On Publishing My First Feature with The Big Issue

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Edition 759 of The Big Issue Australia — “Goddess Only Knows”, p.30-31.

There is something strangely disorienting about seeing your work in print for the first time.

Not on a screen, not in a draft folder, not in a Google Doc you can endlessly adjust — but fixed. Held. Circulating in the world without you.

My recent feature on Nikita Gill, published in The Big Issue (Edition 759), began as a conversation about myth and girlhood. But somewhere in the process, it became something else — a reflection on voice, on who gets to speak, and what it means to write from within structures that don’t always make space for you.

The process of writing it was one thing. The process of editing it — of letting it shift, soften, expand for a broader audience — was another.

I think this is something I’m still learning: writing doesn’t exist in isolation. It moves through other people. Through editors, publications, readers. It becomes collaborative, even when it starts as something deeply personal.

There were moments where I felt protective over certain phrases, certain rhythms. Moments where I wondered if the piece was still entirely mine. But seeing it now, in its final form, I can recognise something else — not a loss of voice, but an evolution of it.

A translation.

Being published in The Big Issue also carries a weight beyond the writing itself. It’s a publication that exists within a social framework, one that directly supports vendors and communities. That context matters. It changes how the work sits in the world.

This feels like a beginning. Not in a dramatic sense, but in a quiet, steady one.

Something that says: this is possible.

You can read the full piece via the link on my website, or in print through The Big Issue.