Category: blogging

Begin again

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From the annals of The Great First Chapter Project

About a year ago my husband handed me a brochure for a retreat in a nearby mountain village. We were standing in our Beijing kitchen while the girls played make-believe dog at our feet. The brochure was more like a handmade pamphlet – four pieces of white computer paper folded in the middle and stapled three times along the crease. There was a grainy photo of a cement terrace on the cover, and a more alarming photo of people sitting in a room with their eyes closed, and text under the photos that explained something called a ‘day of silence’ and yoga and the chance for participants to reinvent themselves. My husband, Lukas, told me these things would make a good week’s vacation for me, and he smiled while I looked at the photos, but it was a distant smile.

from ‘Elsey Come Home‘
by Susan Conley

I’ve been thinking, as you do at this time of the year, about endings and beginnings. About the things I hoped for at the start of the year, and the things that happened, and the things that I wanted to happen but didn’t (or haven’t yet). And about next year too, of course — the same kind of things, what I hope for, what I dread, what I can plan for, what I can’t. What I might just have to take on the chin.

One of the things that happened for me this year was that, as part of winning the Deep Creek Residency, I got to have a conversation with a publisher after he’d read the first 20 pages of the manuscript I’m currently working on. I’m the kind of writer who works from project to project — that is to say, uncontracted — and I also spend years between publications, years working alone, writing and rewriting and doubting myself all the while, so this was an incredible opportunity, one I’ll be forever grateful for.

Over the course of one hour, the publisher and I talked about many things, one of which was how important it is to get the first few pages of your manuscript right. We talked about prologues. We talked about hooks. We talked about grabbing the reader within the first five pages. We talked. We talked. Oh, we talked.

And I’ve been thinking about beginnings ever since.

Abandoned writer’s cabin, Deep Creek, October 2024.

So much has changed for me in the last two years when it comes to writing. I’ve had my first piece of literary fiction published, my novella Ravenous Girls. I’ve begun work on my second piece. I’ve won a residency. So many beginnings! Somehow, it seems fitting to end my year of writing on this note, thinking about beginnings.

On this note, I’ve started collecting quotations from books whose first chapter, or first few paragraphs, or even — rarely — first sentences, grab me. I’m calling this The Great First Chapter project, and I can’t think of a better way to start than with the first paragraph I’ve quoted in this post, which comes from a novel I love, Susan Conley’s Elsey Come Home.

My husband, Lukas, told me these things would make a good week’s vacation for me, writes Conley, and he smiled while I looked at the photos, but it was a distant smile. There it is, the story lying ahead of us in a nutshell: the story of a husband and wife who love each other but are estranged, the story of a marriage that needs healing. I knew the moment I read this line for the first time that I would love this book, and I did.

View from the cabin, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Before I go, I wanted to mention some good news I’ve had recently. My story ‘A Farewell’ was shortlisted for the MIKI Prize and included in the MIKI Prize 2024 Anthology, which was launched last week, and just this week my story ‘City of Lights’ was highly commended in the Marj Wilke Short Story Award 2024. I’ve never really focused on writing shorter pieces before, but this year, while I was working on a longer manuscript, the one that the publisher and I were discussing, I also started writing and submitting stories here and there, where and when I can. I have a lot to learn, but when it comes to beginnings — this feels like another one.

The cabin from afar, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading (and listening) …

Stay true

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Other people’s words about … reading

When I get to our house, Lauren and Edith are both asleep. The house is dark and quiet, and warm too — the solidity of English homes is a welcome point of difference to Australia, where we were used to draughty Edwardian weatherboards — and, still buzzing with the thoughts that occurred to me on my walk home, I pour myself a tumbler of the Aldi whiskey we got on special, and, thinking of how a quiet house and a calm world allow a reader to become their book, and how, at the same time, it is the act of solitary reading that produces that quietness and the calmness, and how, at the same time, it is the reader’s desire to be a model reader, their desire for quietness and for calmness, that makes it so — thinking of that, I sit down at the dining table in the living room and try to remember the thoughts I had on my walk home — as if thoughts can be possessed, rather than experienced; as if my thoughts are a book that I can lean into, to which I can be true, and through such trueness of reading make order, quiet and calm where before there was none.

from ‘Anam‘
by Andre Dao

There are a couple of things that resonated with me in the passage I’ve quoted above from Andre Dao’s award-winning novel, Anam.

