Flight is a metaphysical thriller in which the classic narrative patterns of the adventure story and the spiritual journey are intermingled. The protagonist, Fern, is a young woman so damaged by her past that she has withdrawn from reality behind closed doors. But reality has not abandoned her and soon comes knocking.
The story of how Fern learns to face the real world raises questions about the nature of reality itself and our perception of it. Her journey is played out against a background of myth and metaphor; sometimes eerie, sometimes earthy, always spellbinding. This contemporary gothic thriller grips the reader from the first page.
The story opens in Sydney where Fern has immured herself in the attic of a rented terrace house. When her house-mates pack up and leave, Fern is forced to face the outside world. But her past is waiting for her and Fern is soon running scared as her sanity and beliefs begin to unravel.
Beleagured by memories and otherworldly visions, Fern gradually learns to trust her own powers and perceptions. When someone or something begins to attack her through her dreams, she decides it’s time to stop running and start looking for answers.
Together with Adam, an ex-soldier haunted by the past, Fern embarks on a journey which takes them from inner-city Sydney to the labyrinthine depths of the Tasmanian wilderness, where she must finally face down her demons.
In Fern’s search for wholeness and self-knowledge, she learns that help can come from mysterious and surprising places, and that the greatest danger of all is the life unlived. As Fern heself soon discovers, in order to fly, one must first be willing to fall.

I came early, slithering into the outside world and into safety, or so I hoped. But this was to be the first of many hopes, all dashed against the brutally sharp edges of reality.
As in all great myths, my birth was accompanied by a prophecy. I, it seemed, would be the death of my father. How this was to come about no one could say. But the prophecy was there, it escaped from the mouth of Simple Simon, the old gardener at the Botanical Gardens in Adelaide, where my mother often went to sit in her lunch hour.
On this particular day she was waiting to meet my father. He was late and the pregnant girl felt a persistent nagging worry. There was something big hovering around the edges of things, a sense that life had woken up that morning slightly askew. Nothing she could put her finger on, but it was enough to make her nervous. And then there were the contradictions: worry that he would come; worry that he wouldn’t. Fear and love tugging her between them until all she could feel was a tearing anxiety. You see my father was a strong willed man, older than her, but still too young he said, to be tied down like this. He would have walked away but he was snared by his desire for my mother. She was beautiful and fragile and needy, easy to bully but also detached in a way that he could never put a finger on. This detachment was what kept him there, waiting, wanting her to surrender completely. But my father wasn’t a reflective man, he didn’t know any of this. If asked he would have said it was his responsibility that kept him there, that it wasn’t right to abandon her, though really they were both too young for marriage and children.
It was autumn. There was a chill in the air and the sun was weak, but the sky was blue and the day was clear enough to make everyone’s heart lift. Even my mother’s, the seventeen year old girl with the rounded belly who sat on a bench chewing a deviled egg sandwich and watching the wind playfully toss the autumn leaves up and away from the meticulous piles Simon was making.
When one particularly playful gust sent the leaves up in a spiral, my mother forgot her troubles for a moment and laughed. Simon looked up, straight at her and her laughter quickly turned into a shudder. Where one eye should have been there was a socket, dark and deep. One eye looking out, the other inwards – perhaps this was the secret of his second sight. Or then again, it might have been the snake bite all those years ago which left him hovering between life and death for weeks on end. When he finally woke he knew things other people didn’t, but had forgotten how to live in this world. No one knew how old Simple Simon was or how long he’d been working in the Botanical Gardens. He was a fixture, like the giant oak under which my mother sat.
Simon stood up straight, wincing as he stretched, one hand massaging the small of his back, the other leaning on his rake.
‘Ah,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That one will be the death of her father.’ He walked over to the girl, wincing again at the creaking in his swollen joints, and poked his finger into her tight belly. ‘Mark my words, the death of him.’
While my mother sat staring at him, open mouthed, he went back to his raking, still shaking his head, but with a gleam in his eye.
At that moment I moved. Well bounced really. Did a somersault in a small space, causing my mother to double over in pain and think her time had come. It hadn’t. I wasn’t going anywhere. Safety I thought, lay in the warm fluids that contained me. And I didn’t want to kill anyone, especially my own father, even though I wasn’t exactly fond of him. There’d been words already. White knuckles and fists, sending me curling up into a tighter self protective ball. My father didn’t love me. Even then I was certain of that. And he didn’t love my mother. Like me she stood between him and his plans. He wanted only to conquer her, in the same way he planned to conquer the world. You see, my father had big ideas swirling inside his head. Even then he loved power more than people. Even then he would let nothing stand in his way. (more…)

‘. . . A bit of a Heart of Darkness – Apocalypse Now tale. It is part thriller, part hippie road story and part rite-of-passage trip in search of identity. Above all it is a compelling, stylish and well-paced read. Frightening at times and searching in its awareness of landscape and family secrets, this is a fine debut.’
Weekend Australian

‘A deeply moving fiction debut in which Dub examines the virtue of truth, the harm of lies, the pain of secrets, the desire for belonging and the difficulty of confronting ones past to ensure the future.’
Weekend Gold Coast Bulletin

‘A gritty sandblown kind of story that once begun gets into your consciousness with compelling insistence. Yes, it’s a page-turner and yes, it’s a thriller-cum-rite-of-passage tale. . . The strength of Dub’s ability to tell a story and hold an audience is clear in this first novel of hopefully many more. It is a book of many pathways to the heart and soul, of not only a country but families who deny the truth of who they are and what they strive to protect. . .’
Sunday Tasmanian

‘Here we have a Tasmanian writer with a first novel that grabs you from the very first page. Well written, it is a compelling story that takes the protagonist on a journey of self discovery. . . We will hear more from Rosie Dub; well done.’
Tasmanian Life

‘. . . a fascinating story of discovery, generations, Romany lore, Australia, and of Storm herself.’
Cairns Post

* * * * *
Adelaide Advertiser

‘An absorbing first novel.’
Women’s Day

What formed the basis of the novel Gathering storm? Was it a theme or a particular chapter or scene of the book you had in mind? And how did the novel develop from the first ideas to the final version that’s here on my desk?

