Kristin Lee - Lifestyle Writing

20/05/2026

It's been a while since I've been to Antipodes Bookshop & Gallery in Sorrento. It's sad to see this little gem, which has been so much more than a bookshop, come to a close.

I'm sure it will be greatly missed by the community and visitors alike.

After many beautiful years, we have made the deeply difficult decision to close the doors of Antipodes Bookshop and Gallery.

There are no words quite large enough to express our gratitude to everyone who has walked through our doors — the loyal readers, curious wanderers, holidaymakers, artists, writers, children discovering their first beloved stories, and the many friends we have made along the way. You have made Antipodes far more than a bookshop. Together, we created a place of conversation, imagination, connection, and community.

Independent bookshops hold a special place in the world. They are sanctuaries for ideas, quiet refuges from noise, meeting places for kindred spirits, and homes for stories that shape us. To have played even a small part in the literary and cultural life of Sorrento has been an extraordinary privilege.

We are endlessly thankful to have shared recommendations across the counter, hosted conversations and exhibitions, celebrated books and art, and witnessed the joy that stories continue to bring into people’s lives. Every purchase, every visit, every kind word and conversation helped sustain not only a small business, but a dream.

Running Antipodes has been one of the great honours of our lives. While closing this chapter brings sadness, it also leaves us with immense pride and gratitude for what this little shop became within the Sorrento community.

To our fellow local businesses, authors, artists, and supporters — thank you for believing in the importance of independent spaces and for helping us keep them alive for as long as we could.

Most of all, thank you to our readers. Thank you for reading widely, thinking deeply, supporting local, and reminding us every day why bookshops matter.

Though our doors may close, the conversations, friendships, and stories shared within these walls will remain with us always.

With heartfelt gratitude,

Jane and the beautiful team, Suze, Andrea, Miles

Antipodes Bookshop and Gallery

22/04/2026

What an amazing opportunity for published children's book authors and illustrators. ✨️💛🌟

22/04/2026

Nothing beats the power of song, especially when it can help keep an endangered language alive.

I love this touching story and performance by Peter and Rosie. It's truly special.

ABC Australia

18/03/2026

Signed.

We are almost there! ✨✨

Sign & Share the petition.

SAVE WRITERS VICTORIA 📖📝

Petition Link: https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/get-involved/petitions/restore-funding-for-writers-victoria/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnPh3GVc9rfxuwe5KTSngRT6DPT9knNvv2wJQsK_SY8-mTMphwLpot8WPy-28_aem_tdAs6Todlb9tC-RLMdjUGQ

16/03/2026

And here's one for the short story lovers...

Thinking about entering a short story competition this year? Here’s a prestigious opportunity for fiction writers.

From the competition website:
The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction and welcomes original short stories written in English.

Key details:
• Word limit: 2,000–5,000 words
• Prize pool: $12,500 total
– 1st: $6,000
– 2nd: $4,000
– 3rd: $2,500
• Open to: Writers worldwide writing in English
• Opening date: 2 March 2026
• Closing date: 18 May 2026

If you want to sharpen your short story writing before entering, explore our Short Story Essentials course and learn how to craft powerful short fiction.

Find out more here: https://www.writerscentre.com.au/blog/enter-the-2026-abr-elizabeth-jolley-short-story-prize/

08/03/2026

For anyone who is working on a non-fiction piece and would like to be considered for a mentorship through Queensland Writers Centre, see the below opportunity.

The non-fiction genre categories are quite extensive, which is great to see.

✍️ Tell us your story.

Memorable open now until 7 April 2026.

All you need to enter is a synopsis and up to 2500 word writing sample.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QWCMemorable2026

01/03/2026

While I tend to my mum's beloved garden, especially the alpine strawberries that like to grow year round, I often think of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, 'Braiding Sweetgrass'.

It's a beautiful, insightful and reflective read.

I need to tell you what happened last Tuesday.

