Transcript available from website.

Show notes

• Carmel read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and the works of Charles Dickens as a child, and was encouraged to put on plays using his dialogue (for example, between Pip and Estella in Great Expectations).
• Carmel has an abiding love of poetry, although she does not write it. Her early influences include Alfred Tennyson and B. Yeats.
• Carmel acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens. This contrasts to A. S. Patrić, who in Season 1 discussed his inability to engage with Charles Dickens and his preference for and emersion in science fiction.
• George Crookshank illustrated editions of both Charles Dickens and the Brothers Grimm, both of which influenced Carmel as a child.
• Carmel quotes Oodgeroo Nunuccal, an Indigenous poet, when talking about the past, present and future in her writing.
• At the time of this interview, Carmel was reading Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir by Gail Godwin.
• Carmel taught Andy Griffiths (who opened Season 2 of The Garret) at university, and now enjoys his Treehouse series with her grandchildren.