I am a writer, 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, in publications including The Age, the Australian, The Guardian, The Monthly, Meanjin, Island, and Women’s Agenda.

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’.

At the moment I am working on a number of projects, including a novel and an Australia Council and Creative Victoria funded manuscript that seeks to understand the way isolation and attachment shape what it is to be human. I am also nearly through a PhD by PRS (Creative Writing) at RMIT, where I am looking at how psychoanalytic clinical techniques might contribute to a writing practice.

I have a law degree, an editing postgraduate diploma, a creative writing postgraduate diploma, 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. I am Lecturer, Publishing & Editing, at the University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communications, Faculty of Arts.

I am part of an excellent initiative called NovelLab, which you can read about here.