the sea – twenty-one words

This world

October 8, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the seaTagged algal bloom, books, Clare Chambers, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poem, poems, poetry, reading, Small Pleasures, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … kindness

He knelt down to undress her, his shaking hands fumbling over every button and zip and hook, until she was naked in front of him. Then he stopped and looked up at her with a troubled expression.

‘I haven’t done this for seven years. Will you forgive me if it goes badly?’

Jean laughed, amazed at her own boldness in displaying her body while he was still fully clothed. It was the strangest feeling, placing herself in someone else’s power with complete confidence. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.

‘Well, I haven’t done it for longer than that. But it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re kind.’

And so even though they were unpractised, they were kind and that made it all right. And afterwards they lay for a long time pressed together, her head on his shoulder, his hand stroking her hip while the night deepened around them. There was no urgency to move apart; morning and work were a long way off.

From ‘Small Pleasures‘
By Clare Chambers

Depictions of sex are notoriously hard to get right, and what sets those that work apart from those that don’t isn’t always obvious (although personally I feel that it helps if the writer avoids analogies with mountains and valleys, and doesn’t refer to a man’s ‘member’!). But I think the passage I’ve quoted above, from Clare Chambers’s lovely novel Small Pleasures — a novel set in 1957 — is one of the most moving sex scenes I’ve ever read.

It’s also somehow shocking. How many sex scenes have you read recently where the lovers were explicitly kind to each other? I can’t remember a single one. So when I say the scene is shocking, I mean, not that Chambers sets out to describe something graphic or taboo-breaking, but the opposite — that this is the word she uses, kind. And so even though they were unpractised, they were kind and that made it all right. How beautiful is that?

Deep Creek, September 2025.

I’ve been quiet over here for a while, not because I haven’t wanted to write a post, but because I didn’t know how to find the words to do so. Earlier this year, a toxic algal bloom hit the coast of South Australia. It began in regional locations but then spread to the metropolitan coast, killing marine animals in its wake and turning the ocean into a graveyard. Although scientists originally predicted that it would disperse during the cooler weather of the winter months, it hasn’t done so, and as summer approaches it’s clear that the bloom will remain for some time to come. There are thought to be several causes for it, among the most obvious of which is global warming: we are experiencing a marine heatwave in South Australia.

When I think about the algal bloom, I feel powerless and devastated. I have lived the whole of my adult life around the sea. My house is within walking distance of the sea. My holidays and camping trips are centred around the sea. I walk and run by the sea. I go to the sea to remind myself that there is another world beyond the human world — to tune the rhythm of my breathing into the rhythm of the waves, in and out. In and out.

But now what I feel when I go to the sea is grief.

Deep Creek, September 2025

It’s impossible for me to write a post here, on this blog in which I have for so many years celebrated my life by the sea, without acknowledging the algal bloom, and yet I find it almost equally impossible to write about it. And so this is the reason for my quietness. These words, even as I write them, do not come easily to me.

The effects of climate change are not kind. This is not a kind world.

Deep Creek, September 2025

I will finish by saying that the photographs that accompany this post come from a recent trip I made with a friend to Deep Creek, to the place where I spent a week on a writing residency around the same time last year.

Wait — let me rephrase that: I will finish by saying that Deep Creek is a place of stunning natural beauty and I am grateful for my time there, but that it, too, like the ocean, is vulnerable to climate change, because this is not a kind world.

It is not a kind world.

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, discussing 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 in this essay artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
These poems remind me that one reason why I turn to poetry is because of the ways that some poems acknowledge, so often, our ever-present inability, and, in doing so, they perform exercises of coping. They reimagine lives. They repeat. They open doors. They enter: Devin Kelly again, this time exploring Matthew Nienow’s poem For What it’s Worth.
Thank You For the Tulips: more poetry here, perhaps because I need it — this time a poem by Lisa Bellamy on motherhood and love.
At 50, Choosing New Make-Up: one more poem for good measure, this one by Wendy Barker. In fact, there are several others by Barker if you scroll down the page, though this is the one that first drew me to her poetry.

