Kristen’s Echat With... Owen Zupp
(No. 3 in the Echat With... series)
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I first ‘met’ Owen by email back in 2006 through my day job as a
military bookseller. At the time, he was ‘just a customer’. Two years later,
after embarking on my Battle of Britain research, his name again crossed my
radar but in a totally different context. My friend Doug Hurst, who wrote
(among other things) The Forgotten
Few. 77 RAAF Squadron in Korea, asked if I had read
Owen’s biography of Squadron Leader Kenneth Butterworth McGlashan AFC. He
recommended Down to Earth. A fighter
pilot’s experiences of surviving Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Dieppe and
D-Day to me for the ‘terrific insights
into the RAF and England in those times ... That aside, I thought it a very
good read’. And it is. (Don’t just take my word for it. Have a look at Andy Wright’s review at Aircrew Book Review. http://aircrewbookreview.blogspot.com.au/2009/04/down-to-earth-sl-kenneth-mcglashan-afc.html ) Doug pointed out that, typical of his generation, Kenneth
McGlashan was a modest man with no claims to special recognition among his
peers. But, according to Doug, Owen decided to tell his story ‘because he
thought Ken did more than most and, having read it, I agree with him.’ Not a
bad starting point for your first book, and one certainly that has helped me
get a handle on the RAF during the Battle of Britain.
Soon after Doug’s recommendation, I contacted Owen and congratulated him
on his book and asked if he could recommend a UK researcher as I needed to
obtain records from British institutions. Since then, I have enjoyed sporadic
contact but over the last year or so, Owen and I have slipped into a semi-regular
econversation relating to our separate research projects. I have gained much
from this and it is good to be able to share achievements and progress with a
fellow writer. I now count Owen as a writing friend, but I have to confess that
I had no idea of the depth of his experience as a journalist, pilot and
aviation author. Not, that is, until I asked him to be the third in my Echat With... series.
So, what’s Owen’s background? He holds a Masters Degree in
Aviation Management, he is a commercial pilot with nearly 17,000 hours of
flight experience and has
flown all around Australia and the world, and he has 20 years in airline
operations. In addition to Down to Earth, he has written articles which have appeared in Australian
and international journals and recently launched his first ebook, 50 Tales
of Flight: From Biplanes to Boeings, a collection of stories from
his aviation blog, which became an Amazon instant bestseller. He is currently
working on another ebook about his solo round-Australia flight and an account
of his father’s Second World War and Korean War experiences.
Incredibly, given his great literary output, Owen did not set out to be a writer. He started his working life as a paramedic, studying and learning to fly in between his shifts on the streets of Sydney. As you can imagine, he saw some terrible sights and grew up quickly, but his stint with the NSW Ambulance Service gave him a life-long sense of perspective and appreciation of life’s gifts which are ever apparent in his blog posts and underpin his 50 Tales of Flight. So, what made him take the leap from paramedic to aviation author?
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Owen had been working for Ansett Australia as a pilot but when it
collapsed, so too did his job. That was the turning point that saw him embark
on post-graduate studies and take up his pen to share his experience of flight.
Fortunately, he was not lost to commercial aviation. It wasn’t long before
Qantas snapped him up and, when he is not holed up in his study writing, or packing
school lunches, or having coffee at his beloved International Cricket Hall of
Fame, Owen is plying our airways in a Boeing 737. But where did his love of
aviation spring from?
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It seems in Owen’s case, Nurture came out winner in the Nurture V
Nature debate. ‘Born to a fighter pilot father and air force radar operator
mother’, Owen tells me, ‘the odds of me being a plumber were slim. I lived and
breathed flight from an early age’ and he was ‘sitting in aeroplanes and
peering into cockpits with cupped hands for as long as I can remember’. After
watching for so long, I wondered about his first flight. ‘It was with my father
in a Cessna 150 and I couldn’t reach the pedals on the floor. I would’ve been
about five and my strongest recollection is during the take-off, looking down
and watching the runway falling away from the wheels. It’s a very vivid
memory.’ Fast forward eleven years to his first solo in a Cessna 152 at Camden,
NSW. ‘Strangely, I had absolutely no nerves about going solo; I’d experience
stronger butterflies before going out to bat in a cricket match. It was a beautiful
still morning and I just wanted to scream out to the world that I was actually
flying!’
