Stories Behind the Story with Better Reading
Stories Behind The Story: Francesca de Tores on Unveiling Gender Identity Through Historical Fiction
Francesca de Torres talks to Cheryl Akle about her journey from poetry to historical fiction, the complexities of gender identity and literary inspirations. Her latest book Saltblood is out now.
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- Duration:
- 32m
- Broadcast on:
- 01 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
This is the Better Reading Podcast platform with stories behind the story, Jane's Be Better podcast, my book chat with Caroline Overington and more. Looking for a particular podcast? Remember, you can always skip to it. Welcome to the Better Reading Podcast, stories behind the story brought to you by Belinda Audio. Listen to Belinda audio books, anywhere, everywhere. Hi, this is Cheryl Arkel from the Better Reading Podcast, stories behind the story. We talk to authors about how they came to tell us their story. Francesca De Dores, welcome to Better Reading. Pleasure to be here, thanks for having me. Francesca is a novelist, a poet and an academic. She is the author of four previous novels published in more than 20 languages. In addition to a collection of poems, her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. Her first historical novel, Salt Blood, is a thrilling adventure weaving Mary Reed's remarkable story of survival, passion and transformation. It really is quite a remarkable story and that's why she's here today. She's here for the Sydney Writers Festival and the book is called Salt Blood. As I said, okay, why historical fiction? I had absolutely no intention of moving to historical fiction. It seemed to me to be too much like hard work. As an academic for years, I'd had enough of footnotes and sources and research and then I was sitting on the floor with my young son doing, this is very lowbrow as an origin story, doing horrible histories, jigsaw puzzle and it made passing mention of two female pirates. And by the time I was halfway through the Wikipedia article, that was it done for 100 percent because I discovered Mary Reed and Anne Bonnie and their stories were so extraordinary that I just knew and it turned out that if you dive into historical fiction, you become obsessed and all the research that I had lived in fear of. In fact, became a passion and the challenge was not doing the research. It was having to drag myself away from the research. I mean, the book has been out for some time and I'm still researching. I'm still discovering new things about these extraordinary women and their lives. I want to talk about that, Jordan, in a minute, but I want to go back to how he came to writing and talking about lowbrow, I'm going to say this publicly, which is kind of almost embarrassing, but I'm going to say it anyway. I've been a big reader for a long time. I particularly love short stories and essays, but I also love fiction. Poetry has never been anything I've been drawn to. However, however, social media changed that for me because it was presented to me more often. I know that's probably not meant to say it, but it really, really introduced me to poetry. I don't think there's any shame in that. I think there's a wonderful democratization. I mean, I don't necessarily love every bit of poetry that's in circulation, but more poetry out there and more eyeballs on poetry is a net win. I have a friend who's a very good poet, and we were chatting about publishing poetry, and he said, and this is a very acclaimed poet who's won most of the major prizes, has many collections, and he said, the realistic truth is that I get more eyeballs on my poetry. If I put it on my Facebook page, then in publishing it with a poetry press, and poetry presses God love them, they do God's work, but the numbers of books that they sell is a tiny fraction of the amount of coverage that something can get if it takes off on social media. I had this really interesting chat with a friend about when you publish with a small poetry press, how much are you doing that for the external ego affirmation, the pat on the back from the establishment to say you're a real poet, when if your goal is not about ego and is in fact about getting your work out there in front of people, perhaps it's a realistic thing to now consider that social media might be the best forum for that. I think there's something in this because we as an industry, I think, you as a writer, me working in a business that promotes reading and talks to readers, and very, very often I'm talking to people that are already reading, voracious readers, like a lot of our community, they'll read 50, 60 books a year, you know, they're big readers, right? But when you talk about poetry, it really has always been very difficult to go and find a poetry book. One, they're not so readily available because the print runs are often very short, as you probably know, and two, maybe poetry is for people that may not go to a book shop, might not be for readers, that you get, you know, five or six beautiful lines of poetry, and maybe you're not prepared to read a whole book, and social media gives you that, and I think that people are reading more because it's there. I've become addicted to it on Instagram. Look, and I think if we think of social media even as a kind of gateway drug, if that draws people to poetry and they end up then buying an anthology of poetry or a collection of someone whose work they discovered on social media, that's all positive as far as I'm concerned. I think poetry has an image problem, then it still has this, people have a perception of poetry as this very rarefied, pretentious, obscure, inaccessible thing that doesn't belong to them. Yeah, and that they won't get. And in fact, if you're in a room with someone and you show them a Mary Oliver poem, you'll see them be shaken to their core, and it is there. And we all think, oh, you know, poetry, for many people think it's not for me, I don't get it. And