an Interview with Marchetta

jamie- hey guys i found an interview ( it said it was a n interview but actuallly apperas to be a report) with th emaster storyteller that is Melina Marchetta.

http://www.lakemac.infohunt.nsw.gov.au/library/links/hschelp/english/interview.html


SCAN Vol 12 No 4 October 1993

Her life since winning the awards
Melina's life is hectic because of being a full-time student with a part-time job. The routine of this hasn't changed, so that she has not had much time to think about the implications of winning both awards with a first novel. When pressed about it, she became very enthusiastic, and said that she was 'bugged out by being short-listed'. She was 'so rapt' to be in the company of authors like Gillian Rubenstein and Brian Caswell, whom she's always admired. The high point of receiving the Children's Book Council award in Melbourne for Melina was having her family there. She enjoys meeting other authors and illustrators and finds them idealistic people, with no jealousy, and sharing a common thread of love of children's literature.


The process of writing
Melina's approach to writing is unstructured, in that she doesn't set aside four hours a day to write, but gets to it as she can. It seems to worry her that she has so many competing demands on her time - from her studies and from her large family with whom she still lives. She hopes to go away at Christmas time this year and write solidly, on her own, for two months. She says that her books don't have a strong storyline, describing the one she's working on now as 'wishy washy'. She likes to work out the interaction between her characters and the story line evolves as do the characters. Melina's characters are so real to her, that she spoke about them as if they were alive. For example, when she was talking about Josephine being at a passionate stage of her life where she doesn't yet know that 'people will understand more if you speak less', she said 'I know that she will grow out of it' and then, as if to remind herself 'No she won't, she's a character'.
When she has let the story evolve into a first draft, Melina works on it to make it as perfect as she can. With Alibrandi, she worked with Erica Irving of Penguin to reorganise parts of it, to cut it down, to edit some of the minor characters such as Sister Louise, who played a much bigger part in the first draft of the story, and Christina, who is the one character that Marchetta would like to pick up on again some time in the future.

Her next novel
Melina is working on a book quite unlike Looking for Alibrandi, except that it is also set in a boarding school and the characters are 17 years old. The new book is like Alibrandi in that interaction between characters is of prime importance. It is at the first draft stage, and the storyline is still in the process of evolving. She is moving the chapters around to find the right place for them. She is refreshingly modest about this second book, and confesses to fears that people won't like it. However, when she writes, she forgets all about misgivings, and becomes totally engrossed in what she is doing.

Reasons for writing for the young adult group
'I don't know, but I know I always will'. She finds this group fascinating, identifies strongly with it and likes the stage teenagers are at of being so open to change and growth, so vulnerable yet so exuberant. She thinks that at 28, she is still very similar to them in tastes, and that today's teenagers are maturing very much faster than those of her time. She cares about the pressures young people are under - such as the HSC, and vulnerability to self-really use, because she mixes with them daily with her own family and in her induced problems.is ab Melina le to write about teenagers with truth and in the language they teaching and because it is not long since she was that age herself.
It was when she began to talk about Looking for Alibrandi that Melina really opened up and she is much more at ease talking about the book than about herself.


What is the essential concern she has in her writing?
Growth through interaction of characters is Melina's essential concern, both in Looking for Alibrandi and the book she is writing now. She said several times during the interview that she respects the readers' right to their own perceptions of what Looking for Alibrandi is about, and to predict outcomes for the characters in the story. Melina sees Looking for Alibrandi as being about Josephine's growth to freedom through the interaction of the women of the three generations of Alibrandis - Katia Alibrandi, Christina Alibrandi, and herself.
Further changes come about in Josephine from interaction with other characters, namely:·
her father, Michael Andretti·
her boyfriend, Jacob Coote·
her suicidal friend, John Barton·
her girlfriends, and Poison Ivy, the school captain whom Josephine misjudges, and·
Sister Louise, the school principal.

Grandmother Katia is the source of greatest comedy in the book, which surprised Melina who has discovered that people laugh aloud when she reads extracts from the book involving Katia. She didn't intend to be funny and is drawing on both of her own grandmothers as the source of Katia. She is really just using their language in Katia's mouth. Josephine has two obsessions - her own illegitimacy and her Italian descent. Grandmother Katia grates on both - as she has appeared to reject Christina for having Josephine illegitimately and because she is almost a caricature of an older Italian woman. As Josephine interacts with her grandmother in the story, and discovers the secret in the old woman's past (that she too gave birth to an illegitimate child, Christina), she grows towards freedom - she realises she is proud of her Italian descent, and that her obsession with illegitimacy has been just as great as her grandmother's.
The relationship between Christina and Josephine also leads towards Josephine's freedom and away from the problems which she brings upon herself. Melina likes the character of Christina, who was originally much more fully drawn. Christina has such strength, much more than Josephine gives her credit for. The character of Michael Andretti is the only point of criticism Melina has had about the book. Critics have said that he is not real and that Josephine is too accepting of him. Melina agrees that he is the only character in the book who is not based on a real person (all the others are random amalgams of people she knows). Melina believes that Josephine's acceptance of Michael is a stage in her growth to freedom.

