Yesterday, for the first time in a few weeks I took a look at the draft program for the Emerging Writers’ Festival. I don’t know how much we’re revealing about it before the program launch on 4 May, so I’m just going to say this: Holy shit, I love this festival. On the 2012 program so… [Read more…]
March 27, 2012
Mid-last year I decided that 2012 was going to be my year of being a writer. I’ve been a professional writer for ages—the corporate kind. I enjoy corporate writing. I value immensely the things I have learnt from doing that work for ten years, particularly discipline and the ability to step back from my work… [Read more…]
October 21, 2011
Want to come hang out with me and a six pack of cider on Sunday night while appreciating a super cool projection installation? The work opened in April at Michael Koro Galleries at 110 Franklin Street in the city and the artist is setting it up for one night only to get some extra footage. Sunset… [Read more…]
October 2, 2011
I love This Is Not Art. Way more than you do. (You can see previous love letters here and here.) I haven’t missed a year since I came for the first time in 2003. I worked on the festival in 2004 and 2005. It was super fun and having it on my CV has gotten… [Read more…]
September 14, 2011
My favourite writers’ festival, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, is after your donations to do a cool new thing — a mini-conference for the next round of writers who will remind the world how awesome Australia is, giving them ideas and inspiration about using the internet for the powers of good. The conference is to be… [Read more…]
September 14, 2011
The stories told about my grandmother Madeleine are many and varied and mostly colourful. The most colourful and varied of these are those she told herself. I heard a lot of them before she died because she told us all stories when we were growing up and later I asked for more. I’m writing these… [Read more…]
September 5, 2011
This year I’ve been getting increasingly obsessed with the idea of storytelling. It seems kind of obvious that I would think about the idea seeing as I call myself a writer. But, honestly, with the type of writing that I spend most of my time doing (blogging, tender writing, marketing copy, sponsorship proposals), storytelling is… [Read more…]
August 17, 2011
Alphonsine and Pierre’s thirteenth and last child was my great-grandmother Florence. Her twelve siblings had dark hair and eyes and strong features from their father. They were tall and strong-looking. Florence had dark hair but was built delicately, had a finer complexion and pale grey eyes. There were rumours about this last baby. The most… [Read more…]
August 15, 2011
Actually, I believe it’s real, I just don’t believe it’s a good enough excuse for not doing something. I think a lot of the time what people call writer’s block is not knowing how to be disciplined. There are people who insist they can only write under certain circumstances, with a certain lamp, on certain… [Read more…]
August 9, 2011
Over the weekend, somewhere on my Singapore-Helsinki-Heathrow stretch, I finished Chris Currie’s first novel The Ottoman Motel. I started it a couple of months ago just after its Melbourne launch but stopped when I got busy and the only time I had free to read was right before bed and I couldn’t because it was… [Read more…]
April 4, 2012
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