Steve MinOn - First Name Second Name

Music. On and welcome to Totally Lit. Thanks, Kai.

Now, I'll just set some context for the listeners that we are in the middle of a cyclone or about to be hit by a cyclone. So, the air is a little bit tense. We're all strapped down. Now, I'm super excited because I have your book in my hot little hand, First Name, Second Name, which has a lovely sticker on the front as well because It's an award-winning book and you're an award-winning author. Yes. Would you like to tell me about yourself and the book?

Well, I'm a debut author. This is my first novel. And I've been a writer for many years, but not a novelist. I've been a copywriter for many years, working in advertising. And this is my first foray into fiction that has not been commissioned by anybody. I wrote a lot of fiction in advertising. Nobody asked for it, but you've given it to us anyway. I've given it to you, yes.

So the book is called First Name, Second Name, and it's about four generations of two migrant families who come to Australia and become one, one family. And the protagonist of the book is a corpse who is walking on a nocturnal pilgrimage back to the town of his birth in far north Queensland. And he's doing that to try and work out why he is the way that he is and what it is that he's lost. He feels he's lost something.

So that's exploring quite a lot of interesting things all at once that I guess need to be unpacked a bit. So he's a corpse but he still is thinking. Yes. And has forward momentum. Yes. He's sentient. He has forward momentum, but it's not momentum that is of his own doing. It's a compulsion. He feels a pull. And so he walks. During the day, he collapses in a heap like a corpse should do, and he lies usually face down on the roadside somewhere.

And then when night comes, he is suddenly awake and up on his feet and then walking again. And he's walking along the highway because that's what the compulsion is telling him to do. But he did have an expectation that his sisters would help him with his journey. Yes. At the beginning of the novel, the novel opens with him having a moment of clarity in his dying hours where he is able to write a letter to his sisters in which he asks them to transport his body north.

But he asks them to do it in a very strange way. He wants them to strap his body to two poles of bamboo with his arms tied there with leather thongs. And for them to walk him north, one of his sisters at the front of the poles of bamboo and one of the sisters at the back. And of course, they think this is a very... That's like a stretcher style arrangement? Like a stretcher, but he's actually suspended upright as if he is walking between them. Oh, okay. Right. So vertical.

Vertical. Right. Yes. And there's just two sisters? Just the two sisters. And so this he explains in the letter. And in the letter he also says, can you please do it at night? Because you need to avoid the heat of the day. And some strange questions from passers-by, I imagine. Yes, that's right. Why are you walking along? Don't draw attention to yourselves, he says. And of course, when he eventually passes, the next scene in the book is he's

passed and his sisters are asked to attend to his bedside. They turn up at the hospital and they find the letter there. And it's explained to them that sometimes when people are dying, they have a moment of clarity. It's some of the synapses working in their brain and they're able to do something. But it's usually a fantasy and it's something that they can't control in their brain. And so they often say things, or in this case, he's written a letter.

So the sisters think this is a ridiculous idea and something that's just happened as he was dying and it's a bit of madness. And so they, of course, don't want to do that for him. They think it's crazy. I do think it was crazy too. Yes, and it is a crazy thing. Where are they walking from? From Brisbane to Innisfail. Yeah, Brisbane to Innisfail, that's a long way. A thousand, over a thousand miles, thousands of kil... almost 2,000 kilometres.

So that's a big thing he's asking for as well. It's too much. It's too much. And they think it's too much. But when he realises that they're not going to follow through with his wishes, his corpse comes, reanimates in the hospital, and it makes the journey by itself. So it's as if he has manifested this journey and his body is doing the work for him. But he's also aware that he's doing it and he's also aware that he's dead.

So it's a bit of a frightening realisation for him as he begins his journey. That's really interesting, I think, that they are not honouring his wishes. In the examination of that, does he acknowledge that or ponder on that at all? Or is he not thinking in that way once he's a corpse? Well, the book does unfold very gradually. So, yes, these are questions that I'm sure the reader will have and that he has. And he's not really aware of why he's the way that he is as a corpse walking north.

And we don't really know as the reader yet why they're not honouring his wishes. But we suspect, I think most readers will suspect, that there's something going on with this family. They don't connect. They're not communicating. And that as the book continues, the story continues, we get to understand this idea of disconnection between the family members and how deep that runs.