I was driving to work, listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer describe how strawberries are the first gift of the earth each spring. How they grow low to the ground, as if kneeling. How they offer themselves freely, asking nothing in return except that you notice. That you say thank you. That you remember this is what generosity looks like.

And I had to pull over because I was crying so hard I couldn't see the road.

Over strawberries.

Not because something tragic happened. Because Robin's voice - calm, warm, like your wisest grandmother explaining something you desperately needed to understand - had just explained that strawberries teach us the very first lesson: the world gives to you before you've done anything to deserve it. And your job isn't to earn these gifts. It's to receive them with gratitude and give back in return.

That's what "Braiding Sweetgrass" does. It takes things you've walked past your whole life - moss, asters, salamanders, strawberries - and shows you they've been speaking to you all along. You just forgot how to listen.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. And she narrates her own audiobook with a voice that feels like walking through a forest where you're finally allowed to stop performing and just be.

No rush. No performance. Just presence.

1. Her voice teaches you to see plants as people, not things.
This sounds abstract until Robin explains it. In English, we call a tree "it." A thing. An object. In Potawatomi, plants are "ki"—a being with life force, agency, intelligence. That one shift - calling a maple tree "who" instead of "what" - changes everything. Suddenly you're not looking at resources to extract. You're meeting relatives. Beings with their own gifts, their own language, their own ways of caring for the world. And when you're in relationship with someone, you have responsibilities. You can't just take. You have to give back.

2. She made me understand reciprocity in a way that broke me open.
Robin tells this story about her daughter coming home from school having learned that plants produce oxygen for humans. And Robin gently corrects her: plants don't make oxygen *for* us. They make oxygen and we're lucky enough to breathe it. We're not the center. We're participants in a system where everyone - plants, animals, water, soil - is both giving and receiving constantly. The earth has been giving to you since before you were born. The question isn't whether you deserve it. The question is: what are you giving back?

3. The science and Indigenous wisdom don't compete - they complete each other. Robin moves between peer-reviewed botany and the stories her elders told her, showing how both illuminate truth. Science teaches observation. Indigenous knowledge teaches relationship. Science asks "how does this work?" Indigenous wisdom asks "what is this teaching me about how to live?" She doesn't choose between them. She braids them together - just like the title says - until you can't separate where one ends and the other begins. And hearing her do this in her own voice makes it feel lived, not academic.

I think Robin Wall Kimmerer's voice will change you. Not because she's trying to. Because she speaks like someone who's spent a lifetime listening to what the world has been trying to tell us. And once you hear it through her, you can't unhear it.

I cried over strawberries. Over moss. Over the grammar of animacy. Over a passage about her daughters learning to see themselves as part of the web instead of separate from it.

This book is teaching me to live differently. To notice more. To give thanks. To ask what I owe the earth that's been feeding me my entire life without ever sending a bill.

Start this audiobook. Let Robin's voice slow you down. Let her teach you to see the world as gift instead of commodity. As family instead of resource.

You'll never walk past a plant the same way again.

And that's exactly the point.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4u2jbLJ

25/02/2026

Think this will be my next read...

Did you know that the most remote bookstore on earth is in New Zealand, run by a woman who refuses to retire (And Thank God For That)!!

So, Ruth Shaw is in her seventies, lives at the absolute bottom of New Zealand in a town so tiny it barely registers as a dot on most maps, and runs a bookshop out of a renovated cowshed that has somehow become a pilgrimage site for book lovers from around the world.

She has no staff. No fancy marketing. No Instagram-worthy aesthetic. Just her, thousands of books crammed into every available space, a few comfortable chairs, and a personality so delightfully cantankerous and warm that you fall in love with her by page three.

"The Bookseller at the End of the World" is Ruth's memoir, and reading it feels like spending an afternoon with your favorite grandmother, the one who tells slightly inappropriate stories, has strong opinions about everything, makes you tea without asking, and somehow makes you feel like the most interesting person in the room even though she's clearly the star of this show.

