EVERYDAY STORIES: THE WRITING OF STEVE GRAY
When you meet Steve Gray through his writing, what strikes you first is his voice. It’s conversational, funny, and grounded in the rhythms of ordinary Australian life. Whether he’s writing about a suburban street, a country town, or a quiet moment in someone’s lounge room, his tone carries the easy warmth of someone telling a story over coffee.
Gray’s novels I Lived off Easey Street and Missing share this voice. They’re both deeply human stories, unpretentious, curious about the small details of daily life, and full of empathy for people doing their best to make sense of things.
“I was hanging out at a gallery on Easey Street one day,” he says, “and went around the corner to look at some graffiti. I spotted an old house across the road that reminded me of a country farmhouse.” From that simple moment, I Lived off Easey Street began to grow. The old house became the seed for a novel about luck, love, and grief, set amid the creative bustle of Melbourne’s inner north.
Missing was born in a similar way, from a sense of place. “It started with a visit to a country town during a festival. I began wondering what it would be like to live there — a place going back to the gold-rush days, layered with generations.” The story that emerged follows Steph, a woman coping with sudden family loss, and is a quietly affecting work, a portrait of how ordinary people carry on when life breaks apart.
The art of noticing
Gray’s fascination with everyday detail runs deep. As a kid growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, he loved peering into other people’s homes, literally. “Neighbours would go on holidays and leave me to water their plants or feed the cat,” he recalls. “The old lady next door had a crystal cabinet full of treasures. Each room revealed something new.”
He remembers the smells, the dark timber window frames, the twisted cords of old blinds. “There were always details,” he says, “and those things stuck with me.” Later, reading The Mango Tree at school, a book filled with lush domestic description, he recognised the same impulse to look closely, to record what others might overlook.
It’s this instinct that makes his fiction so vivid. I lived off Easey Street hums with local colour, small businesses, backyard banter, design studios, and neighbours popping in for tea. Missing, meanwhile, finds poetry in the practical: lists, cupboards, paperwork, the quiet logistics of grief.
“Our neighbourhood was loaded with people dropping in for a cuppa,” Gray says. “As I got older, those conversations started to make sense — politics, who was up to what, how expensive things had become. The list goes on.”
Writing through change and loss
Both novels explore how people handle upheaval, but without melodrama. His characters don’t fall apart; they keep going. “I’ve been ‘trained’ to handle grief differently,” he explains. “I take an observational approach, like I’m looking from the outside.”
Over a long working life, “about seventeen jobs and business changes,” he says, Gray learned the art of getting back up again. “It’s not how many times you fall, but how many times you’re able to get up. Writing helps me explore that.”
He channels that resilience into his characters, who face tragedy with quiet dignity. In Easey Street, Todd loses his partner in a sudden accident, yet the story remains calm, reflective, even humorous. Missing takes a similar tack: grief unfolds through the small routines of survival, making tea, feeding the dog, sorting through old boxes.
“Some people experience loss and it has a major impact,” Gray says. “For me, handling things the way I do feels true. It gives me a chance to explore myself through a fictional lens.”
Art, observation, and respect
Before turning to fiction, Gray spent more than forty years in the visual arts, creating, teaching, and observing. That long practice of looking has shaped his prose. “I’ve spent a long time pondering things,” he says. “Dappled light through trees, climbing trees, people’s gestures — it’s all there. Observation is everything.”
That careful seeing extends to his treatment of people. “I like writing worlds filled with feisty females who can protect themselves,” he says. “And I’ve always liked the notion of respect — in all its forms.”
Respect, in fact, became something of a mantra. “I once famously said, ‘Respect is my word of the year!’ No one took any notice,” he laughs. “But writing it down reminded me to keep finding ways to share its meaning.”
Place, humour, and connection
For Gray, place is vital. “It makes things real — the details, the mannerisms, the personality types,” he says. “Then add to that the setting — a suburban corner or a country town. The sense of place is everything.” He likes to imagine readers hopping online to explore the real streets his fiction mentions, “jumping onto Street View to look around.”
And while his stories often deal with serious themes, humour is never far away. “Frank Zappa once asked, ‘Does humour belong in music?’ I think it belongs everywhere,” Gray says. “Humour softens things, builds rapport. I like to laugh.”
That gentle, observational humour threads through both books, a reminder that life, even in its hardest moments, has absurdities worth smiling at.
Looking ahead
Between Easey Street and Missing, not much has changed in Gray’s process. “I sometimes have a bunch of things on the go,” he says. “Other times, I let stories sit for a bit before continuing.” But new interests are taking shape. “I want to infuse more detail and make opening chapters super engaging,” he says. “Lately I’ve been trying some poetry and shorter novellas.”
He’s also exploring neurodiversity, ADHD and other aspects of difference, both personally and through his writing. “These are things I’ve had to deal with on a personal level. The more I learn, the more I appreciate. I’ll always be exploring what it means to see the world differently.”
The quiet power of ordinary life
Ultimately, Gray’s writing reminds readers that ordinary life is full of meaning if you look closely enough. His stories linger not because of dramatic plot twists, but because of how real they feel, the smells, the habits, the neighbours, the memories.
Together, I Lived off Easey Street and Missing form a portrait of everyday grace, one about luck, the other about loss. Both are suffused with humour, empathy, and the slow, steady pulse of human connection.
Steve Gray doesn’t write to impress; he writes to notice. And in doing so, he turns the simple act of paying attention into something quietly extraordinary.
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