Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer who has been published widely. His war novel, Bodies of Men, was published by Hachette Australia in 2019. It was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year, and shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards. Nigel’s new novel, My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, will be published by Ultimo Press (an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing) on 4 May 2022 and has been described as ‘A triumph of a book’ (Peter Polites), ‘A poignant and ultimately hopeful novel’ (Delia Falconer), and ‘A must-read of Australian literature’ (Holden Sheppard). Nigel lives on unceded Ngunnawal / Ngambri / Gundangara Country, otherwise known as the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.
Today, Nigel Featherstone is on the blog to answer a few of our questions about My Heart is a Little Wild Thing. Read on …
Nigel Featherstone (Photo by David Lindesay).
Please tell us about your book, My Heart is a Little Wild Thing!
NF: The novel is about a man called Patrick who has always considered himself a good son. Willing to live his life to please his parents, his sense of duty is paramount to his own desires and dreams. But as his mother’s health deteriorates and his siblings remain largely absent, Patrick finds the ties that bind him to his mother begin to chafe. After an argument leads to a violent act, Patrick travels to a familiar farm on the Monaro, a barren but beautiful expanse of rolling plains at the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. There he reflects on what his life has been – and through a chance encounter with a rare animal and an intriguing stranger, he starts to wonder if perhaps it is not too late to let his heart run wild.
Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
NF: I became interested in tiger quolls in 2007 because they are functionally extinct in the ACT region, where I live, but every so often a body will be found on the road or there will be a sighting of a live one in a suburban garden. I began thinking about how the animal might exist in a piece of fiction. It did appear in various manuscripts, but those have remained in the bottom drawer. Then one day I started thinking about my mother, how she had a very definite idea about how I should live my life, which was not necessarily the idea I had for life. It took me a few years but in the end I decided to disobey her and live according to my own values and desires. What if I had not obeyed her?
Almost immediately Patrick Ash appeared: middle-aged, he lives in a small semi-rural village and in the same street as his mother; he wants to be a writer but chose to be an architect to please her (although, after a promising start, that career never came to much), and he has hidden the fact that he is attracted to men. After he has a terrible fight with his mother, Patrick takes himself down to the Monaro to recall the happiness of his childhood; there, he sees an animal – I think we know what it is – that leads him to meet a man who will change his life. I have spent 30 years living on the edge of the Monaro and I have long been fascinated with the place: it is strange, mysterious and potentially dangerous, and I think that is why Patrick is so fascinated by it, because even as a boy he knew that there was something strange, mysterious and potentially dangerous at the core of his being, something that would, if allowed to be expressed, become beautiful.
Tell us a little bit about Patrick, your protagonist. What was your favourite thing about writing him into being? What would you say is the most challenging thing about him?
NF: Spending the last three years with Patrick has been fascinating. He is thoughtful, sensitive, tender, self-obsessed (at times), melancholic, shy; but he is also brave and takes risks, and I reckon he is a sensualist too, and romantic. Plus he has a rather lovely sense of humour. Writing him and his story has been interesting to me because I wrote the novel as if Patrick is writing a memoir about the most significant period in his life, the one during which he finally becomes who he needs to be and starts living freely. Perhaps the most challenging element of writing him is his introspection – he thinks a lot, and he also worries about everything. But, despite his circumstance, he has lived a life that has been very much worth exploring – he is not as restrained as he at first leads us to believe – and that helped me to help him write his memoir.
The ‘mother’ is an ever-present figure in fiction. What interests you about motherhood and the mother-son relationship as a writer?
NF: Two years ago, in those quiet, empty days between Christmas and New Year, my mother died; her final years were destroyed by dementia. The day after she was cremated, I thought, Who exactly was the woman who brought me into the world and raised me? Although Patrick’s mother is not my mother, writing this novel has been a way of answering that question. I think he ends up knowing more about his mother than I know about mine, though perhaps he has shown me how I might remain connected with my mother, even though she is gone. Also, it is probably true that gay men have interesting relationships with their mothers: loving but complex, and sometimes intense. Maybe the novel is also asking, why is that so?
