When a memory becomes a story

A remembered incident rarely arrives with a neat beginning and ending. It may be a conversation, an object or a moment whose meaning changes years later. Winding Back takes pleasure in that unfinished quality: the point at which something remembered becomes material for a story.

In his author’s notes, Wilton Morley explains the dual-time theme behind the collection’s title and identifies some of the experiences that set the stories in motion. Theatre work, family history, travel and newspaper reports all provide beginnings. He also distinguishes those beginnings from the inventions that follow.

The detail that stays with you

One story starts with a painting connected to his father. Another draws on a story relayed by Lauren Bacall. The title story follows his reading of a newspaper report about deportation. These are varied points of departure, joined by an interest in how an encounter or an image can remain in the mind and acquire a different life on the page.

The opening, ‘Larry’s Last Act’, returns to a young producer taking an American comedy around Australia. Its early pages concern familiar theatrical pressures: finding an affordable cast, managing an actor’s expectations and moving a production between towns. The practical detail creates a convincing place from which the story can take its own course.

Reading across then and now

A collection gives the reader permission to pause. You can read one story, carry its last image into the rest of the day and return later to a different setting. In Winding Back, that rhythm suits the movement between earlier events and their later consequences.

The author’s notes offer an additional pleasure for readers curious about how fiction is made. They let you see a starting point without requiring you to treat everything that follows as autobiography. A real memory can be the spark; the finished story has its own possibilities.

Begin with the opening below, then explore all fourteen stories to see where Wilton takes those first sparks.