Internationally bestselling Australian author Holly Ringland can't believe Sigourney Weaver of Alien fame is starring in the seven-part TV series that has brought her book to life.
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"I don't have words, that's the truth," she said laughing over the phone from her tropical Southeast Queensland home. Ringland even made a cameo in the Amazon Prime TV series.
"I don't have words, because I don't think they exist in our language to describe the emotion. It is sort of two dozen things all at once. It's surreal, overwhelming, beautiful, traumatic, thrilling, jarring, incredibly moving, like it is everything all at once.
"I mean in what world is Sigourney Weaver playing a character I made up?"
Ringland's novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart was written in part at Katoomba's Varuna, host of the Blue Mountains Writers' Festival, [October 20-22] so she feels she has come full circle to be back "in the Blueys".
The book won The Australian Book Industry Award General Fiction Book of the Year in 2019. She is one of the key authors taking part in the Mountains literary weekend.
"All I wanted as a teenager, burning to become a writer, was to go this almost mythical sounding place, the Blue Mountains, near the Three Sisters, Eleanor Dark ... everything about it to my teenage mind was just bewildering. So I had Pearl Jam posters on my teenage bedroom wall and also this little cut-out picture of Varuna, because I wanted to go so badly."
She won a place in 2015 at Varuna, the National Writers' House, and with her "very raw" first draft "spent that whole week really thinking about how to make it [the book] live".
"I don't know that the taxi driver knew what to do with me [when he took me there]. I lost my mind I was so excited.
"And now I'm coming to tell stories in a place that was that first place. Varuna nurtured me. I went for a walk ... and I read the story about The Three Sisters and then on the hike I saw a lyrebird.
"It was wild and magical and I am so looking forward to coming back to that land. It'll be a real full circle moment. It's gonna be very emotional I think for me deep inside."
It was wild and magical and I am so looking forward to coming back. It'll be a real full circle moment
In her novel, Australian native wildflowers and plants provide a language for the broken 'flowers' - the women who have sought refuge from violence at Thornfield flower farm in remote north-west Queensland.
The rights to the book have been sold to 30 countries, including Britain, Canada, Russia, Japan and France. The Slovak Academy of Sciences has even added 60 Australian flowers and trees to the national lexicon, after the translator discovered that there were no words for them in the Slovak language.
The book also celebrates Australia's rich Indigenous heritage and the outback - where Ringland lived for several years in her 20s. Many fictional places in her story, and in the screen series, have led to giant spikes in unsuccessful Google searches.
She said she is still amazed, "that I could make up a crater or a town and it would be alive for people ... it's feeling like I'm in some whiplash ricochet wonder chamber that only I occupy".
Ringland has since written two other books The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding and the non-fiction The House that Joy Built. She will be in conversation with Michaela Kalowski exploring the themes of joy, grief, courage and transformation at The Carrington Hotel on Saturday October 21 at 3pm.
Ringland has spoken about her own traumatic experiences with male-perpetrated violence and said it has been re-traumatising watching the story come to life.
"It's been powerful and intense ... joy and grief cheek to cheek the whole way."
One in three women have endured physical or sexual violence perpetrated by someone known to them, and one woman on average is killed every week by a current partner. She has had women recount stories of abuse at her book signings.
She said the book is about that "sore place on the page and it's how that affects us all, how universal it is".
"[Before the book] I wasn't writing from the sore tender true place .. once I learned to go into it, when I wrote from there that act has changed how I lived."
Ringland started writing the book in Britain, somehow remembering the sights, sounds and smells of Australia while overseas. She had spent her life savings to travel overseas in 2009 to complete a Masters in Creative Writing. She tapped into the popularity of flowers being a language, just as it was in Victorian England. Then she made a decision to link trauma and flowers.
"[Writing the book in England] was the siren song that I called to myself. I think I needed to leave home to write myself home."
More than 85 writers will appear at the festival including Charlotte Wood, Clive Hamilton, Craig Foster, David Marr, David Suzuki (Canada, live streamed), Ellen van Neerven, Julia Baird, Nardi Simpson, Richard Fidler, Robert Dessaix, as well as 2023 Stella Prize Winner Sarah Holland-Batt and 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner Shankari Chadran.
To find out more go to www.bluemountainswritersfestival.com.au
