Menu Close

On Writing

Displaying 1 - 10 of 31 articles

That sinister rope at the end of the trope reveals Charles Simic’s dark sensibility. Shutterstock

Talking Ordinary: from Simic to Farrell

Where Robert Frost might write a few lines soundly cut from the solid old tree of language and delivered in his mellifluous White Mountain voice, The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a…
Harvey Weinstein: the allegations against him cast a spotlight on the stories we prize in literature and film. Paul Buck/EPA

Rape is a plot device in western literature, sold back to us by Hollywood

Woody Allen said it was “sad”. Quentin Tarantino said he needed to nurse his own “pain” and “emotions” about the revelations. Oliver Stone took it further – it was not just that he gave the nod to Woody…
Google is adept at throwing up news we don’t need in our searches. So it’s time to fight back.

Taking control of who gets to send us news

Recently, I was in hasty need of multiple sources on a breaking news story, so I went to a well-known news aggregation website. But before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options…
ecowaltz/flickr

On poetry and pain

There are several ways into the book Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain, edited by Heather Taylor Johnson. And there are many uses it might serve in the multiple worlds of poetry…
Heather Rose, the 2017 Stella Prize winner. The Stella Prize

Exquisite prose, with rare and subtle insight

Heather Rose has won the 2017 Stella Prize for her novel The Museum of Modern Love, a fictional exploration of the power of art to transform individual lives, written in exquisite prose, with rare and…
Dean Lewins/AAP

Art for art’s sake

Most people who have completed a cultural studies or sociology degree in recent decades will have come across the world of Pierre Bourdieu, one of that army of extraordinary scholars who filled the 20th…