Anne Skyvington

Category: Writing

  • Cultural Events in this Part of the Globe

    Cultural Events in this Part of the Globe

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    Anne Skyvington
    in

    A Short Story Literary Prize “Entries are now open for the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize worth a total of $8000. This year, for the first time, we will be accepting online entries as well as hard-copies. We have also decided to open the Prize so that all writers, not just Australians, are eligible to…

  • New Family New Decade and a New Blog

    New Family New Decade and a New Blog

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    Anne Skyvington
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    A Watershed Year: 2014 My husband Mark Onslow and I went to bed one night with three grandchildren, and woke up the next day with seven grandkids!  That’s exaggerating; it happened over a few months, starting with two new little ones (fostered Aboriginal kids) and then increasing to two more older siblings. Moving house and…

  • Ocean Baths and Swimming Pools

    Ocean Baths and Swimming Pools

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    Anne Skyvington
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    I love the part in the “Life of Pi” movie where the hero explains how he came to be called ‘Pi” from the French word for swimming pool (piscine). Swimming pools have always been an obsession with me too: from the rough ones built into the Clarence River bank at South Grafton when I was…

  • The River Clown

    The River Clown

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    Anne Skyvington
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    I love my brother Donny to bits. He’s the funny one in our family. He sings and yodels “There’s a Track Leading Back” and plays the guitar like his heroes, Slim Dusty and Smoky Dawson. I follow Donny, both of us barefoot, around the farm. I’ve been following him all my life. Since I was…

  • Crow

    Crow

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    Anne Skyvington
    in

     He is waiting for me again this morning, out on the same post, watching me with one eye slanted as always, my jet black crow. He is out for what he can get, the crow. I give him titbits, a piece of meat or a worm or two that I dig up in the garden.…

  • Brave Novels and Memoirs

    Brave Novels and Memoirs

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    Anne Skyvington
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    I’ve just finished reading a memoir by a writer, Alan Close: Until You Met Me: A Memoir Of One Man’s Troubled Search For Love about his lifetime struggle to have a committed relationship with a woman. It is a redemption story that relates his hard-won victory over his emotional problems linked to this situation.  He…

  • Memoirs I Read 2013

    Memoirs I Read 2013

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    Anne Skyvington
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    Lately I’ve been reading reading reading … especially memoirs, as I come closer to sending one of mine off to a competition at Finch Publishing. I’ve also been attending Beth Yahp’s Memoir Evenings at the Randwick Literary Institute on the last Tuesday of the month. One of the books I’ve enjoyed recently is Marzipan and Magnolias…

  • In Dublin’s Fair City

    In Dublin’s Fair City

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    Anne Skyvington
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    We caught a plane to Dublin from London. Here we had our toughest passage through Customs yet. Admittedly Heathrow is difficult; it’s being renovated and we had to catch several buses to reach our terminal. Also, the Customs woman seemed to think I was on a false passport and fired questions at me: “Do you…

  • Alternative Narrative Approaches

    Alternative Narrative Approaches

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    Anne Skyvington
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    Are you  a planner or a laisser faire type when it comes to narrative structure?  Do you put plot, character or language first? Aristotle, in Poetics, claimed plot as the main and most important function in creating aesthetic structure. Not much has changed today, although many writers prefer to start off writing without a strict…