April 2025 news

I'll be reading from work in progress at Newcastle Writers Festival as part of University of Newcastle's Breaking Out Student Readings. Sunday 2 April 2024. Watt Space Gallery

Featuring Honey Kassel, Bronwyn Rennex, Cade Turner-Mann and Jackson Turton. Hosted by Michael Sala 

So delighted to have been selected as one of the State Library of NSW's Summer Fellows. I am looking forward to spending more time thinking about poems and birds and archives over the Summer months. 

Image: Giant petrel nest and egg / Harold Hamilton 1911-1914  

Collection Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Gunyah artists-in-residence program is located on Gathang country, the ancestral lands of the Worimi people. I'm very excited to have been awarded a residency for later in 2024. 'Gunyah' means resting place or place of shelter in the Gathang language of the Worimi people in the North Arm Cove area, and the term also features in a number of other Indigenous languages in NSW. 

This timber pole house, named Gunyah, was designed and built in the early 1980s by a group of friends who continue to enjoy holidays here, as well as inviting artists to spend time in this special place via the Gunyah artists-in-residence program. 

I'll be thinking and writing about birds, colonies and archives.

2024 selection panel: Vanessa Berry, previous Gunyah artist-in-residence; and Kath Fries, Gunyah AIR director. 

More info https://gunyah.blogspot.com/

Wow. It's a huge honor to have been accepted as a visiting scholar at the State Library of NSW for 2024. 

SLNSW says "We are proud to be celebrating 50 years of the Library’s Fellowship program.

This year we’ve welcomed our biggest cohort yet, with 8 Fellows and 18 Visiting Scholars, from diverse disciplines and research backgrounds.

Over the next 12 months they will explore, interpret and reimagine the Library’s collection to uncover fresh perspectives on Australian history, society and culture.

We can’t wait to see how your research develops and what surprises are waiting to be discovered in the collection!"

https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about-library/awards-fellowships/fellowships

Spent a fabulous week at Varuna, writing, thinking, eating and walking. So grateful for the opportunity and the time to write.

Bronwyn Rennex’s Life With Birds and Beth Spencer’s The Age of Fibs disrupt linear narration in favour of the fleeting and fragmentary. The child of a Vietnam veteran, Bronwyn pieces together her teenage life in North Ryde, revisiting family disavowals with adult sensitivity. Beth also evokes suburban pasts in a series of microfictions and memoir, debunking myths sold to girls and women in the 1970s, exemplified by Fibs bras.

They’ll speak to Jodi Vial about evoking the past and reimagining the memoir form.

So delighted to be part of Perth Festival  Writers Weekend this year. I'm on two panels:  

SAT 25 Feb - Past Perfect Sharron Booth, Portland Jones and Bronwyn Rennex with Emily Paull and 

SUN 26 Feb - Needy Subjects: On Writing about Class, Gender and Memory Alice Pung, Bronwyn Rennex and Madison Godfrey with Victoria Midwinter-Pitt. 

'Between the smoke and the stone' is an essay I wrote about the process of writing Life with Birds. It's in the latest issue of the fabulous Openbook magazine published by the State Library of NSW. 

White space of the unknowable - A daughter’s fragments of memory by Sarah Gory •

Appeared in Australian Book Review September 2022, no. 446

https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/981-september-2022-no-446/9586-sarah-gory-reviews-life-with-birds-a-suburban-lyric-by-bronwyn-rennex

Broadcast Tuesday 20 Sep 2022 at 9:42am

'Finding my father before and after the Vietnam War' - You can listed to my interview with Beverley Wang here:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/finding-my-father-before-and-after-the-vietnam-war/101415346

Totally chuffed to be included in the Rose Scott Womens Writers Festival this year.

Even more delighted that I'll be on a panel titled Remixing Memoir with Beth Yahp, Bastian Fox Phelan and Eda Gunaydin It's on Saturday 17 September. More details via the link below:

http://www.rswwf.com.au/remixing-memoir-2022.html

How lovely to stumble across this endorsement from Gabrielle Williams (and Dan from Carlton) - booksellers at Readings in Melbourne. 

https://www.readings.com.au/news/what-were-reading-rennex-shamsie-and-sehee

I was back at my old stomping ground today - Eastside Radio Studios in Paddington. I had a great chat with Virgina Lowe on the Drive program. Eastside are having their annual radiothon at the moment. There's lots of great prizes to win if you become a subscriber. You can listen to my chat with Virgina here: 

https://eastsidefm.org/episodes/wednesday-drive-400pm-22nd-jun-2022/

I sat down with legendary photographer and blogger Lorre Graham to chat about Life with Birds. You can read the interview here. I love Lorrie's blog - she writes about food, fashion and fabulous women. Photo by Lorrie. 

Life with Birds has launched. Phew. 

Thanks to the Hollywood Hotel - such a fabulous venue. Thanks to Gleebooks for selling on the day. Thanks to all those who came. It was a special day. There will be signed copies available at Gleebooks, Ariel and Harry Hartog in Marrickville. More to come soon.

Thanks to Mark Mordue for including me in the fabulous program at Addi Road Writers' Festival on Sat 14 May.  

I'll be on a panel with Anna Salleh and Claudia Taranto.

Breaking the Mirror – Constructing a biography of your father  12:20pm Gumbramorra Hall  

We are endlessly fascinated by the lives of others and the art of biography is about distilling a coherent and compelling story. But when the subject is one’s own father, how does a biographer undertake this daunting task? The ethical dilemma of representing an unknowable familial figure is a perennial one for storytellers with no easy resolutions. Innovating with form not only makes it possible to approach this challenge; it can lead to a newfound freedom to tell a deeply personal story about someone else.  

Bronwyn Rennex: biographer and memoirist; author – Life With Birds  

Anna Salleh: journalist; producer of A Most Unlikely Malay, a two-part ABC RN feature on her father, the Malaysian poet and writer Salleh Ben Joned.  

Claudia Taranto: moderator; senior producer ABC RN documentary programs Earshot and The History Listen

See the whole program here:

Addison Road Writers' Festival 

Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022 returns on Saturday 14 May, back bigger and bolder this year.  • 30+ writers, poets, journalists and artists across 12 panels  • Short, sharp ‘hotspots’ of thought and energy from 10 solo speakers and performers of music, spoken word .

Mark Mordue and Sheila Ngoc Pham, Artistic Directors, Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022

Finally decided on a cover for Life with Birds. It's a detail from a book by Dorothy Baruch published in 1942 titled 

You, Your Children and War. 

Upswell's mission is to publish writers who need to be read; who turn the world upside-down with their insight. Knowing the surge of joy that comes out of a book, we create beautiful objects that will still be in the cultural imagination 100 years on. You can find out more about the fabulous Terri-ann White who runs Upswell and read the catalogue for 2022 here.