A gentle kiss on the lips of the Inquisitor

Note: This article was published on my new Substack newsletter this morning. All articles are still open to everyone, so please hop over there and check out what I'm doing. If you like what you see, feel free to subscribe to stay up-to-date with my new stuff, or take out a paid subscription to keep …

Watching the party through the window

This is the first post of my new newsletter on Substack. Please check it out here. For a long time, the story I’ve told most often to define who I am — or who I think I am — is the account of a cliff collapse in the southwest of Western Australia, back when I was a newspaper editor …

Time to reevaluate the prominence trauma has in our stories

There’s an excellent article on the prevalence of the trauma plot in contemporary literature in the January 3-10 issue of The New Yorker, which grabbed my attention for two reasons: first, as a writer wanting to understand more about the craft (and which types of stories are currently popular and why) but secondly, as someone …

A glimmer of hope in the lights of Piraeus

The pandemic cannot last forever. The Spanish flu ended, and so will this. But it’s also true that we’re entering the darkest days of the pandemic, and after two years of it already, it feels sometimes that ‘We’ll be lost forever.’

Turmoil + soul = jazz

So I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep. Some years back. And I’m thinking about money. Not thinking so much as fretting. Probably panicking. So I go downstairs and for some reason stand in front of my bookshelf, looking up at the books I hadn’t looked at or considered or opened for a long time. …

She introduced me to so many things: pasteurised milk, sheets, monotheism. Dwight, The Office

Elliptical faith: Religion in the dots and thin spaces

On Saturdays, I do a few hours of subediting work on the News Corp Australia metro newspapers, such as the Sunday Telegraph in Sydney and the Herald Sun in Melbourne. This weekend I subbed a couple of stories that contained some bad language; the conventions we follow on the newspapers to deal with such words …

Beauty and the beast: Some thoughts about Jacinda Ardern

You should never trust a person wearing a mask ... unless you’re in the middle of a pandemic and that person is Jacinda Ardern. I interviewed Jacinda Ardern in Crave cafe last Thursday in what was a surreal and somewhat discomfiting experience. Surreal because after two years of trying to get this interview, and after …

Who wants normal? Not me

I’m starting to grieve the idea of going back to normal. Not that I think ‘normal’—meaning the way things were—is achievable, ever again. We won’t come out of this and return to what we had, ever. But some things will return, for sure. Some I’m happy about. Others I’m not looking forward to at all. …