Their eyes stare straight out at you from five grainy black-and-white photos on the wall. Such young faces, framed by luxuriant waves of hair in various stages of bouffant rebellion. The hair is unmistakably from the seventies, but those eyes could be staring at you from any decade. The men’s facial expressions seem to cover the spectrum of human emotions. Malcolm Rennie is grinning, Brian Peters has a half-smile, and there’s a faint wry twist to Gary Cunningham’s lips. But Greg Shackleton is furrow-browed and there is something haunted in Tony Stewart’s serious, wide-eyed gaze.

 To the girl standing right in front of me at the Byron Bay Blues Festival recently: Because you have only lived in that creamy clear skin for two decades I don’t expect you to know that it was not polite of you and your friend to push your way through the crowd of people who had been standing on their tired mud-caked feet for over an hour in order to be close to the front when Paul Simon sauntered on stage.

Stepsisters often get a bad rap. Think of poor Cinderella, dealing with not one but two of them, both ugly, selfish and vain. Think of poor Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), whose stepsister Claire Clairmont was rumoured to have had an affair with Shelley’s famous husband, Percy the poet. Just a couple of months ago US gossip magazine Newsweek featured a breathless tale of a poor woman whose dream wedding venue was ‘stolen’ by her wicked stepsister. But I’m here to tell a different tale about these much-maligned siblings.

How do you use language to illuminate the darkest moments in a life? How do you recount the desolation of grief without further wounding yourself - or your readers? Can writing tether you to a place of safety when you are engulfed by vulnerability? These are questions Justy Phillips and Sian Prior were forced to contemplate whilst writing their recently-published memoirs.

Early in May this year, just before Mother’s Day, I flew to Vietnam for the first time. It was a planned escape. I wanted to avoid being ambushed by media images of motherhood - the breakfasts in bed, the bunches of flowers, the adoring children. In Vietnam, mothers are celebrated in August, not May, so my first day in Hanoi would be an ordinary Sunday. No danger of being reminded of my involuntary childlessness. Or so I thought.

We’ve all been there. Walking down a dark laneway at night, our senses suddenly hyper-acute, checking for danger. Listening behind us for footsteps breaking into a run. Listening ahead of us for footsteps falling silent. Using our ears because our eyes don’t work so well in the dark.

This has been my experience night after night as I’ve walked home from the local train station. When you’re a theatre critic night work is inevitable. Most of the time I feel lucky to be living only a ten-minute stroll to the train. And yet, night after night, I’ve had to steel myself to enter the long dark alley between the station and the end of my street.

In a popular TED talk on infidelity, relationship counsellor Esther Perel argues that having an affair is not so much about looking for someone else as looking for a new self. Evidence to support Perel’s theory can be found in Rochelle Siemienowicz’s memoir ‘Fallen’. In this frank account of the dying days of a marriage, the author describes her twenty four year old self searching feverishly for a new identity through a series of intense sexual encounters whilst on holiday in Perth.

Dear David Foster Wallace,

I have lugged a heavy heart over the Snowy Mountains, breathless with grief, and later planned how to turn my personal lovelorn anguish into profitable literary activity.

I have enticed my aging mother into a small canoe, observed as her face turned the colour of talcum powder while we paddled towards an ever receding East Timorese island and later pondered how to convert her distress into a witty ‘bad travel’ column.

I have visited a cyclone-wrecked Queensland coastal town and gathered quotes illustrative of the resilience of the human spirit while sitting in the local doctor’s surgery nursing a bladder infection and feeling anything but resilient.

A tragic-comic list has been doing the rounds recently on Twitter. Entitled ‘The Creative Process’, the list is a seven-stage description of how writers often feel when they embark upon a new project: ‘1. This is awesome 2. This is tricky 3. This is s**t 4. I am s**t 5. Everything I do is s**t 6. AARRGGHH 7. Booze.’

Behind this humorous tweet lies an all-too-familiar state of mind that I usually describe to my writing students as ‘The Self-Sabotaging Writer’s Blues’. For the lucky ones it is a temporary crisis of confidence that is quickly overcome. For others, it can lead to the complete abandonment of a writing project. So how do writers find their way through a thicket of paralysing anxieties?

Once you start noticing the piles, they’re everywhere you look, in all shapes and sizes. Driving from the crowded Balinese capital of Denpasar towards the north-east coast, I start to count all the different types of objects heaped on the side of the road.

