I just wanted to share this gorgeous little snippet Maija Lindbergs wrote in class today, when we were messing about with viewpoint and grammatical POV. Maija is a final-year student of Creative Media, and she’s AWESOME, as you’re about to find out … POV: Third Person Viewpoint Character: Owlbit Owlbit was a rabbit by day and an…
The Underwater Fancy-Dress Parade is a children’s picture book, written by Davina Bell and illustrated by Allison Colpoys. It was published by Scribe earlier this year. Davina Bell was, for six years, part of the editorial team in Penguin’s Young Readers department, and is the author of the four Alice stories (part of the ‘Our Australian…
I’ve been dreaming of covers for Dying in the First Person. The images in my head are of water, and of Samuel and Morgan (the twins around whom the novel swirls) as reflections of each other. So, of course, the images that come to me most often are Caravaggio’s Narcissus: Or this equally evocative image (again of Narcissus),…
Last year, my life got shaken, rattled and stirred. It was one of those years that changed the very foundations of my life. One of the amazing things that happened was that I won the 2013 James Tiptree, Jr Award for my novel, Rupetta. This award is presented annually by a panel of judges (overseen by the…
Gillian Polack, a historian and writer (can you be one and not the other?) has recently been celebrating Women’s History Month over at her blog/livejournal by inviting an impressive number of women writers to provide guest blogs about overcoming obstacles. My contribution is one of the last to go up, alongside an amazing plethora…
The girl in this poem does not love you She’s just a girl, after all one syllable, four letters barely a phoneme, she’s just a noun, common as a lettuce or a paperclip. The woman who wrote it on the other hand is a wreath of bones and blood wrapped round a disobedient heart (a heart…
This semester, I’m teaching a writing course called Fairytales & Other Forms. Every week, we read a fairytale in various variants, and the writers in the course are asked to write their own (new!) version. The students are second year undergraduates, who are totally amazing. Every week they surprise and delight me with insights into…
— In honour of World Poetry Day We are on the way to the meeting when one of the poets calls and asks us to pick up beer on the way. Although we are on the phone for a while (the fields of the Lockyer Valley flashing past us, fading into darkness as we pass)…
I did shoplift something once, when I was a teenager. I went to K-Mart with my best friend and (deliberately) dropped the stolen goods into a milkshake I had purchased especially for that purpose. I don’t remember what the item was that I stole. Intended to steal. In the end, I didn’t have the guts…
I don’t know why I remember that argument with my mother so precisely. We have fought many times, over the years, with increasing frequency. I keep waiting for things to ease off. To reach that moment I have heard about when she sees me as a woman, and I see her as one. When we…