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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

[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 […]

There is a power in riding a horse. This is a sentence I have written many times, in several different contexts, but it is an idea I find myself coming back to again and again. The power isn’t just one of mass, or force, or brute strength. I’m not sure I know exactly what it […]