Mavis Stucci

LynMiller is the pen name of Mavis Stucci, who prefers to keep her official name for normal life and artistic endeavours.

LynMiller has led ‘an interesting life’. With no career path to follow, it was a natural follow-on from a rambling childhood, spent in Canada and New Zealand, to go to Australia as a young adult, to ‘see what happens’. What happened was both good and bad, but never boring. As with most rolling stones, the moss of stability and riches was not in the pocket but in the mind, not the result of collecting things on the highway to worldly success but of gathering experiences and characters along a far different road. Fully camouflaged, these assets often find their way into her writings.

LynMiller believes that creation is far more inspiring than destruction, that growth must be intelligent and sustainable, that true efficiency is the antithesis of competition and that integrity and cooperation always win when everything is tallied at the end of the course.

While always in love with writing and books, as Mavis Stucci, she worked in graphic design, cartooning and illustration, and taught art to both children and prison inmates – not in the same place, of course. After studying art at UNSW, she spent nearly three months on a ‘world whirl’ to soak up art in Africa, Europe, North America and New Zealand. Mavis has also worked in hospitality and aged care, been a farm caretaker and went droving during a drought; she’s picked fruit, had factory work, been a shearer’s rouseabout, a cleaner and a supervisor and has assisted teachers and a diversional therapist; she loves creative arts, travelling, the bush, most creatures (including people), her personal independence – and occasional visits to the big city ‘to visit friends, get some culture… and remind myself why I love living in the country’.

Conceiving and producing the Adamadas Chronicles’ stories and graphics ‘energises my imagination, mind and life; the world’s way compared to ElWay – all of that inspires the stories and characters, though anything can generate an idea… even a pot of parsley.’