book-review – twenty-one words

Don’t look at me

April 4, 2026Posted in a thought, Autumn, books, Cairo, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged book-review, books, despair, Dream State, Eric Puchner, fiction, flash-fiction, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … marriage

She’d thought true love was about being understood: about finding that person who could see the sadness in you, the peep show of crazy you kept from everyone else. But what if it was better to be misunderstood? Not to be reminded all the time, just by looking at your partner’s face, that the peep show was there? What if love wasn’t about sharing yourself completely, about yoking your secret sorrow to another’s, but about finding someone who made you forget yourself?

From ‘Dream State‘
By Eric Puchner

Cece, one of the protagonists in Erich Puchner’s novel Dream State, is a woman after my own heart. Having married Charlie, a man she is deeply in love with, she runs off with his best friend Garrett, a man whom she meets just before her wedding — the man whom Charlie has in fact asked to officiate the wedding, the man who (briefly? forever?) captures her heart in a way that Charlie can’t. Because Garrett understands Cece. Garret sees her. And it feels magic to Cece.

Or does it?

I love Puchner’s exploration of love in the passage I’ve quoted above. I love the idea that love — romantic love, enduring love, the love between two people — might be the opposite of a truth-finding mission, that it might instead be about finding someone who [makes] you forget about yourself. I love the idea that maybe sometimes that’s where the magic between two people lies: in the way they can help each other turn away from sorrow towards joy, towards their more beautiful selves. It’s a lovely, if also poignantly humorous, reworking of the idea of romance.

Easter table, 2026.

On the topic of stories about romance and love, I’ve just had a story of my own published, which is about a couple who meet and fall in love in Cairo. If you’d like to read it, you can find it over at The Marlowe Review. It’s called City of Light.

I have some other stories coming out this year, which I’ll provide links to here as they come out. I’m excited to be seeing my words in print, online, after all these years. Writers, I think, are a little like lovers — we write our stories to share our secret sorrow, but we also write stories in the hope that we can help a reader forget themselves for a little while as they lose themselves in our words.

That’s what we try for, anyway. That’s what I try for.

Lately I’ve been reading …

The pendulum appears in the house in March. Abigail does not know if it has arrived by post or if her mother has bought it in a shop in the city: ‘The Pendulum’, a short story by Ea Anderson in Peatsmoke Journal.
I thought for a time that my dad was a murderer. It was that first summer of vultures: red- headed drones, their wings pouring shadows onto our heads. Mobs of them shitting in parking lots and roosting in the alleyways downtown. Mobs of them, black and sinister: ‘Vultures, American Vultures’, a short story by Craig. M Foster in Quarterly West
When we run out of nice things to say to each other, Gil and I watch TV like we’re each just a brain in a jar, sitting side by side. Except instead of brains we’re hearts. And by hearts, I mean sex organs. And by sex organs, I mean all we ever do anymore is fuck: ‘The Bright Jars of Our Bodies’, a piece of flash fiction by Sara Hills in Flash Frog
The room is always quiet and milky and her little nails scratch a bit when they touch my hand, grasp my finger: ‘My Sister’s Life as a Series of Rooms’, a piece of flash fiction by Nora Nadjarian in Craft
It was one of those drinking games. You go around the table, and each person says which memory they’d borrow from a parent to embody: ‘Heart’, a piece of micro fiction by David James Poissant in The Cincinnati Review
My mother says my father’s 30-pound weight loss is the result of a renewed commitment to his health: ’The Wintering’, a story in one sentence by Maureen Aitken in Monkeybicycle
For years I lived / as if my life were made of clay: ‘For years I lived’, a poem by Maggie Smith, from her latest collection, A Suit or a Suitcase (quoted in its entirety in Ron Charles’s substack, Free Time — scroll to the end of the post to find the poem)
Body is something you need in order to stay / on this planet and you only get one: ‘Living in the Body’, a poem by Joyce Sutphen