First, there’s the mention of draughty Australian houses. I thought, reading these words, of the grey, rainy winter days of my own childhood in South Australia, although unlike Dao, I grew up in a 1920s colonial-style house rather than a weatherboard one. Our house had french windows and a verandah with wrought-iron lace trimming and a terrazzo floor. The ceilings in the house were high and the walls were thick, and we had central heating, but we used it sparingly. In June and July, then, when the days were at their shortest, those rooms were cold; I remember going to bed with a hot water bottle to warm my feet on. Even in adulthood — perhaps especially in adulthood — the houses I’ve lived in have been chilly in winter, the kind of chilly that requires you to wear several layers to ward it off.

In Australia, we like to believe that we don’t experience cold weather, and to an extent that is true — but there is nothing like the internal climate of a poorly heated house to remind you that winter does exist here. It does indeed get cold.

Guinea Flower, Aldinga Scrub, September 2024.

But the main theme of this passage is reading, and the quietness and calmness we seek from it. A quiet house and a calm world — isn’t that what most of us want? How wonderful it is that reading, an activity whose seeming simplicity belies its complexity, can give this to us.

How wonderful, too, that in discussing this Dao takes us from the idea of reading books to reading our own thoughts — and how we may stay true to them.

Lizzie, August 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

End-times

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Other people’s words about … the end of the world

It has been so many years — a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. People take supplements, for vitamin D, for energy, complain the damp has reached their bones. It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention — exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

from ‘Private Rites‘
by Julia Armfield

In Private Rites, three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, are living in the end-times of the world. Their world, their day-to-day, is one of endless rain, of land flooding, buildings subsiding, people drowning. It’s not the world we live in, not quite — and yet it is. When I read the passage above, I thought of the days of the Covid lockdowns, of 2020 and 2021 when on the one hand everything stopped — when no-one went out, when people lost their jobs and their lives — and yet on the other hand, people went on. They bought food; they spoke to their loved ones; they slept and ate and bickered and loved each other and tried to stay healthy and tried to stay apart from each other while also trying not to let go of each other. Armfield’s rainy, drowning world is a lot like that.

Pathway to Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

The pandemic is over now, at least officially, and no-one speaks about it anymore, except in passing, but it has changed our lives forever. Meanwhile, in the background, there is the climate crisis, which was possibly what made it possible for a pandemic like Covid to happen in the first place, and which continues apace while we look away and go about our lives.

Vines at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

For me, Armfield’s words in the passage above capture all of this, the worry and the refusal to worry, the going on and the not quite going on. It is exhausting, and it is boring. Writing about it, I think, is important.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Calculus

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Other people’s words about … counting calories

In 2008, I downloaded a new app to my iPod. The icon featured a silhouetted figure in the middle of a balletic jump, lithe and limber like I wanted to be, and when I clicked open the app I was welcomed and asked to input my height, current weight, age, gender, and goal weight. MyFitnessPal, which debuted on the app store in 2005, is to this day one of the most popular calorie counting apps worldwide. Its icon is also regular featured in eating disorder starter pack memes and discussed on pro-ED websites. ‘Does anyone else have MyFitnessPal app trauma???’ someone posted, while another joked darkly about ‘the myfitnesspal to eating disorder pipeline’, and another mocked ‘myfitnesspal’s yassification of orthorexia’. The app is focused on calories in and out, calculating your personalised daily allotment based on your biometrics and the date by which you’d like to hit your weight goal. During the era I spent addicted to the app, every time I considered putting something in my mouth, I searched it in the apps’s expansive database, and often decided against eating it after seeing its caloric content. What I did eat, I entered, and the app updated my remaining calories for the day accordingly. The app quickly became a ritual and a rulebook, and scrolling my daily record in bed at night a practice as yearnful and penitent as running my fingers through rosary beads.

