Journeys of the Mind and elsewhere

I have always loved stories. I grew up with an insatiable appetite for epic journeys that took my mind to places unbounded by time and space. I had never considered a career as a writer, but as a postgraduate student at Sydney University researching sea level rise, I needed to pay the rent. So I worked part-time as an underwater photographer and contributed stories to magazines. That led me to living on a yacht in the South Pacific for many years, working as a freelance writer, editor, and photographer for dozens of international journals and magazines including National Geographic Traveler.

When I moved back to Australia as a single parent, I needed to be at home, so I wrote a novel. It won an award, so I wrote a few more novels and was invited to write tie-in novels and short stories based on the television series Stargate-SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. The alien ‘gods’ premise of Stargate had always intrigued me, so when the Queensland University of Technology offered me a research scholarship, I ended up with a thesis titled The Attraction of Sloppy Nonsense. It provided a nice set of tools to teach creative writing (and understand how people can fall down and remain captive in disinformation rabbit holes).

In 2008, looking for a new adventure, I bought a small property in the foothills of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Southern Alps, added some sheep to mow the paddocks, and spent several months each year journeying elsewhere.

Then one day, an ecologist, an organic dairy farmer, and a coastal geomorphologist (that’s me), walked into a bar just south of Ōtautahi Christchurch… Which is not the start of a joke, but where my current writing story began.

Like all good stories it’s full of drama, mystery, and intrigue. It began billions of years ago, involves massive impacts from comets, continents smashing into one another, Earth’s wobbly orbit around the sun, and of course, people—heroes and villains and everyday people of all ages. These days, you’ll catch me researching this rapidly unfolding story and teaching writing courses for The Writers’ College. I also have the privilege of serving on the Te Pae Tawhiti Distant Horizons awards judging panel.