My published writing – twenty-one words

A thousand ways

November 27, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged book-review, books, Brandon Taylor, despair, fiction, Minor Black Figures, Ravenous Girls, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … making art

There were always concessions. Little self-betrayals of one’s values and virtues and morals, the thousand ways everyone cut against their convictions in order to get things done. That was the real crux of modernity. The extractive cost required to make any kind of progress. No matter what you did or sought to do, the cost was always a little bit of yourself. You could keep your work whole and intact, but then no-one would ever see it. And even if you did pay the price, it was possible that your work would end up stuffed in a desk in a place upstairs, totally forgotten. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was staking anything of value to anyone else — just his integrity.

But that was all [Wyeth] had. That was the one thing left to him in the whole world. His convictions. His sense of not betraying himself to get ahead. Putting a painting in that show — not that he had a painting to begin with — felt like a kind of death. Like the only kind of death that really mattered to him. The death of his vision of himself as a painter. What would he do after that? What would he have left to him?

‘It’s possible to over think things,’ Bernard said. ‘Really, it’s down to what you want to do.’

‘Agency,’ Wyeth said.

‘I know. How awful.’

From ‘Minor Black Figures‘
By Brandon Taylor

I can think of no-one who writes better about living in the modern world as an artist than Brandon Taylor. No-one, more particularly, who writes better about being a young, queer, Black male artist in the twenty-first century who is trying to practise art while not succumbing to the white gaze. (Taylor describes white supremacy in another wonderful passage in Minor Black Figures, as giving Black artists a tiny white man in your mind to argue with constantly all the way up and down until you died never having had a single thought that was not either about whiteness or a reaction to whiteness).

This is not my story, clearly. Still, as a (middle-aged, white, female, straight) writer, I feel a great deal of kinship with Wyeth in the passage above as he struggles with the value and integrity of his art practice. Yes, yes, yes.

Pomegranate flower in my garden, November 2025.

For myself, post-publication of my novella Ravenous Girls, I’m still writing. Still writing, still learning. I am often puzzled by the values I encounter in the publishing world and more broadly in the world of books and reading — puzzled by how writers seem to be valued more for their productivity and conformism than for what they have to say or how they say it. As a consequence, I don’t know if I’ll ever have another book published. But I do know that I will continue to write, and that the act of writing — when I separate myself from its place in the commercial world — is meaningful to me, in and of itself.

Or, as Taylor puts it: Anyway, it wasn’t like he was staking anything of value to anyone else — just his integrity.

Lizzie mid-yawn, November 2025 (this cat has no issues with her own integrity!)

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve been exploring the world of short fiction in the last year, discovering some wonderful short stories, flash fiction and micro fiction in the process. Below I’ve listed some of the stories I’ve enjoyed — happy reading!

You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work … Sordid Little World by Gerri Brightwell, via X-Ray Lit Mag.
I warned you that my grandmother wouldn’t like you and that you wouldn’t like her … an unnamed piece of micro fiction by Sophie Hoss, via Ninth Letter.
I do not want to die here … Godless, by Australian writer Mel Goode, in monkeybicycle.
My father and I got into a fight over a kitchen mouse that lived in our bread … Fried Chicken and Pumpkin Pie by Adrienne Beer, in the Roanoke Review.
The pendulum appears in the house in March … The Pendulum by Ea Anderson, in Peatsmoke Journal.
They are prone to many things. They are prone to squabbling, which for some is another way of conversing … Bluebird by Michael Edman, via L’Esprit Literary Review.

Soar

June 26, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, Winter, writingTagged All Fours, book-reviews, books, despair, fiction, Intimacies, Miranda July, poetry, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … tea

You made me tea
while I shook the rain from my jacket
You stooped to fit into the kitchen
but handled the cups as if they’d been
the fontanelles of two young sons
whose picture sits in the hip of your 501s.
We spoke of — what? Not much.
You weren’t to know how your touch
with the teaspoon stirred me,
how the tendons of your wide, divining hands
put me in mind of flight.

You wouldn’t have known
when you bent to tend a plant
that your shirt fell open a smile’s breadth.
You parted the leaves and plucked
a tiny green bud. Best to do that
with the early ones, you said.
I thought of the salt in the crook
of your arm where a fine vein kicks.
Of what it might be like to know
the knot and grain and beat of you;
the squeak of your heart’s pips.

