Dr Nicola Redhouse

I am a writer and academic living in Melbourne, Australia. My debut nonfiction book Unlike the Heart:  a memoir of brain and mind (UQP, March, 2019) explores philosophy of mind through the story of my own experience of early motherhood, and the schisms between biological and psychological approaches to mental health.

I have been published widely on topics spanning dream science, the Royal Commission into Mental Health in Australia, soundscapes of the Pandemic and voice therapy, for publications including The Age, the Australian, The Guardian, The Monthly, Meanjin, Island, and Quarterly Essay.

I also write about funny stuff, like my piece in The Guardian about the time it took a hundred years for my children’s beds to arrive from a furniture store I have called Captivity, lest they try to sue me.

My fiction has been published in the literary journals Meanjin, Island and Kill Your Darlings, and in the anthologies Best Australian Stories and the Big Issue Fiction Edition, and my poetry has appeared in Cordite, Slow Canoe Live Journal and the Brain Science Network.

But my most successful and unpaid piece of writing to date is definitely my anonymous (no longer!) review of a stay at a terrible hotel, ‘Like a children’s play where the castle set falls forward and reveals itself to be chipboard’.

My PhD research, ‘The Net of Associations: Psychoanalytic States of Mind Brought to the Page’, offers ways for creative writers to use psychoanalytic modes of noticing affective and emotional content to extend and enliven their conceptual and craft choices. I offer these techniques in creative writing workshops, including in a pilot study currently underway with Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences students through the University of Melbourne’s New Horizon’s Fellowship.

I have a law degree, an editing postgraduate diploma, a creative writing postgraduate diploma, my PhD, and a HECS debt up the wazoo. I worked as a book editor for a long time, which was wonderful and also no help to the HECS debt. I have taught creative writing at RMIT and at the University of Melbourne, and now work at the latter in the School of Culture and Communications, Faculty of Arts, in the role of Lecturer, Publishing & Editing.

I am part of an excellent initiative called NovelLab, which you can read about here, and am part way through two quite different novels.