Transcript
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Welcome, you’re listening to Between our pages, a Premier’s Reading Challenge WA podcast.
My name is Fiona Bartholomaeus and together we’ll be diving into the wonderful world of books and reading right here in WA.
Today we're chatting with award-winning author Holden Sheppard about his second novel, The Brink.
Let's go.
The Brink is a captivating story about a group of teenagers celebrating the end of their schooling journey by going on a leaver's trip, but it doesn't go according to plan.
After a man is found dead on a beach, tensions run high between the teens as blame, fear and secrets attempt to tear the group apart.
It's the latest book from popular and award-winning YA author Holden Sheppard.
Holden, thank you so much for joining me.
Holden Sheppard
G'day Fiona, it's really nice to be here, thanks for having me.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
So you've been writing since a very young age. Do you remember the moment that made you get into writing?
Holden Sheppard
I do. I was seven years old when I started writing, which was 1996, so I'm showing my age a little bit, but I remember reading a lot of Enid Blyton back in the day. And there were lots of boarding school stories at the time, and I remember reading those on a trip to Perth.
I'm from Geraldton originally, so we didn't have a lot of bookshops. And we went to this trip to Perth where Dymocks Morley in the Galleria was just, to a little kid, it seemed massive.
You know, it was so exciting.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Wherever you look, there's books everywhere.
Holden Sheppard
Shelves and shelves and shelves. You know, I just remember thinking it was incredible and they had such a range of books that I hadn't seen before. So I bought a whole heap of books with my holiday spending money.
And then on that trip back home to Geraldton, I remember just, it occurred to me that I loved books so much, I could actually write my own. There was nothing stopping me.
So yeah, pretty much the next day or next week, I've gone to the supermarket, got a little exercise book and a pen, which was really exciting for me at the time because I was in year three and we didn't have our pen license.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Oh, so you were ahead of the game.
Holden Sheppard
I was ahead. I was like rebelling fully, you know, I was just like, but I was so serious. I was like, ‘I'm going to be, I'm going to write a book. I'm seven, I'll be published by the time I'm eight’.
You know, in the front of the exercise book, it says something like, ‘this book will retail for $2.75’ at Target.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
I love that so much.
Holden Sheppard
But it was just so serious. It was never a hobby, it was never a kid's thing. It was, ‘I have worked out, I'm this little tiny man, I've worked out what I want to do with my life and now I'm going to like, go ahead and do it’.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
That's exciting and crazy to think that you had such a clear path in your mind from such a young age.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah. I think you know, my siblings are much older than me and I think I was surrounded, you know, all these older siblings having conversations about careers and things. And I think it must've just, I must've been a little five-year-old sitting at the table going, ‘well, I guess I better get a move on’.
You know, I want to be like my brothers and sisters.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Don't be the last one.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah. I don't want to be left out. So, I've just been really serious. And yeah, I wrote this great little story called, I say great little story, it was terrible, but it was called First Form at Clifton Towers, and it was about a boy called Jake who was 12 and he was going to boarding school. And, you know, it was derivative of Enid Blyton completely, but it was the first time I started to tell stories myself and once I started, I just kind of never stopped.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And since then, you've released a number of short stories and a couple of novels. Your latest one is called The Brink. Can you tell us what it's about?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, so The Brink is about a group of high school leavers who head out on their leavers trip.
I always have to check what state I'm in when I say this, because if you go over east, they all say schoolies and you say leavers and they look at you like you're an alien. Yeah.
They go on their leavers trip and each of these people, each of these teenagers is just, you know, at the end of Year 12, they've kind of pretended to be someone to fit in at high school, which pretty much all of us, I think, do.
We all kind of put up a persona to survive high school in some way.
And as they leave high school, all the facades are starting to break down a little bit. You know, they're starting to get glimpses of who they really are and there's growing pains, they're trying to shift. And while they're on this leavers trip, they end up at a very isolated place called Brink Island and they decide to have their leavers week there. You know, it's not where they meant to be, they meant to be at Durian Bay, but that didn't kind of work out.
And so they go on this really secluded beach trip. It's just an island, it's pretty much just about, 13 of them should be pretty fun. They can get up to whatever they want. But then in the middle of this leavers trip someone drops dead and this very sudden death has massive consequences for the whole group, it starts to tear them apart at the seam.
So you've got kind of Leonardo, who's this really shy anxious boy, but he, he wants to be tough. He wants to learn how to be, how to grow up and be a man but how can he when he's so weak and he's so sensitive, you know, like he doesn't know how.
