Newsletter - November 2024

Introduction

Welcome to all subscribers, old and new. It has been a huge month and I do hope you will find something to inspire you in my November newsletter.

During the final weekend in September, I flew to Sydney to volunteer for the Northern Beaches Readers Festival, the brainchild of Australian women’s fiction author Sandie Docker. While many festivals focus on literary work, this one invites the authors who write the books we read when we need to relax and escape, so called commercial fiction. That is not to say that the authors do not deal with serious topics. The discussions about aging women becoming invisible, the importance of relationships, patriarchy, and how a bit of magic can make life palatable were just some of the issues discussed. If you missed out this year, do put it in your diary for 2026. This festival is one not to miss.

And I did my Books at Stones launch chatting with Brisbane Scribe Jane Connolly. If you are in Brisbane, it is well worth stopping by and having a browse at the excellent selection of books. And do say hello to Karen and Michael who are incredibly supportive of the local writing community. And of course, my novel, The Truth about My Daughter is set here and at the excellent café across the road, Stones Throw. Grab some brekky, a coffee or one of their muffins and say hi to Harry.

I was privileged to be one of the authors invited to speak at the inaugural Sunshine Coast Hinterland Writers Festival. Thanks to Lea and Rob of Rosetta Books, it was a fabulous festival with events dotted around the Hinterland. And do visit Rosetta Books it you happen to be in Maleny. Enjoy a coffee and piece of cake and make sure you purchase some of the books by authors who featured at the first SCHWF. I was delighted to see The Truth about My Daughter on the shelf alongside Big Music, by fellow Hawkeye author, Gillian Wills. And next year, make sure you come along and enjoy some of the events while absorbing the idyllic setting.

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I was part of a panel discussing Truth, chaired by Janet Lee. It was impossible to do justice to such a huge topic in forty-five minutes. Carly-Jay Metcalfe spoke about death and how it is a truth we avoid discussing, while Kirsty Iltners spoke about the ways we curate our lives to present ourselves in the best possible light. I looked at how families sometimes rewrite history until it is impossible to recall, ‘which bits are fabricated or embellished.’

Above right is a glimpse of the three of us just before our session.

The final bit of news I want to share is that I have signed a contract for another one of my novels, A World of Silence, with Hawkeye Publishing. ​

Running

I take it for granted that I can run and participate in sport, sign up to do a marathon. However, not so long ago, women’s participation in athletic pursuits was controversial. The first woman to run a marathon was Katherine Switzer who made history in 1967 by using her initials K.V. Switzer to obtain a race bib to run the iconic Boston Marathon. She did not plan to make a political statement and there was nothing in the rules forbidding women from running a marathon. It was just assumed that ‘the weaker sex,’ were not capable of doing so. She was shocked when four miles in, the race director tried to eject her from the race with force and it was only because Switzer’s boyfriend intervened and blocked him that she went on to create history.

That marathon took her four hours and twenty minutes and changed her life and that of every woman wanting to run the marathon after her. Because she defied the conventions of the time, she paved the way for generations of women to feel empowered and strong by voting with their feet and taking up distance running.

I enjoy walking, and every Sunday head to the local Reserve with hubby where we tackle a hill or two, chat and sometimes spot a koala. When I run, however, it changes the way I experience the natural world. I become aware of the earth beneath the soles of my feet and how my muscles and ligaments make instant adjustments depending on the terrain. I become aware of my body in new ways – the way I breathe, how my heart beats while my lungs exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, enabling me to fly down hills and pump and pant up the other side. There are extraordinary shifts occurring physiologically, pushing my body to adapt to pressure, to the joy of exercise. I become aware of the world I am running through in an intimate way. The warmth of sun on my face, the individual drops of moisture on my skin and the delightfully noisy morning chorus of birds.

Most of all, I notice changes in my mental state. The tangle of thoughts and worries dissipate, and I know that my pulse racing is the healthy outcome of my exertion. My senses become finely tuned and I experience the subtle change of seasons, taste moisture in the air and inhale the scent of morning brews as a I pace past local cafes. Time is experienced differently when running. It acquires an elasticity as I move outside the constraints of hours, minutes, and seconds. My brain releases feel-good neurotransmitters, and endorphins rewarding my efforts, enabling me to go further than I imagined I could when I pushed myself out of bed. There is even evidence to indicate that the flood of hormones and neurotransmitters produced while running improves neural connections or synapses, increasing mental capacity - the ability to think and reason and modulate our higher functions.

I wear through three pairs of running shoes each year, exchanging them every 800km, a total of around 2,400km over a year. I spend much more on these than any other shoes I wear but I know that it is an investment in my physical and mental health.