From ‘Tea’
By Tiffany Atkinson

Once upon a time, I used to describe myself as someone who drank ‘endless cups of tea’ — which was indeed true, once upon a time — but these days I’m sensitive to caffeine, and so my morning pot of tea, the treasured pot of tea, is the only tea I drink for the day.

And while I drink that pot of tea, I write. Some years ago, when I decided to make a commitment to writing something every day, no matter how little, I linked the commitment I’d made, very strategically, to my morning pot of tea. That way, I told myself, even when I’m filled with doubt about whatever it is I’m writing at the time, even if every part of me wants to give up on it, even if procrastination and writer’s block are overwhelming me, I still put myself through the process each morning — because of the cup of tea that accompanies it.

That’s how I wrote Ravenous Girls, in fact — one pot of tea at a time.

Morning pot of tea, June 2025.

Tiffany Atkinson’s beautiful poem Tea — which I found in a book that a dear friend gave me, Sophie Dahl’s Ten Poems about Tea — isn’t about tea, not really. It starts with a simple, everyday gesture, a man making a woman a cup of tea, and then, like all the best poems, it takes flight. It soars.

It’s a poem to be read slowly, to be savoured, just like a pot of tea.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Bluebells are popping up and there are patches of bracken: Phoebe Weston explores the ‘ghost woodlands’ of England, tracts of land that have been grazed for centuries but are now being returned to their original woodlands.
I am actually grateful that I have an opportunity to correct the record on this because I think people have the wrong idea about my path: Brandon Taylor, in an interview at The Republic of Letters. I am a huge fan of Taylor’s fiction, and perhaps for this reason it has come to me only slowly that I am less enthusiastic about his online presence. I don’t know why this realisation astonishes me — this is true about many of the writers whose fiction I admire: it’s their work I love, not them. Be that as it may, this is a fascinating interview in which Taylor articulates his thoughts on writing, writing success, the state of fiction in the US today, micro-agression, and literary criticism.
The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel”, which is incorrect – not because you could easily name 10 others, rather because what it ignited was not an honest heart-to-heart about hormones, but something far more radical. What if a woman just told the truth, about sex, monogamy, marriage, mortality, domesticity, friendship, the life of the mind?: Zoe Williams in conversation with Miranda July, author of the novel All Fours. This is an interesting interview, even if, like me, you are not a fan of All Fours. Disclosure: I didn’t plan to read this novel. I felt that I would loathe it, for reasons that are essentially encapsulated in the quote I’ve used here. Having now (reluctantly) read it, I can say that I found it both unexpectedly better than I thought it would be and just as irksome and loathsome as I had thought I would find it. Mostly, though, I think what I object to has less to do with July’s writing (which is at the very least thoughtful and entertaining) than with the way that since publication All Fours has been heralded as ‘the truth’ about ‘perimenopausal’ women. Why do we even need to look for one single ‘truth’? July’s truth is not mine, but in all fairness, she may not have set out to write ‘the’ perimenopausal novel in the first place. What do you think?
One of the admirable things about All Fours is that July lets her protagonist have such ugly feelings: Okay, or maybe the reason I didn’t enjoy All Fours is simply that it offended me? Here’s Garth Greenwell on why it’s important to set aside your offence as a reader.
The dog barks only at pigeons, no other bird species. The amount of discussion the owners have given this topic could constitute a peer reviewed paper: And finally, a piece of short fiction, Weike Wang’s hilarious and poignant story about dogs and their owners.

The soft clatter of keyboards

June 4, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, Winter, work, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, book-reviews, books, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poetry, reading, The Modern, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … crying at work

Anthea told me she went to the bathrooms in the basement, by the cinema, when she needed to cry at work. Joanna recommended the stairwell behind the librarian’s office. I just sat silently at my desk, staring hard at my computer screen, rubbing my eyes as if they were smarting from all the data entry.

I was lucky to be here, checking measurements and shining the sentences that would appear on object labels. The open-plan offices felt like a new-age monastery; we showed our devotion through our long hours and low salaries, our gratitude and obsession with our work euphemistically called ‘attention to detail’ in the job advertisements. These offices were almost always silent save the soft clatter of our keyboards and the occasional ring of the elevator doors opening when somebody left for the galleries filled with bright, white light, where the crowds gathered to take photographs of endlessly reproduced images, paying homage to our gods, to modernism.

