Who: Dorothy Johnston.
Where: Canberra, Australia.
What: Dorothy’s an award winning Australian novelist. She’s written eight novels, one of which, The Trojan Dog, won the ACT Book of the Year prize in 2001. She has also written a collection of short stories, The Division of Love.
She was born in Geelong, Victoria and trained as a teacher at the University of Melbourne, later working as a researcher in education.
In Her Words:
(Dorothy wrote this for the Sisters in Crime newsletter in Australia after she got back from her retreat here)
I arrived at Rydges Hotel early in October dazed and jet lagged, having just got off the plane from France. I still regret the timing, which prevented me from participating in SheKilda as fully as I would have liked. But La Muse, the writers’ retreat where I’d been staying, was so enjoyable that I’d like to spread the word. Home to the retreat is a beautiful stone manor house, the newer bits dated the middle of the seventeenth century, and looking out across a steep, tree-covered valley. The village is called Labastide Esparbairenque and is tiny (35 permanent inhabitants) and unspoilt. It’s situated in the mountains, twenty kilometres from Carcassonne. On a clear day, you can see across to Spain.
I wrote the best part of a novella while I was there. For the first few nights I was wide awake at 3AM, and while I lay listening to the owls in the valley, I suddenly saw what my main characters would have to do and where their actions would lead them.
I don’t know about inspiration for specific crime stories, but since returning to Australia I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at the closed company of a writers’ retreat. Then there are the villager inhabitants themselves, thirty-five being a perfectly manageable number. I learnt, amongst other things, that they have their own special version of the poison pen letter. Of course, it helps if your main character speaks French, and I found the surrounding countryside great for brushing mine up. The people in the Languedoc region speak a very growly French, deep in their throats; and there are the hunters, too, in the autumn and early winter, who scour the mountain sides with their baying dogs, and whose collective demeanour brings to mind the big bad wolf.
Insults aside, the La Muse directors are charming people, the house a dream, and walks in the woods and along the mountain streams perfect for the contemplation of dark deeds. And the local history – Labastide is in the middle of Cathar country, a stronghold of the Cathar, or Albegensian heretics who were finally exterminated by the Inquisition – is blood-soaked and violent enough to satisfy any criminal imagination. Retreats are for three weeks and there’s heaps more information at La Muse.