Perilous adventures in writing & art
So, some amazingly wondrous news. I’ve been invited to join the jury for the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. I would like to ask you to help me and my fellow jurors find the BEST works for the award this year. You can do this by clicking on the link below and submitting any recommendations you…
This is a tiny, tiny extract from my current work-in-progress. A novel whose draft title is The Book of Ruth. It is the story of a family growing up in a small riverside town in northern New South Wales after the Second World War. Beth, lying belly down on the pier, her hair and hands hanging down,…
Today’s guest post is by Elizabeth Kasmer. I met Liz a few years ago, when she first started working on the manuscript of a beautiful Young Adult manuscript called ‘Aurora’. I’m still waiting (impatiently!) for her to finish the novel and find a publisher, but in the meantime I’m delighted to have the pleasure of reading…
Some afternoons I would sit on the back deck and do nothing for so long that the light would fall out of the world. There is a moment, unfixable, between day and night, when you still believe you can see the wrens darting about. But then the light is truly gone, and you aren’t sure whether…
Guess what? Rupetta got a favourable mention in The Washington Post. In a fabulous article by Alyssa Rosenberg called ‘20 ways to fix Hollywood’s woman problems‘ (no, the answer is not that Rupetta will DESTROY THE JOINT). This is super double awesome because two years ago today I was in York, in a superbly strange ‘haunted’ pub,…
Over the weeks leading up to my mother’s death, I went out into the orchard each night and trained myself to see in the dark. This was at her insistence. A training I at first refused. Initially, the only things I could see were shadows. I navigated by scent and memory. This is the lemon tree; here the orange;…
This post is about the perils of being naughty, and of new mothers. And baking. It begins with a strange tale, drifts off into a discussion of sourdough starters (or ‘mothers’) and then documents our adventures with creating a new mother. Lucy Clifford and The New Mother Lucy Clifford (1846-1929) wrote a delightfully dark story called…
It was 1955, and she was twenty-three, living in Sydney and selling dresses in a department store. She had realised that she didn’t have the money to finish her medical training, and, after a year working in various hospitals, that she didn’t want to be a nurse. Nevertheless, she was bored with selling dresses; she…
Ten generations ago the queen entered the earth. And each generation has had its drummer. Wee Whittler is ours. Small and dark and sombre, she sits cross-legged on top of the mound, at dawn and at dusk, and patters and pounds the world into waking. Into sleep. When I was a child I would go with the…
Kay was one of those they’d Banished. Like prisoners in the old days, or the mad or the homeless, the Banished were as good as dead. In the eyes of the law, anyhow. They had no right to roof or food or love, no right to speak (in public or in private places), no right to…