I wanted to stay, forever, because of the paintings.

From ‘The Modern‘
By Anna Kate Blair

The lines I’ve quoted in the passage above, which make up the opening sentences of Anna Kate Blair’s novel, The Modern, have stayed with me ever since I read it, some years ago now. The novel is about art, love, self-doubt and work — most of all, perhaps, about how in our society one of the things that determines our conception of ourselves, the way we see and value ourselves (and others), is work.

The ethos of work.

What I love, though, about this particular passage (which in fact turns out not to be particularly essential to the course of events throughout the rest of the novel, at least insofar as what happens to Sophia, the narrator), is its tragicomic depiction of women crying in the workplace. Blair dispenses here with the need to explain why Anthea and Joanna and Sophia are crying, and why they assume they have to keep their crying secret. Crying in the workplace, she implies, and secret crying in particular, is a commonplace for these women; they all simply assume, in some kind of tacit shared understanding of themselves and their lives, that they’ll end up crying at some point during the working week.

Aldinga Beach, May 2025.

I’ve worked in several workplaces over the years, and, just like Anthea and Joanna and Sophia, at some point in each job I’ve gone in search of a private place to cry. When I worked the afternoon shift in the call centre of a community health provider, I used to take the lift from the fourth floor down to the car park, walk around the corner of the building to a little alleyway on one side and lean against the wall to cry. When I was a cook, I’d step into the cool room and close the door behind me to cry in refrigerated privacy, crouched in among the cartons of milk and bowls of pastry cream and half-wheels of cheese. I’ve also done my fair share of crying in the office toilets like Anthea, and, yes, like Sophia, I’ve sat at my computer furtively blinking and dabbing at my eyes, all the while hoping that no-one would notice. And/or that no-one would notice me.

What is it about workplaces that reduces women, some women, to tears? Is crying part of our make-up, or is there something about the conditions of our workplaces — the buildings we work in, the people we talk to and report to, the conditions we’re bound by our salaries to — that makes us cry? Or is it rather the space the workplace occupies in our lives, the way it’s crammed in uneasily among everything else that belongs to our non-working selves, those selves we perhaps think of as our true selves?

I don’t know. But I think of Sophia, fellow workplace-weeper, from time to time and smile wryly.

May 2025

Lately I’ve been reading …

I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, ‘Hurry,’ alongside this other poem, ‘Walking Home,’ published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after ‘Hurry’: Devin Kelly, exploring the poem ‘Hurry’ by Marie Howe. Kelly is passionate about poetry and I’m thankful to him for introducing me to many poems I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. But also I love how he explores and acknowledges here artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
The Kiss, by Pamela Painter: Over the last year, I’ve been exploring, both as a reader and a writer, different forms of short fiction, including flash fiction and microfiction. Here’s a flash fiction story I recently read and loved.
We do not pay rent for the air we breathe: Poet and essayist Anne Boyer, exploring capitalism. If you read one essay this week, read this. It’s astonishing — an exhortation, a plea. A prayer.

Decoded

March 28, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, work, writingTagged AI, books, despair, editing, fiction, Intimacies, novel, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … language and interpreting

This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. This was happening to me now, in the conference room. I was absorbed by the task at hand, of decoding the legalese in which the content of the discussion was encased, so securely that nothing seemed to penetrate and nothing escaped. And yet — as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand — something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, ‘cross-border raid’, ‘mass grave’, ‘armed youth’.

I reached for the glass of water. One of the junior associates was speaking now — a solid wall of language that barrelled towards me as I drank all the water in the glass, poured another, and then drank that. I set the glass down, I had lost my place, I looked at the notepad again, as if I would find a clue there. The associate came to an abrupt stop, the former president [for whom I was interpreting] turned to look at me. Is everything okay, the associate asked sharply. I just need a moment, I said. Could we go back — the associate answered impatiently, Yes, yes, of course. How far? He exchanged glances with [the defence barrister] Kees, who was watching me, one arm folded over the other. He had been silent the entire time, now he suddenly spoke. Let’s take a break. Five minutes? And the others immediately rose to their feet as if they too had only been waiting for an excuse to pause.

