Short Story Master

By Andrea Louise Thomas Photos Yanni

Red Hill writer Jodie Kewley is a masterful teller of tales. She writes with exquisite intimacy in a perfectly measured pace that keeps the reader engaged from the first word to the last. Jodie won the Mornington Peninsula Shire Mayor’s Short Story Writing Awards both this year and last year.

The first time that she entered a short story competition was for Family Circle magazine 35 years ago; she won $3000, a new computer, an allexpenses paid trip to Sydney and a chance to meet literary legend, Kate Grenville. It’s a fair call to say Jodie is a natural.

While the reading is effortless, the writing is not. That’s where the craft comes in. Like a great magic trick, the audience is awed, but has no idea how it happened. That’s what Jodie’s stories are like. Even more remarkable, she has never had any formal training in writing and was never given any life-changing advice from a great writer. She just writes.

Jodie comes from a family of storytellers. Her father was a lawyer and is still a painter with great imagination. He’d regale young Jodie with original bedtime stories. Her mother was a lawyer and editor of law reviews, but she too had a knack for storytelling. Jodie’s grandmother was a poet. Growing up immersed in a world of words and ideas was the perfect grounding for a writer.

As a child, Jodie was surrounded by books. An avid reader, she enjoyed stories about pioneering people. Little House on the Prairie was one of her favourite series. She also liked Enid Blyton. Now she gravitates towards literary fiction preferring what she describes as ‘intense literature’ that requires effort on the reader’s part. She is always keen to get her hands on the latest Booker Prize winner.

Jodie has published three books: (non-fiction), Fathers in 1993, Earth Rising, (middle-grade fiction) in 1997 and Welcome to Paradise, (young adult fiction) in 1999. She currently has three novels on the go, but often gets pulled into another short story. She’s been writing them for decades, winning numerous awards. “I love the precision of the short story,” she says.

I love the precision of the short story

Jodie managed all this while doing other work. She did a brief stint as a newspaper journalist early on and she has worked as a cook, gardener, gallery manager and social worker. For the past 30 years she and her husband have been running their business, Red Hill Muesli. Jodie works part-time in order to have time to write.

Jodie goes about her writing in different ways depending on the project. Working on a novel, she plots it out getting all the ideas down before she begins. When working on a short story, she’s much more spontaneous, diving right in. She writes a short story slowly and deliberately getting every detail just right.

Milk, the story that won the Mayor’s Short Story Writing Award this year, came to her as a surprise. She’s not sure where the idea came from. It’s not based on life experience though you wouldn’t know that from reading it. She wrote the story at Police Point during her Artist-in-Residence placement, which was part of the Mayor’s prize.

She took her time working on it over the course of three days. Making sure the voice of a story is authentic is crucial. Interestingly, Milk was written in second person perspective - a departure for Jodie. It just came out that way.

Her characters are not based on anyone she knows. She finds that too restrictive. They are nuanced enough to be real, but not actually real people. She doesn’t base her characters on aspects of herself either. “I feel for my characters, but I’m never them.

I feel for my characters, but I’m never them

I’m a very private person so I’m not going to reveal myself through my writing,” she says.

Setting is very important. How the characters relate to place says a lot about them, she feels. Her stories are often in semirural settings. She gets more joy writing about landscapes and seascapes than urban locations. Seasons and weather are important because she really likes to set a scene.

The two-and-a-half-acre property in Red Hill she shares with her husband, dog and beloved chooks is a source of inspiration both for its incredible natural beauty and for the quiet it provides. Jodie feels a deep connection to the Mornington Peninsula. It often seeps into her writing.

Five hundred words a day is her writing target. Mostly she achieves it, when life doesn’t get in the way, but she can go way beyond when a great story presents itself. If captivated, she’ll spend three weeks crafting a short story before she feels truly satisfied with it.

For a writer with no formal training, who received no writing advice, her mastery of the craft is amazing. Her advice to new writers is read thoughtfully and write whether the mood strikes or not.

NB: For any publishers lurking out there, Jodie has a collection of award-winning short stories just itching to be published.