Running is freedom, improves self-esteem, regulates appetite, keeps our brains from spiralling into anxiety. Why would half the population be prohibited from participating? I am grateful to Katherine Switzer for voting with her feet, for making distance running accessible to women.

Run because you can. Because there were women before you who made it possible for you to lace up and feel the wind on your face without retribution. If you are a man, encourage your sister, girlfriend, wife, or colleague to get out there. Support her when she enters the local fun run with her friends and celebrate when she crosses that finish line. Those kilometres she ran were gained through the courage of women who dared to confront the status quo. Switzer did not aim to change the world, she signed up for the Boston marathon for the sheer joy of running. We can follow in her footsteps and make her marathon count.

GP Wisdom – Creativity and Mental Health

It has been a big month of putting myself out there, marketing my book, attending festivals and book clubs. It has been mainly wonderful and affirming and I am thrilled to see my book doing well. But it has at times been overwhelming too, with much less time to write and decompress.

When I first made a commitment to myself to put aside time to write, it was an incredibly positive experience. When you are up to your eyeballs with responsibilities, it feels counterintuitive to add another thing to your life, but exploring my creativity and giving myself permission to write regularly made my life better in countless ways.

Most of us have heard of the pleasure hormone, dopamine. It is our inbuilt antidepressant and makes us feel good. Dopamine helps us to strive and focus and is central to our curiosity. When we do something creative, this powerful neurotransmitter is released and is now recognised to be to be an antidote to stress and anxiety.

The irony is that now I am in that post publication stage, a lot of my time and energy is going into marketing my book, which is wonderful, but does mean that I have less time to be creative and immerse myself in my writing. I have started to notice more days where I feel overwhelmed or irritated by minor things.

It has been a timely reminder to go back to basics and sprinkle a little creativity throughout the day, not to wait until I have a day off or a solid block of time to write.

I have been forced to take a step back and to reframe creativity from doing to being. I used the delightful idea at the back of journalist, Christine Jackman’s book, Turning Down the Noise, where she considers time in slivers, slices, and slabs. When I feel overwhelmed by life, instead of waiting for a slab of time to miraculously become available, I try to focus on the bringing slivers of creativity into my life by just noticing.

This means no pressure to produce tangible evidence of creativity like a story or even an outline for a story.

‘Being’ creativity means just experiencing a moment here and there through your senses. Pausing to appreciate the magic in the details of life. The perfect morning cuppa, the smell of freshly baked bread when you walk past the bakery or a freshly ironed shirt warm on your skin. These moments are entry points to a whole world of joy to store like a scrapbook in your imagination. Engaging in life’s ordinariness and appreciating how the extraordinary is usually just below the surface of our attention.

When we are stressed and anxious, we skim over the surface of life, dissociate from our uncomfortable feelings to keep ourselves safe and end up missing all the best bits. The tiny details that stimulate our creativity in minute snapshots if we pause and pay attention. Every moment savoured releases that magical neurotransmitter dopamine into your brain. Tapping into our innate creativity improves anxiety, helps with self-belief and is integral to processing difficult emotions. These slivers are the tiny building blocks of good mental health.

When it all feels overwhelming and life feels too hard, pause, do this short exercise, the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique. Sit with your feet planted on the ground and take a few deep breaths.

Acknowledge five things you can see.

Acknowledge four things you can touch.

Acknowledge three things you can hear.

Acknowledge two things you can smell.

Acknowledge one thing you can taste.​

Writing​

For my birthday, I asked the family if they would come along to see an exhibition with me. We wandered through The Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and immersed ourselves in Iris Van Herpen’s, Sculpting the Senses. I know very little about haut couture, but this exhibition was about so much more. Van Herpen creates extraordinary pieces inspired by nature, space, and the environment. She then uses science and cutting-edge technology to create dresses integrating her curiosity about the world and passion about its diversity and intricacy. Her pieces are created using modern materials and 3D printing techniques and recycled materials. Each item is unique, wearable artwork and is the result of her collaboration with those from other disciplines.

It made me realise how siloed our education is. We stream even our young children into humanities or sciences and creativity is always lowest in priority and often considered a soft option.

At this extraordinary exhibition, it occurred to me the sciences and humanities are inseparable, and that creativity supersedes these artificial boundaries we create. It is the result of the intricate patterns occurring in nature, mathematics, and the natural world. Just as we are interdependent for our survival on our environment, knowledge needs to be integrated across all disciplines or we are deprived of a full understanding of the complexity of the universe we live in. We need to nurture our creativity by full immersion in the natural world and all it offers. To understand our history as well as our natural world, to appreciate the infinity of the cosmos from the most distant star to the tiniest particles that go to make up the stardust that is at the heart of everything. We need to move beyond the artificial constructs that categorize knowledge – biology, physics, mathematics, linguistics and observe how every part of the world is interconnected.

