What's new?
July 2019. The very excellent Burning House Press have published one of my short, short stories: 'From where the birch takes the sun'. It's set in a small German town in early 1945, and introduces 12 year old Peter Maier.
Peter Maier wears his best Sunday clothes. His mother laid them out for him, and his father watched as he got dressed, saying, ‘It needn’t be such a drama.’ But, by definition, it does, and will be, and this is why he’s so anxious.
Peter Maier wears his best Sunday clothes. His mother laid them out for him, and his father watched as he got dressed, saying, ‘It needn’t be such a drama.’ But, by definition, it does, and will be, and this is why he’s so anxious.
July 2019. My take on Surveillance Capitalism, why we need to get angrier about lost privacy, and the problem I have with my Glaswegian genes. In Indaily. Also in Indaily, a column about anger, and the art of ranting.
As a purveyor, a refiner, a diviner of words, I fear for the future. Mostly, a world in which citizens are so paralysed by fear – so busy trying to pay taxes to subsidise the technocracy, so distracted by the promises of technology, so angry they spend their days seeking others to blame for their despondency – that they don’t see the big picture: a world in which, removed from the communities, the values, the relationships that used to nourish us, we succumb to the future through a mixture of apathy, tiredness and ignorance.
As a purveyor, a refiner, a diviner of words, I fear for the future. Mostly, a world in which citizens are so paralysed by fear – so busy trying to pay taxes to subsidise the technocracy, so distracted by the promises of technology, so angry they spend their days seeking others to blame for their despondency – that they don’t see the big picture: a world in which, removed from the communities, the values, the relationships that used to nourish us, we succumb to the future through a mixture of apathy, tiredness and ignorance.
June 2019. In my final piece for the Adelaide Review, I look at at the Ern Malley hoax, and obscenity trial, 75 years on. Read it here.
June 2019. New story ('The Holotype') in Island 157 (out June 3). To whet your appetite, here's another story I wrote for Island (151): 'Box of Bones'
March 2019. This Excellent Machine is now out. It's about growing up Hillcrest, and all that involves.
Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.
Here is a generous review from Lisa Hill at ANZ LitLovers
Marcel (Proust), Milan (Kundera) and Me (me), in the Sydney Morning Herald
Read an extract here in InDaily
Another extract from The Adelaide Review.
Review from the excellent Helen Eddy at ReadPlus
A published work-in-progress (2018) from Westerly
Review in The Australian
Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.
Here is a generous review from Lisa Hill at ANZ LitLovers
Marcel (Proust), Milan (Kundera) and Me (me), in the Sydney Morning Herald
Read an extract here in InDaily
Another extract from The Adelaide Review.
Review from the excellent Helen Eddy at ReadPlus
A published work-in-progress (2018) from Westerly
Review in The Australian
February 2019. Another Adelaide Review piece I wrote about the death of the social contract. Or, in other words, how much your government doesn't really love you.
The late cultural theorist, Mark Fisher, described a corporate-political lovefest that aims to “keep us in a state of panicked anxiety … and radical competitive individualism so that we can’t act together and gain a collective agency”. Instead, functioning individually, wired into a world where technology will save us, connect us to a community of the like-minded, encourage our creativity and sense of self-worth. But what we’re really left with is a semi-medicated existence where, all of a sudden, and for no reason, we feel like crying.
The late cultural theorist, Mark Fisher, described a corporate-political lovefest that aims to “keep us in a state of panicked anxiety … and radical competitive individualism so that we can’t act together and gain a collective agency”. Instead, functioning individually, wired into a world where technology will save us, connect us to a community of the like-minded, encourage our creativity and sense of self-worth. But what we’re really left with is a semi-medicated existence where, all of a sudden, and for no reason, we feel like crying.
January 2019. Here are four short features I wrote about a few of my favourite books. All were published in Indaily.
1. Under the Volcano
2. Wise Blood
3. Blutsbruder
4. Pedro Paramo
1. Under the Volcano
2. Wise Blood
3. Blutsbruder
4. Pedro Paramo
November 2018. My play for voices, Westward Ho!, has just been listed for performance/purchase with Australian Plays. It concerns an ageing greyhound trainer, and a twelve-year-old boy who saves him from death by leading him back over a strange version of his life. It premiered in 2012 with the Centre for International Theatre, produced and directed by theatre legend Guy Masterson and the brilliant Joanne Hartstone.
She was buried in the Parklands. By her husband, who’d clanged her on the head with a shovel. Used it to bury her, at three in the morning, when it was all quiet. She just talked and talked and talked, never stopped. And in the end, he’d had enough. So he murdered her. Caved in her skull, right at the back. Put her in his bread van and drove to a quiet spot, dug a hole, dragged her into it, and without a word of a lie, she was still talkin’ as he covered her with dirt…
She was buried in the Parklands. By her husband, who’d clanged her on the head with a shovel. Used it to bury her, at three in the morning, when it was all quiet. She just talked and talked and talked, never stopped. And in the end, he’d had enough. So he murdered her. Caved in her skull, right at the back. Put her in his bread van and drove to a quiet spot, dug a hole, dragged her into it, and without a word of a lie, she was still talkin’ as he covered her with dirt…
