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The Symbolism of Tea in Literature
COLONISATION AND IMPERIALISM Get Out (2017), a film by Jordan Peele An Australian example: “We were slaves to white families,” she said. Aunty Lorraine worked as a servant in rural New South Wales, from age 15. “The final part of your training was how to serve high tea to white families that you going to […]
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Getting Lost And Storytelling
Stories that scare me the most often involve getting lost. The scariest Australian stories are, to me, the ones where a little boy goes out into the wilderness and dies in the heat, unable to find his house.
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Overcoming Perfectionism
Perfectionism can be a superpower but can hinder us in getting things done. Framing perfectionism as fear is one way to harness it.
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In Praise of the Sloth
Of all the deadly sins, slothfulness is the least problematic. In fact, most people would benefit from becoming more like a sloth, not less.
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How I Met My Husband by Alice Munro Short Story Analysis
The narrator of “How I Met My Husband” has a different voice from most other characters by Canadian author Alice Munro.
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Gravity by David Leavitt Short Story Analysis
“Gravity” is a short story by David Leavitt, born 1961. I’m reading it in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates (1992), though it was first published in 1990 in Leavitt’s A Place I’ve Never Been collection. This gay writer had his first collection published at the age of twenty-three […]
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How To Write Like Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson did not only write disturbing supernatural stories. Her most famous short story is “The Lottery”.
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Superheroes In Storytelling: Various Notes
Love it or loathe it, the superhero is an ambivalent archetype in storytelling, useful to either bolster the conservative status quo, or subvert it.
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Narrating Faulty Memory in Fiction
Today I’m taking a close look at examples of fictional narrators who know their memory may not be accurate.
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Why writing does not get any easier with practice
Does writing get easier the more you do it? Yes and no. The mechanics get easier but each project presents its own new problems.
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Transgender Jokes Which Are Actually Funny
So we’ve had decades and decades of jokes where trans people are the butt of the “joke”. This has extended to children’s media, where stories about gender transgression of any kind, but especially boys dressed forcibly as girls, have propped up the gender hierarchy by making it seem legitimately punishable to transgress. We’re in a […]
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Tricks for Writing A Lengthy Work
How do you write a lengthy piece of writing — a book, a thesis — without giving up? Various writers share tips and tricks. Here are a collected few.
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Describing Australian Landscapes in Literature
How do Australian authors describe Australian landscapes, making it fresh every time? Here are some examples.
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Drafts and Rewriting: How many “drafts” do authors really write?
How many drafts do fiction authors really write. Also: what counts as a draft?
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White Literary Taste
Did the 2020 efforts towards diversity and inclusion in the wake of George Floyd impact the systemic racial bias in publishing and reviewing?