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Not the Cessna, but a Tiger Moth
After experiencing such unadulterated joy in a small aircraft, why
then, I asked, did Owen leap from a private licence to flying the big jets of
the airlines? Again, it was Nurture, the influence of his father, who ‘would whistle as he went off
to fly aeroplanes at 2 a.m. in the pouring rain. I thought there MUST be
something special to this flying thing’. He never shook this
thought and, as an adult, ‘four years
as a paramedic paid for flying lessons which ultimately led me into commercial
aviation’. He
initially flew outback charter and ferried aircraft overseas. ‘I
taught folks to fly and even held the approvals
to issue them with licences. Eventually I joined the airlines’. He made the
switch because they ‘always seemed to offer the greatest deal of security and stability
for a family life. The collapse of Ansett proved that not to be the case.’
A stable family life is important for Owen (as for everyone) and
he has been lucky enough to experience aviation and love combined. He is
‘happily married to a girl who flies Boeing 767s’. Kirrily ‘learned to fly at
the school where I was the Chief Flying Instructor, although she gave the
grumpy boss a wide berth. It was when she joined the staff as a flight
instructor that we came to know each other’. They now have ‘four wonderful
children’.
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Despite a fulfilled aviation and family life, Owen has one secret
hope. ‘I still hold out that the phone will ring and I’ll be off to England to
play in the Ashes series this northern summer’. It is a good thing Owen hasn’t
laid down his pen while he waits for that call and, in the interim his current
career as a pilot influences his writing more than his hoped-for one as a
cricketer. He admits that ‘I’m very, very lucky. From the cockpit, we have the best corner
office view that is forever changing. I am fortunate that I’m able to share
that view and my thoughts with people through writing’.
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With a busy flying career, family and lots of writing projects on
the go including blog, book reviews, articles, the next ebook, promotion of the
first ebook and his father’s story, I wondered how he managed to be so
productive. Owen confessed that ‘it’s a struggle that is mostly offset by
getting up at 4 a.m. The best time to write for me is in those early hours
before the kids begin their daily routine’. Needless to say, down time is rare in
the Zupp household but when he does have a few moments to himself, his
favourite way to relax is ‘having dinner, or even just a coffee, with my wonderful
wife’.
Just like any other writer worth his salt, Owen does not spend all
his time off drinking coffee and dining out. He reads. Currently on his bedside
table is Phillip Bradley’s acclaimed Hell’s Battlefield. The Australians in New
Guinea in World War II. When he finishes that, he will be back in the air
with Charles Page’s brilliant biography of Charles Learmonth, Wings of Destiny (a signed copy, what’s more).
I am sure WoD will become a firm
favourite but I could not help asking about his all-time favourite. Sadly, Owen
can’t remember the name and has unsuccessfully searched for it for years. ‘It
was in my school library and was published around 1950. The paper cover had
long gone and it told the tale, with black and white photographs, of a young
lad taking his first flying lessons and going solo in an old J-3 Piper Cub. I
borrowed it every week for about four years.’ Hopefully this strikes a chord
with someone and, if so, please let Owen know the title!
From books to films. How, I asked, would Owen spend a gift voucher
for the world’s biggest DVD shop? Ewan McGregor’s Long Way Round, The
Untouchables, The Right Stuff, the
Hunters in the Sky series and One Six Right: The Romance of
Flying, directed by Brian
Terwilliger.
I must confess I had to look that one up and, according to the
good folks of Wikipedia, One Six Right
looks at the unsung hero of aviation—the local airport—through the life,
history and struggle of an airport icon: Southern California’s Van Nuys Airport. There are lots of aerial
sequences and stories by passionate pilots, air traffic controllers, historians
and flight enthusiasts such as Sydney Pollack, Lorenzo Lamas, Paul Moyer, Hal Fishman, and Desiree Horton. One Six Right tells how Amelia Earhart broke a world speed record over Van
Nuys’ runways, and, for film buffs, reveals that scenes from Casablanca were filmed on the grounds and Marilyn Monroe was discovered while working in
its hangars.
Once the DVD player is turned off, Owen
retreats to his special writing place to tell his own aviation tales. ‘I love my study! It was actually twice the size until the arrival
of our twins called for more space. The smaller room now has a better writing
atmosphere! It has a number of bookshelves and cabinets. The leather-inlaid
desk was one of the first pieces of furniture we purchased when we built the
house.’
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Owen has adorned his study with favourite cricket pieces and photos of
aeroplanes, and ‘there are photos all over the walls of personally significant
people.’ One of those significant people is his father Phil, who served as a
commando in New Guinea and flew with 77 Squadron in Korea. There is a photo of
Phil’s aircraft with a shattered canopy in Doug Hurst’s The Forgotten Few and the Australian War Memorial’s Gloster Meteor
is the very aircraft in which Phil flew his first combat mission. As well as being a key influence on Owen’s aviation life, Phil
Zupp was the greatest influence on his son’s reading life. ‘Forced by the economic
times of his day to leave school at a young age, he became a prolific reader
with a phenomenal general knowledge. I can’t remember going to bed without him
reading to me or relating some wonderful story from his life’. It is an example
that Owen has taken to heart as he shares his experiences, stories and books
with his children, and with his readers.
