This month’s reading pile features three very different books (poetry, essays, a novel), each resonating with its own heartbeat. I’ll begin with Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin. It’s a new release and I’d heard a lot of advance buzz, so feel fortunate I got my hands on a library copy when I did. Word of mouth has only…
As discussed last week, this is the first of the two promised interviews that I managed to salvage from the audio taken at the Williamstown Literary Festival. Here I’m talking with Emilie Zoey Baker, an award-winning Australian poet, educator, slam champion and spoken-word performer. She has toured a lot of the world as a guest…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Thirty-Two This is a significant, soul-searching and (for me) sad episode. Except it’s not a ‘true’ episode because I haven’t got the accompanying audio… the very thing which makes a podcast! I recorded the below without realising that one of the drawbacks of reverting to a free account was that I would…
We’re deep into literary festival time of year and coming up fast, from the 24th August to 2nd September, is the Melbourne Writers Festival with new artistic director Marieke Hardy at the helm. Its theme is ‘a matter of life and death’ and there is a lot to go see, spread over a number of new venues….
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Thirty-One Today’s guest is Annabel Smith. She is the author of the digital interactive novel The Ark, US bestseller Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, and A New Map of the Universe, which was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards. She was an inaugural Australia Council Creative Australia Fellow and holds a…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Thirty This episode’s guest is Kate Mildenhall. Her debut novel, Skylarking, is based on the true story of Kate and Harriet, best friends growing up on a remote Australian cape in the 1880s, and the tragic event that befalls them. Skylarking was named in Readings bookstore’s Top Ten Fiction Books of 2016…
This month is about finishing off books. I needed a few psychological ‘wins’ and moving titles from my Goodreads ‘currently reading’ to ‘read’ list usually provides a nice mood boost. (Tell me I’m not alone here.) This required my having to re-borrow these Twin Peaks titles (twice!) from the library, but I got there in…
The combination of school holidays and beginning to write a new book (excite!) has made me a little disoriented. In fact, I had a jolt of surprise when I took a look at the date – how are we almost halfway through July? How will All The Things get done? So to distract myself from…
This isn’t going to be my usual Living List goal after-the-fact recall. They are usually quite long because the experiences typically are, and there’s only so much I can write about a two-hour movie. What I will say is we were a little concerned it was going to happen at all as we drove towards the…
