Steph Amir, occasional poet

I've been writing poems for about two years now, and one of the first poems I had published was Unwelcome Neighbours .  It's about one of my favourite animals: the grey-headed flying-fox (a species of fruit bat).  Flying-foxes live in colonies, and in Melbourne the colony used to live in the Botanic Gardens, until there were complaints about them damaging trees by eating and roosting in them.  The solution was to move the entire colony to another park, a feat that had never been undertaken before, and I thought it was remarkable.   Researchers, government officers and park rangers worked together to use a combination of deterrents (a sound that the bats didn't like) and lures (delicious-smelling fruit) to shift the colony east.  The bats never made it to their final destination, instead settling in Yarra Bend park, which somebody decided was a good enough outcome. Thousands of bats still live in the Yarra Bend colony, and they're adorable.  Sometimes I take my 5-year-ol

Three of my poems were published in   Otoliths   journal, on 1 August 2022. Otoliths is  an  Australian online journal created by Queensland-based poet Mark Young. One thing that drew me to this journal was its name. Otoliths are small round bones in the ears of vertebrate animals (including humans). They sense gravity and movement, which is crucial for balance. As an undergraduate zoology student, I spent hours volunteering on a research project that involved removing the otoliths from small fish. The otoliths absorbed minerals from the water that the fish were drinking and living in, so by matching the mineral composition with the concentrations from different creeks and rivers, it was possible to see where the fish had migrated from. I don't think I ever found out what the research findings were, but I do remember that yanking out bits of bone from behind hundreds of fish-brains was horrifying and satisfying in equal parts. When it came time to choose my own research project for

Hello, I'm Steph.  Welcome to my page.  I'm a part-time social scientist, part-time writer from Melbourne, Australia.  I'll be posting some of my published work here, along with a bit of commentary, for anyone who's interested to read it.   I mostly write poetry, but have published a few short stories and essays, and sometimes do freelance copywriting on request.