Sunday Blog 9 – 24th October 2021 Last night I was perusing one of our excellent independent bookshops, already clutching a couple of eclectic choices, when I saw a hardcover copy of Being Ram Dass. This is a memoir written not long before Ram Dass’ death in 2019, and I plucked it off the shelf, …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
Re-reading The Collector
Sunday Blog 8 – 17th October 2021 Sunday night melancholy cloaks me like a miasma. I blame the 1963 book The Collector which I ploughed through over the weekend. The last time I read it was 1982 when I was 17 and finishing school – three decades later it is still a recommended reading text …
The generosity of writers
Sunday Blog 7 – 10th October 2021 If I remember correctly, I saw Michael Robotham speak at the Margaret River Writers’ Festival a few years ago – or perhaps the Perth Writer’s Festival. My memory is notoriously unreliable. For me, there’s nothing I like more than a Writers’ Festival where you can buy all sorts …
Dirty linen
Sunday Blog 6 – 3 October 2021 “It will involve a free trip to Sydney”, I told my daughter. “All we have to do is air our dirty linen on national television.” Luckily, I had her at “Free trip to Sydney.” Clearly, I’m writing about long, long ago, in a pre-Covid world of 2018. Somebody …
Last days of Cobb Street?
Sunday Blog 5 – 26 September 2021 Cobb St is my family home built in the 1960s. The photo above is how it looked in 1963 when my father was just getting started on six decades of home handyman projects. I found a journal entry from this time last year, dated 26 Sep 2020: “It’s …
Taking flight…
Sunday Blog 4 19 September 2021 I have a habit of taking notes while listening to people speaking, which means I can end up with scraps of paper with random scribblings which no-one but myself can decipher. I found just such a scrap this week while cleaning my work desk. It was from the keynote …
Drama Triangles
Sunday Blog 3. 12th September 2021 – winnowings from this week’s readings This week there have been several books on the go, but Martha Beck’s latest book The Way of Integrity has been the one that has dominated, both in written and audio form. If you have never read anything she has written, you might …
Father’s Day
Sunday blog 2. 5th September 2021 I am at my mother’s house on the first Father’s Day in Australia since my father died. I am here to oversee the ritual of a roast in his honour which will soon be in the oven. We will gather in several hours to eat the roast. It’s not …
Turning pro?
Sunday blog 1. 29th August 2021 Your average audio book takes between 6 and 12 hours to listen to. Think about it. Imagine if you could sit down over a weekend and talk into your voice memo for ten hours and knock out a book. Technically, you could, but in reality, books can stretch over …
My Real Name
It was the third time he’d approached me in two hours. I was scratchy-eyed and still unclaimed, waiting at Thessaloniki airport from three o’clock in the morning. A particularly charmless airport in Greece’s second-biggest city, six hours north of Athens. He was yet to find the person he’d been tasked to meet, or so I …