1. Home
  2. News
  3. Featured Writers

Featured Writers

Short stories, features and poems from our writing community.

Writing with Schiz

Sean O'Leary is wearing a dark blue top and using white earbuds

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.

Long-form fiction ‘rewarding’

Vincent Silk stands in front of a cream brick wall. He has short brown hair, brown eyes and is wearing a black hoodie.

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.

Days of love and E.F.T.P.O.S.

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!”

Genre hard to pin down

A photo of Sarah Madden lying on a squiggled hot pink couch on a mosaic floor. Sarah is wearing a black dress and has a bowler hat partial;ly covering her face

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.

The Fear

A photograph of Jessica Obersby. Jessica has short red hair and has a parrot sitting on her shoulder

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

Binky

– Runner-up of the 2018 Grace Marion Wilson Prize for Fiction –

How to Manage Bitterness, Anger and Hurt in Memoir Writing

Ahead of her next Memoir workshop, Sarah Vincent writes about how to manage bitterness, anger and hurt in memoir writing. 

Years ago I did a workshop on memoir writing with the great memoir writer and teacher Patti Miller. Her workshop was full of terrific advice, but one thing she said in particular has stuck with me …

“There are two things readers of memoir will not put up with: bitterness and self-pity,” she said.

Change slow, but heading in the right direction

A photo oj Jax Jacki Brown in a wheelchair, holding a phone and wearing a black T-shirt with pink text reading 'Piss on pity'.

Jax Jacki Brown has been at the forefront of increasing the prominence of writers with disability in publishing. Ahead of our Own Voices: Why Writing Matters forum in Wodonga, she talks about change, the importance of stories, and her involvement in WV’s new Publishability program.

Writing at the Intersection

Writers Vic's Ellen O'Brien spoke to Rafeif Ismail ahead of her workshop: Writing and Intersectionality.

In your workshop, participants will learn about intersectionality and how to write diverse characters and characters of colour in a respectful way. Could you tell us a bit about intersectionality and who you think will benefit from your workshop?

Q&A with Deborah Sheldon

Deborah Sheldon is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. Some of her latest releases, include the dark literary collection 300 Degree Days and Other Stories, the bio-horror novella Thylacines, the dark fantasy and horror collection Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories, and the bio-horror novel Devil Dragon.