then suddenly you lose a parent, and the most, the greatest consolation available to you, people turn in these times of huge need and sadness to poetry. So I think there is a sense, an unfair sense, that poetry doesn't belong to people that it's not for us, and yet in times of need we find ourselves turning to it. So it is there, it does belong to all of us, and if more people are stumbling across poetry on social media, then I'm all for that. Yeah, no, I am too. I am too, and I'm reading, I mean, at the moment, there's just so much beautiful work up there. Okay, all right, I want to go back to, you know, before you became a poet, before you became an academic, tell me where you, how you grew up, did you think you were going to be a writer? Where did it all start? I grew up in La Troita, Tasmania, and I was very lucky because I grew up in a house full of books. My father was a historian, my mother was an English teacher, and it was a house. I mean, we recently, we moved back recently from after 15, 16 years in London, and the guys that were doing the move came, and they did a survey of our flat, and they said, "Okay, 86 boxes of books." And everyone else I told that story to, you know, their eyebrows would shoot off into the stratosphere, and they'd say, "Oh my God, you've got a problem." And I told my mum and dad, and they said, "Oh yeah, that sounds about right." So I, you know, it's a blessing and a curse, but I was raised in a very bookish household, I was a nerdy kid, and I am probably unusually, I was one of those kids that knew from data that I wanted to write. That was my great passion, and it was my huge good fortune to be raised in a house where that was fostered, and I had caring teachers who encouraged me in that. In Tasmania. Yeah, but I left Tasmania at 17, and to go, well, I had a year overseas. Tasmania is the kind of place where you desperately want to leave when you're 17, because it seems so boring and insular, and then, of course, you spend the rest of your life realizing how wonderful it was, and how beautiful it was. And it's in all my books. You know, my collection of poetry, which was the first book that was published, was called "Bodies of Water," and I look now at Salt Blood, which is about bodies, and pirates, and oceans, and I think I'm still writing the same book, and I wouldn't be writing that book had I not been raised in La Troita. So I'm very much a creature of an island upbringing surrounded by water. That's my passion. But I did a gap year in England, and then I did my undergrad and my PhD at the University of Melbourne, which was a wonderful experience, and again, met people and writers with whom I'm still in close contact today, and who I admire so much. So a straight writing path, but you didn't go off and become a journalist? No, I didn't. I wasn't foolish enough or deluded enough to think I was going to be a writer and make my living from that, and that would have been a really bonkers thing to do. So I loved academia, and so I didn't do my PhD in a creative form. I did a kind of straight English literature, philosophy PhD, and I set myself a challenge of, okay, if I don't do the creative writing PhD, I need to test myself now. I'm not an undergraduate anymore. No one's setting me assignments, you know, write this poem, write this story. So if I really want to be a writer, will I still do it when no one's holding a gun to my head? I'm saying, okay, you have to hand this in. You don't have a deadline? Exactly, exactly. And I did, and I do love the critical and theoretical side of English literature and research, but I did keep writing. And so my first collection of poetry, which to me was also my last collection of poetry. You're a teaching and writing. Yeah, I started doing some teaching during the course of my PhD, and then the poetry collection came out while I was doing my PhD. Right, okay. And first and last. First and last, I still write poetry, but I then moved into full-time academic work and started writing a novel on the side, which became my first novel. And I've had the enormous good fortune to be able to write full-time sense then. So really, I'm a lapsed academic and a lapsed poet, but I am still writing poetry. But you're a now author. I am. Yeah. So why did you, why did you move to fiction? I think there were things that the scope of a novel allowed me to do that I couldn't do in poetry. There might be people that can, can achieve an epic story and gradual dawning character development in poetry. I certainly couldn't. I needed that more expansive scope. So I moved to novels and it was difficult at first because I agonized over every sentence, every single line, because poetry, which is still my first and perhaps my greatest love, poetry is so exacting, and every single word has to be right. And I discovered very painfully that if you're writing a first draft of a hundred and ten thousand word novel, you simply can't operate at that level. Now, I think my writing still skews lyrical and poetic, and I, I'd like to think it's not sloppy, but certainly in the early drafting process, I had to give myself permission to write some crap, because you simply can't write with a poet's attention to detail in a first draft of a sweeping novel. But I like to think, I hope that my poetry hat comes back on as I edit, and that the language in the novels still hopefully has a poet's eye to it. You know what I just thought of then when you were speaking, picture books, children's picture books, and some of the writing in those. I mean, so few words, yet such beautiful stories told. And, and such profound insights, you know, I went through the picture book stage, my, my child is ten now, but when he was young, I was absolutely flabbergasted by some of the things that, that I was learning from children's books, you know, and the classics, the classics for a reason. So, um, Morris Endex, where the world things are, I'll eat you up, I love you so, a handful of words. And it said everything about, about that devouring kind of love that we, that I was experiencing for the first time as a, as a parent, and the dangerous sides of that, the possessive qualities, you know, we say we could eat a baby up, their lovely chubby limbs and so on. But there is also that proprietary devouring quality to that love. And Morris Endex got it in a handful of words. Hmm. You've just given me goosebumps. