Here is a list of selected publications, with links to online versions included where possible. Also, I’m currently hard at work on a novel manuscript (deep breath!). Here are some posts about the process.
SHORT FICTION
- Forthcoming: ‘The Geography of Loss’ in Seizure: crime (2013).
- ‘
To Matthew AdamsReturn to Sender’ in Etchings: Three Chords and the Truth issue 11, February 2013, pp. 67-72: A story about young love, connection despite difference and the rawness of adolescence, as well as the very real divide that exists in Australia between the mainstream and the disadvantaged. The story started with the opening paragraph and grew from there, and along the way was also informed by a conversation I had with my aunty’s friend — she works with at-risk youth and was saying how she had seen, over and over again, women choose boyfriends over their teenaged sons.
- ‘Not Here, Not in Our Town’ in Mascara Literary Review issue 11, May 2012: I wrote about the slow coming together of ideas for this story in a 2011 post.
- ‘The Waiting
’ at Verity La 6 April 2012: A vignette on guilt and longing, and on purposeful waiting as a kind of lived repentance. I’m not sure who she’s waiting for. Sometimes I think it must be a rejected lover; at others, an abandoned child. It was written in 2005 but I came across it again recently and so sent it off.
NARRATIVE NON-FICTION
- Forthcoming: the piece I mentioned in two posts last year; probably to be published late 2013 (yippee!)
- ‘Red Dog’ in Griffith Review Online: What is Australia for? issue 36, May 2012: Part appraisal of the movie, part personal essay, this looks at Red Dog‘s portrayal of Australian identity. It’s also about the comfort of family stories and about the rupture when children realise their parents are fallible human beings. The process of writing this piece spurred a 2011 post.
- ‘Untying the Tongue: The Elusive Art of Interpreting’ in Kill Your Darlings issue 6, July 2011, pp. 71-79. Also broadcast on Radio National’s First Person, 18 November 2011; you can listen to it: A personal essay that considers cross-cultural communication and the identity of the interpreter, as well as taking a look at one historic interpreter, La Malinche. I had fun bringing together anecdotes and sharing some studies I’d come across.
- ‘Peru’s Heartbeat’ in HEAT 20: Plain Vanilla Futures, Spring 2009, pp.193-202: A personal essay I was fond of but didn’t think would find a home, given its very specific, very non-Australian theme. Its anchor is the Afro-Peruvian wooden drum known as the cajón, which gave me the chance to write about my love of dancing festejo, and about the wonderful people who took me in in Chincha, Peru.
- ‘The Melancholia of Happy Endings’ in harvest issue 2, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 13-17: A memoir piece on the loss of self that is an inevitable part of relocating to another country, culture and language, and on the guilt and responsibilities that come with being the reason for that someone’s relocation.
JOURNALISM
- ‘García’s Peru’ in Inside Story, 21 July 2o1o: A piece of social/political commentary that I felt compelled to write after governmental actions went from concerning to worse. These actions seemed to be following a pattern and reminded me of an observation made by Peruvian historian Cecilia Méndez G., which I hadn’t understood at the time of reading but which had resonated, somehow. Now, it made perfect, frightening sense.
1 Comment