A New Direction for the Burning Archive

Dear Reader,

Don’t be alarmed. The Burning Archive will continue on. But it is going to change.

I will experiment with a changed form and cadence for the blog at least over the next six months.

I am going to approach the blog with the advice of “document, don’t create” that I saw on popular vlogger on youtube, Ali Abdaal. For periods of the last ten years the blog has been my primary creative outlet. But that is now changing. I have my books in preparation, my podcast, my poems and my essays. And driving all of that my restless curiosity about how to save culture and history from the flames. So I am going to use the blog as the platform for all of those aspects of my author life.

Out of the flames, the author is born.

I will make short posts daily, at least five days a week.

And I will focus on documenting, rather than creating. The big creative outputs will get a show here, but this site is going to be the gateway to me, not the phenomenon itself.

In a way this approach is a bit of an evolution of how I have written for the blog over the last year or so – I have reposted old essays, posted some extra notes on my podcasts – which is great by the way and you can find links and sumaries of all episodes here – and my Flowers of the Mind series. In Flowers of the Mind, I brought together fragments from my reading, thinking and tweeting over the week in a process midway between creating and documenting. You can expect more of this, but shorter and more frequent, and linked more to what I am doing and creating each day.

By the way, while we are speaking about Flowers of the Mind – have you bought my collected poems yet? You can buy Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems 1996-2020 from multiple online platforms as either an e-book or a print edition. Links to Amazon, Booktopia, Dymocks are here – these are the big booksellers in Australia, but check your preferred online retailer since it is distributed through Ingram Spark.

I think you will like the poems here, and you will see the emergence of both these metaphors for the modern writing life – the Burning Archive and Flowers of the Mind. They bother emerged and evolved in my poetry. Please help me out by buying my collected poems. I would really appreciate it.

That’s it for now. I will write more for you tomorrow.