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 published just after Australia’s COVID lockdown, Fragments in Time – A diary of homecoming. I hope you enjoy it!

“…I didn’t expect to be touched so deeply by the return to my Italian birthplace in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. Thirty-seven years after my migration I not only re-discovered the little town of Grado…but the family I left behind as a child…two visits in 1992 and 1993 awakened me to a hidden reality I hadn’t felt in my Australian life-style and which began to influence my life from the inside out…“

Biography

Love of writing, theatre and dramatic arts led Anita to write prize-winning play A Light Vision for a city council competition. Other successes include radio drama produced by ABC Radio National Come with me on a Fantastic Journey and The Return and Educational books Presenting the Curriculum–Addison Wesley Longman and Drama Across the Curriculum–Longman Cheshire.

Anita juggled writing with school-teaching, directing and performing in plays and running drama-in-education workshops for teachers. The play Greetings from Retaw sponsored by the E&WS water board, toured primary schools for two seasons and 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’s final involvement in drama-in-education was co-directing a national drama conference (NAADIE). Later a more relaxed lifestyle teaching yoga and meditation within her Counselling Extra-Much More Than Talk business gave opportunity to write for wellness. Reigniting a passion for fiction in writers’ groups she started the writing cooperative Create-Write with a writer friend. Short stories for the Writing Keepsakes anthology and memoir Fragments in Time followed. Another memoir Lessons From the Pidge is in the wings.

Read about recent YA novels
Fiddle Sticks and Farfalla below.

FIDDLE STICKS:

Teenagers Demetrio, Guido and Marta time-slip from ancient Greek, Roman and 1950’s Italian cultures into the 21st century. Victims of a time warp, they land in the Wasteland. United in aim to return home the strangers form friendships. Fleeing the Keepers in the Wasteland they are separated in Outback Australia and reunite in Darwin.

Confused by modern life thousands of years into their future, a chance meeting with Buck, a ranger, and his sister Lauren, distract them from plans to reverse the time warp. Demetrio’s mutual attraction with Lauren and Marta’s find of aged versions of herself and family on social media raise doubts about returning. How does 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 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?

FARFALLA:

In late 21^st century Earth is a colourless, deteriorated planet. Crystal (16), her father Ed (a scientist), Ellis (16) 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 restrictions, leaves Crystal pining for that existence. Will she find out why the planet has deteriorated so rapidly and her mother disappeared? Anguished that best friend Ellis is smitten by Magenta (17), unaware The System has sent her to spy on them, Crystal withdraws to Ed’s secret lab and learns what lies behind her father’s butterfly experiments.

Transported inside Ed’s human-sized butterfly cocoons, along with Ellis and Seline, Crystal lands on a hill in a thriving, beautiful world. Emerging from her cocoon she searches for the others. How does she overcome the challenges of gravity, timelessness, intense silences? What do the festoons of butterflies know of her mother and will they help Crystal find her?

Discovering the crystal hillside can transmit messages to the old world, Ed guides colleague Dr Johns and Magenta, now defying The System, to perfect metamorphic experiments. Will this help people’s chances of survival in the old world? And will Crystal’s belief that all is possible with a clear, creative mind and a hopeful heart, be realised in the new world?

When I’m not writing I teach yoga and meditation 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. The plaque above my desk keeping me focused in my writing reads: ‘Follow your heart it will always know where to lead you.’

Stay well and enjoy life!

Anita Clara