From ‘Intimacies‘
By Katie Kitamura

When I was a young woman I studied French, German and Mandarin at university. I had a facility for language, for words, and in those days I thought that I might one day become an interpreter in one of these languages, like the narrator in Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies. I studied all three languages for a year, having also studied French and German at high school, and then at the end of the year, which was the end of my first year at university, having achieved distinctions in all three subjects, I left university, left Australia, and didn’t return home to resume my studies for another three years.

By then I’d decided not to pursue a career in languages at all. I had understood from my travels that my natural shyness and introversion would make the kinds of context in which an interpreter works difficult for me, and I had decided not to challenge myself in that way. Funnily enough, this realisation came to me while I was living in Germany, where I had gone to live for a year to become fluent in German. Funnily enough, I should add, by the time I came to the realisation that interpreting wasn’t for me, I was almost entirely fluent in German. Anyway, I came back to Australia and left all of this behind, my fluency in German, my plans to be an interpreter, all of that.

Footprints in the sand, March 2025.

It’s funny, though, because Katie Kitamura’s description in the passage I’ve quoted above of the experience of being so immersed in the pursuit of choosing the correct word that you lose all sense of meaning is something I am deeply familiar with in another context — editing. As an editor, I have edited books in the fields of geology, medicine, history, literature and religion. On hearing this, people frequently say to me, ‘Wow, you must have learned a lot about geology/medicine/history/literature/religion!’ But the truth is, I don’t absorb that kind of information when I’m editing. Like Kitamura’s interpreter, I decode the language I’m working with in the material I’m editing — meaning that I make sure that the sentences are grammatically correct, that there are no spelling errors, that the writer has presented their argument cogently — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I understand it.

You literally do not know what you are saying, says Kitamura’s narrator of interpreting. Likewise, I would say of editing, I literally do not know what I am reading.

There are times when I regret losing the languages I learned when I was younger. There are times when I wish I had tried a little harder, thought a little more laterally, about how a person like me might use her language skills in her career without needing to be a gifted conversationalist or gregarious extrovert. But perhaps in the end my love for words and decoding language are what led me to become an editor, even if only by default. And I am, despite everything, grateful to have found my way to an editing life. It has served me well.

Lately I’ve been reading …

So autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented: I’ve been reading up on autofiction recently, though I’m not a fan of some of the most famous autoficton novels by Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti. Here, Christina Lorentzen explores what autofiction is in all its guises.
The inspiration for this book arrived after a long creative drought, during which I came to accept that I would never write another novel: Melanie Cheng, on writing her Stella Prize-longlisted novel, The Burrow. As someone who has experienced many a long creative drought, I find Cheng’s comments, along with the comments of all the other novelists long listed for the Stella this year, fascinating.
Cyra is a young queer woman whose sobriety is not the driving force of the novel. Her recovery is a part of her story, but it doesn’t define her. (For a long time, I thought my sobriety had to be my entire identity. I didn’t know how to make room for the rest of me): I’ve read many books, both memoirs and works of fiction, about alcoholism and other forms of addiction, and I’ve always been troubled by the way they seem to present only one path to sobriety, which is abstinence and AA. But here, I’m glad to report, is Saratoga Schaefer on why their first novel depicts a different path to sobriety.
You would be surprised to hear that even the Mediterranean diet riles me. I don’t dispute that fruit, vegetables, nuts and olive oil are great choices. I eat them all the time and my desert island food is, probably, a Greek salad – tomato juices, olive oil, vinegar, bits of onion – mopped up with fresh bread. The trouble with the Mediterranean diet is that most of us don’t live in Crete: Yotam Ottolenghi on why intermittent fasting messed with his brain instead of helping him to lose weight, why eating isn’t only about nutrition and why the solution to losing weight isn’t dieting.
How AI is stealing our writing: Yes, my writing, too, has been stolen by Meta’s AI tool, and while I’m shocked and devastated, I’m sad to say that I’m also not remotely surprised that this is where AI is taking us …

My body, my self

March 14, 2025Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the seaTagged anorexia nervosa, books, despair, Emma Copley Eisenberg, fiction, Housemates, reading, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … other people’s writing

Most of the articles that Leah’s housemates were reading and talking about in the kitchen were also clearly a product of this system. Either they made arguments about ‘justice’ and ‘representation’ that were so flatly predetermined and simple as to make Leah want to crack a pencil in half or they were written in gesturing and floaty theory-ese that was outrageously divorced from the relevant concerns of being a person. Either they purported to know everything, tacking all the problems at once and offering vague, useless answers, or they tackled nothing, risked nothing, tried for nothing.