You’ve got Kaya, who's the perfectionistic good girl, but you know, just for a week, she wants to be bad. And then you've got Mason who is your kind of classic footy jock, not too much of a bully, just a bit of a meathead, but he is developing feelings for his best mate. And so he doesn't know how to process that.
So each of them is kind of dealing with something that feels like it would tear their persona apart.
And once the stakes go up, once there's a death, they're kind of like, well, what's the point of pretending anymore?
So yeah, it started as a book about, I thought friendship. I think it's much more a book about identity.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
So where did the idea for the story and the plot and the school leavers come from?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah. You know, someone asked me this at the launch of The Brink actually, and it was like one of my high school mates. And they're like, is this based on our Leavers trip in 2005?
And I actually had to think for a second because they said something about, ‘you know, that guy with the big machete’. And I was like, ‘you're right, there was a guy with a big knife’ at our Leavers trip.
So I think that influenced the creation of the character of Machete Max, who's kind of one of the slightly unhinged locals in this story.
In terms of the story and where it came from, The Brink is the very first thing I wrote when I was about mid-twenties. I started in 2014, would you believe?
So it took eight years before it was kind of a publishable novel. But the very first step was, yeah, 2014 and I was kind of, I was more writing plot driven action-adventure stuff then. So initially this was a little bit more straight up thriller. There was not much identity stuff, there was not much emotion. It was more about everyone's trapped on an island and people are dropping dead like flies.
There were a lot more deaths in the earlier version.
There was a version that was kind of horror-esque that absolutely would never have been published.
When I think of the final version, when I think about the one that got published, I often start a novel and I come to a novel thinking about what Ernest Hemingway said about writing hard and clear about what hurts. And so I did that with Invisible Boys, my debut novel. And then I got that kind of trauma of that experience for that first book out of me. And I sat there, I was like, ‘okay, well, what else, what else needs to be expressed? What else am I like demanding to kind of talk about freely?’
And the thing that hurt a lot was growing up, probably, with friends who were friends with the persona that I put out there. You know, they were friends with someone I pretended to be. And once I stopped pretending to be that person, we weren't really friends anymore. That was really hard.
That was really hard, not just for the friendships falling away, but you're left kind of scrabbling at, well, who, who am I? If I've constructed my own identity to be as liked as possible by a bunch of people I was crammed in a classroom with. You know? When that classroom's gone, who am I pretending for anymore? Why am I doing this? That was really hard to kind of get a grip on who I was after high school. And in a way it was a lot better because after high school, I kind of, I flourished and I kind of, you know, worked out what I like.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And you go through different kinds of experiences and find more friends who connect with you on a deeper level.
Holden Sheppard
You do, you know, you go to uni or you travel. You know, I went backpacking in Europe a week after I turned 18. I just went away for four months and just did everything.
And you find people, yeah, who are of a like mind. But, and more importantly, it doesn't matter how many people you find. What I learned was that stop defining yourself by other people or building a persona for other people, like just rock up as you and if people like you, great, and if they don't like you, you'll survive, like big deal.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And your book explores quite important topics such as masculinity, sexuality and mental health. How important is it for young adults and older teenagers to have access to books with these topics?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, I'm really proud of what I write about, which I guess every author is proud of what they write about, but for me, these things, I guess, growing up became fascinations of mine. You know, like I wanted to find stuff that spoke to the condition of being a young man and what that looks like, you know, coming to terms with your sexual orientation and being okay with it, you know, and releasing the shame that comes with that, and definitely mental health and substances and all that kind of stuff. Like these are the kind of the darker edges of the grittier edges of being an older teenager.
And sometimes there's societally, we kind of, you don't talk about them in polite conversation. You know, you don't go to a dinner party and kind of, ‘well, here's my trauma’. You know, it doesn't usually come up that way. And so I feel like the novel is such a great way to do that because it's like a very intimate art form.
It's just read by the one person who needs it and they get to connect with you on that level, and I think that's why I can be so free in the way I write is because I like to put that offering out there to someone to be like, ‘hey, here's me at my most vulnerable and when you want to read it, if you want to read it, you can access this too, and if there's a connection, great’.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And is that why you chose to write this as a novel rather than a short story or another kind of form?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, it feels like when you've got big themes like this, you need a novel length to kind of get through it all.
Especially if you look at the expressions of masculinity in this book, you've got a real spectrum of people. You know, you've got Braden who's kind of not masculine at all. And it's kind of like, ‘well, that's fine’, we want to show that that's cool.
