The Joys of Binge Reading

Sophie Green’s stories of fresh beginnings, unexpected friendships and the power of love in small country communities are Top 10 Best sellers, and they’re all built around Sophie’s personal passions for, among other things, music, yoga and swimming.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today on Binge Reading Sophie talks about her varied career as a country music podcaster and aficionado, how she came to write two Home and Away spin offs, and why she thinks writers can learn a lot from musicians.

The giveaway this week is Sadie’s Vow, Book #1 in my new Home At Last series…

Book #2 Susannah’s Secret will be published late October, or early November.

An unconventional woman. A handsome European. Together, they plunge into dirty mob dealings and certain danger.

Limited Time Offer – Five Days Only.

free download sadie’s vow

Martin Walker’s Encore episode on his latest book To Kill A Troubadour goes live to general audience today.

listen to martin walker on encore

If you’d like to support the show, why not Buy Me A Cup of Coffee at buymeacoffee/jennywheelX

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Links to the episode:

Bellbird Country Choir playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPpYyaC9JNGvmSsJeT3nwXHi5MQm1TGii

Home and Away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_and_Away

Michael Connolly: https://www.michaelconnelly.com/

Richard Osman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Osman

Kayte Nunn: https://kaytenunn.com/

Kayte Nunn on JOBR: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/kayte-nunn-desire-revenge-courage/

Kazuo Ishiguro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazuo_Ishiguro

The Cowra Breakout: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0135848/

Tamworth Country Music Festival: https://www.tcmf.com.au/

Singer Jenny Mitchell and Sophie Green interview on Sunburnt Country podcast: https://sunburntcountrymusic.com/2022/08/14/jenny-mitchell-on-her-sublime-new-album-tug-of-war/

The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club. https://www.amazon.com/Inaugural-Meeting-Fairvale-Ladies-Book/dp/073363656X

Cover designs by Christa Moffit: https://abda.com.au/tag/christa-moffitt/

Links:

Where to find Sophie Green:

Website: https://www.hachette.com.au/sophie-green/

Instagram: @sophiegreenbooks

Facebook: @SophieGreenAuthor

Twitter: @sophiegreenauth

Tik Tok: @Sophie Green Books

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.

But now, here’s Sophie.

Introducing author Sophie Green

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Sophie, and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.

Sophie Green – Small town, second chance women’s fiction

Sophie Green: Hello, Jenny. Thank you very much for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: You have made this area of small communities a real winner for yourself. The books you’ve written about small communities have been Top 10 bestsellers, practically all of them, and the most recent one is The Bellbird River Country Choir. It’s about a group of people drawn from disparate backgrounds and places who all meet in this small country town and join a choir. What is it that attracts you to small towns?

Sophie Green: I think partly it’s because we all form our own small communities within larger communities. I’m Sydney born and bred, but I live not far from where I grew up and I have friends that I’ve met in the same area and met in other small communities, like working in a book shop.

I think we do tend to find our little communities within the larger, and also from a storytelling point of view, small communities are good to work with because I don’t have to think about a whole massive cast of characters. I can focus on one particular place and the people who live there.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting because the book does give a real sense of you understanding small communities. I did know that you lived in Sydney, but of course, as you say, metropolitan centers all form their own smaller communities. Do you still have any contacts with people you were at primary school with, occasionally?

Small communities form everywhere

Sophie Green: Actually, no, because I didn’t have a lot of friends in primary school or high school. School was not the best time for me, but I did make a very close friend when I worked in a bookshop who is one of the people this book is dedicated to. The bookshop forms a small community in and of itself, because everyone who’s there wants to read and loves reading, and so you more naturally make connections that way.

I have tended to make connections through activities, which is one of the reasons why I’m interested in pursuing that in the novels – swimming in The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle, yoga in Thursdays at Orange Blossom House, and now music in this one.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you swim?

Sophie Green: I do, yes. I live near a harbor beach in Sydney, and so I swim at the harbor beach. I don’t actually swim in the ocean. I did used to live at a surf beach and I do look at the people who swim laps off surf beaches and think, well, they’re a lot braver than I am. When I swim at my harbor beach, I tend to always make sure I can put my foot down on the sand if I need to in a hurry, and that someone is always further out than I am because they can be the shark bait.

Music features throughout the book

Jenny Wheeler: We will get onto talking about each of these books in a bit more detail, and you are very interested in music. We’ll get onto that. Music features very strongly in Bellbird River, and then with Orange Blossom it’s set around a yoga community, so in each of these books you’ve chosen a setting that you understand very well and feel emotionally connected to.

Sophie Green: Yes. It’s not necessarily me mining my own life, but I think it’s normal as a storyteller to write things you can connect with and feel, and also write from experience in life if I can. I just happened to have a few very well-defined interests that I’ve pursued for years on end, so when it came to writing stories, I’ve gone to them first.

