Very chuffed to have my story Tumble selected by the fabulous Anna Spargo-Ryan to appear with these beautiful pieces in Overland’s spring fiction edition!

Kill Your Darlings was the first literary journal I ever read. I found out about it at the Emerging Writers Festival, early 20s and still constantly dazzled by the big city lights of Melbourne. I remember being delightfully scandalised by the name – so EDGY, so FRESH, so MELBOURNE – and scribbled it in my notebook alongside Going Down Swinging and a couple of others. I remember someone (embarrassingly, the bit I remember is not who) saying that their greatest advice was for emerging writers to be brave enough to call themselves writers – in the present tense and not in terms of something they would one day somehow become – so I made a pledge to call myself a writer from that point forward, and to pitch to every single one of those journals. Kill Your Darlings, by dint of its name, was my goal post, and boy did I miss those posts. Off the left boot and into the bleachers type misses…

But eventually, around the time my first book was published and after years of wonky kicks, I made it, and I was about as proud as you’d imagine of someone with my level of goal-oriented anxiety. Which makes it very bittersweet to see my name once more on the contents page, this time in KYD’s final print edition as it moves onto bigger and better things online.

My piece ‘A Tale of Two Irans’ was written in the process of researching manuscript 2 (which I promise to one day finish writing. One magical faraway day…) It’s about the expectations and assumptions we bring with us when we travel, and how these are inevitably smashed into a thousand pieces as we are reminded once more that humans are humans are humans, and that people are not their governments and governments aren’t always their people.

Thank you print-version KYD for being such a stellar publication and for fostering so many new and wonderful Australian voices. See you on the interwebs.

The lovely Maggie Jankuloska and I chatted about writing, creativity and the power of words over at The Regal Fox. By the by, I am loving The Regal Fox and the interesting pieces they’ve been publishing. Another great new literary website!

Very happy to have my short memoir piece ‘The Nudists Next Door’ appear in the December 2016 edition of The Victorian Writer. It’s the members’ mag for Writer’s Victoria – the Victorian writing centre for information, support and workshops – so you may just have to mosey on over to their website and order yourself a copy! Or you could mosey on over there and check out their fantastic courses and events. Or you could mosey on over and just kind of lurk about the periphery without anyone knowing your business because it’s a free world, isn’t it, and who am I to demand such prying information from you?

My uber-talented pal Katie Rowney chatted with myself and Kirsty Eagar about setting in novels over at Writing Queensland. Article online here.

Why yes, that stack of books is nestled upon a carpet I bought in Iran! How savvy of you to notice.

Sorry for the silence, but I’ve spent the last couple of weeks traipsing about Iran researching book 2: talking politics with young activists in Tehran cafes, getting chased by camels in the sand dune desert and staring in wonder at the centuries-old mosques and shrines swelling with the faithful and devoted.

It is another place, Iran, so different from the Iran of the Western media and political fear mongering. It is a place of history, proud of a Persian culture that spans far before the arrival of Islam in the 7th century. Of a language that survived the Arab invasion through the determination of its people and the power of poetry as a form of resistance. Where poetry still is a passionate act of subversion, alongside theatre, the arts and the internet as the populace refuse to be restricted by a revolution hardly anyone seems that taken with.

This was the thing that struck me most in Iran – the many daily acts of defiance of its people. I met religious conservatives and Tehrani hipsters, elderly villagers and well-off city folk, and everyone seemed determined to show me that Iranians are not their government and will not allow their government to limit their freedoms. Whether it be making their own wine at home, pushing the limits of what is considered a headscarf or striking up conversations with strangers in cafes to encourage them to enrol and vote in the elections, people find ways to voice their protest and demand their freedoms – to demand the choice to decide what they do, how they dress, how they practice their religion and who governs them. And more than anything, what people tried to convey to me through their frank openness, their friendly conversations and their boundless hospitality was their frustration at knowing how the world sees them. As one woman told me: We hate that people think we are terrorists or that our government represents us. We just want people to know that we are people, some good, some bad, but people like everyone else.

My big brother and sister-in-law were kind enough to ask me to do a reading during their wedding ceremony last night. We joked about me pulling the reading from my own book, but there’s nothing really wedding appropriate in TBIB at all, plus I’m conscious about being that person.

Instead, I read a wonderful passage from Louis de Bernières’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a subtle shout out to my family’s Greek heritage. I love the book, and, as I said in my introduction to the reading, ‘it is a beautiful story of love and war and Mussolini and syphilis, so perfectly apt for a wedding.’ Here is what I read (affixed to the back of a copy of TBIB because everyone loves a good self-promotional jape.)

“When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day… For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.” – Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

As for the rest of the wedding, I danced as if no one was watching which made all the people who were watching laugh.