Incredibly and against all odds, my modest writerly dreams, for what they were, came true. But culminating in my early thirties, prime child-bearing age, they coincided with the births of two children, complicating things in the way that parenthood has been complicating the lives of men and women forever.

The study of writing is so often characterised as an indulgent activity - people seem to take the importance of tertiary fine art or musical education at face value, and you don’t often hear people deride elite sports training because a person could run just as well as their local track.

Frank Boyce is the third author featured in the ‘Young Writers’ section of Overland 201 with his story ‘Minerals are not nomads’. Frank is a writer and student living in Melbourne. He’s interviewed here by Kalinda Ashton and Samuel Cooney. Why write? Terry Eagleton speaks about artistic or cultural production as different groups of people […]