Events

When my children asked me to write the story of my early life, I put off the task for many years. Did I really want to revisit that traumatic time when, as an adolescent in the fifties, I suffered from …

I wrote my latest novel, Like Mother, in what I call a ‘white heat’. No plotting, no Proust-like interviews of characters to find out their favourite foods, and no research. Just the white page (or screen, let’s be honest I gave …

Allow me to get the irony out of the way first: in writing a piece about self-doubt, I am feeling a lot of doubt.

I have started this post several times. I’ve tried opening with a definition of doubt. I’ve …

In my novel Eye of a Rook, modern-day Perth writer and academic Alice Tennant researches the history of hysteria and gynaecological pain to make sense of her own mystifying disorder, coming up with the idea of two bodies:

One, …

Two thirds of the way into structural editing of my novel Nikolai the Perfect, my publisher summoned me to her office. This wasn’t a routine meeting. As soon as she opened the door I could tell she was psyching …

My novella The Door is inspired by my friend Shane Jones’s painting of a very realistic door. It hung in the stairwell of his home when I went there for dinner one evening. At first, I thought he had added …

It took me some time to find my way into this profession. There was the business of a certain letter which I wrote in my thirties asking for reviewing work, which was addressed to the editor of a prestigious literary …

In real life, conflict makes me anxious. It’s more than discomfort, a natural by-product of conflict, but a deep-down anxiety: a rat nibbling the insides of my gut.

I don’t run from conflict and I’m not a pushover. But when …

This morning my children aren’t home. Instead of seizing this precious time to write, I watered the plants in the back and front yards. I noticed that my favorite, blood-red, geranium needs to be dead-headed, and that the golden hibiscus …

‘Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’ Oscar Wilde.

Writing sex should be easy. Few people of adult age would be unfamiliar with the basics, and there’s (surely) a finite range of variables to the act itself. …