writer | editor | artist
Here’s a little list of things I’ve been working on of late … I’d love to hear all about your recent successes, or works in progress, too 🙂 Poems (out now): ‘All the things I Kept’ in Cordite (Monster) ‘Strange Men’ in Southerly (Violence 78.3) – TW for sexual assault & violence ‘Night Drive’ came…
What have I been up to lately? Here’s a list of a few recent publications … ‘Night Drive’ (a poem) in Verity La. ‘The Beautiful Husband’ (a short story) in Social Alternatives (Volume 36, no 3) A Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge ‘review’ of Dickens’s David Copperfield at Going Down Swinging. I co-edited a special issue…
An audience needs something stronger than a pretty little love story. So, why shouldn’t I write of monsters? (Mary Shelley, the character, from the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein) Darlings! You won’t believe it. (Well, you might). Here’s the most amazing news: in March next year, I’ll be a Guest of Honour at the 39th annual…
Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham: pay particular attention to my pets, the grasses. — by Lorine Niedecker (1940). This semester, I’m teaching a poetry course for third year undergraduates. I’ve never been one to divide a semester into the usual kind of weeks (week one: line, week two: stanza, week three: metre and metonymy ……
‘Libussa’ is one of the tales related/retold by Johann Karl August Musäus, and first translated into English by Thomas Carlyle. It was published in Carlyle’s three-volume publication Translations from the German (1827). The tale below is a transcription of Carlyle’s translation (not one of my own translations). The tale was part of Musäus’s 1728 collection Volksmärchen der Deutschen (German folktales). Musäus drew heavily…
At a recent conference on excess and desire in twentieth- and twenty-first century women’s writing, one of the presenters quoted from Natalie Kon-Yu’s 2016 essay, in Overland, ‘A testicular hit-list of literary big cats‘. In particular, she quoted from the section in which Kon-Yu describes the depiction of Jake Whyte’s gender in Evie Wyld’s Miles…
Recently, Gyspy Thornton blogged about the notion of fairy-tale mixtapes, an idea borrowed from Adam Hoffman’s discussion of Andrew Lang, and how to conceptualise the eccentric array of works pulled together in Lang’s coloured fairy tale collections. The always sparkly and scholarly Rebecca-Anne do Rozario blogged her fairy-tale mixtape here. The idea is to take inspiration from…
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…
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…
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…