First Word

It was an enormous privilege to have Adam Thompson, author of the incredible short story collection Born Into This, join me for the last episode of this season of the podcast. We caught up over Zoom to talk about creating and experiencing joy in fiction, writing in service of your community, and what happens when you stay open to opportunity. Adam mentions Nathan Maynard’s play The Season as the catalyst that turned him on to writing as a viable creative pathway. We briefly discuss Adam’s sho...

The delightful Mirandi Riwoe, author of the short story collection The Burnished Sun, as well as the novels Stone Sky Gold Mountain and Sunbirds, talked with me over Zoom about her meticulous planning processes and how to mine history for the seeds of short stories. Mirandi points to Maxine Beneba Clarke’s short story collection Foreign Soil as the book that showed her she could write short fiction, and also refers to Elizabeth Jolley as an inspiration. She also mentions William Somerset...

Multi-award-winning Queensland short story writer Laura Elvery and I caught up over Zoom to talk about her astonishing record of sweeping story prizes – as well as what it's like to write about women winning prizes of another kind. In this episode we talk about several writing awards, some of which are now defunct. The ones you can still enter (depending on your location) are the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction, the Nielma Sidney Short Story Prize, and the Kill Your Darlings New Australian Fi...

Fiction, comedy and TV writer Jack Vening is a funny bloke. We caught up over Zoom to talk about George Saunders, writing humour, and how to elegantly devastate your readers. In the course of our conversation Jacky mentions several authors he draws inspiration from, including Garielle Lutz, Donald Barthelme, Joy Williams and Benjamin Weissman. He recommends the episode featuring Roberto Bolaño’s Gomez Palacio by Daniel Alarcon on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which you can also read yo...

Ben Walter is a Tasmanian author of fiction, essays, poetry and experimental prose, whose writing has recently appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Saturday Paper and Griffith Review. His most recent book is the short story collection What Fear Was. We caught up at his home in the Huon Valley to talk about sources of inspiration, and following your nose into your prose. The stories we discuss in this episode are It’s all happening here, published in Overland in 2016; For the perishable body...

Author, essayist and academic Ellena Savage and I caught up over Zoom to talk about sources of inspiration, discipline, waking up in the middle of the night/the very early morning to write, and our mutual desire to throw our devices off tall buildings. The podcast that I mention in this episode where Ellena talks about writing forms is actually not the magnificent ‘Take Home Reading’, hosted by Stella Charls at the Wheeler Centre (although you should definitely listen to that one here) -...

Brisbane writer Yen-Rong Wong and I caught up over Zoom to talk about how and why to write about race and identity, addressing your younger self with your creative practice, and her idiosyncratic writing and editing style. I highly recommend checking out Yen-Rong’s curated selection of her writing here - it deals with growing up, race, culture, parents, and sexuality, in a really broad range of forms, from brief op-eds to lyrical reflections (and you should read her excellent reviews too...

Melbourne author Sam van Zweden and I caught up over Zoom to talk about revisiting memory, writing mental health, the importance of having a dedicated “input day”, and how to turn a mango into a memoir. The books that Sam recommends in this episode are The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and Intimations by Zadie Smith (which is a book of essays Smith wrote and published during the early days of COVID019). She also gave a well-earned shout out to Eloise Grills, Liminal magazine, and Sy...

Award-winning Tasmanian novelist and all-round good bloke Robbie Arnott and I sat down together in Craig Farrell’s office studio in New Norfolk to talk about knowing what you want to say before you say it, editing hacks (drink the revolting tea), writing masculinity and resisting publishing trends that you know will be bad for you. Robbie’s essays that I mention in this episode are ‘Best Man in a Crisis’ in Kill Your Darlings, and ‘Birds and Knives’ in Meanjin, both of which come highly ...

In the first episode of First Word's first season (!) Tasmanian novelist Erin Hortle and I sat down together to get really in-depth about the practical process of writing and editing (hot tip: have a clean room!), the shifting landscape of feminist literature, surfing, Tim Winton, and the sometimes indistinct line between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. The ABC conversation with Ben Folds, about the musician who asked the muse to come back at a more convenient time? That’s with R...