Benjamin Law's appearance at the Mudgee Readers' Festival this weekend will cap off a whirlwind fortnight for the author, who's been up and down the country for launch events for Growing Up Queer in Australia.
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Law compiled the collection of Australians' experiences of being LGBTIQA+ at different times and places, across the country. The book is the fourth in Black Inc's Growing Up... series, with the first - Growing Up Asian in Australia, edited by Alice Pung - being Law's first foray into the world of books and lead to his publishing deal.
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"The template was already set up; some authors we target because we think they'd be great contributors; then for everyone else we open up the submission process to the entire nation," he said. "And with a book like Growing Up Queer that's especially important, the queer community's acronym - LGBTIQA+ - is long because there are so many different queer experiences.
"There are so many generations across so many different parts of Australia.
"One of the big things that we wanted to make sure of, was that we had all of the 'Australias' covered. Whether that was; 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, now; or if it was to do with urban vs regional, suburban and country."
Law said that the stories about growing up queer in regional areas speak of an experience which can be "a beautiful thing" in a close-knit community, but can also be an isolating one that "compounds that sense of being an outsider".
Although a moment like the legalisation of same-sex marriage - which he admitted thinking he might not see in his life - is something that can help lessen some of that isolation.
"Australia - in an overwhelmingly solid response - said 'yes' to same-sex marriage and that was followed up by parliamentarians. And you can't underestimate what effect that has on a young person's psyche, especially one living in regional or remote Australia," he said. "Something like that being the national conversation, as painful as the postal survey was, the result reminds you that your community is out there waiting for you."
I was always a big reader - as a kid I was always reading books and a teenager I was voraciously reading magazines - and I thought it would be great to try and write those kind of stories.
Coming to the Mudgee Readers' Festival is all too fitting for Law, who parlayed his love of the written word into a career.
"I was always a big reader - as a kid I was always reading books and a teenager I was voraciously reading magazines - and I thought it would be great to try and write those kind of stories," he said. "That kind of magic of a writer being able to introduce the most mind-boggling story and communicate so intimately with people, really appealed to me.
"I tried to make it so writing, or something related to writing, was always my work. I'd be writing for the local music magazine, but I'd also be production designing and laying out their pages for them.
"And for a long time while I was doing my post-graduate I was working in a book shop and also teaching writing at university. Then I was lucky enough to turn it into my fulltime freelancing gig, which has continued to now."
He also writes a popular Good Weekend column and has seen his memoir The Family Law turned into an acclaimed SBS show.