Ruth doesn't write like a "proper" memoirist. She writes like someone who's grabbed you by the arm at a dinner party and said, "Let me tell you about the time..." She rambles. She goes off on tangents about sheep getting into her garden or tourists asking ridiculous questions or the particular way storms roll in off the mountains. And it's absolutely glorious because you realize: this isn't someone trying to sound writerly. This is just Ruth being Ruth. And I tell you Ruth is magnificent.

1. She started the bookshop because she had a cowshed and too many books.
No romantic vision. No business plan. Just Ruth thinking someone ought to do something about her town having no bookshop, and since nobody else was volunteering, it might as well be her. That "I suppose it'll have to be me" energy runs through every page and makes you want to hug her.

2. Being remote should have killed her business; instead it made her legendary. Manapouri has maybe 300 people. Getting books there takes weeks. Getting customers means people actively choosing to visit the middle of nowhere. But that impossibility became the whole point. People show up specifically because her shop is at the end of the world run by a woman who refuses to quit. She accidentally turned isolation into magic.

3. She writes about aging with honesty that makes you laugh and cry at once.
Ruth's in her seventies hauling book boxes alone. Her knees hurt. Her back aches. She writes about it with perfect grumpiness and humor that never tips into self-pity. She's not trying to inspire you; she's just telling you what it's like to be old and stubborn and still doing what you love because the alternative is unthinkable.

4. Her cowshed accidentally became the heart of a community.
People wander in for five minutes and stay for hours. They tell her their stories. She recommends books with the confidence of someone who's read everything. Tourists leave feeling like they've made a friend. Ruth created this gathering place just by showing up and being herself.

5. She loves books like you love an old friend; deeply but without drama.
No grand pronouncements about literature. Just: books are excellent, people should read them, and if that means running a shop in a drafty cowshed forever, so be it. Her unglamorous devotion makes it more moving than any flowery declaration ever could.

Read this when you need to remember that extraordinary things look ordinary. That stubbornness can be a virtue. That you don't need perfect circumstances; you just need to start and refuse to stop.

Ruth Shaw kept showing up to her ridiculous bookshop at the bottom of the world, being cranky and funny and generous and real. And somehow that became extraordinary.

I want to be Ruth when I grow up. We all should.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3OwLcuU

21/02/2026

For those interested in submitting middle grade fiction and young adult fiction, check out the below opportunity with Wombat Books.

We have an opportunity for authors of middle grade and young adult fiction to submit a query letter ahead of our submission periods or ahead of Kidlitvic, CYA and Sketch and Scribe and other events Rochelle is attending this year.
We will respond to all query letters!
Check out the details on our blog.
Link here:
https://wombatrhiza.com.au/blog/query-letter-for-authors-for-middle-fiction-and-young-adult-fiction/

19/02/2026

Totally resonate with these words from the lovely Nerina Lascelles Art, although I sometimes find my "new year" kicks off somewhere between now and the March equinox.

How about you?

Happy Chinese New Year, friends, followers and fellow creatives! 🐎🔥✨

Can you relate to that strange in-between space after the Western New Year? For me, the weeks between January 1st and the Chinese New Year often feel like a kind of limbo… a gentle suspension. Not quite the old year, not fully anchored in the new. A threshold.

Not sure how you feel, but for me, the Chinese New Year has long felt like a more energetically appropriate passage of new beginnings than the Western calendar. It feels aligned with nature’s rhythm — a true ignition point.

And now, as we enter the Year of the Fire Horse, I can feel the shift. The momentum. The spark.

The Horse carries vitality, courage, movement and expressive freedom. Fire amplifies that creative force — passion, visibility, boldness, heart-led action. It feels like a year that invites us to honour our artistic voice fully. To create bravely. To move with confidence. To let our work run wild and alive.

I’m genuinely feeling the excitement building toward what feels like a very positive year — especially in the studio. A renewed enthusiasm to show up, experiment, express and commit deeply to the creative path.

Here’s to a year of fearless creativity, artistic expression and inspired momentum 🐎🔥✨