Welcome to Three Questions with Van Heerling. This is where you get to meet authors, actors, painters and anyone else that is bent toward the arts, but on a more personal level.
VH: If you had two years left to live from this moment, what would you change about your life?
IU: Nothing. So many unplanned events occurred in my life when I was a teen, and I know I don’t want them to happen to my kids. I don’t want them caught unaware. I’m so paranoid about this I’ve told my kids what to do if somehow I died. They know where the investment papers are, they know how they were supposed to finance their lives, and they know they’d be the ones responsible to look after their dad who has disabilities.
VH: After a difficult day what do you do to recuperate? Does it work?
IU: I draw. It helps me unwind. This is the time when I can be with myself without worrying about critics, editors, reviewers, naysayers, or anyone else breathing down my neck. I can get lost in my own world doing something I love, creating beauty as I want it to be, without any dictates and with no obligation to please anyone.
VH:What is the worst advice you have ever given someone? How did it work out?
IU: “If you want to commit suicide, go ask someone else how to it! I have no experience in this matter.”
This was a young girl of 17, originally one of my old fans. Other fans only wrote once. But she wrote continuously, and I replied because she was a loner and very depressed. Yet no matter how I befriended her, she wouldn’t listen to my advice and kept on winging about nothing and everything. After two years, she wrote to me announcing that she was a lesb and asking for the best method to commit suicide.
How did it work out? Ohh… she didn’t do it.
VH: Whoa that's heavy. Thank you Ia.
IU: Nothing. So many unplanned events occurred in my life when I was a teen, and I know I don’t want them to happen to my kids. I don’t want them caught unaware. I’m so paranoid about this I’ve told my kids what to do if somehow I died. They know where the investment papers are, they know how they were supposed to finance their lives, and they know they’d be the ones responsible to look after their dad who has disabilities.
VH: After a difficult day what do you do to recuperate? Does it work?
IU: I draw. It helps me unwind. This is the time when I can be with myself without worrying about critics, editors, reviewers, naysayers, or anyone else breathing down my neck. I can get lost in my own world doing something I love, creating beauty as I want it to be, without any dictates and with no obligation to please anyone.
VH:What is the worst advice you have ever given someone? How did it work out?
IU: “If you want to commit suicide, go ask someone else how to it! I have no experience in this matter.”
This was a young girl of 17, originally one of my old fans. Other fans only wrote once. But she wrote continuously, and I replied because she was a loner and very depressed. Yet no matter how I befriended her, she wouldn’t listen to my advice and kept on winging about nothing and everything. After two years, she wrote to me announcing that she was a lesb and asking for the best method to commit suicide.
How did it work out? Ohh… she didn’t do it.
VH: Whoa that's heavy. Thank you Ia.
FICTIONALISED TRUE STORIES
Olympic fever runs high in the Australian summer of 1999 and 17-year-old Sydney has caught it. Little does she know taking a holiday job in the beehive that is the Olympics' public-transport call centre will be life altering. Shaken by her parents' divorce, the sheltered Aussie is further plagued by abusive callers, obnoxious government agencies, constrictive office rules, and liberated friends. She is trying to negotiate these challenges as her own personal Olympics when Pete finds her. Pete, Boston's former child prodigy whose soothing voice floats across her workstation, sees through Sydney's tough outer shell. Pete knows what it takes to present a dignified front when all you want to do is howl at the moon. Treating their friendship like an art, he invests time and creative effort to pull Sydney out of her despair.
Tragedy strikes when an accident leaves Pete with a major brain injury in a Boston hospital. When the going gets very, very tough, will you abandon the one who's promised to love you until he dies? Set in Sydney and Boston where heartbreaks are juxtaposed with humour, SYDNEY'S SONG is a young girl's courageous journey to adulthood and a love story. A work of fiction based on real events, this novel with an Australian accent also shows the world that living with disabilities does not prevent a person from attaining happiness.
