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 s...

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 Somerse...

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 ...

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 ...

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 bo...