Creativity is the Best Midlife Crisis
What I’m reading: Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
What I’m playing: The Planet Crafter: Toxicity (dlc)
A laptop screen displaying an explosion of colour.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to my very first blog post!
My name is Tara-Lee (T-L, Teal) and I thought for the first edition, I should give a brief introduction to myself and my creative journey.
I started writing at the beginning of 2011, after I’d experienced a devastating personal life event. To distract me, a friend asked me to write some short stories that would help market his indie zombie film.
Knowing nothing about zombies (or writing, for that matter), I made the logical decision and turned to Google. I unfortunately cannot find the original quote now, but I remember reading that a zombie story allows the author to explore personal traumas. This really resonated with me at the time because I’d just experienced my own.
So the zombie stories allow us to tell stories of people in real crisis, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so easy to use zombie stories as metaphors for anything else—I can’t imagine any fear not being able to be told as a zombie story. It’s also why the genre will never die. – Jonathan Maberry
Things got a little less personal when my town, Rockhampton, flooded. Then my hometown, Toowoomba, experienced a much larger and more devastating flood. I remember staying up one night, unable to sleep as I waited for news on my then missing brother (he’s fine).
In the weeks to come, I took notice as people made facebook groups to direct resources and support and reminded each other to check on their elderly neighbours. Others ignored road closures to drive through flooded streets as a kind of dark tourism that caused further damage to roadside businesses. The best and the worst of human nature was revealed at once.
I wrote some short stories inspired by what was happening around me, and when the indie film project fell through, I self-published them as ebooks, and promptly forgot about them.
Since then, I’ve moved home to Toowoomba and started learning game design as a hobby. I joined a theatre group and wrote a short play, and I eventually enrolled in a university degree, studying both game design and creative writing.
Australia has experienced both bushfires and a pandemic, and I’ve been taking notes. How do people treat each other when times are hard? What do I want to share with people who are experiencing grief? How can I encourage people to be kind in dark times? These are some of the questions I wish to explore through my creativity.
References
Morton, L 2013, ‘Interview: Jonathan Maberry’, Nightmare Magazine, March, no. 6, viewed 30 September 2026, <https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-jonathan-maberry/>.
