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Wifedom by Anna Funder was an interesting read and it made me realise the years I studied history at university was all bullshit. Funder uses six letters by George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to write a 420 page biography and drip, drip, drip acid on his reputation. Funder claims she’s a fan of Orwell’s….

Before you enrol in an expensive and entirely inappropriate creative writing course, read Sonia Henry’s “Put your feet in the dirt, Girl’. It’s a memoir and not fiction but that doesn’t matter. If you can’t write as well as that, give it away. Her book has forward drive, characterisation through action, excellent dialogue, exceptional scene…

I watched with interest as Leigh Sales delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture. When Adam wore short pants to school, I used to be a journalist writing for AAP and AdNews. Note the first 15 or so paragraphs are given over to her accidently parking in Ita Buttrose’s car park at the ABC. It’s a classic…

Jacqueline Maley of the Sydney Morning Age published a story recently which flagged, much like News Corporation flags a sensationalist headline, that we (you and me) should force boys to read women authors. How exactly are you going to ‘force’ them? Hold a plate of Brussel Sprouts to their head? Men read far fewer books…

Let’s cut to the chase. Most literary fiction teachers have sold bugger-all books. They’re not in Premier League. They’re Leigh RMI or Farnsborough, languishing at the bottom of Third division. And you want these people to help you write a novel? Get real. In Australia, the only top shelf writing teacher is JM Coetzee at…

OK. I admit when I picked this book up and I saw she had completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Melbourne Uni and then sat at the feet of a literary parasite of yesteryear to polish the manuscript, I was going to King hit it. Turgid trash. Bum wipe, etc. Then I read the…

I wasn’t surprised to learn Sinead O’Connor had died. Her son killed himself last year and she said at the time, she had little to live for. O’Connor was born in Dublin 1966 and was sent to a reform school for girls but left in her mid-teens to focus on a music career. She moved…

I blame Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and to a lesser degree, Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, for the guff written by many young Australian fiction writers today. Libby Angel’s novel, Where I Sleep is fair average quality taken from diaries of the narrator’s time in Melbourne in the 1990s. It’s about a young failed…

The UK Chichester Festival is hosting a revival of The Sound of Music, but those planning to attend have been warned they “may find certain themes distressing”. The Festival said the production contains themes of: “Music; family; romance; the threat of Nazi Germany and the annexation of Austria,” as the plot follows the story of…

I never knew why Fifi showed up at RMIT Professional Writing. She was a refugee teacher from the TAFE Business School in Berk Street. I put down my dry martini and copy of Tattler and said, ‘welcome aboard’ and made a note to write three more short courses to pay for her salary. It was…