In 2021 RMIT will launch the Speculate Prize in partnership with Giramondo Publishing. Speculate is a new national award for an unpublished speculative fiction manuscript, sponsored by Whispir and supported by the Speculate Literary Festival.

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

I’ve always been fascinated by the spell a good yarn can cast over you but it wasn’t until I studied screenwriting that I actually understood where that magic came from: structure.

Once, in the middle of the night, I watched a Youtuber try to live one week of their life according to Haruki Murakami’s writing schedule.

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’).

On 15 May I met my classmates for the first time. It was a Saturday and, after months of online lectures, ‘break-out room’ activities, and virtual roundtable sessions with writing, editing and publishing professionals, we gathered together at the Bowen Street Press for an intensive masterclass…

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.

When I signed up to be on the working group for Hardie Grant’s ‘Spark Prize’, I did so with the belief that I was going to be getting valuable experience in the publishing industry.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

The mighty footnote is something most of us are familiar with. They haunt the bottom of textbooks. They tuck an author’s relevant anecdote to the bottom of the page.

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.

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?

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.