Nathan Ballingrud's first collection, North American Lake Monsters, is a slim, mediative volume of dark fiction. I first became aware of Ballingrud's fiction in a piece entitled 'You Go Where It Takes You,' the story of a single mother dealing with the difficulty of direction and...
I have a student who tells me she is surprised that I know anything. "You live in your little bubble," she says, and indicates around me. "You have all your books and you write a book. Why do you know all this stuff?" We'd been talking...
Finished Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero this morning, and I liked it greatly. I have been reading in the mornings lately, before I begin writing. A new habit, and I'll see if it'll last, but I am enjoying the regular reading. In the past, I have found it...
I saw the Wolverine last week. It was filmed near where I live and a block from where I once worked as a projectionist. As a film, it's not bad. Set after the awful X-Men 3, the film offers an image of a bearded, drunken Wolverine...
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I like dialogue. I like it in novels, comics, movies, TV, anything, anywhere, and I like it in its many different forms, with the one exception of the comic book stylised accent speech that, no matter how it is done, is by and large awful. Mostly, I...
I have lived in Western Sydney all my life. It is a poorly represented area in Sydney, an area that is blamed for violence, racism, and various other unpleasant things that happen in Australia. Quite often, you'll hear it quoted in a political news piece...
If there has one been one thing that has become apparent to me while writing Innocence, it is that I would have made a terrible designer of cities. I design things on aesthetic, on metaphor, on symbolism, on what will, perhaps, be interesting to destroy. I...
I taught a workshop over the last three days, one based on vampires and horror. An odd choice, because horror isn't really a love of mine, but the vampire has gone through some interesting changes over the years, from villains to anti-heroes to heroes, even....
And so, in coming full cycle, Kevin Rudd deposed Julia Gillard three years and three days after she deposed him, before an election. It was inevitable: Gillard could never justify the political removal of Rudd as Prime Minister as anything other than a moment of political...