Melina finds that Jacob is a very popular character. She says that to create him, she had to physically tell Josephine to shut up, to give him a go. Josephine's interaction with Jacob teaches her that her pigeon-holing of people into socioeconomic groups which are completely separate has been false, and that her snobbish attraction to the elite values of her school and the success she sees as personified by North Shore Sydney, with its wealth and success in the eyes of the world, has also been false. Josephine learns that she loves Jacob because he is completely himself and without pretensions of any kind. She also makes a significant choice not to have sex with him, another milestone along her road to self discovery. She chooses not to sleep with him because the time is not right. This contrasts with the decisions Katia and Christina made about sex when they were Josephine's age. Melina hates it when people say that they are so glad she has put 'the moral' point of view regarding sex, because that wasn't her point. It was just that Josephine wasn't ready and had the maturity to choose not to.
John Barton is the character that Melina finds it difficult to talk about. She says 'no-one is comfortable to kill off a character', but that it was not believable for John to come in at the end of the story and say that he had come to terms with his father. Melina knew all along that she would have to kill him. His suicide is about HSC pressure and parental pressure but it is more than that. There is an intrinsic weakness in John - he is not able to fight for his own freedom. Interaction between John and Josephine teaches Josephine that the priority that she puts on elite success - becoming a barrister, getting top marks in the HSC, winning debates and public speaking competitions, being school captain, etc. means nothing if you do not have the freedom to make your own way in life. His death shows her that she does have such freedom.
Josephine's girlfriends, the outrageous and hilarious Seraphina, nervous Anna, and Lee, who is very similar to Josephine, act as contrasts to Josephine along her path to freedom.
Josephine's jealous and misguided relationship with Poison Ivy, the school captain to her vice captain, changes at the end of the story when she discovers that John Barton was right, and that she and Ivy are very alike and could be friends, if Josephine could just not over react to Ivy's apparent racism. Melina made the point that this book is not about racism. 'It is about ignorance, and not just Anglo-Celtic ignorance. It is about Josephine's ignorance'.
Sister Louise, like Christina a much more fully drawn character in the first draft of the novel, is based upon some of the wonderful feminist nuns Melina came across in her own school days. It is in the encounter with Sister Louise after the very funny wagging of the school walkathon that we see the first indication of growth in Josephine. She acknowledges that she has been irresponsible and Sister Louise makes her realise that she has the potential for leadership.
Summing up JosephineMelina said that Josephine is really two different people at the beginning and the end of the book. In the beginning, Josephine is overdramatic, poised to react to any real or imagined slight to her Italian background and her illegitimacy; very inclined to put people into slots and to not allow for any overlapping. Her problems are not great, it is only her perception of them that gives them such importance. She is inclined to be self absorbed, and to over-react in ways that are sometimes silly e.g. spitting on the menacing boy in Macdonalds. Melina is upset when people quote her as not liking Josephine - it is just that she can see her faults, and is helping her along the way to getting rid of them. At the end of the book, Melina sees Josephine as beginning to achieve freedom - she has learnt that she has blown her problems out of all proportion, that not everyone is about to crucify her for being Italian and illegitimate. Josephine's interaction with the other characters has brought this about and it is this interaction which is the essential fascination of writing for Melina Marchetta. She has written in Looking for Alibrandi an amazing first novel. She is delighted with its success -there are 37,000 copies of it in print and sales are spectacular. Many schools have class sets. We finished the interview speculating on what would have happened to the characters in later life. Melina's confession: she would have had Jacob and Josephine find each other again after some years, Christina and Michael would get together too, as the essential respect is there, and ... wait for it, in wildest speculation, Marcus Sandford and Grandmother Katia would get back together!

All's well that ends well!
But it is up to the readers to make their own speculations.
Melina's next publication is a short story, tentatively called "Anna and Francesea", in a new Agnes Nieuwenhuizen anthology, also provisionally called Family, to be published in 1994.
Scan contacted Melina Marchette through Lateral Learning (Speakers for Schools), ph. (02) 9968 2067.