Interview with author Donna Milner

What was the hardest part of writing your first novel? And what has the experience of publication been like?

The hardest part was definitely structure. The first draft was finished quite quickly but it took a great deal of time to dovetail the past and present chapters properly. For months I had all the chapters spread out on the dining room table and floor where I moved them around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle until they fit.

The publication experience has truly been exciting and sometimes overwhelming. Even in my wildest imagination I never expected all this. I am only now beginning to believe it is true. I am sure it will feel even more surreal the first time I see After River on the shelves in the bookstore.

River acts somewhat like the sun from the minute he arrives on the farm, and everyone begins to revolve around him. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

Yes, it was a conscious decision that this stranger would be someone that everyone in the family would fall in love with. In a critique of an early draft, I was advised to turn River into the antagonist, but I just couldn't make him the bad guy. Yet even keeping his character gentle, his arrival would act as the catalyst to throw their seemingly perfect lives off balance.

The women in the novel are exceptionally strong characters. Do you have a favourite among them?

Nettie, of course. This story is in no way autobiographical, but for this one character I did use my own mother as the prototype. I gave Nettie some of her qualities (and many I wished she'd had). Her physical appearance, her love of books, and her piano playing, for instance. Like Nettie my mother was an accomplished pianist and had one certain song she would always play for me. My mother passed away last year and that piano piece still has the power to make me weep.

Why do you think Nettie has so many regrets – many things 'haunt' her throughout the book – and what is it about mothers and daughters?

What is it about mothers and daughters? Well, that's a huge question. It's my experience, as a daughter, and as a mother of a grown woman, that we are extremely hard on each other. I identified immediately with the Jodie Foster quote in the book about a "time in every young girl's life when she hates her mother so deeply she can feel it right down to her toes." There was definitely a time in my life when I experienced that feeling, and moments when I recognised it flashing in my daughter's eyes. Yet behind all that you know there is love and that’s what keeps you going.  I read the first draft of After River out loud to my mother during her last months and we discussed this aspect of mother/daughter relationships. She too identified with the statement in regards to her own mother. I was fortunate to be able to spend her last days with her and there was very little left unsaid by the time she passed away last year. Still there is always that something left buried, untouched. And in the end what we can't, or don't, say to each other causes more regrets than what we do.

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