from ‘Dead Weight‘
by Emmeline Clein

I have written two novels now that feature characters with eating disorders in them, a YA novel and my recent novella, Ravenous Girls. Both the characters in my books, like myself, experienced the onset of their anorexia in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before the existence of the internet, let alone of iPods and the app store. And yet when I read the passage I’ve quoted above by Emmeline Clein, I thought how familiar it sounded and how, despite the passage of time and the onslaught of digital technology, the experience of anorexia has remained in its essence the same across generations, at least in certain parts of the world and among people of a certain class.

Whether you count calories by consulting a book of charts that is updated and republished annually (as my characters and I did in the 1980s) or whether you download an app and then ‘chat’ about it online with your pro-ana friends, you are still counting calories. You are still measuring yourself by your food intake and the effect it has on your physical appearance. You are still, in other words, measuring your worth by what you eat and how you look.

Taperoo Beach, July 2024.

There are people who say that when we write about the experience of anorexia we trigger others to seek the experience out. I am not one of those people. The subtitle of Clein’s book is On Hunger, Harm and Disordered Eating, and I think it’s the first two words of that subtitle that grab me most strongly. Hunger is the primary experience of anorexia, whatever your age or sex or class or gender, and harm is the result — in some cases, terrible harm.

Perhaps we can’t prevent that harm when we write about it, but perhaps, too, we can try to make sense of it. And that, I believe, is important.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Each week I bookmark pieces I’ve read online that I might list on my blog, and each week my list grows and grows, since I read far more than I blog. For this post, I’ve dived into my archive of bookmarks for some pieces I’ve loved over the last two or three years.

Community

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Other people’s words about … social media and the internet

My suitcase was a water bottle, a P60, my clothes without a wardrobe and brutalised with creases — but, I thought, I should not be complaining, there was always someone who had it worse than me. Whenever I forgot, I looked at my phone or self-flagellated with the Guardian. There was a proliferation of opinions on Twitter about what it took to be a good, inclusive, progressive person, but I read such lists and threads on the cusp of going to Waitrose or preparing for sleep, whereupon they were quickly replaced with other lists: sliced bread to be bought, teeth to be brushed. When I remembered I had forgotten them, I felt like a terrible person anew. I wanted to discuss this with someone, but there was never any time. Quickly, I realised the absurd wealth of the places I had been in over the past year: rooms in which such discussions could be played with in theory, without urgency, at any time, and then set aside to be taken up at a later date. The internet was one such room: a constant, useless distress in my pocket. I had resolved to stop looking at my phone if I could help it; to turn off my notifications and live less theoretically.

from ‘Three Rooms‘
by Jo Hamya

We all bewail the role of social media and the internet in our lives while continuing to use it unceasingly, it seems to me, but I found the passage above by Jo Hamza’s narrator particularly poignant.

Recently, I read online about what some people are calling the ‘Nazi problem’ on Substack. I gather, from my brief research (online, of course), that Substack has been accused of not proactively removing Nazi content, and that as a result, people are now querying whether it’s an acceptable platform to continue to publish on. Some of the opinions I read (again, online) were by people who had only recently moved from another platform to Substack, and they were expressing exhaustion at the thought of moving to yet another platform.

I sympathise. I think it’s impossible to keep up with all the news about the relevant platforms. I prefer to work towards longevity and sustainability in one or two spaces — either the spaces you are most comfortable with or the spaces that you feel are most suitable for what you are writing about. For that reason, I’ve been writing this blog since 2014 here on WordPress, and I don’t intend to move away.

I hesitate to use the word community (despite its very common usage in this context), but nonetheless, here I am, still blogging away. And here you are, some of you, still reading my posts. So thank you. Truly, thank you ❤️.

