Interview with Karen Sedaitis, October 2001

for now, I lack confidence. Poetry is even more personal than prose, and I think it's the most purely artistic expression of the inner self, which is what I love about it. I also like to write inflamed letters to newspaper editors.

Maggie: What made you decide to study for a BA in professional writing? Do you feel it has helped your work?

Karen: Insecurity made me enroll, and no, I haven't found it beneficial at all. I was disappointed to discover that virtually none of the students I met were seriously interested in writing, and I'm sure this affects the attitudes of teachers. I found myself effortlessly doing very well and yearning for challenge, stimulation. and not finding it, and wondering what the hell I was doing there when I could be using the time to write. Consequently, I've deferred my studies. I expect I'll be kicked for saying so!

Maggie: Who are your literary heroes?

Karen: At the moment, Turgenev, having just finished Sketches From A Hunter's Album. In the past: Keats, Blake, Wilde, Tolstoy, Patrick White, David Malouf, Ian McEwan, Alice Munro, Greek mythology, fairy tales. I love children's literature, get masses of pleasure from reading good books to my children. We've just finished Roald Dahl, and are reading Lewis Carroll at the moment.

Maggie: Are you working on something new? What can your readers expect to see next from you?

Karen: I am six chapters into a novel, Blue Beard's Beloved, which is a completely different experience to that of writing Soul Dark Soil. I find it challenging, and engrossing, and frightening - I feel as if I am really exposed, as a writer, as a person, because I try to pour so much into it in order to bring it to life. A short story can be stopped once the momentum slows, or reaches a natural eddy in the flow of the tale, but in writing a novel I try to keep the story, and the characters, moving along, moving somewhere.

This story gives me more scope to explore a few characters in detail, and I'm very interested in women particularly: women's will, women's ambition and hunger, the power of curiosity - as well as the romantic relationship. I am inspired by questions of Blue Beard's surviving wife, and the relationship between the two, hence the title. I expect it will be finished early next year (2002).

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