So in this book, some of this theme is drawn on from your own experiences and I did read that part of it is inspired by your own name. Did you want to tell me a little bit about when did you first get the idea to start writing the story? So I am a mixed race person. So my father was Chinese and my mother was Scottish. Now the readers of the book will draw an immediate comparison there with the characters in the book because there are characters in the book who have that same mixed race.

And the idea I had when I was writing it was to try to explain what it was like to be a mixed race person. So I drew on my own experience in that way, although the story is fiction. And it seemed to me to be a good way to start to explain what that mixed race experience was like. So yeah, it does draw a lot on my own experience and also family stories.

And I originally wanted to write the book, As a straight historical fiction, I just thought maybe what I should do is tell the story of the Chinese, particularly in North Queensland, because it's not a very well-known story in North Queensland during the Gold Rush. I only happen to know because I spent some time growing up in Townsville, so I had an understanding that there were Chinese in that area. But, yeah, it's not a common knowledge right across Australia that that part

of the history. No. That part of the history? Yes, of the Chinese as a minority. But in far north Queensland, during the gold rush in the Palmer River area, there were more Chinese than there were Europeans. There were actually something like 18,000 at one stage Chinese. Far outnumbered all of the Europeans in all of the entire north of the country.

So there's a big Chinese history up there. And I thought, well, maybe what I should be doing is telling the story of my ancestors who came in the gold rush as prospectors. But what happened as I was writing that story was I realized that I also needed to explain for context what my experience was as a child of a mixed race couple, to give it some context of just to see how it was today. So you've got an experience of both cultures.

How did you find, was there a big disparity between when you were learning about both cultures? Yes. I would say that, I joke about it now, I say I'm going into my Chinese period because.

As this would be the experience of many mixed race people, particularly when one family member is, one parent is a person of colour and the other person, the other parent is a white person, is you tend to lean into, the white culture because it's in this country it's more accepted and so I've one of the reasons I wanted to explore the Chinese side was that I didn't really explore it as a child I didn't really

have much of that culture as a child so I felt it was maybe I'm just addressing the imbalance, now by writing this story and is there anything that you learned about that culture that you found inspiring and that helped you with the book? I did learn a lot about the Chinese culture, particularly with respect to the dead. And maybe it's probably a good time to maybe talk about some of the customs of dealing with the dead, which I found very fascinating.

And it led to the conception of my protagonist, who is, in Chinese terms, he's a zheng shu which is a walking corpse.

And the Zhongshu is a myth that was created in the Qing dynasty and it was a little bit of fake truth actually because what was happening at the time was there were a lot of people working far away from home, and they would have an accident or die the belief was that they wouldn't be at rest unless they returned back to the town of their birth to be buried there, and some of them had no money, and so therefore they had to be transported by

their relatives or by friends back to the town of their birth. And often what they did was they would carry them in the form that I've described in the novel, carried between two poles of bamboo and walked the distance back to the town of their birth. And people, townsfolk, village folk would see them. Walking through the night. And the reason they walked through the night was because they didn't want the bodies to go off and deteriorate too much. That makes sense.

Yeah. And so they would see these people being walked and they would misinterpret them as being a demon or something like that. So that's where the myth of the Jiangxi began. So that was a fascinating insight. That's quite a bit of dedication to give to someone as well. although if it's only just like the next village over, it's probably not that bad a walk. But if it was... They would hire people to do the job as well.

Yeah, they would hire people to do the job as well. And sometimes they even had a belief that if they hired a necromancer, the necromancer would be able to cast their magic on the body and reanimate the body as well. So all of this sort of mystical myth surrounds the creature. And I found that fascinating.

Yeah. And how far is that belief carried into modern day now? Is it just nobody does it now? No, no. And, I mean, sorry, they return bodies back to the town of their birth, obviously, but, you know, they call a car in an hour and they stick them in an ambulance or something like that. Modern technology helps out. Like they did in Qing Dynasty, China. So, in the story, is there, I guess, like a journey of discovery along with the journey of him travelling to his hometown?

