This new website has been under construction for a while but is finally finished! It was designed by the immensely talented Connor Tomas O’Brien, who is not only a website designer but also a writer, co-founder of Tomely and director of the inaugural Digital Writers’ Festival, which runs from 13 to 24 February. The program […]

“Money culture recognises no currency but its own. Whatever is not money, whatever is not making money, is useless to it. The entire efforts of our government as directed through our society are efforts towards making more and more money. This favours the survival of the dullest. This favours those who prefer to live in a notional reality where goods are worth more than time and where things are more important than ideas.

For the artist, any artist, poet, painter, musician, time in plenty and an abundance of ideas are the necessary basics of creativity. By dreaming and idleness and then by intense self-discipline does the artist live. The artist cannot perform between 9 and 6, five days a week, or if she sometimes does, she cannot guarantee to do so. Money culture hates that. It must know what it is getting, when it is getting it, and how much it will cost. The most tyrannical of patrons never demanded from their protegées what the market now demands of artists; if you can’t sell your work regularly and quickly, you can either starve or do something else. The time that art needs, which may not be a long time, but which has to be its own time, is anathema to a money culture. Money confuses time with itself. That is part of its unreality.”

— Jeanette Winterson, ‘Imagination and Reality’, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Vintage, London, 1996, pp.138-139.

Geoff Orton and I met because we happened to be sitting next to each other at a Sydney Writers’ Festival session, Singapore Sling, in May 2011. It was the week after I’d quit corporate law to give myself more time to write, and it was encouraging to see that one of the panellists, the writer Shamini Flint, […]

I had a brilliant time last Thursday at the launch of The Sleepers Almanac No. 8 at Trades Hall in Melbourne. In the Almanac is a long short story of mine called ‘Two’ — I wrote a little bit about in my last blog post. The directors of Sleepers Publishing, Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn: Sam Twyford-Moore, writer and […]

I hope the year has started brilliantly for all of you. UK writer Samantha Memi has asked me to interview myself about my next big thing, which is a long short story due out in March. 1.  WHAT IS THE TITLE OF THE STORY? Two. 2.  WHERE DO YOU GET THE IDEAS FOR YOUR STORIES? […]

This is a short story by Eric Yoshiaki Dando, first published by Sleepers Publishing in 2006 and reproduced here with Eric’s kind permission. A Shortage of Santas A friend of a friend is recruiting Santas for shopping centres and says that they are having trouble finding them.  The money is slightly better than my labouring job. […]

The assets sale for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby film adaptation was held in Matraville on Wednesday. I didn’t have my usual camera with me, so I took these shots with my smartphone while skipping around the warehouse looking at all the curiosities. The beautiful old chair on the left is now part of my growing collection […]

Samantha Memi‘s chapbook, Kate Moss & Other Heroines, has just been published by Black Scat Books as part of its Absurdist Texts & Documents series. The chapbook includes Samantha’s short story ‘Bouffant’, which has previously appeared on this blog, and other gems like ‘Kate Moss versus the Millipede’. Samantha sent me a surprise gift from the UK, […]