I’ve enjoyed writing in most genres but my favourites are memoir, short stories and young adult fantasy/fiction to entertain, enlighten and tease the imagination so that readers are a little bit awed by life and the world we live in.
Born in Grado, an island above Venice in the Adriatic Sea, I write under my Italian name, Anita Clara Iussa. When I returned for a visit decades after migrating to Australia in the fifties, I awakened memories of a culture I thought I’d lost. The story of my return, scribbled in note books, began to live again in my memoir Fragments in Time – A diary of homecoming.
BOOKS
Recently Published:
A FEATHERING OF WISDOM – an Inspired Life
A Memoir
POSITIVELY SHORT – A collection of feel-good tales
Coming Soon:
FRAGMENTS OF A LIFE – A migrant’s journey
A Memoir
YOUNG ADULT NOVELS
A SENSE OF TIME
Teenagers Demetrio, Guido and Marta time-slip from ancient Greek, Roman and 1950’s Italian cultures into the late 21st century. They land in a Wasteland. United in aim to return home, the strangers form friendships and flee the harassment of Keepers. Finding themselves in Outback Australia they’re befriended by Buck, a ranger and his sister Lauren.
How will Demetrio’s mutual attraction with Lauren, and Marta’s find of aged versions of herself and family on social media, raise doubts about returning to their homelands? Will Demetrio’s theory of parallel existence create more confusion?
How will Guido’s inherited seer qualities, the ancient scroll, the sacred Outback rock and the sticks from the Wasteland help reverse the time irregularity? And can he convince his friends that the only solution to the modern-day problems is to return to their eras?
BEYOND THE CRYSTAL
In late 21st century Earth is a colourless, deteriorated planet. Crystal, her father Ed (a scientist), Ellis and his mother Seline share a subterranean home in a world governed by The System with Rulings enforced by Guardians.
A colour photograph of her mother Suria on a pristine beach and Ed’s stories of life before environmental restrictions, leaves Crystal pining for that existence. She wonders why Earth has deteriorated so rapidly and why her mother disappeared long ago. Anguished when best friend Ellis is smitten by the beautiful Magenta, unaware The System has sent her to spy on them, Crystal withdraws to Ed’s secret lab. Here she learns her father is constructing human-sized butterfly cocoons.
Transported inside a cocoon, along with Ellis and Seline, Crystal lands in a thriving, extraordinary world and finds the others gone. How does she overcome the challenges of gravity, timelessness, intense silences? What do the festoons of butterflies know of her mother?
Inadvertently transported to the new world Ed discovers a crystal hillside and uses it to transmit messages to the old world. He guides colleague Dr Johns and Magenta, now defying The System, to perfect metamorphic experiments helping people transport to the new world? How will Crystal find her mother and eventually reunite with everyone?
Love of writing, theatre and dramatic arts led Anita to write prize-winning play, A Light Vision, for a Payneham City Council competition. Other successes include radio drama produced by ABC Radio National, Come with me on a Fantastic Journey, and The Return, followed by Educational books Presenting the Curriculum–Addison Wesley Longman and Drama Across the Curriculum–Longman Cheshire.
Anita juggled writing with school-teaching, directing, writing and performing in plays. Greetings from Retaw, sponsored by the water board, toured primary schools and the one-act play, Woman in Black was performed by women’s theatre group Vitalstatistix as a script-in-hand performance and included in the Adelaide Hills Drama festival.
Anita left theatre and school teaching behind and in a complete reversal of lifestyle became a counsellor and a yoga and meditation teacher. Years later, reigniting a passion for writing in writers’ groups she started the writing cooperative Create-Write with a writer friend. Her short stories are published in the Woodcroft Writers anthology Writing Keepsakes and in Positively Short – a collection of feel-good tales. Memoirs Fragments in Time and A Feathering of Wisdom followed. Another memoir Fragments of a Life – A migrant’s journey will be coming out in 2026.
When I’m not writing I teach yoga and spend time with my husband Peter, a great friend and scrabble player, and teenage grandchildren only a brisk walk away. My treed southern Adelaide home surrounded by creeks triggers memories of the home I left behind on the River Murray in country Victoria.
Stay well and enjoy life!
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Welcome to my writing world! 