Writing
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion
I came to writing through a childhood love of reading. Reading is immersion, an opportunity to lose yourself in another’s words, and other’s lives, both real and fictional. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was eight or nine years old. I created my own magazines, wrote stories based on the ones I loved to read. It became – and still is – my primary way of expressing myself, firstly to myself, and then, over time, to others.
My book What Will Be Worn: A McWhirters Story, was published by Transit Lounge in 2018 and longlisted for the Mark and Evette Moran nib Literary Award in 2019. I also write short stories, nonfiction in the form of reviews, feature articles and essays, and a whole lot of other stuff. Every day I fall a little more in love with the essay form.
Essays and creative nonfiction
- ‘MenopauseTM’ in Griffith Review online, January 2026.
- Letter to a Seabird in Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ), Vol 9. 2023.
- The Ocean Sounds Like a Motorway in Island Australian Nature Writing Project, June 2022.
- The Sea in our Bodies: writing in/with/from the Intertidal Zone in Text Journal of Writing and Writing Courses special edition ‘Surfing and Creative Writing’, November 2021.
- ‘Achiltibuie un(re)visited’ published in Causeway/Cabhsair: A Magazine of Irish and Scottish Writing May 2021.
- ‘A spy in the family’ published in Within/Without These Walls, an anthology, September 2018 in association with Brisbane Open House 2018.
- The longest road out is the shortest road home: my pathway to publication, WQ (Writing Queensland), June 2018.
- Reading Ferrante: a masterclass in storytelling, WQ (Writing Queensland), September 2016.
- Not dead yet in the Overland online magazine, July 2015.
- The business of writing: what to tell your students in the Overland online magazine, August 2014.
- Dreams, ambitions, realities: writing for work and writing for play published in The Emerging Writer in May 2013.
Reviews
- Turning moments into hours, months and centuries: a review of Robert Dessaix’s Pleasures of Leisure, published in The Lifted Brow Review of Books in September 2017.
- Postcards from Surfers: 30 years on in Meanjin, November 2015.
- Lost and found in America: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild first published in Kill Your Darlings 21, April 2015.
- Review of Boy, Lost published in the Australian Women’s Book Review in July 2014.
- Review of Just Kids published by Stilts in July 2012.
Features, profiles and travel writing
- Gold Coast Australia: World’s Greatest Places 2021 in Time Magazine July 2021.
- An introductory guide to snacks and street food in China published on intrepid.com in July 2019.
- What to expect while you’re travelling by train in China published on intrepid.com in July 2019.
- The World Nomad Games looks like ‘Game of Thrones’ come to life published on fodors.com in August 2018.
- What it’s really like to visit Kyrgyzstan, land of the nomads published on intrepid.com in March 2018.
- ‘Way of the Nomad’, a profile of nomadic vet Dr Campbell ‘Cozy’ Costello, published in QWeekend, the weekend magazine of The Courier-Mail in March 2017.
- Travel articles ‘Take a bow, Bowen’, ‘Animal Attraction’ and ‘Whale Watch’, published in Detour, the official Greyhound publication, in July 2012.
- Travel article ‘Australia’s best summer music festivals’ published on NineMSN website in December 2010.
- Feature article ‘Looking forward to life after school’ published in Sydney Medical School magazine Radius in November 2010.
- Travel feature ‘Two to tango’, about tango dancing in Buenos Aires, published in Australian Marie Claire February 2007.
Short fiction
‘The day the world stayed the same’ was joint runner-up in the 2012 Overland Victoria University Short Story prize, and featured in Overland 209.
‘Gift shop at the end of the Earth’ featured in annual prose anthology, [untitled] 6, in 2012. You can order yourself a copy here
‘I hope I never’ was published in the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing Anthology Passages in 2003. A rare find now, but my Mum has a copy if you’re interested.
