Sunny Garden

An aspiring poet at 13, my biggest claim to fame was nearly meeting Laurie Lee (Cider with Rosie) while holidaying in the Cotswolds with my parents. Which translated, meant Mr Lee was drinking beer in a quaint English pub, musing over his literary career, while I hovered outside the door, too bashful to approach him.

Year Nine English had convinced me he was the king of the metaphor, bard of the brook and rolling hills. Worthy of his presence I was not.

Seven years on, I am feeling a similar sense of trepidation on a sunny day outside Toowong shopping centre near Brisbane's CBD. I am waiting for Nick Earls, best-selling author of Zigzag Street, last year's Bachelor Kisses and the most recent 48 Shades of Brown.

An Internet site devoted to him claims he recently posed for an Archibald Prize portrait, and will deliver excerpts from his new CD - spoken pieces with music - at the October Livid concert.

But when he strolls towards me, hands wedged into jeans pockets, he is anything but the stereotypical artiste.

So down to earth in fact, that he is soon chuckling over a short black about his childhood stories of Tommy, a bird who ventured to a land of "poo and big orange diggers", that were the favourite of his kindergarten class.

"The more poo there was and the more diggers there were, the better the stories were and so I just kept doing it ... you've got to start somewhere."

For Earls, "somewhere" was a farm in Northern Ireland, before he immigrated to Brisbane with his medical mother and management consultant father in 1972 at the age of nine.

And though it is not Lee's atmospheric village of Slad, Earls maintains Brisbane is as good a place for a career in writing as any.

Many of his books have a distinct Brisbane flavour.

Headgames, a quirky collection of short stories published this year, has subject matter ranging from Ekka ice-cream to drunken nights at the Royal Exchange hotel.

There is also Bachelor Kisses, a comedy about the sex-lives and misguided adventures of three Toowong twenty-somethings.

"It took me a long time to develop a sense that we were as entitled to be a part of stories as anyone else," he explains.

"In the 1980s I never met another novelist and I really did develop the idea in my head that stories were things that happened in other places to other people.

"And then I thought there are probably people a bit like the people I know almost everywhere and Brisbane's as good a place to set a story as any."

Earls' books have reached audiences in the UK, Germany and India, where he recently performed 40 shows of pieces written for performance.

"You get this sort of message all the time, that between genders and races and countries there are so many differences but you stand up and do that [and] people laugh at the same places and you think...in so many ways, we're the same."

With six books published in the last four years, Earls far exceeded his own expectations of having a "novel published every two or three years that might end up selling 5000 copies".

His story-telling ability is attributed to his mother, who would tell a young Earls formulaic stories about "colour coded" witches.

"Various other members of my family naturally made things up for our amusement. It seemed like the natural thing to do."

Yet his chosen profession was to become a GP. Earls graduated from the University of Queensland in 1986 with Honours in Medicine.

He admits to being "a bit of a Philby" as a student - the awkward virginal hero of Headgames.

"Obviously there were times when it seemed years were going by without anyone wanting to go out with me.

"I had my Philby times, I really did."

Now, residing in Toowong with Sarah, his wife of eight years, Earls is celebrated on the Internet by the Sunny Garden web site (named after a fictitious restaurant in Bachelor Kisses).

Users can "order a beverage and download an interview with Nick Earls" or order "side dishes" of his latest works.

Sunny Garden's creator, Liz Perkins, admittedly "quite a big fan of Nick's work" opened the site in January after finding an absence of on-line information on him.

Perkins believes Earls' work is about "the 'crap' of real life. Real life where nothing much happens...it's that aspect of his work which I can relate to."

However, for Earls, real life is hectic.

In between editing next year's novel - a secret - "I sold it to my UK publishers without telling them what it was", Earls is co-writing a screen play, campaigning for a "Yes" vote in the referendum and writing anti-GST letters to politicians.

He just finds time for a daily run and grocery shopping.

"My Filofax is utterly crammed with stuff I've got to do. I'm a totally mental list maker," he explains.

"I'd be happy to keep doing all this for a hell of a long time, but I'd also like to have a bit more control over the pace of it so I could sit back and enjoy it sometimes."

Earls of Bris-dom is © Holly Arden and is used with permission.

Disclaimer:
Sunny Garden is designed, written and maintained by Liz Perkins, in cooperation with Nick Earls and Penguin Books. Any questions about Sunny Garden should be directed to Liz

All original contents are © Liz Perkins.