About + Contact
Hi, I'm Amanda. Born and raised in small-town Iowa, I now live in Brisbane, Australia, meaning of course that I feel Australian when I'm in the US and American when I'm at home. All good, mate.
I got my PhD in ecology in 2008, around the same time all my hair fell out from chemotherapy, and my daughter started crawling. It was a big year. Cancer changed everything - I pulled right back from academia and started this blog and worked hard at being the mum I thought I was capable of being. I suddenly felt compelled to write, write, write. Who knew where the moments would take me?
And 5 years on, I really like who I am,
whoever that is.
Last year, I put it out there to the world that I was going to be a writer, damn it, and then not 2 weeks later I got myself a 3-year full-time research fellowship to study the mechanisms of death in Australian semelparous* marsupials (*and for those of you wondering what the hell that means, it's a kind of lifestyle where the males of the species grow and mate and mate and mate and then die. Just like that, ka-pow.)
Which means, of course, that I'm going to try to have it all. Ka-pow.
And you'll be hearing a lot about sex addiction and death and all that stuff.
We travel a lot - my husband Robbie and my daughter Nelle and I - which is why you might be surprised to know I actually live in Brisbane. If you're interested in seeing some of the places we've been, I like writing snippets here.
I think there's more in common between travel and thift-store shopping than you might expect, and that this commonality explains why I love both. A place (and by this I mean a city or country or thriftstore) can be grotty or fancy or try-hard or overpriced or eyebrow-raisingly cheap, but every single place is stocked with its very own culture and is laden with hidden treasures if you take the time to look. Things, people, memories, experiences of value.
It's all about treasure-hunting, really.
I think there's more in common between travel and thift-store shopping than you might expect, and that this commonality explains why I love both. A place (and by this I mean a city or country or thriftstore) can be grotty or fancy or try-hard or overpriced or eyebrow-raisingly cheap, but every single place is stocked with its very own culture and is laden with hidden treasures if you take the time to look. Things, people, memories, experiences of value.
It's all about treasure-hunting, really.
In my 'free' time, I read a lot, but I'm not afraid to put down a book or an article if it hasn't captured me. If you're interested, these are some books that did capture me. I want to be the kind of writer that captures people like me.
I guess fundamentally, I'm like this: I'm not scared of heights, but I'm scared of falling. I know my limitations, but also my potentials. Good poems make my brain floaty. Roadkill makes me shiver, but I also like photographing it. I'm scared of cancer coming back, but I'm also scared of living a life scared of cancer coming back.
But that's ok, I'm ok. And maybe it took me 37 years to find this edge between places, but oh my.
I like it here.
Amanda xx
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