Welcome to Not Quite Right.
My name's Ed and I'm Amanda and we are here at Words on the Waves,
rounding out the end of our Saturday with a discussion with Tara Ray Moss.
Yeah, so Tara Ray or Tara Moss as most people
know her, is quite a well known figure in the
Australian writing scene and has written quite a number of books now across
variety of genres as well and non fiction and is now leaning into the crime noir,
I suppose.
And we spoke to Tara about her latest book and also a little bit about what
it's like to write with chronic illness.
Yes.
So here's our chat with Tara Ray Moss.
Well, we are here at Words on the Waves with
Tara Ramos.
Nice to meet you, Tara.
Hello, lovely to meet you both.
Thanks for having me.
So tell us about what brings you to Words on the Waves.
So my latest book is The Italian Secret.
It's my 15th book and my third in a new historical fiction series set in
Australia.
And in this one, The Italian Secret kind of gives away
that we also go over to Naples and I'm really excited to be here.
It's actually, after 2627 years in publishing,
it's the first time I've into this festival, so this is exciting for me.
It's gonna be great to catch up with other authors and to introduce more
readers to Billy Walker, my 1940s Pi.
So you're getting into the detective novel sort of space and what is it about
that that appeals to you?
Well, I grew up loving film noir and hard
boiled.
And I think it's important to recognise that hard boiled crime was a really
important moment for bringing working class people into our fiction.
Prior to that, there was this golden era of era of
fiction where of crime certainly where it was all upper class, you know,
or our stories, our fairy tales are always, you know,
royalty and princesses and so on.
But with hard boiled, it was working class people.
It was the underbelly of society.
However, women usually didn't fare very well.
You know, they tended to be the victim or the femme
fatale, which also means the victim really in a
lot of cases.
They could be deadly to others, but they were often deadly to themselves.
And what I wanted to do was to take my beloved hard boiled film noir genre and
subvert it by taking a main character who looks like the femme fatale.
She looks like Ava Gardner from The Killers in 1946,
but she's actually the hero.
She's one who solves the cases, she's the one who gets things done and
she's the one who leads us through these stories.
She's not a historical though.
Most people assume, oh, you know, this woman doing this,
it never would have happened.
We did actually have female PI's in Sydney and in Australia in the 1940s.
We just didn't write about them and we didn't make shows about them.
So that's another layer of fascination for me is the under told or untold
stories.
And Billy Walker's a great example of that.
So, I mean, you've got the book going today.
Beautiful.
So do you feel like you associated that idea,
like just going beyond people's expectations of that first impression?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm obsessed with vintage.
I mean, I'm an unabashed vintage nerd.
Oh, my gosh.
I'm wearing a beret like in the third one cover.
Oh, my goodness.
Right.
So there is this interest I have in vintage and in the material items and
objects from the time because I think they speak to the history and they hold
some kind of connection or emotion to the people of the time.
So all the locations in the books are real locations you can go to.
In fact, I did a Billy Walker walking tour of
Sydney in February for the first time and took fans of the series around vintage
Sydney.
Everything from the clothes to kind of the language and the other things they're
doing is quite authentic and historical to the time.
However, what I've done is, like I said, sort of subvert the expectations around
the genre.
Not because people weren't like that or they couldn't be like that,
but because it hasn't been the trope from that.
We're always looking at Philip Marlowe.
This is like if Philip Marlowe was a woman and there were those women at the
time and you spoke about the working class as well.
And I think Naples in the 1940s would have been a very working class.
Oh yeah.
Place.
Is that what drew you to that location or, or is it more the like the romance or did
you just wanna get a holiday over there?
You got you figured out.
Well, I've been writing for so long.
Like, like I said, this is a 15th book.
So you always wanna write something set where you wanna go.
That's one of the ways that you keep going,
but also one of the ways you are excited about the work.
I always say that you should write what you know and what you want to know.
So you start with the foundation of things that you feel like well immersed
in, but then you want to push yourself and
expand yourself.
For me, setting part of this book in Naples,
again, some of it's in vintage Sydney, which I know really well by this stage
after many, many years of research.
But vintage Naples I didn't know as well.
And I was fascinated by because they got hit by everyone during World War 2.
You know, they started out as an Axis country.
Mussolini had them on the other side, right?
And then when he was deposed and they switched sides,
you had the Nazis going for them too.
So you had American bombers bombing the heck out of Naples,
the Allied soldiers and bombers, and then you had the Nazis coming in as
well.
So they got hit with everything, including the eruption of Mount Vesuvius
and 44 as well.
So this is a group of civilians who got hit really hard.
And I wanted to touch on their stories And I guess also complicate,
perhaps a verb, but certainly complicate the more common
trope in historical fiction where we focus almost exclusively on Americans and
Brits during this World War 2 era.
Yeah, fascinating.
And you've written and spoken a lot about your life with chronic illness as well.
And I feel like writing can be a relief in that sense, but also a challenge.
So how do you manage the life of a writer?
That's a good question.
I've got my cane Wolfie in my car parked outside.
And I don't need Wolfie today, which is amazing.
So I've done really well the last 2 1/2 years since remission.
OK.
But it's something I have to manage.
I just have to stay on top of my nervous system,
my mobility to manage complex regional pain syndrome.
