Author Archives: susan

Happy New Year! We’ve just been for a picnic in our beautiful Botanical Gardens; ducks, dogs, kids on their new Christmas bikes, blankets spread on the banks of the (very small) lake in the shade of willow trees under a … Continue reading →

I don’t usually go all confessional in this blog. I’m a pretty reserved person and while I hope my books are interesting to others, I’m not sure that my private life is. But. Here goes. To all you writers out … Continue reading →

Current events  – our despicable government, the Trump circus, continuing attacks on renewable energy, our ongoing torture of refugees and the rest – have been so depressing, unsettling and generally vile that recently I decided on a short news moratorium. … Continue reading →

How about another voice? While I was incubating How Bright Are All Things Here, I re-read my mother’s travel diaries and memoirs, and used some of her descriptions as the basis for parts of the novel. She wrote this for … Continue reading →

This is me in front of one of Douglas Green’s – my father’s –  student paintings. It’s a nude – the back of a naked woman – and I posed tactfully in front of her bottom. My son, when small, … Continue reading →

I have just read another book by Sybille Bedford – earlier this year, it was her novel, “Jigsaw”. This one “Quicksands: A Memoir” covered much of the same territory. Same, but different. Vivid and personal, even confessional. It is not … Continue reading →

Spotted in Readings, Carlton and in the bookstore at Cairns airport.

My new book, How Bright Are All Things Here, had its launch on Sunday. After feeling that I was about to face the guillotine for the past couple of weeks, my distress reached peak intensity just before the speeches began. … Continue reading →

I’ve just finished a couple of Siri Hustvedt books; a novel and a collection of essays. I’ve had Sorrows of an American for ages, but never read it. And within a few minutes, I was so absorbed that I knocked … Continue reading →

I had a break in writing recently and took to making art pages in one 0f those cheap black spiral bound visual diaries. Here are a few.