Last Wednesday, I went away for a few days to Taradale, to write. It was a productive time, if only because I made some decisions about book 3, wrote a few words, read (one of the new Black Inc Writers on Writers volumes, Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings; and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, [...]
Category: art
The Bad Diaries Salons
This is a new thing, happening in Melbourne and elsewhere. On twitter one day I put the question out whether there were any writers with their old (bad) diaries - you know, the excruciating ones from childhood, teen-hood and early adulthood. Where it was all about the self, the indignities and mistakes. Pages filled with [...]
Chigozie Obioma and the case for ‘audacious prose’
This week, Chigozie Obioma's debut novel The Fishermen was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Obioma was already on my radar, first because I'd been hearing about the book, and then because I booked into a workshop he's running at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival next month. I booked into it so fast, it was like [...]
Wuthering Heights. It’s a love-hate thing.
Thursday was Emily Brontë's birthday and she would have turned 197. Her pièce de résistance Wuthering Heights was probably the first (and only?) piece of classic literature that I connected to with such visceral, anguished, teenagery love, and now regard with no less admiration, but it's tempered with a more mature writerly and readerly respect. As a teenager I wrong-loved [...]
The glorious Tilda Swinton
There's always been a lot to admire about Tilda Swinton. And now there's this as well. A wonderfully moving speech, about the light and dark of Art, and how it feeds the soul, how it lets us know we have souls, how in many ways, it is the stuff of life. Paintings, writing, music. Discovering [...]
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