writer | editor | artist
Just outside the door to my office is the photocopier. Things have been like this since the refurbishment, and I don’t see them changing any time soon. At first, this was good: convenient. I can hear my printing running off, and if I need to photocopy something for a student visiting my office I can do…
She had, for some time, been considering the poem he wrote for her. This poem in which she did not recognise herself. It was true that she had worn black for many years; that she lived in mourning for some part of herself she could not name.In her own dreams, she was black like the…
Today – oh joy of joys! – a guest post from the inestimable Jane Bryony Rawson. Jane is the author of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (published by Transit Lounge), which has most recently been shortlisted for the Most Underrrated Book Award 2014. Writing in The Australian, Ed Wright said, of…
I want to offer you forgiveness. I want to offer to myself, as a gift, my forgiveness of you.
On the afternoon of February second, you brought snowdrops into the house. Armfuls of them, their heads shyly drooping. Every empty jar in the house was filled with them. Then you set freshly-blessed candles on the tables and windowsills alongside the flowers. The scent of flowers and beeswax warmed the house.’They must burn all night,’ you said, shaking out the match’s…
When the job was done, Jared went down to the river and took off his shirt to wash it. Then he walked home, toiling up the long rise to our place. It was late afternoon, and the light had that drowned golden tone it gets at times. The road cut a pale, straggly tunnel through…
Recently, a fellow writer who has often received feedback telling them they need to proofread their work more carefully asked me for some advice on proofreading. Here’s what I came up with in terms of advice on how to approach proofreading your own work, with a little help from your friends. What is proofreading? Proofreading is not the…
a thousand clear confetti spangle your arms like moons the scales of our fish dinner * the fruit in this poem cannot be eaten unlike the poet * the river remembers where it lives; no matter how often you turn me away I will return to the same bed * Not 2oo words today; but…
They say that on Wednesday, the fourscore of April, a great fish rose above the waters and began to sing. It was a wintry day; cold and blue. Her scales glittered like wet sequins. While she sang, she waved her pectoral fins, as though she danced upon the air. Clouds formed around her, or wisps of clouds, pale…
Marcel Proust once wrote: One only loves that which one does not entirely possess*. And Proust, as you know, has often been mistaken for a philosopher. Or a relationship advisor. He was French, after all, and we often confused ‘being French’ with a capacity for understanding love. We had thought that making love in Paris would bring…