It’s perfectly fine if you’re not writing at the moment and if you don’t write anything ever again.

The writer’s voice: a precious thread that can guide us out of this dark labyrinth.

The resilience is the container, really, for my vulnerability – the egg carton holding the fragile shells. Inside the shell of my skin, my brain is the white, the yolk my yellow heart, quivering in gooey jelly.

‘What if systems were created to ensure that disabled people were put first, and not last? What kind of world would exist if disability was taken for granted, rather than tacked on? Let’s write some stories to find out.’

I believe our mental instability and persistent dissatisfaction in life can be attributed in part to being writers – the anxiety about a permanence that can never be perfect. We live with our past selves in print— yet we are allowed to grow. At any chance we are given. How do we write a self that will continue to expand and twirl across the eons of our limited time?

I write nature. Or, more correctly, it writes me. My creativity stems from my connection to landscape and my relationship with the natural world. It is source and subject – who I am, how I write, and how I live my life.

I come from a storytelling culture, and stories are the glue that hold my Goori community together, across time, anchoring us in Bundjalung country. Our stories instruct, they provoke and they entertain. Yet our stories have been marginalised through colonial subjugation, or otherwise appropriated and tacked on to the stories of others.

‘These days nearly all my friends are writers. Much of the joy in my life comes from our conversations about books, our introspective lives, and our work. It also comes from witnessing their efforts and celebrating their successes.’

‘Playing with quicksilver is what poets do. Like children gently prodding the mercury and marvelling at the weightlessness of what appears heavy, the fleetness of what should be slow, the formation of one from what was many, poets do not feel the danger their material conceals …’