{"id":168498,"date":"2022-07-14T09:54:23","date_gmt":"2022-07-13T23:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=168498"},"modified":"2022-07-29T14:48:50","modified_gmt":"2022-07-29T04:48:50","slug":"read-a-qa-with-shirley-marr-author-of-all-four-quarters-of-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2022\/07\/14\/read-a-qa-with-shirley-marr-author-of-all-four-quarters-of-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Read a Q&A with Shirley Marr, author of All Four Quarters of the Moon!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Shirley Marr is a first-generation Chinese-Australian living in Perth and an award-winning author of young adult and children’s fiction, including YA novels Fury and Preloved, and children\u2019s novels Little Jiang and A Glasshouse of Stars. She describes herself as having a Western mind and an Eastern heart. She likes to write in the space in the middle where they both collide, basing her stories on her own personal experiences of migration and growing up in Australia, along with the folk and fairy tales from her mother. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arriving in mainland Australia from Christmas Island as a seven-year-old in the 1980s and experiencing the good, the bad, and the wonder that comes with culture shock, Shirley has been in love with reading and writing from that early age. Shirley is a universe full of stars and stories and hopes to share the many other novels that she has inside her.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Shirley is here to answer a few of our questions about All Four Quarters of the Moon<\/a><\/strong>! Read on \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shirley Marr<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Please tell us about your book, All Four Quarters of the Moon!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM<\/strong>: This is a story of two young sisters who move to Australia and finding themselves in an unfamiliar new world, create a world for themselves made entirely of paper \u2013 forests, oceans, burrows, grasslands \u2013 all populated by little cut-out animals. In this secret world, the sisters reinterpret old Chinese myths to make sense of their own story. The novel moves through the phases of the moon and we see how their lives unfold over the course of this as they deal with cultural change, challenges and hardship.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Why was it important to you to write this story? Where did the inspiration come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM<\/strong>: I wanted to write something that reflected the journey I went through with my own younger sister and hope that readers with close siblings can relate with this bond and connect with the story. I wanted to tell another migration tale, covering aspects that I didn\u2019t tackle in my previous novel A Glasshouse of Stars, mainly the family dynamics of dealing with change. Once again, the inspiration for many of the scenes comes from my own personal experiences, but this time there are a lot more funny and amusing stories!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduce us to your protagonist, Peijing. What\u2019s your favourite thing about her?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM:<\/strong> Peijing is the older sister, so she prides herself on being the sensible and responsible one, who brings honour to the family, while keeping her extremely cheeky younger sister in check. My favourite thing about her is she is so self-sacrificial. While she grumbles on the inside about bearing responsibility and not being able to fully artistically express herself, she will literally do anything for her family. I think this is very much an older sibling thing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to write something that reflected the journey I went through with my own younger sister and hope that readers with close siblings can relate with this bond and connect with the story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

How have your own experiences of migration influenced your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM:<\/strong> I feel that if I didn\u2019t use my own experiences to inform my writing, then I am losing an opportunity to foster empathy, compassion, and understanding by allowing readers to look into my world, see what I have seen with my own eyes and have a gentle dialogue through story-telling. It\u2019s important for me to wear my heart and my story on my sleeve and make it an important aspect of everything I write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All Four Quarters of the Moon invokes many stories from Chinese mythology. Can you tell us about some of them and how you incorporated them into the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM:<\/strong> It\u2019s an all-star cast! I\u2019ve taken a lot of the many popular and well-known stories such as the legend of how the animals of the Chinese zodiac were selected, how the maiden and the rabbit came to be on the moon and how the Lunar New Year celebrations came to be. But as they are so well known, I didn\u2019t want to do a straight re-telling. Instead I have the sisters tell the stories to each other, so they are seen through the eyes of children and how it relates to their world. What I have ended up with is (hopefully) funny, slightly satirical reinvented meta-fiction!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you love about writing for younger readers?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM:<\/strong> I love writing children stories because even if they have dark parts or hard lessons to learn, they\u2019re always full of hope and there is an opportunity to provide mechanisms for coping with certain situations or dealing with change. Whereas adult books can sometimes be all about unhappy people in unhappy relationships who learn absolutely nothing and end up with unhappy endings!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there any books or authors that you can definitively say have had an impact on your development as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM:<\/strong> Strangely, William Faulkner! Although I\u2019m not a Southern Gentleman living in the ruins of a post-Civil War society, I connected deeply with his works that speak of honour, legacy, ancestry, justice, and inter-generational trauma. As a Chinese person, all these things resonate with me. In much the same way, I hope that even though my readers may not be child migrants, but if they are lost and trying to find their place in their world, then we can connect through shared universal feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the last book you read and loved?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM: <\/strong> Not coming out until October 2022, but A Girl Called Corpse<\/a> by Reece Carter! Fresh and spooky and representative, I predict it will be the next smash series!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Check out our Podcast and YouTube channel now!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What do you hope readers will discover in All Four Quarters of the Moon?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM<\/strong>: I hope that if they are trying to find their fit in the world like Peijing that they will see with the changing of the moon \u2013 which wanes, but is then new and then full \u2013 that their story will evolve and with persistence and courage, they will prevail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, what\u2019s up next for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SM<\/strong>: I\u2019m working on a contemporary middle-grade science-fiction! Wild I know, but don\u2019t worry, it will be touched with diversity and own voices like my other stuff!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks Shirley!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 All Four Quarters of the Moon<\/a><\/strong> by Shirley Marr (Penguin Australia) is out now!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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