I’ll be talking collaboration, animation and illustration with the mighty Ant Sang at WORD Christchurch 2018. Ant Sang: Dharma Punk Best known for his Dharma Punks comics, the award-winning graphic novel Shaolin Burning and his work on the ground-breaking animated television series, bro’Town, Ant Sang brings to WORD his latest work, a collaboration with author Michael Bennett. Helen … Read more…
event
Bad Diaries Salon WORD Christchurch, 31 August
We’re thrilled to be bringing Bad Diaries Salon to New Zealand, and to WORD Christchurch 2018, which runs this year from 29 August to 2 September. The theme for WORD Christchurch this year is ADVENTUROUS, and Bad Diaries Salon will be bringing the #RISK to Friday night at the festival, following on from the gala Starry, Starry Night event. … Read more…
Bad Diaries Salon, Geelong, 11 July
Bad Diaries Salon was established mid-2017 with a call out from Jenny Ackland on Twitter – were there any writers who still had their old, bad teenage diaries, and would they be prepared to read them live? The response was overwhelming. Result: four salons were held in 2017, and Bad Diaries Salon is back with a Winter 2018 series … Read more…
Bad Diaries Salon, Port Fairy, 7 July
Bad Diaries Salon was established mid-2017 with a call out from Jenny Ackland on Twitter – were there any writers who still had their old, bad teenage diaries, and would they be prepared to read them live? The response was overwhelming. Result: four salons were held in 2017, and Bad Diaries Salon is back with a Winter 2018 series kicking … Read more…
Short Story Club, on stage and on air
Back in May 2017, Jesse Mulligan kicked off a new weekly feature on his weekday afternoon show on Radio New Zealand: Short Story Club. The idea for Short Story Club first came up, if I’m not mistaken, one afternoon a few weeks earlier when Jesse had frequent bookish guest and LitCrawl Queen (or possibly Pirate) Claire Mabey on the show. It works like … Read more…
Short Story Book Club Live at LitCrawl Wellington
I’ve been enjoying heading in to the RNZ studio now and again this year (here, here, here and here) to take part in Short Story Club, a weekly feature on Jesse Mulligan’s afternoon show. One of my stories, ‘Once had me’, has even been the story for discussion (not, obviously, a week I took part in the discussion; … Read more…
AFTERGLOW: Regrets and other events
On their website, the folks at Unity Books in Wellington recap events they hold in-store with blog posts titled AFTERGLOW. So, stealing from Unity (this is, I promise, the only manner in which I steal from Unity), I’d like to look back at the gleaming afterglow of events I took part in while I was … Read more…
Tell it Slant workshop, FAWWA, Perth
After a quarter of a century in research science, sticking with the facts, the biggest kick I get from writing fiction is the freedom it gives me to invent, to make stuff up (to lie?). I love working at the interface, too – the space where fact and fiction blend or join or mix, or where … Read more…
Author talk at The Grove library, Perth
I’m heading back to my reading roots on 4 October, to The Grove Library in Cottesloe, to talk about ‘writing, reading and everything in between’. I grew up in North Cottesloe in the 1960s and early 70s, and the little old library that was then on the site of the fabulous shiny current Grove Library was my … Read more…
The Bad Diaries Salon Volume 3, Perth
Melbourne literary phenomenon The Bad Diaries Salon (BDS) is coming to Perth this month, in its first outing beyond Melbourne. The Bad Diaries Salon Volume 3 Perth: Regrets features Brooke Davis, Laurie Steed, Annabel Smith, Jenny Ackland and me reading from our early, unedited works, on the theme of REGRET. The BDS is a salon series where writers read from … Read more…