We wander through the mist and the mud, the land brown and desolate. I know in my heart that I’ll never see my Solenn again, that this fairy woman whose hair was glossy, thick and blonde like my dead mother’s, whose eyes were the colour of mossy boulders, whose skin was like silk has tricked me into roaming this part Breton, part fae countryside forever, a spectre trapped between two worlds. There’s no point asking why she did it, enchanting herself to look achingly beautiful, or what made my sense of self-preservation fade as I spent the night in her bower. I could ask her, but she’ll never answer.
                                                              *
We wander through the mist and the mud, the land brown and desolate. This man who I’m sure I’ll be cursed to drag along beside me until time itself gives out won’t even look at me now my back is bent and my skin wrinkled, my lips dry and my gossamer dress ripped to black rags. He won’t admit that it was his lust that made him forget his new wife, that magic had little to do with it. If he asked, I could tell him that my form-shifting spell was a test and he failed it. I could tell him that I am his moral conscience. I could tell him that all he has to do is utter sorry and mean it and he and I will both be free. I could tell him, but he’ll never ask.

Venero Armanno is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, including his recent book Burning Down (2017). His other well-known books include Black Mountain (2012), The Dirty Beat (2007) and Candle Life (2006). Further back, Veny’s novel Firehead was shortlisted in the 1999 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award; in 2002 The Volcano won the award with Best Fiction Book of the Year. His work has gone on to be published in the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Israel and South Korea.

His latest novel, The Crying Forest, enters the realm of speculative fiction. Agata Rosso, a once-mighty yet now prematurely aged European witch, believes that the special gifts in a young girl named Lía Munro can restore youth and vitality both to herself and her bedridden husband. She sets a deadly plan in motion to capture and use Lía-but will the girl have enough power to protect herself, plus the father she loves so much?

Without further ado, welcome Venero!

On your Wikipedia page, it states you wrote 10 unpublished novels over 14 years before getting picked up. What made you keep going and do you have any advice for other writer hopefuls still struggling to get published? Have any of those unpublished novels been picked up since?

So yes, that’s true, I did write a lot of novels before having something published. I was young enough in those days to think I could do anything, so I launched in when I was 17/18 and started writing a horror vampire novel that I was sure would bring me instant fortune and fame. When that didn’t happen I realised I knew less than zero and that there was a long learning road ahead if I was to take this thing called writing seriously. However, still being young, I thought I could teach myself what I needed to know and do this by writing non-stop.

That part of the idea was good, but I set myself the formidable task of writing a novel a year until one got published. A novel a year doesn’t leave room for a lot of rewriting but that was part of my ignorance – I’d dash off 80 to 100,000 words, over the course of a calendar year, spend a week or two polishing what I had, then would start sending the ms off to every publisher I could find in the telephone book. This was in the late 70s into the end of the 80s, so there was no Internet, everything was hard copy on a typewriter with lots of time spent at photocopy machines and in post offices. Anyway, once I’d finish a ms I’d start on the next. I seemed to have no problem with new ideas, though maybe the ideas weren’t all that good. I wrote in any number of genres.

Once I got through my Stephen King phase, I had my Fitzgerald, Greene, Hemingway, Cheever… you understand what I mean. Rejections came thick and fast but to specifically answer your question here, what kept me going was a lot of fear – I dreaded being either stuck in an office job or spending the rest of my life working as a bricklayer’s labourer, which is what I had to do in my teens and twenties. Probably a more important point is that some rejections would have a nice note attached to it: “We can’t publish this ms but we like your writing so please send us your next book.” I recall I had lots of messages like that, so if an aspiring writer needs any greater encouragement, then they’re probably not all that serious about their craft and should think about something else. 

So any advice I might have for aspiring writers is along the lines of what I wrote above – keep persisting, keep trying. Don’t worry about time. Don’t want it all straight away. You might take years to find your true voice, something that’s original and new and completely yours. That’s what publishers are after – a new voice. You’ve got a lot to learn so give yourself every opportunity to learn it. Early success only comes to a few, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong in taking a longer road – because you want a writing career that is a very long road anyway, with strong foundations. That takes time and effort and every shortcut short-changes you.

