AustLit

'In 2008, life, as I had known it for the preceding four years, ended. I had been living in the red majesty of Australia’s Central Desert, building a career from a rich and unique professional platform, and personally, I had fallen in love. However, between the lines of this white-girl-in-the-outback postcard was the overwhelming reality of the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention and a hidden abusive relationship. This is a story within the story of a story, of what severance leaves in its wake; how after leaving my desert life behind, I rediscovered creative writing and through writing fiction began to edit what Maria Popova calls my ‘inner storytelling’ (Popova 2013b), learning to ‘draw positive meaning’ (Perry 2012: 77) from traumatic experience. This is a story written from what Avery F Gordon describes as my ‘haunting place’, ‘conjuring’ my ‘ghosts’ to ‘put life back in’ to my memories (Gordon 2008: 22). This is ‘that sore place’ Tom Spanbauer says is ‘within each of us that is the source for stories that no one else can tell’; this is how I began to embrace writing fiction as ‘the lie that tells the truth truer’, through the act of what he calls ‘dangerous writing’ (Spanbauer nd).' (Author's abstract)