I’ve always loved reading from the time I learnt around the age of four or five. I read myths, fairy tales, legends, and encyclopaedias as a child. I began devouring history books and historical fiction, science, science fiction, speculative fantasy, religion, classic novels, poetry, and philosophy.
The first story I wrote was published! In Woman’s Day in 1965. It was a story called “Black Lily” and was published in a special holiday fiction section along with stories by Agatha Christie, Pearl Buck, and an unknown author called Robin Green. (That was me.)
I left Australia not long after that, lived and travelled in many countries, and forgot about the writing. I never stopped reading though. When I returned to Australia, my friend Annette Canterbury (AKA Tulku Rose) asked me to co-author a series of books for teachers and children. We wrote the books, William Brooks published them, and I had caught the bug.
Since then, I've published non-fiction articles on travel, history, mythology, language, politics, religion and philosophy, a children’s picture book and a self-help manual on learning.
Because I was unhappy with the magazines for women, I founded, edited and published an alternative magazine for women entitled The Dawn after Louisa Lawson’s original nineteenth century newspaper for women.
In 2010, my book on Joan of Arc was published. I wrote it as a series of imaginary interviews with Joan herself. The book, Ride the Wind. Choose the Fire, is based on fact and took some fifteen years of research and several trips to France.
Next, I put together a book of inspiring quotes, one for each day of the year, illustrating it with my own photographs and paintings. I called it The Gift of Pearls.
My most recently published book, Busting the Myths of Mars and Venus, blasts the lid off the constraints of gender roles and stereotypes and the damage they do to people and the planet. It also offers strategies for changing the lives of women and men, girls and boys, for the better. Told with anecdotes and humor, highlighted with my own illustrations and supported by ten years of research in fields ranging from anthropology to sociology, history to literature, folklore to psychology, medicine and neuroscience, myth and religion – and pretty much everything in between. It's the first in a series. This book offers you, the reader, an unforgettable experience and could change your life. Once you see, you can never unsee.
I am currently working on a second book in the Gift of Pearls series. This one is about writers and writing. Also in the pipeline is a Memoir and a second book in the Down to Earth series, Busting the Myth of Merit: Why Merit Doesn’t Work for Women.
You’ll find more about me and my writing here. https://www.veronicaschwarz.com/writer
