writer & thinker
For The Guardian, I reviewed Monica Zanetti’s teen romcom, Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt), a pretty charming story of queer love – romantic, familial, and intergenerational.
‘Zanetti cleverly plays with the idea that our queer predecessors paved the way for how we live now, but as individuals can be just as bumbling and out of touch as anyone else when it comes to dealing with teenagers. We might idolise OWLs (“older wiser lesbians”) but they’re only flightless, bug-eyed humans after all.’
As an AFAB nonbinary person, many feminist and women’s spaces welcome me – but often that welcome is itself a form of trans erasure, an insistence on seeing us as the genders we were assigned. I wrote about my uncomfortable relationship with feminist literary spaces for Feminist Writers Festival.
‘I’m pretty accustomed to not feeling at home anywhere – this is often a good thing, a productive tension. The can of worms fertilises the soil. But whether it’s Feminist Writers Festival, Facebook writers’ groups, or other feminist literary initiatives like the Stella Prize, I think it’s important to remember that you can’t simply tweak the category of woman to accommodate nonbinary people. Nonbinary disturbs the foundations of binary gender because it’s supposed to. It’s intentionally an interruption, a question as well as an identity.’
My first profile for The Saturday Paper is on musical theatre icon Nancye Hayes – aka ‘Nancye with an E’ – who will soon celebrate six decades in show business.
I reviewed the new audio play of Loaded, Christos Tsiolkas’s debut novel that shot through my veins two decades ago as a queer migrant teenager living in North Richmond.
My suburb guide for Seddon is finally out! Just in time for you to check out these places as they reopen after lockdown. It was really fun eating my way through the neighbourhood for research purposes.
‘The novel toys with the frame of a feminist revenge fantasy but Yannie makes an atypical heroine. Her rage is not sexy or witty or glamorous. It’s curdled resentment, sour and hard, obsessive and cracked.’
Read the rest of my review of SL Lim’s Revenge in The Saturday Paper today.
I’m in the Spring 2020 edition of Meanjin with a review of Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain. Grab a print copy or subscribe online to read.
My first game review for The Guardian looks at Tell Me Why, a narrative adventure from French studio Dontnod and the first major game to feature a playable transgender character.
I’m often homesick for the internet I grew up with, where the dominant tone was painful sincerity rather than snappy wit, and no one had to have a body unless they wanted one.
Here’s my essay for Kill Your Darlings: a juicy deep dive on sexting in quarantine, internet nostalgia, catfishing, anonymity, romance, text-based gender affirmation, and coming unfleshed.
I’m delighted that my first piece for The Saturday Paper is a poem: this poem, which was originally commissioned as part of Assembly For The Future.
