Contributor Profile

Bio

Since an early age, the question for me was always “How to make a living from writing?”; the answer, “journalism”, although flawed, seemed logical at the time. Thus did I begin my professional writing life as a trainee journalist in Adelaide, first with the original but now-defunct Murdoch afternoon tabloid, The News. Little did we realise at the time that we (for I surely was not alone) were at the heart of The Beast: that was just before Rupert’s worldwide media empire became the leviathan with which we are today all unfortunately so familiar.

Ah yes, mainstream journalism. And the illusions of youth. “Mainstream journalism” has since become a dirty pair of words, although, I hasten to add, I have great respect for the sadly dwindling number of genuine, old-school investigative journalists, irrespective of their employer; we need more of them, as well as more quality media productions to fund and foster their work. I would caution against holding one’s breath, however. In my darker moments, I believe the news media, for the most part corrupted, snivelling and cowering, to be irrevocably held hostage to the Josef Fritzl that is the entertainment industry.

I explored various forms of art and expression through the 1980s, including more concerted forays into creative writing; but, from 1991 when I began university studies, I concentrated on academic research and writing with a focus on Middle East politics, history, society and economics. This period included several stints writing and editing for non-mainstream media productions; through it all, my writing continually returned to topics concerning the media and related sociopolitical issues.

For the first half of the ’90s my writing was that no man’s land hated and despised by both journalists and academics, but, as pendulums have a tendency to do, the pendulum of my writing oscillated and then swung definitively from journalism to academia. The academy teaches a great discipline in writing: sound arguments developed and presented on the foundations of thorough research, sober analysis and zero tolerance for error. Sometimes this approach is taken too far, however, and the most basic purpose of any writing – to communicate – is lost in a dry, jargonistic ocean of a virtually unreadable progression of words: the polar opposite of the mindless dumbing down of language and the pursuit of celebrity, sensation and scandal in the popular media.

After making the transition from one form of writing to another, I have, since my book on Saudi Arabia was published in 2003, returned to that no man’s land between academic writing and journalism and discovered that not only is it its own discipline, but that it is the one I prefer when writing nonfiction. I began this settling-down phase while I was still in Beirut, where, after a six-year exile from creative writing, I also made a return to performance poetry; in 2004 I organised, I am told, Lebanon’s first public performance poetry events, at least post-civil war. It was a welcome change from sub-editing, page editing, feature and editorial writing (sometimes all at once) in the surreal, high-tech sweatshop that was the editorial department of Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper. Then, in June 2005, bringing my tempestuous four-and-a-half-year relationship with my Lebanese employer to a somewhat sudden conclusion, I sought new paths elsewhere.

Coming to the United Kingdom was going from one extreme to another, reminiscent of the academic–journalistic writing divide. Extremes are not healthy, and while the Lebanese and British physical and social environments are entirely different, they both represent extremes, and they do, in fact, overlap in many ways. One country struggles against the odds to develop and better itself; the other has fallen from First World status in a frenzy of bureaucracy, politeness and hooliganism and, of course, suffers from advanced post-imperial decay. Both are authoritarian states, one “traditional”, decentralised and weak; the other strongly centralised and employing technology in its relentless drive to an Orwellian future. I should add that neither are particularly unique in the realms of human experience.

In June 2006 I helped found the Hereford Writers’ Group; a year later I left the group before I was expelled. I was, in fact, fearful of being run out of town. After experimenting with more traditional forms of creative writing, my transgression – in the eyes of many of my fellow writers and fine upstanding citizens – was to submit to the group some short pieces such as would not be out of place in SomethingDark. Fortunately, by that time I was a contributing editor and writer for the London-based, international fetish magazine, Skin Two, then in its twenty-third year of publication.

In 2008 I became Skin Two’s features editor, and was a close observer to the process that saw the death of the magazine and the birth of what was meant to be a new series of hardcover books in early 2009. I am pleased with my role in what turned out to be the only hardcover book, the Skin Two Fetish Yearbook 2009, and with the part I played in helping revamp the publication with issues 58 and 59 of the magazine. However, the economic environment and the evolving interests of magazine readerships meant it was time to move on, and the result is SomethingDark.

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