Zita Whalley on unconventional storytelling techniques
By Andy Malt
As part of Margate Week our Local Writers Showcase will give the opportunity to hear from some of the incredible writing talent located in Thanet. Fourteen writers will read excerpts of their work, covering fiction, wellness, memoir and more.
One of the writers to take the stage is Zita Whalley. Originally from Australia, now living in Margate, the writer, journalist and theatre-maker will read from her work-in-progress novel Oh, Australia! Kangaroo. Are You Married?
A coming-of-age story, its protagonist is a young woman called Jess, who leaves Australia for a rite of passage backpacking trip to Japan. She never quite makes it there though, getting caught up in an adventure in South East Asia en route that lands her in trouble.
“It's a story about discovering your wanderlust and what happens when plans go awry,” says Zita. “Equally, though, it's about home and the people who ground you.”
The story is told through emails from Jess to friends and family back home, as well as her own diary entries. This, says Zita, “reveal aspects of Jess' character and can expose her as an unreliable narrator through the information she chooses to share and to whom.”
Telling the story in this way also helps to ground the book in a particular time. “The story is set in the early 2000s, before smartphones and social media and when people didn't know if you were just having fun or lost and in trouble,” she explains. “Also, it's just how you communicated back then, a blast of highlights that you may or may not have embellished.”
In part, the book is based on Zita’s own travel diaries. Although, she says, the story is “a total departure from my own experience”, her own record of being in her early 20s and travelling the world has helped to “inform characters, place and moments in time.”
“A flick through is good for a laugh and a cringe,” she says of the diaries and correspondence she has kept hold of. “It reminds me that realising the world is big and you are in it is dizzying, and also of the fearlessness and stupidity of being in your 20s; when you can't pay a bill on time, yet somehow you've managed to take yourself off to the middle of the Laotian jungle; when you have opinions on everything, but you've barely started adult life.”
The Local Writers Showcase will take place at The Margate School on Tuesday, 1st October from 7.30-9.30pm. Other writers set to share their work are Jeanine Connor, Madeleine F White, Seb Reilly, Simon Mason, Gavin Boyter, Mike Goldwater & Sarah Tait, Andrew Dennis, Bernie Morgan, Anna Gash, Naomi Gale, Sarah Bowman, Sarah Candlish, and Joshua Piercy. Tickets cost £5. Book yours here.