00:00:41
S1: Connected by NBN Vision Australia radio is more accessible than ever. You can listen online on your smart device or through the Community Radio Plus app. With the right connection, you can bring trusted news, conversation and connection within reach across Australia with NBN full fibre connecting more homes every day. You can check your address on the NBN website to find out what is available to you. Do great things with NBN. Visit nbn.com.au/check to find out more. Station sponsor.
00:01:11
S2: Welcome to a Vision Australia Radio podcast. Love our podcasts. Why not listen to us live? Ask your smart device to play Vision Australia Radio or visit radio.org.
00:01:36
S3: On Vision Australia Radio. Welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced creative voices in our community on air now and also available on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts. I'm Kate Cooper and our guest on Emerging Writers today is Dublin born, Perth raised crime fiction writer Ruth McIver, who is speaking with us from Western Australia. Ruth is one of the featured guests at the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, which we spoke about in last week's program. This festival is being held from the 2nd to the 16th of October in streets, bars, wine cellars and other diverse locations across Fremantle while loop so that people can come along and engage with writers, writing and storytelling. The Totally Lit Festival, and I quote, imagines new and original ways to connect live literature and storytelling to place culture, history and community. One of the many highlights of the festival is prime time on Saturday 10th of October, a full day with a fantastic array of crime writers, including Ruth and other well-known names such as Sophie McNeill and Geoffrey Robertson. So we're delighted to bring you this conversation with Ruth today. Ruth has a PhD in true crime inspired fiction. Her debut novel, I Shot the Devil, won the Richell Prize and the Affirm Prize in 2018. In that same year, her first manuscript, Nothing Gold, was runner up for the banjo prize. Ruth has since published The Blackout, a standalone audio original for Audible Australia, an audiobook and podcast service that I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with. Her sequel to I Shot the Devil, titled The Sound, is the second book in her Southport Chronicles and has just been released in the United States through Blackstone. Ruth teaches crime and genre fiction and works with writers as a mentor, manuscript assessor, and structural developmental editor. The totally lit website describes her as passionate about genre fiction, nature, animals, music, and magic. Welcome to the program, Ruth, and thank you for making the time to speak with us today. You're originally from Dublin and then grew up in Perth. How has your Irish background shaped your Australian identity?
00:04:14
S4: Oh wow. Yeah. I mean, I see myself as Australian, but I always describe myself as Irish. I think Irish people are very much storytellers and they can't really say anything directly or answer a question directly. There's always a story. So that's definitely a huge quality of mine, and I think Irish people have a lot of humour. They're quite irreverent, you know, in so many ways. There are a lot of similarities with Australians, but I think Australians can be more serious. So I think while I see myself as Irish Australian, I definitely think my national character comes through more as an Irish person.
00:04:55
S3: Coming from a tradition of storytelling. As you've told us, when did you first start writing creatively and what did you learn from your early experiences?
00:05:05
S5: I started writing really young.
00:05:08
S4: My brother was also an aspiring author and avid reader. He actually was reading like cookbooks and my mum's romance novels when he was about 2 or 3, and so he was also very advanced as a reader, so he was always giving me books, too. I was very into the idea of crime early on, and I would write stories about like, you know, my Cabbage Patch dolls being abducted, but, you know, these kind of very dark stories. So it would have been 7 or 8 or something, but I started going really like I was into poetry. I was into writing plays, I wanted to write screenplays, and I wrote this really bad novel. And it was, I think, pretty much just ripped off from back to the future. And my brother was very stern with me and he was like, you don't plagiarize, you know, like he was like, I mean, all writers do that. That's how they learn. And everyone has some kind of emulation when they first start. But he was it was a very kind of like profound kind of reckoning because even though it could have been seen as shaming, it was so like serious. I was like, I see, you know, this is important. I better not do that again. So that was a really important lesson to be original.
00:06:27
S3: And the advice would have been given with love. But how old were you when you wrote your first novel then?
00:06:32
S5: Oh, well, I was writing like I wrote.
00:06:36
S4: Kind of a couple of Neal novels. You know, they kind of got abandoned halfway through. I would have been like 9 or 10, but they were, you know, again, very much taken from real life. Like one of them was based on a Phil Collins song. And I would like make up characters, names and stuff, but I wrote a screenplay when I was 14. I had a novella, I think, when I was like 16, but I actually started writing my first novel when I was in my 20s, and it took so long because it kept it was almost like this, this thing that never ended. It started as a literary novel, and then it became a crime novel. And then anyway, it took me so long to write and I ended up getting an unpublished I place. I was runner up an award for that novel, but it just took so long to write. And then in the end, it hasn't been published. So it was I was never not writing a novel, if you know what I mean. It was just many of them didn't stick.
00:07:34
S3: So it's a vocation and a passion and a craft for you.
00:07:38
S5: Oh, absolutely.
00:07:39
S4: There was never any question. I mean, like, I love dance and gymnastics and stuff when I was a kid, but I really didn't see myself as doing anything else. That's what I always wanted to, to be. And I, I have this book that I have in my desk. It's an Edgar Allan Poe. It's not actually a short story. It's it's poetry. And I bought this when I was like, I think 11 and I was obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. I loved him, and because I was in America, we were exposed to a lot of those kind of American poets and traditions. And yeah, I, I really aspired to that. I never had any other kind of plan. So it's been a lifelong. Yeah. Study passion, ambition.
00:08:23
S3: That's wonderful. You mentioned crime fiction before. And as we mentioned in the introduction, you have a PhD in true crime inspired fiction. So what is it about crime fiction that really appealed to you when you were young and continued as you grew older.
00:08:40
S5: I think I always loved true crime.
00:08:43
S4: I think I got into crime fiction itself when I was probably in my 20s. I mean, I would say probably earlier than that, but I think it was more authors like Patricia Highsmith and that sort of thing. But then I went into like procedural crime. I started to find that I liked it more in my 20s. That's why I kind of changed my novel from a kind of literary novel into a crime novel, and that the plotline changed and it became it actually became procedural with true crime. I think it was a kind of a family interest. My father was very obsessed with true crime, and so was my brother. And I think I used to clip out articles and keep files on things. And I also had a pretty macabre interest in death and stuff. And I was really interested in like, tabloid stuff too. Like very much the luridness of sensational stories. And I think the reason why I wrote the PhD, because I was very interested in how the media shapes narrative surrounding crimes and how misleading that can be, and how that can kind of determine innocence and guilt, and how true crime inspired crime fiction, or even documentaries that have a narrative style can change justice outcomes. So just as the media shapes meaning, so can fiction change people's minds and hearts?
00:10:06
S3: So that was the focus of your PhD.
00:10:08
S4: Yeah, very much so. I wrote about my first published novel. My debut was very loosely inspired by a crime that occurred in the 80s in America, and it was very similar. There's a little bit of like a few nods to the West Memphis Three in that book too. Basically, I kind of grew up in that Satanic Panic era, and I was very into heavy metal and that kind of music. My brother was too. That's why I was into it. But the idea of, you know, the devil coming through these kinds of mediums and music and stuff and youths getting really demonized and falsely accused of crimes and whatnot, that really interested me. So that was kind of what inspired my novel. And then I started looking at true crime inspired fiction as a lens to sort of go through old cases and to look at our past and to look at history.
