Sunday Blog 198 – 17th August 2025 This week I’ve been to Melbourne for a two-day meeting which I had intrepidly volunteered to co-chair, then I played catch-up with other work and volunteering commitments and worked on my final assignment for my first unit of a creative writing graduate certificate. As I’ve been focusing on …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
A Glimpse of Helen Garner
Sunday Blog 197 – 10th August 2025 On a wild, wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, I was scampering across Perth, spreading myself across several different writing events on that one day. I missed the interview with Helen Garner, arguably one of Australia’s greatest living writers, at the WA Museum. Luckily Gillian O’Shaughnessy took …
Dates remembered
Sunday Blog 196 – 3rd August 2025 On the 3rd of August 1979, I was fourteen years old, and I’d never left Australia. I was about to head off for sixteen glorious weeks in Europe with my parents and my (plentiful) siblings. I flicked through the photo album from that time today, marinading in the …
Kalgoorlie dreaming
Sunday Blog 195 – 27th July 2025 This week I had a mini-break in the mining town of Kalgoorlie, a 6-hour train ride from Perth. Kalgoorlie was my home from age 8 months to 3 years. No, I don’t remember it really. But I also went on several work trips there in 1988 and 1989 …
Look for the helpers
Sunday Blog 194 – 20th July 2025 I don’t know if anyone needs to hear this nugget of wisdom from Fred Rogers’ mum. If you’ve never heard of Fred Rogers, he was a TV presenter, depicted in the biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood in 2019, played by Tom Hanks. His mum advised him …
More on yes and no
Sunday Blog 193 – 13th July 2025 What’s got my attention this week was an interview with Atul Gawande, one of my favourite clinician authors. Take, for example the first lines of the introduction his book, Being Mortal; I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. I …
Information asymmetry is a thing…
Sunday Blog 192 – 6th July 2025 This will be my last spider bite blog, I promise. For those of you who may need closure, my spider bite wound is healing very well and I’ve eventually settled into the community nursing service after my bumpy start. Perhaps next week will be the end of the …
The perfect patient mask slips
Sunday Blog 191 – 29th June 2025 Last Sunday I finished my blog praising the health system and intoning that my spider bite wound was healing. By Friday of this week I hobbled out of the non-profit organisation I’d been discharged to for my ongoing wound care. I clutched the back of my leg on …
Spider Bite
Sunday Blog 190 – 22nd June 2025 Somewhere on the night of 10th June 2025, a spider found its way into my bed. Perhaps I turned over and squashed it as it sought out its prey–other spiders if it was a White Tail Spider–which I suspect it was. Whatever, it bit the back of my …
Yoga is just one answer
Sunday Blog 189 – 15th June 2025 As I continue with the edits on my memoir, I want to share extracts with you, here and there. Especially when the editing intersects with my endless podcast listening, and there’s an insight that might be useful to you today. As I’m talking about my memoir, I’d like …