In my previous two blog posts, I’ve talked about my love affair with English literature, encouraged and nurtured by schoolteachers in India who did the best with what was available. Reading Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Hardy, Lamb, Austen, Bronte, Woolf and a legion of writers from the 18th – 20th centuries started me on the career […]

In 1985, when I was two years old, my parents moved to a farm on a road called Honeysett Lane about twenty k’s from a town called Gulgong. Back then Gulgong was the town on the ten dollar note and to this day when people ask me where I’m from, that’s how I describe it. […]

If there’s one term I see and hear all too much within the writing community it’s this: “Writer’s write.” If you ask me, it’s kind of stating the obvious and about as profound as a Kardashian’s latest Instagram post, yet it gets thrown around by writers to themselves and to each other like some Neolithic […]

Over the years I have done my fair share of writing courses and I often wonder if they have made any difference to my writing outcomes. Have they really been a worthwhile investment towards improving my writerly craft? When balancing out the ledger sheet of pros and cons, I am confronted with copious squiggles of […]

Growing up in Willetton in the 70s and 80s holds special memories for me: traipsing back from Southlands Shopping Centre with a layered perm, the kind that made your hair frizz out like the steppes of some peasant’s mountain, and discovering the white spaceship house that had magically landed on a lake on Apsley Road. […]

I have a confession to make. Some of my short stories began their lives as novels. Novels that were cumbersome, messy affairs, that had no cogency or idea of an ending, some being relegated to the bottom drawer before they could even reach first draft status. But having been brought up in a household where […]

I don’t have an office so my writing desk is tucked away in the corner of the living room with plastic tubs filled with papers, old uni files and floor to ceiling shelves of books. A guilty shopping addiction, the books are now double banked and the smothered tomes seem to be creeping into other […]

There is a power in writing. This is a sentence I have written here before. In that post, the first I offered in this series, I was daydreaming of riding—there was an element of self-indulgence, even while I argued for the power a horse has to take me somehow outside myself. The more subtle indulgence […]

[The following is an excerpt from a work in progress—a piece of creative nonfiction which, as the title suggests, I have been developing slowly for some time…]   I take my glasses off to swim. I leave them tucked in the folds of my discarded dress, follow the softened outline of Lucas’s body down and […]

1. A lot of my writing, over the last few years, has involved playing with fragments. The style appeals to me as holding the capacity to embed uncertainty, a sort of tongue-in-cheek response to that old Realist assumption that writing ever could describe anything with certainty anyway. The philosophical (or perhaps self-absorbed) part of me […]