Bad Diaries Salon WORD Christchurch

Bad Diaries Salon RISK at WORD Christchurch 2018

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

Bad Diaries Salon Geelong #FIRST

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

Bad Diaries Salon Port Fairy #DELETED

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

Jesse Mulligan Short Story Club on RNZ

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 Claire Mabey on the show. It works like this: every … Read more…

Short Story Book Club Live at LitCrawl Wellington

LitCrawl Wellington 2017

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…

The Bad Diaries Salon Volume 3, Perth

BDS Vol 3 Perth - Regrets (credit: Robert Lukins @robertlukins)

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…

State of Origin workshop, FAWWA, Perth

Tracy (and brother) at Allen Park, c. 1971

‘Where’s home for you?’ is a question that I (Melbourne-born, Perth-raised, New Zealand-based) often find hard to answer. As I settle in for a month as FAWWA CAL Established Writer in Residence (on the edge of Allen Park, just around the corner from where I grew up), join me for a workshop exploring State of Origin.   Workshop: State of Origin … Read more…