Best Australian Yarn: WA author Holden Sheppard excited to find his favourite short stories, joins Prize Jury

Holden Sheppard is just back from the gym. He’s showered and grabbed a bottle of water but you can still hear the crackle of energy around him.

He’s sent the manuscript of his third novel, Time Bomb, to his publisher ahead of schedule and the noise around his debut novel, Invisible Boys, continues to swell.

He celebrated the news that it will be translated into French by posting on Instagram a picture of himself in front of the Eiffel Tower, and is waiting optimistically for confirmation it will be made into a television series.

Coming up is a new role as one of five Prize Jury judges of the Best Australian Yarn, the unique short story competition run by The West Australian in partnership with Navitas which encourages all authors, published or not, to compete for the world’s richest prize pool.

The WA author is looking forward to reading the top 50 stories, finding his favourites and having a robust discussion with his fellow judges.

He’s a guy you’d like in your corner. He has the fitness to go the distance in any debate and, as an ardent Collingwood football supporter, you know he’d give his eye teeth — and probably a few more — to get the result he wants.

“I’m going to be like, ‘if it’s not going to win, I need it in the top 10’,” he says. “I’m picking the story with heaps of heart. If it comes down to a battle with a well-structured story, heart to me has more value. Obviously, you would like to have both, of course.”

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Sheppard has carved out his name baring his soul. The parallels with his own young life are clear in Invisible Boys, a raw, no-holds-barred story of three Geraldton boys coming to terms with issues of masculinity and homosexuality.

His second novel, The Brink, graphically explores drug and alcohol use, relationships and mental health against the backdrop of a death which tears apart a school leavers party.

But he says Time Bomb, which he hopes will be released next year, is the closest thing he has done to memoir. “In my other books I have hidden myself in three different characters or personas. This one is the first time I have been willing to show up as one character, one narrator.”

That narrator is “an alcoholic, gym junkie, angry, bisexual labourer”.

Sheppard has been drinking since he was 16. “I have an interesting relationship with alcohol,” he says. “I definitely enjoy it. I remember as a teenager my friend’s parents went away. We all went over to his place and raided the liquor cabinet — whisky, beer, cooking sherry. I remember feeling happy and calm.”

He gave up drinking for four years but started again as he made the rounds of book tours to promote his novels. At the moment he hasn’t touched alcohol for three weeks.

Like his drinking, he has worked hard to control and understand his anger. “As a young man, I repressed a lot of it,” he says. “I’ve been in therapy because I’ve had lots of problems with it. But I can be chill as well.”

Such issues fascinate Sheppard. “How can a man express himself and put up boundaries without anger becoming violence?” he ponders.

His fourth novel will be a sequel to Invisible Boys. Sheppard had intended to write his debut about young men in their 20s but he tested the water with a short story in which a 16-year-old Hammer realises he is attracted to men.

“I just kept going because I had a lot to say about that topic and about that time of life,” he says.

Sheppard often speaks at schools. “For a lot of the students you are showing up and affirming that it is OK to be that kind of person,” he says. “That’s huge. There is no right way to be gay, there is no one way.

“The main message in the first two books is about shame. Everyone goes through the teenage years with some level of it. It is powerful to hear that you don’t have to be ashamed of who you are, that you are OK just as you are. I wish I could have heard that.”

His advice to aspiring writers mirrors his advice to young people. “Be authentic, be true to you,” he says. “Write the story only you can tell, even if you think you are really boring.

“I used to think, ‘what the hell do I want to say? I’m from Geraldton and I go to a Catholic high school’. Don’t assume that your life is boring — only you are you.”

Entries in the Best Australian Yarn close on August 1