Yeah. He understands by the end what he has done in his life and why he is so disconnected from his family and also... The reader understands what this family has faced in their time. One side of the family has come to Australia from wartime Great Britain, from Scotland. They migrated to Australia. So they are also disconnected from their family by a vast distance.

And also there are a lot of things that happen to the family, Just little, small, interpersonal problems that arise that cause the family to distance themselves from each other. So there's a lot of that theme of being disconnected, detached, and the guilt associated with being detached from your family that carries through in the novel. It is a hard thing to think about losing the people that you love as well.

And I could already see, I was having a look at the first pages where the sisters are communicating of his passing and I'm like, oh, this might be a bit sad in places. Yeah, it's quite a sad story in places, but I think I've, hopefully I've had a fairly light touch with it and there's also some quite funny parts. It's black humour because we have a walking corpse and he's deteriorating on the journey and he's encountering people. I'm trying to resist Weekend at Bernie jokes, Steve.

Yes, yes. Well, he's reanimated himself. He's not being reanimated by other people. So, I mean, it's a melancholy novel, but also it's quite funny in places because, you know, life is sometimes funny, what happens to us. And hopefully I've captured some of that as well.

Now, if you can tell me a little bit about your journey to publication in that you've been connected to the Queensland Writers' Centre with some of your work, and then you've also won the Queensland Literary Awards Prize as well. How did that all happen? Did someone prompt you to enter those, or did you have a bit of a plan about how you would move forward with publication? I began my journey as a writer of fiction fairly late.

I'd already had an entire career and hadn't written any fiction in that time. And when I started just before COVID writing fiction, I had no idea what I was doing. It was a different form of writing to the type of writing that I was used to doing in advertising. I was taking simple ideas and making them more complex as opposed to taking complex ideas and making them simple for ads. So there was a big steep learning curve.

So I thought the best thing I should do is maybe start doing a few courses and attending a few seminars. and the Queensland Writers' Centre was a good start point for me. I wrote my first manuscript for a novel and submitted it into the publishable competition with Queensland Writers' Centre and it made it through. So I was one of the winners of that. So part of the prize that you're given is a mentorship And I had a mentorship with Michael Muhammad Ahmed,

who is from Sweatshop Literacy Movement. He gives you a lovely shout-out on the front of your book too. Yes, yes, yes. He blurred my book, which was very nice of him to do that. And he's a very, he's a Miles Franklin shortlisted writer. He's a very, very well-regarded, highly regarded author in his own right.

And he gave me a lot of advice. And some of the advice that he gave me was, I like what you're writing, but you probably need to delve a little deeper with some of your writing and start writing from the heart. Start writing about yourself, perhaps, or some of the stories that you have in your past. And so I did that and I think it was good advice because I wrote a little bit more honestly and I suppose I bled a bit on the page as well. It's where your city comes from, Steve.

That's right. And especially for a debut author, I think it's probably good to start that way because you're reminded as you're writing that you need to dig fairly deep into human emotion. That's what readers really like to read, and it's got to feel authentic as well. It can't feel performative. And so the next novel I wrote was First Name, Second Name, which I then, in a fit of hubris or madness or something, thought I might just enter this into a competition and see what happens.

I didn't submit it to people very much. I submitted to one agent, I think, and also one publisher, but I didn't hear back. And so I thought, I've got nothing to lose. I'll enter a competition. The great thing about competitions like the Queensland Literary Awards is you know that there are really great people who are going to be reading your book. And you also get an answer. You don't just get ignored.

You get a response. And the response may just be that someone else is announced on the shortlist and you're not on the shortlist, but at least that's a response. You know that you haven't achieved, and you can see who went onto the shortlist, and you can see what their stories are about, and you can see what the judges were wanting. So as it turns out, I was one of those people that was put on the shortlist, and then when I won, I was granted a publishing contract with UQP.

That was part of the prize. So that's just an inside lane into getting published and it's a bit of lightning striking. It's a bit of luck, but also it's a huge leg up and I'm really grateful for that.

And UQP, the book looks beautiful, so they've definitely put heart and soul into helping produce the book for you. What was it like working with them? I really liked working with UQP. They're a small publisher. They're a small independent publisher and they have a really fantastic, I suppose, eye for stories on the fringes. They really like stories from different cultures, people of color, different and also people who are in minorities as well.

