writer | editor | artist
This week, Boo and I bought a new cookbook. The truly wonderful The Pie Project by Phoebe Wood and Kirsten Jenkins. What? It’s getting colder up here on the Downs, and pie is just necessary to get us through the winter. The book includes sections on hot pies, cold pies, and cheat’s pies, and is beautifully…
In Dying in the First Person, Samuel is a translator of his brother’s works, which are written in the language of Nahum. Nahum doesn’t exist in the real world: at least, not outside the boundary of my imagination. It is a language that the two brothers created when they were young. Or, depending on how you…
May is coming, and with it, the release of my new novel, Dying in the First Person, which is being released by my fabulous publisher, Transit Lounge. This may send me mad (if I’m not already). Writing this book has been a long, slow process. It has been written during a period of extraordinary change in my life. I…
The life of a writer is, as you probably know, a lot of time of quiet, pyjama-clad desperation punctuated by occasional bursts of socialising or special events. Today is a special event day, with pyjamas. Today, the author copies of Dying in the First Person arrived. Let me set the scene for you: B and I…
This week I’ve been honoured to participate in a roundtable discussion of Patricia Mckillip’s new novel, Kingfisher, with Jonathan Strahan, Gary K. Wolfe, and Ian Mond over at Coode Street. The novel is a riff on Arthurian tales of Percival (or Parzifal), in a modern North America where questing knights ride around in limousines or on motorcycles,…
I’ll be presenting a paper on the life and work of Barbara Newhall Follett as part of the Forgotten Lives/Biographies symposium being held at USQ on April 28th this year. This paper developed out of a research interest that informed the writing of Dying In The First Person, in particular, children who have created paracosms (fully imagined alternative…
I listened to a lot of classical music while I was writing Dying in the First Person. Mostly ABC Classic FM – so whatever they were playing when I sat down to write seeped into my consciousness and infected the prose. Perhaps as a consequence the main characters also listen to, and talk about, and write about,…
Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything, but I’ve been busy. Promise! My big news is that the new novel is as close to being ready as it can get. Edits done. Cover designed. Release date locked in. Transit Lounge have done a beautiful job of transforming my rough and ready manuscript into…
The wonderful librarian at Monash University’s Rare Books (Stephen Perrin) has shared with me just a few of the many ‘John Mystery’ publications in the collection. John Mystery was an Australian children’s publishing phenomenon. He published hundreds of small, cheap books for children during the late 1930s and 1940s, for very young children (his Fairies and Fairies ABC, for…
Here’s a delightful little snippet from my recent sojourn in the Monash University Rare Books Collection. One of the books in their collection is Australian Fairy Tales, by Hume Cook, illustrated by Christian Yandell. The book was first published in 1925 and includes the following rather interesting Foreword by the RT. HON. W. M. HUGHES, P.C., M.P. Formerly…