I feel I’m having an enjoyable ride as a writer. After a couple of successes in 2010/2011 – when I first started to submit short stories – I’ve continued to win competitions and be published. I’ve also continued to write for the theatre and have had plays and monologues performed from Townsville to Melbourne. I recently contributed a monologue to an historical performance in my home town of Yackandandah and Cathy McGowan, our Member for Indi, was so enthusiastic about it, she praised it in the house of Reps. I have another monologue currently being performed in Melbourne as part of Baggage Production’s MadWomen Monologues. All good fun!

I usually travel for two or three months every year with my husband, Chris, both overseas and in Australia. We’ve recently returned from Japan where the very different customs, food and manners – and the behaviour of tourists – will soon feature in a story I’ll set in Kyoto. Last year, an incident on an African safari was literally “meat” for another story.

This year, I decided it was time to bring a selection of my stories together in a collection and entered the exciting world of self-publishing. In September, this year, Tailwind, was launched by Anson Cameron, columnist for The Age and novelist, at the Write Around the Murray Festival in Albury. He said of the collection: ‘This is the sort of book I really enjoy: the stories are grounded in place, populated by people we all know, not fictional people, real people. They’re the sorts of stories in which you continually recognise someone. Which isn’t always pleasant, because quite often they’re a pretty imperfect human being involved in an irreversible dilemma.’ The story I wrote for the first Margaret River Press Competition (2012), ‘Things that are found in trees’, could lay claim to this summing up, I think, and I’m still writing about those same real people.

Beverley Lello has won several awards for her short fiction, one of the earliest being the first Margaret River Short Story Competition with Things that are found in trees (2012). She has been published in Country Style Magazine, page seventeen, fourW, [untitled], Award Winning Australian Writing and anthologies published by Stringybark Publishing and Margaret River Press. This year she won the Ex Libris Port Fairy Short Story Competition and the Booranga Prize for Fiction (Booranga Writers Centre, Wagga Wagga). Beverley has recently published a collection of her stories, Tailwind. Find her at www. beverleylello.com.