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Interview with Alan Fyfe, author of T
I can’t believe it’s been over two years since I last published an author interview on this website! I’m back and my first interview in my 2022 series is with Alan Fyfe — some of you may remember Alan’s poetry reading from last year. This time he’s back as a very-soon-to-be published novelist. As with the artists and writers I previously profiled, I included questions from The Proust Questionnaire in this interview. Authors are always free to ignore these or any of my other questions but I am very grateful that Alan answered all of them because now I know even more about this very talented writer who I am…
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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…
