Nov 28 2009
Writing fantasy isn’t the sole prerogative of fantasy writers. How about long-serving members of parliament? [since this was posted, Tony Abbott has become leader of the opposition. Wall builders around Australia should start ordering bricks and cement]
Jul 15 2009
Reading at the launch of Cutwater literary anthology in Chippendale, Sydney. July 11th 2009.
Image by Georgia Blackie 2009.
Jul 09 2009
I’ve been carrying out appraisals of manuscripts of children’s books. You might think, because the style of writing, the marketing and the themes and the apparent intended functions of children’s literature that are so different to those of adult books, that some different skills or approaches or considerations apply. And, I suggest, you’d be wrong. Here’s why …
Jul 06 2009
Here are my photographs of the Kids & YA Literature Festival held at the NSW Writers’ Centre in Rozelle on Saturday 4th July.
Jun 29 2009
I think I am reading this because it is going to be discussed in the First Tuesday Book Club, Jennifer Byrnes’ entertaining literary discussion program on ABC 1. But I am also reading Fowles’ book because I am fascinated by the premise. Like Sebastian Faulks’ Engleby, it features the voice of obsession: a lonely misfit stalker.
Jun 28 2009
There are some books, not many, that you want to carry on reading, long after the final page. It might be the setting or the theme that you love. Perhaps it’s the main character, someone you admire and long to travel further alongside. It might be the quality of the language. Usually, in a good book, all of these are present in some form, but when you reach the end, you’re glad. It’s been a great journey, but it’s time to move on.
What on earth could be the reasons to want to carry on reading The Kindly Ones, the grim and very long first-person fictional account of a senior German officer from the Second World War? Continue Reading »
Jun 27 2009
At the NSW Writers’ Centre in Rozelle, Sydney, coordinated by me. Panels on all kinds of children’s writing from picture books to YA. More here.
Jun 08 2009
The Cutwater literary journal, edited by Dan Collins and Sam Twyfford-Moore, is launched on Saturday 11 July.
Jun 05 2009
There’s a line in my piece, “The Last Travel Story”, appearing in the literary journal Cutwater, published next month, that includes the phrase, “soon-to-be-extinct fish”.
So what, you say. Well, as is noted in Hari’s report below, only that we humans (collectively, not individually) are responsible for the likely imminent extinction of yet another species. Gone. Fished out and forked off. Finito bonito.
Anyway, “The Last Travel Story” is a bleak ditty, a sordid exercise in self-indulgence. And a credo of sorts. Pass me the vodka, it’s time to write that letter.
The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction
Apr 10 2009
The proceedings of the 2008 AAWP conference, Creativity and Uncertainty, at which I presented a paper have been published online. You can find there my oeuvre “The Uncertain Voice: writing the young narrator“.