Week 48/2025: Tas Writers MiniFest
Week of 24 November 2025
The week started off great and ended with me succumbing to a head cold on Sunday.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
Tas Writers MiniFest
The Hobart Writers Festival Tas Writers MiniFest happened on Saturday. There were six sessions available over the day and you could book a whole day pass or select individual sessions.
I couldn’t decide what to go to and what to leave out, and the cognitive overload got so much that I booked a day pass, which made every other decision that day very easy. I just needed to arrive at 9.15 and stay there all day.
It was a great decision. I had a great day!
Meadh from Tas Writers introduced each session with an Acknowledgement of the Country we were on, and a recommendation for a book by a Palawa author, including Trish Hodge’s Palawa tunapri, which I wrote about last week.
Some sessions were more relevant to my interests than others but I found them all interesting and the panelists had great conversations that sparked ideas and inspiration.
Here’s a quick overview of what I took away from the day
Session 1: Historical Fiction: Stories Close To Our Hearts
Claire Van Ryn, Karen Brooks, Angela Baker
- Karen writes to give a platform to women who have been erased from history, alongside the marginalised men. What we learn in history is all about upper class men and war heroes, so we need to learn about the stories that aren’t told—of the women, workers, illiterate people etc.
- Karen immerses herself in the literature, language, art, music of the period she’s writing about.
- Angela: Writing makes you learn about yourself, who you are. It changes you.
- Claire: Write anything to get started. Write even if you won’t keep it or you don’t like it and it’s terrible. It’s better to have crap to work with than a blank page.
Session 2: First Tasmanians: A Deep History
Shayne Breen in conversation with Andrew Darby (author of The Ancients)
Shayne’s book First Tasmanians A Deep History looks at 40,000 years of Aboriginal history on Lutruwita/Tasmania, which traces the history and movement of people across the island as the climate changed. The book has a lot of scientific information and he wanted to make it readable for the general public so he used literary techniques and invented a fictional character whose life cycle is traced in the book.
Session 3: Short-Form Fiction: Risk Takers & Thought Makers
Rayne Allinson, Ben Walter, Tess Crawley & Sam Castle
This session included the launch of the Forty South 2025 Short Story Anthology, which includes the eight best entries from the Tasmanian Writers’ Prize 2025, one of which is by panelist Tess Crawley, and the winning stories from the the Young Tasmanian Writers’ Prize 2024. Panelist Sam Castle was the winner of the senior section.
Takeaways
- Ben: Short stories are manageable and you only need one idea, a feeling, an emotion—you can get this out there and it’s done, then you can start again and do something else over and over, not like a novel which can be an albatross around your neck.
- Tess: Competitions with deadlines are your friend because they force you to write something.
- Sam: Walk more, observe, find things to write about.
- Ben: Ask yourself what form does an idea need? Have options in your toolkit to articulate something in the form it needs to take.
- Ben: An idea that doesn’t go anywhere immediately is hard to work with—if I abandon it in a folder, the excitement is lost.
Session 4: Female Voices in Contemporary Tasmanian Fiction
Liz Evans, Meg Bignall, Nadai Mahjouri, Kate Kruimink
This session looked at questions like: What is women’s fiction? Why don’t we have men’s fiction? Why will many men not read fiction by women (because ‘women’s fiction’) but women will read books by men?
The authors talked about writing as mothers and bringing their own stories into their novels.
They also talked about where they set their novels. Meg said she writes stories set in Tasmania because it’s her home but this is where her stories happen they are not ‘about’ Tasmania, whereas Liz prefers to set her novels in England for a number of reasons, one being because she knows those places so well.
Session 5: Publishing: Small, Mighty & a Little Bit of an ‘Upstart’
Judith Ridge, Hobartisan Books (Niki Horin), Evercreech Editions (Adam Ousten), Forty South (Lucinda Sharp)
This was an interesting discussion about the different options available for people to publish their work. I learned that gaps in mainstream publishing are providing opportunities for micro-publishers and for self publishing. It’s important to research the publishers you want to approach and to be able to position your work against what they do, and to be able to sell it to them. Practice your pitch.
Takeaways
- Tasmania produces extraordinary writers.
