I shouldn’t be writing this. I’ve had three viruses in recent weeks, and each have decimated me. The latest is lingering. Compounded with the chronic fatigue syndrome I’ve lived with since 2017, the effect is physical exhaustion that makes it …
Writing Nature: A Guest Post by Anthony Ham
In his book Silence in the Age of Noise, Erling Kagge, a Norwegian polar explorer, describes how, in 1986, he was sailing along the Chilean coast in the South Pacific when, sometime between midnight and 4am, he heard “a …
Breaking through the publication barrier: A guest post by Alice Robinson
I’ve been hanging around in the Australian literary world for quite a while – at least since 2015, when my first book came out. In that time, I’ve published two novels and have two more forthcoming with Affirm Press. I’ve …
Giving Voice to the inanimate in fiction: A Guest Post by Robyn Cadwallader
‘If your hurried heartbeat did not bind you to your swift smallness, you would know that affinity binds you to stone.’ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
I always begin to write not knowing what I’m doing. …
Rejecting the L(ikeability) Word: A Guest Post by Megan Rogers
When I was in my final year of literary studies at university, our professor ran a tutorial on characterisation. Half of the session was dedicated to creating likeable females. ‘Women are motivated by two things,’ he mansplained. ‘Safety and service.’ …
The Ecstatic Truth in Creative Nonfiction: A Guest Post by Jayne Tuttle
I never set out to write nonfiction. I’m not sure what I write is nonfiction. I don’t know what it is. I don’t really want to know. My first book, Paris or Die, contained the account of a bizarre …