Curtin Writers Club

I used to get angry about issues. Offended by injustices and unrest and inequalities. About seeing anything or anyone seen as “other” treated with varying degrees of shabbiness. Ideologically, I think on the left. But I’ve never been much of an activist or an agitator. In 2015, I went to a marriage equality rally in the city. The crowd spooked me, and I found the whole experience unsatisfying. Not for what it was trying to achieve, but just in how I couldn’t wholly engage wit

The island before sunset was a vision of blue, gold and white; a brilliant sky above an ocean that shone golden, crashing into the rocks standing high out of the water. The sound of the ocean was met with the cries of birds that hovered overhead, hanging in the air as though bound to the earth with an invisible twine. Above the craggy, pale rocks, a young woman travelled alone along a path of crumbled stone, hair swirling in the saline wind. Her tunic was streaked with dust a

The recent rise in the visibility of transgender people has led feminist communities to challenge and re-conceptualise ideas about gender. The intersectional feminist movement has sought to be more inclusive by acknowledging the interactions between racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and gender. However, many feminist theorists who were critical to second-wave feminism feel the need to protect an essentialist view of gender, particularly what it means to be a

[Content Warning: Sexual assault] A disturbing trend has emerged in conjunction with the rise of provocative storytelling, particularly in television and, to a lesser extent, in film. The trend is not necessarily the decisions made by their writers, but more in the reactions to them. In a landscape where popular stories are darker tonally and greyer morally than they have been in recent memory, I have noticed audiences, critics, and the like starting to reject the power of th

She’s recording names from bogged beings, borrowing together some species of a story, stealing all rank, title, means, from grave markers and, although alone, the suggestion of another snatches her, under a wounded lamppost’s shadow, under which slender fingers crack, limbs quake, peers up, stupid girl, and again down, sodden shoulders, dripping lips, brow furrowed. That’s what they like about her, a weight carried, of a neat thing she’s a sallow version. She then

Yesterday was the day I hoped would not come. I received a very nice letter from Kindle thanking me for my participation in the Kindle Scout Program, but saying that Remission had not been selected for publication. I can’t say that it doesn’t smart, because it does. Today, having slept on it, writing a post about it seems like the best way to pick myself up and dust myself off. So where am I? I had hoped that they would take it for several reasons. Obviously I was after the i

I bought a book of Wordsworth that one hundred and thirty years ago was given as a gift on Christmas Day which I am told was a sultry Wednesday by the man on my computer screen and the inscription reads Dear Violet but says nothing further, as if the words of Wordsworth expressed affection more than anything its buyer could write themselves. When the volume was twenty-six years old a sister of nine called Violet Jessop lived through the sinking of the Titanic, the s

The room was dark and the crowd eager when she appeared: LadyNerd Keira Daley, ready to teach. Accompanied by her pianist sidekick Mark Chamberlain, Keira burst into song, introducing the concept of LadyNerds; the women who activated history and explored the unknown, all facing obstacles but overcoming them with willpower, skill, and wit. LadyNerd 2: Game of Nerds premiered at the close of Fringe World 2017, in the Shambles Theatre, and what a way for the festival to end: wit