We've got Leonardo who is really shy and anxious and soft and vulnerable, but like that kind of masculinity is okay as well. But also, he wants to learn how to be tough, he wants to learn strength. How do you do that?
You've got Mason who is pretty tough physically, but emotionally he's a soft little, you know just falling in love with everyone.
And then you've got someone like Jared who is just really angry, really angry and really traumatized and doesn't know how to of verbalise it.
And I think if you look at all four of those, there are all kinds of young men and boys who are out there at the moment, and to talk about that in a Tweet or a short story, you kind of can't capture that spectrum. But if you have a full novel where you give a personality and a character to each of those types, I think it offers something deeper for a reader to connect with and hopefully, I think my mission is always to kind of validate everyone, you know, just to be like, we're all okay as we are.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
So for those who pick up The Brink, what do you hope they take away from it?
Holden Sheppard
I hope readers of The Brink, pretty much anything I do, I hope they kind of come away feeling like ‘I am good enough as I am and all my feelings are okay’, which I know sounds really therapy but I am a bit of a therapy junkie, to be honest. I don't look like it. I might look like a punk or whatever, but I'm a huge therapy junkie. And I believe that when we go looking for emotional art, we are looking to have an emotional experience, we’re looking for a cathartic experience.
The messages I get from a lot of people is that my books help them process trauma, and a lot of my readers are adults, to be honest, like older teens, definitely, you know, 15, 16 up. But the vast majority tends to be adults as well because every adult has gone through adolescence, and pretty much in my experience, every adult has like had some kind of cringe experience or, you know, 10 cringe things that.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
We can all relate to.
Holden Sheppard
Like, I'm always there, like just before bed thinking, ‘oh God, that thing I did when I was 17’, like it's so embarrassing, like, ‘why did I do that?’
We've all had those and sometimes they're kind of funny and cringe, and sometimes they're things that we really beat ourselves up over, even in adulthood.
So I hope people come away from reading these books feeling like that thing you went through, it's okay. Like everyone's human, everyone's a bit cringe, everyone's had moments they would rather delete from their whole life, you know?
Fiona Bartholomaeus
So your stories are very much aimed at a young adult audience. Why do you like to write for that age bracket? Even though, like you said, you have more adults reading your content?
Holden Sheppard
I think I probably, a couple of things. I started writing when I was young and so most of my writing, especially in my teenage years when I wrote a lot, like I wrote so much as a teenager because summer holidays, I was bored. You know, I'd just tell my parents, I'd be like, ‘I'm bored’. And I always got told ‘boredom is a product of a lazy mind’, you know? As if like, go find something, go create something.
So a lot of my writing was teenage. And so therefore I'm writing about. 14-year-olds, 15 year olds, as I grow, I'm you know, writing characters who are maybe one year older than I am at the time, things like that.
So I got fairly settled, I guess in writing stories around my own age and then I aged out of it myself, but you kind of keep writing about that time.
I think for me, my teenage years were so gnarly, like, but in a way I didn't express that I kind of had to keep coming back to them in story because I went through hell in different ways. And I was so deeply thoughtful and introspective and sensitive and angry, but none of it was expressed at the time.
I was really like this just good Catholic school boy getting kind of straight A's and things like that. So, but you know, like I was that, I was that kid and externally that persona was like concrete, you know, ‘I'm good. I'm well behaved. I'm normal. Everything's fine’.
And then underneath was just like, whoa, like just volcanic. Like in the brink, Leonardo is probably the expression of who I was in high school best, and like he describes things as tectonic and volcanic and erupting and molten. And that's how it felt. Like I just felt like I was holding myself in and I was so scared of anyone seeing who I was for better or worse, and it wasn't just about my sexuality. It was just about everything. It was just about being a grown man and I was terrified of letting people see that I was flawed and messy and angry.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And you mentioned earlier that you are born and raised in Geraldton. How do you think your regional upbringing shaped your writing career?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah I think, well, the funny thing is my brain still hasn't processed that I live in a city, which is really, it's so bizarre.
So I've just written my third book and it's kind of back to a regional space because I guess emotionally my locus is still there. You know, like I grew up in the country and I grew up, I guess, in that space where you're not, I'm not a farm kid. I'm not like a rural remote kind of kid, but I'm a regional kid. I come from a country town. And so you just have a different perspective on life and in some ways it's a bit more bogan and it's a bit more laid back and I'm fine with that.
