Still Life With Cat

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the ...

"If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly t...

The brevity that is the soul of Twitter is not, I feel, entirely my thing. It's enough of a struggle writing four short fiction review...

On the grounds that it's never too early to start worrying about something, I have been worrying about a keynote speech that I don't...

Last night in Melbourne's Federation Square, the new Stella Prize for the best book of the year by an Australian woman was launched as ...

There have been some changes to the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, thus : This year five awards will be presented in the followi...

are all I'm good for at the moment. * Am up sharp pointy end of Adelaide book, lurching from one paragraph to the next as deadline loo...

We're now into September (we're almost a week into September; gah) and that means that I'm getting up towards the pointy end of...

Lo these many years ago when I was writing my PhD thesis, I frequently voiced a wish that someone would invent a form of sentences and parag...

If anyone reading this happens to be teaching creative writing or running workshops or whatever, here's an article you might find useful...

No doubt every word of this report on David Marr's Quarterly Essay on Kevin Rudd is true; I don't know what the stance of the chil...

Loth to let the litblog thing go altogether, though one has tried and failed to keep it up at more than one site, one is having yet another ...

A paradox: when you're in the grip of literature -- of poetics, rhetoric, narrative, drama, symbolism, metaphor, style, grammar, diction...

Opening paragraphs, as any Creative Writing teacher will tell you in Week 1, are crucial to any writing venture but most particularly short ...

This isn't the first time I've had cause to consider the uses of literature in thinking about how to live one's life and manage...

Don't give your main characters names that are too fanciful, pretentious, un-euphonious, unusual or unlikely. Give them names that are a...

When writing first drafts I will usually bung in instructions to myself as I go along, most often [CHECK] where I have relied on memory for ...

It's a witty, funny, fast-paced book with some grit and some edge and it's the sequel to a best-seller, but I'm only up to page ...

As envisaged, I spent most of yesterday afternoon playing with the toy linked to in the post before last, and from that ludic activity (see ...

A person could play with this random academic sentence generator (props to my FBF Deborah Green) all afternoon. The real challenge here is ...