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What Australian Literary Conversation?
Literary Australia can hold a sustained public conversation about as well as a Salvation Army band can play Wagner. I’m not referring to conversations held privately between peers, across coffee...
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‘You’re the least important person in the room’: Memoir and Bad Behaviour
I studied creative writing at university. I loved almost everything about the course: the teachers were inspiring, the readings insightful and provocative, and the workshops were a safe and temperate...
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A Bride Stripped Bare: A writer gets naked on the path from novel to memoir
Call me Eve. Of course it’s not my real name … But it’s the name I call myself when I think back to that time when I was a young wife – so very young, so very hungry – and I picked the fruit and ate...
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On Journals: Private writing in the age of the overshare
Image by Barry Silver I often have an anxious feeling when I reread the very vain and pretentious passages of my adolescent notebooks. I wonder why I scrutinised my male high school crushes with...
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Cold Feet and Hot Little Hands: Abigail Ulman on writing – and not writing –...
When my short story collection, Hot Little Hands, was half-written, I was fortunate enough to get a book deal for the finished product. At the time, I had six stories, and I only needed to write three...
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Breathing In, Singing Out: Three notions of voice in writing
James Baldwin. Image credit: Mottke Weisman In workshops and at festivals, aspiring writers have asked me: ‘How do I find my “voice”?’ The more I think about the idea of ‘voice’ in writing, the more...
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On Being An Expert: Eliza Henry-Jones on writing fiction
When you write a book, you are suddenly perceived as an expert in whatever your book is about. Which is terrifying. And feels untrue. I’m not an expert on anything I’ve ever written. For me, writing...
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Writing about the New Yorker: A genre unto itself
In the introduction to her 1999 book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, the famed American journalist and essayist Renata Adler opens with: ‘As I write this, The New Yorker is dead.’ Adler’s...
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Between You & Me: The New Yorker’s Mary Norris on publishing, editing and...
Mary Norris begins her chatty grammar guide and memoir, Between You & Me, by chronicling the odd jobs she held before she began working at the New Yorker in 1978. She delivered milk – awkwardly...
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Can the Writer Speak?: On writers, politics and terrorism
Writers, it turns out, are aliens. ‘All writers are Martians,’ according to Martin Amis. ‘They come and say, You haven’t been seeing this place right; it’s not like that, it’s like this.’ Nobel...
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