Most of my unpublished mss deserve every bit of their non-publication, though I have a soft spot for the first one. It’s about a Sicilian-migrant-vampire who has an underground lair at a university and who kills students by night. In the end he gets bored with his life (i.e. I got bored with the book) and so commits suicide. Now, I’ve never read a book about a Sicilian-migrant-vampire who commits suicide. Somebody should publish it! Of the other books two did get published but in new forms. These mss became Strange Rain and My Beautiful Friend, two books that did very well, but they changed a hell of a lot from the drafts I’d first written in the 80s.

In addition to writing, you’re also a teacher at the University of QLD. How does teaching affect and inform your writing work and vice versa, particularly with your latest, The Crying Forest? 

I won’t complain because I love my job and I’m very happy to have it, but of course it certainly takes up most of my time – meaning I have less time to write. This could be a good thing actually; maybe it’s better to be forced to slow down, though I would have liked to have written more books over the last twenty years that I’ve been at UQ. Having said that, though, teaching creative writing forces me to engage more with the form – to really think about what I’m doing and how. It also gives me a direct look at readers i.e. students who love reading. Why do they read? What are they reading? Which books do they avoid like the plague? All of this is really interesting for a writer. It’s true that a teacher can learn more from their students than vice versa.

You’ve written novels for adults, young adults and children, as well as several short stories. How do you think trying out these different modes has shaped your writing, particularly your current novel?

I think writing short stories is one of the best ways possible to find your voice and to learn and improve your craft. The end of my little tale above about all my unpublished mss is that around 1988 someone said to me, “You spend a year or two writing entire novels that don’t get published… why don’t you try short stories instead?” It was a lightbulb moment. Yes indeed. Why not write short stories and send them out and get rejected (or maybe one day published) even faster? So then I embarked on a campaign of always having stories in the post to editors at whatever magazines or competitions I could find. That was my real start, when stories started being accepted and I started winning some prizes. My first published book was in fact a collection of these stories, Jumping at the Moon, not a novel.

This sort of writing experience does affect all my novels, including The Crying Forest. How? I think because it gives you the tools for shaping sub-plots into their own discreet arcs. The difference is that these sub-plots (which are stories in themselves really) have to feed into the main plot of course. However short story writing skills help you/me actually make those sub-plots so much stronger (I hope!).

You were born in Brisbane to Sicilian parents. Does that background influence your writing in any way, particularly with The Crying Forest? If so, how?

Yes, all my writing is informed by the migrant experience. Of my parents coming to this country when they were young (they met here and married) and me being a child of a father and mother who didn’t understand much about their new country at all. I’d be a completely different writer without these experiences, or, more likely, not a writer at all. It’s the outsider syndrome—growing up I never quite felt part of Australia even though I was born here. The family home was very Sicilian and the family and friend network was also almost purely Sicilian. So in a way it was as if I was new to this country as well: home was one world, outside of that was something completely different, and I really didn’t fit in. So as something of an outsider one becomes very observational: of everything around and also of the past, if I can put it that way.

Many of my books are based on Sicilian history and research, and The Crying Forest ultimately came together in the same way – I was researching something completely different and accidently came across myths and legends that weren’t Sicilian (but from the north, in Friuli) but that had resonances in Sicily. These legends had to do with witches and werewolves, and so my research deepened, leading me to think, well, Australia is a country of migrants, what if these legends had travelled across the seas with the migrant diaspora? That was really part of The Crying Forest’s germinal idea—and where I live, in an area that was once completely rural and has its own forest lands, felt like the perfect place to take up these mythologies.

Are there particular themes and ideas you return to again and again in your work? Why do you think that is? Do you revisit such ideas and themes in The Crying Forest?

As you might have gathered by now, recurring themes have to do with the migrant diaspora, leading to themes of loss and belonging—and, even, of the longing for the old world left behind. I’ve always felt sort of floating between two cultures – not quite part of one or the other, so that forces me back to writing inside these themes.

You’ve written in a diverse range of genres. What sort of books and authors inspire you and why? Are there stories you’d compare The Crying Forest to?

I think The Crying Forest is a sort of literary supernatural tale, in that characters’ emotions, their relationships and personal baggage really drive the plot—as well as a lot of “real” history. So I’d consider books in the same ballpark might be The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and even The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. But that’s setting myself a very high bar!  A writer/reviewer I was just speaking to said the book reminded him very much of the writing my Peter Straub, and I can see that – If You Could See Me Now and Ghost Story in particular.

