Q&A with Georgina Maxine

Georgina Maxine is a writer born in Jersey in the Channel Islands and raised in Queensland who discovered her love for written words by growing up with a speech impediment. 

All These Crossed Words is a structurally innovative work that moves between the external logic of the puzzle and the internal logic of the self. It’s highly rigid and deeply confessional all at once. What inspired you to use a crossword in this way, and what was the process of creating this piece?

My starting point was the issue theme: GAMES. I knew I was interested in experimentally structuring my piece to resemble a game, but I needed either a fiction or non-fiction story to run through it.

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to write about the speech impediment I grew up with and how it shaped my life. My speech impediment is still there, at least to my ears, but many who have only known me in my twenties as a litigation lawyer can appear surprised when I tell them of my experience. Only yesterday, I told a colleague I wrote this piece and she replied, ‘What speech impediment?’ It’s a bittersweet response. I’m glad others may not be as aware of it as I am (or perhaps they’re simply being polite), but at times I’ve found myself wondering if I’ve over-exaggerated the struggles I’ve been through in my mind because my impediment impacts me less now. Writing this piece and exploring the difficulties I had as a child and teenager has helped me appreciate that my experience and the worries that stemmed and remain from it are valid.

Knowing my theme, I needed a way to express a long period of time in a condensed form. I brainstormed all the games that have had some link to my speech impediment and the types of scenes that could come from those games. This immediately led me to a wordsearch format. I attempted to make the wordsearch work, but found my writing was stilted as wordsearches are not often accompanied with comments on the words to be found. I’m sure I could have made the wordsearch work with some edits, but I amended the story into a crossword format and found I liked the non-linear result.

It was a semi-painful process getting the exact non-linear structure I wanted: I knew karaoke needed to be last, but that meant reformatting the crossword over and over and removing and inserting different games to ensure karaoke was in the right position. Animal Crossing had to be sacrificed, but I think it was worth it.

After I read your piece for the first time, the title took on a very different meaning. All These Crossed Words is not merely a reference to written words that bisect each other on the page—it represents all the words you tried to say that slipped, fumbled, or were struck out. It’s an incredibly powerful metaphor. Can you talk to us about your relationship with words?

I’m so relieved you like the title! Honestly, titles are the bane of my existence. I was on a road trip with two friends when I was about to submit the story and realised it was untitled. What proceeded was me throwing out terrible suggestions that all included either ‘cross’ or ‘words’ until I landed on the final product. It only occurred to me after I submitted how perfect the title was.

I’ve always loved the written word. My parents read to me a lot growing up and this turned into a very intense vampire obsession in my teens (not just Twilight, I read all of them) and then into choosing a law career because it was word-based. The majority of my days are spent reading and writing, whether that be court cases and legal advices, or novels and my own stories. 

My relationship with the spoken word is more complicated. Networking events, loud spaces, groups of four or more people, strangers asking for my surname which I can’t say clearly (it isn’t Maxine, that’s just my penname)—these can have me hyper focused on my speech and playing mental gymnastics to formulate sentences that avoid problematic sounds. Around friends, family, my litigation team at work—it’s easier, even if I still find myself wishing I had someone else’s voice.

Your website tells me you’re finalising your debut dark academia fantasy novel with an asexual main character. This sounds rather different to an experimental crossword essay! How does writing across genres inform your creative process?

I read and write quite widely across genres. For me, the common strand in my writing is that I enjoy character-focused stories. Similar to how my piece for The Suburban Review had me considering myself as a character and important aspects of my past, my novel started with my main character and the hurdles in her life.

All my writing tends to have similar themes of self-worth, mental illness, queer identities, and complex families and friendships. My novel includes those themes and, whilst it may be set in a fantasy world, it explores topics that apply to our world, such as being asexual in a hyper-sexualised and monogamous society that expects people to pair up. A lot of my character’s experience being asexual overlaps with mine, but otherwise her story is her own and one of my favourite parts of writing is discovering that story.

Alisha Brown

Alisha Brown is a writer, editor, and musician born on Kamilaroi land with ties to Wonnarua, Yuin, and Gadigal Country. She won the 2025 Finding Beauty Poetry Prize and the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize, placed second in the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has also appeared in many SCWC anthologies and was Highly Commended for the 2024 and 2025 SCWC Poetry Prizes. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, Cordite, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and Meanjin, among others. Her website is alishabrown.com.au