I don’t plan before I write, instead I start with an image that haunts me and perhaps a theme or two – then see what happens. I write from start to finish, each day’s work pointing me to where I should go next. As I write a plot evolves and I get glimpses of scenes that might come later. It’s an exciting process, fraught with dangers and punctuated with miracles. As Stephen King says in his book, On Writing – stories ‘pretty much make themselves. The job of a writer is to give them a place to grow.’ Aside from a little tidying up, I don’t edit much along the way either, as so much of the material emerges from the unconscious and I can’t tell what use it will be until I have a complete draft. Then I rewrite, over and over, layering and developing, each time understanding more of what I have written.

For me the idea usually comes in the form of an image. This was the case with Gathering Storm. After spending ten years living in the UK, I had returned to Australia with my British husband, Tim and our two young children. We took the opportunity to spend a year or so travelling around Australia in a campervan and our third child was born during this journey. I never imagined this would become a research trip for Gathering Storm but one day in the middle of the desert I suddenly had an image of an abandoned toddler. The contrasts in the image were extreme, the harsh, unforgiving desert and a fragile, vulnerable child. I wrote a few words in my diary, then wrote NOVEL in capital letters and circled it. Four years later I returned to that idea and a story slowly formed around it.

In retrospect I see that the themes in Gathering Storm relate closely to the issues in my own life when I returned to Australia. The journey our family took around Australia was also my own journey into myself, exploring my relationship to the country in which I’d been born and accepting the growing certainty that like Storm, I too needed to turn around and face the past.

Storm is searching for her roots. What’s more important for a human character: the search itself, or the goal Storm is aiming for?

Many of us wish away the search for the goal, yet the two are so closely related that it is impossible to have one without the other. Without her search, Storm would not have been strong enough to look at the truth she was seeking, which eventually came in the form of a traumatic memory that had been buried in her unconscious self, its tentacles reaching into her conscious life and stopping her from living well.

For Storm the search took the form of a road trip into the desert, an unknown and dangerous place. This journey through the wilderness is symbolic of the mythical journey into the labyrinth, or the underworld, a place in which a monster must be faced. The journey parallels the quest of the hero in ancient mythology. It is a place where inner change happens. A place where fear is faced and old wounds healed.

(more…)

Since ancient times we have told each other stories. We sit around camp fires watching the flickering flames and exchanging tales, or curl up in bed with our books, or sit in the cinema, or in front of the television.We read newspapers, listen to the radio and browse the internet. We make up stories for our children, or meet friends for coffee and swap anecdotes. When we sit down at the dinner table and talk to our family, we construct stories from the events of the day, shaping our ideas into a satisfying structure with a beginning, middle and end, creating a narrative flow, an atmosphere, tensions, hooks and characters.
Stories are a natural part of us, deeply embedded in our psyche. Aside from their entertainment value, they help us to make sense of the world. Stories provide frameworks, enabling us to find meaning in our lives, to create order from chaos, beauty from horror. In stories we seek commonality, universal truths. Through stories we reach out to others and we discover ourselves.
For most of my life I have been closely linked to storytelling, professionally, as a writer, an undergraduate and postgraduate student, an editor, mentor, and a teacher of writing. And personally, as a child eager for stories, then as an avid adult reader and a mother of small children. All this time I have been developing my own ideas about the transformative nature of story. What stories give us. What makes them important in our lives. Questions that have become the basis for my thesis.
Over years of writing and teaching I have come to understand just how vital the creative process is to human development. When we shut down that process we shut down ourselves. I believe most writers would agree with Kafka who once wrote: ‘ . . . the existence of the writer is truly dependent on his desk and if he wants to keep madness at bay he must never go far from his desk, he must hold on to it with his teeth. (84)
There are many forms of creativity and each has its own craft with its own techniques and tools that must be learned over time. But there is also a timeless element, the art, the magic of creativity. For me this magic comes in the form of writing. And it exists in the fusion of memory and imagination.
It is well known that memory is closely linked to creativity. The word itself comes from the greek word Mnemosyne. Born from the marriage of Uranus and Gaia, heaven and earth, Mnemosyne was personified as the mother of the nine muses, the patron goddesses of poets and the source of creativity
Memory grounds us, it encompasses what we know, creating fences and boundaries, forming our identities and blurring the fine line between subjective and objective. Memory has a tendency to reinforce the past, creating patterns of unconscious, but learned behaviour, proved perhaps in the old adage - history repeats itself. But memory also has the potential to enable the development of wisdom.
Imagination is like the trickster gods of old. It is a liberating force, cutting through what has been established, making strange what is normal, allowing us to step into the shoes of another, to break free of what we know and to fly. According to Websters dictionary, ‘imagination is the act of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality’. Although imagination has the potential to create an entirely new future it is often dismissed as mere fantasy or used in a destructive manner, as seen in the tendency the human race has to apply the imagination to the invention of weapons.
Memory and imagination are each double sided and together they appear to be contradictory. A tension is created, between the grounding nature of memory and the flightiness of the imagination. For me, the vitality of that tension creates meaning. It is the source of my stories. Trusting it, is an act of faith in the unfolding mystery of story. (more…)