Writers who have had a huge impact on me I’ve already mentioned: from Stephen King to Graham Greene, F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I’d add Truman Capote, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Oscar Hijuelos, Ray Bradbury (who I had the immense pleasure of meeting once, in a Parisian bookstore) and Haruki Murakami. In fact at present I’ve just been rereading The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Martian Chronicles, plus The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and South of the Border, West of the Sun. I love going back to my literary heroes.

Tell us more about The Crying Forest. What inspired the novel?

In 2001, newly-married and with my wife Nic pregnant with our first (and only) child, we travelled from our rundown inner-city Queenslander-style home to see an even more rundown old house in an outer-west suburb I’d never even heard of. We went because we’d seen a picture of a house in the real estate pages of a newspaper, and I’d never seen anything like it. The place was like some Gothic old English country manor that a louche rock star would buy and fill with drugs, booze and groupies.

We discovered the place was located on land that once had been part of immense hectares of farming property. Built in 1932, it sits at the top of a small hill and was (and still is) nicely isolated. With all good sense thrown aside we bought the property and moved in.

Some people, tradespeople for instance, don’t like to be alone in our home; we however find it inviting and perfectly peaceful. It became the “red house”—Rosso House—of The Crying Forest. And that forest itself is nearby; overgrown trails are where I walk my dog almost every day. So, for that matter, is the wider fictional region the book calls “Grandview”.

So in terms of inspiring the novel, other than a very spooky home, an isolated property and endless state forest, another thing that informed this book were the wild packs of escaped dogs in our region, howling at night and raising hell, plus the proliferation of deer—an introduced species not native to the region. Dogs and deer wage their own battles. It all just seemed to cry out for a novel about the supernatural, and I’d wanted to write this book for years, even though it was well outside of my usual genres.

What was the hardest part of writing The Crying Forest? What was the easiest? Did you have to do any research?

All novels are hard, in their own way, even the ones that come pouring out. The Crying Forest did come pouring out… I wrote the first draft longhand in a series of notebooks, then revised and revised endlessly on my computer. The hardest part was finding the time to write. Work at the University can be very intense, and the more senior I become the less extra time I have. So there were a lot of 4am mornings, doing as much as I could before getting ready to head off by six or so.

There was plenty of research for this book, a process I always like very much. While reading texts about several things I wanted the book to touch on I came across information about Italian witches: this interested me because when I was growing up my parents would take me to our local Sicilian witch if I needed medical attention, not a traditional doctor. I remember this crazy old crone treating me for neck aches (which she made worse) and a broken finger (thanks to her, it’s still crooked). My parents used to talk about the way this woman’s potions could cure all manner of illnesses, and that she was more knowledgeable than any fool-doctor with medical training. Remembering her, I read more about witches (and werewolves) in Sicilian and Italian mythology, and in particular I discovered the Benandanti: 

“The benandanti (Good Walkers) were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches (malandanti) in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.” (from Wikipedia)

It really didn’t take too much imagination to put all these disparate elements together: house, forest, Italian folklore.

What do you think’s different about The Crying Forest to your other books? 

I’ve only published in the supernatural once before, with My Beautiful Friend in about 1995. So The Crying Forest is a real departure into witches and werewolves, and people with special powers.

What’s next on the writing horizon for you?

I’ve got two novels on the go which are more my own traditional sorts of works, but I’ve got more of The Crying Forest planned, if circumstances allow me to go that far. I’m not one for sequels but I feel like there are more stories to come from these characters, some really fascinating threads that I’d love to explore. The book is mainly set in Brisbane, Australia, however many of the characters are European—I’m excited to follow them into places like Rome, Sicily, Barcelona and Paris… you know what the writer’s imagination is like!

Thanks so much for your considered answers Venero! I’m pumped to read your novel now! For you readers out there keen too, you can read more about the novel here (and watch a cool book trailer). The Crying Forest is available for purchase in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

Well for starters, the red-gold leaf was as big as my face. Which is why it was kind of bad it stuck to my forehead, nose, mouth, chin like glue. I wrestled with it, and you’d think I’d have won easy-peasy on account of it being a tender sugar maple versus a boy, but it wouldn’t budge. I think I had a panic attack – certainly, it was hard to breathe, and I soon hated the taste of crisp bitterness and dirt mixing with saliva. I bashed into other trees in the national park (I’d gone for a picnic and wandered off), seeing blue stars behind my lids, none of which helped either. Falling in a heap, crying and a-shivering seemed the only thing to do.

