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REPOST: Moving in from the Margins with Rashida Murphy
My best laid plans to publish a fresh interview before the new year has gone awry so here is a repost of my interview with Rashida Murphy from earlier this year. *** Rashida Murphy is a Perth based writer, poet, mentor, and author of The Historian’s Daughter (2016, UWAP). She has a Masters in English Literature and a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University. Rashida is also known in the local writing community for being a big supporter of emerging writers, especially those of us who are—for lack of a better term— ‘people of colour’, ‘ethnic writers’, ‘non-whites’, ‘third world looking’, ‘multicultural Australians’ [insert a…
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Sophronia Liu – A Shimmering Sea, 20th Century Hong Kong
It has taken me a very long time to put together this post because I wasn’t sure how I could best honour my friend Sophronia Liu. I have had this post marked as “Private” for over a year. I met Sophie in 2010 at a conference in Hong Kong. I was immediately drawn to her creative energy and openness. Until I met Sophie, I’d never met a female and Chinese artist my mother’s age, let alone someone who was part of the 1960s Asian-American/civil rights movement. At the time, Sophie was a PhD student who was working on her memoir, which was posthumously published as The Shimmering Sea, a collection…
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Talya Rubin and The Pandemic Poetry Project
Welcome to a New Day If the cherry tree were in blossom like this always, maybe we would not weep at the losses the silences. How a boat moored in the harbour is quiet now. A friend inside it, or not inside it eats dumplings, sips soup, sleeps away from the people she loves in case by breathing too closely on their soft skin, too near to be safe she kills them. A white bloom is sudden, a shock of life, like birth, like the birth of a little girl in my arms, something uncertain and beautiful as a cloud or the sun triumphant from behind a cloud. “Welcome…
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REPOST: Emma Young: Journalist and Author of The Last Bookshop
I’ve been so busy in 2020 that I haven’t had much time to update this blog so please enjoy a conversation I had with Emma Young back in late 2019. Emma’s debut novel The Last Bookshop will be released this month. ** Emma Young is an award-winning journalist at WAtoday by day and a novelist before sunrise. I met Emma, at Laurie Steed’s KSP 1st Edition fellowship in 2018 where she inspired me with her commitment to her craft. I learnt so much from her about how to ‘own it’ as a writer and my writing practice has changed because of Emma. I already a big fan of her work at the…
