Julia Green
About Author
Julia is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and the Course Director for the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. Her students have included prize-winning Sally Nicholls, Marie-Louise Jensen, Lucy Christopher and Elen Caldecott. Julia lives in Bath.
Author link
http://www.facebook.com/JuliaGreenAuthor;http://www.julia-green.co.uk/
Interview
BRINGING THE SUMMER
BLOOMSBURY
MAY 2012
Bringing the Summer is Julia Green's latest teen novel, published by Bloomsbury, which explores families, loyalties and love. The author has talked to us about writing for teens, inspiration, and the ups and downs of love.
Q: Why do you write for teenagers?
A: I love writing for teenagers because this is such an important time of your life: you are doing things for the first time, making big choices, thinking about many important, life-changing things.
It's a time of transition: the borderland between childhood and adult hood. The emotional changes, the new relationships, all these make excellent material for the kind of fiction I want to write.
It's a complex, challenging, difficult time for many. I think hope that stories can help and make a difference. At the very least, they can make you realise you are not alone in how you think and feel.
The stories I read at this time of my life have stayed with me for ever ( I Capture the Castle, K M Peyton's novels, Alan Garner's The Owl Service, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights ....)
Q: We met the main character, Freya, in Breathing Underwater. What do you enjoy about revisiting a character you've already written about?
A: I like writing about new characters (I'm doing that at the moment, for my next novel) but there's a real satisfaction in re-visiting a character from an earlier novel.
Freya from Breathing Underwater was so real to me, and there was so much more I wanted to show about her. I went on thinking about her, wondering how she would be in the years that followed, as she grew up. In Bringing the Summer, she's 16 - the same age her brother Joe was when he died. That seemed to be significant.
Readers seem to like following a character through more than one novel. I still get asked if I'm going to write a third novel about Mia ( from Blue Moon and Baby Blue). It's lovely that they care about her and want to find out more.
Q: There's a bit of a love triangle going on between two brothers and Freya - did any earlier literary siblings inspire this, like Jules et Jim perhaps?
A: The two brothers ( Gabes and Theo) aren't based on any other literary brothers. They 'borrow' some aspects from some real young men I know, but mostly they are my own creation. They represent opposites in some ways the light and the dark.
I always knew that it was really the whole idea of a proper big family that Freya was falling in love with. That neither of the brothers was the 'right' one for her, in fact. The next book, if I were to write it, would be about Freya and Danny, and would be set back on the island of St Ailla.
Q: The settings in your novels, such as St Ailla, feel very 'real' - how do you go about creating that?
A: Place is very important to me: it's so much more than the setting where things happen. It brings a whole new layer to a story: an atmosphere, a feeling to the novel. It anchors the story in the real physical world, and it takes the reader somewhere different, while they are reading.
It can influence what happens too. I always loved this aspect of Thomas Hardy's fiction. I choose places I know, and can imagine in detail, and often I choose a place where I would like to be ( islands, coasts: the sea or rivers are often important in my work).
Q: Freya is a keen artist - are you?
A: I wish I could paint for real, but I can't. I imagine the paintings that Freya does in the novel : I can 'see' them vividly in my imagination. I paint with my words instead. I like looking at paintings, and I mention real artists that I like( Winifred Nicholson, for example).
Q: Freya enjoys discovering Gabes' family and learning about their life growing up in an old farmhouse - was that anything like your upbringing?
A: My own upbringing wasn't like Freya's or Gabes'. I had a (mostly) happy family life in a smallish village in Surrey with two sisters. The one big sadness was that our brother died as a baby.
I longed as a child to live in the proper countryside, in an ancient farmhouse like Gabes'. I still wish that, sometimes! I'd like the orchard and hens and the beautiful garden. But I'm grown up enough to be content with what I do have in my life: my own gorgeous family. I have two sons.
Q: In the novel's notes you explain that a 'dramatic incident' on a train decided you on a key scene for the novel - what was that incident?
A: The dramatic incident I refer to in the Notes happened on a journey back from Cornwall, when someone stepped in front of the train we were travelling on.
It triggered other memories, of when this happened to someone in my childhood, and another more recent tragic event. It's horrible, and real. People do take their own lives this way, in a moment of terrible desperation and hopelessness.
Q: What would you like your readers to take away with them from this novel?
A: I hope readers will enjoy the ups and downs of Freya's 'journey' as she falls in love, makes new friends, makes good and bad choices about her life, and grows up a little. I hope they will immerse themselves in her world, and think about their own lives, families and friendships too.
I hope they will fall in love with the family and the house and the people. I hope they will feel things strongly alongside Freya, and find the end uplifting and full of hope. Perhaps they will 'see' and understand new things about themselves.
Q: What do you enjoy about your 'day job' - a creative writing lecturer?
A: High points of my 'day job' include the thrill of helping people achieve their dreams ( writing, editing and polishing a manuscript, finding an agent, getting a publication deal ); meeting lots of creative, interesting people and working alongside brilliant colleagues who are all exceptional writers as well as teachers. Oh, and looking out of the windows of my office in the spectacular house where we teach the MA (Corsham Court) , onto lawns and huge chestnut trees, with peacocks calling...
Q: What are you writing next?
A: My next novel is set on a remote hebridean island .... I have three more chapters to write!