It's part of me and I guess I want to reflect that that's just how I grew up. I still feel like a weirdo in the city. I don't feel like I belong in the city. I go to literary spaces and I've won multiple awards at this point. You know, like I'm pretty well known as an author, but I'm still rocking up and like, ‘oh, I'm the bogan in the room and I don't belong and like, everyone's going to judge me’.
So I think I just want to write authentically of like, ‘well, this is who I am. You can take the boy out of the country, but that country's, you know, the country's still in the boy’. And so that's still going to be part of my voice and part of my characters, I think probably forever in some ways.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
So with what you were saying, what advice would you give to your younger self growing up in Geraldton?
Holden Sheppard
Do you know what? Firstly, I would say to myself, ‘chill out’ because being a really cerebral kid, but also having a lot going on emotionally, I was so hard on myself, you know, like I was really cruel to myself and a lot of my mental health problems and things and the distress that I put myself through was kind of, I mean, yes, it was from the environment, but I was so hard on myself and I was so cruel to myself that ‘fix this, you know, solve it, get better’. And I think I would just chill out. if I could speak to myself as a teenager or teenagers going through, you know, working out who they are sexually or working out just life.
It would just be go easier on yourself, even if it's just go down to the beach for a day and just, hit yourself, you know, just sit there and have fun, go for a swim, you know?
And, you know, do fun things. Like I held myself back from playing footy, for example, until I was an adult, because I knew at the time I was like, I'm this geeky kid. I'm gumpy. Like, you know, like I'm just going to be useless, I'm just going to get bullied even more than I already am. So I won't do that.
And then as an adult, you find that actually team sports footy, I've loved doing these things as an adult. They give me a lot of joy. But they're things that I self-selected out of as a teen. And I feel like if I could go back, I'd just be like, let yourself have some fun, like just enjoy being young, do whatever, like just stop getting so in your head because if you can be kinder to yourself as opposed to cruel, I think you've won half the battle of what life is.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And now you've become a bit of a role model for young people in regional and remote communities. Has that created a bit of pressure for you?
Holden Sheppard
It has a little. The first time I got called a role model, I remember like balking at it and nearly freaking out. And I've gotten a little bit better since then because I think when it was first said to me, I remember feeling like role model means that perfect good boy persona, you know, the straight A's and the good behavior.
And, you know, like I remember thinking like my art was punk, my art was rebellion. And so for my art to be then putting me in a space of being a role model again, it felt like, oh my God, I can't get out. You know, like I'm trapped. I'm just going to be a role model forever.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
These two things don’t relate.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, exactly.
It just felt like artistic expression to me was so punk and such a middle finger in a way to authority and to good behavior. Even though it's about kindness, it still felt like I was rebelling.
So the first time someone said, you're a role model, I was like, no. I just went, ‘no, I refuse. I won't do it’. And I've reflected a lot more since, that was years ago that was when Invisible Boys, my first book came out in 2019. And since then I've kind of revisited and revisited that idea of being a role model and what does that mean? Actually, I'm pretty excited to be a role model, quote unquote, putting little scare quotes here in the air.
I want to be that guy to show, like if you're a country kid and you've got big dreams and you want to go to the city and be an artist or a writer or an actor or something that's not usually done in your background. I want to be like an example of, well, I did it and everyone around me was a naysayer and everyone around me was like, not everyone, but a lot of people were going, ‘well, you should just study medicine or you should just study engineering or you should do something real, get a big boy job’.
And I ignored them and I did what my dream was and I did what I wanted. And everyone looks at that guy and thinks, ‘you're wasting your time and you're selfish and you're never going to make it. Only 1% of people will ever make it from that background’. And they want you to respond by going, ‘yeah well, I'll probably be one of the 99% who fails, so I'll just quit now’.
And I was like, ‘well, I'll have to work hard and become one of the 1% who does make it’. And so if I can be that example for any kid out there, any adult, any person, if there's a human listening to this or who finds my books or finds my example and is inspired to be like, ‘oh, well, he did it’.
I'm a bogan from Spalding, which is like the Geraldton of Geraldton. You know what I mean? If I can do this, if I can make it in the literary world, you can do it too.
