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This blog is meant to be about writing but my beloved Labrador crossed with a Rottweiler (a Labweiler), passed away last Thursday morning. The grief has poleaxed me and all writing has stopped for a while. One morning during the scorching summer of 2008, as my wife and me pulled in to a market north…

Spare a thought for the five Booker Prize judges. The judges who live in the UK and USA, have had to read all 158 eligible novels at a rate of about one novel per day. What was novel seven I read? Beats me. They then create a long list and then a short-list. How they…

This is from The New Yorker a few years back. It’s a piss-take on political correctness on campus. “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” —the Atlantic….

There’s a scene in the film ‘Death of Stalin’, where three senior government ministers are sitting in a car planning to kill Beria. One of them has bought a yapping dog, because they’re so fearful they’ll be overheard, even though the car is parked in a forest. One of the characters says, “I’ve had nightmares…

Uneasy lay my head when I ran the RMIT professional and creative writing programs. I had almost 800 students studying creative writing (including screenwriters) and I was doing my utmost to enrol more, not only from Melbourne but across Australia. Yet something didn’t sit right. I remember asking lecturers Delia Falconer and Laurie Clancy, if…

One of the more curious aspects of creative writing – and here I’m predominantly pointing to short story competitions – is how the imagination is railroaded by the news agenda. Real life is lived outside the highly constructed, framed and decontextualised news. What we see, read and hear on the news is framed to elicit…

As Johnny Rotten said, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” This post isn’t about writing but about lies told to us by our government about the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban – although many of those were in writing. Australian and American troops (and others) have been there for 20 years. Longer than…

I used to spend up big on new and used books. In my 30s and 40s, I had a library that covered the walls of the second floor of my house. I was a big fiction and non-fiction reader – and poetry too. I used to think there was an intellectual pay-off by reading so…

Jane Sullivan from The Age has waded in to the literary prize debate. She flagged that in a survey of winners of the Miles Franklin over the last 64 years, they were predominantly won by white men from NSW in their 40s and 50s. Sullivan is right. Back in the 60s and 70s, men ruled…