Kathryn Heyman is an actor, playwright, performance poet, novelist, and director of the Australian Writers' Mentoring Program. Her new novel Circle of Wonders (HarperCollins) is unlike anything she's written before. In this winding, generous conversation, Kathryn takes us inside what she describes as the \"beautiful grapple\" of writing this book about Roni Bloom, a charismatic woman at the end of her life who has, by her own reckoning, made a mess of things. The novel gathers the women in Roni's orbit to help her live a good death...even if not all are convinced she earned it with a good life.
We talk about her intentional structure of this story alongside the muddier, more mysterious work of finding it on the page. Kathryn pushes back on the old idea that the novel is the realm of the intellect, making the case for fiction as the territory of feeling, and explains why she wanted to write something AI couldn't write! We also get into the craft questions she fields as a mentor: protecting creative energy through building real boundaries, the false binary of plotter vs. pantser, why \"the facts are not always the same as the truth,\" and her dance teacher in Scotland, who taught her that encouragement does what shame never can.
This is a conversation for readers, writers, and anyone interested in what it means to sit, even briefly, in our \"messy and magnificent mortality.\"
Find out more about Kathryn and follow her here:
https://kathrynheyman.com/
https://www.instagram.com/kathrynheymanwriter/
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