News & Reviews Magazine
This article is part of our April edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!
The piece you’re reading now is by Astrid Edwards. Astrid is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing and has interviewed more than 200 of Australia’s most prominent writers and publishers. She is a teacher in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University and sometimes judges literary prizes, including the 2023 Stella Prize. In 2023 she began a PhD at the University of Melbourne exploring potential and perceived barriers to publishing and selling climate fiction in Australia. In 2021 Astrid contributed to the anthology Growing Up Disabled in Australia and made her debut appearance on Q+A in 2021.
Astrid writes for News & Reviews Magazine every month. These are her three latest pieces from previous editions:
I discovered a sadness when revisiting Eggshell Skull. Rereading how bad, how traumatic, the experience of the legal system was then for women and knowing it is still that way is troubling. Lots of change is still not enough change. Published in May 2018, Eggshell Skull was a part of the intensity of #MeToo. Those were heady days, when so many of us, myself included, were given a voice by those who chose to share and publish their experiences.
Eggshell Skull, or ‘Eggie’ as Bri affectionately refers to it, is pure Bri. Precocious as fuck, of course. Who puts a skull and moth on the cover of a memoir of their own trauma? Who chooses a title referencing a legal term that no one outside of the legal community will understand? And who secures a puff from Helen Garner for their debut?
