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Hello!

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.  




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Cash, Handshakes and Crowded Trains

I live in Melbourne, which claimed to be "the world's most liveable city", until COVID hit us harder than anywhere else in the country. For me, 2020 was a bit of a weird time for my city and the world to be turned upside-down by a pandemic.  The reason was, I'd spent the last two years fighting hard against obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which hit me hard in 2018 following hospitalisation with a life-threatening illness and ongoing physical disability.  My OCD manifested in a few ways, but the main one was around the avoidance of germs.  So, it was somewhat surreal to suddenly have everyone else fretting along beside me, but with a slightly different emphasis. While the reality of OCD was very clear to me, it was often spoken about it a way that I found profoundly irritating.  The preoccupations and self-protection mechanisms of OCD suffers were described as being completely ridiculous, when in fact many (though not all) are grounded in truth, albeit taken to u...
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On writing and parenthood

 As published in  The Victorian Writer , September 2022: On writing and parenthood The house where I write is warm. The room is filled with sunshine and quiet. There’s a percolator of coffee and a window overlooking an ocean, or perhaps snow-covered eucalypts. It’s perfect because it only exists in my imagination. My real house has trams rumbling past, a five-year-old pretending to be a dog, and a baby making a beeline for the most dangerous item in the room. Most of my poems aren’t written in a house at all, or even on a computer. I draft on my phone while pushing the pram around the suburbs, sitting on the grass during my lunch-break, or collapsed in bed at the end of the day. Parenthood is at odds with the stereotypes of writers: men with coffee-stained manuscripts arguing about literature late into the night; women at their desks with cats on their laps and pots of tea by their side. Parenthood is also at odds with the reality of writing. Any art requires time and space,...
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