About

Jennifer in Library

Thanks for visiting my website. I’d love to hear what you think about anything I post.    It takes courage to commit a large portion of your time to practising the craft of writing – but at last I’m ready to do this. In 2019 my debut novel was published. I’ve also published some short stories in magazines and anthologies, including my writing group’s anthology, Every Second Tuesday, and I’ve won some awards.

Sorrowing woman leaning on table in front of photo of her husband

For further information see: My Debut Novel on this website:

https://jenniferbryce.net/my-novel/

Elwood Writers’ anthology Every Second Tuesday was launched in December 2020.

MORE ABOUT MY WEBSITE:

I love reading and keep an annotated log of the books I read. From time to time I post reviews of books I’ve found especially interesting. I attend a lot of concerts and plays, so there are reviews of some of these, although in 2020 the opportunities to go out to concerts and the theatre were very limited.

Playing the oboe was once a driving passion for me – now that has been taken over by writing.  I played my last note on the oboe in December 2019.  Here I am playing Bach with my group, Trio con Brio.

trio-con-brio

In the past I’ve spent hours and hours practising – years ago I took out a diploma in performance from the Victorian College of the Arts. Now I think that the acquired discipline of music practice has helped me to write. Some writing is like practising scales.

Until recently I worked in educational research and I ended up in interesting places: Uganda, Botswana, Colombia, Saudi Arabia . . . I’ve written about some of these experiences.

Most important to me is my writing group, Elwood Writers. We’ve been meeting since 2007. There’s a poet, an established short story writer and one member is working on an extended memoir. We meet every fortnight to discuss our work and, as a group, attend events such as the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. Our work has been broadcast on several programs of Cover to Cover on Vision Australia Radio. I encourage you to look at our blog:  https://elwoodwriters.com/

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Why ‘little smackerel’? I guess the name will seem obscure to anyone unfamiliar with A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh was very partial to a little smackerel of something around eleven o’clock – and it always seemed to be close to eleven o’clock. The ‘smackerel’ was usually honey.

My earliest memories of reading – and they are pretty early – are of my grandfather reading the Pooh stories using different voices for each of the characters. He did it very well. I think he loved the stories too. Recently I read that Mrs Milne played a large part in devising the characters and indeed this is acknowledged in a ‘Dedication’ at the beginning of The House at Pooh Corner.

Smackerel? This blog is devoted to my writing, but to just a taste of this and that. Early on, when my writing group first set up a blog, I innocently posted 1500 word short stories and slabs of novel. I was a Blog Hog. I hope that this blog will be more like a degustation platter.

 

My blog is organised into six categories:

I would like to acknowledge that I live and write on the traditional lands of the Bunurong people of the South-East Kulin Nation, and pay my respect to Elders both past, present and future.