Izzy Roberts-Orr is kind of awe-inspiring. She is a writer, theatre maker, podcaster and also the Artistic Director and Co-CEO of the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF) EWF also run the Digital Writers’ Festival which is on RIGHT NOW and accessibleRead more…
Biology has been historically used as a justification for problematic and oppressive arguments. Science was used by the Nazis to justify the extermination of ‘inferior’ races. Ever since the dawn of the era of Enlightenment and subsequent increased secularisation ofRead more…
I don’t like Taylor Swift. Her music isn’t relevant to this assessment. I don’t like her. The person. Or, allowing that she is an extremely clever performer adept at constructing a version of herself for public consumption, I don’t likeRead more…
Following the recent violence committed by white supremacists in Charlottesville, nominally over the removal/non-removal of “historical” confederate statutes, a similar debate has been imported to Australia. In August, a prominent statute of Captain Cook in Hyde Park, Sydney, was inscribed/vandalisedRead more…
Below is an extract from Things That Helped, Jessica Friedmann, Scribe Publications 2017. Jessica is delivering a special workshop ‘Writing Life, Writing Self’, on Sun 8 Oct, 2-5pm, Canberra, presented by the Feminist Writers Festival. More info is here. __ The wind on the hillRead more…
These days, picking clothes from my wardrobe has become an activity fraught with symbolism and memories. Daily I stand in front of my wardrobe and finger the various fabrics, the silks and the lace, lined neatly in rows form navyRead more…
In Latin, alma mater means nurturing mother. In so many ways, the residential college I attended was my nurturing mother. It was also the sexy older sister: seemingly confident and knowing, yet knowing so little. I started to become whoRead more…
Having recently moved to Montreal to study for the next six months, I didn’t have much of a background on its queer scene, except a vague notion that it is fairly LBGTQI+ friendly. In fact I managed to arrive justRead more…
The greatest physician of ancient Rome, Galen, believed that menstrual blood was the result of eating bloody meat. He reasoned that women were just simply too slight to be able to digest meat as well as men. Hippocrates, who isRead more…
It is an undeniable fact that the Western media does not reflect our multicultural reality. I have long awaited the arrival of representations of people of colour in Western media. It is certainly refreshing to see the tide begin toRead more…