Short stories, features and poems from our writing community.
Let us sing our praise of the bitter lie,
Dismiss the stolen children’s cry.
Favour fallacies and fairy tales,
Worship thieves blown in by hearty gales.
Let us sing our praise of the bitter lie,
Deny bloodshed under deathly skies.
Reject sovereign clans of noble grace,
Elect foolish pawns of a ‘higher race’.
Let us sing our praise of the bitter lie,
Watch glibly as democracy dies.
The traumatic scars of colonial lore,
Weep on now and forevermore.
The years between writing my books and having them published are quite far apart. The first draft of ‘Ida’ was written in 2011 and the book was published in 2017; ‘Highway Bodies’ was written in 2013 and has just been published. The writing of both first drafts was very similar, but the editing processes were very different.
An acrobat, a poet, a whip cracker, and now a tutor with Writers Victoria, Ailsa Wild answered some questions about her books, her practice, and writing for children in preparation for her series of workshops in 2019.
Writer Karina Ko has won the 2018 Deborah Cass Prize for emerging writers from migrant backgrounds for her manuscript extract ‘Things I used to Believe’.
Chosen from a shortlist of eight, ‘Things I Used to Believe’ was announced as the winner on 5 December at an event in Melbourne.
I have schizophrenia of the paranoid variety. I write about it quite a lot, both directly from my experience and not. The title story of my second short story collection was called ‘Walking’. It was about me walking out of the psych ward at The Alfred hospital going to my new accommodation at a boarding house in St Kilda. It was a scary day, given that the CAT team had intervened in my life six weeks earlier to put me in the ward. I didn’t go gently into the good night, but I went.
2016 Write-ability Fellowship recipient Vincent Silk recently published his novel ‘Sisters of No Mercy’. Diane McPherson interviewed Vincent about his writing and the role the Write-ability Fellowship played.
To help celebrate International Day of People With Disability, Write-ability is proud to publish 2018 Write-ability Fellow Anthony Riddell’s “speculative non-fiction” work Days of love and E.F.T.P.O.S.
A prolific writer, Anthony's work is some of the most wildly energetic, seemingly nonsensical writing you will ever read. As former Write-ability Project Coordinator Harriet Gaffney said when assessing Anthony's fellowship application “it’s a bit like applying an electric current to your brain the way it makes your synapses spark!”
Ahead of the launch of her novella ‘Blue in the Red House’, Sarah Madden explores how genre labels can be hard to pin down – in life and in writing.
Genre is a funny old thing. You think you’re one thing, and then you’re another. I didn’t know what ‘Blue in the Red House’ was when I finished writing it; not really. I thought it was some odd fiction, a made-up string of weirdness straight from the depths of my imagination, and that was how it sat in my mind until I’d stepped away long enough to see what it really was.
Things I fear:
Being buried alive
The awful, breathless struggle of drowning
Losing the ones I love
Being late
That I will lose my job
That the planet will die due to climate change
That I am unlovable
That my anxiety will win