But books were no better. Most of the books that lined the front window of the volunteer-run bookstore on the avenue were either practical guides to overcoming compulsory monogamy and white supremacy or neatly contained novels about pretty people struggling to fall in love, or stay in love, or have a child, or lose weight (a shocking number of the books lefties loved revealed a plain hatred of fatness), or lose weight after having a child. The viral book reviews, shared in their housemate group chat, were almost always written by viciously smart Brooklyn-based writers who panned any book they deemed too ambitious or emotional — offensive on principle it seemed — in clipped, sarcastic prose. Only smallness of scope and affective numbness were aesthetically acceptable.

From ‘Housemates‘
By Emma Copley Eisenberg

I think this is one of the best critiques I’ve read about the written world today. How do we escape the aesthetic smallness of scope and affective numbness? I don’t know, but I think Eisenberg is onto something here.

Taperoo Beach, March 2025.

Leah, one of the two main protagonists of Housemates, is fat and queer and in love with her housemate Bernie, who is attracted to Leah but not driven to pursue the attraction, or at least not initially. And here again Eisenberg questions our social mores, the platitudes we repeat to ourselves and to others, this time about the discourse of sexuality. Was she more or less comfortable among queers than she was among everyone else? Bernie asks herself. About the same, came the answer. But if she really listened, really paused, there was another answer, which was: less. The style. The discordance, the mismatching, the pride, the attracting of attention and the comfort in that attention, the physicality to dance, to fuck, to march. The physical in Bernie felt meant for other uses.

Leah and Bernie move in a world where people pride themselves for being other, for not living according to the usual socially accepted order. And yet their world, too, demands acceptance and conformity to certain philosophical and sexual tenets. I love how Bernie has the courage to question the over-sexualised expectations that she perceives the people around her to have of themselves and others. The physical in Bernie felt meant for other uses. Now that’s a celebratory sentence if there ever was one.

Taperoo Beach, March 2025.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Styron’s disconsolate characters live in a world which is itself afflicted with melancholia, an entire existence clinically depressed: Greg Cwik remembers the works of William Styron, whose memoir, Darkness Visible, I remember reading in my very early twenties.
I am, to date, a slow writer—my debut novel took ten years. My second, nine. There was overlap between those years, but still. Upon finishing a book draft, I feel no sense of accomplishment: there are so many more to go. Meanwhile, as is true for any number of artists, my well-being is predicated on that of my writing. The first depends on the second. I think sometimes of what Honoré de Balzac said when he ran into his writer friends at the end of a day. He didn’t inquire how they were doing; instead, he asked if they’d worked well that day, since, if they said yes, it necessarily followed that his friends were thriving: R O Kwon on the benefits of powerlifting and how it helps her cope with writing … and with life.
I wish I could tell you in simple terms what it is we make together, she and I. The names there are tend to be a bit off-key. We’ve cared for each other, durably and devotedly, for decades, but we are not ‘family’ in the eyes of any relevant authorities, and certainly not a couple. (She’s a lesbian; I’m a straight man.) We’re not roommates or lovers or coparents. We are not co-owners of a condo, a couch, a dog. It’s true that we’re both professors and so maybe, on somebody’s HR spreadsheet, we go down as ‘colleagues’: Peter Covellio, on indefinable friendships.
Medicine knows one thing about you and decides it therefore knows everything about you – or, at the very least, it has a single frame within which it pictures every single thing about you: Fiona Wright, on how her late-stage diagnosis of autism affected her anorexia.
While eating disorders can (and do) develop on the basis of body image, they are often adaptive, which means the person engages in those behaviors for reasons other than weight loss: While we’re on the this theme, Maggie Slepian explores the long-term course of eating disorders and comes up with the conclusion that recovery is often out of reach. I’ve linked to this article because I am interested in eating disorders and have written about them myself, both on my blog and in my fiction. But this piece troubles me for many reasons. In the first half, Slepian details all the strategies she used when she was severely anorexic to lose weight — there are so many triggers here, I don’t know where to start. (The only thing she doesn’t do is list her lowest weight, but that seems tokenistic.) Beyond that, though, I am tired by Slepian’s conclusion that recovery — by which she means mental recovery as well as physical recovery — isn’t possible. I have read numerous pieces by former anorexics who say the same thing, and I disagree My belief is that, at least in some of these cases, the writers of pieces like this simply haven’t lived long enough (yet) to outlive their eating disorders. In my case, I continued to experience mental symptoms for twenty years after I was initially diagnosed, which was a long time after I had physically recovered. But twenty years in, the disordered, depressing thoughts did fade and within twenty-five years they were gone, and they have never returned. Recovery is possible, at least for some of us. It just takes a long, long time and it doesn’t look the way people expect it to.

