Clare Fletcher is an Australian novelist who has studied journalism, spent time freelancing and discovering different parts of the world. Yet, her stories continue to come back to the wonderful setting of rural Australia.

Clare and I had the pleasure of meeting in person this past July, to talk about Five Bush Weddings, her first novel, on a panel with talented romance/love authors.

Love Match is Clare’s second novel. It follows Sarah as she navigates dating in the small rural town of South Star after a recent breakup & Mabel, as she reminisces on her pieces of beautiful wardrobe, remembering the loving stories that come with each stunning outfit

What and where inspired you to set both of your books, Five Bush Weddings and Love Match in small rural towns?

I grew up in regional Queensland, in a town called St George. Even though I’ve lived away from there for many years – I went to boarding school, then uni in Brisbane, moved to Sydney to work, and even lived in New York for a while – my writing has often returned to those small town roots.

In Five Bush Weddings I wove in a lot of experiences of the country parties and weddings my friends and I would drive vast distances for. I hadn’t seen that part of Queensland on the page before, and so it felt right to keep real place names as a little gift to people from home. So many of the rural-set books published today are dark crime stories, so I wanted to celebrate the joy and resilience and creativity and complexity of regional Australia.

South Star is entirely fictional. With Love Match I wanted to get deep into small town dynamics, the richness and claustrophobia of a place where everyone knows everyone’s business, so I couldn’t use a real town. I didn’t want readers to be distracted by errors in geographic detail or by trying to guess who characters are based on. It’s all made up!

Love Match follows the dual storylines of Mabel and Sarah, which is so fun and funny to read! When writing Five Bush Weddings, did you know that Mabel and Sarah would reappear in Love Match? And what do you feel made these two connecting characters?

I wish I had been smart enough to plan ahead, but I had finished 5BW when I decided to write a second book around Mabel and Sarah. My mentor Emily Maguire asked what happened to Sarah after 5BW, and the idea came to me pretty quickly – I wanted to explore someone discovering their queer identity under the small town microscope. I thought it would be powerful to mirror that journey with someone in an earlier time, and Mabel was so much fun to write. Once I started researching the period when she would have been a coming of age (1960s deb balls, country dances, the Miss Queensland Quest) I knew there was something special there.

Sport was another thing I wanted to incorporate. I think women often write off sport as something that’s not for them, but my own experience playing footy as an adult was really special. There’s a lot for women to gain from community sport, not just physically but socially, psychologically. And as a storyteller sport offers a lot of rich territory to mine.

After Love Match, I thought I was done with South Star. But now there are more stories I want to tell and I’m just using my own books as elaborate writing prompts! It’s all the side characters I have the most fun writing, so it’s quite fun thinking about how to use people in new ways in new stories.

Love, dating and connection are such strong themes in both your novels! Is this an element of writing that you always knew you’d incorporate or did it happen by chance?  

For a long time, I was a bit of a literary snob. Only when I realised I was writing a rom-com did I start reading a lot more in the genre; but of course I had always loved reading and watching rom-coms, I just didn’t think they were as ‘important’ as more high brow culture. It felt liberating, energising and so joyful to realise there were so many talented women writing romance and rom-coms, and that I wanted to be one of them! I was a very romantic kid (in my head – no one wanted to kiss me until I was almost finished high school) so it feels inevitable in a way.

Sometimes I think dating men from Queensland trained me to be a good romance writer. With these blokes who are often quite reticent, if not emotionally constipated, you have to get quite good at finding romance and tenderness in small gestures! Being able to dial up the romance in a perfectly-made cup of tea or a dropped pie I think is more relatable than grand declarations of love from a bush bloke. That said, I love writing male characters and I find giving them strong women in their life helps shape them into realistic men who respect and treasure the women they fall for.Five Bush Weddings was very much about the fact that people falling in love is critical to bush communities surviving and thriving. Love Match goes deeper into the relationships and institutions that hold small towns together and, I hope, makes a case for building a beautiful life there even if sometimes the gossip and lack of privacy might be challenging. I poke a bit of fun at small towns, but it comes from a place of love.

Clare, thank you so much for joining me on Author Talks and spending the time chatting on our Instagram Live. It has been an absolute pleasure to host you and meet in person! You’re now a staple in my growing library and I cannot wait to fill a shelf with your novels one day 📚⭐️

Click on the titles of Five Bush Weddings & Love Match throughout this interview, to purchase your own copies from Booktopia 💚