00:11:05
S3: So was your PhD a combination of your research and creative writing?
00:11:10
S4: Yes. When you do a creative product, you you do your novel and then or your whatever your creative piece is, and then you have an exegetical research component. So my exegetical research actually was about my first unpublished novel, and it was more of a cautionary tale about how I had kind of gone through this process of ten years Plus with this first novel, which was an unsolved cold case which then got solved just as I was potentially getting my agent and stuff. And how many times I had to rewrite it. And just the the guilt and the kind of distress that I was experiencing when I reread it through, like knowing that now the world was watching this and sort of my own shame about maybe using real elements that might harm people. And as someone who's really someone who is so terrified of harm, causing harm, doing harm, I, I think it was a really potent kind of thing for me to explore. And so I actually did rewrite the first novel significantly for the reason that I didn't want to cause any trauma or harm, but I felt like the story was important. So that's something that I, I wrote about in my exegesis, as well as just the idea of sensational crimes and how the media constructs meaning and guilt and innocence and whatnot. So yeah.
00:12:38
S3: That's a really important contribution to research that ethical dimension of crime writing.
00:12:44
S4: Thank you. Yeah, I it was actually the ethics of, of doing. So that's what I'm interested in. And in fact, I had a really ambitious idea at the beginning and I thought, is there an ethical framework? And I developed one because it seemed to be very tacit. It was like there was just this kind of understanding that a certain amount of time had elapsed, and you could write about something, but then there were certain things that were off, off limits. And especially where this crime that I was writing about is where I am from in Perth, a very charged subject. And so I was aware that it would not be well received if I was to not fictionalize it enough, or if I was to call it, you know, potentially cause trauma. But I didn't want to do that anyway, you know, because that was not my intention. But I think I wanted to sort of see if there was a way to make a framework around it. And one of the other things I find really interesting is that people often think something is ethical because it's well written. So if it's very literary, then it means it's in good taste, which means it's therefore moral. But that's absolutely not true. And, you know, there are so many things that you could be doing that are really ethically suspect’, but just because you're, you're doing it in a literary way, it's sort of seen as somehow tasteful. And then, you know, it's accepted.
00:13:59
S3: So that's brilliant. So you're not only contributing to the genre as a writer and creator of fiction, but you're actually contributing to the way in which the genre is perceived and received.
00:14:10
S4: I hope so, yeah, I hope so. I mean, that's of interest to me. And I think the thing that's really important to me, because I wrote a piece for The Australian about this, I don't want to sound. It's terrible because it sounds as if someone is taking the moral high ground or something, which is absolutely not my position. And in fact, I have defended other authors who have looked at true crimes in a fictional way who have been you know, it has been decided on social media that that's not okay. And I'm really passionate about it because I don't believe in censorship or even self-censorship as such. But it's about almost like it's like the kind of right as Hippocratic oath. It's like, do no harm. But the thing is, sometimes harm does come from some, some fictional projects too. It's very hard. But I mean, just because the story is there doesn't mean it should be told that these are questions that I just posed. But I can't say I have the answers. And I have to say, I kind of moved a little bit away in my own practice, away from fictionalizing true crime events, even though it's something that I find really interesting to explore, like a culture era, just because it's so loaded and there's, you know, there's a lot of weight is heavy. I think also like I grew up, my mum was going to be a nun, so she I was very weirdly religious as a child also not weirdly, I suppose, because, you know, but I was extremely religious and very spiritual as I've grown. And I would say like, I'm kind of in remission as a Catholic, but I'm actually probably still a Catholic, but I'm a bit of a pagan. And but I'm obsessed with ethics and morality and what's good and what's right and what's just and fair. And so it's just stuff that I think about all the time. But I think you're right. We do need to have that. It needs to happen in fiction too. And there are a lot of things that are, you know, a lot of people will say, you know, there's no nuance in representation anymore. And that, you know, people have to do things in a particular way. And I think that on social media, that's true. But I think a lot of the things that have been developed in the publishing industry have been developed as a way to kind of stop harm to the author, as well as the publisher, but harm to others. But yeah, just it has become a kind of a weird self-policing kind of loop, so to speak.
00:16:37
S3: And social media is an area crying out for stronger frameworks and a deep understanding.
00:16:44
S4: Absolutely. And it's I think the worst thing is that, you know, these kinds of cancel culture and whatnot, you have people piling on top of people for doing, say, writing something which happened, I believe it was around 2020. A couple of authors, really big ones like Stephen King, the language that he used in books in the 80s and whatnot. But it's like, at the same time, we have people spreading absolute hate and it doesn't matter. Nothing gets taken down. So what what's allowed and what the algorithm is doing is, is so frightening to me, I think.
00:17:17
S3: Yeah. So it's definitely an area where anyone who is working on establishing ethical frameworks is making a really important contribution to our society as a whole.
00:17:33
S6: Nobody like you.
00:17:35
S3: On Vision Australia radio. You're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is crime fiction writer Ruth McIver. Ruth, you mentioned before about your debut novel. That's the one titled I Shot the devil.
00:17:51
S4: Yes. The one that wasn't published was called Nothing Gold, and that was a WA kind of procedural one. I shot The Devil's Part of a two book series, the sequel. That's the sound that publishers sort of said. Do you have a title for the series? And so I said, I've got to think of something quickly. So I called it the Southport Chronicles, and a couple of people who've read it have said to me, oh, we want another one and we want it like this. And I'm like, you can't tell me what to write. I think they've got something nice to happen to my narrator, but it is very noir. So, you know, I can't promise that.
00:18:27
S3: And that first one did win the Rochelle Prize and the Affirm Prize in 2018. Yeah. Would you share with us the feeling of what it's like to win a literary prize and have your creative work recognized in this way?
00:18:41
S4: Yeah. I mean, it's obviously it's especially when it's something you've worked so hard for. It's, it's really, it's like, it's almost like stepping into a mirror. Like that's what it felt like. It was just so surreal to me. But it was what I'd always dreamed of. And, and it was, you know, the happiest I probably ever felt. But at the same time, say, earlier that month, I had been shortlisted and was found runner up for the banjo. And I was devastated. Like, I went to bed for a week and I like I was so upset because I, I had been at the point of I was almost at the precipice. I was like, I would never quit. But in my mind, I was the closest I've ever been to quitting. And I was sort of actually on a trip when I first got the news that I was on the long list. I was on a trip away and I was thinking, you know, on the drive there, I was like, if I could just go to therapy for, you know, to remove that desire, I would do that. Like maybe there's some kind of therapy I could do. So I don't want to have this happen. Like, I don't need to be a writer that I don't need to get my book published that I don't, you know, so I was really at that point of just absolute despair. So this stuff happening was so wild and in a row, but it's amazing. But it's also very odd afterwards because people that had kind of blanked you or refused your manuscript are suddenly wanting to contact you and they're wanting to know you and they're wanting to represent you, or they're wanting to chat with you or, and, and that was very strange for me. I was, I was a little bit disturbed by that aspect because I thought, this is very fickle. And I'm, you know, I don't like that aspect of it us because, you know, you. I think the the problem is with human nature is that until someone else endorses something, others don't believe in it. And that's kind of what that you see that in, in, in real effects.
00:20:38
S3: Before we continue, would you read for us an extract from one of your novels?
00:20:44
S4: This is this is actually the preface. Uh, the prologue. Sorry. And I'm just going to read it because it's one of my favorite sections. So prologue Kafie 1993, the summer that my mom and dad separated, the future was a boat cresting the sound moments before the engine cut out. Moments can be ripples. Moments can be riptides. For weeks, temperatures had spiked into a heat wave, sticky days melting one into the next like ice cream. My house was emptied of adults, except the maid's mom went to the Hamptons to a yoga retreat. While dad said in the city, rather than making the long commute home to the island, working into the night at the World Trade Center. My nanny, Inge, went back to Sweden for the summer, so Rosa moved from the attic room to the guest bedroom on the second floor next to me. I could hear her saying a novena at night for her snoring. When I walked past her room to get a glass of milk downstairs, which I needed after eating the hot tamales and bean heavy Frito casseroles that she made our day. Maid was Rosa's cousin, or maybe her niece. She never spoke to me except when I said Ola and she smiled and said it back. Rosa changed my sheets and said nothing when I wet them, poured me OJ and buttered my toast in the morning, even though I can do those things myself. Sometimes my dad called me to say good night from his office. He'd say ground control to Captain Kathy. I'm calling from above the clouds, and I'd reply, Roger that. I'm below the clouds. I'm on the water. Even though the Hamptons was an hour and 15 minutes by car from our house in Nassau County, my mom was not able to leave the retreat where she was dismantling. She'd call and say, Kathy, I'm disassembling my false self. Or never marry a man who doesn't make your heart soar. My Yogi is showing me how to truly love. I was alone, but I wasn't lonely. I spent most of my time with my best friend Shelly, who was also in the arrow program for gifted kids. Being gifted was a kind of a curse because we were always improving ourselves, crammed in carpools for endless extracurriculars clarinet, computer club painting, drawing, jazz, and tap. In the fall, we'd be back in religious classes at Saint Aloysius. We called it Saint Owls. Twice a week leading up to our confirmation, Shelly's mom, Mrs. Sloan, worked at the library but was our primary driver because my mom couldn't drive because of the hostile energies on the road. Mrs. Sloan smoked through the cracked window and told us to call her Leo, which was also her star sign, even though she didn't really believe in that sort of thing. My mom, who did believe in astrology, said any woman who was a size ten and white sweatpants outside had clearly let themselves go. But I thought Leah was beautiful, even with the smiling crinkles around her eyes and her wild hair, which was just like a lion's mane. All her activities were suspended over the summer, and Shelley's parents were almost always out. Or rather, Shelley's dad was always out, and Leah was always sleeping when she didn't work at the library. The X files theme song radiating from the master bedroom. We listened to Shelley's big sister Erin clattering in past curfew, trying to be quiet. Not that it mattered. Erin would brush past us in the kitchen, reeking of bonfire smoke, beer and reefer. We would all forage in the freezer for frozen pizza pockets and pop tarts and stay up watching MTV. And even though we never left the island, we never felt so free.
00:24:10
S3: Thank you Ruth. And that was from the sound.
00:24:13
S4: Yeah. So the the perspective is of Cathy Carver, who is Erin Sloan, the main protagonist. Her little sister's best friend who went missing, and her little sister's past now. So she kind of gets drawn back into the island via Cathy Carver. And that was one of the like, remaining story threads that I, I wanted to go into from the first book.
00:24:42
S3: How do you go about planning the overall storyline and structure of your novels, and how do you sketch out and develop your characters?
00:24:51
S4: So I, I did have a tutor sort of teach me synopsis quite early on, and so I always do a little synopsis. And so I usually have an idea. I've got like place, I've got some characters or I've got a voice or I've got these things and I have like very bare bones kinds of ideas. But I just write to begin with because I really like to let things unfold. And I just need to be able to play and to be able to work things out. And I find that it will show itself to me. And then there's a point where I get to like a certain word count and I'm like, okay, we need to go in and like, look at the story structure. But I do mostly as it goes, like I'll go for walks away from the laptop and just think about the story and think about the characters and decisions I might make, but I don't really know how it's going to end. And so I kind of know maybe there's going to be something very like I, you know, I, and I have an idea, like, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a screen writer and I was like, oh, I kind of know some of those things already. Like I, I, I do have an idea of like how it has to be structured in terms of like pacing and story and stuff, but I don't really always know. And then I'll go, but when I go back in and edit, I will map it out more. But the first draft is usually quite free. And like I've tried, the reason why I do that is because the first novel, I think the reason why it was so, so, so hard was I was, you know, went to RMIT and I'm studying novel and I learnt a lot, but I tried to really transpose a lot of ideas and do things like using novel writing software and stuff. And it's not for me. I've got ADHD and I, my brain is always going and exploding into directions, and there's always a lot of different subplots and rabbit holes and stuff. And I, you know, that's kind of annoying, but I just don't understand that. Like, I'm like, oh, it doesn't work for me. But also I feel like story is living thing. So it's like, I have to kind of like make a decision to kind of just go on that journey. But in terms of like, if you were trying to write a really commercial book, it's not recommended, I don't think. But that said, you know, Stephen King does that too. So he, he always lets the story unfold. So yeah.
00:27:19
S3: I don't think there's a right or wrong way.
00:27:22
S4: I don't think there is. I think if you're writing, if you want to write a very successful crime novel that's very commercial and it sells, potentially that would be not advisable. But I teach a lot and I do a lot of workshops and stuff, and I never, ever, ever insist that anyone does that. In fact, I always tell them to follow the story, but also to follow their instinct as to what kind of writer they are. Because I think that you have to know who you are. You have to know your weak spots as well as your strengths. And I think you've got to play to both and develop the weaker ones. And sometimes you can just minimize those. Like some people are terrible at dialogue. They can get better. But no one, if you're not great at dialogue and it's not natural to you, you can get better, but you're never going to be in May. You know what I mean? Because dialogue is about having an ear. it's it's one of those, those funny ones like, you know, and then but there's nothing shameful or wrong about that. It's just like, you know, just knowing your areas where you're not so good at something and you're, you're much better at the other things. So.
00:28:32
S3: Exactly. So once you've drafted a chapter or a whole novel, how do you go about editing your own work to achieve a consistent style?
00:28:41
S4: I think at the moment I'm writing something and I think I've been spending, in fact, the last two things I've been writing. I have been a lot more going back and editing over them, but there is also a purpose to that in the sense that I often, if I'm applying for a fellowship or something, or and I don't do that often, or if I want to, if I need to show that to publisher, I want to make sure that I have three really good chapters plus my synopsis. So it's like having that really tight beginning is really important. But mostly I didn't used to do that. I would just race through. I think I'm more particular now, and I will spend a lot longer on those beginning chapters. But I think it's also partly it's just getting stuff down. Like I think, you know, with this one that I've been writing, I think I'm about like 6000 words into it and I'm like, okay, now I'm starting to really see what's happening and I'll take a break from redoing those and I'll go into the story. And yeah, so it's sort of like most of the time, once I get to a certain point, I just go and I don't edit at all. And then I go back in and I edit the manuscript, then I'll edit it a second time before I send it to an editor or maybe even a third time. But that's also because I'm going to be doing some structural, um, refining and make it as clean as I can.
00:30:06
S3: And you mentioned before about teaching, and I wanted to ask you, what are some of the rewards and some of the challenges of working with others on developing their creativity.
00:30:18
S4: Yeah, I actually, I love working in that role. Like it's, you know, I feel that feels very much like a vocation for me too, because I really, I feel like there couldn't be anything more joyful than helping people, you know, develop also enjoy creativity to, to enjoy something that I love so much. I think also because I love story just objectively to be able to help someone improve that. And for the sake of story, it's like, of course I love that. I think the challenges are more that it sacrifices for me in the sense that I find myself giving a lot to others. And I, I do really, I struggle a little bit with that and putting parameters around that. You know, I think mentorship and guidance is such a lost thing now, and it's got a lot to do with, you know, the kind of late stage capitalism kind of thing. So, you know, I all I wanted, All I ever wanted was like, I just wanted a mentor. I wanted someone to guide me and, you know, to help me develop my skills and stuff like that. And so I try to kind of be that for others. And yeah, that, that the only, you know, thing is that it does take away from my own, it kind of depletes some of my own energy. But mostly it's, it's really, really wonderful. I think the main thing that I try to do is empower people. I don't want to be someone's mommy, and I don't want to be there to just like, like, like I'm, I'm also like, I have like chronic musculoskeletal stuff. And I remember going to see this physio and she was like, you know, you can't be like helpless, like come in and fix me. She's like, you need to kind of like take charge of your own pain. And I was like, wow, that's so profound. But you know, it's, it's kind of like I'm teaching people to diagnose their own work and to be like, to be more empowered so they don't need me, you know what I mean? Like, so I'm there as, you know, sounding board and I can help them and stuff like that, but I don't want them to need me. I want them to be empowered so they can do it themselves.
00:32:18
S3: So that's brilliant. And Ruth, you've published a standalone audio original for Audible Australia titled The Blackout. What inspired you to publish an audio original and how can our listeners access it?
00:32:31
S4: It's available on Audible Australia and it's obviously it belongs to them. So it's the only platform, I believe, that you can listen to it. A lot of crime authors do that in between a release. But I love writing for audio. And I, you know, I'm really interested in that format and podcasts and all of that sort of stuff. And it was a really interesting challenge because it was for audio. It's not print, which is, you know, it's a new skill. And then there was a stage in it where they were like, we'd like you to try it as a radio play because we might do it like that. And I was like, oh, okay. And so I was, you know, I had to do that. And then, you know, so it's, it's definitely, it's really good for me as a writer to try new things, like I really want to do TV writing also and whatnot. So I really enjoyed that. The only problem is some of the audible originals do get printed, so you can get them in ebook format, but some people don't listen to audiobooks and they didn't want to to get it as an audiobook, so, or they didn't see it as a novella because it wasn't a printed book. And I was like, no, it is. It's a book, you know? Yeah. It was the first kind of commissioned book, though, that I'd done, which is interesting. You know, it's an interesting experience because, you know, you've been paid. They've signed it, they haven't seen it. There's trust there that you're going to deliver something good. So it's a little bit, you know, nail biting kind of tension wise.
00:33:57
S3: So that's fantastic for our listeners, many of whom do access literature through audiobooks.
00:34:04
S4: Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. I did a workshop with Writers Victoria with Vision Australia and yeah. And there were many, many readers, you know, have such a great library in Australia.
00:34:16
S3: Fantastic. Thank you. Ruth. You're one of the featured guests at the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival. What does this festival mean to you and what are you looking forward to?
00:34:29
S4: Oh, look, I'm just so thrilled because I think Fremantle. Well, Europe is one of my. It is my home in in Western Australia. I love it. I feel very connected to to the area. And I think it's a festival that really celebrates community. I'm also just I love the prison and the fact that the prison is part of the, you know, it's the venue for many of the events. It's just we have such an interesting architectural, but also a very dark colonial and punitive architecture of the area. But it's also so picturesque. So it's got these kind of really interesting contrasts, but it's a beautiful festival. There's there's like a kids element to it, too. And Fremantle's really meant to be walked around like I, you know, it's kind of designed for that. So it feels like such a great kind of place for that. And it's just an honor for me because also, like all the authors and many like people that are on the panels are people that I respect and admire. And, you know, I'm just so looking forward to it. Objectively, there are so many events that I'm going to be attending. Um, besides I'm speaking. I'll be I'm excited to attend.
00:35:42
S3: Fantastic. And if our listeners want to find out more about the Totally Lit Festival, go to totally lit.io. You also have your own website, Ruth mciver.net. Would you tell us what our listeners can find on your website?
00:35:57
S4: Yes, I, I have some of my books on the website. I have some like there are YouTube clips for book trailers. There's a bit about the teaching that I do, the workshops that I run, I do a course called Crime Fiction 101, and I haven't actually announced the course dates, but that will be on the website. So yeah, basically just information about what I do and I link to also my Substack and, and that sort of thing. Yeah. That I also offer teaching and mentoring and whatnot. So that's also on there.
00:36:31
S3: That's wonderful. Ruth. It's been fantastic to speak with you. Thank you so much for joining us from Western Australia. And we'll certainly listen out to follow your career. So all the very best to you for the future.
00:36:44
S4: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.
00:36:46
S3: Our guest on Emerging Writers today was crime fiction writer Ruth McIver, speaking with us from Perth on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk Nyungar people. This program is produced in our Adelaide studios on Kah-nee-ta and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia, Radio via radio, on digital, Online at VA radio.org or find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for emerging writers by Vision Australia Radio.
00:37:28
S1: Connected by NBN Vision Australia Radio is more accessible than ever. You can listen online on your smart device or through the community radio app. With the right connection, you can bring trusted news, conversation and connection within reach across Australia with NBN full fibre connecting more homes every day. You can check your address on the NBN website to find out what is available to you. Do great things with NBN. Visit nbn.com.au/to find out more. Station sponsor.
00:37:58
S2: Welcome to a Vision Australia Radio podcast. Love our podcasts. Why not listen to us live? Ask your smart device to play Vision Australia Radio or visit radio.org.
