From the berry to the book.

How orcharding in the Strathbogie’s made Glenda a literary success.

First published in North by Northeast Magazine October 2016

There’s a buzz amongst local literature enthusiasts about a book that’s due to hit the shelves this coming January.
‘Blueberry’ is the debut novel by Glenda Thomson and tells the story of a young single mother with a corporate career making a tree-change to the hills of north east Victoria to become a blueberry orchardist.
Our region is no stranger to writers, there’s plenty of great literary work produced around here but Penguin Random House have big plans for ‘Blueberry’ and its author.
Already available for pre-order in paperback or eBook, ‘Blueberry’ will be stocked everywhere from bookshops to department stores and will no doubt be packed along with the beach towels on many summer getaways next January. For those on a car trip over the summer or who prefer to listen to their novels, rather than read them, ‘Blueberry’ will be available as an audio-book from early 2017.
So who is the Glenda Thomson? Here lies the author’s most tangible lesson in publishing. Penguin Random House were extremely happy to get their hands on this book, in fact they have commissioned her next book sight unseen, but there was just one small catch – her name just didn’t cut it.
In the cut-throat world of modern publishing, first impressions are everything and Penguin Random House’s marketing team deemed ‘Glenda’ just a tad too old fashioned.
Note to any Sheila’s or Joyce’s out there, you might want to choose a pen name before taking a career change into literature.
Glen was deemed too masculine and she wasn’t keen on a pen name so her husband Alistair saved the day by researching the Gaelic feminine of Glen which was found to be Glenna.
Glenna proved memorable and timeless and with just one letter difference, it kept everyone happy. “I like the name, Glenna, and wish Mum and Dad thought of it sixty years ago!” Glenda said.
Both former executives from Melbourne, the couple’s road to the Strathbogie’s was one of chance. Glenda found an advertisement for a farming property on the internet one weekend on a visit to Beechworth in 2003. They rang the agent, and visited it on their way back to Melbourne. ‘We fell in love with the hills, granite outcrops and views, and put an offer on it almost straight away.’ Glenda said.
The plan was a weekender but after a year of weekends, Glenda and Alistair ran out of reasons to go back to the city on a Sunday and decided to make Strathbogie their home. A dream to run cattle led the couple to a local cattle group called Beefcheque and not only did they learn the cattle skills they needed but they found a readymade community of like-minded people.
In 2006, the neighbouring property came up for sale but there was just one catch, it came with a ten-acre blueberry orchard. Intensive horticulture wasn’t on the couple’s ‘to do’ list but they thought, “Why not? Let’s give it a go.”
Alistair found a TAFE course on blueberry growing in Melbourne and before they knew it they were commercial blueberry orchardists.
“We made a good team,” says Glenda, “we’d prune together and come harvest, I’d look after the packing shed and Alistair took charge of labour and the books.’
The eight to ten weeks of harvest, “was like white water rafting; there were blueberries coming at us from every direction” explains Glenda.
Picking Blueberries is all done by hand and the whole bush can’t be harvested at once. Over the harvest period each bush will be picked up to six times and it can be back-breaking work.
The Thomson’s blueberries ended up on the shelves of every major supermarket and for several years they made a good profit. But then came a change that pealed the death knell to many small berry producers.
To meet year-round consumer demand, blueberries are grown all over the country. Large foreign owned companies have invested heavily in Australia over the last few years making it much harder for small producers to compete. Blueberry farms two hundred times the size of the Thomson’s have now been established in Tasmania, the fruit of which coincide with harvest in the Strathbogie’s and suddenly they just couldn’t compete. “It wasn’t economical for us to continue,” Glenda explained.
Glenda and Alistair knew selling the orchard off as a going concern would ensure financial failure for the next owner and they couldn’t bear to see all their hard work fall into disarray.
In 2015 with very heavy hearts, the Thomson’s pulled out their thirty-year-old blueberry bushes, transplanting one hundred bushes to their home garden to keep the memory alive.
The blueberry orchard may be gone but the wealth of knowledge it gave Glenda was just what she needed to realise a long held dream of becoming a published author.
Before all of this and before meeting her husband Alistair, Glenda spent twenty-four years in corporate communications.
Raised on an apple orchard, now long buried under the urban sprawl of Wantirna South in Melbourne’s east, Glenda was busy raising a young family when her circumstances changed and she needed to return to the workforce.
With three children under ten years she found a way to manage work and family and set off on whirlwind ride into the corporate stratosphere complete with world travel and charge accounts.
On setting out, Glenda had no idea where her career would take her but as she says “it’s sometimes good to be naïve because if I’d known the barriers, I mightn’t have had the courage.”
“People will say I’ve been lucky but interestingly, the harder you work, the luckier you get and most of all I just loved my job.”
After twelve years working for an international aid agency, the second half of her business career, Glenda headed corporate affairs and crisis management in Asia-Pacific for a global food company.
It was a busy time in her life and although she describes it as “a brilliant ride” she also admits to “living on adrenalin” and there was no time for her to express her creative self.
It was during these “cerebral years” Glenda met Alistair who worked for the same company but previously in London and New York.
After quitting corporate life and taking time to smell the roses, Glenda took a creative writing course and a casual interest quickly became an obsession. “I got really addicted and that’s not like me,” she explains, “I was used to going from one thing to the next but writing just held my attention”.
Every afternoon at two pm Glenda retires to her study with an inspiring view out over the Strathbogie hills to write.
Her first attempt at a novel took her seven years and a lot of soul searching. Much had changed over that time and although the first book remains unpublished, it served as a thorough literary apprenticeship.
Glenda explains the vast schism between the worlds of high-brow literary fiction and commercial fiction and her realisation she had a much better chance of being successful by bridging the two.
By making her work more commercial, she wasn’t selling out; she was increasing her chances of being published and ultimately increasing her potential readership.
The second book, ‘Blueberry’ took four years and Glenda heeded the saying ‘write what you know’ very literally. Whist the characters are all fictional they draw on Glenda’s own experiences both practically and emotionally and most poignantly, the blueberry orchard they lost has been immortalised into the pages of the book.
‘Blueberry’ spans a year in the life of a small horticultural operation and with a slightly melancholic smile she admits “you’ll know how to run a blueberry orchard after reading it.”
The publishing success has not only given Glenda the professional acknowledgement she sought, Penguin Random House’s enthusiasm for her writing style has given her a new motivation and her next book is nearly complete after less than a year.
Her current work also draws on her knowledge of country life but this time Glenda is focusing on the multi-generational dynamics often experienced in modern families.
Glenda has recently welcomed her fifth grandchild to the world and also has constant contact with her elderly parents who are 85 and 90 years old. Not only is her writing style part of a new contemporary genre, so is her life.
“I had this moment when I was taking mum’s walker out of the car boot, so I could buckle my grandson’s car seat in, and I fully grasped the demanding lives women of my generation now experience. It’s a theme I like writing about.”
Once upon a time people had one career, retired, helped out with the grandkids for a bit and promptly fell off the shelf, but things have changed and Glenda finds herself (not facing impending infirmary) but at the beginning of a new incarnation. “It’s very exciting to have a new career at my point in life,” she says with humbleness but at the same time a sense of ownership that inspires confidence.
Glenda is the new face of country women; she’s well dressed and worldly with a quiet sophistication that enables her to move freely between the paddock and the board room.
Starting a new career at any stage in life takes guts and “you’d never take on any of these things if you knew what was really involved,” admits Glenda, but she’s done it and the world is forever just that little sweeter for her labours.