Stephanie Parkyn – French Love & Obsession

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:22 — 35.6MB) | Embed

Don't miss out on the latest episodes. Subscribe now! Spotify | More

Welcome back to The Joys of Binge Reading podcast.  I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and here in New Zealand we’ve taken a month out for a summer holiday break – blobbing out at the beach.

Now we’re back – rejuvenated and raring to go – in our mission of helping you – our audience – discover popular best sellers you’ll find irresistible reading…

Australia’s bush fires have made international news while we’ve been in recess, so it’s fitting to kick off the first episode of 2020 with author Stephanie Parkyn, whose latest book – Josephine’s Garden – explores the love and obsession the discovery of Australian flora and fauna created for Napoleon’s Empress Josephine Bonaparte and nineteenth century science.

Links to all the talking points in today’s podcast can be found in the shownotes on The Joys of Binge Reading website.  Feel free to subscribe to the podcast – and leave us comments of what you hear – at Thejoysofbingereading.com

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

• The long and challenging road to publication
• Transitioning from science to creative arts
• Why she loves strong women
• The Australian fires
• The writers she admires most
• What she’d do differently second time around

Where to find Stephanie Parkyn: 

Website: http://www.stephanieparkyn.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sparkyn.story/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephanieparkyn/ 

Website: www.stephanieparkyn.com

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny Wheeler: But now she is. Hello there Stephanie, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Stephanie Parkyn: Hello. Nice to speak with you, Jenny.

Small beginnings

Jenny Wheeler: Look, you really should be calling you Dr. Stephanie Parkyn because you have got a PhD in science and you had a very interesting career in science before you turned to writing fiction.

I’m wondering, how did that transition occur and was there some sort of epiphany moment, some Once Upon a Time moment when you just knew that you had to write fiction?

Stephanie Parkyn:  I guess I always wanted to write. So when I was a little girl, I was writing short stories and poems and things like that from a very early age. But I put that aside while I was doing my school and then tertiary education, and working as a scientist. But really, it was always there in the back of my mind.

 I was always making up stories around me, I guess. So I started to get into it again. And the Royal Society had the Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing. And I thought, well, that sounds like perfect for me.  I tried to do a bit of my fiction storytelling, and I got short-listed in that prize.

Manhire Prize a big encouragement

So that was a huge boost and encouragement to start writing a novel. And I did start writing a novel while I was working, and that novel has never been published. It’s my trial novel, shall we say. But, yes, so I think having it in the background and also that short story prize as a little goal to go for, was a bit of a impetus to get back into the writing.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now you’re carving out a niche for yourself in the area of historical fiction with books that very much reflect that scientific background. And can you tell us what has drawn you to the stories that you’ve chosen to tell?

First novel – seven years work

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes sure. My first novel Into The World, I was drawn to it because it was about scientists, and it was about that early age of exploration, which seems like such a wonderful time when you didn’t really know things about the world.

Now we can look it all up online, but then of course, they had to travel to unknown places for the very first time. And when I started looking into it, I was living in Tasmania at the time, and I was fascinated by the story of these explorers who had come there and had this interesting, curious interaction with the local Aboriginal people.

I found that there was a woman that had disguised herself as a man and journeyed on the voyage, and that was what started me. That kicked me into that story thinking, well, what was her story? How did she end up, doing this. So, yes that was it. Science led me into  that. And the botanist and the gardener who appear in Josephine’s Garden – they were in that first book as key characters as well.

Empress Josephine’s passion

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s fantastic. Now the newest one is called Josephine’s Garden and it’s a captivating tale of Napoleon Bonaparte and his Empress Josephine who had passion for creating an amazing garden at their country home. Malmaison. How did your interest in Josephine evolve?

Stephanie Parkyn:  Well that actually it came from the first book, in a way, because, the botanist and gardener that I just mentioned, they go onto become involved with Josephine.

So I wanted to see what happened to them at the end of my first novel. And, the gardener becomes chief gardener for Josephine and the botanist is part of the Jardine du Plantes that ended up being something close to botanical rivals with Josephine. So that was perfect to explore that next phase. The first one was the French revolution era of France, and the next phase is Napoleon, and Josephine.

