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In: Creativity, Stories

The origin of a story can be difficult for fiction writers to place. It’s not because we writers are overly secretive. The process in itself is a mysterious one. Big stories take a lot of working out. There’s multiple characters and plot lines. Novels are a process, but short stories are different. They can suddenly appear and when they do, it’s like love at first sight. Seconds before we didn’t know of them and then we writers are involved and not just involved….we are committed. Sometimes the story tells itself. Sometimes it’s character first. A lot of the time, for me at least, its voice.Read More →

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In: Human Nature, Reading, Uncategorized

There are special books, so strong in time and place, they transport us into the past. We walk with the characters through cities and landscapes. We smell the bakery on the corner or the mud of the riverbank. We hear the voices around us and we are immersed. We can begin to feel like Gump, a part of important moments in history.  It’s strange to think we really can live for a time in the past. It’s extraordinary to know that as long as there are people to tell these stories, those times cannot fade away. All readers need to do is pick up theirRead More →

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In: Freedom, Reading

Being quick to judge a book might feel like intelligence, but maybe its not.  Perhaps it is a means for us to shimmy out of a difficult text and move on to something more effortless.  If we think of this exercising of our reading skills as we think of our muscles, it may be we are giving in when the possibility of gain is just ahead. And what is the price of our impatience?  That we never get anywhere worth going; that we perpetually fall short or turn to the next thing which also barely holds our attention long enough before we move to something even lessRead More →

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In: Human Nature, Reading, Uncategorized

They sit to the side almost, left out in the sorting of literature, where poetry goes with poetry and novels with novels. The short story, the tale, while highly recognisable and democratic in the spoken form, is treated with uncertainty once it is written down. It is neither this nor that. It’s not verse. It’s prose, but it doesn’t take the reader as far. We don’t learn all there is to know about a character. We don’t watch a world gradually unfold. Not often anyway. Writer, John Cheever, says it this way: “A collection of short stories appears like a lemon in the current fictionRead More →

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In: Freedom, Reading

Reading is following a knotted rope into a dark cave. We go into it on faith and emerge carrying with us something we didn’t have before. The particle might be small, a mere speck, but it is there, this new thing and already it has combined with others to form constellations. It’s a remarkable thing that we do, when we read…every bit as remarkable as that which the writer has managed. In fact, without the reader, the writer manages little, mere squiggles. We don’t always remember what we mean to accomplish when we set out to read and the magnitude of the feat once we haveRead More →

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In: Telling it True

His name was Billy O’Rourke. Now that’s a great name, I thought. A pub-poet name and I rather hoped he smoked a pipe, played the fiddle and drank whiskey. At the point of our meeting, I couldn’t tell. I was having my eyelashes tinted when he walked into the small salon I frequent and my eyes were firmly shut. My mouth too, for I had been told by my knowledgable hair stylist, Raelene, it is much harder to keep one’s eyes closed when one’s mouth is open. Perhaps she was after some quiet time. Who can tell? Anyway, Billy O’Rourke arrived with his wife. ThatRead More →

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In: Freedom, On the Road

We, Australians, are a bunch of tall-tale tellers. Our country lacks water, so its not  entirely our fault. Our humour is drier, arid even. When we recount with a perfectly straight face that time we caught a giant barramundi out of a row boat, which was then taken by a crocodile and then by a great white shark etc., we find travellers, particularly Americans, will be booking flights to some place else before we even get to the red-back spider we overlooked when packing the fishing equipment. We just know if we drill you with an intense and serious gaze, you will believe we regularly wrestle crocodiles (a past-time of theRead More →

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In: Creativity, Freedom, Love, Reading

We carry our cynicism on our backs as snails do in defense against certain inevitabilites, death not the smallest amongst them.  It’s best not to be shocked. Let’s not, in our naivety, be taken by surprise. Let’s put it out there, warts and all, before life slaps us squarely in the face. Our cynicism opens doors for us in social circles and we lean against lamp posts and on dinner tables with a terrible nonchalance that may, if we are lucky, look like wisdom or street smarts, at the very least. We’ve broken down traditions which were worn out echoes of less understanding days and there are moreRead More →

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In: Creativity, Human Nature

Just to say the word is boring. We draw it out to borrrredomm and it falls like a rock down a well into nothingness. Other animals know it. I have dogs who have chewed the legs off tables when they have missed their walks. Boredom is a black hole. Think about it too much and we might bring it on and be sucked in. When life is interesting, it ceases to exist, but when the wind changes it creeps back and we are mind-numbingly, bone-crushingly at its mercy. There is simple or situational boredom. It’s the stuff of long school days in hot classrooms, withRead More →

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In: Human Nature, On the Road

I have come to an abrupt halt while my internal organs are still in motion. It is in this small window before the adjustment occurs, this lag in the time it takes to jump from one comfort zone to another, where I rediscover something surprising.  I say rediscover because I think I’ve known it before.  Returning home after a trip is strange.  Everything is known and yet unfamiliar. Why is it that I can look at old things with new eyes?  I see my street, my front paddock, my house, the contents of its rooms as a someone else might do before familiarity floods back.Read More →