Knock-knock?

Hello. It looks like we’re the first people to stop by for a while.

My name is Stephanie. I’m new here. The Melbourne Writers Festival asked me to blog for them this year because Angela Meyer is packing her suitcases and zooming off on a trip to Europe. I know you’ll miss her terribly, but I reckon we can become friends.

You might have seen me around the traps – I tell stories at Ginger and Honey and sometimes on the Overland Literary Journal blog. I get pretty fired up when I care about something, so maybe you’ve seen me getting shouty and argumentative on Twitter. Or perhaps you’ve come across my creative writing? You can find some of it in harvest, Voiceworks, and the Emerging Writers’ Festival Reader. I’m interested in literature and politics, music, philosophy and criticism, but I also really like birds, in the bushwalking, binoculars-wearing, Harry-high-pants-and-carrying-a-guidebook kind of way. (Please don’t judge me.)

At the moment, I’m writing a PhD on literary representations of Indigenous Australia and a novel to boot, so I’ve been reading a lot of Australian fiction lately: Gail Jones and Peter Carey, Xavier Herbert, Kim Scott and Alexis Wright. I’ve been at university for eight years. That seems like a lot, but I’ve also been regularly commandeering my Dad’s old Land Cruiser and running off with it to the Top End to hang out with my extended family and friends, chasing crocodiles, cane toads and the occasional unseasonal storm. So it’s not all bad.

Anyway, I’ll be making this place a regular hang-out. I think you should start coming around more often.

Who in the Sam heck are you?

You may have noticed there’s one new blogger in the ‘hood for the 2010 festival. Well, hello! The folks at MWF have asked me to join Estelle and Simon (who will be re-introducing themselves soon) to blog the bejesus out of this year’s festival. I’m Angela Meyer – a writer, reviewer, editor, blogger, and (importantly) reader from Melbourne. You might already have heard of me via the LiteraryMinded blog…?

You can learn all about my work on the ‘About Me’ page over there. Or, you can analyse me through a short, random mash-up of some of my favourite things (the first ones that pop into my head):

David Bowie  Albert Camus  strawberry jam  Australian literature  memes  Richard Yates  writers’ festivals  my boyfriend  Ghostbusters  writing fiction  Twitter  Marilyn Monroe  Midnight Cowboy  the word ‘facetious’  cartoons  sad endings  Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds  Shakespeare’s Hamlet  Prague  The Electric Literature iPhone app  Kafka  Sir Ian McKellan  retro-future  making lists  Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac’s live acoustic version of ‘Big Love’  Wes Anderson  Nabokov’s Lolita  The Simpsons  Edvard Munch  the fact I was born in 1984  Frankenstein (book & film versions – even the bad ones)  absurd theatre  Punch Trunk

That’ll do. Hope you enjoy my take on things.