Old World discovers the New

And I didn’t know much about them, other than that it was supposed to be a great love story, but very tragic that they had to part because she couldn’t give him a child.  So it was looking at those gardener’s lives and realizing that she had this amazing passion for gardening, and that she was maybe a little maligned over time as well.

That gave me the impetus to think,’ Oh, there’s something here. There’s something interesting here as a story.’ The fact that she was trying to desperately try and to give an heir to Napoleon,  to keep her place in society and at the same time trying to grow these amazing plants from around the world that people were seeing for the very first time.

So that was what got me into that one.

Great greenhouses & wallabies

Jenny Wheeler: Actually, I was going to ask you about this, because in the book her desire to have a child and her desire to propagate the first Blue Gums in Europe become very much interwoven in the story. And she sees success in her greenhouse with the Blue Gums or lack of it as a portent for what might happen with her own personal fertility.

I wondered how much of that was fact and how much was your own creative license. But it sounds like quite a lot of it was basically historical fact.

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes.  She certainly was very obsessed with growing these plants from around the world. So she would write to sea captains who were going to, Australia and she had Napoleon send the Baudin expedition, which came around Australia at that time as well.

And she was really keen on getting these seeds back from that expedition, and that’s when she gets into this botanical rivalry with the official Jardin du Plantes. So she was definitely very interested in growing these things. She had wallabies and emus that had been collected on that voyage as well.

An imperial rivalry

 Just all the different exotic plants from around the world of the times. And in regard to the Blue Gum. I know she was growing a lot of the Australian plants, the eucalypts and the acacias and things like that for the first time in Europe. With the Blue Gums, I can’t actually remember how much I absolutely knew or how much I inferred, but I knew that Jacques Labillardière – that’s the name of the botanist, he officially described the Blue Gums for the first time.

And because I was including him in the story, and because he and the gardener had found them for the first time for European audiences, I guess, for European eyes, I knew that they would have been a very important species for them to try and grow.

And there were hints in the records that I read that there definitely was a rivalry between the two – the Jardines du Plantes and Josephine, because the Minister of Marine had to intervene at the time and sort out who was going to get the specimens. So there was definitely something there. And then I just extrapolated from that.

Two remarkable survivors

Jenny Wheeler: Both of your heroines – both Josephine and the woman in Into The World, Marie Girardin, they’re both very strong, independent woman, willing to do things that are a little bit outside of the normal range. What did you find particularly engrossing about Josephine as you got more into her character?

Stephanie Parkyn: Well, it was an amazing rags to riches story for her. She really had some struggles in her life that I found fascinating as well.  The fact that she was sent to Paris is a 16- year-old to marry a man that she didn’t know.

He despises her when she gets married and he ends up putting her in a convent, separates her from her children, or one of them, at the time. Later she manages to divorce him, but then later still she gets put in prison during the Reign of Terror because he was put in prison. So she nearly loses her head at that stage of history as well.

Maligned girl from Martinique

Then she goes on to meet all these new leaders of France and be escalated into Napoleon’s realm.  So she becomes Empress of France from starting as a colonial girl from Martinque sent to Paris when she was only a teenager. So she had an amazing backstory.

She must have been so determined to achieve what she did with the garden at Malmaison as well. The fact that she built these big glass houses for the first time in Europe, and she has been a bit maligned as a prostitute which came out of the English propaganda of the time as well.

But she certainly was an A list celebrity party girl of the time when she first met Napoleon and at these parties, anything would go. So she certainly had a risque past, but she’s been thought of as either a prostitute or it was considered that her interest in botany was more about just the prettiness of the flowers.

Australian fauna and its fate today

But if that was the case, then why would she have tried to grow all these unusual things from seeds from around the world that she wouldn’t know whether or not they were going to be pretty flowers or not? You know, I think there was more to her than has been projected over time.

Jenny Wheeler: What’s happening now with the Australian fauna, just in this last few months, the terrible fires that they’ve had there.  I wondered if you saw any irony in the fact that it was so celebrated in the 19th century and yet now they face like virtual destruction. What are your thoughts in response to the crisis that’s going on there?

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes, yes. It’s terrifying and catastrophic and especially when the fires are going into, into wetter rainforest areas that are not as climatized to dealing with fire regimes.  When I was living in Tasmania, parts of the forest. that burnt there were the wetter forests, and they won’t come back as quickly as the more dry eucalypt areas.

