Crave: Where everybody knows your name

I was conducting an interview recently with a couple of guys I think the world of. But it wasn't going so well. In fact, it was going horribly. Ten minutes into the conversation, they started to argue. Not with me but with each other. I realised later, listening back to the tape, that I had …

When God took Job’s teeth: Tommy Tiernan tells a Bible story

No one — NO ONE — tells Bible stories like Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan. That he tells Bible stories at all says something. Something about his Catholic upbringing, perhaps, and definitely something about where his faith is now. As he said in a recent interview on Irish television, ‘It feels to me that we're born with an …

Rachel Held Evans: A voice crying in my wilderness

As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, "in an age of information overload ... the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust ... Rachel Held Evans, Searching For SundayFor …

Wildwood: The tunnel

I lost myself today, which happens when the day is spent with people rather than words. Some people do double duty — rich connection AND words ... but in their absence I need to find myself again in my writing. So, here's a chapter from the novel Wildwood, which crawls inexorably towards its completion in the …

Sam Hunt: Telling the story, telling it true, charming it crazy

In February, 2013 I had the best day of my journalistic career. I travelled with my publishing and editorial assistants, Gabriela Guedes and Meg Williams, to the Kaipara farm of famed Kiwi poet Sam Hunt. It was an unforgettable day, during which Sam verbally abused a woman over lunch because she was speaking too loudly …

Beautiful … and ugly: My pact with Jared Noel

I made a pact with Dr Jared Noel, who died four years ago today. He would give me his story, and thereby establish the writing career I had always wanted, and I would continue to tell his story, whenever possible. His book, Message to My Girl, was published a year after his death. It wasn't …

Rock bottom: JK Rowling’s solid foundations

There are several quotes by writers that I come back to when the going gets tough. JK Rowling's speech at Harvard in 2008 has been a go-to many times over the past 10 years. What resonates? Her acknowledgement of the length of the tunnel; her stripping away of inessentials, what some would call 'failure'; her …

Release the Bats

If you fail at basketball, you fail at basketball. If you fail at literature you risk failing as a person, because your full matrix of being is at work in it — DBC Pierre, Release the Bats

On writing: Wild Wood and the Babadook

It was just one small comment, but it made a world of difference. 'I love that process of being told by the work what it is, but it also requires faith and trust and that can be hard.' Just a flash of understanding that acts like a key, a key that unlocks ... me. I …