‘Trees are how I see the world and central to my imagination. I feel better when I’m among them. And my language seems to lend itself to writing about trees.’

‘The short story form demands a respect for the limitations of time and space, and enables a focus on the particular, the intimate, and the fleeting.’

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an event where writers all over the world come together with a shared goal of each writing a fifty-thousand word novel. As the name implies, it takes place within a single month. For those that haven’t written anything of a comparable length before it can be daunting, but these […]

No one can avoid grammar. Even if you can’t tell a pronoun from a participle at ten paces, you’re still an amateur grammarian; you employ it, at quite a sophisticated level, every time you speak or text or make a half-decent sentence, even a sentence fragment. You need grammar if you want to make sense, […]

You may have thought all the hard work was over: goodbye to those nights slaving over plot lines and tweaking dialogue, farewell to those days building up to penning the final page, the final paragraph, the final sentence. Once it’s done, it’s done, right? Well… not really. Now comes the searching for a publisher, the […]

We spoke with Felicity Castagna ahead of her workshop with us on June 16. Your last book Small Indiscretions: Stories of Travel in Asia and your upcoming release The Incredible Here and Now are both concerned with the idea of place, but seem like very different works. Did you face different challenges in writing these […]

  How do you strike a balance between recognising that young adult readers are no longer children, but are not quite fully fledged adults either? Do you ever second guess yourself and tone down or take out particular scenes or plot lines? I spend a great deal of time before I start my draft, getting […]

What is it that you love about the short story? For a few years now I’ve been writing in author bios that I had a crush on the short story, that I was madly in love with the short story, that I was still in love… I guess I love everything about short stories. I […]