As well, they like stories that are a bit challenging. and I think perhaps my manuscript fitted a lot of those. Ticked a lot of those boxes. But a story of Queensland as well, a little bit. Yeah, that's the other thing. There aren't that many stories set in Queensland, strangely enough, and there aren't that many stories set in Queensland with the type of characters that I write about. And I, you know, I really like the idea of representation. So the main character is gay.

He is also a mixed-race person. There aren't that many stories about the mixed race experience out there. And if there aren't that many stories, you may as well write one of your own. Yes, that's true. It is interesting to be able to raise up voices that you identify with and that you can see there isn't representation for as well. So good on you for being brave to write something that might be considered in the fringes.

Well, it seems like it's a minority thing, but actually it's not because I think there's a stat out there that says that 70% of Australians identify as, or have a parent or a grandparent from another country. It's true. Although not for, my heritage is English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and we've been in Australia about seven generations. Yeah. But we didn't come as convicts, if you ask any of my relatives. I think quite possibly we might have been convicts though.

So I actually love exploring other cultures but also acknowledge that I don't know a lot about my own culture because we have such a mix that I don't really specifically know about my Scottish or Irish or Welsh or English heritage.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is probably also one of the themes that the book touches on. It's this idea in Australia that migrants should integrate, This is a big part of the book and part of that idea of integration is fitting in and not being different. And I think that's one of the things that one of the sort of melancholy parts of the book is this regret that the main character feels for the life that he's spent fitting in.

And I think I was inspired to write about that idea when I'm sure we've all seen these programs where they talk to palliative care nurses and they always say, you know, what do people say when they're dying? And do they have, you know, what do they say their biggest regret is? And they always say that the person, the people who are dying, they say their biggest regret is always that they weren't more themselves. Yes. Yeah.

And I think that's probably, if you think about it in that, in those terms, there are a lot of people who have integrated into this country and done so to fit in and to be good migrants and they've given something up to do that and that's their culture and sometimes it is the people that they surround themselves with as well. It's interesting because when you get to know other people, you find that those differences can actually bring you together as well.

So all those times where people are like, oh, we're feeling frightened of someone because they're different, often we're all quite the same in many ways as well. So it does sometimes seem to be a waste of time to change yourself to fit in with other people. And I haven't got that from a cultural perspective but I have got it from trying to fit in with other women, trying to fit in to society's expectations of what women are like.

So, yeah, you try to shrink and cut yourself into something else to fit in with what people think you should be and I think it is when you look back on it, it's a waste of time to have done that. Yeah, and we often talk about culture in that space but also with the protagonist. He is culturally, he is Australian because he knows no other culture other than the culture that he is.

But because of his Chinese background, his heritage, he's often identified as not Australian because of the color of his skin or the shape of his eyes. The type of hair he has on his body. And so this story is about looking at people's identity down in that sort of micro level. And one of the reasons why I chose to write about him as a corpse, because he's walking along, he's focused, very, absolutely focused on his skin as parts of it are falling off.

And he has self-loathing as a corpse and self-loathing in life. Which is another one of the themes that you'll find in the book.

Fantastic. Now, you have your Brisbane launch coming up. That's next week. Are you getting excited? Next Friday, yes. Oh, I'm very excited. I mean, it's a hard thing to write a novel. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done. And it's a long journey. And then when you get to the point where you're finally holding it in your hand and explaining it to people, it just feels like such a privilege.

It feels like such a privilege to be able to explain your ideas to other people and that they're there to hear them. So I'm really looking forward to my launch. I've got my ticket booked. I'm very excited. And it's at one of my favourite bookstores, Avid Reader as well. It is. I think it's like a coming-of-age event for every writer in Brisbane that your first book that gets published, you hold it at Avid Reader for the launch. Yes.

I spent so many hours at Avid Reader watching other people launch. So it's very exciting to be there. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Steve. I am looking forward to the launch and I'm looking forward to getting through the book and I'm already hooked after checking it out this afternoon. And I will probably hit you up with more questions when I see you. Sounds good. Thank you for having me, Kai. It's great chatting. Very well. Music.