Jenny Wheeler: In Bellbird River Choir one of the key characters is this international opera singer, Gabrielle, who almost retreats to this small town to heal herself. She’s had an operation on her throat which is affecting the quality of her voice. She wasn’t fully warned that this was a possibility and she certainly didn’t consider that it was likely to happen to her. Now that she’s finding her international career truncated, she’s feeling a real loss of identity and purpose, so she’s hiding out for that reason.

Some of the others are also in painful retreat from pasts or from difficult circumstances – being a solo mum in Sydney and finding it very hard to cope, those kinds of things. They have all got something that they’re dealing with and they’re drawn together in this choir. You really get to enjoy these characters as their past unfolds.

Character who developed a life of her own

Sophie Green: Thank you and thank you for reading so closely. Gabrielle was actually a character who was not going to have a point of view originally. Well, I had put her in originally and then I thought, no, I can’t have five, I need to have four. In the last few books I’ve had three and four. She just insisted on being a main character in the story, and I was going to have her as Victoria’s cousin. I originally wrote her as this little side player, as Victoria’s cousin.

Then she became an irresistible force. That thing that happens when you’re writing, where characters come to you and tell you what they want and tell you who they are and how they have to be in a story, I don’t really understand it. I think they just come from somewhere else and she wanted her story told.

She’s a complex character. She had a difficult childhood herself in Bellbird River and that’s one of the reasons why she hasn’t been back for a long time. For me, Victoria and Gabrielle are the love story of this book. That bond they’ve had, even though they haven’t seen each other regularly for years, is so strong that Gabrielle instinctively knows that’s what she needs when she’s healing.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s a bit like asking Dame Kiri te Kanawa to take a back seat, isn’t it? I can see why she broke through.

Look for the playlist with Dame Kiri on it

Sophie Green: Dame Kiri is actually in the playlist I put together, the songs from this. I’ve put a playlist on YouTube at the request of my publishers, all the songs as they appear in order. I remember Dame Kiri singing at the royal wedding in 1981, and so I thought, she’s someone that people may remember well. Of course, she’s had an incredible career, so she features in the playlist.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ll have to make sure we get the link for that playlist because I’m sure people would be interested in hearing it.

Sophie Green: It is now on my social media, and I’ve got a link tree which has it on as well, so people, google Sophie Green Author link tree, and that’ll probably pop up.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. One of the things I enjoyed about this book, I read quite a lot of mysteries because we handle quite a lot of mysteries on the show, but the pace of this is more elegiac than some of the mysteries I read. It’s lovely. It’s like you’re stepping into a flow and you get carried along in the most lovely restful, but irresistible kind of way as the personal secrets come to life.

They very gradually get revealed as we go through the book. You get to know the characters’ innermost thoughts, and each chapter is a point of view chapter from one character, isn’t it?

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Sophie Green’s writing planner

Sophie Green: It is. That’s how I structure it. When I plan these novels, I use a color coded grid so I can see the flow of points of view and how they shift and change – to avoid having too many of Victoria close together, for example. I like to move that around. I think it’s good for the reader to have changes of perspective and different things going on at different times.

Jenny Wheeler: That really impresses me, the color coding. It’s something I always would love to do in my own writing, but never quite get to do it.

Sophie Green: It was born out of necessity. I have a full-time job and I don’t have a lot of time to write. I realized after I’d written The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club that a bit more planning would probably stand me in good stead. That’s when I started developing all these documents that I now have. The novel I’m writing for next year is the most planned of anything I’ve ever written.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. As we’ve said, music is something that’s close to your heart and obviously it’s at the center of this book. I noticed that in the author credits you credit a friend who invited you to join a band 20 years ago. I gather it was associated with the Tamworth Festival. How did all that come about and tell us about it?

Sophie’s Tamworth Festival experience

Sophie Green: My friend’s name is Marilyn and we worked together. She had worked in the music industry for years and she’s also had her own bands for years. She is this incredible force of nature. She’s the most wonderful, inspiring person. I’m not the only one who thinks that.

She was putting together a country music covers band, and she wanted it to be mainly women, and then the men were going to be the rhythm section. She had a whole concept in mind and she needed a backup singer and percussionist. I’ve played piano since childhood and done a bit of singing in choirs myself at school and whatnot. I thought, oh, I’ve always wanted to be in a band. I’ll try out for her band. And so she put me in.

I was a snob about country music at the time, because I only knew about American country music and I didn’t like a lot of it. I thought it wasn’t much going on lyrically, or musically for that matter. But we booked some gigs at the 2003 Tamworth Country Music Festival, and up we went, and it completely changed my life in the most glorious way.

The standard of music that was there, the artists, the collaborative nature of the industry and of the festival, and all those artists together – I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. So for someone who loves all sorts of music and has always been really passionate about music – when I was at university, I would go and see bands several nights a week and I’ve always been a bit obsessed with music – for me, it was Mecca. I just loved it.

A long music-based friendship

I left the band a few years after that, and she has a different band now. That band plays a lot at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, and that friend Marilyn is now my guitar teacher. I’ve been learning guitar for four years, so we have a long music based friendship. I really believe that without her, I wouldn’t be writing about country music, which I do as a hobby, and therefore, I don’t think this book would exist.

Jenny Wheeler: You mention that you’re writing about country music. You’ve got a country music website called Sunburnt Country Music, and that’s where you interview and review country music artists. Are they mainly Australian?

Sophie Green: They are, yes. I do include New Zealand artists, in fact I recently interviewed the wonderful artist, Jenny Mitchell, who has a new album out called Tug of War. There’s my little plug for Jenny. She is originally from Gore and now lives on the North Island. Because there is a great New Zealand country music scene, I do keep my eye on that, but I mainly focus on Australians.

I used to cover some Americans, Canadians and British artists, but I prefer Australian and New Zealand music, so that’s why I cover it. And again, my passion for music is increased every time I hear more music from Australian artists because it’s so good, so rich. They are so talented, so dedicated. I feel that the industry has given me a lot, and I do the website as a way of giving back to them.

How music and writing interact

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Yes, it is a very rich music industry that you’ve got there. You have also talked about how country music has taught you things for your writing. How do the two interact and interlink?

Sophie Green: I think because country music, particularly in Australia, is a real storytelling genre. I know it is elsewhere too, but I think here there are Australian stories about all sorts of aspects of life – about work, about the land, about relationships, family, all sorts of things. I think listening to a lot of that music and the discipline in telling a story in a song is really instructive because you’ve got three minutes to present a whole world.

Some artists are amazing at it. Some of them put a whole novel themselves almost in a song, not because of the amount of words, just because of the amount of story they get in. But also, having the opportunity to talk to a lot of artists over the years, interviewing them and finding out how they feel their relationship with fans is, what they think about fans and how they think about fans. That connection between audience and artist is really strong in Australian country music.

Sophie Green sees herself as a storyteller

I was aware of that before I even started writing fiction, and I think it informed what I do and still informs what I do, because I think about that connection. My job is to tell a story to people. It’s not to be a writer. If I’m a writer, I can just sit and write and I can do that for my own amusement. But I’m telling stories to people and I wouldn’t have known how to do that the way I do without those artists.

Jenny Wheeler: I have seen a number of commentaries saying that the music industry is that much further ahead of the author industry. We’ve got a huge amount to learn from them and the way they are relating to their audiences, so it’s interesting to hear you say that.

Sophie Green: I’ve also noticed, increasingly in the past few weeks, the number of them who are on TikTok. They have all had to adapt, particularly over the past couple of years. It has been disheartening for a lot of them, but also inspiring for me to witness the ways that they have sustained or created connections with audiences because they haven’t been able to play in person. It’s not just about likes on Facebook. It’s been other ways of telling their story, presenting themselves, getting music out there. So again, I learn a lot from them.

Jenny Wheeler: Thursdays at Orange Blossom House is set in North Queensland and it’s a multi-generational story once again, primarily about women’s lives – the chances they’ve taken and those they’ve missed. They’re brought together doing yoga at Orange Blossom House. That’s the meeting point. Tell us about your yoga experience and what drew you to write a book around yoga.

Sophie Green: I first got on a mat as a student in 1993. I was an active child. I’d done ballet and all sorts of other things. It was while I was working at a bookshop in Sydney and a colleague said to me, you should go to yoga. Then another colleague said, you should do Iyengar yoga.

Yoga in the Orange Blossom House book

We forget now – people who are practicing yoga now may not even have realized – but in the early 1990s there wasn’t a lot of yoga around. A lot of it had been done in people’s garages and in church halls, and indeed it was in a church hall at the top of my street that I went to my first class. I went to the Yellow Pages and I found the Kuring-Gai Yoga School, and I called and said, do you have an Iyengar yoga class? She said, yes, Mondays 7:30pm. So off I went.

The teacher’s name was Judy and Judy would be my teacher for over 20 years. I found that practice made sense for me, and it wasn’t just about the postures. It was about the whole encompassing nature of it, which is to do with meditation and philosophy and the history of it, all sorts of things. At about the seven year mark Judy started saying to me, it’s time for you to teach. I said, I don’t feel ready. I still think it’s really important to be a student before you can be teacher.

About the nine year mark, I finally gave in and said, what do you want me to do? She said, go and get a diploma for remedial massage to learn anatomy and physiology. So I did that. Then I did my teacher training. I completed my teacher training in 2002, and I’ve been teaching on and off for 20 years now. Teaching is a whole different thing. You then have to struggle to remind yourself that you’re still a student sometimes, and that you can just be a student.

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Sophie Green - Second Chances