​Sometimes people say I'm weird, and I like it when they do. I like odd things. But I really felt like the odd thing when I turned up at The National Writer's House, Varuna, for my week long NEWC Fellowship. 
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It wasn't that I was the lone guy in a group of six. It wasn't that I had driven 8 hours and felt kind of light-headed. It was more the fish-out-of-water type of odd. 
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I kill people. Okay, let me rephrase that. I kill people ….. okay, third time lucky…. I kill fictional people and then send other fictional people off to solve the crime. . . and there’s no better place to do that than at Varuna, The National Writers’ House.

Or, as I like to call it, murder central.

A LOVE LETTER to arachnids is how Armidale creative James O'Hanlon describes his forthcoming book, I Love Spiders.

James won the 2021 Varuna/New England Writers’ Centre Fellowship for his manuscript, which takes an endearing and scientific look at his great passion, arachnids.

"I spent a lot of time hanging around arachnologists and realising how overwhelmingly fascinating spiders were," James says.  ​"I thought the rest of the world ought to know about this, so the idea for a popular science book was born."

​EVER get stuck into a good story, only to find your mind drifting after a few chapters because you can’t understand the characters?

Armidale editor Anna Thomson found she couldn’t “fall into” the story with some works she edited, even though the plot was well written and constructed.

Her solution was to write her own novel and, thanks to the inaugural Varuna-New England Writers' Centre fellowship, she spent a week working on Bloodwood.
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“Having an entire week to work uninterrupted on the manuscript was just what I, and it, needed,” Thomson said.