Video transcript
2019 NSW PRC author interview – Rebecca Lim

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TAMARA RODGERS: Hi. I'm Tamara Rodgers from the Premier's Reading Challenge. We're here at Riverside Theatre Parramatta for the Sydney Writers Festival All Day YA, a celebration of everything that's amazing about YA literature.

We've been joined by some fantastic Australian and overseas authors. We're really excited to bring you these chats. We'd really like to thank the Sydney Writers' Festival for having us along, and also thank our programme sponsors, our media partner NewsLocal, and our supporting partner, Dymocks Children's Charities. Thank you so much for your support.

Hi. I'm Tamara Rodgers from the Premier's Reading Challenge. We are hanging out backstage at All Day YA for the Sydney Writers Festival. Super excited to get to catch up with some great authors, including Rebecca Lim. Hi, Rebecca. How are you?

REBECCA LIM: Hi, everybody. Hello.

TAMARA RODGERS: So is this your first Sydney Writers' Festival? You've done a few before?

REBECCA LIM: I actually did one last year. So I think last year I came up to talk about strong female protagonists, I think. So I was talking about bad girls and girls who were a little bit different.

TAMARA RODGERS: The really fun ones?

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. The really fun ones. You get to do fun stuff.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah, cool. So you've written 19 books plus some bits and pieces in other things. Usually, that means that you're a pretty big reader, right? Someone who writes so much is obviously going to be reading a lot.

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. I'm reading all the time. I mean, I constantly have the news on, always looking at newspapers. Yeah. All the time. And reading books--

TAMARA RODGERS: What did you read when you were a kid? Just like, what's your connection with stories when you were growing up?

REBECCA LIM: I mean, this is kind of why I write the books I do now. There weren't a lot of Asian kids in the books that I was reading. So I started off reading kids' literature. And then I sort of moved into fantasy sci-fi, where you can kind of see like all sorts of species of not just human, but other things represented. So yeah, I started reading fantasy when I was about 9 or 10.

TAMARA RODGERS: Any particular books that stuck with you? Or authors that you kind of went, umm, yeah, I want to do that?

REBECCA LIM: It's kind of hard. Because I'm so ancient that a lot of the people that I used to read are kind of now a little bit wrong. You know, like, when you go back to a book after 20 years and you go, hang on a second. What did they say about women in that one?

So I did used to read a lot of female fantasy authors. But they kind of-- that whole female role was still kind of really very, very traditional. But for kids' fantasy, I really enjoyed Michael Ende's book. So he's written 'The Neverending Story.' He's also written 'Momo.'

I really enjoyed recently Rebecca Stead's, 'When You Reach Me,' which was incredible, because it's one of those books where you get to the end of the story and you immediately go back to the start to try to figure out all the clues that you missed because it's just so cleverly constructed. And it's got the whole time travel thing as well.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah, nice. And I love a bit of time travel.

REBECCA LIM: Love time travel books. I mean, you do sort of sit there going, how does that work? Does that work? You know, like the whole 'Terminator' thing, you know? It's kind of like that.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yes. And try to piece of those little connections together and go, hang on. Where are we now?

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. Which year was this? And is this the same timeline, or is it a different timeline? But, yeah, time travel stories are fantastic.

So I remember reading-- there were a few English authors I think in the 1980s, and this is showing my age, who did time travel novels that had kids going back to Tudor England or things like that. And also, you know, [inaudible] is an absolute classic.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yes. Yeah. So in your own work, a lot of your stuff is set in lots of different places around the world. But some of your more recent work-- so the 'Children of the Dragon' series is very Australian. How different is that to write a place that you're intimately familiar with because you live there?

REBECCA LIM: It's just so much easier. It really is. I mean, the thing to me, like, quite deliberately in the beginning was to try and set things all over the world. Because I want kids to get this idea that there is a broader world out there, and there's a lot of different cultures. And we should actually be trying to reflect the world that we live in rather than one very narrow viewpoint.

But I think the older that I've gotten, you kind of can say more and you can do more. And authors used to be told, can you make it more generic? Can you make it more international?