So if that is a role model that I'm going to be put on a pedestal as, I'm totally okay with that because I'd love to do that for someone. And just beyond that, there's various ways that I don't fit into the world. You feel like a misfit as an artist, as a gay man. I felt like I didn't fit into that world for a long time or that identity. And I'm kind of pumped now to be like, well, there's no right way to do that. There's no right way to be a gay bloke. So if I'm going to be this weird gay bloke who doesn't fit into the normal stereotypes, then I want to show all those guys who were like me when I was 18 or 19 and can't find their way. I want to tell them like, well, it's fine. It's fine. If you are not fitting into stereotypes, great, because I don't either. I'm a misfit and it's fun.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And all it takes is just one person to be that role model or just say what you've just said for people to go, ‘oh, actually, that's me as well. I relate to that’.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, and it's like it's so universal, you know, like going really doggedly insular into like what made me me and talking about that. Just about anyone can relate from any gender, any sexuality, any age of person, knows how it feels to kind of be put in a box and told like, ‘well, you can't do that because you're that’. A lot of us want to go outside the box. A lot of us can relate to that.
So I'm happy to be a role model for that stuff. I don't want to be a role model for getting straight A's, okay?
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Now, your debut novel, Invisible Boys, is being made into a TV show. Currently it's in post-production. What was that like for you finding out that your debut novel was going to be on the big screen?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah it's a dream come true, it's beyond a dream really because as a writer you dream of the day that you get a book published and you're like that's the whole dream, that's the end of the line.
So to find out that something's getting adapted to become a you know 10 episode tv series which is, Invisible Boys, that was just like this extra bonus level of awesome you know? Like it was just so incredible to know it would happen.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Did you ever think that would happen was that ever in the cards of what you could imagine?
Holden Sheppard
Well, I mean like every author kind of hopes of like, I'll be a New York times bestseller and I'll have seven figure advances and I'll get movies and TV shows made of my books, but it's not really realistic. And, you know, being from WA and Invisible Boys is with a small press. So you're kind of like, ‘well, isn't likely’.
And the fact that it kind of got optioned and that went to development and then Stan got on board and then suddenly it was like, ‘this might happen, this might happen’. And then it did, you know, it got greenlit. It's now been filmed. It's now in post-production. It'll come out in 2025.
So it's just the coolest thing to see like your, the characters you made in your head become real people. Like I had a chance to, through the producer, I had a chance to meet the four main boys in my cast.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
It must have been really interesting for you seeing them act out your words and what you imagined.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah. Yeah. It was just, it was a bit out of body. It was just like phenomenal.
So firstly, you're meeting these like incredible actors with tonnes of charisma and they're oozing confidence but then you actually see them.
The thing for me was seeing them interact with each other. So like meeting each of these four actors, I was like, cool like, this is amazing. Nice to meet you. I gave them all a signed copy of my book to keep kind of thing.
And I think the actor playing Zeke, Aiden, came in while I was chatting to the actor playing Hammer, Zach. And suddenly I think they just hugged or something. I had a little chat and they hugged. And seeing them interact with each other just made me trip out. I just went, Zeke and Hammer are hugging.
It was real, so meeting them wasn't the moment it was real it was just the moment I saw them interact with each other, it kind of sunk in that these are characters I made up. I wrote them in a story in 2017 when I was at my lowest.
I wrote a fantasy book, got rejected by everyone. I was at a very low point. I just went, well, screw it. I'm going to write whatever I want. And I write Invisible Boys. I write these characters. I create them. And then seven years later, you're like, ‘oh, they're right in front of me’.
These are actors doing it. It was incredible, incredible. And they're just really nice guys, so super exciting.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
How exciting is it for you to have now your book, your story, reach a wider audience than previously before?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, well, I think that's the kind of exciting thing is that books get read by a certain number of people, but your book sales are not, in Australia, the market is small. So your book sales are not like in the seven figures. You're not selling millions of copies. You're selling tens of thousands of copies and things like that.
So to have something go on screens makes it a much bigger deal. It just means that a much larger number of people who don't necessarily read usually will come across your story. So that's pretty exciting to know that it will go out to a larger group of people, not just in Australia, but potentially across the world.
There's an international distributor and the sky's the limit as far as I'm concerned. So hoping that means good things to follow for the book. Hopefully it goes even further and it starts to snowball beyond that. Yeah.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And this isn't where we're ending with you in terms of your novels. You do have your third and fourth on the way. You're in the process of finishing up the edits and everything like that. Can you give us a sneak peek on what they're about or where you're at with them?
Holden Sheppard
Yeah. So the third book is pretty well edited now, like it's in a good place. And the current working title is Two Kings. I haven't mentioned that title in any interviews or anything publicly yet.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Oh, it's a scoop.
