Two Sides of the Story: Beyond the Couplet

Going Beyond the Couplet, acclaimed Victorian writers Craig Sherborne and Cate Kennedy sit down together for a conversation exploring the points of commonality and difference in their respective writing practices.

Exploring different styles of writing that each has undertaken, Kennedy and Sherborne investigate the ways in which a story or an idea calls out to a certain form in its telling. Sherborne notes the history of writing, in which writers might typically produce work in various formats rather than the “professionalised” manner that dictates genre and style today.

Discussing the power of poetry to distill ideas and images in ways that prose cannot, the pair read poems from their books, exploring the unreliability of imagination and the richness of compressed writing through eroticism and allusion.

Elsewhere, they uncover their working methods, talk about differences between memoir and journalism, revel in the similarities between the craft of writing and that of music, and ponder the bridges that books build between readers and writers.