‘I don’t turn to fiction for escape; I love how it helps us makes sense of the world, and offers illumination, even enlightenment.’
Current global events make life seem bleak and unweatherable at times. What value do you think there is in finding joy through fiction?
NF: Such a wonderful and, yes, pertinent question. Fiction offers that incredible combination of taking us away from our own lives and predicaments to the lives and predicaments of others, all the while discovering commonalities and core truths. I don’t turn to fiction for escape; I love how it helps us makes sense of the world, and offers illumination, even enlightenment. It can provoke too, which is necessary, potentially more necessary than ever. I could not begin to imagine living without fiction: it adds so much depth to my life, and, yes, joy.
Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming a writer?
NF: I have been writing for most of my life. I am fortunate to have attended a school that had a weekly double creative-writing class from primary school to year 10, as I remember it. I am also fortunate that my mother was a big reader – and, for a while, a bookseller – and our house was filled with books, and every month she took my two brothers and me to the local library to borrow our next reads. In my early twenties I started writing short stories and sending them off to literary journals and, over time, began being published. I spent some years having work – collections of stories, three novellas, a novel – published by small presses and/or university publishers. And then came along Bodies of Men, which was published in 2019 by Hachette, and now My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, which is being published by Ultimo Press, the mighty and adventurous imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing. So, it has been a slow burn of a career, if I can put it that way. It has taught me that patience is a virtue (!), and that in the literary world it is best to write the way you want to write, rather than write what some folk wished you wrote. There are almost 8 billion different ways to write, thank goodness.
Who did you write this book for? Who do you wish would read it?
NF: I wrote the book for lovers of literary fiction, but also for anyone interested in the true life of Australian families, in different expressions of sexuality, and in how human life and nature (if those are to be separated) intersect. It is also a novel in which music plays a central role. Quite honestly, I hope everyone reads it. I put my soul into this one, and, yes, my heart.
What is the last book you read and loved?
NF: The Service of Clouds by Delia Falconer. I so admired the novel’s evocation of the Blue Mountains and the extraordinary way every paragraph is so finely shaped, each containing a whole world, sometimes a multitude of worlds. And the sense of magic. I also loved Falconer’s Signs and Wonders: despatches from a time of beauty and loss. And I absolutely adored 40 Nights by Pirooz Jafari: a novel about war, migration and family told with such generosity and openness – I found it very moving indeed.
What do you hope readers will discover in My Heart is a Little Wild Thing?
NF: I hope readers discover the Monaro, because it is such a beguiling part of the world. I hope they discover a little more about how gay lives can be expressed – this was not my original intention (sometimes these things only become apparent once the novel has been finished), but in a way the novel tracks a significant time in the life of gay Australia, from the oppression and tragedy of the 1980s to a more inclusive time now, accepting that it is still not inclusive for all. And I hope readers discover more about the ways that all human beings are intimately linked to the natural environment around them – perhaps we can only ever be as happy and healthy as the nearest patch of bushland is happy and healthy.
And finally, what’s up next for you?
NF: A rest! Having said that, I am continuing to work on my new work for the stage, a play with songs, which is being developed through The Street Theatre in Canberra. Last year I founded a spoken-word-and-music collective, called Hell Herons, which is a collaboration with poet Melinda Smith and performance-poet CJ Bowerbird. Speaking of music, there is a wonderful project relating to My Heart is a Little Wild Thing – more about this in a few months. And there is always a new piece of longform prose that is knocking on my noggin.
Thanks Nigel!
—My Heart is a Little Wild Thing by Nigel Featherstone (Ultimo Press) is out now.
My Heart is a Little Wild Thing
The day after I tried to kill my mother, I tossed some clothes, a pair of hiking boots, a baseball cap and a few toiletries into my backpack, and left at dawn.
Patrick has always considered himself a good son. Willing to live his life to please his parents, his sense of duty paramount to his own desires and dreams. But as his mother’s health continues to deteriorate and his siblings remain absent, he finds the ties that bind him to his mother begin to chafe. After an argument leads to a violent act, he travels to a familiar country retreat to reflect on what his life could be...
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WILD THING DIARY 6: letting go (but holding on), public lives, conversations | Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote