From her home in the South Australian Coastal Town of Wallaroo, Tricia Stringer’s novel explore contemporary issues usually with a country setting.
As a child growing up on a farm on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, Tricia Stringer’s twin passions were for reading and pretending to be a librarian. Her fascination with all things literary has manifested into adult life first with her career as a teacher librarian and, more recently, as the author of an impressive line-up of rural romance, historic and contemporary relationship-focused novels. “My mother was a huge influence, both as an avid reader and as a volunteer at our local library,” Tricia recalls. “When I wasn’t reading, I was busy pretending to be a librarian, arranging all our books in alphabetical order and checking books in and out.” Tricia went off to boarding school in Adelaide and then teacher’s college.
She worked in various country schools, met and married Daryl, who worked as a postmaster for Australia Post. In 1989, they moved east to Wallaroo on the Yorke Peninsula’s Copper Coast where Tricia had been offered a permanent teaching role. For a time, they had the licence for the local post offi ce and, true to form, Tricia set up a children’s bookstore in the spacious building. It was Tricia’s dedication to her students that inadvertently kick-started her writing career when the Copper Coast community was hosting its biennial celebration of its Cornish heritage, the Kernewek Lowender Festival.
The event celebrates the discovery of copper in the region in 1859 and, in the ensuing years, the towns of Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina boomed as copper miners from England migrated to work in the mines. By 1865, Cornish settlers made up more than 40 per cent of South Australia’s immigrant population, and by 1875 Moonta had surpassed Cornwall as the British Empire’s largest copper region. By 1890, the population of the region was approximately 30,000. “As a teacher, I went looking for something to bring this story to life for my year four and five students,” Tricia recalls. “When I discovered there was nothing age appropriate, I hit on the idea of writing a book about it for them. I quickly learnt that it wasn’t that easy, but I did go on to write a few local stories that are still in school libraries in this area.” With some writing courses under her belt, Tricia was emboldened to enter a competition for stories with a rural theme. “That was in the early 2000s and rural romance wasn’t even a genre,” she recalls. “But I ended up self publishing
three novels.”
The turning point came in 2012, when Harlequin Australia was looking for rural fiction and Tricia submitted her fourth manuscript. Queen of the Road won the Romance Writers of Australia’s book of the year in 2013, and she followed up with seven rural romances and a three-part historical saga set in the Flinders Ranges. She resigned from her “day” job in the classroom in 2014 and has since focused entirely on her writing. In recent years, Tricia has pivoted to writing family focused novels, often rural-based, but dealing with contemporary issues. “I decided I’d like to write about people who are closer to my own age,” she says. “Older people are often relegated as secondary characters and I wanted to give them a voice.” With a well-honed work ethic, she manages to produce a new work every year.
Tricia’s most recent offering, Head for the Hills, a story of a small Adelaide Hills town divided over property development with a detour into the plight of women at risk of homelessness, is her 17th novel. “When I was still teaching, I’d grab any squirrel of time for writing, which meant that I often worked in the early mornings and late at night,” she says. “But, these days, I’m more regular with my hours. I imagine I’m going to work in an office and go into my study first thing in the morning. That’s my best time as I wake up with ideas and need to get them down.” Tricia aims to commit 2000 words to the keyboard most mornings, some days with more success than others. That leaves the afternoons free for life admin — she manages her own social media, writes a quarterly newsletter to her inner circle of readers and deals with the usual minutiae of running a small business. In between, she’s a note maker, journaling any thoughts about her current book or the next one — “I’ve always got stories fermenting away in my head”. “I’m not a huge plotter,” she explains. “When I start writing, I have a rough idea of the beginning and where it’s going to end up, but what’s in between is a surprise. With Head for the Hills, one of my lead characters turned up in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. I had no idea at that point that she was going to become so important to the storyline.”
On the odd occasion that she does get stuck, Tricia says she knows to get up and go for a walk, or a paddle in the ocean that her new home on Wallaroo’s waterfront overlooks. “We have a pontoon, but we don’t have a boat,” she says. “However, we do have kayaks. Daryl is an ocean kayaker as he likes to fish, but I stay closer in. I also enjoy the garden, though Daryl is the main gardener in our partnership.” Time with family and grandchildren is another important distraction. With a son and daughter-in-law working in the Adelaide Hills wine industry, wine is another abiding interest, and Tricia recently embarked on a challenge to match each of her books with an appropriate drop. Head for the Hills is paired with a Gamay, from the Adelaide Hills, naturally. While she says she enjoys every aspect of the writing process, inevitably there comes a time when she despairs that “nobody will want to read it”. “I was heartened to learn that even [bestselling American horror writer] Stephen King admits to that phase,”
Tricia says. “It’s part of the discipline to just keep writing, and it will sort itself out.” It also helps that she’s been working with the same editor for the past 10 books. “I genuinely enjoy the editing process,” Tricia says. “I can talk with my family about whatever I’m engrossed in, but eventually their eyes glaze over. It’s great to have an editor you know and trust to make suggestions that inevitably make the story stronger.” When Australian Country caught up with Tricia, she was about to embark on promotional tours for Head for the Hills, which would take her back to her old home country on the Eyre Peninsula up to Queensland and possibly home via the Victorian city of Bendigo. “I do love meeting my readers,” she says. “Their feedback is always appreciated and the travel involved always opens the possibility of a setting for another book.”
