Just dropping by to say that the piece about my dad came second in the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Memoir Comp. Plus a short story that I wrote about a safari in Botswana came second in the Southern Cross Literary Competition. See here for details.
To summarise, I submitted 41 pieces of work this year - either poetry, short stories or non-fiction. One of these received a first place award, three achieved second places, and at least three were published in online literary journals. Plus, I managed to get my 8-word story (Brisbane summer. Mangoes, mozzie bites and cold beer.) out on a Brisbane billboard. I also currently have a piece of work which has been long-listed for a comp - results out January, 2018 - and a piece of work which I've been requested to enlarge and resubmit to The Big Issue (more about that next year). So overall, although I HAVE STILL NOT scored a contract for my manuscript, I am pretty happy. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that.
Happy New Year!!!
Sunday, 31 December 2017
Wednesday, 8 November 2017
News flash
I am really happy to announce that I've been shortlisted in the Katharine Susannah Prichard Memoir Comp for 2017. Results to be announced publicly on 4 December.
The piece I wrote is about my father, and his last days in a frail care centre. I called it "Going Home".
Here are a couple of lines from the piece that I particularly like:
The piece I wrote is about my father, and his last days in a frail care centre. I called it "Going Home".
Here are a couple of lines from the piece that I particularly like:
These things happened a
long time ago and I have forgiven him. I forgave him because he served on navy destroyers
in WWII when he was sixteen. I forgave him because he saw things no kid of
sixteen should be made to witness, and almost certainly these were things he
could not un-see.
And here are two pictures of my father. This recent one:
And this one, circa WWII - in his navy gear
Monday, 25 September 2017
The blank page
Out of the blue, two kind friends gave me a copy of Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer. Reading it yesterday, I found this:
That blank page can be very scary. We expect so much of ourselves, we are often too scared to write because we have a sinking fear our words won't live up to our expectations. Don't be this person. Be the person that knows it takes many drafts to produce beautiful words. Be the person that writes something small - one sentence maybe - and returns again and again to build on to it. Word-by-word, if need be.
That blank page can be very scary. We expect so much of ourselves, we are often too scared to write because we have a sinking fear our words won't live up to our expectations. Don't be this person. Be the person that knows it takes many drafts to produce beautiful words. Be the person that writes something small - one sentence maybe - and returns again and again to build on to it. Word-by-word, if need be.
Monday, 11 September 2017
Memories and Memoir
Newsflash: I am very happy to be featured as a finalist in Field of Words' Memoir Comp.
You can read the piece here.
I'm particularly grateful because this piece of writing concerns an emotional and distressing time of my life and I can now share it with readers. If I have any tips about writing memoir, they are write it like it is. Sometimes the truth on its own is enough.
Sincere thanks to Field of Words. I have now been a finalist in three of their writing competitions this year, making me a very contented writer!
You can read the piece here.
I'm particularly grateful because this piece of writing concerns an emotional and distressing time of my life and I can now share it with readers. If I have any tips about writing memoir, they are write it like it is. Sometimes the truth on its own is enough.
Sincere thanks to Field of Words. I have now been a finalist in three of their writing competitions this year, making me a very contented writer!
Wednesday, 28 June 2017
Award Winning Australian Writing
My short story Telling a Weed from a Flower has been selected for inclusion in the 2017 Award Winning Australian Writing anthology. I couldn't be happier. And, again, I thank Field of Words for the opportunity. Without their support and the support of other writing comps, emerging writers like me would have a hard time finding a place to publish their work.
Friday, 14 April 2017
New story ... a Winner!
It's been a while ... And, yes, I have been busy. But here is something that won't take long for me to put up, or for you to read.
One of my short stories Telling a Weed from a Flower is the winner of an online competition run by Field of Words. I am thrilled and honoured, and grateful to Field of Words for their continuing support of emerging writers. Congrats also to Julia Thatcher for her runner-up story, Insomnia.
