Adjectives have always been out there, mobs of them pressing on the outside walls, their faces against the windows, their shoulders at the doors. They just want to be inside close to all the nouns that…
What is a society without its poets? If all poetry disappeared from our libraries and shelves and virtual depositories tomorrow, would it make much difference to us? If we were forbidden to write poetry…
There’s an old saying in journalism: “All news is local”. It means that news, wherever it comes from, needs to engage the interest of its local audience if it is to succeed. But read today’s paper, or…
Your voice carries your character. You might have a light, strained voice, or you might have a deep, rolling voice, but that is not your voice. It is the prop you were given, and you use it as any good…
Clementine Ford is no stranger to speaking out. This makes her a near-perfect poster person for the Stella’s schools program and their latest project Girls Write Up – a day-long wordfest and workshop for…
If it’s an election, you can bet that our cash-strapped publishing industry is preparing to unleash another volley of those hardy perennials known as the election campaign diaries. Penned by seasoned political…
One thing bursts out of another. Christine Brooke-Rose, in A Grammar of Metaphor (1958), called it the genitive link. When Ballarat regional poet Nathan Curnow begins his poem The Lighthouse with, nuns…
This week’s Sydney Writers’ Festival not only celebrates the art of writing, but the art of reading. Of course, it is difficult not to worry that this might be because the art of reading – that is, deep…
I am living in a small, remote Aboriginal community where my wife is a school teacher. I have set myself the task of writing a poem a day for a year, and putting this poem on Facebook for my friends who…
This is a story about stories. Who writes them. Who owns them and what happens when the two things get muddled. It’s a story about true stories, life stories, stories written by amateurs and professionals…
Charlotte Wood has won the fourth annual Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things, a dark and dangerous book shot through with a kind of feminist rage that – after decades of anti-feminist backlash…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first sentence of a novel sets the tone. Our new column, On Writing, explores the wonderful world of opening lines: from Tolstoy to Elmore Leonard.