What do you do when you aren’t in the mood to create, and feel as if you have no ideas? In a previous post, I wrote about some of the ways I keep writing when I don’t feel like showing up to the page. Those strategies are mostly about getting started, and usually they work […]
I’ve just finished a series of workshops with a wonderful group of family historians. We met fortnightly over the space of a term, and I heard some truly extraordinary stories, not only because of the particular people and events included, but also the way in which those stories have been told. This post is partly […]
My writing journey has involved traversing a long, winding path with numerous detours and roadblocks, sometimes entire landslides, but I’m slowly learning that nothing we do or experience is wasted – even discarded words and manuscripts. I really do believe that without the countless writing exercises I’ve attempted, hundreds of thousands of words scribbled in […]
You’ve most likely heard the names Kate Cebrano, Frankie J. Holden and Amanda Keller, who were among those recently recognised in the 2016 Queen’s birthday honours list. But you probably haven’t heard of Edna Richardson, who was on that same list. Now in her eighties, Edna Richardson has spent the past twenty years visiting war […]
Have you ever tried to find out about someone, perhaps an elusive ancestor, but found little trace of them in the history books or other official records? It’s often the case when researching family history, and it was certainly my experience when writing Many Hearts, One Voice. When I started researching the story of the War Widows’ […]
This year has been full of ‘firsts’ for me. Firsts such as a new-look Treefall Writing, travelling to Chile, learning to run (I have a long way to go), learning InDesign (even further to go), launching a book, and being interviewed on radio. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on Treefall Writing, much of this has taken me […]