Writers Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks were friends before they started to write together. That writing is what sparked their love and what continues to fuel it more than 10 years on. 

Whether it's romantic, platonic, heartbreaking or surprising, our Love Stories series is about love in all its forms. Share yours with us.

I knew I was in love with Andrew when we started writing together.

Two or so years earlier, we had become easy friends after meeting through people in common. 

We read the same books, listened to the same music, cooked the same meals, wore the same shoes, talked in the same way (with flailing arms and wild hand gestures). So of course, we liked each other right away.

But it wasn't until we collaborated as writers that I realised I was in love. Our first projects were strange poems, scores for performances, and silly essays about nothing. They were ways of being together and thinking together, ways of learning about each other and developing a sense of mutual trust and respect.

Writing a life together

Writing together is a form of intimacy. 

From those first projects to now, Andrew and I have written poems, recipes, letters, exhibition catalogues, scholarly books, lectures, and radio shows together.

We have redrafted our co-written texts, one word at a time, over and again.

We have been each other's first reader, editor, proofreader, and critic.

We have become attuned to each other's style and found a shared voice.

We have learned to say, and hear, "This sentence does not work" or "This is ugly" or "This is not ready".

We have helped each other to see our writing as a gift for the reader and not as our own property.

We have put our writing to work in arguing, advocating, critiquing, appealing, inviting, protesting, and reviewing.

We have written apologies, confessions, legal documents, job applications, submissions to parliament, open letters, love letters, notes in the margins of books, and strongly worded emails.

Making sense of the times we live in

In 2018 we had a baby, and of course, we wrote our way through it.

We wrote to understand the complexities of pregnancy, birth, and parenthood and we wrote to remember the feeling of welcoming our daughter home and becoming three.

We wrote to celebrate the history of provision and to document the crisis of care we are living in, in these times of sustained divestment from the social store.

We wrote to connect our little family to the stories of community and kinship that make up the history of human life.

Now it's been more than a decade since we fell in love, and only a few years less since our daughter was born. Writing is a daily task, and sometimes it's a bit of a grind.

We're both academics so we are always writing, often to deadline, usually with too many administrative tasks vying for time and space. But we're always writing nonetheless.

We just finished a scholarly book on the history of policing that looks at contemporary Australian art as an important site from which to understand — and critique — police power.

We are halfway through a poetry book on communal life wrested from private property.

We are thinking about the next project, and the one after that. And we are texting each other for guidance on our own writing. "Can you read this paragraph?" "Does this address your comment?" "Is this OK?"

And sometimes we acknowledge that such a thing would be unappealing to most people as a form of intimacy. But for us, it's a love language.

"It's great, except that should be a comma and not a semi-colon."

Or, our highest compliment: "Perf."

More than just us

When we got married in 2020 we were each anxious about writing speeches that the other wouldn't be able to edit and improve. The same thing happened when we each turned 40.

But one thing about our co-writing is that it is more than just us.

In each case we sent the drafts to our trusted friends with whom we also share work and from whom we solicit honest feedback. Our collaborative relationship extends beyond the two of us, too.

It's hard to remember a time before we were in love and before our love took the form of writing. After all, here I am writing about it, an "it'"that seems to encompass everything.

And as soon as I finish, I'll send this to Andrew, so I can approach it anew through his eyes and ears as my first and best reader.

By the time you read it, it will be better from his edit.

Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks are critical art collective Snack Syndicate. They are part of Poetry Month 2026, a national celebration of poetry running throughout August online and at live events across the country produced by Red Room Poetry.