Travel blogging: Can you even be a travel writer anymore?

Can you even be a travel writer anymore? A successful one? A good one?!

Certainly, in this current climate of unpredictability—the ‘will they, won’t they’ of lockdowns and border closures—you’re more likely to garner followers, likes and clout for writing about sourdough rather than seeking, soaking or sunning

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Fixing it in post

For such a young medium, podcasting has already developed such distinct cultural markers; the close-mic breathy voice to mimic intimacy, the affectedly natural banter to start the episode, the fourth-wall-breaking nods towards the production and editing that goes into it (‘we’ll fix it in post’).

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On having written

I was lucky enough to get to work closely with Anna for the months leading up to the issue, after the magazine accepted a work of mine for their first 2021 issue.

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Haydn Spurrell
From catering to copywriting

Since Melbourne’s recent emergence out of restrictions, I thought it was about time I knuckled down and found myself a "real" adult job. I desperately wanted to end my hospitality career, to stop picking up empty glasses and serving rowdy drunken people at AFL matches, and secure a role within the editorial industry.

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Doing things wrong

In the 1996 movie Fargo the movie opens with the following text:

> ‘This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.’

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The Spark Prize: workshop recap and FAQs

The Spark Prize is a new biennial joint venture between Hardie Grant Books and RMIT Writing and Publishing, which aims to foster talent in the narrative non-fiction genre and provide the successful applicant with the essential tools they’ll need to drive their book proposal to publication.

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CREATIVITYBowen Street
The artistry of word-processing

In the past few years, I’ve embraced a reverence for the object as artefact. Fears that digitisation would render print books obsolete were unwarranted. Vinyl records, nearly extinct in the early two-thousands, are making a comeback. It’s in the weight of the thing, in seeing the physicality of pages, grooves and keys.

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Potter-ing in quarantine

Unfortunately, I am one of those people who hasn’t been lucky amidst COVID-19. My contract work has dried up (although to be honest, my job requires me to be in contact with a lot of people throughout the day, so being home is somewhat good) and I suddenly now have ample free time to do whatever I want—within legal boundaries, of course.

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Write it and weep: the turbulent (yet rewarding) journey of writing

What does it take to craft the ‘perfect’ sentence? To have your masterpiece sit alongside the behemoths of the literary world—Wilde, Woolf, Didion, Garner, Flanagan and Malouf? What does it take to string together a perfect group of words, that form a perfect group of sentences that form a piece of work that is timeless, moving and memorable?

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Re-establishing routine in isolation

How are you meant to cope with isolation when you’re a routine-driven person? You’re now stuck at home with almost no social interaction and you’re losing motivation. Your productivity has been lost to the rabbit hole of Netflix and that stack of books you’ve been trying to get to for months. And, on top of this, many of us are transitioning to entirely new processes for work and uni.

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