And I'm so old now, I can actually just say, you know what? I'm going to set it in Melbourne. I'm going to use Australian language. Or I'll set it in Sydney or whatever. And that's what I do now. Like, I've actually consciously made stuff more Australian rather than less Australian.

TAMARA RODGERS: I find as a reader that to read something, and I go, I know that corner.

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. I've seen that street.

TAMARA RODGERS: I know that street. Like, it's such an amazing way to really kind of connect with the story instantly in ways that it's much harder to do if it's set in a place that you're not really familiar with.

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. I've actually have had readers come back to me and say, why would you have taken Swanston Street? Why would you have taken that route to get to the police station? And I love that. That level of interaction is fantastic.

TAMARA RODGERS: It's just not-- you wouldn't walk that way normally.

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. They're like, you know, I would have taken this road instead. And it's great that they can actually see it as it's happening. So--

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah. And some your book feature things like demons, monsters, ghosts, dragons. What is it about those kinds of fantastical elements that you find really fascinating that you want to include in your work?

REBECCA LIM: I mean, as most people would really enjoy, like, just having the extraordinary encroach into an ordinary day is just a fantastic thing. I mean the whole Harry Potter thing, for example. The fact that a seemingly ordinary boy can manifest all these magic powers and have access to this magical world. I think everyone longs for that in their normal life.

So for me, I write this kind of fantasy which is called urban fantasy or low fantasy, that sort of takes the real world as a starting point. And then you kind of merge fantastical elements into it. So for me, in my culture, things like being possessed by demons or seeing ghosts or all that kind of stuff, it's quite commonplace. Like, we believe in that stuff.

So even though I've had the rigorous Presbyterian education, you're trying to marry together all the sort of mythical elements of all the cultures that you come into contact with. And you're trying to dump it all into your book and make sense of it. So that's kind of what I do.

Like, with dragons, for example. There's this view that dragons are like dwarf-chasing, gold-hoarding, fire-breathing things. And for Chinese people in particular, and lots of other Asian cultures as well, dragons are benevolent.

And so they can transform into human shape. They bring the rain. So things like that don't necessarily get reflected in dragon books that kids read. And so I wanted recently just to show a different perspective.

Kids, often in books, don't have a lot of agency. They've got no power. And so you think this seemingly ordinarily looking little Chinese girl is actually a dragon underneath. But she's just not manifesting that at the moment. So it's just to give kids this whole viewpoint on, you may be small, but you have power, that you have extraordinary reserves that nobody knows about.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah. Amazing. So you also write some nonfiction. And the 'Meet Me at the Intersection' anthology in which you edited, as well as contributed a piece to, is one of my-- part of one of my favourite movements in YA literature at the moment. It's this really great collection of authentic, engaging, diverse voices.

Can you talk just a bit about the process of deciding that this book was important and that you wanted to do it? And then, how do you pick out of those so many different, incredible authors that are out there?

REBECCA LIM: And all the intersections. Yeah. That's true. Well, for Ambelin and I, we met at one of those lovey, kind of dozens of author things, where you're all sort of crammed into a room together. And we couldn't actually speak to each other because there was just this big crush of Australian YA authors.

But we kind of started emailing each other about the fact that we're still 50, 60 years later bemoaning the lack of diversity in published Australian fiction for kids. And so the first thing that we did, we thought, well, we don't have any money to do this. But we will put together an initiative where we can try and support emerging authors.

So the first thing we did was a pitch day. And from that pitch day, where emerging authors got to meet with some of the biggest publishers and smallest publishers in the country, some of the contributors for the anthology came out of that day.

And so we kind of worked with them and said, I know you're really shy about this. There's never been a story published about a blind girl written by a blind girl. But can we have a story from you?

So with the anthology, we kind of did everything backwards. We didn't realise that you have to pitch an idea to a publisher, secure a publisher first, and then actually start writing.

TAMARA RODGERS: Before you get authors and stories?

