Cirrus@Austlit

'It was 2009 and I was standing in front of the Monash Creative Writers’ Group as their newly-elected and hardly-despotic-at-all President. I’d been talking about that weeks’ theme and then I’d told them to start writing. In a book that I’d read a few years earlier, a boy who wants to be a spy is told in order to prove himself he has to kill a chicken with a biro. The kids in my university writing group that I’d just handed pens to looked just as afraid. I cajoled them to get started, but even after being given a theme, a lot of them just looked around the room awkwardly, or simply stared into the distance.' (Introduction)