Excitement here as one of my short stories, Calling Time, has been published on WORDLY Online. WORDLY Online (and its print counterpart WORDLY Magazine) is a literature publication of Deakin University. The publication includes everything from short fiction (like sci-fi piece Orb of Desecration), creative non-fiction (such as Eilean Donan which blends personal essay and…
Tag: storytelling
The stories we tell ourselves
When I wrote this piece, I was questioning the idea that our experiences make us who we are; a belief that had, until then, provided me with both justification and reassurance. I’d come across the work of Kahneman who suggests that it is not an experience per se that we remember; what we remember is…
The long and the short of it
Here are the wee stories I’ve written for the first five days of Writers Victoria’s Flash Fiction comp. Initially, my intention was to use it as an exercise to pull together some juicy sentences that I could expand on down the track. Then the working week started, reality hit and despite only needed to come…
You don’t have to shout to be heard
If I wrote about me—my thoughts, my fears—who would I be? What would my voice sound like? Would I sound old? Scared? Interesting? Just a little bit crazy? What would I write? Is long-form the way to go? Could I sustain reader interest, let alone my own? When I hear the story in my head…
I’m just going to start here …
I was rummaging around in my drafts folder this morning and found this snippet that I’d scribbled down at some point. Unfortunately, I left myself no clues as to what ending I had in mind – or even if I had an ending in mind – so I guess this is a teaser until the…
The man
His eyebrows sit neatly between the boundaries set for them. They are so striking in their symmetry that at first you don’t see the way his left eyebrow arches slightly higher than his right. How it lifts even higher as he enquires as to your health. How his lips disappear into his mouth as he…
We spend our lives not seeing what we saw
It’s writing exercise time, again! This time the task was to use the prompt We spend our lives not seeing what we saw to draft three micro pieces – some poetry, some fiction, and a personal response. As always, I did these under time pressure and with the understanding that exercise of any kind isn’t…
The Sometimes Diary of Nina Thirkettle
Wednesday, 16 February I wonder, sometimes, about what type of person I’d be if there was someone watching me all the time. A shadow that I could never escape from. Somebody who was there silently scrutinising my every move, my every action, my every inaction! Would I be a nicer person? Would I give money…
Calling Time
I’m currently working on a short story called Calling Time about a woman caring for her ill mother. Underlying the love the woman has for her mother, there is a real sense of exhaustion and a ‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this’ feeling. In the excerpt below, she wakes after a…
My Grandmother’s Teapot
This was my Grandmother’s teapot. I can’t recall ever going to to her house and not seeing this little teapot sitting on the kitchen table, alongside her tannin stained teacup. As was the custom among her generation, she always used tea leaves and she always, always, steeped her tea way too long for anyone of…
thekettlehasemphysema.net 
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