December 2025 marked the fifth anniversary of Every Second Tuesday, the anthology released by Elwood Writers in 2020. In the middle of a wild Melbourne lockdown, my writing group launched its book via an online event with Readings books. One story of mine included was a personal essay, 'The White Woman’, written after a visit to … Continue reading Stories, Songs and a Post Office in Harlem
Tag: Veterans
Stories of Change and Place
The interconnection between change and place became more apparent to me once I'd finalised my piece for Tim McQueen’s program on Vision Australia Radio (VAR). In preparing with Elwood Writers for Cover to Cover, I better understood that change happens all the time – no matter our resistance – but that it always occurs in place, … Continue reading Stories of Change and Place
The Tricks of Memory
Last month my second cousin, Eliza, died unexpectedly. I hadn’t known her well, but I cried at her funeral. My tears were not for her entirely, although she was too young to leave this earth and had lived a full and loving life. Photographs of Eliza, her husband, her children and grandchildren filled the middle … Continue reading The Tricks of Memory
Anzac Day for Writers
Poet and novelist, Ocean Vuong, whose mother was a child of the Vietnam War, says that all literature is the history of war*. He need not be taken literally, although I tend to do so myself. More broadly, we may agree that literature relies on conflict or inner tension for its existence. Sometimes with resolution, … Continue reading Anzac Day for Writers
The Intimacy of Memoir
Author Lee Kofman says: ‘Memoirists write directly about what matters to them, whereas fiction writers may sublimate their experiences and passions.’ The first half is certainly true: memoirists are concerned with what matters to them. Whole books are devoted to the second part of Lee's hypothesis. But let’s look at memoir for a moment. Lately … Continue reading The Intimacy of Memoir
Putting the Family in Memoir
Flannery O’Connor writes, ‘ … anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.’ If you, like me, write about your family – almost unavoidable in memoir — how do you do so without hurting someone? Upon hearing that I was writing about my veteran … Continue reading Putting the Family in Memoir
Why Writings and Musings?
I wrote this post for the Elwood Writers blog in October 2021 - view here. The post is in answer to Helen McDonald's questions about why we write our individual blogs, and who our intended audience is. Why I Write my Blog I set up the Writings and Musings blog because I wanted to have an online … Continue reading Why Writings and Musings?
The Inciting Incident
What is the inciting incident that sparks your memoir? The question might apply also to fiction writers. It is any turning point in a life that changes something towards the remarkable. For memoirists, says US teacher Kaylie Jones, it's the moment 'the rock came through the window’; the day one's life went ‘careening out of … Continue reading The Inciting Incident
The Right to Write
In a writing workshop, teacher Kaylie Jones encouraged us to give ourselves permission to write. Busting myths, she said, is what the writer must do. The right to write might be more pertinent to the memoirist than it is to the fiction writer, as for us there is less distance between ourselves and the story. … Continue reading The Right to Write
The Eye watching the ‘I’
Among her other skills, US teacher Kaylie Jones runs memoir-writing workshops. At the first one I attended, she explained that the good memoirist uses the omniscient Eye to watch over the more personal ‘I’ of the narrator. In seconds flat, she was at the whiteboard drawing an eye in the sky observing and informing the stick … Continue reading The Eye watching the ‘I’
WRITINGS AND MUSINGS OF MARGARET MCCAFFREY 