- What kids read influences everything they do but this relies on having people introduce them to reading—the loss of teacher librarians in schools, for example, has a huge impact on kids’ reading. This flowed on a bit from a comment made in the previous session about how if you don’t read, you don’t write, and as fewer boys and men area reading, we are seeing fewer male authors.
- Someone said that there is this sense of ‘elitism’ that’s crept into reading that begins to dictate what we ‘should’ be reading. But this is rubbish. It doesn’t matter what you read. Just that you read.
Session 6: Tassie Crime is Doing Fine
Alan Carter, Jo Dixon, David Owen
- Similar to Meg, for David, Tasmania is the place where his stories happen. He says he’s careful not to name places but people may still think they recognise them.
- Jo says you have to be careful of names in a book set in Tasmania because you might unknowingly name real people. She says Tasmanian readers love seeing Tasmania on the page but you can’t get it wrong: Detail is important.
- Jo describes herself as an ‘incomer’ in Tasmania, so most of her stories are about incomers and how they react to the environment, rather than being about people who have lived here for generations.
It was a long day, tiring, but fabulous with so many ideas. I loved listening to people who actually do this thing I’m trying to do! I’m still processing a lot of what I heard and I still don’t have any ideas about what to write, which is kind of a problem . . .
I’m grateful to TasWriters for organising the day and for all the panelists who came along to contribute.
Lovesgiving
The wonderful Toni AKA Honeychild wowed us with her Lovesgiving Fest on the weekend.
There was far too much food for one meal, which is good. Spread the love!
Some of Toni’s amazing dishes that made up the feasts were herb-roasted turkey, Creole roasted pork, the most delicious side of brussels, cabbage and bacon, cornbread, corn pudding . . . and my favourite thing of all, the coconut and lime cream pie.
Amazing! Thank you, Toni.
Habit tracker
Existing habits
I’m not counting Sunday because I was sick that day.
- Go outside first thing (6 days): 6/6
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 6/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 6/5
- Walk (6 days): 6/6
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (3 days): 2/3
- Thinking time (4 days): 1/4
- Mid-day journalling (6 days): 1/6
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (4 days): 2/4
- Evening routine (6 days): 6/6
New habits
- Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 1/5
- Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5
- Days out of 30 I have got up at the alarm: 9/9
Summary of the week
This week I learned
A broken hip is actually a fractured neck of femur. Not the “hip bone”. I think this was something I knew but didn’t know. It now makes sense why the bone density scan looks at the neck of femur. This, people, is the thing we do not want to fracture and is why we do strength training. Right?
The correct sock ratio to be able to wear my rainbow Blundstones. It does not include innersoles. They are now removed and I can wear the boots.
Many things from the Writers Fest. I think my favourite learning was Karen Brooks telling us that in the middle ages, because the water was so bad, people drank five litres of beer and cider every day, so they were half-pissed most of the time and this may well have been the state they were in when they made important decisions . . .
According to Felix, a contestant on Hard Quiz Kids, the name Jellicle Cats (from TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and sung about in the musical Cats) came about because TS Eliot’s grandchild couldn’t say ‘dear little cats’.
This week I noticed
The magpie facing off with the bronzewing pigeon in the back yard.
I saw two plovers back in their normal spot near the bus stop near home.
The Stranger Things parody sign outside St David’s Cathedral.
What’s making me think?
From Elizabeth Davies (@thiswomanlifts on Instagram):
The Fitness Challenge I’m doing is called ‘Playing The Long Game’. Basically, you show up as best you can, forever—accepting that shit is rarely perfect or linear and you adjust for different life chapters as you go. There are no Before & Afters, just lots and lots of Durings.
What was the best thing this week?
I won’t say it was the best thing, but one of the chickens woke me up at 5.25 on Monday morning and I had to get up to let her out so she’d be quiet.
It meant I saw the morning sky, which was particularly beautiful.
Reading
- Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia by Paula Gerber
- Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
- Vagabond by Tim Curry
- William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Terry Doescher
- Minds Went Walking: Paul Kelly’s Songs Reimagined compiled by Mark Smith, Neil A. White & Jock Serong
Watching
- Stranger Things Season 4
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Enlightenment’
- Stranger Things Season 5
About The Author