With a background solidly based
on reading and storytelling, it was a
natural progression to writing his own tales. ‘I think I enjoyed writing from
childhood’, and his first published piece was a poem in the Sunday Telegraph’s ‘Charlie Chuckles’ section when he was about
seven. (BTW, I too am an alumnus of the Charlie Chuckles Club! I wonder how
many other Australian writers have been encouraged by Charlie and his editors?)
Since then, Owen has barely stopped writing but ‘a career in a very technical realm tended to immerse my life in
manuals rather than creative works’. But them with the collapse of Ansett, Owen
had the time and a new impetus to tap into his creative side. ‘I sat down to
write, purely and simply and the words just poured out. I often think they’d
been bottled up for a few decades just waiting to be released’. And how they
were released!
Owen has learned much about his
literary craft in his time and perhaps the most important advice he has ever received has been, ‘write, write
and just keep writing. Get to the end and then go back and start to edit the
work, otherwise you’ll never get beyond the first chapter’. And if he could pass on one
piece of advice to someone starting
out, it would be, ‘just do it. Shelve self-doubt and just start writing’. The
consequence of Owen just doing it has been over 300 articles, one of which led to
his first book. Kenneth McGlashan read
one of those articles and mentioned it to a mutual friend. When Kenneth and
Owen realised they lived near each other, they decided to meet ‘and the book
was born that day’.
Kenneth Butterworth McGlashan
My second reaction to this
(after ‘what a wonderful story!’) was ‘how hard it would be to write about
someone still living’. How does Owen do it? I know I would be forever imagining
someone looking over my shoulder, and worrying if they would be offended by my
conclusions, or if they would be sensitive to a particular line of questions. Owen
overcame any potential problems easily. Kenneth placed no restrictions on his
writing and gave him free rein to tell the story as Owen uncovered it. ‘Part of Kenneth’s magic’,
recalled Owen, ‘was his forthright honesty, blended with a cheeky sense of humour’.
Holding your first book in your hands, smelling that special newly printed
smell and tracing your name on the title page with your finger, are some of the
most exciting experiences of a writer’s life but for Owen, the most fulfilling aspect of writing Down to Earth was ‘establishing a close
friendship with Kenneth and his wife, Doreen’.
Owen’s next challenge was to
write about his father. That, of course, offers its own set of challenges: how
to be objective about someone you love, someone who has been such an important
part of your life, someone who has influenced you so profoundly that you
followed in his footsteps and flight path. I speculated that trying to tell (what I call) Phil’s Story
honestly, with the proverbial warts and all, must be difficult. ‘You’re right
on the money. For these reasons this has been the most difficult work for me to
write to date. Finding the balance of maintaining arm’s length accuracy, whilst
still conveying the insight only a son can offer has been a challenge. At times
I have walked away from the manuscript for a period before reading it again
with fresh eyes. I can honestly say that thankfully I believe that I have found
that balance and the story is still an incredible tale’.
Phil Zupp
From what Owen has told me (in confidence, and I am not blurting) Phil’s Story is indeed an incredible
tale that has developed considerably over the last six years. ‘The main
evolution of that story’, says Owen, ‘is the continuing emergence of new
people, places and anecdotes from my father’s life. Each one makes the story
richer in its own way, even if it is only a short humorous reference. The
passage of time has also allowed me the chance to find official documentation
to support a number of recollections’.
With so many
other writing projects on the boil, I gained the sense that Phil’s Story is almost taking a back seat. I know I get antsy if I can’t focus
on my main writing task so I asked Owen if he felt torn between finishing his
father’s story and compiling his blog, writing his articles and publishing his
ebooks. ‘It has been frustrating in a sense, as my father’s story is my major
work in progress’, he admitted, but ‘I realise by virtue of the amazing popularity
of 50 Tales of Flight, that these [other]
stories need to be shared as well’. And it is all part of a plan. All going
well, ‘Solo Flight. Australia will be
released in August, 50 Tales of Flight
will find its way from eBook to print, and my father’s manuscript [will] soon becomes
a book that does justice to his amazing life. Stay tuned...’. I certainly will.
