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         This is an informal interview tape-recorded at my home over lunch outdoors on a sunny Sydney day. It appears here with the kind permission of award-winning New Zealand author Rachel McAlpine, who conducted it as part of her research into Australian and New Zealand romance writers, for her book THE PASSIONATE PEN.

      Cheryl Sawyer discusses the wider cultural significance of her two professional roles: editing non-fiction and writing mainstream historical romances. She reveals how her editorial experience assists her as a writer, and why in LA CREOLE she chose to write an unconventional hero.

Rachel: Cheryl, was there anything in your childhood that turned you toward your two careers?
Cheryl: I think there are aspects of my childhood that explain why I'm a writer and a publisher. I had a deeply happy childhood: I was a bookworm and at the same time incredibly active because I grew up in the country. So I had the influence of books on my imaginative life, and I had the most wonderful real life you could hope for. My closest friend lived just down the road. With my younger brother we formed this trio of adventurers. We acted out characters in stories and movies Vikings, or cowboys and Indians.
         I had a primary teacher who used to encourage me to write stories, and the institution of the library played a big part in our lives. This would have had an influence on me too I've always loved the theatre. Every year we used to put on a circus. We also put on a puppet show for the Girl Guides, the Scouts, and other schools. So as children we were entertaining other children.

Rachel: How did you come to write your first novel?
Cheryl: I have an English MA and a French MA. I taught for a bit and then got into publishing. We had a baby at that stage, and we decided to go overseas. It was in France that I wrote my first historical novel. I became fascinated by French history because we were actually living in a beautiful seventeenth-century chateau, quite close to Paris, where I was a temporary nanny to the two girls of the Marquis and Marquise de Breteuil. Later I taught in the village, where during the day our son was going to pre-school and my husband was writing a serious novel. He got so keen that he wanted to keep writing in the evening. I thought, I'm going to write an historical novel rather in the Georgette Heyer fashion. It took me a month to write and two months to type out. I got a quite nice rejection from an agent in England, then I just forgot about it and threw it away. I really did it to fill in time. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and that was a revelation.
         Much later I was in France for another year writing a doctoral thesis. Then, back in New Zealand, I tutored at Auckland University, but when we came to Australia I didn't really want an academic career. I thought, I know what I'll do, I'll start writing again!

Rachel: How did you go about it?
Cheryl: For years I wrote in my spare time. I worked in publishing and I had to take the bus to work, which took an hour and a quarter, so in that time, in my head, I would write and edit parts of the novel. I would get to work early and take ten minutes to write down in longhand what I had selected, about a page. On the way home I would do the same thing, write in my head. It took me two and a half years to write LA CREOLE.

Rachel: What made you choose to write historicals?
Cheryl: I believe it's important for us to know what's happened in the past. One thing that horrified me when I was doing research for LA CREOLE was that the diplomatic situation and relationships between countries in the mid-eighteenth century bore a nasty resemblance to what has continued to happen in European history over the last two hundred years. You find the same allies, the same distrust, the same trouble spots where people are gathering to fight each other again and again.
         My first research about Martinique in the 1700s was fascinating. One major source was the Pere Labat who founded the Dominican mission in Martinique and eventually had a sugar plantation himself. He wrote reams of detailed notes about sugar planting and the slaves. Just one detail as an example: the slaves used to hang hummingbird nests inside their huts and keep these iridescent, fragile creatures as pets. Hummingbirds appear twice in my novel, fleetingly: they became a symbol for me of the fragility of life in that terrible situation.
         Most of the details I read about slave life on those plantations I could not put in the book, they were too awful. I read a Belgian PhD thesis in French, for instance, on exactly what nutrition the slaves would have received in the French sugar islands at that time. I read this very clinical, dispassionate book and I had nightmares that night. The facts were dreadful. But the reader has to know some, to realize that my heroine is escaping from utter misery and mindless cruelty. You have to understand why she wants to go back and free the slaves she grew up with, and why she keeps this obsession in the forefront of her mind while she is in France.
         It was funny, last night I was asked by a radio interviewer: "How do people get the confidence to write so fluently about history?" And maybe it is quite a bold thing to do.
         I realized there were three things that made me write LA CREOLE. My desire was first sparked by eighteenth-century French literature. Secondly, I was fascinated by Martinique and Guadeloupe because I had two dear friends from those places and they were both the descendants of slaves. They lent me books on slavery and they talked to me very freely. The third reason was living in that chateau and seeing how modern French aristocrats live. The chateau was kept in the family; first sons of each generation inherited. I was able quite easily to transport myself into the past because I was surrounded by their furniture and paintings, and I could imagine real people amongst them in the 1750s.
         These aristocrats were the people running the country at the time. You have this extraordinary gap between the very high ideals they had about government, ideas that my hero puts into his banned books, and the quite insouciant manner in which they could exploit other races and the poor in their own country.
         Now that we're a global village, you and I are the aristocrats: we belong to a very thin layer of privileged people. When we read in the newspaper about people starving to death in Africa, and we turn the page, we are in effect doing exactly what the French aristocrat did when he drove through the streets of Paris ignoring the people who were about to fall under the hooves of his horses because of exhaustion and malnutrition.
         If you look at history that way, you forget about people being wildly different from yourself, and try to see what they were really like. You can read their letters, their conversations, their books, you can sample the food they ate. That's the fascination, too, of historical fiction.

