A Writers First Aid Kit
No matter where you are in your writing life, there are times when – in order to get up and running again – your writing needs first aid.Here are the essentials of your Writer’s First Aid Kit: Writing time that is non-negotiable. Whether it’s half an hour, two hours, or four, switch off the phone and the…
Featherhood: a Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie by Charlie Gilmour
Another bird-as-a-means book, and one I found compelling, is this memoir by the all-but-unacknowledged son of the late Heathcote Williams, once a notable eccentric, poet, playwright, documentarian and lead activist in London’s “squatting” movement. Gilmour writes with engaging frankness about both the injured magpie he “fathers” and his longing for his own father (who also…
Consider the long haul project
Do you have a lengthy writing project you always thought you would undertake? COVID days that seem to melt away, one by one, into nothing very much? Consider the Long Haul Project. Might this not be just the time to get it done?Yet it can seem discouraging even to contemplate taking on something big. As writer Amy Shearn has…
January 2022, Prizes and Publications
Robin McLean’s gripping debut novel, Pity the Beast, has been published by And Other Stories Publishing, to acclaim: “Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity” writes J M Coetzee. Kirsten Cameron, who hosts the afternoon reading sessions of the Australian FreefallWriting workshops on Zoom, has had her first novel (working…
Solitude
I don’t remember when loneliness became solitudebut I do remember when solitude became wingsthat lifted me in softnessbeyond the sigh of the dayacross a landscape of quiet sunshineabove a sky with no horizon Diana Cawfield
Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder: A Memoir, by Julia Zarankin
This is a book of personal essays, in which various aspects of Zarankin’s extensive birding activities remind her of various things about herself. (Birds, in other words, are often treated as means, rather than an end.) I found some pieces wonderfully well-written, others not so much (the one concerning which bird she would like to…
The Regency Effect
The ease with which your writing flows at a residential FreefallWriting™ workshop is due at least in part to the phenomenon known as “the recency effect” – the fact that whatever we have experienced most recently will tend to be uppermost in our thoughts. When there are no interruptions between sleep, in which your subconscious predominates, and…
Birds of America, by Mary McCarthy
It’s time to pull unread books from the cottage shelves, and this summer, Birds of America came to hand. Written in 1965, it follows the thoughts of young Peter Levi, a half-Jewish, half-European American, who is attempting to live his life by Kant’s Categorical Imperative: to treat other people as an end, rather than as a means,…
August 2021, Prizes and Publications
In stories: British writer Geoff Mead’s short story, Room 1-0-1, written during this year’s Poulstone/Treowen workshop, was published in The Phare Literary Magazine’s Summer Edition: https://www.thephare.com/short-stories/room-1-0-1- Australian Rashida Murphy has had a collection of short stories which “mostly all had their beginnings in Freefall” shortlisted for the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. She is also writing personal essays,…
Open Out those Pivotal Moments
All too often, in autobiographical writing, I see writers dodge the knotty, meaningful moments when they changed their minds about something significant. Yes, those moments often feel hard to write about. But if you open out those pivotal moments, you’ll find they’re the places that most clearly show your reader who their subject is..…
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