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature, whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to, or the succulents that adorn our homes. Nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With all trails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently, with offline maps and on trail navigation. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with all trails. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big row as man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B. But with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com/results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com/results. Terms and conditions apply. Linkedin, the place to be, to be. But it is sad, isn't it? When you look at the way we share stories, every format kind of has its place. I spoke to Memfwoks, the Australian writer, and who collaborates so well with illustrators as well, because the story and the illustrations, as you know, come hand in hand. But she said to me, I had her in here for a podcast once, and she said to me that one of the first things that babies learn is rhyme. It's just quite simple, but they hear language in rhyme. When you read a good picture book, or a good kid's book, that's what you hear, isn't it? It's a skill. Doggrel is easy, churning out bad rhymes, but good rhyming kids' books are really few and far between. I think Harry McCleary from Donaldson's Derry, by what is she? Julia Donaldson. No, she's not Julia Donaldson. She's linearly Dodd. Literally Dodd, who's an easy and author. My son's first word was quack, and we were reading a Harry McCleary book called Zachary Quack, and that was his first word, and those books really nail it, because there are pleasure for parents who, of course, every parent knows how many times you have to read those books over and over again. But if it's a banger, you don't mind, because the rhythm and the rhyme carries you. Yeah, that's right. Who sank the boat was another vote for Pamela Allen? Anyway, so you're writing long form. I think that's challenging on any level, clearly. Did the story come first? How did you decide that I'm going to do this? It's been different for each of my novels. With Salt Blood, the story was so remarkable that I think because the story was there in a way. It was a new experience for me writing historical fiction. I didn't have to agonize about plot, because the plot was already laid out for me. This absolutely extraordinary life. This woman, Mary Reed, born a girl, raised for complicated financial reasons. As a boy, then had served in the royal navy, the army, and ultimately becomes one of only two documented female pirates of the Golden Age of piracy. I mean, that story, the Wikipedia summary alone is so good that I felt that I was sort of, the scaffolding was already there. Yeah. And I was then free to follow voice, because voice is, I think, the key thing, and to try to discover Mary Reed's voice. And she's so different from me. You know, I'm an extrovert, a gabby woman, and Mary Reed, because her survival depended for long periods of her life upon concealing... Sequence. Yeah, concealment. I don't want to say hiding her true sex, because I think it's very clear at a glance of her life that her relationship to gender would have been extremely complex and nuanced. I say one of the two documented female pirates using the terminology of the time, I think, in hindsight, it'd be pretty clear to say that she might now describe herself as genderqueer. Yeah, gender neutral. Yeah, certainly non-binary, I think. But, you know, for long periods of her life, when she was living as a man and it was necessary for her survival for people around her to see only that side of her, she couldn't reveal herself to people. So she had to have a sort of self-contained identity. And the journey that she undertakes, she's finding her voice throughout the course of the novel as much as I was finding her voice in writing it, because she goes from someone who is told what to do by her monstrous mother, who imposes initially this deception on her, to becoming someone who discovers, you know, she says at one point, "My true secret is not that I'm a boy, my true secret is that I like it." So she becomes someone who not comes to terms with, because that sounds like a deficit, but someone who embraces these multiple and fluid identities and comes into her own. And through these acts of enormous courage and boldness becomes a pirate, which is something so entrancing to us that we're still talking about her 300 years later, we're still fascinated by this extraordinary life. Historical fiction has had a surgeon, if you're like, "Oh, I'm not going to say re-surgeons, I'm just going to say surgeons." And I don't know how aware you are of what's happening out there and how much people are reading, but in our community, in particular, the better reading community, they can't get enough of historical fiction. They really can't. And also what is really trending is discovering the voices of women who are always in history, but had never been written about or, you know, they've been silent in a way, because no one had given them a voice like Anna Funder, Wifedham, do you know? Anna Funder's Wifedham sent my book club into such paroxysms of feminist fury that we all adored the book and the conversation devolved into a kind of communal primal scream of feminist rage. It was a glorious shared experience. I'm going to see Anna speak later today as a sitting writer festival. She's wonderful. But so there's that, which is kind of fiction and nonfiction, but there's also