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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...

Light and Colour I

Anyone who has met me knows that I don't really have a haiku vibe.  I'm neither minimalist not serene, but in the interest of exploring different poetic forms, I wrote a few haiku for the 'Light and colour' issue of  Echidna Tracks journal last year, and had two published.   This is the first one.  The editors removed the word "where" , but I prefer the symmetry of the 5-7-5 format. When I read this now, over a year later, the word 'mourn' jumps out, but at the time, it was written with the intent of capturing a particular time and place.   Just over a decade ago, I was heartbroken after being dumped by someone who I'd been crazy about.  I was living with a friend in Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner-north.  The front of the house faced west, and in typical sharehouse style, we had an old couch on the verandah.  I loved that I could have the comfort of the couch combined with the warmth of the afternoon sun.   The relationship h...