Marie O'Rourke

Marie O’Rourke is a West Australian creative writer and PhD candidate from Curtin University. Investigating the quirks of memory, her current creative work-in-progress is a collection of lyric essays pushing the boundaries of post-postmodern memoir. Marie’s creative and critical work has been published in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir (Routledge, 2018), Meniscus, TEXT Journal, New Writing, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and Westerly.

Marie O'Rourke reviews 'Music and Freedom' by Zoë Morrison

August 2016, no. 383 • 25 July 2016

Resurrection being the concept underpinning Music and Freedom, fittingly the performance of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto – which marked the composer's return from a four-year bout of depression – is the structural core of this powerful first novel. The concerto's ominous opening chords, aching second movement, and confident yet unsettled finale reverberate through Zoë Morrison's narrat ... (read more)

Marie O'Rourke reviews 'That Devil's Madness' by Dominique Wilson

April 2016, no. 380 • 31 March 2016

Is it possible to 'just pack up and go, and all your problems will stay behind?' Nicolette is hoping that's the case when we meet her literally on the road to a new life, troubled partner and toddler in tow. Louis, her grandfather, may well have asked the same; his earlier experiences of geographic and personal change form the alternate strand of the dual narrative in That Devil's Madness. ... (read more)