Mark Tredinnick

A manual of good diction, composition, sentence craft, paragraph design, structure and planning, this is a book on technique, style, craft and manners for everyone who writes and wants to do it better. It is a guide to lively and readable writing.

The Little Red Writing Book

Geoff Whyte

The Little Black Book of Business Writing is for everyone who writes for business purposes, in the commercial world, the private sector, the trades and the professions. Mark Tredinnick and Geoff Whyte help readers write the kinds of documents that confront them most days at work – letters, emails, web writing, reports, minutes, tenders, ministerials, board papers, media releases, newsletters, marketing documents, policy proposals, business cards, newsletters, position descriptions, job ads, notes to financial statements, instruction and safety manuals, speeches, presentations and various kinds of technical papers. The Little Black Book of Business Writing helps people write at work with economy, impact and efficiency.

The Little Black Book of Business Writing

the essential guide

Writing well

At the heart of The Land's Wild Music is an examination of the relationship between writers and their. Interviewing four great American writers of place — Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin — author Mark Tredinnick considers how writers transmute the power of nature into words. Each author is profiled in a separate chapter written in rich, engaging prose that reads like the best journalism, and Tredinnick concludes with his own thoughts on what it takes to be "an authentic witness of place."

Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest William, and James Galvin

The Land's Wild Music

"Weather is the oldest story in the world-one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet, as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself, and affecting us, whether we like it or not. We breathe it in; we see embodied in it our fears and desires; it falls on our heads. And we'd better take care of it: our lives are in its hands." Marrying photographs from the collection of the National Library of Australia with an evocative and contemplative essay by poet Mark Tredinnick, Australia's Wild Weather is a lyric field guide to Australia's climate. Tredinnick considers what it means to be living at time when weather is no longer small talk; it is most of the news. Beautifully written, the author contemplates what weather means to us and how it affects our daily lives.

Australia's Wild Weather

LIVING DISABLES us, sooner or later. This book records an instance. Among its other purposes--celebration, witness, seeing justice done, recasting life's exquisite spell, replenishment of language--lyric poetry, that deeper speaking, consoles like no other human accomplishment. Greg Orr has argued that all cultures in all times have evolved the lyric poem to help humans, us languaging animals, survive spiritual catastrophe. Lyric poems do this by transfiguring inchoate and unbearable emotion into habitable places, intimate architectures of speech, gardens of language; a poem gives to airy nothings "a local habitation and a name." Giving it a name and making it a place, a lyric poem can make of a grieving a hearth. A poem puts your pain and delight back among the "family of things." For a poem uses language connected to ecosystems of being and meaning and form and sense where one can feel whole, where one's sorrow has context, where one's solitude has company. And not merely social. For each of us is all of us in a poem. The first person is only interesting in a poem, Seamus Heaney wrote somewhere, as an instance. And instance of being. A poem may cry pain, it may plead forgiveness, it may be a keening, a rant, an elegy, a refusal to go gently, a prayer. But the particulars of its witness are where it starts, not where it stops; each episode or image stands in a poem as a metaphor for all such moments--of anguish, sorrow, regret, desire, despair, gratitude, delight. A poem helps you find the myth in the moment, and so (as writer or reader) endure it. When profound human emotion can recruit the lyric, the personal can become the human, the particular the archetypal. And a collapse of self can become a gathering of distances, a habitat of healing. It is my hope that a little of that goes on in A Gathered Distance. What poetry expresses is not one's self--or not merely. Poetry speaks all our selves. In that sense, though they start with me, in a life like mine, in a disabling caused by living, these poems are not about me. This is not a memoir. These poems are the sense that poetry could help one human make of a great sadness, "that rust upon the soul," as Samuel Johnson puts it, that came his way with the end of a marriage and the fracture of a family. His disabling included grief and guilt and bewilderment and all the rest of it. In many ways these poems saved (and possibly improved) this poet. But if that's all they achieve, they are not the poems he hoped to write. For mine is just one instance of being, and it is one long moment of Being--in its exquisite multiplicity, in its contradictions and chaos and divine comedy--whose lyric I hoped to catch here, and in catching it make some sense, somehow, of the senselessness that Being sometimes seems to be. -- Mark Tredinnick

Poems

A Gathered Distance

The author of The Land’s Wild Music depicts Australia’s Blue Mountains through stories of the land and the lives within it. At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away. A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnick’s story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are. The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of people’s relationship to a world in transition. Praise for The Blue Plateau “One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find.” —Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma “I’ve never been to Australia, but now—after this book—it comes up in my dreams. The landscape in the language of this work is alive and conscious, and Tredinnick channels it in prose both wild and inspired. . . . Part nonfiction novel, part classic pastoral, part nature elegy, part natural history, the whole of The Blue Plateau conveys a deep sense, rooted in the very syntax of a lush prose about an austere land, that there can be no meaningful division between nature and culture, between humans and all the other life that interdepends with us, not in the backcountry of southeastern Australia, nor anywhere else.” —Orion “Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral landscape of loss and experiment in seeing and listening, the book richly rewards that patience.” —Publishers Weekly

An Australian Pastoral

The Blue Plateau

'I came to the plateau in the winter of ninety-eight. A place a thousand metres in the air ... a world of sandstone and eucalypt and unregenerate weather, a place just fallen from the sky ...' The Blue Plateau is a lyrical natural history of the Blue Mountains, and a memoir of one man's attempt to belong there. An inspired meditation on the contours of the land and its people, of time and place and family, the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of friendship, it is a book of many belongings.Here you will meet the plateau's first people; you will meet Les and Henryk and Jim; you will walk the Kedumba and the Kanimbla in drought and fire and flood. Evocative and deeply moving, The Blue Plateau is a poet's story of an astonishing place and a loving portrait of home.

A Landscape Memoir

Blue Plateau

What really goes on inside a sentence? What is your subject, and where is your verb, and what is its tense, and where is your modifier, and why does it matter? Where do you need a comma, and where do you not? Why are dashes and semicolons so misunderstood? When is it which and when is it that? In The Little Green Grammar Book, Mark Tredinnick asks and answers the tough grammar questions - big and small - with the same verve and authority readers encountered in The Little Red Writing Book. The Little Green Grammar Book does for grammar what The Little Red Writing Book did for style. It will have you writing like a writer in no time.

Mark Tredinnick

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