Lace and Blade 5 Author Interview: Gillian Polack

From lands distant or nearby, familiar or utterly strange, historical or imaginary, from ancient times to the Belle Époque comes a treasury of luscious, elegant, romantic fantasy. Come with us on a journey through time and across boundaries, inspired by the longings of the heart and the courage residing in even the meekest person.

Kindle: https://amzn.to/2PBzyj6
Print: here (Amazon) or here (Barnes & Noble)

ePub: https://www.books2read.com/u/bwYJwP

My introduction to the work of Gillian Polack was The Wizardry of Jewish Women, a concoction of pink tutus, sarcasm, amulets and bushfires. and oh yes, Jewish women with and without magic, set in Australia. I was instantly literarily smitten.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Gillian Polack: I love telling people that when I was eight I stopped in front my Grade Three Classroom - for I was in Grade Four and had just been moved to the Big School to study with Mr Remenyi – and said to the empty air, “I’m going to be a writer. I’ll need another job because I won’t make enough money to live on.” My other job was going to be in history, though I flirted with other careers from time to time. I have no idea how I could have known that much about myself or the writing world when I was eight. I suspect Mr Remenyi was a part of it, for he taught us Christina Rosetti’s work and it was love at first reading. I knew I wanted readers to react to my work with the same voraciousness we reacted to her poems.

DJR: What inspired your story in Lace and Blade 5?

GP: I had just been diagnosed with glaucoma and told it was not responding to treatment. I spent three months talking myself through the emotions of it. This story was to remind me that blindness is not going to stop me being myself and that I need to find the people who will see that in order to lead a happy life in future. This story, then, is my declaration to the world about the future I’m carving for myself.

Short Book Review: Motorcycles, Mayhem, and Psychiatry

Medea’s Curse, by Anne Buist (Legend Press, October 2016) This psychiatric thriller immediately

reminded me of the work of Tess Gerritsen and the “Alex Delaware” novels of Jonathan Kellerman. Yet Buist’s heroine is very much her own person, an Australian motorcycle-riding forensic psychiatrist who specializes in women who have killed their own children.

With dramatic tension that never lets up, the story follows Natalie King through cases past and present, with danger never far behind. But who is stalking her? The attentive husband of an inmate who may or may not have multiple personality disorder? The boyfriend of one of her clients, now in prison – and whose present  wife has just been accused of murdering their baby? The charming attorney with whom she’s shared a fling? With the lives of other children at stake, Natalie races to solve the mystery before it’s too late. 

One of the things I liked best about the book was the understanding that no professional can deal with material this upsetting without a support system of her own. Plus it’s really cool to have a strong woman hero who is also really smart!

From the book: Anne Buist is the Chair of Women’s Mental health at the University of Melbourne and has over 25 years clinical and research experience in perinatal psychiatry, working on cases of abuse, kidnapping, infanticide, and murder.

The Feathered Edge: The Australian Connection (Culverelle Part the First)

Last year I began this series on "the stories behind the stories" in this anthology of marvelous fantasy stories I was privileged to edit. I got about halfway through when life in the form of writing deadlines intervened. So I'm going to repost them and hopefully finish the series, then put them together in a companion volume. to The Feathered Edge.

Another of the writers whose work I got to know through the SFWA Circulating Book Plan was Australian Sean McMullen. I think the book was Glass Dragons, the second of his Moonworlds series. It's often challenging to begin a series in the middle, but this one posed no problem. Dragons and vampires and "War of the Worlds" and angsty heroes and radical organizers-of-the-people's-revolution, oh my! Well, not all in that first book, but it was enough to get me hooked.

So a little while later, I wandered into the Tor party at a WorldCon and there was Sean McMullen. I think the introduction caught me by surprise because the first words out of my mouth (after "Hello, I'm Deborah") were, "I love your work!" And received a glorious smile in reply, as if I'd just handed him a precious gift. And yes, it was. We create in such solitude, and reviews are such treacherous things when it comes to "did people like my book? did they understand it?" Then to come all the way to a different continent, to be surrounded by people you've heard of and maybe corresponded with but never met in person, and to have a fellow writer recognize your name and have read -- and remembered -- your work. What a joy!

That conversation was necessarily brief. If you've attended a publisher's party -- or any part -- at a WorldCon, you will understand why. Most communications at large conventions are sound bytes anyway, but when you add a crushing crowd, noise, and alcohol, it's many times so. But Sean and his work kept crossing my path -- we both love cats, we're both martial artists (or I used to be -- 30 years of tai chi and kung fu). By the strange synchronicity of publishing, when I returned to the pages of F and SF with my own work ("The Price of Silence," April/May. 2009), it was to an issue that had a story of Sean's as well. 

(The universe is still conspiring to bring us together: Sean and I both have stories in the March/April 2013 issue!)