The great artists, writers, and creatives rise above that human tendency to see the world through a single lens. I recently read Insomniac City: New York, Olive Sacks, and Me. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, a historian and naturalist and writer. His essays and books embraced the natural world, science history, medicine, and nature. The New York Times called him the poet laureate of contemporary medicine and one of our greatest contemporary writers. I loved this quote from Bill Haye’s book. ‘He had a nature. A nature. He wasn’t this or that, fitted with so many labels, an identity, like people today, but all aspects of him were of a piece – this is who he was, not what he was; a force of nature I suppose.’

Sacks eschewed pigeon holing and being one thing or another – straight, gay a doctor, a writer, a Christian, a Jew. He embraced the world with a curiosity that infused his writing.

Specialisation has enabled humans to evolve and reshape our world enabling us to fly, land on the moon, develop medical treatments that keep us alive for longer and design technology that makes our lives easier. It means that we live in societies where we don’t have to know everything but can become expert about one thing. If we had to make a hamburger from scratch – grow the wheat for the bun, raise and kill a cow, make mayonnaise from scratch – most of us would have no idea where to start. Most of the things we take for granted rely on others. Our food, our shelter, the energy we use daily, our transport and so on. We are all interconnected and dependent on each other. If you have fifty-four minutes to spare, have a listen this fascinating episode of  God Forbid.

In your creativity, recognise your area of expertise and become inquisitive about things you know nothing about. Explore the world with curiosity and find others who have specialized knowledge that is outside your expertise. As a creative, your writing, art or music has the power to transcend these silos of specialisation bringing ideas to your audience in fresh new ways. Spend an afternoon in an art gallery, attend concerts, spend an evening with an astronomer learning about the stars. The world is an extraordinary place, from the furthest reaches of the universe to the tiniest particles that are the essence of everything. Spend three minutes immersed in this incredible video on perspective and allow this to infuse the way you see the world from now on.

Imagine an education system that prioritised the arts. One where it was compulsory for every one of us to study a subject that explores creativity. Drama, dance, music, poetry, art, or creative writing. How would it change our world if creativity was at the pinnacle or our learning and the basic building block for our other subjects?

I challenge you to approach your life from this point of view. Place your own creativity at the centre with all your other knowledge seen from this prism of imagination. It is your creativity that breaks down barriers, provokes discussion and curiosity. As a writer, you do have the power to change someone’s world, to prod them to imagine and dream. You may not be Van Herpen or Sacks, but you can embrace their expansive way of exploring possibilities and allow this to infuse every word you write.

Book Review

I was invited to do a podcast, Cognitive Conversations by the lovely Bianca Milroy about Creativity and Neuroscience together with colleague Dr Fiona Robertson and author Dr Laurie Stead – do follow the link have a listen. It was such a great chat and we spoke so long overtime that Bianca had to do some pretty heavy editing. And after she stopped recording, we chatted for another forty minutes or so.

I bought Laurie’s book, Love Dad. Confessions of an Anxious Father and finished it a few hours before the podcast, wanting to get to know Laurie before chatting in a public forum. It is a book that challenges us to rethink masculinity, fatherhood and raising boys. It is a heartfelt, intimate, and beautiful portrait of how we can challenge patriarchy by dismantling the scripts hard wired into our heads of what it means to be a good father, supportive husband and/or partner and how to be a good bloke.

Many books that challenge the patriarchy focus on women’s issues: juggling work and children, gender pay disparity and social expectations about what women in positions of power should wear and how they should behave. The rallying cry of Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech delivered in parliament on 9 October 2012 has echoed through the years as a touch point for feminism, an eloquent rage that encapsulates what is wrong with toxic masculinity.

Our expectations of men and how this shapes the patriarchy is a topic rarely discussed and addressing this silence is critical if we are to raise boys who are not afraid to show their vulnerabilities. In his memoir, Love, Dad. Reflections of an Anxious Father, Laurie reveals his own struggles about what it means to be man, and how to be a decent husband and father. As a reader, we glimpse his angst about not being a good provider and not meeting the expectations of others as he juggles his creative life with the necessity of paying the bills.