Begin again

December 12, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, rituals, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, The Great First Chapter Project, What I love about ..., writingTagged Elsey Come Home, Susan Conley2 Comments

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) …

- Begin again: On the theme of beginnings, the most beautiful song I know is this one, by Measure.
- Don’t fuck around second-guessing the market. Write the book only you can write. Don’t write for an imagined audience. Don’t write for an imaginary critic. Challenge yourself according to your own intensely demanding critical apparatus. Give it to people who will be harsh. Read it aloud. Re-write and re-write and save the drafts: Timely words of encouragement from Max Porter, in conversation with Dizz Tate back in 2015.
- After you’ve learned to see every date, every man who expresses interest, every room you’re invited up to, as a plot point on the way to the inevitable climax where you get hurt—it makes your mind tangle up, like a sewing machine on a knotted stitch: Stella Mehlhoff, on the effect of coming of age as a post-#MeToo generation member. I’ll be honest, as a Gen X-er I find this piece unbearably sad, although I’m glad I read it. The #MeToo movement, Mehlhoff tells us, has made her generation of women afraid of sex, afraid of romance, afraid of dating. Is this true across the board? I hope not.
- Duck is delicious. Why can’t we have that?: This year, both as a reader and a writer, I discovered flash fiction, otherwise known as microfiction, or stories that are under 1,000 words. In this piece, Esquire offers its own version by sending out napkins around Thanksgiving to five authors and asking them to write a piece of fiction that fits on the napkin. The idea is quirky and genius, and I enjoyed most of the pieces here.
- If sadomasochism is a running theme in Normal People, Conversations with Friends and Fifty Shades of Grey, it is not because any of these novels evince the slightest interest in the transformative potential of subversive sex but rather because sexual quirks are readily legible as a form of deviance in want of normalization: I’m a huge fan of Sally Rooney’s fiction, although I can’t always pinpoint why. Her writing draws me in, moves me and makes me think, and yet it also troubles me. This piece, by Becca Rothfield back in 2021, back when Rooney had published only two novels, articulates some of the things I feel about Rooney’s writing — it’s long, but worth the read.

Like breath

October 23, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, nature, nature writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walking, writingTagged Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family1 Comment

Other people’s words about … places that reside within our hearts

During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on the verandah at 3 AM, night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them — inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge fluorescent light) there are these frogs as loud as river, grunting, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocused by the brain — nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

from ‘Running in the Family‘
by Michael Ondaatje

I have just spent a week away in Deep Creek, having been chosen as this year’s lucky winner of the Deep Creek Residency for writers. I spent that week away writing, reading, bushwalking, running, writing again, then writing some more. It was a joyous time, the rarest privilege, to be given time away simply to write.

Daytime, Deep Creek, October 2024.

In our lives, I think that there are some places, connected to some times, that are somehow magic, that come to us through luck or stealth or a great deal of planning and then reside with us forever. These places become a part of the fabric of who we are, though we may not always understand why, and what we feel, when we think of them or remember them or revisit them, is a sense of awe — a sense of connection to something deeper than we can articulate.

Gully of grass trees, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Deep Creek, place of grass trees and rolling hills and shrike thrushes calling in the trees, place of kangaroos and echidnas and sheep and shingleback lizards, place of tawny frogmouths and fogs and sunshine and rain and big, big skies — Deep Creek is, anyway, one of those places for me, a place close to my heart. I have left Deep Creek now, and the hopes and dreams I went there with — that I would write copiously and productively, that the story I’m writing is worth telling, that the manuscript I’m working on might one day get published — may or may not come true, but Deep Creek is still with me and always will be. I don’t know how else to put it.