Clamour

February 9, 2026Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, books, Cairo, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, moments of beauty, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged book-review, books, despair, fiction, flash-fiction, reading, Teju Cole, Tremor, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … the city at night

But should you happen to arrive at night you might think you were in a different place altogether. From over there is a sound of argument, from over there a clamour of complaint, from over there a gospel choir, from over there the muezzin’s call, from over there three or four sputtering generators, from over there the squall of the bus stop and taxi stand, from over there revellers and water sellers, from over there the neighbour’s relentless television blaring out soap operas, from over there disconsolate wailing, from over there passionate lovemaking, from over there disputation and rancour, a vast sonic mix of an ocean that beats in incessant waves the whole night through until sunrise arrives and the pale light of morning settles a dazzled silence once again over the city.

From ‘Tremor‘
By Teju Cole

When I read Teju Cole’s description above of Lagos, I thought of my own experiences of Cairo when I lived there for a few months many years ago in the 1990s. Yes, I thought. A vast sonic mix of an ocean, I thought, yes. They are different cities — of course they are — but still, Cole’s description captures something of the essence of Cairo for me. That tremendous, beautiful clamour.

Hello, everyone! It’s been a minute since I last posted. I’ve been busy writing and living (and, yes, living and writing), and — always — reading. Meanwhile, an algal bloom has spread along the coast of South Australia. A bushfire has burned through beautiful Deep Creek. A president in a country much bigger and more powerful than my own has tried to buy Greenland. In the face of all the sadness and madness and badness of this world, it’s hard not to feel anything but grief. In the face of all of this, that is to say, I do only what I know how to do, which is to remain present. Show up. Keep living and breathing and writing and reading. Keep living in a way that is meaningful to me. This is all I can think of to do.

Melaleuca bush in flower in the scrub, February 2026.

I took the photo in this post this week while I was out on a run through the scrub. It was a hot afternoon and I was tired and my legs felt very heavy, but I still treasure running, no matter how slow a runner I am these days, and so I pushed on for twenty minutes or so. All along the path, as I ran, the melaleuca bushes were in flower, their creamy blossoms emitting a kind of musty, dusty scent that I love. Can you see a bee in the photograph? There is one, if you look closely; indeed, there were many bees in the bushes, busying themselves with pollen. In close-up, here in this photograph, what you can see is only beauty, but the truth is that on the opposite side of the path along which these bushes grow, the land has been cleared for subdevelopment; it is now bare of growth.

More houses, less trees, less bees — that’s the bigger picture. Yes, this is a metaphor. To extend the metaphor, I will add that I also took a picture of the road, the cleared land (the bigger picture), which I planned to include in this post, but at the last moment I changed my mind. It doesn’t help, I think, to focus on the bigger picture. Let’s be grateful for the small islands of beauty that remain in this world.

I’ll be back again in a few weeks with links to some stories that I’ve had accepted for publication in online literary magazines, for anyone interested in reading my short fiction. In the meantime, for today, I’ll leave you, as always, with some reading. This year, I’m changing my focus in the ‘Lately I’ve been reading’ section and will be providing links to a selection of fiction and poetry there instead of essays and articles. Micro fiction, flash fiction, short stories, poetry — there’s a wealth of beautiful work out there, and that’s what I’ll be providing links to this year.

Lately I’ve been reading …

They are prone to many things. They are prone to squabbling, which for some is another way of conversing: ‘Bluebird’, a short story in L’Esprit Literary Magazine by Michael Edman
At Mercy Memorial, the examination room walls are paper-thin. A man in the next room tells the psych registrar that he will top himself if he doesn’t get the money today, the seventeen-thousand dollars his brother stole from him: ‘Skin Hunger’, a short story in The Masters Review by Melissa Goode
Once when I was young, I read a story in the newspaper: ‘An Accident of Love’, a piece of flash fiction in Necessary Fiction by Nan Byrne
We went out / into the school yard together, me and the boy / whose name and face’: ‘The Shout’, a poem by Simon Armitage
Mom is a groupie, so when Dad has a gig, no matter how big or small, she forces us to go as a family: ‘A Genius Can Always Get Their Hands on a Violin’, a piece of flash fiction in Electric Literature by Drue Denman
I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road: ‘Swerve’, a piece of micro fiction in Brevity by Brenda Miller

