Eros, beauty and friction: what happened when Susan Johnson took her 85-year-old mother to live on a Greek island

This is a copy of a review that I wrote for The Conversation recently. Sydney…

Portrait of Deborah Levy with colourful geometric shapes

Episode 3—Position of the ‘I’ from observer to centre stage  

This next passage in my series is from the contemporary British author Deborah Levy’s memoir,…

Episode 2: The ‘I’ and other voices

This is my second post for writers on the topic of the first person ‘I’ in creative nonfiction and memoir.

A person obscured by dark, an eye and some of their arm visible in a shaft of light.

Episode 1: the presence of the ‘I’ in memoir and creative nonfiction

One of the challenges of writing memoir and other forms of narrative nonfiction is how much presence the ‘I’ should have as the narrator at any moment in the text.  

From ‘scenelets’ to scene

A take-away from last week’s sessions had to do with gathering small scenes or sequences of incidents together into a more substantive single scene.

The critical first, middle and last 10 pages

In the most recent of Writing NSW’s First Friday Club talks, hosted by author Ashley Kalagian Blunt, publisher…