The Great Leap Forward with Penny Gibson I’ve written on and off for most of my life, while pursuing a career, raising children and establishing a small vineyard. In 1999...

The short story ‘London via Paris and Rome’ came to me in an opening sentence: We moved to a new share house on Union Street and from there on it was all home brew, new faces and an evening...

One book down, are there more I wonder? I have spent a lot of time creating words for tour brochures for the garden tours I lead. They are meant to encourage people to join me. I used to write my garden descriptions for the Open Garden Scheme to entice visitors. Always trying to entice […]

The Great Leap Forward by John Jenkins I began writing verse in the early 1970s, and have subsequently had much poetry published and anthologised. To make a living, as one must do, I became a journalist, working mainly in Melbourne and Sydney, but also overseas, variously on magazines, newspapers and some radio. Between 1975 […]

The Great Leap Forward by Keren Heenan The inspiration for my story in Joiner Bay, ‘Oh, the Water,’ came from listening to the Van Morrison song, ‘And It Stoned Me’. The feel-good nature of the song, the nostalgia and space it conjured, I wanted to replicate that in a short story. Not necessarily to rewrite […]

Sophie and her paternal grandfather who had the ‘good war’. The Resilience of a Generation by Sophie McClelland Resilience is a topic that has been on my mind for a while. One of my earliest memories – I can’t have been much older than four – was of feeling the glass inside my grandmother’s arm; […]

Ah yes, I remember it well; that glorious ten minutes or so when an opening line which had perplexed me for a couple of years suddenly revealed itself as a fully-formed story. I remember it with clarity because it was a unique experience. Stephen King says writing stories is like archaeology: we dig and brush […]

Strong. Brave. Paralysed. My brother says ‘You were always strong, brave. I looked up to that. I still do.’ Honestly, I had no idea. On the inside, it always just feels like a pragmatic weighing up of options and going with the one that will let me sleep at night. I reveal to a new […]

Finding my writing community By Gail Chrisfield When my copy of Joiner Bay and Other Stories arrived, I left the padded envelope unopened on the hall table while I changed, briefed my partner about my work day and played with our two excited little dogs. Then I was ready for the moment I had been […]

There’s something enthralling about myths—those stories passed down from one generation to the next to both entertain and explain the many mysteries of human existence. Some myths take liberties with narrative that many writers wouldn’t dare to, and they do it with flair. One of my favourites is Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and Echo. You […]