Events

Lee Kofman is a straight talker. When she told me – over a refreshing beverage in South Melbourne – that she felt I was too hard on myself as a memoirist, my inward response was to bristle. I’d just written …

My memoir, How to Dress a Dummy, began as a Creative Writing Master’s thesis – a feminist critique of the beauty industry. The creative component was a recounting of my experiences working as an international model.

A member of …

The second memoir I wrote was a romantic comedy about how my boyfriend and I finally decided we could live on the same continent. When I had an adequate draft, I sent it to a manuscript assessor. ‘It works’, she …

I think I got more lovers than useful writing advice from the various writers’ groups I tried in my younger years, even though those groups were often composed of intelligent people, and sometimes even acclaimed authors. Partly this must be …

It feels apt to round up the discussion of creative nonfiction that I’ve had here for the last two months by looking in-depth into one creative nonfiction book that in my view exemplifies this genre’s best virtues – its irreverent …

A Canadian novelist once said to me that the difference between a writer and an author is that a writer writes, but an author writes and represents her writing, when it’s done and edited. But when I started out writing, …

To follow on my last post in which I sang the praises of creative nonfiction, this month I’d like to share with you some stuff I have learned about working in this often misunderstood genre (after much trial and error). …

‘I am, at heart, a gentleman,’ drawled the iconic German movie star. A century ago, Marlene Dietrich was taking liberties: she wore well-cut men’s suits when this was considered insolent. She took lovers, of both sexes. She was disobliged, and …

I discovered creative nonfiction only at 31, accidentally, and first as a writer rather than a reader. This was Writers Victoria’s fault. I had been in Australia four years by then. I had three fiction books published in Israel, but …

The novel The Hot Guy started out as a joke. My co-author Mel Campbell and I are both film reviewers, and we often go together to preview screenings as part of our job. One day we started talking, jokingly, about …