About Helen

Helen lives in Melbourne, Australia. She started writing at age 9, when the original PLANET OF THE APES movie showed on television, and she didn't like that Stewart, the female astronaut, died before the movie even got going. So the next day, she sat down and rewrote the movie so that Stewart lived, worked out long before Taylor that this was Earth, and saved the day. 

Helen was a budding, and annoying feminist.

Around the same time, her class were all asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. No one had asked this before. She exchanged looks with her best friend, Agnes, and they both guessed they would be housewives. They have since experienced that, and Helen decided that it sucked.

Helen learned to type in high school only so that she could type up her stories. She edited the school science fiction club's magazine, Super Nova, distracting her greatly from achieving high marks in HSC(except for English).

Helen's first professional publication came at age 17, 1981, when she did her HSC exams, when an essay/article she wrote for English class was published in The Age newspaper. Helen knew immediately she'd be ruling the writing world within five years, and promptly did badly in her Politics exam.

She did a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Literature at Victoria College, which is now part of Deakin University. She studied under Alan Mahar, John Powers, Gerald Murnane, and Julian Gitzen. One of Helen's articles appeared in The Australian newspaper during this time.

Helen also kept up her fanwriting, as an active member of Austrek, the Melbourne Star Trek club, and was a regular writer for SPOCK, the club fanzine, from issue 21 to issue 60. By then, she felt she'd said everything she wanted to say about the Enterprise, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Chapel, and Sulu. Not to mention Klingons, Romulans, tribbles, and characters and aliens of her own invention. Fan writing was a good proving ground for her, teaching her a lot about plot and characterisation.

In the 1980's, Helen built up a series of publications in literary journals in Australia: Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Mattoid, LINQ.

She wrote two one-act plays that were performed by Starforce Theatre Group.

The 1990's saw her busy as the mother of two children. That consumed most of her time, but she was able to squeeze out some parenting articles that appeared in: Mother and Baby, Melbourne Child.

In the 1990's, she started exploring poetry, as a way to keep her writing alive whilst drowning in a sea of nappies, hearing aids, specialist conferences, and driving children to kindergarten, schools, and dance classes.

Helen flirted briefly with Harry Potter fan fiction on fanfic.net and amused herself greatly by turning all the beloved tropes and 'ships' on their heads. She developed a following and a fan club in Scandinavia. To this day, she doesn't know why her fan fiction appealed to the Nordic soul.

With the turn of the century, Helen returned to professional writing with stories and poems in genre journals such as Aurealis, Orb, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

In 2011, her first book of poetry, A WOMAN OF MARS, was published by PS Publishing, Stanza Press. The book launch was at the Reno World Science Fiction Convention, and a copy of the book was bought by a scientist who lectured at NASA, and wanted to use the poems as part of his presentations.

Helen has also taught creative writing, creative journaling, and the writing of free verse at various neighbourhood houses and community centres in the eastern and south eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

Helen is now hard at work on a number of new writing projects, several of which will launch in 2014.