Writing

Creative non-fiction essays/memoir

Catherine’s manuscript, The Red Coat (working title), is a collection of creative non-fiction that engages with topics such as memory, the body and trauma. Tinged with lyricism, humour and hope, it delves into personal and global overturnings.

This book is a body. Red blood on white ice. Arms and legs akimbo on a circus rope lit with red. This book is the wound of the mind. This book is stolen land and visitor land. Guardianship of the land. Changing weather. Ice melting. Red warming sun. This book is wrongs and rights. A promise and a warning. It lingers in the space between knowing and not-knowing. Between memory that is there and not-there. Between a broken body and a whole one. Between strength and fragility. And yet, there are moments of humour and hope: red-lit and shining.

Settings include the Arctic, an intentional rural community, a circus, a hospital and a city street.

Catherine was short-listed for one of the essays in the collection, Instructions for Living, in the Narrative Non-fiction category of the 2024 City of Melbourne writing awards.

Another essay, ‘The Red Coat’, was published in Westerly, Issue 69.1, August 2024.

‘Two hundred and sixty-two days’, (also in the collection) was published in Meniscus online literary journal, Issue 2, 2022.

‘From candles to chocolate’ was published in the anthology A Remarkable Absence of Passion, Nora McManus (ed), Dove, 1991

Poetry

Rabbit Annual 2025.

Rabbit Launch at Wheeler Centre, 10 Dec, 2025, Emilie Collyer, Jess Wilkinson, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Angela Costi.

C Johnstone poem title page.

Catherine’s poetry practice has been shaped by her early RMIT poetry teachers Judith Rodriguez and Ania Walwicz (both now deceased) and enriched more recently through Masterclasses with Mark Tredinnick and Audrey Molloy. Thanks to Anders Villani and Padraig O’Tuama for shorter poetry workshops.

In between working on her creative non-fiction manuscript, Catherine is building a poetry collection, which includes Fragments of a Divided World, published in Rabbit Annual 2025.

  • Fragments of a Divided World, Rabbit Annual 2025, published December, 2025.

  • ‘I believe in Sweat’ in Women’s Circus: Leaping off the Edge, 1997

  • ‘Following’ in Going Down Swinging, 1990.

  • ‘The Song of the Returning’ in Visible Ink anthology, RMIT, 1990

  • ‘Tiger Balm’ in Outhouse anthology, RMIT, 1990

  • ‘Untitled’ in Redoubt, Issue 7/8, Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1989

  • Bead Fireworks (a small booklet of 11 poems published with Judith Zarrella’s Casualty), editor Judith Rodriguez, RMIT, 1989

Two of Catherine’s short stories were published in an anthology, Stories of Place: ///Zinc. level. blindfold by the US publisher, Black Rose Writing, on 10 April, 2025. More information here.

Her unpublished novel, Unspooled (working title), is a contemporary literary fiction work about a queer couple, Nat and Francesca, with a three-year-old daughter, Elly. As Nat deals with the revelation her biological father may be Iranian, the couple struggle with the tension between expressing their own identity and compromising for the sake of their relationship. As conflict develops between them, Nat risks losing both Francesca and Elly. The settings range from an old weatherboard house in Coburg, Melbourne, to the canals and winding lanes of Venice, to the beauty and danger of Isfahan, Iran.

Fiction

Fellowships

2022 Varuna Writer’s Space Online Fellowship for Unspooled.

2023 KSP Writing Fellowship for essay collection The Red Coat.

2025 Gunyah Artist-in-Residence program with Jodi Vial, Betty O’Neill and Josepha Dietrich.

The writing community

I feel privileged to be engaged with the Australian writing community. Thank you to mentors/editors Ashley Hay, Nadine Davidoff and Kate Ryan. A big thank you to Ash for her wonderful words about my writing on the Welcome page. Many thanks to Helen Garner for her letter of support all those years ago and for giving me permission to quote from it on this website. I am very grateful too to Sarah Sentilles, for her insights, support, warmth and for the support letter on the Welcome page. Through Sarah’s Word Caves, I have appreciated the support of writers like Kate Mildenhall, Jillian Langhammer, Betty O’Neill, Clara Brack, Suzanne Brown, Annie Keely, Janenne Willis, Julie Perrin, Eleanor Limprecht, Rebekah Clarkson, Rachael Mead, Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Anne Myers and Ruth Melville. Thanks also to Dani Netherclift for your support and encouragement.

Big thanks to Shokufeh Kavani, E.N, N.Z and S.S for their warmth and openness, for sharing their knowledge of Iranian culture and their insightful feedback on the Iranian chapters of my novel.

Thanks also to writers from the Varuna alumni group such as Jane Messer, Beth Spencer, Anne Butt, Meg Mooney, Madeline Oliver and Teresa Savage. And I am grateful to my life-saving Melbourne workshop group: Maryrose Cuskelly, Marilyn Miller, Chris Ringrose and Trish Bolton for sharing manuscripts, pizzas and drinks and for pivoting onto Zoom during Covid.

Thanks to Jax Jacki Brown for their support, inspiring strength and commitment to the LGBTIQA+ and disability communities. I also appreciated the insights of Sam Elkin and Ros Bellamy who read early extracts of the novel.

Nathan Scolaro, thanks a lot for help with this website.

After a 2020 Curtis Brown Creative (UK) online course, Edit and Pitch your Novel, I connected with a wonderful group of international writers who I met in person in UK in June, 2023. Congratulations to Niamh McAnally, Ben Tufnell and Conor McAnally, the first three in the group to get their books published. The anthology of our short stories, Stories of Place: ///Zinc, Level, Blindfold, was published on 10 April 2025. Thanks to Anne Freeman for her thoughtful response to this anthology and for joining me for a conversation at the Melbourne launch. (See Events page.)

As my engagement with the Australian writing community grows, so too does this list! Thanks to the Writing Circle (mainly based in Perth) with writers such as Melinda Tognini, Louise Allan, Melissa Ashley, Annie de Monchaux, Narelle Hill, Anne Harris, Karen Hollands and Annie Wilson. Also to the Varuna Memoir Masterclass of 2024 with the wonderful Kris Kneen and my supportive writing colleagues, Betty O’Neill, Josepha Dietrich, Clare Boyd-Macrae, Jodi Vial, Nicola Walker and Gabriella Coslovich.