By Poppy Willis Long before J.K. Rowling was accused of transphobia in a 2020 Twitter storm, there was ample evidence to suggest she was always problematic, and the Harry Potter books aren’t exempt from coding her questionable values. But when you love a book, and indeed an entire story world, it’s easy to overlook certain … Continue reading Navigating the Trials and Tribulations of Being a Harry Potter Fan
By Alistair Trapnell I was browsing the internet during a bout of procrastination and came across the term optimal anxiety. That can’t be right, I thought. I’ve always considered anxiety a negative emotion to either suffer through, suppress, or avoid entirely. How can even the slightest ounce of anxiety be considered good for you? Well, … Continue reading Is Optimal Anxiety Real and Can It Help Me?
By Marina Sano CW: Racism, discussions of hate crimesI came of age in the 2010s – so I’m old enough to have seen my cultural background transition from being ‘weird’ and something I felt I had to hide, to all of a sudden being trendy. But when East Asians are attacked in the streets, the … Continue reading Matcha Do About Anti-Asian Hate
By Jing Xuan Teo The thing about growing up in Singapore is that despite being majority POC, we love white people. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s just not that many of them (rarity = want, its basic economics), or maybe it’s the fact that our leaders have entirely forgiven the British for colonial rule, … Continue reading On Internalized Racism and Speaking “Good” English
By Charlotte Armstrong Sifting through Facebook’s ads is no longer like mining for gold, but rather finding yourself at a buffet being served things you never said you liked or wanted, and now your plate is suddenly overflowing. Like most bad ideas, it started late at night. Scrolling absently through my Facebook feed, I … Continue reading The Soft Toy Scam: A Facebook Fraud?
I wish Grattan Street Press had been in existence when I gained my first job at a publishing house. Let me explain . . . I was one of the very first graduates of the new Master of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne in 2003. There were only a few practical editing … Continue reading Things I Wish I’d Learned Before I Became a Fiction Editor
When I was young, I thought life was a linear series of achievements. A long list of boxes to check off, and once you checked enough of them, you were an adult with a career. I have since come to realize it’s a bit more like an Etch-a-Sketch, restarting and erasing constantly, because those two … Continue reading The Post-College Letdown
‘Do you want to come home?’ Mum asked me when the pandemic began spreading internationally. I assured her that I was fine in Australia. It has a better health infrastructure than home, a smaller population, and I had already paid my tuition for the year. New Delhi will always be my city but I was … Continue reading The Woes of Being Internationally Stranded
Nostalgia is ingrained in the millennial identity. But while this has become an object of mockery, it can actually be a useful coping mechanism in these troubled times. One day, when doom-scrolling through Twitter, I happened across the most unexpected inter-generational debate I’ve ever read. A spate of millennial roasting by Gen Z-ers on TikTok … Continue reading The Virtues of Millennial Nostalgia
If you didn’t grow up with a pet of some form, it’s hard to imagine what an incredible presence they are. For me, a home is just a house without one. One of the eternal highlights of my life will be when one of my two adopted cats had kittens. I spent a blissful summer … Continue reading On Motherhood and Dog Ownership
