Every writer hopes to be published. We also hope to be published somewhere that takes care of our words. And presents them beautifully. Writerly is that kind of publication. Writerly is a young and beautifully produced literary journal. In the latest edition, volume 3, I have an essay called The Calendar. It’s about writing, and grief, and the way our dreams sometimes come true, but never in the way we imagined they would. I’m delighted with the way in which Writerly has presented my words, and formatted my images, and presented the work alongside other wonderful essays, stories, and poems. P ..read more

Granta is a prestigious literary journal founded by Cambridge University students in 1889. It launched the careers of many acclaimed writers, such as A. A. Milne and Sylvia Plath, and has published 27 Nobel Prize winners. In 1989, Granta launched a book imprint with the aim of publishing “the best in new literary fiction, memoir, reportage and poetry from around the world”. Granta has recently started offering online writing workshops. The first two are in memoir and nature writing. The courses were developed in collaboration with the Professional Writing Academy, a digital platform that has ..read more

Instagram surprised me recently, with an ad for what looked like a new luxury apartment complex called St Clare. The look was clean and contemporary, with interiors full of minimalist design and mid-century modern furniture. I’m looking for a new home. So getting this ad wasn’t the surprise. I currently follow a few real estate agents on Instagram and even a company that photographs homes. I click the link. The apartments aren’t cheap. The smallest ones start at $1.3M; the three- bedroom penthouse suites with a butler’s pantry and TV room are priced from $4.6M. The Australian property market ..read more

You can imagine a ski resort as a giant park. The paths and trails that go down the mountain are the runs the skiers ski. There are also paths up the mountain, chairlifts and gondolas, which skiers ride to their next run. The runs have different levels of difficulty. Green runs are the easiest, blue and red runs are harder, black runs harder still, and double-black runs are for experts only. Most skiers pick runs according to their skill level. But sometimes, to get from one place to another, you have to ski a run you wouldn’t normally take. Today, for example, to get from where I was skiing ..read more

We often end a year looking back and wishing we’d done more, or maybe less, of the things we did. We wish we’d gone to the gym more, eaten more healthy food, read more books, spent more time with loved ones, or maybe taken more time off work. Or we wish we’d eaten less takeout, or spent less time on the sofa watching TV, attended fewer meetings at work, drank less, or not wasted so much time commuting or writing emails. This often leads to the lists of resolutions and goals people make at the start of the each year. But resolutions seldom if ever work. Just because the calendar ticked over fr ..read more

Every essay I post on this site is accompanied by an image. I take a photo from my library, then edit and resize it to fit the dimensions required for this layout. Sometimes I forget those dimensions, and so I have to find the small digital style guide that has all the important information about how this site is formatted. Looking for that recently, I stumbled on something I wrote in February: my Social Media Strategy for 2023. I created this 11-page document to help me pitch a new book idea to agents and publishers. It outlined the way I used different kinds of social media, my goals for be ..read more

By far my favourite app is Flighty. It’s a beautifully designed piece of software that does one thing very elegantly – track all the flights you take. Every year it gives you a nice end-of-year summary, like Spotify Wrapped, but for air travel. You see the miles you flew, countries you visited, airports you took off from and touched down at, even how many days you spent in the air! Looking at my 2023 summary, I see that I’ve travelled quite a lot. Not as much as in 2022. But more than in 2019 and of course 2020, when travel ground to halt after a few months. But something else also stands out ..read more

Normally I’m good at getting some sleep on long overnight flights. I’ve done a lot of them and have a routine that usually works. My last flight from Tokyo to Melbourne wasn’t like that. We hit turbulence several times during the night. Each bout came right as I was dozing off. It wasn’t bad turbulence. Nothing to complain about. Nothing truly scary. But enough for my body to switch gears and keep me awake. I landed on a Sunday. With no commitments, I could spend a day just napping, recovering, and relaxing. That afternoon I fell down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. There was something sooth ..read more

After nearly three days of travel across the Pacific, via Melbourne, Tokyo, and Seattle, I arrived in Washington DC on a cold and icy December night. It was a few days before Christmas, and for the first time my daughter was going to host the family Christmas dinner. I only ever hosted Christmas dinner for my parents twice. I remember how special an honour it was the first time. I was full of hope this experience would be a great one for my daughter and wanted to be fully present for her. After checking in to the hotel and dropping off my bags, I made my way to her apartment through the wintr ..read more

During my years in India I lived in a farmhouse on three tree-lined acres. One of the stipulations of the lease was that I had to employ, at my own expense, the three gardeners who maintained the property. Every morning they would tend the gardens, mow lawns, and rake fallen leaves. This produced a lot of garden waste. So every week they set alight a huge, aggressively smoky bonfire. That was pretty hard to live with. We’d have to retreat inside with closed windows every time it was lit. After some weeks of this I had a chat with them. Could they compost the waste instead of burning it? They ..read more