Tag: writing life

Superb Mornings, Drunken Swallows.

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by Christopher Cyrill I despise the word blog. I mean no offence to bloggers anywhere and mean no criticism of the concept. I just don’t like the word. I don’t like the word frangipani either. After keeping a writer’s journal for many years I found rereading them a kind of torture that I expect to be reserved for my postdays. (My purgatory, my perdition – read what you wrote down about fiction and process at the age of twenty-nine…now push this rock up that hill, forever.) I view all of my work to this point as juvenilia. And I can’t…

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The Art of Movement

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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…

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This is the End

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by Samuel Wagan Watson   In the past few weeks I was hoping that, as a weekly Blogger for Southerly, I’d be able to do something for my writing. I mean, this is a wonderful opportunity and I am grateful, but I’m still obsessing that somewhere in my journey I missed the turn-off? I thought I would have found my way by now and be more content with the end product in my daily work. But no…I don’t feel I’m even close yet! I was also determined to hand some work into my publisher this week and that’s just not…

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Crime and, inevitably, Punishment!

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by Samuel Wagan Watson Writing is a misdemeanour of self-indulgence; therefore an escalated fit of writing could be considered blatant criminal activity. I took two words from the English dictionary before I even dressed this morning, and being an Indigenous writer its questionable as to whether or not these two words were ever my property to begin with. Suffice to say, I’m not giving these stolen items back, and I will attempt to profit from their acquired value. I was born into a family of writers and I was conceived on the lamb. Mum and Dad got hitched in 1971…

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The Sound Of Music

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by Samuel Wagan Watson My next collection of poetry should now be a semi-completed manuscript in the custody of my publisher. It should be, it would be, it could be…shoulda, woulda, coulda…Truth be told, I rounded a jagged edge a couple of weeks ago in the writing and now I’m stuck on a splinter-curve in the pages. Getting around this particular corner is dangerous. I’m not writing enough to progress and I run the risk of writing too much in the wrong direction and could easily jack-knife my journey all together. I am notorious for allowing a manuscript to cook…

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Flat-Lines

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by Samuel Wagan Watson 2:23AM I probably don’t need to shake-it for another couple of hours.  I’m flying out at around nine o’clock from Brisbane airport, and it’s a Thursday.  Tuesday mornings are the worst.  Traffic is congested on the Gateway Arterial from 6.30am until around 9.  No one knows how to merge onto the Gold Coast motorway!  In my day-to-day work as a writer I need to know this because I haven’t missed a flight…yet.  I dread the moment that happens.  I’ve never paid for a flight in my life, and I wouldn’t know how to, and my agent…

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The Simple Act of Reading

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by Fiona McFarlane It’s been a pleasure to blog for Southerly, and now I’m going to end my month with a shameless plug. On Redfern Street in Redfern, Sydney, there’s an extraordinary place called the Sydney Story Factory. I was invited to give a reading there one night. I was given the address and I knew to look out for ‘Sydney Story Factory’, but when I arrived in Redfern I couldn’t find it; I found, instead, a place calling itself the Martian Embassy. If the residents of Mars were to establish a diplomatic outpost on Earth it might look something…

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Letters From Tove

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by Fiona McFarlane There’s been a bit of heated discussion, recently, about the public role of a writer, some of it in response to an essay in the Atlantic: Meghan Tifft’s ‘An Introverted Writer’s Lament.’[1] Tifft’s piece questions the pressure writers feel to participate in writing and reading communities in order to promote their work – public readings! Festivals! Q&As! Book tours! Conferences! Social media! Interviews! And all the other, less easily classifiable commitments that arise from the very good fortune of having been published. Tifft’s essay hovers somewhere between confession and complaint, and I admire her honesty. She approaches…

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What’s my name?

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by Sunil Badami When I was younger, I was so thrilled by the idea of seeing my by-line in print, nothing else mattered. As I’ve gotten older, how I wish I’d had the foresight, like my idol, Eric Blair, to get a pen name! Why, especially in this age of celebrity, where children’s greatest ambition now seems not to be a doctor or even an actor, but just to be, like the Kardashians, simply famous, would I want a pen name? Not even actors bother with stage names now. Pseudonyms have existed as long as literature has: what other vocation…

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Who am I? My Life as a Writer

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by Sunil Badami Who am I? Reading the excellent, eloquent, engaging entries on this blog before me by much better writers and performers, you’d be forgiven for asking the question. I’m always surprised when people recognise me and my work; the most common response when I admit I’m a writer is ‘have I read anything you’ve written?’—which, I suppose, is a question that answers itself, much like asking a bouncer turfing you out of a nightclub ‘do you know who I am??’ For years, I never actually said I was a writer; given how little I actually wrote in comparison…

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And now for something completely (well, maybe not completely) different

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by Nicolette Stasko Interviewer: Well, hello Nicolette, glad you could make it. NS: Thanks, happy to be here. Interviewer: Just a few straightforward questions to get started. NS: Fire away. Interviewer: Is your nationality American? NS: No, I’m Australian. Interviewer: What are you reading at the moment? NS: I had dinner with my Inspector Maigret supplier last week and now have a new stock of Simenon. I chose A Crime in Holland to read first, as it sounded the least ‘dark’, hoping not to get too excited or addicted because I have to finish this post. But I’m already halfway…

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(Pre)historical fiction

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by Joshua Mostafa I am writing this longhand on board a barge, for the second and longer leg of a trip down the Danube via Linz to Vienna, from where I’m catching the hydrofoil to Budapest (where I’m now typing it up, and trying to make sense of the Hungarian kezboard–keyboard!–layout), then a twelve-hour train ride to Bucharest, from where I’ll be able to get out to the Carpathian mountains. These cities are simply waystations for me, stopping points to sleep as cheaply as possible between the stretches of countryside I’ve been photographing and describing in obsessively detailed notes. The…

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