About me

I am a a former journalist, the child of peripatetic parents from two continents. I work as a communications consultant helping development researchers and NGOs communicate more effectively. Born on Whadjuk land, Western Australia, I lived in the UK for too long and have also called Malaysia and Finland home.

Our home port is on the island of Aegina, Greece but we can mostly be found in the mountains escaping summer mountains or eating noodles over winter.

Why subscribe?

Subscribe to help encourage me to spend more time writing! Plus get access to my old postcards.

Why I write?

I made the decision to start writing again while on a walking pilgrimage, dumbstruck by the trauma of watching my mother’s nervous breakdown yet cocooned in the sanctuary of pilgrimage. My work out-of-office was on, my commitments were reduced to carrying emotional baggage in the direction of yellow arrows. Writing seemed the obvious way to treasure the physical highs and purge the mental lows.

I first wrote as a child; the family on a road trip around Europe in a beat-up Renault station wagon. I was a primary school student enrolled in Australia’s experienced ‘school of the air’ taking part by mail. I was coerced by my father, a diarist with terrible handwriting, to write a travel journal. The important lesson I learned from that experience, aged eight, was that not every diary entry must start with “Today I had breakfast”. Subconsciously I learned that the habit of consistently writing is more important than anything else.

I wrote at high school and was accused of plagiarism by cynical teachers. I ignored them and studied journalism, creative writing, literature and culture at university. I read things I would not have read and even critiqued them from Marxist and Feminist perspectives. I analysed long reads and perfume ads and debated the concept of truth. I offered my writing to be helpfully picked apart.

As an adult in Europe, I worked in communications thinking I would be writing. Instead, I drafted press releases and wrote stories about mundane things like locks and cars, and blogs about academics. While my writing speed increased, my creative output decreased. I also got very bad at attention to detail.

I tried blogging along with everyone else in the early 2000s, and these blogs (for there were more than one) started as the lonely words of a single girl attempting to survive winter in suburban Helsinki. My posts included some insightful cultural titbits but more commonly were nonsensical drunken posts from my broken heart. As I travelled, the posts escalated in exoticism but not in self-censorship, and were peppered with angsty references to the desire to be loved.

I now travel as the closest thing to a proper grown up, with my husband, and love very much requited. He also harbours the idea of both reading and writing and we often talked about The Book. His book was to be called Mountains to Mekong, but we never stayed long enough in either the mountains or the Mekong to start research and someone else wrote the book concept much better. You can however find him on the Long Ride.

We got into a short habit of writing “three moments to remember” every day , but that lasted only for our travels in Ethiopia and now we have only hard-to-decipher tidbits as our only morsel to snack on from that time.

But on the Camino, walking alone, thinking so much, drunk on the details of Lusitanian village life, focussing on myself, and following the Pilgrim’s cliche, I renewed the vow to write again. On return home, I enrolled in an re-recorded online course with Wesleyan College (three quarters of which I valued) which forced me to make every word count, or at least try.

I then took a live online course with CityLit which was less academically rich but a place where I could interact with writers with both lyrical talent (see Helen) and powerful storytelling (see Cameron) and this inspired me to set up a substack, and as I move forward, try to record more of the stories of the people who also bring these wonderful places to life.