Beach tree and seaweed, Island Beach, Kangaroo Island, January 2024.

I’ve spent the first couple of weeks of 2024 quietly, catching up with family and working. Since the publication of my novella, Ravenous Girls, in 2023, I’ve begun writing something new, a continuation in the story of the characters I introduced in Ravenous Girls. I am a slow, doubtful writer, and the publishing world is, in contrast, a fast, uncertain world, but I am quietly enjoying my writing these days — for the moment, at least.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing over the last few years, it’s that you have to celebrate the moments of joy and hope. They are rare and tentative and they quickly disappear, but they happen — every now and then.

PS On that note, if you are curious about my novella or my writing process, you can listen to me in conversation with Elizabeth Walton over on WordRoom, where we discuss novellas, anorexia, literary prizes, the difference between YA novels and literary fiction for adults … and much more.

Lately I’ve been reading …

All that food

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Other people’s words about … not eating

Mae doesn’t look convinced, but she hands me another bowl, which I pass to TJ. He holds it in the space between us, locking eyes.
You didn’t take any, he says.
I took plenty, I say. I’m stuffed.
No. I watched you.
You must’ve blinked.
Then try some more.
I just told you–
Don’t be a dick, says TJ.
Boys, says Mae.
Her voice is terse enough to shut us up.
Mae holds our gaze until we’ve settled. Then she pours more wine into her coffee mug, twirling her food with a fork.
It’s been too long since we’ve been together, says Mae. Let’s make it a nice evening.
So TJ shoves the bowl of tomatoes my way. I scoop more onto my plate. Then I take bites from the spaghetti and the chicken, and it’s all delicious, and the three of us eat silently, until there’s something like a hum between us.
Is the bathroom still in the same place, I ask.
Mae points down the hallway. I don’t look at TJ when I stand. But once I’ve locked the door behind me, I turn on the faucet, and it’s maybe another five seconds before all that food leaves me.

from ‘Family Meal‘
by Bryan Washington

When I was a teenager receiving treatment for an eating disorder, people had certain fixed ideas about what kind of person was likely to experience anorexia. By ‘people’, I mean not just family and friends but doctors, psychiatrists, medical researchers. Anorexics, people thought then (because that was what we called people with anorexia in those years, anorexics, a label that many people would now object to), were generally white, middle-class, well-educated, high-achieving, likeable young women with a tendency towards perfectionism.

Perhaps, back then, this was true. Or perhaps, more likely, if you were anorexic but you happened to be male, poor, uneducated, older than twenty-five, queer, or a person of colour — or any combination of these things — then your anorexia went unrecognised. Undiagnosed. Untreated.

We know better than this now, I am thankful to say.

Fringe Lily, December 2023.

In the passage I’ve quoted above, Cam, one of the narrators of Bryan Washington’s second novel, Family Meal, is grieving the loss of his boyfriend, Kai, who died in unexpected, violent circumstances. Cam is Black and queer; he is also addicted to many things, including drugs, sex and, yes, starving himself. He is surrounded by friends who see what he is doing to himself and try to talk to him about it, try to show him that they see, and that they care, and that he doesn’t need to be alone. It takes him a long time to see this for himself, though.

Cam’s experience of struggling with food is different from mine, and that’s partly because of who each of us is — precisely because I did, after all, fit most of the anorexic stereotypes I’ve listed above — although it’s also partly because everyone’s struggle with food is, simply, different. But I am so glad, so glad, that contemporary literature that includes stories about anorexia and disordered eating has broadened to include other stories than ones like mine.

And it’s funny how, no matter what your background, no matter what your life experience, the feelings don’t change. I’m fucking suffocating from the weight of myself, Cam writes.

I remember feeling exactly the same.

