The Hodgepodge, a writer’s journal
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Random thoughts from an anxious week
Rosalie Gasciogne’s assemblages are like flash fictions or poems – the window frames with corrugated iron ‘curtains’ hint of the yellowing paddocks they might look out on and the people looking – a young woman drying dishes at the sink or hushing a baby, a farmer stroking his stubbled chin, thinking of rain....
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The Pursuit of Happiness
I found myself wishing plaintively the other day for an engrossing and lengthy series of novels to get stuck in to – a series that would enchant and engross. Like The Borrowers, The Farseer Trilogy or the Anne books. It’s no accident that two of that small list are children’s books. What I wanted was ...
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Post-Lockdown Ants in Doc Martens
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve emerged from the past eighteen months of on-again-off-again Lockdowns feeling bruised and flattened. It doesn’t help that The Optimist reads me all the bad news first thing in the morning. Often before he brings me a cup of tea. It’s cruel over-sharing. But the Optimist thinks it’s ...
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Saturday at Through the Looking Glass
I was affronted, turning up this morning to help out at Through the Looking Glass, our local secondhand bookshop, that someone had put Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves out on the bargain book table. I repressed an urge to reinstate it on the fiction shelves and mark it at the ...
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From the book stacks
I had a completely valid reason to spend too much money on books this week. So my daughter and I organised a trip in from the outskirts and it was one of those post-lockdown shocks to find ourselves browsing in shops after so much months waiting for parcels to arrive. I bought a pair of ...
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Franny and Zooey
Reading about J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in two separate places on the same day sent me scurrying to our local library where I found a copy on the shelf. Brilliant! That just doesn’t happen all that often. I hadn’t read this when I first encountered Salinger’s work – and I’m not sure that ...
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Literary Feasts and other musings.
I’ve been reading Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles recently, as much for his musings on winter, rituals and memory as for the recipes that pop up in this book, like glace cherries in the dense molasses dark of a good fruit cake. I found, and earmarked, a recipe for gnudi – I bought a whole ...
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Murder and Other Brainwaves
One of the unexpected pleasures of semi-isolated living in the time of a pandemic has been the wealth of online opportunities that have opened up. (I bet you were thinking I was going to say planning murder!) But not so far off, if that was what you were thinking. I watched the Scarlet Stiletto awards ...
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Teaching poetry in schools, a mini-review and an invitation.
What a year! I note, with shame, that the last post I wrote here was in the middle of last year when we lived in a different world. In between then and now my husband and I have sold two houses and bought a new one, the world has staggered under the pandemic, Melbourne has ...
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Genre Bending – notes from Continuum 15
Okay – so the panel wasn’t called that! And, I admit I’ve taught a short course for the CAE which I titled ‘Genre Bending’. However, the panel on Speculative Elements in Women’s Fiction talked about the difficulties of categorisation in fiction and also the problems marketing can have with fiction that defies or crosses genres. ...