More fires? More loss?

I was living in Australia when the Black Saturday fires came through and people then were trying to say climate change is going to make these fires worse, but nobody wanted to listen then, and there was a backlash to anyone that tried to bring that up.

People are still trying to say, now, this is going to be the future. If we don’t do something about climate change there are going to be more fires and more loss. Yes, so it is a scary time and it’ll be interesting.

I’m going book touring in February through mainland Australia and it’ll be quite sobering, I think, to drive through some of those areas.

Jenny Wheeler: I know that for the people who aren’t living in our part of the world, you’re in the Coromandel and I’m between Auckland and Coromandel.

Smoke’s weird skies 2000 km away

We’ve both experienced these weird skies that we’ve been having since Christmas. I must admit, I chose one recent Sunday afternoon to have friends up for drinks and the sky was looking really weird. I was thinking, what’s happening? Is it going to rain? And then I realized that the sky was a yellow color, and I realized it was the fires. We’ve had orange skies in other parts of New Zealand, haven’t we?

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes.  It was really freaky that day and I imagine it’s way worse for people in Australia that are closer to the fires, but just the fact that it’s come all that way across the ocean and it really rolled in, didn’t it? And it covered us all in that orange glow.  You see the global effect, don’t you?

Jenny Wheeler: In the morning, when the sun was rising, it was  a blood red sun. I tried to photograph it, but it just didn’t come out on my phone. But it was a real blood red sunrise, it was quite weird. It did have an apocalyptic effect.

Malmaison – still has its magic

Stephanie Parkyn:  And everything gets a strange glow. The sun, you know, even now, it’s not quite crisp and clear, is it? Everything is a bit hazy

Jenny Wheeler: Just turning back to Malmaison? What can you see at Malmaison today and have you had the chance to visit there? Is it somewhere you can visit now?

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes, it is. You can visit the house, the Chateau that she lived in, and it’s now a museum, so you can see everything that she would’ve owned as well. The way she decorated it. One of the things that she did do was spend a lot of money on redecorating things.  It is preserved.

You can walk around the music room and the bedrooms and that’s fabulous to see. Unfortunately, the gardens are pretty much not non-existent anymore. Not to the extent that they would have been when she was there.

Garden swallowed by surburbia

She had 300 acres. Now most of it’s been subdivided up for the local town, and so it’s all much closer to the, to the town, and it’s nestled in a bit more, but it’s still possible to visit and get a real sense of what it must’ve been like to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: And I gather that a lot of the love letters are still available. How did you go about your research for Josephine in particular, and where did you find your best leads?

Yeah, so the letters of Napoleon to her have been preserved because she kept them all and they’ve been published. So that was brilliant. They’ve been translated and published, so I did get to read all of those. And there have been a lot of historians that have written about them. So that was a great start to getting into the era and the story of those two people. I read a lot of different books about them, to form my own opinion of who they were and what their characters were like.

Amazing extant records

Some of my other characters are more unknown. There was fortunately, the botanist that I mentioned, I have his own journal from the expedition that he went on that I’ve written about in Into The World. So I’ve got a real sense of who he is from his own words, which is an amazing resource to have and a little bit also, for the gardener in that respect.

And the internet is an amazing resource for us now because you can source so much freely available material. Some of the records of people that knew Napoleon and Josephine, their memoirs are available and translated online.  I would pretty much read widely to begin with. I had a few specific things that were less well known about the unknown people. And then I just start to write and when I need to know something specific, I’ll Google it and see what comes up.

Taking a look at wider career

Look, perhaps just turning away from the individual books to looking a little more widely at your career. You’ve mentioned about your time in Australia and your science career. Tell us a little bit about your life before writing and then how it has fed  into your writing.  How long were you in Australia? And you grew up in New Zealand?

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes, that’s right. I was born in Christchurch and I did all my schooling and university, mostly down there. And then, I worked as a scientist for about 15 years at NIWA.   (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.)  And also, I did my PhD at the University of Waikato.  After that, I’ve always wanted to do writing as I mentioned, but also art.

Time for a creative change

My husband and I  had the opportunity to move to Australia and I chose to not really try and get a science job at that point. I thought I will try to further my art career and also the writing. So that’s what I did while I lived there for 10 years. I got involved in a local art gallery and I concentrated on writing my first novel.