You can read my story here:
To read Julia Thatcher's story go to:
One of my short stories Telling a Weed from a Flower is the winner of an online competition run by Field of Words. I am thrilled and honoured, and grateful to Field of Words for their continuing support of emerging writers. Congrats also to Julia Thatcher for her runner-up story, Insomnia.
You can read my story here:
To read Julia Thatcher's story go to:
Monday, 9 January 2017
"The Yellow Wallpaper" and me
I came to literary theory and creative writing
courses late. I had written as a teenager—the usual angst-filled
poetry, maudlin short stories—but my adult life was mostly about working and paying
bills, with very little time for writing. Then I had children, became a
stay-at-home-mum, and suddenly I had some free time again. I went to writing
courses, which gave me both confidence and inspiration, and after that I bumbled
along independently—but with no success. I was producing work, but I didn’t
know where to send it, and when I did it was always rejected. Something is missing,
I thought. Could it be a creative writing degree? Is this something I should be
considering?
At the end of my first undergraduate
year, I won my first short story competition. Two years later, I won the university’s
undergraduate writing prize. Since then I’ve been short-listed in comps, and published
in a number of literary journals. I won’t go on. Whether I can attribute all
this to one creative writing course is debatable, but what I can say with
conviction is that university taught me many things, including to be disciplined.
When friends phoned to ask me for morning coffee, I declined. I said I was
working, and quickly learned not to take offence when they said, “Working? What are you doing?” “Writing,”
I said. “Oh, that,” they said, as if I had told them I was doing needlepoint. I
watched how other writers worked. I listened in class, I learned, and I read,
and I read. I read stuff that I would never
ever have read on my own, including things I didn’t even like, and I am a
better writer for it.
I’ll be the first to agree
that literary theory can be as dull and tedious as a writer stuck indoors on a
rainy day without a computer … but it needn’t be. With the right teacher,
literary theory can speak to you. It did to me. From the walls. The piece of
writing was “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I read it twice
before the lecture, and didn’t get it. So
what, I thought, a woman and some
wallpaper. The lecturer went into it in depth. She started with Freud and
psychoanalysis. Then she moved on to how the narrator discerns a ghostly woman in
the sub-pattern of the wallpaper, how the narrator’s quietly going mad, trapped
by her domestic life and her marriage, and so forth and so on. I was
awe-struck. Oh, I remember thinking, Oh. Hooley-Dooley. Look what you can do with
words! It wasn’t the proverbial
penny dropping. It was a radiant light shining where before there’d been gloom
and murk. It had never occurred to me that you could say one thing, but mean
another. That you could hide secret messages within your writing. That, in quoting
another literary work within your own, you could reveal the ending. Ian McEwan
does several spectacular things in Atonement,
and this is one of them. He mentions W. H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts—about life going on in the face of suffering, and
Icarus, the boy who fell from the sky—signalling to the reader that there will
be no happy ending to this narrative. Literary devices such as intertextuality;
stream of consciousness; the unreliable narrator; and theory such as
psychoanalysis; postcolonialism; eco-criticism; all these should be learned to appreciate
how good writing works.
As an aside, I’ll concede it’s
possible that Barthes, Foucault, Woolf et al aren’t relevant to all writers. Commercial
writers, for instance. I know at least two who have achieved publishing deals
without any background in creative writing courses and, Whoo Hoo, I say, because they are my friends. But I will still
argue that commercial writers are better writers for knowing the nuts and bolts
of writing.
My
point is, why assume you don’t need a degree to be a writer? Why should being a
writer be any different from any other career? In today’s writing world, where
publication is on knife-edge, book sales are wildly unpredictable, and even publishers
can be surprised by what readers want—witness the explosive popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, picked up by
mainstream publishers only after its unexpected self-published success—you need
every iota of help you can get. I think it also comes down to this: how badly
do you want—not to write—but to be a writer? And not just any writer, but a good writer? If you really want to be that writer, surely you will make it your business
to find out everything there is to know about your craft?
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