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. We actually put together the whole thing. We edited the whole thing. And then we started the heartbreaking process of trying to get people to publish it. And heaps of publishers were really supportive of the idea. But then when it came to the actual, can the marketing team sell this? Can the sales team sell this? Can you actually sign a contract with us? Heartbreakingly, people would just go silent. And so we'd go, are you still in that acquisitions meeting? It's been two months. Are you trapped in this room, and you have me ringing back?

But we were really lucky because Fremantle Press has worked with Ambelin in the past. And even though it's not sort of 90% Western Australian authors, they actually loved the whole collection so much. And there were some Western Australian emerging writers in there that they said, well, we'll take the whole thing on.

And that's what we've found. Like, a lot of smaller publishers are a lot braver than the big publishers. Because they're saying, we're not for profit. Even though we're not quite sure how to sell this, and there's no place for anything like this, and no one else has ever done one, let's just have a go, which was amazing.

TAMARA RODGERS: And the fact that no one has done it is a really good indication that there's an audience for that kind of stuff.

REBECCA LIM: Well, we've been told for years that no diverse kids write, and no diverse kids would read, which is false. I mean, you've seen them at the festivals and things. And you see them at school.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah. My background is a teacher-librarian at a school in Western Sydney. We had an Intensive English Centre. So the majority of students were from non-English speaking backgrounds.

REBECCA LIM: And they're absolutely reading.

TAMARA RODGERS: They're absolutely reading. They're absolutely reading and craving stories that reflect something that they're--

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. Who they are.

TAMARA RODGERS: --familiar with. Even if it's not their actual experience, just to see someone who has a name that sounds like theirs on the page is so incredibly powerful.

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. It just makes them feel less invisible. And that's the thing. So I think that's kind of why-- I mean, we're still trying to get up, I think, a mentorship scheme for emerging authors this year.

But it's really important. If you've got a platform, and because Ambelin and I've been around long enough now, we've got a back catalogue, to actually make space for other people. Because nobody else is deliberately making space for them. So if we're there and we can do it, we should do it.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah. So if there are students out there who are watching this, who if you kind of feel like they've got a story that they want to tell that's unlike anything that they've seen anywhere, what advice would you give to those kinds of kids who want to write, but don't know how to find their way into that?

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. It is kind of daunting. Because in the past, you'd submit something to a slush pile, which is basically just a whole anonymous pile of manuscripts from people all over the country. And then, you'd hope that the publisher would pull it out.

These days it's a lot easier. So there are websites like the New South Wales Writers' Centre website-- I think it's called the Writers' Fic website-- the Australian Society of Authors website. There's a lot of stuff on those about how to get an agent and how to find a publisher, how to narrow down the kind of genre that you want to write for.

And a lot of publishers these days, which is amazing, there's like a weekly pitch email. You can actually come up with say, one chapter, two chapters, three chapters in a synopsis. Just follow the guidelines that the publisher sets. And you send it to that email address.

So there's no reason stopping you from actually putting the thing together and actually getting it out these days. Whereas, in the past, everything seemed so impossible to contact.

TAMARA RODGERS: You needed to know the secret handshake.

REBECCA LIM: Yeah. You just needed to figure out who to send it to. Who do I-- where do I get it to? And will it ever be responded to? But with these new websites and emails and portals, people will get back to you straight away and say, we received it. And if we love it, we'll get back to you in six weeks. So just try. Like, these days it's a lot easier to just try.

TAMARA RODGERS: What's next for you? What do you-- is there anything particular that you're working on that you can tell us about, or--

REBECCA LIM: Ambelin and I, actually, we were talking about this yesterday fairly late into the night. We're thinking we might write some time travelling, genre bending stuff for adults maybe. So yeah. We'll see how we go.

TAMARA RODGERS: Oh. You have at least one--

REBECCA LIM: Reader?

TAMARA RODGERS: Reader.

REBECCA LIM: Thank you. That's really kind.

TAMARA RODGERS: Chuck some time travel in on there. So thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us here today. We really appreciated the chat. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks for having me.