Resting place, Deep Creek, October 2024.

And this is what I love about the passage I’ve quoted above by Michael Ondaatje, the way he captures the mystery of a place, its essence; the way it has become a part of him. I have never been to the jungle that he writes of, never heard peacocks who weep weep loud into the night. But in Deep Creek I have felt what Ondaatje describes. In Deep Creek I have felt that I have found a place that will, like breath, always be with me.

First light, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it: Thea Lim explores the commodification of art, and of our lives.
- I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be: On a related theme, Amy Stuber, on writing short stories, trying to write a novel, and then returning to short story writing. On writing what she wants to write, not what the industry tells her to write. And on growing older.
- Ethical Consumption can ultimately serve as a type of delusion or fantasy where we tell ourselves that our economic actions are righteous and that we’re doing our small part to make a difference, even in the face of underwhelming evidence: Elizabeth L Cline, exploring the problems with ethical consumerism and making the argument for returning to Consumer Activism.
- Even now, years later and sober multiple times over, the story I recount reflexively about Nick’s death and my concurrent relapse is not the true story: Adam Spiegelman, on heroin addiction and the aftermath.

Stay true

September 27, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walkingTagged Anam, Andre Dao2 Comments

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 …

- Mine is not, I think, a rare journey. We used to be called midlist, we writers who win prizes and get great reviews but don’t sell in large numbers. I’m not sure trade publishers even use that term anymore. They’re not really interested in middling sellers. No matter the thrill and attention out of the gate, if we don’t make that transition from promising debut to big seller, trade publishing loses interest: Having had a novella published myself by a small publisher myself late last year, I was interested to read this piece by Rilla Askew, on being published by a small press after earlier publications with a trade publisher.
- And indeed, when Shane calls escorting ‘the most exhilarating thing I’d done in my life’, it feels like she’s admitting to something forbidden: Sascha Cohen explores Charlotte Shane’s memoir of her life as a prostitute. This is an interesting read, although I was disappointed not to see a reference to Australian Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, which explores similar transgressive territory. (Spoiler alert: Holden, like Shane, enjoyed working as a prostitute and often liked her male clients.)
- All this automation could make us reconsider what we like about the manual aspects of writing. It’s a bit like the challenge photography presented to drawing and painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it didn’t eliminate these techniques, but it did make people rethink what they wanted from them: Simon Reader reviews two new books that suggest that we can protect our writing from AI by practising ‘structured chaos’.
- In these countries, where olive cultivation can be traced back thousands of years, the loss of olive groves is akin to losing a culture as well as vital income: Daphne Chouliaraki Milner explores the effect of climate change on the world’s olive growers.

Calculus

July 21, 2024July 21, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, Winter, writingTagged Dead Weight, Emmeline KleinLeave a comment

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.

- Twenty years ago we did not have constructive ways to leave the age of fossil fuel behind. Now we do. And the solutions keep getting better: Rebecca Solnit, on why the stories we tell about climate change are as important as the things we do — and why they’re not, in fact, all about doom and gloom. Like many people, I tend to spiral into despair whenever I consider climate crisis. Solnit’s piece, from early 2023, is considered and wide-ranging and allows much room for hope.
- When I was confident we could meet socially, or off-the-record, we embarked on that all-too-rare thing in adult life – a new friendship: Alice Vincent, in another piece from 2023, on forming friendships later in life.
- But I knew, even at that young age, that I had to write in order to feel whole. Whether or not anyone else read my work, or paid me for it, was a separate matter: Ann Napolitano with some wise words on writer’s block, on not writing what you know, and on offering yourself grace.
- Again, I feel grateful that so much of my education happened in spaces of that kind of permissiveness, where the value of unexpected pleasure was seen as greater then the danger of non-catastrophic, unpleasant experience. That space of permissiveness allows for a kind of discovery: I’m a huge fan of Garth Greenwell’s two novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, so when I heard that his next novel is coming out later this year (in the US, at least), I got pretty excited. While we wait for that, here is Greenwell in a fascinating, thoughtful conversation about cruising, queer spaces, the #MeToo movement and capitalism.
- It didn’t occur to me to be scared: Maggie Slepian, in a more recent piece, tells a startlng, moving story about how she nearly drowned while she was out kayaking … and what happened afterwards. This one is worth reading all the way to the end, though I can’t promise you won’t cry.
- The sex was okay, I guessed, but what I really liked was seeing my body through their eyes; the hollows of my stomach, the knobby delicacy of my collarbone. I still felt a sick shame in the pit of my stomach in the morning when they left, but it was less like an overpowering stomach flu, more like a mild bug: I’m finishing with this more recent piece by Emma Specter, which returns to the theme of my post today, and what Specter calls the ‘calculus [of] … calories in, calories out’. Does this sound familiar?

