Okay, so it’s not so much a TOUR as it is fun two-day celebration! I’ll be at Gympie and Kilkivan libraries next week! Thank you to Gympie Regional Libraries for your support. I hope to catch up with many readers I’ve not yet had the chance to meet.
Gympie Library: Friday 29th September 2023, 5.30
Kilkivan Library: Saturday 30th September 2023, 10am
Come along and celebrate The Wonderful Thing About Phoenix Rose! FREE event, but you need to register. I’d love to see you there!
By popular demand… this is the SECOND workshop (the first one sold out!)
Writing retreats are, hands down,one of the most important things you can do as a writer. Having just come back from my twice-yearly writing retreat week, I am bubbling with enthusiasm to share the joy. Why not join me for a weekend of writing at Bribie Island (Qld) this October to find the time and space to go deeper.
Are you writing a novel, memoir, short story or lived experience self-help book?
You’re invited to join a small group of fellow word lovers to spend quality time diving deeper into your project.
Writing retreats take us physically out of our everyday, which translates nicely to transporting our minds to different places too. Writers can and will write under any circumstances, if they are so determined. Yet, in my considerable experience of writing retreats, absolutely nothing comes close to the value of dedicated writing time and (possibly more importantly) mental space for our creative brains to expand and grow.
I’ve balanced this retreat with enough structure to give you guidance but also enough free time for you to follow your heart.
Retreat Structure
Our home base will be in the Bribie Island Library on Saturday and Sunday, from 9am to 2pm.
We will spend time talking about our projects and brainstorming our way through problem areas. We’ll practise different ways to access the deeper parts of our characters and their backstories.
We’ll break between 11am and 12pm for coffee and lunch. You can wander solo or join with others to continue chatting over food.
We’ll leave the library at 2pm, at which point, you decide how to best continue your retreat. You might head for coffee and cake with fellow writers and continue book chat, wander the extensive walking path along the foreshore and get some sea air to allow your subconscious some processing time before heading back to your accommodation to write some more, or head out again for dinner. It’s your call.
The theme of this weekend is Diving Deeper, with the focus on adding depth and value to our words rather than racing to add words to our total word count. (Don’t worry, though, we’ll also do that too.)
The maximum number of spaces for this weekend is 7.
Your Investment: $225pp.
(Accommodation is not included. See below for suggestions.)
This lovely library is situated on the foreshore of Pumicestone passage (Bongaree) and is an easy, flat, few minutes walk to cafes, coffee, ice cream, and various shops. I recently ate at Annie Lane cafe every day while on retreat and enjoyed coffee and incredible cakes from Scoopy’s, just over the road. I also enjoyed the foreshore walk, which has a wealth of historical photos, information and quotes to inspire a dozen new stories or characters that you might even weave into your own project.
Accommodation
Bribie Island has a wide range of accomodation options available so you are sure to find something to suit your needs.
Bongaree Caravan and Cabins has simple but affordable options that can suit up to 4 people art once, in some cases. They are also just a stone’s throw from the library!
So, fun fact: when I was a journalism student at Griffith University, Frances Whiting was my writing idol. Her warmth, her humour and her focus on people’s stories was exactly the thing that attracted me to writing the most. I didn’t get to have a job or career that allowed me to write like that for newspapers, but it was those same qualities that I honed and carried over into my fiction works.
Years ago, Frances and I were once billeted into a home in north Queensland, where we’d gone to be part of a writers festival, and she gave me some awesome clothing advice. (Because, I most definitely AM the person who needs styling clarity.) And because she is Frances, it didn’t feel like a criticism, it felt like, oh, wow, I wish I’d known that before — thank you!
This week, I get to sit down and have a chat with her about my new book, about road trip stories and animals and neurodivergence, and it kind of makes me feel like, ten books down, I might finally be An Author…
I’m so looking forward to this. If you’re in Brisbane, you can come along too. It’s a free event but you must book online here.
Are you writing a novel? Writing memoir? Writing for blogs or social media?
Food connects us all.
Everyone has stories in their memory and in their heart that include food. Days spent in the kitchen with your mother or grandmother making biscuits. Afternoons wandering the apple orchard, picking fruit with your brothers and sisters. Maybe brewing some cheeky cider with your dad in the back shed. The first time you tasted seafood. The warm, hearty stews that kept you going through a difficult winter. The endless lasagnes left on your doorstep after a bereavement. Every day, we eat. Every day, we create more memories.
Perhaps you would like to take some of those memories and get them onto paper. Maybe you would like to channel your passion for food into writing for magazines. Maybe you would like to know how to enhance your fiction writing with the joy of food.
This workshop is for you.
Join with me to discover diverse ways to use food in story. This one-day course gives you a raft of new writing tools to approach food in your writing with more fun, depth and elegance. Bring your pages to life with mouthwatering descriptions and tantalising facts to hook your reader and keep them reading till the very last bite.
To find out more about the workshop, go to my WORKSHOPS page.