a lot of historical fiction where, you know, we're talking about famous people and they're usually men, but the book is telling their story, the woman's story. How do you feel about that? And do you read that type of fiction? I do. I'm a big fan of historical fiction. I always think when a genre tends to be dismissed as historical fiction sometimes is, it's always worth interrogating why. And historical fiction, the cliche and historical fiction reader is a woman. And I think that's largely why the genre is sometimes dismissed as trivial, silly, you know, bodice rippers and so on. And these value judgments very rarely stand up to scrutiny. Some of the greatest writing of current times have been historical fiction. You only have to look at Hillary Mantell. I'm really interested in this movement of sort of revisionist and particularly feminist revisionist retellings of lives at the margins of documented history, because women have always been there. Non-binary, gender-queered trans people have always been there, but their voices haven't been heard. And also working-class people have always been there and their voices. And indigenous people. Absolutely. Yeah. And out of history. They were right there and they're not even spoken about. So I think it's a really thrilling movement. And I'm excited to be part of it with salt blood, because within the historical record and Bonnie and Mary read barely figure, their names are mentioned twice really within the credible, solid historical documents. There's a proclamation from Governor Wood's Rogers in 1720 that lists Anne Bonnie and Mary read in the list of pirates who'd stolen the ship called the William in August of 1720. And then there's a trial transcript. And I'm not spoiling the book when I say they were brought to trial, A, because it was 300 years ago, and B, because these incredible women actually had one further trick up their sleeve. So that is not the end of their story. And beyond that, the only document we have that actually names them from the time is a book that came out a few years later by a deeply unreliable and slightly fantastical source called Captain Charles Johnson. It wasn't his real name. And he wrote this book called The General History of Pirates, which has shaped most of the sort of popular imagination of what pirates are ever since. And he waxes lyrical about them and their childhood and their past, but you do have to take most of what he says with a pinch of salt. So these women's names barely feature. But I love the fact that we're still fascinated by them, that people are still telling their story, asking questions about them. I'm not the only person to have written a novel about Mary Reardon and Bonnie. I'm sure my publicist would love it if I were the only one, but I'm not. And I won't be. And I love the fact that people are going to continue telling their story because their voices were left right out of history. There is a moment at the end of the trial transcript, which said, you know, after pages and pages of the charges against them and the witnesses who were called to testify against them. And it says, do the witnesses have anything to say in their defense effectively? I'm paraphrasing here. And it says, and the witnesses said nothing material in both the women's trial and the trial of their male crewmates. And I love this idea of nothing material. They could have said anything they could have given the most impassioned speech putting forward their own stories and how they were driven to do what they did and the choices and the very limited choices that they had. But none of that is considered material by the transcript, by the historical record. It doesn't even make it into the transcript. So I'm so fascinated to have the opportunity to try to give voice to these women because their voices were left out. Because really, I mean, also women, as well as not being written into stories, they were treated often very badly. And if there was ever a conviction, it's more than likely that they were guilty, right? Yeah, I mean, I think there was a fascination with what these women did because they'd broken boundaries so profoundly by becoming pirates. Pirates were already seen as violent criminals, which indeed they were, though some of them had a political and ideological aspect as well. But for women to do this was doubly scandalous because they'd broken not only the rules of the country, but also all the unspoken, or perhaps not entirely unspoken, rules about gender and what was permitted to a woman to do. How do you deal with research and writing? I mean, because you were saying before that you could be researching forever. And I think I'm one of those people that once the research started, I wouldn't then go to writing. I don't know if I could ever leave it. And in your research, did you discover things that reshape your story? Once you've like, what's the process? Absolutely. If you go into research with an idea of what you're looking for, that's all that you'll find. So you have to go in open-minded and particularly with something like piracy that we have so many preconceptions about what pirates are and what they did, how'd I gone in just looking for things to support that I would have had a very different experience. So I think you have to approach research with a really open mind. And the joys are the things that you don't already know, because you don't know what you don't know when you begin research. For example, we think of pirates always as these really anarchic, chaotic mavericks, the sort of Jack Sparrow version of piracy. And one of the things, one of the most useful sources that I came across was this collection of pirates' articles. And what that is, is almost every pirate crew had, and we have many of these remaining, basically a legal contract that was signed by the members of the crew, which stipulated in incredibly boring, legalistic technical terms, the details of how the ship would run. No drinking, no gambling on board, for example. That