• 2020,  Rashida Murphy

    REPOST: Moving in from the Margins with Rashida Murphy

    My best laid plans to publish a fresh interview before the new year has gone awry so here is a repost of  my interview with Rashida Murphy from earlier this year.   ***     Rashida Murphy is a Perth based writer, poet, mentor, and author of The Historian’s Daughter (2016, UWAP).  She has a Masters in English Literature and a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University.  Rashida is also known in the local writing community for being a big supporter of emerging writers, especially those of us who are—for lack of a better term— ‘people of colour’, ‘ethnic writers’, ‘non-whites’, ‘third world looking’, ‘multicultural Australians’ [insert a…

  • Sophronia Liu

    Sophronia Liu – A Shimmering Sea, 20th Century Hong Kong

    It has taken me a very long time to put together this post because I wasn’t sure how I could best honour my friend Sophronia Liu. I have had this post marked as “Private” for over a year. I met Sophie in 2010 at a conference in Hong Kong. I was immediately drawn to her creative energy and openness. Until I met Sophie, I’d never  met a female and Chinese artist my mother’s age, let alone  someone who was part of the 1960s Asian-American/civil rights movement.  At the time, Sophie was a PhD student who was working on her memoir, which was posthumously  published as The Shimmering Sea,  a collection…

  • New Writers

    New Writers & The Land of Maybe

    The Archipelago   Endless horizon of blue-grey sky and sea. Freckled with spots of green and brown. The wanderer sees all with a pair of black beady eyes. Looking for a place to stay. At last, a refuge! He perched on top of an iron cross, wings wrapping him from the blowing winds. As the sun fell, darkness took over the sky, with dots of pale white forming arbitrary patterns – by Alen Tanoyo     Church Scattered clouds in lines of laced Not a single open face Blackened church of green white steeple Not a view of living people Rusted roof brown and slate Not a friend, a pal, a mate…