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 …
Builders and Renovators
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 …
Writing Sex Should Be (Un)Easy: A Guest Post by Paul Dalgarno
‘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. …
What kind of writer am I? A Guest Post by Tobias McCorkell
After two-and-a-half years writing a memoir about my childhood and adolescence, I had what I can only describe as a ‘creative meltdown’. A sort of short-lived nervous breakdown induced by artistic failure. It happened during the Easter long-weekend in 2018 …
To write is to show up: A guest post by Chloe Higgins
The idea that a writer must wait for inspiration is one I hear often, especially now that I mentor new writers, and it seems always to come as a shock to them when I tell them that writing—like any other …
Urgency in Writing
In the autumn of 2006, while still quite new to Australia, I was doing my first ever writing residency – in a yellow house in the Blue Mountains called Varuna, which once belonged to the novelist Eleanor Dark. Every night …