There are piles of bricks and cement bags, sawdust and tiles, timber and kindling and peanuts and rice and stone carvings and religious offerings of flower petals. And on the heads of women, balanced magically in reed baskets, there are teetering towers of palm fronds and fresh fish, fruit and vegetables. So many piles of stuff is being made into other stuff, or that no one has figured out what to do with yet, or to be offered up as appeasements to the Heavenly Rulers of All Stuff.

In the main street of a small town in northwest NSW there’s a street sign covered in hieroglyphics. The strange wedge-shaped strokes look like some ancient Sumerian script. ‘Stock Brands of the Liverpool Plains’, the title says. Next to the hieroglyphics is a list of names - ‘Known Early Squatters’ - and all but one are men.

As I wander the deserted town I notice all the names on all the buildings – lawyers offices, proprietary hotels, automotive repair shops – are men’s names. The women are silent and invisible in the public records of this town. Behind the scenes, though, the women have been making themselves heard.

I’ve been teaching writing as therapy for eight years, but I’ve been practicing it for decades. Since my teens I’ve found writing to be the best way to make meaning from my thoughts and feelings, and to manage my anxieties. Some people keep a daily diary as a way of making that meaning. Others might write a memoir, a poem or a short story. All forms of creative writing can help us shape narrative from the chaos of our daily lives. But how does it work?

Out the front of my house stands a eucalypt whose bark is the same flesh-pink as those giant human babies sculpted by Ron Mueck. At least, right now it is. Sometimes the bark is as grey and slit-scored as a medical student’s cadaver. Every day there is an imperceptible change in the colour of the tree and sometimes months pass before I notice the transition. About twice a year the slits peel back and the tree does a slow-motion striptease for me, shedding its curled fragments all over my garden. In between long stints at my desk I head outside to sweep the dry scrolls off the path. It is a comforting Sisyphean ritual.

Thirteen times: that’s how often I’ve packed up my personal diaries and carted them from one house to another over the years. That’s a hell of a lot of cardboard boxes stuffed with notepads full of stuff about me. Why did I do it?

Recently I joined a small gathering of women who had volunteered to read out random excerpts from their youthful diaries. At the event dubbed ‘The Symphony of Awkward’ we fell about laughing as we paraded our unedited former selves in front of each other. How quickly embarrassment can mutate into hilarity when it is shared.

Once every change of season I pack my bags, travel to a nearby suburb and get semi-naked amongst a group of strangers. This intimate ritual has become a highlight of my social almanac. Before you jump to conclusions, let me be clear: there’s no hanky-panky involved. The ritual of undressing is called Clothes Swap and it involves a loose collective of about twenty-five women, many of whom only ever meet at these events.

After my heart took a trampling recently, a wise woman advised me to get out from under the doona and look at the horizon. So when an invitation arrived to go walking in the Snowy Mountains I decided to take her advice and see if some of the most spectacular horizons in Australia could help lighten my load.

Sian Prior thought she was in for a tough mountain trek through southern France. With a little cheating and a lot of good food, she discovered that a 120 kilometre hike could be an exercise in hedonism.

Shy people have a lot to contend with - not least the word itself. The word shy has a number of different meanings, none of which are flattering. To ‘shy away from’ something implies avoidance. ‘To shy’ can also mean to move suddenly in fright. To ‘be shy of’ something can mean to come up short, or be insufficient. And to be a shy person in our extrovert-worshipping age can be seen as being inadequate for the task of relentlessly positive self-presentation.

What I wonder:

Hey Lofty is this how it was?

The mind returning and returning to the leaking body,

to the seeping ulcers where the bones are peeping through,

the bones aching from the fever,

the head aching from the blows you took

when you tried to stop the Japs burying a skeleton

who was not quite dead,

a skeleton whose hands still shook,

though his blank eyes stared star-wards?

I've fallen in love with a media star. And here's what I've learnt: front-page fame won't necessarily save you from extinction. My love-object first hit the headlines a couple of decades ago when former premier Jeff Kennett dismissed it as a "trumped up corella". The orange-bellied parrot (its real name) was getting in the way of Kennett's plan to move a chemical storage facility to Point Lillias, near Geelong. The "OBP" was endangered and Point Lillias was one of the places the remaining parrots came to feed.