Rachel: How do you feel about being described as a romance writer?
Cheryl: Historical romance belongs to the good old ripping yarn section of our literature. I'm being marketed as a romance writer, and that's fine. The roman, tales of adventure woven into a love story is one of the great forms of literature. We haven't grown out of it and we're not going to. Statistically, romance is the most read form of literature in America and here. Exactly why, I'm not sure. At one stage I came to believe that human beings write love stories and read them in order to believe that human beings are lovable. We say to ourselves, we may be ruining the planet or ripping our souls apart but we are lovable creatures. If so it may be one of the greatest lies we've ever told ourselves. That's an extreme and negative view but there's at least a particle of truth in it.

Rachel: Now, Cheryl, you've told me your own romance was a bit like the romance in LA CREOLE?
Cheryl: My own love story started when my husband and I met at university. My husband's eyes are very alive and he engages with people very directly. He's fascinated by other people and he genuinely loves the company of women for conversation, companionship, intellectual debate. He has a very socialising influence, too if a few of you are sitting round talking, the conversation becomes animated pretty quickly.
         So when I created my hero in LA CREOLE, I thought it would be fun to make him like my husband. I wanted the hero and heroine to become friends before they were in love. You cannot become friends with the person who stands mysteriously and gloomily in the corner hiding his Byronic past: you can only ignore him or argue with him or chuck yourself at him. But if you've got someone who already engages with you and is prepared to be a genuine friend (and men like that do exist because I'm married to one) you can speak frankly to one another. My heroine is the one with the Byronic past and my hero is the energizer.
         My hero is not rich and has no influence at court. He ruined his own chances by being arrested for keeping subversive literature under his bed. That's a true story, by the way, which gave me his surname, Dupre de Richemont. When I sent LA CREOLE to a friend in France she said, Oh, I know the Dupre de Richemonts! - I was tickled, and very pleased that I hadn't slandered their ancestor, because he really did spend time in the Bastille. Precisely how long, however, I don't know - I let him out after a year.

Rachel: Do you think being a publisher has helped your writing?
Cheryl: Publishing has probably helped me somewhat as a writer. There's a very creative side to it once you get to the stage of putting together a list and you're attracting authors who have really got something to say. When you plan a book with an author you think about structure and content. Publishing is creative in other ways too, particularly with non-fiction: you're helping society to reflect on itself, participating in a very humble and behind-the-scenes way in the culture of the country.
         Possibly in the macro-editing and the rewriting you bring your editing skills to bear on the text. That's quite hard if you start your editing directly after you've written it. But as Sartre said, if you can put something away for six months and then bring it out of the drawer, you've got some chance of looking at it as a reader rather than the writer.

Rachel: Do you want to say a little bit about the environment you work in?
Cheryl: Previously, my working environment was the bus. Now I've got the tiniest Macintosh in a corner of our bedroom. Our apartment is on the roof of a brick building, with a swimming pool and a large tiled terrace looking over treetops and rooftops. We decided to give it a Mediterranean look so we've got lots of terracotta and a bit of topiary and lavender and cypresses. One of the regular things I do in Sydney is opera and classical music reviews. I've been fond of opera for a very long time. We're happy here, until we set out for Costa Rica or wherever.