Tag: memoir

  • Ep 67 Learning with a beginner’s mindset with Darryl ‘The Bird Guy’ Jones

    Ep 67 Learning with a beginner’s mindset with Darryl ‘The Bird Guy’ Jones

    ‘I regard my seventh book, Curlews on Vulture Street … as my first real writing. You know, this is the one I’m most proud of. It was the biggest challenge and the one I enjoyed the most.’ Darryl Jones is a Professor of Ecology at Griffith University in Brisbane, where for over 30 years he […]

  • Success story – Curlews on Vulture Street

    ‘Plenty is going on between humans and wildlife. This intersection of realms is where I have been dwelling now for several decades; the strange, exhilarating place where people and nature mix, often uneasily, trying to understand what the heck is going on.’ – from the introduction to Curlews on Vulture Street Curlews on Vulture Street: Cities, […]

  • Ep 56 How to survive a stalker with Ellis Gunn, author of Rattled

    ‘If he wants to follow me, I can’t stop him.’ After a random encounter with poet and author Ellis Gunn at an auction, a stranger decides to stalk her. Years later, she sits down to write about the experience – and realises it’s connected to a lifetime of gendered abuse, including surviving both sexual assault […]

  • Ep 52 Epiphanies, obsession and vulnerability with Lech Blaine, author of Car Crash

    Writing a memoir is all about taking the mess of life and shaping into a coherent, moving narrative. This is what author Lech Blaine did for his memoir, Car Crash. Then, when writing Top Blokes, a Quarterly Essay on Australian politics, he found himself weaving memoir into his writing once again. What’s the cost of […]

  • But how does your HUSBAND feel about your memoir?!

    When I started writing, one major thing I had absolutely no idea about was narrative structure. I thought I just had to write a good story – and that’s true, but it was only later that I discovered how essential structure is to good stories. It took me an embarrassing number of years to even realise […]

  • Ep 50 How to remake the world with author Sarah Sentilles

    “We have these narrow stories about what it means to be a human being,” author Sarah Sentilles says. But we have the power to expand them, just as we have the power to remake the world. Sarah Sentilles is the author of Draw Your Weapons, Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own and […]

  • Ep 38 How to survive an earthquake with Michelle Tom

    ‘I went on a post-mortem enquiry. How did we end up here? We were five and now we’re two.’ Michelle Tom began her writing career as a print journalist in her native New Zealand. Michelle was selected for the ACT Writers Centre HARDCOPY 2019 program and for a Varuna Memoir Masterclass in 2017. Michelle lives […]

  • Listen, be interested and be brave: Q&A with Samia Goudie, Boundless Mentorship runner-up

    The Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship, presented by Writing NSW and Text Publishing, is awarded to an unpublished Indigenous writer who has made substantial progress on a fiction or non-fiction writing project. The writer is paired with a senior Indigenous writer for a structured year-long mentorship. The 2021 Boundless runner-up is Bundjalung writer Samia Goudie, for […]

  • Ep 30 Recovering from childhood with Ruhi Lee, author of Good Indian Daughter

    After growing up suffering emotional, verbal, physical, sexual and psychological abuse within what was ostensibly a loving family, author Ruhi Lee decided to speak out. But before she could do that, she had to learn how to articulate and process her own feelings. Beyond basic terms like happy and sad, she didn’t have a language […]