Poet, writer
Excited to have made my first US poetry publication – in Barrow Street 4×2 of all places!
4×2 is the famous Barrow Street’s online journal for poets who have not yet published a collection.
I was one of the dorks giving their summer reading recommendations about the 20min mark in the Meanjin Podcast Episode #6, in which Jonathan Green, Justine Hyde and Robert Lukins are being very charming on the subject of book recommendations:
The book I recommended was Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives.
In an event reminiscent of the time I once confidently asserted I was not attracted to Tom Hiddleston, in March 2017 I wrote a blog post about how I had decided never to write explicitly about my experience of childhood sexual assault.
That was clearly an extinction burst.
My objections were to do with being uncomfortable with misery memoir i.e. the aesthetisisation or commodification of women’s suffering – I needed to have a point other than ‘look at my pain’. I found it here by responding to another piece by Shannon Burns. While it’s Burns’ right to define his own experience, I found a lot of his conclusions deeply misguided.
I’m grateful to Meanjin for their graciousness in giving me an equal platform to comment critically on something they’d published. My piece (content warnings as per the subtitle):
Delight to have a poem, “The Stone”, in the Winter 2017-18 issue of Oxford Poetry.
Delighted to be reading ‘Industry, Melbourne‘, a landscape poem about heavy industry in Melbourne’s west, on the relaunched Meanjin Podcast Episode #1.
Text of the poem also appears on the website:
I also have a second poem, ‘Exile’, in the print edition:
Delighted to have two readings of poems related to family estrangement appear in this audio zine. Apologies for my current asthma-medication Lady-Batman voice!
Artist statement:
Like many queer people, I am estranged from a large part of my family. We were a camping and travelling family, and I have quite a passionate relationship with the places we used to go. But the memory of family is intertwined with the memory of place, so that even when I am literally standing in the beloved place, I still feel that I am in exile. And that’s what these poems are about.
I have an angry poem about Melbourne public transport masturbators up today in Cordite Poetry Review‘s awesome Suburbia issue.
Readers of my twitter may recall this as the poem during whose composition my honour was deeply offended by MS Word suggesting I was trying to write ‘jazzed’ not ‘jizzed’.
If you were ever enticed by the idea of the mischievous long story of mine ‘Hector Fucking Katros’, Tincture Journal (which is sadly closing down) has now made all its archives free – you want issue 16 of summer 2016 for meeeeee: http://tincture-journal.com/buy-a-tincture/
Teasers and and quotes from this story are in my previous post, New fiction: ‘Hector Fucking Katros’ in Tincture Journal 16 (Summer 2016).
I have two poems in the wonderfully long-running Australian web journal foam:e this month:
This is nearly the end of my oeuvre of poems about my estranged mother. I’ve never spoken publicly about them aside from the bare announcement of publication. Realising I’d almost published them all now – and I don’t think I’ll write any more – I thought I’d write this post.
This post discusses childhood sexual assault non-explicitly.
Continue reading “Saying goodbye to the mother poems (Regarding two poems in foam:e)”
Hey-hey, a story about some sad/mad lesbians on a roadtrip in country Victoria, by me – available for free online in Verity La:
This is the first of many sad/mad lesbian stories. I am really over coming out stories. I am all about the ‘all girlfriends break up with me and lesbian housemates TOO INTENSE ABOUT RECYCLING’ stories.
Verity La is an awesome long-running Australian web journal that is generally way cooler and edgier than I am. They’re running Australian women’s writing all this week in honour of International Women’s Day, huzzah.
