Michelle Johnston loves being a doctor but she also loves writing books.
By Ara Jansen
Compelled to write, Dr Michelle Johnston also loves the acquisition of knowledge which comes with each book she has written.
“I’m always writing and learning something new,” she says. With her recent novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles, she did a dive into the world of bacteria, among other investigations.
The book is set in the subterranean realms of a large public hospital where a chaplain, struggling with the loss of his family and faith, meets the hospital’s scientist who believes the bacteria he is working with might be producing gold.
In the meantime, the number of homeless outside the hospital is increasing, almost Christmas and you can’t buy chocolate in the gift shop. It’s a story exploring science, faith and alchemy.
“For a long time, I have been keen to set a story in Royal Perth Hospital,” Michelle says. “It’s a rabbit warren and has labyrinthine space and dead ends. It has been cobbled together and there are so many unusual doors. In the book, it’s almost a magical place as it explores what makes you believe what you do.
“It was important to me to do some research and keep the veracity of the science and have that be believable, alongside some magical realism. I also found it interesting to explore medical issues through the eyes of a chaplain rather than a doctor.”
Michelle has been a consultant emergency physician since 1999.
“There’s a lot to love about medicine,” she says. “It’s an amazing job – incredibly rewarding, satisfying, challenging and gives me great pleasure. I would not swap it for anything and it feels like a rewarding way to spend one’s life.”
Her first novel, Dustfall, is the story of two doctors at different times who end up at Wittenoom hospital in a story of crashing consequences and the suffering caused by asbestos mining.
The author says it’s hard to nail down why she loves to write. She considers it a compulsion more than anything.
“I don’t feel complete if I am not writing. That has been the case for most of my life. Writing has helped me understand the craziness of the world and it gives me a perspective on things. I also would not call it a soothing hobby.”
As her children are now grown, Michelle works part time in order to write more and makes it her spare time priority. She’s now in the exploration stage of her third novel.
Tiny Uncertain Miracles was about four years in the writing. Michelle says it took a little while to find the story, with ideas and drafts being written and dumped before it started to reveal itself. She calls the process “joyful difficulty”.
A voracious reader, Michelle has written for most of her life, taking a hiatus during her medical studies and then in her children’s early years.
“My goal is that I just want to be able to keep writing. As long as I have some readers, that’s good too. There’s such a joy in writing, in creating new things. To write a beautiful sentence must be like crack cocaine. Though I don’t know what that’s actually like – cocaine, that is – I do know writing a magical sentence is such a buzz.”
Tiny Uncertain Miracles is available now.