That’s when the coven found me.

I should have expected something of that nature, living in New Orleans and all, but usually they’re fake new agey types rather than, you know, actual witches. These ones prodded, the wood bristles of their broom poking into my arm and chest as they whispered.

That’s when one drew my hand in hers, kissed the inside of my palm (I later learnt that meant ownership, that she’d sealed me as personal property). “What’s your name, kid?”

“Troy,” I said, “and I’m thirteen, which is old enough to fight if I have to and young enough my parents will come find me if I’m not home by dark.”

“Why is there a leaf on your face, Troy,” she snickered. “I bet you’re no crash-hot fighter with that obstructing your vision and your parents won’t want a leaf-boy for a son neither.”

She had a point. “It won’t come off,” I said, looking at my feet.

“No,” she said, way too calmly. “We’re trying a new enchantment. Good to see it worked. It’s more interesting than rats, rabbits, or a pumpkin, don’t you think?”

“If it’s all the same to you, miss, I preferred being a boy, and I’m getting mighty dizzy and sick in this darkness. I’d be much obliged if you’d help a kid out.”

She placed a cool finger to my leaf, muttered an incantation, carefully ripped the waxy cells so I had eye and mouth holes. “Will that suffice?” The other witches cackled around her.

“As I said, miss, I was really hoping to get back to straight homo sapien.”

“But you see, I need a new familiar, and you crashed right into our circle.”

That’s how I came to live in a forest looking like a freak with Betty McLean, leaving school, friends and family behind.

Its mouth stretches and I can smell decay, and something vinegar sharp. “Aren’t you afraid, good Sir? It’s October after all, and though I hate to point it out, you’ve got a long drop if you lose your grip.” Its voice is low and deep, a matron’s voice.

My heart’s hammering fit to wake the dead now – too bad that someone already has – and I dig nails tighter into my precarious perch. Just in time. With a sudden whoosh of cold air, the ghost’s floating, its nose to mine. An ache spreads through my chest, like the winter chill. Suddenly, I’m glad I have my knife in my pocket.

She’s a woman. I can tell ‘coz she’s all in dusty white, her crinoline showing off full skirted splendour and lace at the bust. Her starched cotton gown is dry against my knuckles, dry as animal carcass salted within an inch of its life, and I kind of like it. Reminds me of that time Lucy let me stroke the triangle of stiff linen at her lap. Poor Luce married off to that drunkard, Willie. Free Willie, we call him, on account of his easy way with the young girls at his inn. She might be respectable now, all chignon buns and silks and furs and in a good strip of London where the posh toffs go but—Well, I was glad to leave her sitting at my kitchen this morning. I’d promised her I’d not make her go back, that she could stay with me as long as she needed, until she found her feet.

“Don’t you want to know why I’ve appeared?” The ghost lady asks politely. “I’m told most people do.”

I run through my worst transgressions as fast as I can. Until this job, I stole watches on the corner, pickpocketed coin while I boot-blacked, guarded a brothel.

“None of that,” she says, amused. “Petty, small things, and you needed to do them to survive. I’m no sanctimonious rich philanthropist in the House of Lords to lecture you.”

“Can’t say I do know then,” I say. “And if it’s all the same to you, I’d much rather you left.”

“I can’t do that,” she says. “You see, you’re a good man with a good heart.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You see those men scurrying away in the shadows?” She says.

I look down towards the dark park lined by brass fencing and see four of ‘em, top hats pulled over their heads, toiling away with a coffin on their shoulders.

“They’re grave-robbers and know full well you’re a watchman as much as a lamp lighter. They’d have stabbed you easy as winking afore your knife could flash.”

Cor, I could see she were right. If I’d have shimmied down a minute or so earlier, I’d have happened upon ‘em … “Here,” I say suspiciously. “Why d’ya care so much ‘bout my mortal coil?”

She’s crying now, clear tears sizzling as they hit the air and vanish. “I was William’s first wife. Ran away from a respectable home to be with him and he beat me until I died, a bloody pile of rags. Your Luce was smarter than me. She got away.”

