The Secrets of the Huon Wren by Claire Van Ryn
About the author
Claire lives in Launceston, Tasmania, and has called the north of the state home for most of her life. She received a BA in English at the University of Tasmania before getting married and travelling the world: 12 countries in one year.
On her return, she accepted a position as journalist at The Examiner Newspaper in Launceston, where she worked for nearly 10 years in a range of roles including arts reporter, features writer on The Sunday Examiner and lifestyle columnist. In 2012, Claire’s non-fiction book Faith Like a Mushroom won the Australian Young Christian Writer award.
Claire has since worked as a magazine editor, communications specialist, writing tutor and manager of her own content creation business, Inkling Media. Some of her lesser known occupations included a season of blueberry-picking, assessing early childhood settings in London’s East End, barista, shoe-fitter and still life model.
Claire is currently focused on raising her two children and spending more time honing her fiction writing skills.
In 2020 she wrote her first fiction novel The Secrets of the Huon Wren, (Penguin Random House, 2023) set beneath the Great Western Tiers and Mother Cummings Peak in Tasmania’s heartland. This is where Claire was born, and where generations of her mother’s side of the family have lived since they first migrated from England in the 1830s.
Review
Delving into past secrets. The Sunday Tasmanian (Hobart, Australia) – Sue Bailey June 25, 2023
“You disappear when you grow old”, an older woman once told Tasmanian journalist and now author Claire van Ryn.
The words haunted her.
The Secrets of the Huon Wren, Ms van Ryn’s debut novel, is a story of love, memory and the secrets kept by time.
“I was interested in exploring a relationship that crossed generations: an old woman and a young woman, as friends,” she said.
“With dementia in the mix, the usual modes of communication are hampered, unreliable. Yet the friendship endures.”
“I’d love for readers to mull that over, and to consider the richness of connection despite the decades of age difference.” The inspiration for the book came during a campfire conversation in Queensland in 2018 when a woman told her about working in a nursing home. “She developed a particular soft spot for a woman with advanced dementia who had a doll that she cared for with the same gentle nurturing instinct as a mother with her newborn baby.
“The Secrets of the Huon Wren is for readers who love the intersection of past and present, family mysteries, a strong sense of place in Tasmania, and the satisfaction of two disparate stories bringing healing as they are shared.” Ms van Ryn, a journalist at the Examiner newspaper in Launceston for 10 years, also touches on grief in the book. “Grief is a universal theme we can all connect to,” she said.
“I think we sometimes fail, as a society, to give space for people to grieve in all its different iterations, and however it might need to be expressed. Yet, that’s when healing comes.” She was offered a contract for the book in May last year as she and her family of four were on a year-long trip around Australia.
“The editing process was squeezed between sightseeing and stints when we were too remote for phone signal, let alone internet access. Often I escaped the hot, cramped and noisy van to little town libraries to progress the edits as needed. It was a particularly surreal and serendipitous thing to hold actual copies of my novel on the day we sailed home to Tasmania.”