After the rain, Flooded scrub, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Loss

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Other people’s words about … doing what we love

It was a lie that Timo had not loved [playing] piano enough. He had loved it very much, but in a way that was difficult to describe. It was apophatic — he could only describe it through its negation. He only understood how much he loved the piano after he had given it up. Even that decision in hindsight seemed arbitrary, a whim. An act of petulance. But he had loved it, and he still did. Every day, he felt like a struck tuning fork, vibrating all the time. Except that it wasn’t pitch he was tuned to but something else, some horrible frequency cutting through the universe. Loss, he thought. It was loss.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

In the passage above, Taylor’s character Timo is a graduate student in Iowa who used to study music but then gave up. Sometimes, when he is on his own in the apartment he shares with his boyfriend, Fyodor, who works at a meat-packing plant, he sits listening to classical music recordings, losing himself in the music he so loves. But when Fyodor comes home, Timo switches the music off immediately, mid-piece, refusing to talk to Fyodor about this thing he so loves — refusing, also, to allow Fyodor to share in a part of him that in many ways still feels like the truest part of himself.

The Washpool, September 2023.

When I read the words I’ve quoted above, I thought about the times that I’ve given up writing over the years. Though I’m not beginning to claim that I am as talented a writer as Timo is a musician, nonetheless, writing for me has always been a channel of creativity, a tool that helps me make sense of and navigate the world. I don’t know why, honestly. I do know that I have a longing to make something beautiful (though this is another impulse I don’t really understand), and that writing is the only way I know how to (try to) do this. Maybe that’s why, every time I’ve ‘given up’ writing ‘for good’, I’ve returned to the practice later.

I’ve written before about how I’ve learned over the years to value my writing practice for the practice itself rather than for any measurable outcome. That’s partly what I’m saying again here, in response to the words I’ve quoted today. But it’s more than that, too. What Taylor expresses so beautifully is the same sense of loss I always feel when I stop writing. His image of a tuning fork vibrating to the wrong frequency describes this feeling beautifully. At the same time, I’d also describe the feeling another way, as a feeling of being muted. Silenced. When I don’t write, I feel as though I have lost my voice: I feel as though no-one hears me.

I understand, as a writer who is published very infrequently, that few people hear me, anyway. But writing is my way of speaking to the world, and not writing is the opposite of that. Not writing feels like grief.

The Washpool, September 2023.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back soon with another post about writing, and with a little piece of news, the news I’ve been hinting at for months now. Watch this space! ❤

Lately I’ve been reading …

In the ether

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Other people’s words about … emails

Dorothy used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links. Email had been the way that she and the people she know or was getting to know had crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives. Their way of life, alas, had ended. Long emails had ceased being the preferred mode of storytelling among her peers, or perhaps they no longer had so much to say to one another, and emails, though sealed with perfunctory hugs and kisses, had become businesslike. Sending a thoughtful email that she had drafted over several days and edited would, she knew, be a form of aggression; it would be foisting unpaid labour, a homework assignment, on a friend. She herself liked homework, but it was unreasonable to hope for such an email: There was too much television to keep up on, and if you wanted to know what someone was doing, you could usually find out on social media. Still, Dorothy had not stopped checking, expecting, or wishing that a good message might be out there, waiting in the ether just for her.

from ‘The Life of the Mind‘
by Christine Smallwood

Oh, how wryly I smiled when I read the passage above. My smile was wry on two counts — first, I come from a generation before Dorothy’s, and so I miss letters as well as emails. And second, there is so much to unpack here, from the description of a long, thoughtful email as a form of aggression (ouch!) through to that funny but terribly sad comment: There was too much television to keep up on.

Shining sand, Aldinga Beach, May 2023.

Meanwhile, I’ve had some good news recently. As a result, my life has been exceptionally busy for reasons that I can’t (yet) go into, though I promise that I will when I can. But I couldn’t resist popping in to leave you all to enjoy the passage above for now.

