Gregory Day—multi-award winning novelist (The Patron Saint of Eels), poet, nature writer, fisherman, bard, Yeatsian, and place tragic—made a speech at the Melbourne launch of my poetry collection Fire Diary back in late May, a speech in which I felt so recognised as a man and a poet that I could find little to say afterwards—in my gratitude and some deeper feeling I still can’t name—except “thank you”. Greg’s words created a silence you want your poems to create—into which…
My first book of poems, Fire Diary, was published in November 2010 (Puncher & Wattmann).
It gathers 49 of the poems I’ve been writing over the past few years and arranges them in four sections: “The Perfect Body of the Beloved”, “As Near to Stillness as I’m Ever Going to Get”, “The Rain on the Face of the World”, and “The Black Terrain Between”.
I left out more poems than I put in; I hope to…
The Little Black Book of Business Writing (UNSWP, 2010), which I wrote with Geoff Whyte, does for functional writing what The Little Red Writing Book (2006) aimed to do for all writing (creative, in particular). The black book is the third in my trilogy of books on the writing craft and the writing life.
Don’t use writing to sound like someone doing business (or policy or research, science or finance or sales); use writing to get the business…
The Blue Plateau was the first book I sat down to write. It changed a lot in the writing, and I wrote a lot of other books before I got to the end of it, but it was always going to be the book it became, once I became the man I needed to be to write it. The book is my attempt, in my accent, to do for the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, what Henry David Thoreau did…
The Little Green Grammar Book, twin to The Little Red Writing Book (UNSWP, October 2008), aims to do for grammar what the red book does for style. And in the same tone of voice. It’s useful, but it has attitude. It’s fun, I’m told, to read.
Grammar is the rules for paradise, I say in the book; writing is the paradise. Grammar is the set of rules you’ll need to know and sometimes cleverly break, but never forget,…
Writing Well is what my writing primer The Little Red Writing Book is called in the edition published by Cambridge in 2008 for the US and UK (and other English-speaking markets).
Essentially the same as the red book (2006), Writing Well is adapted for use outside Australia: more US and UK examples, my best shot at US spellings, and a few improvements.
A Place on Earth (UNSW Press, 2003; University of Nebraska Press, 2004) is my anthology of nature writing from Australia and North America. It starts with an introductory essay in which I managed to say, better than I have, perhaps, said since, some things about nature and nature writing and why they matter so much. My book includes my “Falling Water,” about living in two…
The Land’s Wild Music (Trinity University Press, 2005) is a road book. According to poet Pattiann Rogers “The Land’s Wild Music is the record of a quest, an odyssey, Mark Tredinnick’s journey of exploration. Focusing on the work, the places, and the lives of four major contemporary writers, Tredinnick’s narrative investigates the complex interconnections existing among the land, language, and…
