Author: Elizabeth Lancaster

Since babyhood, my twin granddaughters, Isla and Mia, had always babbled to each other in a stream of random vowels and consonants. But when they were about seventeen months old, these exchanges began to seem more intentional.This curious phenomenon even has a name: cryptophasia.

While waiting for my next memoir to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2026, I'm developing an interest in the short form of nonfiction, also known as Flash Nonfiction. I love the discipline of this form, where every word has to be involved in the heavy lifting. This teeny tiny piece was published this morning in  50 Give or Take. 

This Australian summer has so far been brutal and it’s only January. Don’t be fooled by the Sydney beach scene above – I was home by 9am. Heat and humidity are my (MS-related) kryptonite, causing me to retreat into books and, if I find a good tv series, please let me binge watch it. At the moment, I always have three books on the go. One on audio for driving, watering the garden or walking (heat permitting), one in hard copy for the sofa when I’ve no energy for anything else, and one on Kindle at bedtime. The fact that the three I’ve recently read are all experimental memoirs is no coincidence, as each one led me to the next. Beginning with the most recent:

Is there any such thing as a Good Taste Guide to decorating a Christmas tree? If so, I’d like to purchase a few copies as stocking fillers for both my…

Having just relocated with my husband from Australia, and with time on my hands, I signed up for a writing course in New York City to learn about the craft of fiction, specifically short stories. I loved the intensity of this form and the fact that every word counted. I began a few stories and worked on them obsessively. Memoir was not even on my radar...

Growing up, I used to think funerals were exotic things that other people’s families had — like a holiday house — something just a bit out of our reach. My family didn’t ‘do’ funerals. We didn’t even ‘do’ death. As for any talk of an afterlife, well, don’t even go there. When I was seven Mum’s father died. He lived in a country town far from Sydney, so we rarely saw him. My brothers and I were not told of his passing, but I overheard a phone call between Mum and her brother. I could only hear her end of the call. She was worked up, almost shouting...

Okay, I’m outing myself – when I was young, I was a little in love with Billy Joel. Even after I’d moved on, his early stuff could always transport me. Just a few bars from Piano Man, Italian Restaurant, She’s always a Woman and I’m back there at a particular time and place, filled with a sense of endless possibility. I hadn’t thought about Billy Joel in quite a while. Then in February...

Sometimes lessons in parenting can sneak up un us and in this case, arrived for me just in the nick of time. I'd been invited to a lunch where I was surprised to run into a classmate from primary school.                     

It was during Covid that a brand-new set of twin girls burst into our lives. There is no history of twins on either side of the family, so none was more surprised than my daughter and son-in-law.