My first paying job was collecting glass soft drink bottles for cash. We stayed at Mooloolaba for holidays and you could take the bottles to the local service station and collect 5 or 10 cents for each one. Quite lucrative really. Especially if you didn’t mind spending half your holiday with your head stuck down the bottom of a public bin with someone holding your feet so you didn’t fall in! The lure of cash to spend at the local lolly shop was enough to spur me on.
2. What is your nickname?
Meg, megsie, megs, chops, and here is a confession, one of my oldest dear friends used to call me ‘never wrong’ mmm, hopefully I’ve become more humble over the years. My husband just calls me ‘lovely’.
3. What is your greatest fear?
Not living out my life to the full with the gifts that have been given to me.
4. Describe your writing style in ten words.
Non fiction narrative with a bit of aspirational fiction thrown in.
5. Tell us five positive words that describe you as a writer.
I like to think I’m a weaver weaving threads between us with words.
6. What book character would you be, and why?
Pollyanna for her unwavering positivity, Nancy Drew or George from Famous Five for their fearlessness and adventurous spirits, Anne of Green Gables for her feistiness, Jo from Little Women because she is forthright, and she makes a career for herself from writing.
7. If you could time travel, what year would you go to and why?
When I was a child there was a time when I really wanted to be an archeologist, so perhaps to go back into ancient history to see the pyramids being built, or Pompeii before the volcanic eruption, or to walk through the streets of ancient Rome or Greece.
8. What would your ten-year-old self say to you now?
I’m glad we’re still friends and that you’re doing what you always loved.
9. Who is your greatest influence?
So many people and experiences and books and writers. I love Robin Klein and her attention to small everyday details in her stories, I feel like I’m there and it makes the story so authentic. That reminds me a bit of the story of Jesus cooking fish on the beach for breakfast after the resurrection. It just seems so everyday and ordinary. I love it when the profound and the ordinary meet. I read Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby recently, and the way she weaves words together almost made me want to cry. And lastly Anne Lamott because her writing does make me cry and laugh almost simultaneously.
10. What/who made you start writing?
Being such a reader as a child made me love the world of words. My mum reading to me as a child was a great motivator. I find writing helps me to process the ideas, thoughts, experiences I come across. It stops them all buzzing around my head and annoying me.
11. What is your favourite word and why?
Eclectic. Because I love to see a ramshackle collection of things, ideas, words, people, beliefs, and influences thrown together. It excites me and makes me wonder about what connects us all to each other.
12. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?
That’s just TOO curly for me. I’ve heard people say ‘the Bible’ to that question, and I understand because it has so much diversity from poetry to history to philosophy, joy, bewilderment, crazy characters. For pure enjoyment, I could probably settle for all of Agatha Christie’s books, I’d forget whodunit by the time I’d got to the last one and started back again.
Megan Forward is an award-winning Australian illustrator, author, artist and printmaker. She has recently written and illustrated a picture book about sustainable living in an urban environment titled A Patch from Scratch, published by Penguin in March 2016. Visit Megan's website and Facebook page for more information about her books, creative projects and exhibitions.
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