You’re the author of a staggering nine novels of woman’s contemporary fiction. Did you choose this genre or did it choose you? Hm, maybe it was a bit of both? I hadn’t heard of such a thing as ‘women’s fiction’ when I first met with a publisher. She encouraged me with the old chestnut ‘write […]

Linda Funnell will be running DIY Digital: Reaching Your Readers with E-books and Print on Demand on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 November. Here she asks one of her guest speakers, Anna Maguire, about the trials and triumphs of digital publishing. How quickly is the digital publishing landscape changing? Is it getting easier for DIY […]

In an age of touchscreens, desktops, and video-on-demand, the ability to handle visual communication is an advantage for every writer. It’s not always about artistic technique, but a willingness to embrace the use of images to get your message across. Matt Finch talks graphic storytelling with Pat Grant. “Visual metaphor is an incredibly powerful force,” […]

What exactly is a short story? In one sense it is completely obvious – a story that is short – but defining it is something far more complicated than issues of length. The short story has always been at the core of everything I write from my collection of travel fictions, (Small Indiscretions: stories of […]

Before Deborah Abela joins us to teach Writing for Kids in October, she tells us about her popular Max Remy series, how working in television can teach you about being a writer, and her work with Room to Read. The Max Remy series now consists of ten books – a busy Superspy indeed! Did you […]

Dr Robyn Ferrell is the author of several books of philosophy and creative writing and is Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. In the lead-up to her The Art of Truth course, we pick her brain about her own writing and the writers that she […]

Barry Divola loves short stories so much that he wants you to write them. That’s why he’s running a course called Jumpstart, to get your creativity flowing and give your story writing a kick in the pants. The author of Nineteen Seventysomething (Affirm Press) recently won the Margaret River Short Story Competition with his story […]

The chronicler of family stories begins the writing and publishing journey with many years of research. I have found that research of many diverse records has been important for writing a memoir of my own childhood: some of the most interesting and useful are school records. I have been able to trace some of the […]

This is an extract from a piece that originally appeared in the Emerging Writers’ Festival book.   My friend, Chris, insists that when I write about sex I am never writing about sex. This seems ridiculous. I have spent over a year and a half writing a short true story about sex every day. 511 […]