I know some of my rusted-on beliefs about manhood were challenged as I read about the difficulties Laurie faces. Despite many disappointments and challenges, he stares down social norms to carve out what is best for his own creativity, his family, and his relationships. He is not afraid to give a voice to his failures and vulnerabilities, to shape them into words and commit them to the page to be scrutinized. Writers of every gender will relate to his worries about his work being irrelevant and rejected, his fears about remaining unpublished while simultaneously trying to earn an income and complete his post graduate studies.

While navigating fatherhood, Laurie is selected to do a prestigious overseas writing residency and his inner voice tells him this is his make-or-break opportunity. He spends the time in Bulgaria working hard on being successful. He is careful to dress the part while worrying that this unique opportunity is slipping away. On the final day, despondent about his lack of success, he gives up and dresses in his comfortable jeans and hoodie and finds himself able to connect to others. His poignant thoughts as he flies home will resonate with everyone who has felt anxious of falling short, of not being good enough, rich enough, clever enough, published enough or simply not enough the way they are. Laurie sums it up beautifully, ‘…and it’s this simple truth I hold onto as I fly home: all the moments I missed to be me while I was trying to be perfect.’

Laurie’s book is essential reading for any man anxious about being masculine enough and afraid to discuss his deepest fears with those he loves. I would recommend buying a copy for your father, brother, husband, and any other male in your life who is worried about revealing vulnerabilities. It is only when men recognise their own frailty and failures that toxic masculinity will be relegated to the past. We need young men who reach out and support each other, unafraid to reveal themselves and all their imperfections. It is our flaws and failings that make us loveable, human, and relatable, something Laurie has explored with humour and honesty in his delightful memoir.

My Writing

On the first Friday of every month, The Australian Writers Centre run a competition called Furious Fiction where you are provided with some prompts and invited to write a 500 word story over a weekend. At the end of the month, the judges choose their favourite stories and showcase these on their website.

I have been writing stories for Furious Fiction every month since I discovered this competition. It is a great way to give your creativity a workout. Most of the time, I don’t list but it is always a buzz when I do.

My September story, Still Life, long listed. It is an unusual story as I had the glimmer of an idea after seeing the prompt on Friday night and then slept on it. In the morning, I woke up early with a fully formed story in my head, leapt out of bed and wrote it down in fifteen minutes. This has never happened to me before and made me wonder how I could coax my brain to create stories while I’m asleep more often! When I work out how to do this, I promise to let you know.

I’ve always been fascinated as to why reality TV shows, where people compete and do weird and sometimes dangerous things, have such appeal. This story was my response to a prompt that was simply a picture which I will include below.

Still Life

We are the final seven still standing, or, strictly speaking, still sitting. One from each state and territory except for Tasmania. After one of their contestants died in front of an audience of thousands, they opted to withdraw. Martha had an arrythmia or some sort of seizure. It’s hard to pick the truth from the rumours and the loud voices of the naysayers who have been protesting the Still Life project from its inception.

            There are twenty minutes left before we head to our respective spaces. We each got to choose our own set up and our clothes. I chose yellow because it’s bright and stands out, and for the first time in my life, I want to stand out. Maya has created controversy by wearing her hijab. Some even accused her of cheating which is crazy.

            Fifteen minutes until we each sit and are watched. I know people have paid upward of five hundred to come in person to the gallery and to watch us, well, sit. My space is simple. A table and chair in a small kitchen with a sink, some hanging cups, a cooling loaf of bread and a bowl of fruit. The bread is a masterstroke and has made me the favourite to win.

How does she cope with the smell of a freshly baked loaf when she can’t eat or drink for hours and hours?

            The truth is, I have a secret weapon. A discipline and command over my body others could only dream of. For years I barely ate at all and slowly disappeared. My psychiatrist protested my participation but was overruled. I know many object to me being a part of the Still Life Project, but for me it is power. Over myself and my future. I am choosing to sit still and not eat or drink or move or relieve myself before the world. They worry about the psychological impact on all of us, but on me especially.

            Ten minutes remain before we take up positions in our chosen spaces and sit while the crowds stream past to watch. There are rules. They are not allowed to touch us, although their eyes, greedy with fascination, stare as we sit unmoving, each hoping to be the one who lasts the longest.

            Five minutes left now. It is strange how elastic time can be. These final moments seem to last forever and yet accelerate while I fix my mind into position. I know some of the others stuffed themselves before coming in, but I carefully calibrated my input to ensure I wouldn’t need to relieve myself. The old fellow has also raised people’s ire, but he is tough. A veteran, I believe, who has experienced far worse.

            The camera crew have set up because the Still Life project is being beamed into every home in the country. The ratings are soaring since it started six months ago.

            The gong rings.

            It is time to start sitting.

            I am ready.

            I will win.