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On 4 December 2011, Owen
wrote that ‘writing can be a solitary, one-way street of communication,
punching words out into the world beyond and rarely hearing a voice echo back
with comment. Yet that somehow makes the exercise a cleansing journey through
one’s own thoughts, offering clarity to concepts that may otherwise annoyingly
rumble around inside the head’. That was part of the second post on the blog
and website he began four days earlier when he committed ‘to entering the world
of blogging which was a fantastic tool of communication on the around Australia
flight and I will even endeavour to try my hand at the so-called “social
media”’. Since then, Owen has effectively used facebook and blog to connect
with readers. The blog’s genesis may have been ‘a desire to share a mixture of
published pieces and random musings on aviation with a broader audience’, but
‘the natural progression was to grow those “tales” into a published work and
the ebook—50 Tales of Flight—was the
most logical, affordable step in the first instance’.
Regular contact with his
readership is time consuming, but Owen believes it is worth it. Owen told me
that he, like any other author, ‘often wonders if anyone is reading the words
that you write. These new mediums let the author know first-hand that people
ARE reading your work. Furthermore, the feedback can allow the writer to see
their work from a different perspective; sometimes you can stand too close to
the mirror’. Owen values the opinions of his readers and consulted them when he
was deciding on the all important cover art for his new ebook. ‘Releasing the
two covers of Solo Flight. Australia
for the greater community’s opinions was a very worthwhile exercise’.
It is interesting that Owen refers to the ‘community’, because Solo Flight. Australia springs from
Owen’s community mindedness. Back in 2010, the centenary of the year in which
powered flight first took place in Australia, Owen took part in an adventure
dubbed ‘There and Back’ to help raise funds for the Royal Flying Doctor
Service. During that solo flight, Owen ‘maintained a detailed diary, took
hundreds of photographs and hours of footage’. He always intended pulling this
together into a book but that project had to line up behind all his others. But
when 50 Tales of Flight ‘received
such an amazing response, I knew another ebook had to be forthcoming’ sooner
rather than later. ‘Consequently, Solo
Flight. Australia was born and, like 50
Tales of Flight, it may well evolve into print’.
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Just as he embraced social media to promote his work, Owen has taken
advantage of the many varied faces of publishing. Grub Street put out Down to Earth in 2007 and, while it is
currently out of print, it may well be reprinted when Kenneth McGlashan’s
restored Hawker Hurricane takes to the skies. (See http://www.owenzupp.com/_blog/Owen_Zupp/tag/Dunkirk/) Owen hopes that Phil’s Story will be published by an
Australian house but he decided to self publish 50 Tales of Flight as an ebook. He believes that print and ebooks ‘each
has their own realm and audience and as an author each form needs to be
approached differently. I have no real preference as each style fulfils a
different need at different times. I initially decided to publish an ebook
purely because of convenience and cost. The success of 50 Tales of Flight as an ebook then provided a wonderful indicator
and stepping stone to print should I venture down that path’. With this
sensible outlook and valuable experience, Owen decided that Solo Flight Australia should first see
life as an ebook as well.
Owen’s success as an ebook author has been hard fought. It doesn’t
matter if the book is good (and it is) if no one knows about it. Right from the
start, Owen has been a dedicated ebook marketer. He has promoted via facebook,
called for reviews of 50 Tales of Flight
to be placed on Amazon by all who read it and then shared those reviews via
social media. (See mine, for example, at http://www.amazon.com/review/R15U0KJQH4QGHK.)
He has had giveaways to reach new readers and kept his followers up to date
with his Amazon rankings. I wondered if Owen found this ardent marketing a distraction
or necessary evil. ‘I don’t find it to be either. I learnt with Down to Earth when it was first released
that the author’s job is to market the book. Publishers have an ever-changing
stable of books to distribute, so the author needs to share their passion for
their book to the greater audience. Whether it is an ebook or print, marketing
is simply part of an author’s role in the modern world.’ Owen has accepted that
role and has benefited from it.
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Stepping out of the modern world and into Kingsford Smith’s Southern Cross
Owen has had many thrills in his writing career and it is hard to
pin down a ‘greatest’. If pushed, he would opt for a ‘three-way toss-up.
Signing copies of Down to Earth at
the Duxford Air Show in the UK alongside Battle of Britain veterans; having a
copy of my first published article faxed to my hotel room in the United States
the day it hit the news-stands; [and more] recently, 50 Tales of Flight gaining bestseller status in the aviation genre on
Amazon on its first day of release. I have been very fortunate along the way’.
Fortunate perhaps, but Owen has worked hard for his well deserved success.
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