Brian Walters, barrister and poet, talks with me about poetry and the conservation of the wild at a special evening event, part of the conference of the Australian Environmental Law Association, on 1 October 2020.

My poem “Walking my Name Back Home,” which features in my forthcoming collection Walking Underwater, has just been published in The Secular Heretic.

“Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electroconvulsive therapy can” (Jerome Groopman). In conversation with crime writer Ann Cleeves tomorrow night at 6:00pm (Sunday 13 September, Eastern Australian Time), I’m going to ask Ann about the healing power of words—writing them and reading them—and of literature, in general. This is in the wake of a recent donation Cleeves has made to kickstart a bibliotherapy scheme in the northeast of England, where she, like her detective Vera Stanhope, lives. We may also consider the therapeutic power and innate divinity of places and birds. Our conversation is part of BAD, the Sydney Crime Writers Festival, run this year on zoom. Get your tickets at badsydney.com.

If writing is the road, grammar is its rules. Think of this as an assertive driving training school. My brand new online grammar workshop, over two successive Sundays (2:00pm Adelaide time) on Zoom. Based on The Little Green Grammar Book.

I can think of nothing more important for all of us than to hear first nations' voices—first nations' poetry—in the world right now. And always. What we have so long silenced is the wisdom we, in dominant discourses, have lost.

This year’s Charles Causley Festival, in honour of the great Cornish poet, will be run online, 24 to 26 July. An innovative response to the pandemic, this move offers up the Cornish festival, based in Launceston, to the world.

“PROSE IS language making sense,” wrote Octavio Paz (poet, lover and diplomat); “poetry is language making love.” The conditions of a poem are the conditions of love. So, if love is what you want to write, poetry is where you need to turn. My short piece on how to write a love letter appears in the Review section of The Weekend Australian, 4 July 202.

Poetry gathers distances—other voices, other lives, your own abandoned pasts and failed loves, and all those you miss and all that you’d become—and makes of them a hearth. The way a garden in a city is all the gardens in the world. “A Gathered Distance,” the title poem of my latest collection speaks of all this, with the Sydney Botanic Gardens in view. How wonderful to find that book, itself, keeping some fine company—Rumi, Plath, Cohen, Larkin, among others—in the poetry section at Berkelouw, Darlinghurst, recently.

On Saturday 6 June 2020, I find myself reading at an online event, Writing to Buoy Us, organised by Cath Drake. The reading is for Cath’s poetry students, who come from all round the world. Join us—6pm Sydney time—on Eventbrite.