Tag: Felicity Castagna

The Art of Movement

30 November 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Visual artist Abdullah M I Sayed and writer Felicity Castagna reflect on art, writing and exercise. Felicity Castagna One of the hardest aspects of writing, for me, has been learning how to sit still. In many ways my other job, as a teacher, suits me much better. When I teach, I move constantly around classrooms and lecture halls on the excuse that the students in some far corner of a room might need my help, but really it’s just because I find it hard to think without moving. Numerous studies have suggested that movement is integral to creative practice: It…

Who Gives a Shit? On motherhood and the arts

25 November 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

by Felicity Castagna I went into labour with my first child while I was hunched over the final manuscript for my last book. I was thirty pages away from completing all the edits that needed to be done before it was sent to the printer the following week. It was my husband who convinced me I was in labour. I wasn’t really sure despite the feeling of my entire body contracting every few minutes. I had a manuscript before me and a deadline and how could this baby be arriving two weeks early, so inconveniently, before I had finished? A…

Just Make it Electric

20 November 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Felicity Castagna A lot of space in literary circles has been given of late to trying to define what is highbrow and what is middlebrow and why those distinctions matter. I think we would be better off having a debate about literature that is ‘technically good’ but boring and literature that is ‘electric.’ That, to me, is a distinction that matters. It is a distinction that makes a text both engaging and enduring. In my mind, the electricity of literature lies in the voice of the text: it’s the hardest thing to get right and it’s also the hardest…

The Man From Snowy River does not come from Detroit

12 November 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

by Felicity Castagna The writer John Gardner famously said that there are only two plots in fiction—a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. What he’s essentially pointing to here is that all stories are about place. Place is at once both an incredibly abstract and generic term but also a word that points to something that is very specific; a local space with its own unique and tangible identity, something that is intimate and unique and felt in different ways by those who inhabit it. When we ask a person, ‘Where do you come from?’…

November monthly blogger – Felicity Castagna!

3 November 2015 SoutherlyBlog, News

An enormous thanks to Samuel Wagan Watson for his wonderful posts. Our blogger for this month is Felicity Castagna. Her bio is below. Felicity Castagna’s work has been produced for ABC Radio National and ABC television as well as being published in journals and newspapers such as Heat, The Age, The Sun Herald, Island, Wet Ink and Award Winning Australian Writing. Her latest book, The Incredible Here and Now (Giramondo, 2013) received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literature Awards, the WA Premier’s Book Awards and The Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year…

Revelators, Visionaries, Poets and Fools: the palimpsest of Sydney’s western suburbia

7 May 20157 May 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Luke Carman The suggestion that Australia’s literary ‘centre’ appears to be shifting – or leaning, at the least – towards Sydney’s ‘suburban frontier’ is becoming commonplace. Perhaps the first (certainly the most emphatic) recognition of this decentring to find its way into print was provided by Sam Twyford-Moore, director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, who stated in an interview last year that ‘Western Sydney is the capital of Australian literature… if not already, then certainly it’s the future’. As someone with a sensitive ear for the minor tremors of our most aspirant and incubational writers, Twyford-Moore can reasonably be…

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