Holden Sheppard
It's a scoop for you. But yeah, I'm working with Two Kings. That one is, someone just described it to me as a delayed coming of age story.
So that's all I'm going to say about that one. I'm super, super vague about it.
And the fourth book is a sequel to Invisible Boys. So it's actually following Zeke, Charlie and Hammer a little bit after the end of that story, because that story very much ended almost on a cliffhanger in a way. And my original idea was the sequel. The sequel was meant to be the first book. It's just that I happened to write a little prequel first by mistake and it got published, which is a nice problem to have.
So yes, a book three coming soon, Two Kings. And the title might change, but you know. When you're speaking to me in this exact moment, it's currently titled that. And then after that, a sequel to Invisible Boys is coming.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Fantastic. Well, we definitely look forward to hearing more about your books. Now, the Premier's Reading Challenge has almost wrapped up for 2024, but it's always important to keep reading. How important has reading been in your life?
Holden Sheppard
Oh, reading was like my way to survive and I think probably to dissociate from stuff that was unpleasant as a kid.
So for me, I was like a bookworm from the age of like three, right through to 18, you know, like until the end of high school and beyond. I mean, obviously I still am because I'm an author, but once you become an adult, it's a lot harder to read as many books as you did when you were a kid.
But no, I used to devour like Emily Rodder, Jeffrey McSkimming. I loved the Cairo Jim adventure stories. So many great things.
And then obviously high school was like Harry Potter and John Marsden, Tomorrow When The War Began. That whole series was like my jam. Like I found that when I was about 14 or 15 and I just, my mind was blown. And I think I'm still, my life philosophy, I think is still influenced by that series of books, you know, in my own writing.
So reading's been huge for me and I think I was just encouraging young people to read and to make the most of your time while you're young, because you have enough time to read and you don't have to pay bills and things.
So, you know, enjoy those books and enjoy that escape because it's very special having that bond. You bond with characters, but in a way you're bonding with another human soul. You know, an author puts something of themselves out there and hopes that it will connect.
And so I think we read because we want connection and we want safe connection where sometimes people can feel dangerous or we get hurt by people. They've done stuff and it hurts us and we kind of shrink away from humans. And a lot of introverts are readers because I think we're looking for ways to connect with soul and to feel-
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Relate to other people's experiences.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, but in a way that we know can't hurt, in a way that we know will feel nice. Yeah, so read and connect.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Something that I like to do with all my guests, before I let you go, I'm going to ask you a couple of rapid-fire questions.
Holden Sheppard
Awesome. Oh, a lightning round. I love this kind of thing. I hope I can think of something to say though.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Just want the first answer that kind of pops into your head.
Holden Sheppard
Okay.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
First off, what is your favourite book?
Holden Sheppard
The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
What are you reading at the moment?
Holden Sheppard
I'm just started reading Wrong Answers Only by Tobias Madden, which is kind of like upper YA kind of gay fiction.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Do you prefer non-fiction or fiction?
Holden Sheppard
Fiction usually, but I just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's, nonfiction kind of like guide to life. And it's, he's like my idol now. Like Arnie is now my, my role model. When we speak of role models, at 35 I finally found my role model and it's Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Do you have a favorite genre?
Holden Sheppard
Contemporary, like realist stuff. Like I'll mostly read kind of realist these days, but as a kid, I used to love adventure.
And I know that doesn't really count as a genre these days. Like if you look in a bookshop, you won't see adventure, but I used to like read like Choose Your Own Adventure.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
Oh, they're the best.
Holden Sheppard
Yeah, and Usborne Puzzle Adventures. And like, this is middle grade, junior fiction kind of stuff. If there's anything adventurous, whether it's fantasy or sci-fi or action or crime thriller, if there's some element of adventure and found family, that's my genre.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
And finally, in the spirit of the Premier's Reading Challenge, how many books do you hope to read by the end of this year?
Holden Sheppard
Oh, one million. I don't know. Let me go with 20.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
That is a nice, solid number.
Holden Sheppard
And that's, I'm not going to make it, but I can tell you now, but I will try.
Fiona Bartholomaeus
You’ve been listening to Between our pages, a Premier’s Reading Challenge WA podcast.
Thanks to our guest Holden Sheppard for joining me on this episode.
This episode was recorded on Whadjuk Noongar land, we acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and pay respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Stay tuned to your favourite podcast player for future episodes.
Thank you for listening, happy reading and we’ll see you next time.