COMMENTS FROM INDEPENDENT REVIEWERS:
"Strong characters, evocative writing..." (Peter Fitzsimons)
"SYDNEY'S SONG demonstrates the way in which human beings can thrive under adversity using the power of their hearts and wills." (Matt Posner)
CREDITS:
Literary editor: Irina Dunn
Illustrations: Ia Uaro (vignettes), Alexandra Davidoff (portraits), Abbir and Will Belacqua (additional drawing)
Trailer music: Michael Maas
Olympic fever runs high in the Australian summer of 1999 and 17-year-old Sydney has caught it. Little does she know taking a holiday job in the beehive that is the Olympics' public-transport call centre will be life altering. Shaken by her parents' divorce, the sheltered Aussie is further plagued by abusive callers, obnoxious government agencies, constrictive office rules, and liberated friends. She is trying to negotiate these challenges as her own personal Olympics when Pete finds her. Pete, Boston's former child prodigy whose soothing voice floats across her workstation, sees through Sydney's tough outer shell. Pete knows what it takes to present a dignified front when all you want to do is howl at the moon. Treating their friendship like an art, he invests time and creative effort to pull Sydney out of her despair.
Tragedy strikes when an accident leaves Pete with a major brain injury in a Boston hospital. When the going gets very, very tough, will you abandon the one who's promised to love you until he dies? Set in Sydney and Boston where heartbreaks are juxtaposed with humour, SYDNEY'S SONG is a young girl's courageous journey to adulthood and a love story. A work of fiction based on real events, this novel with an Australian accent also shows the world that living with disabilities does not prevent a person from attaining happiness.
COMMENTS FROM INDEPENDENT REVIEWERS:
"Strong characters, evocative writing..." (Peter Fitzsimons)
"SYDNEY'S SONG demonstrates the way in which human beings can thrive under adversity using the power of their hearts and wills." (Matt Posner)
CREDITS:
Literary editor: Irina Dunn
Illustrations: Ia Uaro (vignettes), Alexandra Davidoff (portraits), Abbir and Will Belacqua (additional drawing)
Trailer music: Michael Maas
Ia Uaro is an Australian author.
She was born in the beautiful and remote, world's widest tea plantation by Mount Kerinci in Sumatra where her dad was the plantation's accountant, her mum a teacher. Her dad died when Ia was 13, and Ia moved across the ocean.
She proceeded to become the busiest teen ever: playing in a drum band, tutoring maths, learning languages including English as the fifth language, and, at 17, a teen magazine published Ia's first fiction as a serial. Inundated by her fans' letters, the publisher printed it as a book, which was subsequently bought by the Indonesian Department of Education for high-school libraries.
Ia used the proceeds to help fund her university studies, during which time she was active in aero-modelling, martial arts, mountaineering, speleology... and studied petroleum seismology among her music-playing friends. After her graduation Ia worked with French, Norwegian and American geophysical companies, besides being a volunteer translator.
In Sydney since 1995, Ia is a mum who does several kinds of volunteer work for the community, assesses manuscripts, and writes real-life socio-fiction.
Her husband, who suffers permanent partial brain damage, says Ia now sleep-talks in English.
Part of SYDNEY'S SONG's proceeds will be donated to the Brain Foundation.
Need more Ia Uaro?
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She was born in the beautiful and remote, world's widest tea plantation by Mount Kerinci in Sumatra where her dad was the plantation's accountant, her mum a teacher. Her dad died when Ia was 13, and Ia moved across the ocean.
She proceeded to become the busiest teen ever: playing in a drum band, tutoring maths, learning languages including English as the fifth language, and, at 17, a teen magazine published Ia's first fiction as a serial. Inundated by her fans' letters, the publisher printed it as a book, which was subsequently bought by the Indonesian Department of Education for high-school libraries.
Ia used the proceeds to help fund her university studies, during which time she was active in aero-modelling, martial arts, mountaineering, speleology... and studied petroleum seismology among her music-playing friends. After her graduation Ia worked with French, Norwegian and American geophysical companies, besides being a volunteer translator.
In Sydney since 1995, Ia is a mum who does several kinds of volunteer work for the community, assesses manuscripts, and writes real-life socio-fiction.
Her husband, who suffers permanent partial brain damage, says Ia now sleep-talks in English.
Part of SYDNEY'S SONG's proceeds will be donated to the Brain Foundation.
Need more Ia Uaro?
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