JM Donellan

Category: correspondences

  • A regicidal thank you story.

    As one of the crowdfunding rewards for We Are All Ghosts, I promised contributors a personalised poem. I got fairly liberal with the term ‘poem’ after I’d written a dozen or so and just started writing obituaries, dictionary entries and this regicidal thank you story. It began, as these things often do, with the entrails…

  • Casino Battle Royale

    Dear Brendan, Thank you for noticing that my website is a thing that exists, something that most of the universe has sadly not yet achieved. I’m very flattered by your offer, $85 is more than the average short story anthology will pay for a piece and considering I would have to do almost nothing to…

  • Campbell: The Shocking True Story of a ‘Man’ Who Hated The Arts So Much You’d Think An Artist Stabbed His Puppy As Part of an Abstract Performance Piece

    Dear Campbell, Having just read the news that the Queensland Theatre Company censored a joke at your expense due to concerns that it might affect their funding, I thought I’d let you know that I’ve been inspired to write a play about your life. The current working title is Campbell: The Shocking True Story of a…

  • XMAS BOOKS.

    The good thing about buying books as Xmas gifts is that you can write in the front of them and it saves you buying a card. This means that not only do you save on money and paper wastage, but many years from now when you and the person you gave the book to are…

  • VLAD = Very Lucky Australian Dictator

    My dearest Newman it’s your old pal JD here. As you know, I do my utmost to be a law-abiding citizen, no matter how ineffective, draconian or heavily criticised by experts the laws in question may be. After all, we all know that pesky experts just get in the way of progress, right? What with…

  • Look ma! I’ve gone viral!

    Remember when Australia had a Minister for Science? Ah, good times, good times. Well, back in those dizzy halcyon days in the distant past (about a month ago) I wrote an angry little letter to Teresa Gambaro. It was just before the election and I was feeling angry and confused about the state of politics…

  • Don’t ever contact me again for any reason including the apocalypse.

      Dear Teresa, After receiving personally addressed but entirely unsolicited mail from your office for the third time, I decided I would send you a polite request to never again send me any kind of communication at all, ever. This includes, but is not limited to, letters, phone calls, text messages, morse code, Da Vinci…

  • Internet dating

        Hello there potential lover. I hope that you are having a nice day. Recently I broke up with the most amazing girl in the world, thus obliterating my last remaining vestiges of belief in the existence of real and eternal love. As a result, I am now resigning myself to what my generation…

  • Dearest Ministers of Education: please buy 2 million copies of Zeb and the Great Ruckus.

    To: senator.collins@aph.gov.au, education@ministerial.qld.gov.au Dear Mr Langbroek (State Minister for Education) and Mrs Collins (Federal Minister for School Education), I’m sure that your political parties are very busy dismantling essential health services and implementing draconian internet security protocols respectively. I would, however like to borrow a few moments of your valuable time to talk about an important issue, which is the dire…

  • If loving you is wrong, I’d like to be partially incorrect.

    This week, I'm going to give you some advice on romance. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's either A) How did I end up at this page when I was looking for videos of cats playing keyboards??? or B) Why on earth would J. M. Donellan be qualified to give relationship advice? He seems…