Posts

Why I kept a travel journal, not a diary, became clear only after I had filled several notebooks. A diary usually turns inward, recording the private weather…

W.B. Yeats wrote in a world of newspapers, telegrams, political speeches and public controversy, yet his poems can feel uncannily suited to the speed of…

A lost manuscript is more than a missing file or a bundle of pages left on a train. It is a vanished record of attention: the afternoon spent shaping a…

Humour has a complicated relationship with serious writing. It can expose hypocrisy, loosen the grip of fear and help readers stay with an uncomfortable story.…

There's a particular hesitation that settles in when a writer considers memoir. The fear is rarely about exposure. It's about vanity. You sit down with a…

Howard G. Franklin's memoir-travelogue treats the terrain of Ireland as something more than backdrop. Across its pages, bogs and boreens, Atlantic cliffs and…

The transition from a digital blog post to a printed book chapter represents one of the more intriguing evolutionary paths in contemporary writing. Many…

There is a particular silence that follows the arrival of a slim envelope. I learned it long before my name appeared on the spine of a book, in a small rented…

Every novelist who ventures into the past eventually meets the same formidable companion: the archive. For writers in Australia and elsewhere, the appetite for…

A walk through County Cork in prose begins long before any traveller books a flight to Shannon or Cork Airport. For Australian readers in particular — many of…