As always, there are links to some reading below, too. I’ve listed a few more than usual, just to keep you going till I next write …

Rock pools, Aldinga Beach, May 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Roar

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Other people’s words about … country and city life

Ramesh was used to the sounds of the suburbs. He never noticed barking dogs or level crossings. On the train to work every morning he turned up the volume of his audiobook so it was louder than other passengers’ mobile phone conversations. But [tonight he was in] the country [and it] roared. He could hear the air move in the trees. He had grown up in Croydon, moved to Glasgow at seventeen, back to London at twenty-three, then Sydney at thirty-six. As a child he’d stood outside his parents’ bedroom listening to his father’s whistling snore. He liked living in places where he could hear others alive. He reached for his phone where it sat charging. For an instant he saw his hands illuminated in the bluish light of its screen. He set his rain sound app to the setting called ‘Harbour Storm’.

‘What are you doing?’ Henry croaked. His face was pressed to the pillow. ‘You don’t need that tonight.’ 

Ramesh opened his mouth to argue, then he heard the rain outside, like gunfire on the corrugated iron roof.

from ‘Pulse Points‘
by Jennifer Down

I love this passage, not because I’m in accordance with Ramesh, but for the opposite reason. I love the ‘roar’ of the country. I spend most of my time living in a house in the suburbs. It’s close to the beach, which I love, but it’s even closer to the railway line, a line that trains zip up and down every half an hour from five in the morning until midnight.

Sunset, early August 2022.

I don’t mind the sound of trains, actually — as suburban sounds go, I find it vaguely comforting — but when I leave my house to stay outside the city, to visit Aldinga Scrub or to camp in Yorke Peninsula, I feel a knot inside my chest of which I wasn’t even aware releasing itself.

Sounds I love when I am away from the city: the dull roar of the ocean at the end of the road (yes, another roar). The whistle of a hot wind through the trees. A frogmouth letting out its low, persistent, booming call at dusk. A shrike thrush singing. A magpie warbling. Frogs croaking. Insects clicking in the grass. And, yes, like Ramesh, the rain drumming on the roof.

Still, the photo accompanying my post today, like so many of my photos on this blog these days, comes from the suburban beach at the end of the street I live on. The sand is being eroded away and there are car parks dotted along the coast line and on most weekends a food truck selling hot donuts sets up shop during daylight hours.

But it’s still the beach. It’s still wide and beautiful and open and … The sea still roars.

Lately I’ve been reading …

It’s a lengthy list today, because I’ve been reading far more than I’ve been posting. But I hope you find something interesting below.

How to go on

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Other people’s words about … hard work

He worked construction down on the river, where they were putting up a new footbridge. His own job involved the careful freighting of materials onto the platform where the crane rested on the water. There were times when he thought he’d get sick from the motion of the barge, the constant shifting underfoot. There were times when his hands hurt from lifting and pushing and turning, tightening the straps until they wouldn’t give, tightening them until it seemed impossible that anyone would ever be able to set them loose again. Days when his back ached and his stomach hurt and his hair was peppered with grit, when his eyes burned, and his nose burned from the stench of oil and of the river, which was dying a slow, choked death via a series of minor diversions. But then, on bright winter days, he’d look up and see the geese tracking across the sky, moving up there free as air, and he’d think that there was something beautiful left in the world. And he could go on like that, as long as there was something beautiful left in the world.

From ‘Filthy Animals‘

by Brandon Taylor

I work in a call centre, an office job, unlike Brandon Taylor’s character Hartjes in the passage above. It’s not a physically demanding job. Even so, there are days when my head aches from breathing in stale, recycled office air, when my hips ache from sitting too long, when my voice croaks from talking for hours on the phone, when my stomach hurts from choking down my emotion after a difficult phone call. In the end, just like Hartjes, I feel my job in my body.



Neighbourhood frangipani tree, Taperoo, April 2022.


What grabs me most in the passage above is the river, in all its symbolism, dying its slow, choked death. Like Hartjes, I find myself looking up from my day, seeking the sky, seeking the air, seeking a glimpse of beauty and wonder.

That brief hint of beauty. That brief reminder of how to carry on.

Lately I’ve been reading …