Thankfully, I'm doing so well that it's not getting
in the way of my writing or being able to come to festivals and meet readers and
things like that.
But I guess if you're going to have mobility problems, it's never fun.
But if you've got a rich inner world, that helps, right?
But chronic pain obviously makes that hard because once you're in pain,
it is harder to be creative and be like, have your inner freedom can be very
hindered by that.
So overall, I just feel like this sounds really hokey,
but every day feels like a miracle to me.
And I'm being just completely, completely honest about that because I
didn't think I would recover.
Yeah.
Prolific.
Like, how do you do it?
I mean, I think it's impressive anyway to write,
but to do that in the face of quite severe, yes, illness must be.
It was really hard.
I'll be completely honest, it was really hard.
So I've been a novelist published since 1999.
So this is a long time now, 27 years, but there was the last 8 or so years
where my health impacted the turn out of my product activity in my work.
So I was still able to write.
It was much slower.
I had smaller windows where I could really do what I love.
That was really hard.
So now I'm not hindered by that.
That's just amazing.
And so I feel creatively free as well as physically.
I just imagine too like holding the thread of a novel when you're saying like
it's interrupting you constantly.
Yes, that's right.
So how did you keep that thread going?
Did you just keep mulling it over in your mind even when you weren't able to write?
I think for me, there was some frustration and being
pushed out of the work.
So for those of you who are writers, you might kind of have a way you think of
like how you immerse yourself.
And for me it's almost like getting the bends.
If you come out too fast, you get like shot out.
And when you're re entering the water to get down deep like that,
like you can't just arrive.
It takes a little work to swim all the way down to get really into the into the
work.
So if something in your life, if it's external circumstances or it's
physical or internal, if it keeps shooting you out, it's hard,
it's disruptive.
What I kept doing is just kept struggling and get getting back in.
Just keep getting in the water until I could refine the thread of the story and
keep going.
And it kind of made me learn how to write in small segments of a couple of hours at
a time instead of the longer sitting periods that I used to do.
I don't love it because it was not a nice experience of writing from that
perspective, but I found I could do it actually.
And I know every writer works differently.
Some people do like little bursts through the day especially.
I'm a single mom as well, so that sometimes comes with the
territory.
But, you know, there was a time where I used to stay up
all night and write, and I don't do that now.
It's not realistic.
It's not going to be great for my health or for my home life with my daughter.
So you just have to adapt.
Yeah.
And I think, as you mentioned, it's not just chronic illness,
for example, it's people who have young children or
demanding careers or just whatever reason find themselves without the creative
energy and trying to write.
And, you know, writing can be financially difficult even
as a best selling author many times over.
It doesn't mean that you're raking it in.
And I wish, I wish I could tell you all, yes, everyone hits the best made loaded.
We don't have to worry about anything.
But that's just not the reality of publishing, certainly not today.
It might have been a little bit better 20 years ago or something just in terms of
the industry, but a bit like it is for musicians and
artists of all kinds can be difficult to navigate the financial aspects of life.
And you just got to keep going for it.
So I think it's always worth continuing to write and find a way to adapt to your
circumstances, whatever those limitations are.
And, you know, obviously you've found yourself in this
space now writing these crime novels and this historical fiction as well.
Is that something you think you're going to continue for a little bit longer?
Yeah, I'm writing the fourth in the Billy
Walker series, so the War Widow, the first one I said in 1946,
The Ghosts of Paris is the second one set in 47.
And The Italian Secret, which I'll be talking about today comes
out and it's set in 48.
So 1949 is next on the list.
And I'm writing about that at the moment as well as working on a mind body spirit
book.
It'll be my 5th genre relating to some of the healing work and rune work that I do
as well with the Spirit of healing.
It's called OK Oh, I look forward to it.
So I like juggling all of these different areas.
It keeps me stimulated and interested, and I'm always interested in learning new
things.
I think that's very common.
You find a lot of writers, you know, you have to write what's you're
interested in, and it's very hard to sustain an interest
in one thing.
Yeah.
Especially when you're going so deep into it as to write novels about it.
Yeah, forever.
So it's good that you have the flexibility, I guess,
to go down these different paths.
I'm a bit weird knowing, like, like I've written in so many different
genres, fiction and nonfiction, because I know that's a little unusual
among my colleagues in writing.
But I like the contrasts and I like the challenge.
So it works for me, Yeah.
You got to keep yourself interested.
I wonder if you do you find time for reading as well?
Absolutely.
Do you read within your genre or do you read something completely different?
Well, I've just been reading Fiona Kelly
McGregor's The Trap, so I'm very excited about that.
Set in 1942 Sydney.
So there's some synergy there with my Billy Walker series,
but sometimes I'm reading non fiction, sometimes I'm reading sci fi,
like there's a whole range.
And I do like a lot of the classics as well.
So I read quite widely.
And one of the ways to keep that up as well is through audiobooks,
which I think are wonderful because if I'm driving to a writers festival,
I can be listening to an audiobook.
If I'm outgoing for a walk, trying to keep my fit,
self fit hiking in the Blue Mountains, for example,
I can be listening to an audiobook when I'm not listening to the birds.
So there's always a way to keep reading, prioritise it and you can do it.
Take your time, as they say here at Words on the Waves.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you for speaking with us, Tom, Best of luck on your upcoming panel.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right Podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Waves Writers Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.