Special guest speaker

Mark Tredinnick

Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher. He lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia's southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom as The Cambridge Essential Writing Guide), The Land's Wild Music and A Place on Earth. The Blue Plateau—a landscape memoir on which he has been at work for some years—and The Little Green Grammar Book will appear in 2008. Mark is working on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age.

In recent years, in addition to his own books, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, some of it with a landscape focus, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa 18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby).

Mark's writing has appeared in Best Australian Essays, Island, Manoa, Mascara, Orion, PAN, Southerly and other journals and newspapers. His essays, criticism and poems have been published in chapbooks and anthologies, and he writes regularly for The Bulletin. Mark's honours include the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2007), the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2005) and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize (2005), shortlistings in the ABR, Broadway and other poetry and essay prizes, and residencies in Hawaii with the Pacific Writers' Network, at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and at the Camden Haven Pilot Station, a nature writing centre on the New South Wales coast. Mark talks and teaches widely on writing, landscape, justice and ecology. For over a decade he has run writing programs at the University of Sydney and at writers' centres in Australia and the United States. He runs them these days, too, in his cowshed in Burradoo. He mentors aspiring writers, and now and then he edits a manuscript in need of help. He teaches grammar and composition, and he consults, on writing matters, with clients in business and government.

Other seminar presenters

Karen Beilharz

Karen Beilharz's first foray into the realm of creative writing coincided roughly with her family's purchase of their first IBM PC in the mid-80s. Since then, making up stuff and writing it down (or typing it up) has always been something she's enjoyed doing. These days, when she's not blogging, designing webpages, knitting, hanging out with her husband Ben, or working on one of a handful of writing projects, she rearranges sentences and paragraphs, corrects punctuation and acts as webmaster for Matthias Media, and keeps The Briefing ticking along every month.

Trevor Cairney

Trevor Cairney has been researching and writing about language and literacy for over 30 years. He was a reluctant reader and writer in high school but managed to pass HSC English without reading any books. He did some study, became a teacher and later a father—two roles which increased his fascination with how children learn language. He became fanatical about children's literature, and eventually went on to do research in the fields of literacy, literature and language. He has published over 200 articles and eight books in these three fields, has run a number of writers' workshops for children and adults, and, like many of us, is a frustrated writer with a file of unfinished works of fiction. He is a husband, father and grandad, and in his spare time, is Master of New College, University of New South Wales, Director of Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education (CASE) and has an Adjunct role as Professor of Education at the University of New South Wales.

Greg Clarke

Greg Clarke caught the writing bug early, and when his letter to Doink the Dinosaur concerning how to save your pocket money was published in the Armidale Express he was infected for life. He is the author of a few books on Christian topics, has published the odd poem, and has a bulging manuscript box under his desk with a cat sleeping on it. By day, he is Director of the Macquarie Christian Studies Institute and Director (with John Dickson) of the Centre for Public Christianity; by night, he sleeps, and when not sleeping hangs out with his wife and kids, watches cricket, listens to U2, laughs at good sketch comedy, and writes.

Rebecca Jee

Rebecca Jee has been inventing new worlds and things to fill them ever since she can remember. She has dabbled in poetry, prose, scriptwriting and non-fiction, has had her plays performed at university, has had work published in short story anthologies and magazines, and has completed a MA in Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales. She won a Varuna Fellowship last year, which gave her the luxury of time and space to work in the Blue Mountains on her almost-completed first novel. The novel is about cultural identity, and being half-Chinese and half-Australian (thought it's also about much more than that), and Rebecca has a complex love-hate relationship with it. Rebecca currently works for the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students where her main role is to write for, edit and design Salt magazine, a twice-yearly publication aimed at helping students think through what it means to live as a Christian while at university. Amongst many other things, she likes quirkiness, flights of fancy, and a good laugh, and is champion of her Year 6 teacher's cause to eradicate the word ‘nice’ from creative writing.

Tony Payne

If not for the providence of God, who planted him in a job where he was required to write, edit and publish things for a living, Tony Payne (by his own admission) would still be one of those people really interested in being a writer who never actually gets around to writing. As it is, during nearly 20 years at Matthias Media he has authored numerous books and other publications, edited many others, and written more Briefing articles than he can remember. When he is not working with words, he likes to read them, shout them at televised sport, or share them quietly with his wife Alison and their five children.