What draws you to write short stories, and who has influenced your writing practice of this form? I had never written a short story until I started studying creative writing at university. Writers that influenced me included Tim O’Brien, Janet Frame, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alice Munro. O’Brien’s story, ‘The Things They Carried’ (1990), was […]

The prize is getting into the chair every day. The prize is saying to myself, this isn’t over. Because my story isn’t finished. I regard submission of a story as an achievement. It signifies that I’ve written a story, which puts me a long way in front of the earlier me, the person who dreamed […]

The following is the title story from Fabulous Lives—our upcoming anthology by Perth writer Bindy Pritchard. Her collection features stories that embrace people with all their frailties and strengths, failures and hopes, as they reach critical junctures in their lives.   ‘Fabulous Lives’ It was too late for Edith. She knew that when she stood in the […]

In some writing workshops, there’s an inverse ratio between how closely someone has read a story and how much they’ve got to say about it. I’m a diligent reader. I pay attention to the stories people have submitted; some might say too much attention. My friends judge me as intense. The judgement of others tends […]

I don’t know many writers. In the town where I was born no-one ever admitted they were a writer. Contemplation was an illness, and its practitioners were people to be avoided. Perhaps nobody wrote. Or perhaps the irrigation plains of northern Victoria were so plain that people thought they couldn’t write about them. I decided […]

Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 and died in 1964. Whenever I read those dates, I wonder what she might have written if she’d had a few more years. YouTube has a video of her reading ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in her sardonic, Southern drawl. It’s a serious story, but in the […]

As the writing trainer for Bright Lights, No City, you worked closely with a number of the participants—can you tell us a bit about your role throughout the project? My role was to help the participants to feel confident about their writing. This meant giving them the freedom to write in a form of their […]

Can you tell us what you’ve been up to since you completed Bright Lights, No City with Centre for Stories? For sure! I’ve had a pretty hectic year since the project finished. I wrote two very personal pieces: a novella called ‘Poster Boy’, which got published, and a piece of memoir called ‘Territory’, which didn’t. My […]

For readers, I always recommend Elena Ferrante’s superb Neapolitan novels. For writers needing motivation, I like to recommend practical 'how to' writing books. My current obsession is the screenwriting classic Save the Cat! I have become quite evangelical, giving copies away like Gideons Bibles to wannabe writers...

What is your fail-safe book recommendation? Put me on the spot, why don’t you, I only do this for a living…have to go with Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey. What was your reaction when you found out your short story collection was going to be published? Well, I didn’t twig immediately that it was happening. […]