Emily Paull

What do you get if you lock five people all interested in Literature(or six depending on the day of the week) in a house by a beach and tell them to write? (In case you were wondering the answer is bad amateur photography.) In all seriousness, I think that the little break from the norm was exactly what I needed.  I would (and frequently do) describe myself as a somewhat uptight person.  I live by the mantra of “What Would Mum and Dad think?” and when I usually go away to my Grandparent’s beach house the week can have the effect of turning me into Scary Prison Guard Dragon Lady.  But so far, every time I have taken people with me down there without parents, I have managed to become a little more laid back and enjoy myself a little more.  Every night this week, The Writers did some cooking.  (This was a nice break from consuming a lot of raw cookie dough/ chips/ chocolate and in some cases wine.)  Every day, there was much lying o...

Is this not just the most beautiful sight you have ever seen? Okay, well maybe that’s just me then.  New notebooks have always felt like new chapters in my life.  When I start a new notebook, I feel like maybe I am not tied down by what I wrote in the old one.  All the whinging and pining and the rants (my gosh, the rants!) are closed up. They are over.  They are stuffed into a pile of old notebooks.  I actually have a lot of notebooks.  Waiting.  Waiting to be used.  People give them to me for birthdays and stuff like that, and I’m rather behind on using them.  I really miss being able to just buy a fifty cent composition book and cover it with pictures as I go on, but I understand that buying me notebooks is how the people around me try to say that they “get me.” Front view.  Do you like my funky calculator?  Back view.  When you put them together they actually say Know Your Rights.  And the words are the De...

June 16. Its a date that won't ring true to many of you, unless its your birthday or the birthday of someone close to you. But I want to introduce the concept of Bloomsday to you all. James Joyce's Ulysses , a modernist novel spanning a whopping 600+ pages of train-of-thought, takes place over the course of a single day, June 16. And Joyce fans everywhere like to celebrate this special day by reading it over the course of Bloomsday. Or at least starting it. I'm pretty sure I came across the idea of Bloomsday in a column by Danny Katz once. Of course, back then, Ulysses was just a really thick, scary book. So how, you may ask, did I come to read it? Well, first of all, read it is being used relatively here, because I actually didn't finish it. I got through 150 pages, which is pretty impressive because a lot of sources say that if you're going to give up on a book you need to at least give it 50 pages. And I gave it three times that. I gave it a week and a bit of my...

This year, for the first time, I made sure that I went to the writers festival. I have been before, maybe a year or two ago, with a friend of mine and her mother (who is also a writer). On that occassion, we saw a panel on creating new worlds in science fiction and fantasy stories. But on this occassion, I was determined to go. Luckily for me, so was a good friend of mine, and we met up at the event. For some reason, these things are always more fun with someone you know sitting beside you. Perhaps it is because you can talk about it long afterwards and prolong the experience. Anyway. I went to three sessions. The first one was called Reimagining the Literary Tradition which, roughly speaking, was about intertextual references and the use of other forms to shape new work. The speakers on that panel were Helen Oyeyemi, Goldie Goldbloom and Craig Silvey. I have to admit, I was only there to see Craig Silvey talk about Jasper Jones. I read that book at the end of last year and I really l...