A thousand ways

November 27, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged book-review, books, Brandon Taylor, despair, fiction, Minor Black Figures, Ravenous Girls, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … making art

There were always concessions. Little self-betrayals of one’s values and virtues and morals, the thousand ways everyone cut against their convictions in order to get things done. That was the real crux of modernity. The extractive cost required to make any kind of progress. No matter what you did or sought to do, the cost was always a little bit of yourself. You could keep your work whole and intact, but then no-one would ever see it. And even if you did pay the price, it was possible that your work would end up stuffed in a desk in a place upstairs, totally forgotten. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was staking anything of value to anyone else — just his integrity.

But that was all [Wyeth] had. That was the one thing left to him in the whole world. His convictions. His sense of not betraying himself to get ahead. Putting a painting in that show — not that he had a painting to begin with — felt like a kind of death. Like the only kind of death that really mattered to him. The death of his vision of himself as a painter. What would he do after that? What would he have left to him?

‘It’s possible to over think things,’ Bernard said. ‘Really, it’s down to what you want to do.’

‘Agency,’ Wyeth said.

‘I know. How awful.’

From ‘Minor Black Figures‘
By Brandon Taylor

I can think of no-one who writes better about living in the modern world as an artist than Brandon Taylor. No-one, more particularly, who writes better about being a young, queer, Black male artist in the twenty-first century who is trying to practise art while not succumbing to the white gaze. (Taylor describes white supremacy in another wonderful passage in Minor Black Figures, as giving Black artists a tiny white man in your mind to argue with constantly all the way up and down until you died never having had a single thought that was not either about whiteness or a reaction to whiteness).

This is not my story, clearly. Still, as a (middle-aged, white, female, straight) writer, I feel a great deal of kinship with Wyeth in the passage above as he struggles with the value and integrity of his art practice. Yes, yes, yes.

Pomegranate flower in my garden, November 2025.

For myself, post-publication of my novella Ravenous Girls, I’m still writing. Still writing, still learning. I am often puzzled by the values I encounter in the publishing world and more broadly in the world of books and reading — puzzled by how writers seem to be valued more for their productivity and conformism than for what they have to say or how they say it. As a consequence, I don’t know if I’ll ever have another book published. But I do know that I will continue to write, and that the act of writing — when I separate myself from its place in the commercial world — is meaningful to me, in and of itself.

Or, as Taylor puts it: Anyway, it wasn’t like he was staking anything of value to anyone else — just his integrity.

Lizzie mid-yawn, November 2025 (this cat has no issues with her own integrity!)

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve been exploring the world of short fiction in the last year, discovering some wonderful short stories, flash fiction and micro fiction in the process. Below I’ve listed some of the stories I’ve enjoyed — happy reading!

You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work … Sordid Little World by Gerri Brightwell, via X-Ray Lit Mag.
I warned you that my grandmother wouldn’t like you and that you wouldn’t like her … an unnamed piece of micro fiction by Sophie Hoss, via Ninth Letter.
I do not want to die here … Godless, by Australian writer Mel Goode, in monkeybicycle.
My father and I got into a fight over a kitchen mouse that lived in our bread … Fried Chicken and Pumpkin Pie by Adrienne Beer, in the Roanoke Review.
The pendulum appears in the house in March … The Pendulum by Ea Anderson, in Peatsmoke Journal.
They are prone to many things. They are prone to squabbling, which for some is another way of conversing … Bluebird by Michael Edman, via L’Esprit Literary Review.