Kate Mildenhall on The Mother Fault and learning to sail

Kate Mildenhall is a writer and teacher. Her debut novel, Skylarking, was longlisted for Best Debut Fiction in The Indie Book Awards 2017 and the 2017 Voss Literary Prize. Kate teaches creative writing to young writers and co-hosts The First Time, a podcast about the first time you publish a book. The Mother Fault is her second novel. Kate lives with her partner and two daughters in Hurstbridge, Victoria.

Today, Kate Mildenhall is on the blog to share her experience with conquering fear and learning to sail in order to be able to write The Mother Fault. Read on …

Kate Mildenhall (Photo by Cat Black).

As any writer knows, there’s no rule that says you have to DO the thing to write about it. But there is something magical about ‘walking the ground’, seeing the place, learning the strange skill.

I’d heard Sally Piper speak about her solo hike around Wilson’s Promontory as she wrote The Geography of Friendship, trying to capture the isolation and dread her character might feel. To write the character of Mim, a woman who escapes Australia by boat with her two young kids in tow in The Mother Fault, I needed to be afraid on the open ocean.

In my late night google sessions, I stumbled upon the Darwin to Ambon Yacht rally. They were looking for experienced crew. I didn’t sugar coat the email; No experience, very enthusiastic, I wrote. But I wasn’t holding my breath. I knew that there were always countless volunteers for these opportunities. So when the call came from Neville from Darwin asking me to hot-bunk with the only other female member of his crew, I didn’t hesitate.

I kept notes during those four days we sailed from Darwin to Indonesia, while I rocked back and forth in my little cabin after I finished my shift, in the moments before I gratefully succumbed to sleep. I had absolutely no idea what I was embarking on, I wrote. This is extraordinary.

Everything is alien – the sea, the sky, the movement of my body, the sizzling sound of the waves. Flying fish leap on to the deck and have to be scooped up and rescued. It takes us all night to sail past a ghostly oil rig. Sometimes, one of the other yachts is visible, coloured sails ballooning in the warm wind. But mostly we are alone. I am bruised in odd places from bashing against doors and cupboards. The wind picks up in the middle of the Banda Sea and we are racing, cutting through waves at an angle I feel defies logic. Trying to sleep before my midnight shift, my body is pressed against the flat of the wall. As the noise of the water and wind and the creak of the boat picks up, I am sure I am going to die. I feel stupid that I’ve done this all for a book. I’m a terrible mother, I think.

But I don’t die. I am wonderfully, thrillingly alive. My entire body is buzzing with it, as if all my nerve endings have been exposed. I DID IT. The terrifying thing.

I pour these feelings into my manuscript. The strength I’ve discovered in myself, that bravery I used to know when I travelled to foreign places as young woman, all those times I revelled in risk, sailed close to danger. And I place these feelings next to that primal longing I felt for my kids when I was so far from them, the need to feel their little bodies next to mine.

I hold all these feelings, and I write like hell, imagining a fair wind at my back, and the open ocean ahead of me.

—The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall (Simon & Schuster Australia) is out now.

The Mother Fault

Limited Signed Copies Available!

by Kate Mildenhall

Mim’s husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him – especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them ‘safe’.

But suddenly Ben can’t be tracked. And Mim is questioned, made to surrender her passport and threatened with the unthinkable – her two children being taken into care at the notorious BestLife. Cornered, Mim risks everything to...

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