Cirrus@Austlit

'THE DAY OUR puppy was due to arrive, my husband and I cleaned our apartment well enough to receive a foreign dignitary, or child services. When the pet taxi arrived, the driver thrust with one hand a small quivering creature at me – no blanket – and with the other a wad of paperwork. I handed the creature to my husband, who took him into our warm bedroom and prepared him a bowl of food. I entered the room to witness the puppy scarfing the food whole, like a seagull. My husband and I looked at each other. Then the dog regurgitated a mound of wet, pink barf. As soon as it was out of his mouth, he leapt on it again and wolfed it down. Again, the food poured from his mouth, and when it hit the floor, he went to eat it. I scooped him up in my hands to put an end to the madness and looked at him closely.'  (Introduction)

'When my father, Laurie, retired from his job as a high school science and IT teacher, he’d been a teacher for about thirty-five years. He was, I think, a good teacher. ‘I wasn’t super teacher,’ he told me, ‘I wasn’t Eddy Woo, but my students did well and sometimes they bought me a beer years later, I was an ok teacher.’ I liked the fact that he was a schoolteacher, liked that he chose to work at a public school down the road, because his values were my values.' (Introduction)

'In the months before my first book—a collection of personal essays—was published, I dreamt a series of painstakingly literal nightmares. The return of the repressed? I wish. These were unmediated renderings of my base fears about a book I had written coming into the world.' (Introduction)

'For many cooking a meal each evening can feel like daily drudgery.

'But maybe the kitchen doesn't have to be the place of nightly agony, or at least that's how one sassy celebrity chef of the 1970's made things seem.'

Source: Radio National Fictions.