05 Jan

When we write about hurt.

My recent book The Happiness Glass was one I debated the wisdom of publishing. I feared it was too personal, too revealing; it shed light into places that were best…
12 Oct

Notes on Life Writing

  There are two main difficulties with life-writing. The first is that the volume of material the writer has to work with can feel overwhelming, so that as they sit…
21 Oct

Capturing the Castle

There is so much dreaming involved in the act of inhabiting, and businesses like Ikea are built on and cater to the innate yearning in each of us to inhabit our own castle. But writers, too, over time have been tuned to this universal human need. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard quotes the poet Vincent Monteiro: Who has not deep in his heart / A dark castle of Elsinore.

01 Apr

Rooms Within

Literature abounds with enviable rooms of every stripe, and I have always had my favourites. The attic in Little Women, for instance, where I was entertained by the plays written…
02 Mar

Last Light

This photograph was taken when I was three or four years old, and its location is almost certainly a sheep station somewhere in the red dirt country beyond Broken Hill.…
04 Jun

Slow days gardening with pen and paper

I have been quiet on this blog for a longish while, and every so often I have remembered this with a ping  of regret, even guilt. But then I have…
15 Sep

The Secret Lives of Rooms

I have been an ardent fan of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and I always strive to write at least one Hopperesque moment into a novel.  This involves putting one…
09 Sep

Love of Letters

Words on a page make language visible. Even after years of reading, the magic does not diminish.  I love books that include a note on the typeface, since almost every…
23 Aug

Do you recognise this place?

Some of my favourite writers are closely associated with particular landscapes. The two Williams (Trevor and Maxwell) are linked respectively with small towns in Ireland, and Lincoln, Illinois. Roddy Doyle…
22 Aug

The decision to cut

With the wild weather this past weekend, I had to decide whether to pick my first crop of Queen of Night tulips.  I have loved looking at them from the…