you had to keep your pistols polished and ready at all times. The captain shall have one and one quarter share, the quartermaster shall have one and one eighth share. You know, really nitty-gritty, legalistic stuff. And you think, what the hell? Pirates had contracts. And so more disciplined than we thought. More disciplined, not on land. This is very much a while on board the ship thing. I think when they were in NASA, all bets were off. Yeah, but I guess if you're in a small space, you have to have some rules. Yeah, exactly. And this was a practical rather than a moral thing. I mean, the prohibition on drinking and gambling is so that fights don't kick off. It's not because they're puritanical, quite the opposite. But I was so fascinated by the way that these pirates had this in many ways, quite tightly ordered society within their crews, which completely goes in contrast with what we think we know about pirates. So there were so many occasions where I would stumble across things that blew my mind. For example, I thought that the claim in Charles Johnson's book about Mary Reed serving in the Royal Navy and the Army as a man, I thought, really, that seems so far-fetched. And lo and behold, the research revealed that, in fact, while we don't have documentary evidence of Mary Reed doing that, there is at least one solid documented historical precedent, which is Kirito, Christian, Kavanaugh, or while she went by many names, who served in two wars, passing as a man, and was only discovered after the battle of Ramalee, which is the war of Spanish succession, the same war in which Mary Reed served, when the surgeon who was piecing together her shattered skull said, "Oh yeah, by the way, this is a lady, guys." So these figures have always been there. Women and trans and genderqueer people have always walked amongst us and done extraordinary things. So this historical precedent for what is perhaps the most outrageous claim about Mary Reed's life really made me think, "Jesus, if that's true, you know, maybe it's all true." And it was so thrilling to think what she managed to get away with, what she managed to achieve. Yeah, brilliant book. It's called Salt Blood. I want to talk about you coming back home. And how do you think, and the reason why I'm asking you this, is I feel that even in fiction, there's always parts of ourselves in it, you know, you telling this story is very different than to someone else telling this story because of what you bring to it. Do you think that there will be a difference in what you write now that you're back in Melbourne and that you've left London? Do you think that those environmental differences have some impact on your work? I don't doubt that they do, but I think that I seem to have been formed rather early. So I suspect that it's more that I always wrote as a Tasmanian and an Australian, even during my 15, 16 years in London, rather than that I was writing in a more urban and English way while I was there. I think my imagination has always skewed to the wild, to the oceans, to islands. And I think that my coming home is only going to reaffirm that. I suspect that every book that I've written has been more shaped by Tasmania than by anything in my subsequent life. And I'd be surprised if that changes. I think at a certain point, I've accepted that this is who I am, that I write books about women, oceans, islands, and rather than trying to break that mold, I think I'm going to embrace it now and lean in. I'm five novels in. This is who I am. I think I better just celebrate at this point. Are you working on another? I am. I became so completely immersed in the period of this, the tail end of the Golden Age of piracy, the early 1700s. And I've done so much research in bloody rigging, ships rigging. I know too much to waste at all. So I actually spent almost a year trying to write a book set in a different time and place. And I just couldn't make it work. I think my heart was still at sea in the early 1700s. And so I've gone back to a story that actually puts in a brief appearance within salt blood. So Woods Rogers, the governor who came and led the crackdown on the pirates that ultimately led to the capture of Bonnie and Reed. He made his name many years earlier on a circumnavigation of the world. And he wrote a book, an account of that journey. And during that journey, he stopped on a remote island 600 miles off the coast of Chile, where he discovered someone who had been abandoned there for four years and four months earlier, called Alexander Selkirk, a bad, tempered, slightly violent Scottish sailor, who had through a series of his own bad decisions, ended up being dumped there by his crew and survived there alone for almost four and a half years. After his rescue, he becomes the model for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. So I mentioned him in salt blood. And at one point in my editor, we were trying to lose a few thousand words, said, "Is the stuff about Selkirk really necessary?" And I really fought for it. Now, I do believe that it serves an important role in the book, because Mary Reed is reflecting on identity and what happens when everything else is stripped away. Who are you at your core? But I think now in hindsight, I was already in love with Alexander Selkirk's story. And that's why I refuse to cut him from salt blood. I've come back to him now. I've no longer fighting it. And so I get to be at sea in that period, again, asking that fascinating question about what happens and who are you when every other trapping of the world of companionship is stripped away? What remains then? Oh gosh, I can't wait. We're out of time. Thank you so much for visiting us today. The book is called Salt Blood. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. If you'd like more information about better reading, follow us on Facebook or visit betterreading.com.au. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Belinda Audio. 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