writer | editor | artist
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…
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…
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…
You know that I like bunnies, right? In fact, I quite like all the woodland creatures, but rabbits, or hares, or bunnies have always appealed to me. Perhaps this can be explained semi-magically: they’re said by some to be one of the animals strongly associated with my sun-sign (Virgo). Maybe it’s because, even though I…
Little Miss Muffet Sat on a tuffet Eating her curds and whey; Along came a spider, Who sat down beside her, And frightened Miss Muffet away. The first printed version of ‘Little Miss Muffet’ appeared in a book of nursery rhymes published in 1805, though one old rumour has it that the Elizabethan naturalist and physician, Doctor…
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…
SPOILER ALERT: This long ramble about Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows includes a discussion of the book’s ending. You can safely read right up till the ‘spoiler alert’ graphic. Also, the book (and my ramblings about reading it) includes discussions of suicide. Just sayin’. 🙂 I belong to a book club. Have I told…
The Australian Women Writers Challenge was founded in 2012 by Elizabeth Lhuede. On the AWW website, she writes: Are male authors more likely to have their books reviewed in influential newspapers, magazines and literary journals than female authors? They are according to the VIDA count, an analysis of major book reviewing publications in North America and…
It’s 2015, and this year I promised myself I would post a little bit about each of the books I read. Which is why, right about now, I’m wondering why I started the year reading Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually liked it. I enjoy…
This Christmas, I constructed a little house out of gingerbread. It had pink glass windows (raspberry flavoured boiled lollies), and snowy white icing. In Europe, baking gingerbread was once (in the 1600s) the province of those who belonged to the gingerbread baker’s guild, except at Christmas and Easter, when anyone could have a go at…