Further Reading
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BOOKS Small Moments (2007) This is a short novel I wrote, and that was published in 2007, though I actually started writing it several years before then. Small Moments marked the first time I wrote about the character Sacha; after finishing the early drafts of the novel I decided that I liked her too much to leave her behind, so I based Instant Life Substitute around her. Small Moments describes the week immediately after the bushfires that devastated Canberra on the 18th of January, 2003. In particular, it describes the response to those fires of a family of four - Sacha, her sister Kate, and their parents Robert and Helen - who, though they live in Canberra, were not directly affected by the fires. The novel explores issues of "ownership" of a natural disaster: whether those who aren't affected have a right to feel as injured by the events, as do those who lost property in the fires. It also attempts to be an accurate depiction of life in Canberra immediately after the fires, and the sense of community that came through as a consequence of that day, and ultimately of the resilience of ordinary life and ordinary people in the face of such circumstances. I actually started writing Small Moments a year or so before the bushfires: it started out as an attempt to defy Tolstoy's oft-repeated maxim that all happy families are alike; I felt that for too long this had been used by writers as an excuse to ignore the lives and stories of happy families and to concentrate instead on increasingly cliched and repetitive stories of unhappy or disfunctional families. The family I created in the novel lived in Canberra, because that was where I lived and had grown up. When the bushfires struck it quickly became apparent to me that it was impossible to write a story set in contemporary Canberra, and not address the fires in some way. At the same time, I felt that the story of those people not affected by the fires was in many ways more interesting - because less often told - than the stories of those people affected by them; also, I felt that it wasn't my "right" to tell the story of a family who were directly affected by the family. So, after much new writing and re-writing and heavy editing - and about eight or nine drafts - Small Moments was completed. It is, I am told, the first novel to be written about the 2003 Canberra bushfires. You can hear an interview I did about Small Moments on Canberra's local A.B.C. Radio station here.
We Both Know: ten stories about relationships (2005) We Both Know was my first book. It started life as a collection of fifteen stories, which I wrote over the course of several years and compiled as a Christmas present for families and friends a couple of years earlier. I then culled the collection down to the ten strongest stories, edited and re-wrote them where necessary, and submitted it for publication to Ginninderra Press, who quickly agreed to publish it. The collection arose out of a desire to explore human relationship of various kinds: not just romantic relationships, but also relationships between parents and children, between friends, and even (in the final story) between a man and his dog. You can read one of the stories here.
Both Small Moments and We Both Know are available from their publisher, Ginninderra Press.
WEBSITES In addition to I.L.S., I'm also involved in the following websites: This is a blog I set up in 2007 in order to write "discursive reviews" of C.D.s, movies, and T.V. shows. To my shame, I don't update it nearly as often as I should - but I'm hoping to rectify that. We'll see.
This music blog was set up in 2007 by Jeph Jacques, as an outgrowth (and eventual replacement) of the recommended listening page on his website. The blog has a broad remit to review music in any form, of whatever kind the reviewers feel like discussing. I'm one of five contributors to the blog. |