February 2025. Another piece in The Australian about why people don't read (or write) the 'big books' anymore. And talking about the journey. Perhaps part of the problem is that we’ve lost interest in the journey on which writers can take us over our lives. From comics, to pre-franchised, pre-teen Tolkien, the discovery of Holden Caulfield, the oh-so-clever twenty-something Infinite Jest, then to something serious, Bolano, perhaps, and on and on it goes, the road less travelled that’s no longer travelled at all.
January 2025. Lockheed is a story about a cleaning woman who has been living in Elvis Presley's scrapped 1962 Lockheed 1329 Jetstar in a New Mexico boneyard since the seventies. Published by Sarasota's Magazine 1.
January 2025. Travel magazine Sojournal have published my take on Himmler's fist concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, a short train trip out of Berlin. The smell of something dead, the wet ground, the bulbs, the pea and ham soup from the SS barracks across the road, the sound of singing, an accordion, dogs barking, although it was just silence.
November 2024. This piece in The Australian is my take on French parachutist Franz Reichelt, the art of washing elephants, and why writing fiction isn't good for your health (or mind). So now all of these people have set their sights on washing elephants, but instead of saying forget the elephants, we say, Here, come and study elephant washing in more detail and you’ll have a better chance of getting a (the) job. We put an enormous amount of effort into learning the art of elephant washing (study tours, residencies and so on) but the job never comes up because the elephant dies and we’re all sad and some wannabe elephant washers even kill themselves.
Garry Shead The Ern Malley Suite
October 2024. Here's another Ern Malley chat I had with Mair Bosworth on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Detective. I had read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still the black swan of trespass on alien waters.
January 2024. I wrote this essay in the Glasgow Review of Books about the German (early) modernist playwright Georg Buchner, and especially his play-in-fragments, Woyzeck. I also talked about a few similar writers (ranging all the way to the twentieth century). ... a series of fragments as powerful today as they were 190 years ago. The sharp, frenetic dialogue reflecting Woyzeck’s psychosis; the excision of everything unnecessary; the contrast of dialogue and folksong; the unheard voices, all leading to the inevitable.
October 2023. After seeing an Australian Museum exhibition of the Scott Sisters' nineteenth century paintings and descriptions of moths, I wrote this piece, out now with EcoTheo magazine. You can read the piece here or order a copy of the magazine here. In their wattle-and-daub living room, father and daughters glance across the candle-lit room at each other; the nib of Walker’s fountain pen disturbs the silence as Hattie washes out her brush in a jar of water, then continues painting the green-winged male moth, with its transverse streak; the flame-red females with jagged patches on each forewing.