I’m gaping. The ghost is already breaking up, wisping at the edges like a thread pulled loose. She won’t be with me much longer and still I can’t think of anything to say.

“You could try thank you,” she laughs, sounding faint as her mouth smudges out like chalk wiped from a blackboard.

“Thanks,” I whisper, thinking of what woulda happened to Lucy had I not come home.

But the ghost’s already gone.

Ben

We ballroom danced
through your glitter dust
switched partners, said
“encompassing Wollongong, Sydney, Melbourne
let’s follow your rose red.”

Foxtrotted to your piping
opened our arms and said “yes”
Give us chai magic and the beat
duck charmed dreams
gentleman’s jacket sewn deep

Silently rubbed skin-
fire for justice
spirit for kindness and care
open heart for love
and passion for fair.

So though death clutches
in conga clasp
this much I know is true;
your song winds on
we’ll keep dancing for you.

The Hestia

My hips wedge against the boat rim. I can taste the roughness of knotted rope at my mouth. Thick braids constrict my hands, feet, waist. With the movement of the boat, I roll into cracked and peeling painted edges.

The Hestia.

I had defined myself by him and me: Paul and grey stone pylons, pebbled sand underfoot, waves crashing, shoreline to shoreline. Back then, I imagined that our love would run free, our feet taking wing. Like Jesus we’d walk on water into sunset, coming out the other side, unscathed…

“Hestia, Hestia,” he said early in.

“Not Hestia. Ruthie, remember?”

Too dark. Too reticent to be flaming Hestia.

He stroked my cheek.“My island worshipping Hestia, darling.” His eyes burn smoke rings on my retinas as he flings liquid all over.“Sacred heart, sacred flame, burn bright for me.”

The boat lulls gentle on cresting tips. He hasn’t shared salt spray or the scaly damp of silver fishies. Rainbows reflect in slick oil.

He drops the match, leaps ashore and pushes the crackling boat into deeper sea.

Blistering skin. Obscured by smoke and flame.

Behind me, the pylons and Paul’s mad shadow. Ahead, the promise of blurry sunset.

A tall woman towers over me, her hair done in intricate ringlets like the statues they have in The Louvre, a shining pomegranate balancing on her head. When she smiles, crimson juice stains her teeth. “Welcome,” she says as she extends me her hand.

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Maybe it’s for the best. I’d had nowhere to go and no plan for the future when I’d run away from Andre’s drunken punches, but I’d soon found homelessness every bit as lonely and soul-biting as the newspapers said.

“What a strange question,” the woman replies, and I can see she believes it, grey silk sliding about her arms as she pulls me to my feet. She extends me a black goblet. “You won’t die unless you drink.”

I hold onto the goblet, but I don’t do as she says. “Where am I? Who are you?”

“The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, silly. Where else? As to who I am? I’m a woman who’s lost her way.”

I glance behind me, through the Arc, at a world that’s white and full of magic from the fairy lights on the trees and laugh. “Join the club. Where are you trying to get then?”

“Aglea.”

“Never heard of it,” I say dismissively, leaning back into the Arc. It’s weird having no one crowding for snaps or yelling because you’re ruining the aesthetic of a national monument.

“Not it. Who.” She smiles. “You know I’m Persephone, right?”

“Sure, and I’m Hades.” Still, there is the fact I’m in some kind of second Paris so maybe it’s not as mad as all that.

“You’re not mad at all,” she laughs and I’m trying not to freak out that she’s somehow read my mind. “The world’s gotten everything wrong about me. They say I wanted the underworld to escape my mother, that Hades kidnapped me, and I made the best of it, that other Gods and heroes came to woo me. They say Hephaeastus was one of them.” She steps forward to grasp both my arms. “Bullshit. It was you, Aglea, I yearned for.”

“Come again?”

She tilts her head. “You truly don’t remember?” And before I can back away her honeyed lips are on mine and it’s intoxicating and frightening all at once.

“We walked through the Elysian Fields and we loved, but then you returned to Zeus and Olympus. You Charities were always too unselfish. I’ve waited so long for you to be reborn and to find me.”

My head feels like cotton candy as I let her take my hand and force the death goblet back to my lips. I’m thinking I’d rather stick with a goddess over Andre or begging and there’s the fact I remember someone who looked an awful lot like this Persephone in Algeria, when I’d bought my plane ticket to France. She’d given me money, told me some story about making a fortune in the city of love. Had it all been leading to this?

