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Best Read with Vegemite: One Shot World Tour - John Marsden and "The Rabbits" (Part One)
August 15, 2007
You can't talk about Australian authors for youth without the name of John Marsden coming up. Sorry. Can't be done. If we are to believe Something About the Author (Vol. 146) it is because, "First, he is known for not talking down to his audience, fully aware that for many teenagers, life is bleak, challenging, and dangerous. Second, he is applauded for his ability to craft exciting adventure stories in while the young protagonists are called to adult action - with all its moral and ethical implications." Authors that find success in the critical and commercial realms alike live the dream in a lot of way. Best known, perhaps, for this Tomorrow, When the War Began series, Marsden's work extends from YA novels to picture books to the creation of his very own school.
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In Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS) he wrote, "Growing up in Australia wasn't a matter of kangaroos, surfboards, and the wild outback. Not for me anyway. My childhood was spent in the quiet country towns in the green southern states of Victoria and Tasmania. It was peaceful, secure, and often very boring."
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According to Wikipedia (notoriously unreliable) "In 1982, he was arrested while on the blockade attempting to stop construction of the Franklin Dam. As all the prisons in the region were full due to the number of people arrested, Marsden was placed in the high-security Risdon Prison for a night. He later wrote that he used the experience to help him write scenes in Letters From The Inside and parts of the Tomorrow series."
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Of Catcher in the Rye in SAAS, "I'd never dreamt you were allowed to write like that . . . For the first time I was reading a genuine, contemporary teenage voice. If I've had any success at capturing teenage voices on paper, it's because of what I learnt at the age of fifteen from J.D. Salinger."
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Of what may be remembered as his most outstanding book, The Rabbits, the Horn Book review said, "This book is a title to jolt readers . . . There is no doubt as to the writer's intentions: to sober , sadden, and provoke."
He has a truly beautiful website that requires an enormous screen to view it properly. He also keeps a blog with titles to his posts like Alice: an unsolved mystery, Go ask Alice, and The Elusive Alice, down in the garden, possibly eating cucumbers. It is also notable in that this blog began with the following statement: "I can feel a blog coming on. I am about to blog. I’ve never blogged before but when a blog forms in your stomach and starts to work its way through your system, you know what it is. Blog. Oh God, sorry, that was a big blog, and now I’m about to blog all over the room."
(CONTINUED IN PART TWO)
Posted by Elizabeth Bird on August 15, 2007 | Comments (7)
