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Drusilla Modjeska

Perhaps I'm just being fashionably late, but I've just read Drusilla Modjeska's 2013 Seymour Biography Lecture and it's brilliant. Modjeska ponders her "defection from that borderline ground between the biographical and the fictive, my journey through the check-points into the land of the novel." Her lecture takes us to the highlands of Papua New Guinea and into the art galleries of metropolitan Australia, exploring the limits of empathy when attempting to tell someone else's story. The barkcloth carried esoteric meanings for the Ömie; could its integrity survive sale and the [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:55:43+11:00September 25th, 2014|Interesting Articles, Writing|0 Comments

The Stella Count – Women and Book Reviews

Sad fact: The majority of book reviews in Australian publications are still of books by male writers. The Stella Prize, in conjunction with Books+Publishing, has just released the statistics for the 2013 Stella Count, tracking the relative number of reviews of books by women as compared with books by men in most of the major newspapers and literary journals. This year, the Stella Count also indicates the genders of literary reviewers, and provides information on whether books by male or female writers are reviewed by male or female reviewers. Go [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:55:43+11:00September 24th, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

Laura Ingalls Wilder Autobiography

Hands up who loved the Little House on the Prairie books? Not just me then? Thought not. Then you might be a teensy bit interested in the forthcoming publication of Pioneer Girl - Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiography. Now the writer's autobiography, from which she drew the material that has delighted readers for decades, will be published this autumn for the first time, more than 80 years after she first wrote it. Wilder's Pioneer Girl, the story of her childhood, was begun by the author in 1930, when she was in [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:15+11:00September 2nd, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

Confessional Writing – too much information?

Andie Fox blogs at bluemilk.wordpress.com and regularly writes opinion pieces for Fairfax. Her view of feminist motherhood is often feisty, thoughtful and insightful. Her posts regularly point me around the web to fascinating articles and sites. One of Fox's recent Fairfax pieces (read it here) caught my eye. It's about why women's memoir writing is important. Click through - it's worth a look. I’m inclined to go gently in condemning even this kind of women’s writing. That women should have been forced to specialise in domestic work, that this work [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:16+11:00August 15th, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

Interview with Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert writes luminous and lucid articles and books about topics the rest of us dismiss as being too hard. She brings stories to life about science and climate change. Much awarded and lauded for her work, Kolbert is interviewed here by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. In the movie Bang the Drum Slowly, there's a card game called "The Exciting Game without Any Rules," and I think that's a good description of writing in general. It's true of nonfiction writing in the sense that you are at the mercy of events. [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:18+11:00July 21st, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Excellent review of a new biography about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, here at the New York Review of Books. The review lucidly explains some of Amazon's troubling corporate practices, and Amazon's impact on the publishing industry. He is not an easy man to caricature. In Stone’s portrait, he is nerdy, dreamy, prescient, and ruthlessly competitive. He aspires to kindness as a personal ideal but sometimes rages cruelly at his subordinates. He demands hard data and has an unusually keen mind, one that allows him to follow complex numbers [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:19+11:00July 9th, 2014|Book Review, Interesting Articles|1 Comment

Updike – a review of a review

I read so many book reviews that I often feel far more well-read than I actually am. "Oh yes," I say, affecting an air knowledgeable nonchalance when asked about a certain book. "I know it. It received great reviews." Chances are I'll never get around to reading it, though. And does that matter? A good book review is an end in itself, as enjoyable and informative to read as any other essay form. Just such an example of a fascinating review can be found here, in the Times Literary Supplement. [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:19+11:00June 28th, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

Write like a Mother#^@%*&

Less an article and more of a wandering conversation between an emerging writer and an established one, this piece from Creative Non-Fiction provides some important messages. “Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. You need to do the same. … So write. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” Believing in yourself [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:20+11:00June 24th, 2014|Interesting Articles, Writing|0 Comments

Men, stop lecturing women about reading romance novels

Try this terrific article at the Washington Post about why we deserve better than snide lectures. Another year, another man who is utterly horrified to discover just how many American women read romance novels. This time, the perplexed fellow in question is William Giraldi, a novelist and editor who has taken to the pages of the New Republic to tell us just how appalled he is by the popularity of the erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the more general financial success of the genre...Giraldi also tells us that [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T14:56:20+11:00June 18th, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments