Writing, Editing, Communications
Local art emerges from Brisbane’s cultural heart Caroline Gardam It’s just passed 9am on a warm Saturday in Brisbane, and already the temperature is nudging 30. At West End’s Hope on Boundary, a popular, earthy social enterprise café, it’s market day. Between a plant stall selling $2 begonias and justice advocates Micah Projects’ sausage sizzle […]
I was delighted to be invited to co-edit Our Inside Voices: Reflections on COVID-19 recently. It contains essays, fiction, and poetry from a wide range of Queensland writers. My mate Brad Marsellos, whose amazing locked-down playground pic features on the cover, said he felt calm after reading the stories. Getting back behind the red pen […]
A visit to the local secondhand bookstore over the holidays wasn’t enough (bagging Malouf, Lessing, Armanno, Lewycka, Modjeska, Murakami, Astley); we fell into the Lifeline Bookfest on the weekend. I think we came home with about 100 books. The joy was in stumbling into titles that have always been on the “to-read” list: Silent Spring. […]
This post is seven years too late. A perverse and quite irrational sense of anti-nepotism, for want of a better term, has prevented me from becoming acquainted with Jane Gardam‘s beautiful writing before this year. We are not related (sadly!); even if we were, since Gardam is Jane’s husband’s surname, I couldn’t even claim shared […]
After an absence whose days were full but not fertile, here are Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens, Playing House by Amy Choi, and the wonderful Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. Astute (one may say time-fortunate) readers may note the newish and natty little quote hanging around recently added reviews. This quaint folly is my editor’s […]
I’m all in a dither over this latest review. Already, it’s taken much longer to write than usual. It has been written, deleted, rewritten a few times. The book was poor. I disliked it on a number of levels: starting with the macro, I think the genre of “memoir” can do without half-life scratches from […]
After an amazing read, thank you Mr Johnson, I am now reviewing something so banal that I have to put my work aside so that I do not write something cruel*. But I am so puzzled. I understand marketing (although at times I wish I didn’t). I understand the fact that I can not get […]
I’ve been a little slow in getting these up, but here are a couple more reviews. Today I added a review of Panic, by David Marr, which (being the diligent lefty urbanite that I am) I enjoyed, in the main. The other review is of a book called Lady Almina and the Story of the Real […]
The latest review copy arrived yesterday. A novel for young adults. A teenage girl’s dying mother reveals that her father is not really a deceased war hero; rather, he’s a Hollywood action hero. And she has a bitchy half-sister. Kill me now.