Bulletin

Issue: May 2005

News

A novel emerges and the literary world takes note

It started a decade ago when Catherine Padmore and fellow Creative Writing students workshopped her short story idea during a tutorial on the fourth floor of the Humanities 2 Building on the Melbourne (Bundoora) campus.

With much perspiration, and plot and character changes, the idea gradually metamorphed into a novel produced in tandem with her own academic progress from La Trobe BA undergraduate to Doctor of Philosophy.

The result is Dr Padmore’s first major literary creation, Sibyl’s Cave, which, besides achieving strong praise in a number of reviews in Australian newspapers, was short listed for the 2001 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (first book category, South East Asia and South Pacific Region).

Now a lecturer in La Trobe’s English Program, Dr Padmore is using her own recent fiction writing experience to help Bachelor of Arts students taking one of her units, Writing Fiction.

Sibyl’s Cave is the story of an Italian orphan, Billie, who emigrates after a childhood in Italy and the United Kingdom to a new life as an adult in Australia. It is a rich story about family and the importance of identity. The novel was a component of her PhD studies in creative writing at Deakin University

Although she herself underwent the migrant experience, having emigrated with her family from Britain at the age of 11, the story is by no means autobiographical.

‘It is pure fiction, although I drew on some elements from my own experiences where appropriate to the story,’ she says.

She intends to continue teaching and writing, mining the intellectual ores of each aspect of her work to enhance the other. Her current writing project, a novel about Elizabethan women, is in the preliminary research stage.

‘I have always wanted both to write and to teach. I suppose for many writers there is an element of the solitary figure seeking inspiration alone in the garret away from the temptations of daily life.

‘However for me there is another element and that is what well may be the relatively new writers’ process of workshopping writing ideas. The teaching process is very helpful to my writing as the freshness and enthusiasm of the students in discussing their own writing efforts gives me strength and encouragement.’

Her students today undergo the same highs and lows as she did when her writing was workshopped.

‘It can be nerve-wracking when a fellow student comments on your prose or your plot but this has advantages because Creative Writing is one of the few subjects where students gain inspiration and practical help from their classmates. Workshops can reveal what we sometimes don’t see in our own writing’.

Dr Padmore plans to have her next novel completed within two years.

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