S1: Connected by NBN Vision Australia radio is more accessible than ever. You can listen online on your smart device or through the Community Radio Plus app. With the right connection, you can bring trusted news, conversation and connection within reach across Australia with NBN full fibre connecting more homes every day. You can check your address on the NBN website to find out what is available to you. Do great things with NBN. Visit nbn.com.au/check to find out more. Station sponsor.
00:01:11
S2: Welcome to a Vision Australia Radio podcast. Love our podcasts. Why not listen to us live? Ask your smart device to play Vision Australia Radio or visit radio.org.
00:01:36
S3: On Vision Australia Radio. Welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced creative voices in our community on air now and also available on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts. I'm Kate Cooper and our guest on Emerging Writers today is Dublin born, Perth raised crime fiction writer Ruth McIver, who is speaking with us from Western Australia. Ruth is one of the featured guests at the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, which we spoke about in last week's program. This festival is being held from the 2nd to the 16th of October in streets, bars, wine cellars and other diverse locations across Fremantle while loop so that people can come along and engage with writers, writing and storytelling. The Totally Lit Festival, and I quote, imagines new and original ways to connect live literature and storytelling to place culture, history and community. One of the many highlights of the festival is prime time on Saturday 10th of October, a full day with a fantastic array of crime writers, including Ruth and other well-known names such as Sophie McNeill and Geoffrey Robertson. So we're delighted to bring you this conversation with Ruth today. Ruth has a PhD in true crime inspired fiction. Her debut novel, I Shot the Devil, won the Richell Prize and the Affirm Prize in 2018. In that same year, her first manuscript, Nothing Gold, was runner up for the banjo prize. Ruth has since published The Blackout, a standalone audio original for Audible Australia, an audiobook and podcast service that I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with. Her sequel to I Shot the Devil, titled The Sound, is the second book in her Southport Chronicles and has just been released in the United States through Blackstone. Ruth teaches crime and genre fiction and works with writers as a mentor, manuscript assessor, and structural developmental editor. The totally lit website describes her as passionate about genre fiction, nature, animals, music, and magic. Welcome to the program, Ruth, and thank you for making the time to speak with us today. You're originally from Dublin and then grew up in Perth. How has your Irish background shaped your Australian identity?
00:04:14
S4: Oh wow. Yeah. I mean, I see myself as Australian, but I always describe myself as Irish. I think Irish people are very much storytellers and they can't really say anything directly or answer a question directly. There's always a story. So that's definitely a huge quality of mine, and I think Irish people have a lot of humour. They're quite irreverent, you know, in so many ways. There are a lot of similarities with Australians, but I think Australians can be more serious. So I think while I see myself as Irish Australian, I definitely think my national character comes through more as an Irish person.
00:04:55
S3: Coming from a tradition of storytelling. As you've told us, when did you first start writing creatively and what did you learn from your early experiences?
00:05:05
S5: I started writing really young.
00:05:08
S4: My brother was also an aspiring author and avid reader. He actually was reading like cookbooks and my mum's romance novels when he was about 2 or 3, and so he was also very advanced as a reader, so he was always giving me books, too. I was very into the idea of crime early on, and I would write stories about like, you know, my Cabbage Patch dolls being abducted, but, you know, these kind of very dark stories. So it would have been 7 or 8 or something, but I started going really like I was into poetry. I was into writing plays, I wanted to write screenplays, and I wrote this really bad novel. And it was, I think, pretty much just ripped off from back to the future. And my brother was very stern with me and he was like, you don't plagiarize, you know, like he was like, I mean, all writers do that. That's how they learn. And everyone has some kind of emulation when they first start. But he was it was a very kind of like profound kind of reckoning because even though it could have been seen as shaming, it was so like serious. I was like, I see, you know, this is important. I better not do that again. So that was a really important lesson to be original.
00:06:27
S3: And the advice would have been given with love. But how old were you when you wrote your first novel then?
00:06:32
S5: Oh, well, I was writing like I wrote.
00:06:36
S4: Kind of a couple of Neal novels. You know, they kind of got abandoned halfway through. I would have been like 9 or 10, but they were, you know, again, very much taken from real life. Like one of them was based on a Phil Collins song. And I would like make up characters, names and stuff, but I wrote a screenplay when I was 14. I had a novella, I think, when I was like 16, but I actually started writing my first novel when I was in my 20s, and it took so long because it kept it was almost like this, this thing that never ended. It started as a literary novel, and then it became a crime novel. And then anyway, it took me so long to write and I ended up getting an unpublished I place. I was runner up an award for that novel, but it just took so long to write. And then in the end, it hasn't been published. So it was I was never not writing a novel, if you know what I mean. It was just many of them didn't stick.
00:07:34
S3: So it's a vocation and a passion and a craft for you.
00:07:38
S5: Oh, absolutely.
00:07:39
S4: There was never any question. I mean, like, I love dance and gymnastics and stuff when I was a kid, but I really didn't see myself as doing anything else. That's what I always wanted to, to be. And I, I have this book that I have in my desk. It's an Edgar Allan Poe. It's not actually a short story. It's it's poetry. And I bought this when I was like, I think 11 and I was obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. I loved him, and because I was in America, we were exposed to a lot of those kind of American poets and traditions. And yeah, I, I really aspired to that. I never had any other kind of plan. So it's been a lifelong. Yeah. Study passion, ambition.
00:08:23
S3: That's wonderful. You mentioned crime fiction before. And as we mentioned in the introduction, you have a PhD in true crime inspired fiction. So what is it about crime fiction that really appealed to you when you were young and continued as you grew older.
00:08:40
S5: I think I always loved true crime.
00:08:43
S4: I think I got into crime fiction itself when I was probably in my 20s. I mean, I would say probably earlier than that, but I think it was more authors like Patricia Highsmith and that sort of thing. But then I went into like procedural crime. I started to find that I liked it more in my 20s. That's why I kind of changed my novel from a kind of literary novel into a crime novel, and that the plotline changed and it became it actually became procedural with true crime. I think it was a kind of a family interest. My father was very obsessed with true crime, and so was my brother. And I think I used to clip out articles and keep files on things. And I also had a pretty macabre interest in death and stuff. And I was really interested in like, tabloid stuff too. Like very much the luridness of sensational stories. And I think the reason why I wrote the PhD, because I was very interested in how the media shapes narrative surrounding crimes and how misleading that can be, and how that can kind of determine innocence and guilt, and how true crime inspired crime fiction, or even documentaries that have a narrative style can change justice outcomes. So just as the media shapes meaning, so can fiction change people's minds and hearts?
00:10:06
S3: So that was the focus of your PhD.
00:10:08
S4: Yeah, very much so. I wrote about my first published novel. My debut was very loosely inspired by a crime that occurred in the 80s in America, and it was very similar. There's a little bit of like a few nods to the West Memphis Three in that book too. Basically, I kind of grew up in that Satanic Panic era, and I was very into heavy metal and that kind of music. My brother was too. That's why I was into it. But the idea of, you know, the devil coming through these kinds of mediums and music and stuff and youths getting really demonized and falsely accused of crimes and whatnot, that really interested me. So that was kind of what inspired my novel. And then I started looking at true crime inspired fiction as a lens to sort of go through old cases and to look at our past and to look at history.
