished it and polished it and polished it to make that 10,000 words really good. I said, No, well, I think the rest of it's fairly consistent, like that. And he said, Okay, well, I don't, this is not going to be me teaching you how to write a crime novel. We're going to talk about how to get you published. And I was just like, and he said, This is publication quality work. Um, I'm not saying that that's a guarantee, but you should be thinking that way. Um, and he said, and you really need to start thinking that way and working towards getting it out there because you're not writing this for yourself, you're not spending hours and hours of your life doing this just for yourself. You need to admit that you're doing this because you want it read, and so let's talk about how that's that can happen, sort of thing. And and he's like, You are a crime writer, and I was just flawed. I remember getting off the call and going to my husband and saying, William says I can write, you know. And in the big scheme of things, that's not a huge thing, actually, like compared to getting an agent or getting a publishing deal, or but in a in a way it is bigger than all of that because it was that moment when I realized I need to take myself seriously. Yeah, so I definitely credit William for that and and told him so.

Speaker 1 34:54

Fantastic. But it was your writing that persuaded him, wasn't it? Yeah. The the idea of having a mentor is um super interesting to me. Do you still keep in contact with him? A little bit.

Speaker 2 35:06

Like, I mean, we um I send him a copy of my first book. Um he will put stuff on my Instagram or or whatever when a book comes out saying, Oh, congratulations, it's so great, and he's sort of shared my stuff. Like, we sort of stay loosely in touch, but um he's I don't expect him to continue to be my mentor, you know. It's um I think that people can fall into that a little bit of sort of getting a bit attached to their writing mentors and expecting uh you know that to continue, whereas he's got his own books to write every year and his own students to teach, and um so yeah, no, he he respectfully let me go, I think, after that period.

Speaker 1 35:52

That was very kind of him. Have you considered paying it forward? Would you mentor someone, do you think, as you go on?

Speaker 2 35:58

Oh, if I was thought that I could do justice to that. I mean, I don't think having published two books puts me in a position to be teaching others how to write, not yet. Um I'm certainly encouraging of emerging writers and and talk to people who are who love writing, but oh, I don't put myself in I don't I don't think I know enough. I mean, I don't know if I know anything still. Like I, you know, half the time I'm trying to work out how to do it. So maybe in the future.

Speaker 1 36:34

I think you undersell yourself a bit. I think having published two books is pretty amazing, and what you're you know, you're on working on your third, so yeah.

Speaker 2 36:43

Yeah, but just because you've done it doesn't mean you can tell others how they should. And I think there's some really great writing teachers and mentors around who've earned their stripes, who also it's not just about publication history, but some of these people have studied, you know, creative writing or masters in creative writing, and so they do have a deep understanding of sort of process and um yeah, like the questions around form and process and style is quite a technical area, but I don't think that I have that.

Speaker 37:19

Well, that's the end of part one of our chat with the exceptional Christine Gregory. You can find links to Christine's books in our show notes. And don't forget to tune in for part two that drops next Monday, the twenty-seventh of July. Until then.