Perilous adventures in writing & art
Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros. ~ Khargavi?ana-sutra [the Rhinoceros Sutra] c.29 BCE Clara had once attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: We are living in a science fictional world. During the workshop,…
Woohoo! Approval has just come through for a course I’ll be teaching at USQ in semester one next year. The course is called CWR2001 Fairytales and Other Forms. According to the newly-approved synopsis (not yet available on the uni website, but soon, I promise!): Through close study of a range of poetic forms, and a…
I am interested in usable truths. I am interested in food I can eat, water I can drink, and stories I can tell. I am interested in doorways and roads: leading in, leading out. I am interested in stones, particularly the stones that mark the path we must walk tonight. My mother has died, and her corpse…
After lunch, we wander along the foreshore of the lake. There’s a raised wooden path, shaded and cool. As we walk, she tells we how the lake formed. ‘Where the lake is now,’ she says, ‘used to a great valley full of trees. The local people used to come here and celebrate every three years, when…
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…
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…