Tag: writing

Lessons from the State Library of Victoria

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Nic Low I spend a lot of my time writing in a cottage in the bush. As an antidote to isolation, when in Melbourne I work out of the State Library of Victoria. I love the atmosphere beneath the reading room dome: readers deep in their cups, students flirting in echoing whispers, security guards watching like snipers from the galleries above. I’ve become fond of some of the guards over the years, particularly the eastern-European woman with short blonde hair, and the older caucasian bloke with a big white moustache. They never remember me. Anyone who’s worked in the dome…

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In Sickness and in Health

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 by Tara June Winch We’re home now; I’m at that vantage point, sorting boarding pass stubs into the recycling, shaking the sand out of bag linings, looking back at photographs, at diary entries without dates; looking back with the fogginess of a fresh return. Earlier this week in the AirBnb on the headland in Tamarama, I wrote: “Disney channel is on in the background. There is nowhere to hide on the road. There is no time, no length of quiet in my mind to write. We’ve been sick too, I couldn’t write then also, but I didn’t fight through that…

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The Vegetarian Regular at the Meat House Cafe

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by Tara June Winch I’m typing this on my best friend’s deck, during a winter that feels like a summer. I’m using her laptop, I don’t own one myself. I’m the writer without the laptop. Back home in France I have a PC, the keyboard is AZERTY and this one is QWERTY so q’s are appearing where a’s are meant to and so on. Home now is France and the best friend’s deck is Australia, the edge of the Gold Coast. Here birdsong lasts 24 hours, the baby in the far room wakes at 3am, 5am, and refuses with indignation…

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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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Just Make it Electric

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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…

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The Man From Snowy River does not come from Detroit

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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?’…

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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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