Echo

June 29, 2024June 30, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, books, Cairo, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, What I love about ..., Winter, writingTagged Normal People, Sally Rooney3 Comments

Other people’s words about … intimacy

He exhales. In the spring he would sometimes wake up at night beside Marianne, and if she was awake they would move into each other’s arms until he could feel himself inside her. He didn’t have to say anything, except to ask her if it was alright, and she always said it was. Nothing else in his life compared to what he felt then. Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body. It was something he could never have with anyone else, and he would never want to. Afterwards they’d just go back to sleep in each other’s arms, without speaking.

from ‘Normal People‘
by Sally Rooney

I don’t know anyone who writes about intimacy better than Sally Rooney, especially in her first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People. What I love about Rooney’s writing is that she understands how our emotions convey themselves to us by manifesting themselves physically. Connor’s longing for Marianne in the passage above, his longing to be inside her, is both physical and emotional. It’s all-encompassing, unspeakable, the kind of intimacy that he doesn’t have words for — that most of us don’t have words for. Only Sally Rooney, as I said, can write this way.

Port Elliot, June 2024.

I’ve been thinking over the last few months about why I write and what I want to write about next, now that my novella Ravenous Girls is out in the world. And I’ve been writing, too, or trying to. Earlier this year, in fact, I submitted part of a new manuscript, the manuscript I’ve been thinking about over the last few months, to the Deep Creek Residency — and this week I found out to my excitement that, based on the strength of the material I’d submitted, I have been named the winner for 2024 of the residency. Which is deeply exciting.

It’s funny how writing works, though — by the time I got the news about winning the residency, I’d pretty much convinced myself that this manuscript, or the version of it that I’d worked on and submitted to the residency, was unfeasible. Clunky. Strained. Embarrassing, even.

So maybe I was wrong about that; maybe I somehow got myself lost inside my own echo chamber. This happens to me over and over again whenever I’m writing, and yet each time it happens to me, it astonishes me anew. It’s not a place I recommend staying in very long, this echo chamber. It’s a desolate, lonely place.

Aldinga Beach, June 2024.

Partly what I’m writing about in my new manuscript is Cairo. Partly what I’m writing about is the two sisters that I wrote about in Ravenous Girls, Frankie and Justine, at a later stage in their lives. And partly what I’m writing about is intimacy, not in the way that Sally Rooney writes about intimacy, but intimacy nonetheless.

Intimacy, which is its own terrifying echo chamber.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- And still you write. It takes stamina and dedication and perhaps a bit of insanity to work on the same story, year after year, and do it without praise, without support, without even the knowledge that it will come together in the end: On the subject off writing, here’s Peyton Marshall, on the value of writing slowly. Long-time readers of this blog will know that there were ten years between my second book, a novel for young adults, and my third, a novella. Talk about getting lost inside an echo chamber! I find much to relish in Marshall’s words here.
- To be honest, I’m a little frightened of how humbled I am. Which is why I must share my news several times a day, and with all 12.9K of you — to show that, even in the wake of success, one can achieve an improbable amount of humility: Still on the subject of writing, in this piece Jeff Bender lampoons the social media posts that writers publish in the wake of publication. Ouch! This made me laugh at first, and then cry. In the end, it’s not the writers who come off badly here — it’s the industry.
- Clouds rend the air: This poem, ‘My Atmosphere’ by Alan Felsenthal, took me by surprise. Read it to the end and you’ll see why. Reading it again now, I’m still left breathless.