The sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s time to lock ourselves away under tea and a blanket and write into the wee small hours like the antisocial gremlins we are!
Every second Tuesday from November to February join us for a drop in writing and feedback session session. Upload the piece you’d like workshopped on the Friday before the session to here.
Then, on the designated Tuesday from12-2, feel free to drop in and drop out of the Google Meeting.
It’s been a hot while my loves, and I know we are all zoomed out, but I also know that some of us are craving a little of that human connection outside of the humans/fur humans with whom we are locked down. Therefore, on Wednesday 1 September, 8, September and 15 September I will open the Zoom room for a 2 hour long love-fest on Deborah Levy’s living memoir series. Bring wine, bring tea, bring your adoration for those books you get something new from every time you read it. Bring your evangelical enthusiasm (“No, babes, you don’t understand. YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK.” – no judgement, we’ve all said some iteration of this sentence). This isn’t a “lit class” discussion, it’s wine, reflection, musing, philosophy, therapy, sharing. It’s vulnerability and respect. It’s real estate.
15 September 20:00 AEST: Real Estate
Available at Neighbourhood Books, Brunswick Books, Paperback Bookshop, Hill of Content
Enter the Zoom here from 8pm on 8 September.
So this one is for my law and law-adjacent peoples. I’m just going to throw it out there: Bookclub, but with a legal focus.
Hear me out. I know y’all practitioners already do A LOT of reading, but most of y’all, in my experience, are giant fucking nerdburgers who miss having the time to read fantasy and sci fi (I see you, boo). This is where I step in. CV time: I have a PhD in literature and have taught literature at Victorian unis since 2012, I have a law degree, worked as a researcher and paralegal at a firm for seven years (decided not to practice because I saw how the sausage was made), and I’ve taught law to creative industry professionals since 2018. I’ve been running a relatively successful book club for about three years. I am also a firm believer (my students might call me evangelical) in the power of stories to help us understand the world and ourselves better.
Y’all are also professional readers and storytellers. You are also working in an industry that can suck the joy out of everything it touches. Let’s bring some joy back to reading the law.
Enter Lady Chatterley’s Book Club (one of my fave censorship trials, buy I’m open to changing the name). This is a pilot program for the first five months of 2020. Ideally, it would be based in the Melbourne CBD, and would run once a month. We would read a novel and a case (I’ll create a reading list based on responses) and use the literature to frame our understanding of both the set case and of legal practice/the world more generally. I’m limiting the pilot program to 10 seats, so if you are keen let me know asap. Feel free to retweet/share with friends/frenemies/colleagues/ who you think might be interested.
I’m proposing the following genres of literary texts:
Memoir and Life-Writing
SF, Fantasy and Spec Lit
Trashy crime and Thrillers
Queer Literature
YA and Bildungsroman
Classical lit and adaptations
Shakespeare and adaptations
If you are keen, shoot me a response/email/DM and let me know your preferred reading list.
Irish mythology has fascinated me since I was a little girl. The stories of sliding between parallel worlds, of the human and the Sidhe, of Tir Na n’Og, seemed both familiar and strange. I felt like I missed something by not being able to speak Gaeilge (or Cymric for that matter). My family name is Irish, but my family moved to Australia five or six generations ago, I think we traced it to about the time of the famine. I am one of the invaders.
Continue reading “Reflection: The Invasion (The Grey Land Book 2) by Peadar O’Guilin”
I feel like I come across authors at just the right time in my life. In my early 20s, as a young and terrified queer woman, it was Jeanette Winterson. She was gifted to me on my twenty first birthday by a schoolfriend. Ten years later (and late to the party), it was Angela Carter. She was a writer whose urgency leaked through the page and into me. Most recently, it has been Kathy Acker. Her rage, her despair, her passion, resonates with me right now. I don’t know if it’s because she seems a long past oracle of the current zeitgeist; her depictions of toxic masculinity, written during the early 80s could have been written last week. She is a Casssandra. Her Great Expectations, made me work as much as Dickens’ rambling tome did. But where Dickens’ skill is in setting scene, hers in in unpacking a character.
Continue reading “Reflection: Great Expectations by Kathy Acker”
The Wayward Girls' Book Club 