So, yes, it was a complete change. Mostly before I went to Australia, I was in science. And then when we went there, I tried a few different things that I’d always wanted to give a go. And fortunately, the writing has worked out and I’m now doing that pretty much full time.

Jenny Wheeler: Now, for those who don’t know, NIWA is one of the Crown agencies in New Zealand that handles water and weather, doesn’t it?  Does that mean you’ve actually got a pretty in depth understanding about all of these weather events and climate change.

Discovering herself as a writer

Stephanie Parkyn:  I was a freshwater ecologist, so not on the climate side of things, but I definitely worked with people alongside us who were climate scientists. It’s an interesting place to learn a lot about different sciences going on. That’s for sure, because we were fresh water and marine and climate.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned about your art, were you actually practicing as an artist, like painting or drawing?

Stephanie Parkyn:  Oh yes, that’s right. I did pastels art, mainly pastel paintings. I was exhibiting and I still have a few pieces around the place.

Jenny Wheeler:  That’s wonderful.  Look, if there’s one thing that you’ve done more than any other, to attribute your success as a writer, what would you think it would be?

Stephanie Parkyn:  Oh, that is a really hard one.  I think it’s probably persistence, really. It’s just the length of time that it takes, I’m just sticking at it, because it took me seven years to write the first novel.  And it took a long time to get it published as well.

Stephanie as reader . . .

So it’s all that sort of stickability really. And eventually, you know, if you work hard and you work at it and you work at the craft, and then just keep persisting no matter the number of rejections.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Stephanie as reader . . . because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and, and it’s predicated a little bit on series reads. I found it interesting that your two books are very much linked, although they’re not published specifically as a series, but it’s lovely that the story can be carried through.

Who do you like to binge read and have you got any recommendations for our listeners about who you’d think would be great for them to try?

Stephanie Parkyn: What actually got me back into reading in terms of a series was the Harry Potter series, funnily enough.  When that came out, it was that time when that you had to wait for the next one to come out yet.

Her Harry Potter addiction

You know, I hadn’t had that experience for a long time, or maybe ever, with reading. So with the Harry Potter one, my husband used to joke, Oh yeah, you’ll be lining up at the bookstore with all the kids in their capes. And so that one actually got me back into that joy of waiting for the next one to come out. You know, being so involved in those characters.

These days I actually seem to read more one offs, but I do like that TV series Poldark so I should try the books of that. And also people have been recommending to me the Outlander series of books, which I haven’t, read yet either.

But in terms of series, those are the ones I’m thinking I should delve into.

Other beloved authors

Jenny Wheeler: Also people even without having exactly a series, people discover an author and they like to read everything by that author. Have you got some favorite authors apart from JK Rowling, that you like to read everything that they write?

Stephanie Parkyn: There’s an English author called Hilary Mantel, everyone probably knows it, but also Michelle Lovric. I read one of her’s called The Book of Human Skin, and I was captivated and had to go back and find all of her other ones.

Another one is called The Floating Book. She writes a lot about Venice, it’s all historical and I really love those. She does very poetic descriptions, but strong poetic descriptions, just really surprising and great characters too. So, Michelle Loveric is one that I’d recommend – They’re set in the 1600’s, the 1700s.

Jenny Wheeler:  It’s amazing how many good writers there are around, even though I’ve been doing this podcast for two years, and I’d say probably at least 50% of the people we have on our historical fiction writers, but nobody’s mentioned her name to me before, and she sounds as if she’d be really good, but there’s lots of undiscovered treasures out there, isn’t there?

If you were doing it all over again . .

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes, that’s right. I chanced upon her by winning that book at a raffle or something. So, you know, it’s strange how you come across things. And then I really sought to seek them out whenever they get published now.

Jenny Wheeler:  Fantastic. Now we’re starting to come to the end of our time together. So just taking a look back over your writing career, at the stage, if you were doing it all over again. Is there anything that you would change, and if so, what would that be?

Stephanie Parkyn: Probably not in terms of my life experiences because I think it was great that, you know, I really enjoyed my science career and I really enjoyed, , trying art and, you know, just adding all these different things to your life experience before  you go to write because it’s kind of like, it’s an outpouring of stuff that you’ve accumulated in your a life experience that comes out on the page.

