‘Reading YA as a young person empowered me with the language to talk about things that I didn’t know how to talk about. I found a library of reference for my many emotions and experiences.’

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?

The Writing NSW team is heading to Sydney Writers’ Festival! Check out what we’re most excited to see, and give us the strength to not spend every dollar we have on books.

Please note, the Writing NSW office will be closed on Friday 26 May.

‘Research has given me characters and their stories and if the synopsis is the bones of my novel, research helps me put flesh on those bones.’

‘I’m a strong believer in the stimulating qualities of limitations: the more constraints you have to work within, the more creative you have to be; the less room you have to overthink, the better.’

‘Poetry has many different forms and poets approach poetry in different ways, just as musicians and painters vary in the ways in which they approach their art forms.’

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.

Take a look at what we’ve read in March: funerals, thrillers, Songlines, and the Ming Dynasty. It’s quite a list this month…

‘I’ve always loved the notion of a detective of some kind coming into a community to investigate a terrible crime, and sifting through all the chaos and turning things upside-down in their quest to find truth, and justice for the town, then restoring it to a kind of temporary peace (until next time).’