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Famous Adopted People: a Novel – by Alice Stephens
I saw Famous Adopted People at my local library and picked it up for a friend who has an adopted child. I was in a hurry so I didn’t see the words ‘a novel’ and thought it was a non-fiction book about famous adopted people. It is not. The book is best described as a rollicking read that explores a range of salient issues around transnational adoption and one that exemplifies how some truths are best told through fiction. At the start of the novel, we meet two young women who are negotiating the complexities of their transnational and racialized identities. At the center of the story is Lisa Pearl, a Korean-America adoptee who isn’t…
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Nicole K: On Finding a Voice – The Tapestry Project
Nicole K is a Singaporean writer and the founder of The Tapestry Project, a mental-health advocacy organisation. She was one of a handful of students from an arts college in Singapore who came to Perth for the AAWP conference. There were five or six concurrent sessions, and I chose the Singaporean writers one because I wanted to know what sort of writing was coming out of the former British colony; one where the Chinese settlers are the main ethnic group and English remains the official language. I really related to the stories written by her peers —a mix of cosmopolitan locals and expat writers— about mistaken identities in the post-colonial…
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Fremantle Press Emerging Writers Pilot Program
My first blog post was about KSP’s 1st Edition Retreat and through KSP I am part of Freo’s emerging writer’s mentorship program. The three of us who took part in that program had a weekend of intensive workshops with Laurie Steed but we do not have an ongoing mentor. There are three other writing centres involved in the program; each centre has its own selection process. Mel, Emma and I were selected through a blind submission process. I went to the first of five workshops yesterday and this one was run in partnership with WA Poets Inc. The focus was poetry but there were some discussions about short stories. The conversation…
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Deborah Cass Prize Shortlist
“Hate is not only a political strategy, it is a failure of imagination, a lack of empathy. We can’t legislate for imagination, we can only do what people have always done: tell new stories, build better worlds in the theatre of the mind.” — Dan Cass I am on the shortlist for the 2018 Deborah Cass award. Deborah was an academic at the London School of Economics who decided to focus on creative writing after a cancer diagnosis. She had two short stories published before she passed away in 2013 at the age of 53. Her family and friends set up the Deborah Cass Prize for early career writers from a…