A long hard process to publication

The only thing, the major thing for perhaps other writers that I’ve learnt was just that process of trying to get published the first time. I tried to do that with my first book, it took me about three years of individually trying, pushing that and I learned a lot about going the right way.

I did things the wrong way and I learned more about how I should have done it when I did actually get my first published. So. Yeah, there’s all that learning, but you can’t help that, you know, that’s, that’s all part of life. And the things that you pick up along the way, but no, so there’s nothing really that I would change.

Jenny Wheeler: Who are you published with now?

Stephanie Parkyn: Allen and Unwin.

Touring Australia with Josephine

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. There are well known to Australasians. So what is next for Stephanie, the writer? I know you’ve mentioned you’re going on a book tour to Australia in February. Tell us a bit about where you’ll be in that tour.

Stephanie Parkyn: I’m starting in Melbourne on February 4, then I’m going through of Warrnambool along the coast, and then through to Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney, around the Sydney area, and hopefully up the coast towards Brisbane a bit as well. So that’s some of the major ones. Adelaide is 11th of February. Canberra a few days after that and Sydney around the weekend of the 15th of February. But all that should be on my website soon.

Jenny Wheeler: Right. And what about works in progress? If you’ve got anything else that you’ve got on your typewriter, so to speak?

What she has planned next

Stephanie Parkyn:  Yes. Yes. So, and in speaking about series, another third one that is connected to these other two. So in the first novel, the first scene starts with my heroine has to give up a child to go on this voyage. She’s an illegitimate mother and she’s been abandoned by her family.

 Her choice is to give up a child and disguise herself as a man and flee the wrath of her family.  In the third book, I’m writing the story of the boy. So this is her child that she gave up. So it’s what happens to him ultimately and how he reconnects with his mother. So in terms of series, it’s great to keep some of those characters going and they feed into each of the books, even if they’re standalone stories.

Marie’s abandoned son revisited

Jenny Wheeler: It’s fantastic. And how much of that one is, is historically accurate?

Stephanie Parkyn: It’s based at the time when Napoleon’s reign is ending. So my character is grown up when you first meet him. And he’s a storyteller and he’s a traveling storyteller, and he’s been moving through these areas that the French owned at the moment because Napoleon’s empire is there, but the empire is crumbling and they’re having to get out because the Russians and Prussians are starting to reclaim the areas as their own.

That’s the true facts of the time that are happening. And then my characters are all made up within that. But the true dates and those sorts of things of what battles were happening and how things were changing will be historically accurate.

Jenny Wheeler:  Fantastic. All of it sounds as if would be great fun. When will that one be published?

Where can readers find you online?

Stephanie Parkyn: Well, I’ve just finished the first draft, so it’s still got a few more drafts to go before I feel I can even show it to anyone. So I’m hoping, another couple of years and it should be out on the shelves. Let’s hope!

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely, Stephanie. Now look, do you like interacting with your readers and if you do, apart from these tours, that would be online.

How do people find you online and do you have a place where you like to talk to readers?

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes, I am on Facebook and on Instagram. So Facebook, I have a page called StephParkyn’sstoryplace.   And Instagram is just under my name and all that should be on my website, which is Stephanie Parkyn.com.

I love meeting people in the flesh as well at different events.

Full shownotes with links

Jenny Wheeler:  And we’ll have full show notes of this. We publish a full transcript of our podcast interviews as a blog, and we’ll put links to those at all of those particular places in the show notes, so that if people want to, they can find them that way as well. Thank you.   I wish you all the very best with your book tour in Australia. It sounds like that coast that you’re going down as one of the areas that’s been quite heavily hit. So you definitely will see some of the devastation, I think on that trip.

Stephanie Parkyn: Yes, Coffs Harbor and Lismore. They all had the first brunt of fires, I think. Yeah, so those are places I’m going to as well.

Okay. Stephanie all the very best, and thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you.

Stephanie Parkyn: Thanks, Jenny.

If you enjoyed hearing Stephanie you may also enjoy Karen Brooks – Restoration Thriller The Chocolate Maker’s Wife or Tea Cooper’s The Naturalist’s Daughter.

Thanks To Our Technical Support:

The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.

Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz

https://www.facebook.com/sparkyn.story/
https://www.instagram.com/stephanieparkyn/

www.stephanieparkyn.com