A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, containing my piece ‘The Nabokov’ (co-authored with Ben Peek), has been released.  In honour of this, here’s a summary of a flower that exists (fleetingly) in my Downtown world:
Virginflower
The virginflower is characterised by the soft, pure flesh of its bloom, which is bell-shaped and resembles the form of a veiled [...]

With the appearance of a grey hair yesterday rather prematurely forewarning me of my encroaching age (23 today), I’ve realised that the window in which I might ever be described as a young prodigy, or young anything, is shrinking alarmingly.
I’m going to drown my sorrows in cake and scones.

I started writing Downtown perhaps two years ago now, taking a fairly substantial break (and from writing in general) whilst completing my honours year at uni last year. There’s definitely a noticeable disjunct between the then and now writing styles, not necessarily in term of my general verbosity, because that’s a given, and to [...]

Issue 2 of Argot, the publication of the National University of Singapore Literary Society, has been released. It contains my story ‘Parasols’.

Time, for me (and I suppose for everyone else), always seems to be quite spare, slipping through my fingers like fish and moving along at a rate frowned upon by whoever sets the speed limits on the roads. I always worry that I’m going to wake up tomorrow and be eighty.
As much [...]

I’ve been mulling (and cringing) of late over some of the dialogue I’ve been encountering in both my readerly and writerly travels.  There is most certainly some ongoing, insidious renaissance of sorts of old-fashioned dialogical pretension, or perhaps it’s merely a morbid authorial fear of abbreviations, or an unbridled desire to apprise the reader as [...]

Last week I received a flurry of frantic text messages from my grandmother telling me to enter a competition being run through an ABC radio show called NightLife.  The competition involved writing and sending in the first paragraph of the ‘great Australian novel’, which I did, or at least sort of did, given that mine [...]

From a review of Paper Cities at Post-Weird Thoughts:
Stephanie Campisi’s The Title of this Story has many things to do with Borges. Metafictional, it tells the story of an onomastician who’s asked to translate and then name a religious book. The story is, of course, about the power of naming and ultimately questions if something [...]

‘The Title of This Story’, which appeared in the Paper Cities anthology, will be reprinted in the October issue of the Czech magazine Ikarie.