00:11:05
S3: So was your PhD a combination of your research and creative writing?
00:11:10
S4: Yes. When you do a creative product, you you do your novel and then or your whatever your creative piece is, and then you have an exegetical research component. So my exegetical research actually was about my first unpublished novel, and it was more of a cautionary tale about how I had kind of gone through this process of ten years Plus with this first novel, which was an unsolved cold case which then got solved just as I was potentially getting my agent and stuff. And how many times I had to rewrite it. And just the the guilt and the kind of distress that I was experiencing when I reread it through, like knowing that now the world was watching this and sort of my own shame about maybe using real elements that might harm people. And as someone who's really someone who is so terrified of harm, causing harm, doing harm, I, I think it was a really potent kind of thing for me to explore. And so I actually did rewrite the first novel significantly for the reason that I didn't want to cause any trauma or harm, but I felt like the story was important. So that's something that I, I wrote about in my exegesis, as well as just the idea of sensational crimes and how the media constructs meaning and guilt and innocence and whatnot. So yeah.
00:12:38
S3: That's a really important contribution to research that ethical dimension of crime writing.
00:12:44
S4: Thank you. Yeah, I it was actually the ethics of, of doing. So that's what I'm interested in. And in fact, I had a really ambitious idea at the beginning and I thought, is there an ethical framework? And I developed one because it seemed to be very tacit. It was like there was just this kind of understanding that a certain amount of time had elapsed, and you could write about something, but then there were certain things that were off, off limits. And especially where this crime that I was writing about is where I am from in Perth, a very charged subject. And so I was aware that it would not be well received if I was to not fictionalize it enough, or if I was to call it, you know, potentially cause trauma. But I didn't want to do that anyway, you know, because that was not my intention. But I think I wanted to sort of see if there was a way to make a framework around it. And one of the other things I find really interesting is that people often think something is ethical because it's well written. So if it's very literary, then it means it's in good taste, which means it's therefore moral. But that's absolutely not true. And, you know, there are so many things that you could be doing that are really ethically suspect’, but just because you're, you're doing it in a literary way, it's sort of seen as somehow tasteful. And then, you know, it's accepted.
00:13:59
S3: So that's brilliant. So you're not only contributing to the genre as a writer and creator of fiction, but you're actually contributing to the way in which the genre is perceived and received.
00:14:10
S4: I hope so, yeah, I hope so. I mean, that's of interest to me. And I think the thing that's really important to me, because I wrote a piece for The Australian about this, I don't want to sound. It's terrible because it sounds as if someone is taking the moral high ground or something, which is absolutely not my position. And in fact, I have defended other authors who have looked at true crimes in a fictional way who have been you know, it has been decided on social media that that's not okay. And I'm really passionate about it because I don't believe in censorship or even self-censorship as such. But it's about almost like it's like the kind of right as Hippocratic oath. It's like, do no harm. But the thing is, sometimes harm does come from some, some fictional projects too. It's very hard. But I mean, just because the story is there doesn't mean it should be told that these are questions that I just posed. But I can't say I have the answers. And I have to say, I kind of moved a little bit away in my own practice, away from fictionalizing true crime events, even though it's something that I find really interesting to explore, like a culture era, just because it's so loaded and there's, you know, there's a lot of weight is heavy. I think also like I grew up, my mum was going to be a nun, so she I was very weirdly religious as a child also not weirdly, I suppose, because, you know, but I was extremely religious and very spiritual as I've grown. And I would say like, I'm kind of in remission as a Catholic, but I'm actually probably still a Catholic, but I'm a bit of a pagan. And but I'm obsessed with ethics and morality and what's good and what's right and what's just and fair. And so it's just stuff that I think about all the time. But I think you're right. We do need to have that. It needs to happen in fiction too. And there are a lot of things that are, you know, a lot of people will say, you know, there's no nuance in representation anymore. And that, you know, people have to do things in a particular way. And I think that on social media, that's true. But I think a lot of the things that have been developed in the publishing industry have been developed as a way to kind of stop harm to the author, as well as the publisher, but harm to others. But yeah, just it has become a kind of a weird self-policing kind of loop, so to speak.
00:16:37
S3: And social media is an area crying out for stronger frameworks and a deep understanding.
00:16:44
S4: Absolutely. And it's I think the worst thing is that, you know, these kinds of cancel culture and whatnot, you have people piling on top of people for doing, say, writing something which happened, I believe it was around 2020. A couple of authors, really big ones like Stephen King, the language that he used in books in the 80s and whatnot. But it's like, at the same time, we have people spreading absolute hate and it doesn't matter. Nothing gets taken down. So what what's allowed and what the algorithm is doing is, is so frightening to me, I think.
00:17:17
S3: Yeah. So it's definitely an area where anyone who is working on establishing ethical frameworks is making a really important contribution to our society as a whole.
00:17:33
S6: Nobody like you.
00:17:35
S3: On Vision Australia radio. You're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is crime fiction writer Ruth McIver. Ruth, you mentioned before about your debut novel. That's the one titled I Shot the devil.
00:17:51
S4: Yes. The one that wasn't published was called Nothing Gold, and that was a WA kind of procedural one. I shot The Devil's Part of a two book series, the sequel. That's the sound that publishers sort of said. Do you have a title for the series? And so I said, I've got to think of something quickly. So I called it the Southport Chronicles, and a couple of people who've read it have said to me, oh, we want another one and we want it like this. And I'm like, you can't tell me what to write. I think they've got something nice to happen to my narrator, but it is very noir. So, you know, I can't promise that.
00:18:27
S3: And that first one did win the Rochelle Prize and the Affirm Prize in 2018. Yeah. Would you share with us the feeling of what it's like to win a literary prize and have your creative work recognized in this way?
00:18:41
S4: Yeah. I mean, it's obviously it's especially when it's something you've worked so hard for. It's, it's really, it's like, it's almost like stepping into a mirror. Like that's what it felt like. It was just so surreal to me. But it was what I'd always dreamed of. And, and it was, you know, the happiest I probably ever felt. But at the same time, say, earlier that month, I had been shortlisted and was found runner up for the banjo. And I was devastated. Like, I went to bed for a week and I like I was so upset because I, I had been at the point of I was almost at the precipice. I was like, I would never quit. But in my mind, I was the closest I've ever been to quitting. And I was sort of actually on a trip when I first got the news that I was on the long list. I was on a trip away and I was thinking, you know, on the drive there, I was like, if I could just go to therapy for, you know, to remove that desire, I would do that. Like maybe there's some kind of therapy I could do. So I don't want to have this happen. Like, I don't need to be a writer that I don't need to get my book published that I don't, you know, so I was really at that point of just absolute despair. So this stuff happening was so wild and in a row, but it's amazing. But it's also very odd afterwards because people that had kind of blanked you or refused your manuscript are suddenly wanting to contact you and they're wanting to know you and they're wanting to represent you, or they're wanting to chat with you or, and, and that was very strange for me. I was, I was a little bit disturbed by that aspect because I thought, this is very fickle. And I'm, you know, I don't like that aspect of it us because, you know, you. I think the the problem is with human nature is that until someone else endorses something, others don't believe in it. And that's kind of what that you see that in, in, in real effects.
