Wind in the Wires

Wind in the Wires

The wind is whispering in Woody Creek...Change is in the air
It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged - kicking and screaming - into the swinging sixties.

Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met.

A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white wedding and happily ever after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man.

But life for the Morrison girls has never been easy, and once the sisters are in each other's lives, long-buried secrets are bound to be unearthed, the dramatic consequences of which no-one could have predicted...

Joy Dettman was born in country Victoria and spent her early years in towns on either side of the Murray River. She is an award-winning writer of short stories, the complete collection of which, Diamonds in the Mud, was published in 2007, as well as the highly acclaimed novels Mallawindy, Jacaranda Blue, Goose Girl, Yesterday's Dust, The Seventh Day, Henry's Daughter, One Sunday, Pearl in a Cage, Thorn on the Rose, and Moth to the Flame. Wind in the Wires is Joy's fourth novel in her Woody Creek series.

Wind in the Wires
Macmillan
Author: Joy Dettman
ISBN: 9781742610788
Price: $29.99

Interview with Joy Dettman

Question: Where did the idea for Wind in the Wires, come from?

Joy Dettman: The original Woody Creek was written in the early eighties and I recall little of how or why I wrote it, but believe it would have been born of issues concerning me at the time.


Question: What did you enjoy most about writing a book set in1958?

Joy Dettman: I enjoy returning to a time we of the older generation understood.


Question: Can you talk about the difficulties of writing a book set in 1958?

Joy Dettman: Book one of the Woody Creek series begins in 1923 with the birth of Jenny Morrison. My parents lived through those years and for me it became a tour to the time of their youth. Wind In The Wires, the fourth in the series, follows the children of Jenny through the late fifties and sixties, a revisiting of my own youth. I enjoy the time I spend working in the past and rarely see the difficulties.


Question: Could you share your writing process with us?

Joy Dettman: I'm a story teller. These day I tell my story to a computer, and once begun continue until I reach the end, which at times means twelve hour days for several weeks. My first drafts are bare sketches, but the tale is there, brief, but complete. This done, I turn back to the beginning to see what I've managed to get on file, and as I work my way through, I add a colour, shape and flesh and blood to my stickman characters. Perhaps my method could be likened to painting with oils, the layering and painting over of colours that are not quite right. The working backwards and forwards, adding words as I go continues until I reach the stage when I begin to cut words, to tweak and tighten the tale. Eventually, I know it is done.


Question: What originally inspired you to become a writer?

Joy Dettman: It is what I do, what I have done since kindergarten when I 'made up' my first infant poems. At ten I wrote fairy tales for a younger sister; at thirteen I wrote my first novel, much of it in high school classrooms. My classmates spoke of becoming a nurse, a teacher; I had no ambition other than to see my books filling a library shelf.


Interview by Brooke Hunter