I’ll take the chance. I drink down to the bitter dregs.

So what did I get up to (beside being a volunteer)? I kicked off my Saturday with a speculative fiction workshop with local horror and urban fantasy author, Alan Baxter.

Author, Alan Baxter, photo credit: Author website

No matter how many workshops I attend I always learn something new, and this time was no exception. I loved Alan’s neat definitions of speculative fiction as fiction that speculates in a way that stretches the reality of our world, stretches using science is science fiction and stretches involving the fantastical, is fantasy with horror able to genre hop in the same way comic fiction does. He also gave us timely reminders about ignoring genre and market and telling the story you want to tell.

I sometimes struggle with narrative drive so found Alan’s tips to check in on pacing, immersion, investment, empathy and tension super helpful, with good pacing leading to tension and tension created through one or more of immersion, investment and empathy. I will definitely be getting future beta readers to tell me when they get bored by my story, when they stop caring about characters and their struggles and if they have empathy for those in the story.

Quote of the workshop to leave you with: Reading equals staring at paper and hallucinating.

Thanks Alan! What an awesome image!!!

I then attended a session on how writers ‘feed themselves’ (because it doesn’t come from the money we make on our art!). It was great to hear about the importance of supportive communities and ways collaboration can lead to better outcomes for more writers. Being a nice, interested person and supporting other people’s work in a genuine way is so key to making sure the literary scene stays vibrant, but also helps you in the long run.

Photo credit: Codie Croasdale

Saturday afternoon, I caught up with some fellow Hard Copy alumni and we mooched around a rooftop bar drinking cocktails and mocktails and talking about our various wips.

Sunday was kicked off in the great outdoors behind the Wollongong Art Gallery in the Arts Precinct, with some slam poetry, live music and Hidden Harvest to feed us a brunch of re-purposed bread and jam made from unused fruit. This was such a chill way to spend the morning and left me in a great head space to attend more panels!

Hidden Harvest all set to get brunch started, photo credit: Wollongong Writers Festival Facebook Page

I started off with a super interesting panel on romance and consent. The all-female panel discussed whether society distrusts romance fiction because it’s overwhelmingly written by women in Australia (95% in fact) and therefore often deals with women as subjects rather than objects and the liberating and challenging way we can write romance when we start with the two golden rules of 1. Make sure characters seek active informed consent at all times and 2. Anything consenting adults do after that is natural. There were also welcome reminders for being mindful of slut-shaming, ageism and the alpha male slipping into a creepy emotionally abusive style relationship with the heroine. These things are pervasive story tropes in our society, but we should think about them and critique them and challenge them in our writing.

I had some great fun in a break seeing a bibliotherapist (a librarian who gives you tailored one on one book rec’s), then ran off to another interesting panel on lived experience of mental illness and telling stories about madness. I loved that the panel covered the importance of thinking about who has the right to tell such stories and that voice matters, that ‘truth’ can be owned by people and claimed back and that stories can be a way of escaping from the DSM medical narrative of mental health experience as a problem to be fixed. Writing poetry and stories becomes a matter of expression, rather than a means to treat the experience of mental illness itself.

By now, I was getting pretty tired, though I managed to fit in one more session right at the end of the festival on writing as a person of colour or from other marginalized groups such as First Nations or Muslim Australians. The panel discussion was full of interesting points on writing genuine experience and getting away from mainstream, often harmful, stereotypes of race, gender or culture which definitely got me thinking about how I consume mainstream TV, film and books and how this can accidentally bleed into my work.

I drove home to collapse in a heap, but what a great weekend! Congrats to all the guest speakers, organisers and volunteers who helped make it all so great. See you next year!

via The Washer Woman’s Favourite by Maureen Flynn (SNEAK PEEK)

Happily, I can now announce I have a second short story coming out with a professional publication. Specul8 Publishing is a Queensland based publisher and journal and its new themed anthology, Temporal Fractures: (mis)adventures in time, comes out in December 2018.

I’m so excited to let y’all know that my story, ‘The Life and Crime of Dr Minnie Isaacs PhD,’ will be in it. It’s a sci fi romp full of silly fun and I hope you love it.

The full author line-up is below. I am pretty stoked that I’ll be in an anthology featuring H G Wells!