On Monday, 11 December 2023, my twenty-one-year-old son and I set off in his van on a 10-day, 4600-kilometre dad-and-son road trip from Sydney to Margaret River. We had planned the trip for over six months to spend Xmas/New Year with our WA family. And yet, I only had a vague idea of our route.
The sign at the front desk of the restaurant was emphatic: "WAIT TO BE SEATED." No "Please" or "Thank you". Bernie and his date, Sally, glanced at each other in awkward silence. "YES," a gruff voice boomed from a speaker on the desk, "DO YOU HAVE A BOOKING?" Bernie stared into the webcam taped to the speaker.
I once wrote a short story titled The Lost Hour that opens: "You know what it's like when you lose something. It's always in the last place you look. But how do you find a lost hour? It's not like it can slip down the back of a sofa like coins or keys!" I've lost a few things but never imagined losing a story!
Episode 88 (29 February 2024): While sorting through storage boxes at home, I found an old notebook belonging to my son. It wasn't a school exercise book but something he'd jotted and doodled in as a twelve-year-old. Among its random pages was a short story he'd written in 2014 about a father who doesn't have "great ideas".
The chemical reaction when I pour the jug of milk onto my cereal sparks a memory: "Snap, crackle, pop!" Growing up, Mum bought us bland wheat cereals for breakfast. "You need the fibre," she'd say, cutting short complaints and requests from my sisters and me for more popular brands.
Less than forty-eight hours after receiving her online order, Third Age Cybertronics delivered Jack to Daisy, a sprightly centenarian who purchased the Advanced Companion Droid to help her with household chores and carry her bags when travelling.
This anthology, drawn from Tall And True and other sources, features 70 examples of my microfiction. Some are Hemingway-esque six-word stories, others one to a few sentences, and there are longer pieces, like the 460-word Her. I hope readers enjoy Tall And True Microfiction as much as I enjoyed creating it.
In 2019, approaching the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found a timely book in a secondhand bookshop: The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 by Frederick Taylor. The book inspired me to write about my contrasting visits to Berlin as a backpacker in 1987 and 1995.
Cassie lay perfectly still in bed, staring at the shadowy shape on the ceiling overhead. A bulky body and eight legs, a spider, but this wasn't Incy Wincy. It was a huntsman with long hairy legs, needle-sharp fangs, and a jump so powerful that if human, it could win gold at the pole vault without a pole.
To help overcome writer's block and start writing the first sentences of A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway is said to have reminded himself: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
Two disclosures. Firstly, I've known Ashley Kalagian Blunt for several years, from her work at Writing NSW and conversations on social media about our writing projects. Secondly, I am not a big reader of crime fiction. But I know it's a popular genre, and after binge-reading Dark Mode, I can see why.
Over the summer holidays, I caught an ABC Science Show podcast, The Year in Tech. Science reporter, Ariel Bogle, discussed with her editor, Jonathan Webb, tech stories which had caught her eye in 2017. She opened with an audio clip from the Ex Machina movie that instantly spiked my interest.
The writer John Banville observed, "Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don't think we remember the past, we imagine it." I have vivid memories of my early childhood (I believe they're memories, not imagination), which is why the #5YearOldSelfie challenge on social media caught my eye.