Alumni Features

If you would like to write a contribution for our alumni features page, we would love to hear from you. Please email varuna@varuna.com.au with your suggestion and we’ll get back to you.

Guest User Guest User

You'll just be the mountains

Enjoy this engrossing feature article from Laurie Steed about how he wrote a memoir in a two-weeks Varuna residency. As Laurie writes at the close of his article: I’d encourage all writers at Varuna to not necessarily emulate such productivity but to embrace the freedom that preceded it. As writers, we sometimes learn to perform rather than create. It’s only when we turn off that constant gaze and see what we so desperately need to say that we can indeed be the house, and the mountains.

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Caught Mapping

As I write this, Sydney, the city where I’ve set my life and much of my fiction over the past 27 years, is ringed by fire and choked by smoke.

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My Type of Fiction

In early October an attorney connected with Donald Trump, John Dowd, sent a letter to Congress stating that his clients would not be cooperating with the Ukraine inquiry.

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Clive Jones Clive Jones

The Struggles of Women Writers

This week as I was preparing to host the Poetry Masterclass week at Varuna, I found myself reflecting on a few things specific to the struggles of women writers.

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Guest User Guest User

The Lure of the Writers' Colony

In Rachel Cusk's latest novel Kudos, one of the characters is ensconced at a writers' residence in an Italian castle owned by a lascivious countess.

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Clive Jones Clive Jones

The Long Goodbye

I can’t remember the last time I did a first-person Monthly Feature like this – one of my ‘true confessions’ – but it was a while ago.

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Clive Jones Clive Jones

Kim Scott interview

As job perks go, some people love nothing more than a free lunch, tickets to see a boy band, or a boxful of Botox..

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