00:20:38
S3: Before we continue, would you read for us an extract from one of your novels?
00:20:44
S4: This is this is actually the preface. Uh, the prologue. Sorry. And I'm just going to read it because it's one of my favorite sections. So prologue Kafie 1993, the summer that my mom and dad separated, the future was a boat cresting the sound moments before the engine cut out. Moments can be ripples. Moments can be riptides. For weeks, temperatures had spiked into a heat wave, sticky days melting one into the next like ice cream. My house was emptied of adults, except the maid's mom went to the Hamptons to a yoga retreat. While dad said in the city, rather than making the long commute home to the island, working into the night at the World Trade Center. My nanny, Inge, went back to Sweden for the summer, so Rosa moved from the attic room to the guest bedroom on the second floor next to me. I could hear her saying a novena at night for her snoring. When I walked past her room to get a glass of milk downstairs, which I needed after eating the hot tamales and bean heavy Frito casseroles that she made our day. Maid was Rosa's cousin, or maybe her niece. She never spoke to me except when I said Ola and she smiled and said it back. Rosa changed my sheets and said nothing when I wet them, poured me OJ and buttered my toast in the morning, even though I can do those things myself. Sometimes my dad called me to say good night from his office. He'd say ground control to Captain Kathy. I'm calling from above the clouds, and I'd reply, Roger that. I'm below the clouds. I'm on the water. Even though the Hamptons was an hour and 15 minutes by car from our house in Nassau County, my mom was not able to leave the retreat where she was dismantling. She'd call and say, Kathy, I'm disassembling my false self. Or never marry a man who doesn't make your heart soar. My Yogi is showing me how to truly love. I was alone, but I wasn't lonely. I spent most of my time with my best friend Shelly, who was also in the arrow program for gifted kids. Being gifted was a kind of a curse because we were always improving ourselves, crammed in carpools for endless extracurriculars clarinet, computer club painting, drawing, jazz, and tap. In the fall, we'd be back in religious classes at Saint Aloysius. We called it Saint Owls. Twice a week leading up to our confirmation, Shelly's mom, Mrs. Sloan, worked at the library but was our primary driver because my mom couldn't drive because of the hostile energies on the road. Mrs. Sloan smoked through the cracked window and told us to call her Leo, which was also her star sign, even though she didn't really believe in that sort of thing. My mom, who did believe in astrology, said any woman who was a size ten and white sweatpants outside had clearly let themselves go. But I thought Leah was beautiful, even with the smiling crinkles around her eyes and her wild hair, which was just like a lion's mane. All her activities were suspended over the summer, and Shelley's parents were almost always out. Or rather, Shelley's dad was always out, and Leah was always sleeping when she didn't work at the library. The X files theme song radiating from the master bedroom. We listened to Shelley's big sister Erin clattering in past curfew, trying to be quiet. Not that it mattered. Erin would brush past us in the kitchen, reeking of bonfire smoke, beer and reefer. We would all forage in the freezer for frozen pizza pockets and pop tarts and stay up watching MTV. And even though we never left the island, we never felt so free.
00:24:10
S3: Thank you Ruth. And that was from the sound.
00:24:13
S4: Yeah. So the the perspective is of Cathy Carver, who is Erin Sloan, the main protagonist. Her little sister's best friend who went missing, and her little sister's past now. So she kind of gets drawn back into the island via Cathy Carver. And that was one of the like, remaining story threads that I, I wanted to go into from the first book.
00:24:42
S3: How do you go about planning the overall storyline and structure of your novels, and how do you sketch out and develop your characters?
00:24:51
S4: So I, I did have a tutor sort of teach me synopsis quite early on, and so I always do a little synopsis. And so I usually have an idea. I've got like place, I've got some characters or I've got a voice or I've got these things and I have like very bare bones kinds of ideas. But I just write to begin with because I really like to let things unfold. And I just need to be able to play and to be able to work things out. And I find that it will show itself to me. And then there's a point where I get to like a certain word count and I'm like, okay, we need to go in and like, look at the story structure. But I do mostly as it goes, like I'll go for walks away from the laptop and just think about the story and think about the characters and decisions I might make, but I don't really know how it's going to end. And so I kind of know maybe there's going to be something very like I, you know, I, and I have an idea, like, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a screen writer and I was like, oh, I kind of know some of those things already. Like I, I, I do have an idea of like how it has to be structured in terms of like pacing and story and stuff, but I don't really always know. And then I'll go, but when I go back in and edit, I will map it out more. But the first draft is usually quite free. And like I've tried, the reason why I do that is because the first novel, I think the reason why it was so, so, so hard was I was, you know, went to RMIT and I'm studying novel and I learnt a lot, but I tried to really transpose a lot of ideas and do things like using novel writing software and stuff. And it's not for me. I've got ADHD and I, my brain is always going and exploding into directions, and there's always a lot of different subplots and rabbit holes and stuff. And I, you know, that's kind of annoying, but I just don't understand that. Like, I'm like, oh, it doesn't work for me. But also I feel like story is living thing. So it's like, I have to kind of like make a decision to kind of just go on that journey. But in terms of like, if you were trying to write a really commercial book, it's not recommended, I don't think. But that said, you know, Stephen King does that too. So he, he always lets the story unfold. So yeah.
00:27:19
S3: I don't think there's a right or wrong way.
00:27:22
S4: I don't think there is. I think if you're writing, if you want to write a very successful crime novel that's very commercial and it sells, potentially that would be not advisable. But I teach a lot and I do a lot of workshops and stuff, and I never, ever, ever insist that anyone does that. In fact, I always tell them to follow the story, but also to follow their instinct as to what kind of writer they are. Because I think that you have to know who you are. You have to know your weak spots as well as your strengths. And I think you've got to play to both and develop the weaker ones. And sometimes you can just minimize those. Like some people are terrible at dialogue. They can get better. But no one, if you're not great at dialogue and it's not natural to you, you can get better, but you're never going to be in May. You know what I mean? Because dialogue is about having an ear. it's it's one of those, those funny ones like, you know, and then but there's nothing shameful or wrong about that. It's just like, you know, just knowing your areas where you're not so good at something and you're, you're much better at the other things. So.
00:28:32
S3: Exactly. So once you've drafted a chapter or a whole novel, how do you go about editing your own work to achieve a consistent style?
00:28:41
S4: I think at the moment I'm writing something and I think I've been spending, in fact, the last two things I've been writing. I have been a lot more going back and editing over them, but there is also a purpose to that in the sense that I often, if I'm applying for a fellowship or something, or and I don't do that often, or if I want to, if I need to show that to publisher, I want to make sure that I have three really good chapters plus my synopsis. So it's like having that really tight beginning is really important. But mostly I didn't used to do that. I would just race through. I think I'm more particular now, and I will spend a lot longer on those beginning chapters. But I think it's also partly it's just getting stuff down. Like I think, you know, with this one that I've been writing, I think I'm about like 6000 words into it and I'm like, okay, now I'm starting to really see what's happening and I'll take a break from redoing those and I'll go into the story. And yeah, so it's sort of like most of the time, once I get to a certain point, I just go and I don't edit at all. And then I go back in and I edit the manuscript, then I'll edit it a second time before I send it to an editor or maybe even a third time. But that's also because I'm going to be doing some structural, um, refining and make it as clean as I can.
00:30:06
S3: And you mentioned before about teaching, and I wanted to ask you, what are some of the rewards and some of the challenges of working with others on developing their creativity.
00:30:18
S4: Yeah, I actually, I love working in that role. Like it's, you know, I feel that feels very much like a vocation for me too, because I really, I feel like there couldn't be anything more joyful than helping people, you know, develop also enjoy creativity to, to enjoy something that I love so much. I think also because I love story just objectively to be able to help someone improve that. And for the sake of story, it's like, of course I love that. I think the challenges are more that it sacrifices for me in the sense that I find myself giving a lot to others. And I, I do really, I struggle a little bit with that and putting parameters around that. You know, I think mentorship and guidance is such a lost thing now, and it's got a lot to do with, you know, the kind of late stage capitalism kind of thing. So, you know, I all I wanted, All I ever wanted was like, I just wanted a mentor. I wanted someone to guide me and, you know, to help me develop my skills and stuff like that. And so I try to kind of be that for others. And yeah, that, that the only, you know, thing is that it does take away from my own, it kind of depletes some of my own energy. But mostly it's, it's really, really wonderful. I think the main thing that I try to do is empower people. I don't want to be someone's mommy, and I don't want to be there to just like, like, like I'm, I'm also like, I have like chronic musculoskeletal stuff. And I remember going to see this physio and she was like, you know, you can't be like helpless, like come in and fix me. She's like, you need to kind of like take charge of your own pain. And I was like, wow, that's so profound. But you know, it's, it's kind of like I'm teaching people to diagnose their own work and to be like, to be more empowered so they don't need me, you know what I mean? Like, so I'm there as, you know, sounding board and I can help them and stuff like that, but I don't want them to need me. I want them to be empowered so they can do it themselves.
00:32:18
S3: So that's brilliant. And Ruth, you've published a standalone audio original for Audible Australia titled The Blackout. What inspired you to publish an audio original and how can our listeners access it?
00:32:31
S4: It's available on Audible Australia and it's obviously it belongs to them. So it's the only platform, I believe, that you can listen to it. A lot of crime authors do that in between a release. But I love writing for audio. And I, you know, I'm really interested in that format and podcasts and all of that sort of stuff. And it was a really interesting challenge because it was for audio. It's not print, which is, you know, it's a new skill. And then there was a stage in it where they were like, we'd like you to try it as a radio play because we might do it like that. And I was like, oh, okay. And so I was, you know, I had to do that. And then, you know, so it's, it's definitely, it's really good for me as a writer to try new things, like I really want to do TV writing also and whatnot. So I really enjoyed that. The only problem is some of the audible originals do get printed, so you can get them in ebook format, but some people don't listen to audiobooks and they didn't want to to get it as an audiobook, so, or they didn't see it as a novella because it wasn't a printed book. And I was like, no, it is. It's a book, you know? Yeah. It was the first kind of commissioned book, though, that I'd done, which is interesting. You know, it's an interesting experience because, you know, you've been paid. They've signed it, they haven't seen it. There's trust there that you're going to deliver something good. So it's a little bit, you know, nail biting kind of tension wise.
00:33:57
S3: So that's fantastic for our listeners, many of whom do access literature through audiobooks.
00:34:04
S4: Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. I did a workshop with Writers Victoria with Vision Australia and yeah. And there were many, many readers, you know, have such a great library in Australia.
00:34:16
S3: Fantastic. Thank you. Ruth. You're one of the featured guests at the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival. What does this festival mean to you and what are you looking forward to?
00:34:29
S4: Oh, look, I'm just so thrilled because I think Fremantle. Well, Europe is one of my. It is my home in in Western Australia. I love it. I feel very connected to to the area. And I think it's a festival that really celebrates community. I'm also just I love the prison and the fact that the prison is part of the, you know, it's the venue for many of the events. It's just we have such an interesting architectural, but also a very dark colonial and punitive architecture of the area. But it's also so picturesque. So it's got these kind of really interesting contrasts, but it's a beautiful festival. There's there's like a kids element to it, too. And Fremantle's really meant to be walked around like I, you know, it's kind of designed for that. So it feels like such a great kind of place for that. And it's just an honor for me because also, like all the authors and many like people that are on the panels are people that I respect and admire. And, you know, I'm just so looking forward to it. Objectively, there are so many events that I'm going to be attending. Um, besides I'm speaking. I'll be I'm excited to attend.
00:35:42
S3: Fantastic. And if our listeners want to find out more about the Totally Lit Festival, go to totally lit.io. You also have your own website, Ruth mciver.net. Would you tell us what our listeners can find on your website?
00:35:57
S4: Yes, I, I have some of my books on the website. I have some like there are YouTube clips for book trailers. There's a bit about the teaching that I do, the workshops that I run, I do a course called Crime Fiction 101, and I haven't actually announced the course dates, but that will be on the website. So yeah, basically just information about what I do and I link to also my Substack and, and that sort of thing. Yeah. That I also offer teaching and mentoring and whatnot. So that's also on there.
00:36:31
S3: That's wonderful. Ruth. It's been fantastic to speak with you. Thank you so much for joining us from Western Australia. And we'll certainly listen out to follow your career. So all the very best to you for the future.
00:36:44
S4: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.
00:36:46
S3: Our guest on Emerging Writers today was crime fiction writer Ruth McIver, speaking with us from Perth on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk Nyungar people. This program is produced in our Adelaide studios on Kah-nee-ta and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia, Radio via radio, on digital, Online at VA radio.org or find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for emerging writers by Vision Australia Radio.
00:37:28
S1: Connected by NBN Vision Australia Radio is more accessible than ever. You can listen online on your smart device or through the community radio app. With the right connection, you can bring trusted news, conversation and connection within reach across Australia with NBN full fibre connecting more homes every day. You can check your address on the NBN website to find out what is available to you. Do great things with NBN. Visit nbn.com.au/to find out more. Station sponsor.
00:37:58
S2: Welcome to a Vision Australia Radio podcast. Love our podcasts. Why not listen to us live? Ask your smart device to play Vision Australia Radio or visit radio.org.
