Just a girl from the country — in conversation with best-selling rural author Fiona Palmer as she launches latest novel

“I’m just a girl from the country that works on a farm.” For rural writer Fiona Palmer, the thought of how she became an author still feels surreal, even after 16 published books. Palmer’s writing career began in 2006 while she was running the local Pingaring shop in partnership with her mother. She started writing down a story which was roaming around in her head. It would later form the pages of her first book, The Family Farm. “It was very much by chance. I was running the local shop and had two small children. My son was just a baby then and I think it was the most busiest I’ve been,” Palmer said. “To escape, I started dreaming up a story and then it got so big I had to start writing it out. “I didn’t really mean to actually write a book but it just sort of happened and then everyone said you should try and get it published and then it just grew from there.” Palmer’s family have always been supportive of her writing career. “My kids quite often say, ‘mum, everyone thinks you must be rich because you’re an author,’ but if only it worked like that,” she said. “Even I’ll forget it at times. I’m just a girl from the country that works out on a farm and it’s not until a book is released and I’m doing events that I think, oh, that’s right, there’s this whole other side.” Palmer has just released her latest novel called Tiny White Lies. Set in Bremer Bay, it explores the trials and tribulations of family life in the digital age and how technology is affecting children. Palmer drew on her feelings of anxiety as a parent of young children who own mobile phones as inspiration for the book. Born and raised in the Wheatbelt town of Pingaring, the majority of her childhood weekends were spent on her uncle and aunt’s farm “Gumlea”. Palmer attended Pingaring Primary School before heading off to Narrogin Senior High School where she boarded at the Narrogin Residential College. Despite earning herself a title as a best-selling rural author, Palmer said she never excelled at English as a student. “I left school after Year 11 but I love telling stories,” she said. “When you’re terrible at English (becoming an author) is never anywhere on your mind. “Creative writing I always enjoyed, but when you can’t spell and your grammar is terrible, no one really pays much attention. “Luckily, there are plenty of editors around to help with all that.” It’s not hard to guess where Palmer finds her inspiration for the settings of some of her books. “I’ve written eight rural stories, so they’re all inspired by living in the country, how unique it is, the great things we do as a community and how we battle on through a lot of Mother Nature’s problems, especially related with farming,” she said. Palmer described her genre as “life-lit”, with stories that look at contemporary issues without focusing on one issue or gender. The author also works as a farm hand and is at her busiest during seeding and harvest. Even then, she finds opportunities to write on the quiet days. “I tend to think about my next book usually over harvest. There’s a lot of thinking time so I try to work on a thread and formulate it in my mind,” she said. “I won’t start writing until I’ve written my synopsis which is a five-page plan on who the characters are and how the book’s roughly going to go, then I start from chapter one and work my way through.” Adding to her talents, Palmer is a third generation speedway driver, racing cars from the age of 16 up until she was pregnant with her first child. “I’m back to racing speedway now. I love anything to do with that,” she said. “It’s a bit of a family affair with my dad and son racing, so we go across as a family and it’s a great day out for us.” Her next book, Stolen Memories, is a mystery about four people on a writers’ retreat.