A sad place

April 19, 2025Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., out & about, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, walkingTagged AI, books, Childhood, despair, editing, fiction, Intimacies, novel, reading, Tove Diveletsen, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … accessing feelings

The exams are over and we’ve had the graduation party at school. Everyone cheered now that they were leaving the ‘red prison’, and I cheered loudest of all. It bothers me a lot that I don’t seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people’s reactions. It’s as if I’m only moved by things that come to me indirectly. I can cry when I see a picture in the newspaper of an unfortunate family that’s been evicted, but when I see the same ordinary sight in reality, it doesn’t touch me. I’m moved by poetry and lyrical prose, now as always — but the things that are described leave me completely cold. I don’t think very much of reality.

From ‘Childhood‘
By Tove Ditlevsen

Some years ago an older woman said to me that she had noticed she didn’t cry very much anymore. She said that when she was younger she had been someone who cried easily, when she was sad, when she was angry, sometimes when she was happy. But now, in her seventies, the tears didn’t well up anymore.

I remember thinking that that wouldn’t be the case for me. I remember thinking that I would always be someone who cried a lot — too much, probably, rather than not enough. I have always cried copiously and easily and very often self-piteously. I have cried at the most inappropriate times, during moments that weren’t about me at all, moments when I should have been comforting someone, not dealing with my own emotions.

Largs Bay Jetty, April 2025.

And yet here I am, mid-fifties, and it’s happening to me, too. In the passage I’ve quoted above from Tove Ditlevesen’s memoir, Ditlevsen is describing the way she felt as a teenager, but the feelings she expresses in this passage describe the way I often feel now, the way the older woman I mentioned above also expressed feeling. It’s a feeling of seeing sad things, being moved by them, being aware that I’m sad about them even, but not being able to access the sadness itself directly. When I do cry, it’s usually, like the adolescent Ditlevesen, when the feeling is being conveyed to me through another medium — a book, a film, a poem, a song.

I miss crying. Perhaps that sounds odd or self-indulgent, but I miss the feeling that came when my eyes grew hot and tears fell down my cheeks and my throat tightened and my breath snagged. I miss the feeling of being there with my sadness, right there. I miss the feeling that follows a crying bout, too, that feeling of being healed, even if only temporarily.

The world is a sad place right now. People will say in response to this that the world has always been sad for someone somewhere, and that’s true. Partly, then, I say that it’s a sad place from a place of privilege, because I’ve experienced times when it seemed that there was a lot of hope in the world, if you could only learn to access it. Still, when I think about the climate crisis, when I think about Presidents Trump and Putin and Xi Jinping and Yoon Suk Yeol, when I think about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the world seems to me a very sad place indeed. Would it help if I were able to cry about this? I don’t know. Like the adolescent Divletsen, I don’t think very much of reality.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Technology appears to extend our connection … (but) while that’s true, it can’t replace intimacy: Willow Defebaugh on loneliness and longevity.
Sure, it’s voyeuristic (or pornographic if you like), and that’s part of the fun: T M Brown explores reality TV and his curious passion for it.
Our innocence is chipped away, often gently but sometimes brutally, by what happens to us. Gradually, innocence is transformed to experience, and we begin to understand who we are, how the world is, and what matters most to us: James Bailey asks people what is the meaning of life and receives a variety of answers.
The great American biologist EO Wilson predicted that human life would not long survive the demise of the invertebrates. But he also devised a plangent term for this epoch from ancient Greek: the Eremocene, a new, isolated place. Our era is not just the human-dominated Anthropocene; it is an age of loneliness: Patrick Barkham reflects on the role of invertebrates on Earth.

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.

We cannot know

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024Posted in a thought, Australian bush, birds, books, coronavirus, eating disorder recovery, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, WinterTagged Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red CoatLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … writing about life

‘We cannot know.’ If used sparingly, this is one of the strongest phrases in the biographer’s language. It reminds us that the suave study-of-a-life we are reading, for all its detail, length and footnotes, for all its factual certainties and confident hypotheses, can only be a public version of a public life, and a partial version of a private life. Biography is a collection of holes tied together with string, and nowhere more so than with the sexual and amatory life. For some there is nothing easier than understanding the sex life of someone you’ve never met, and easier still when they’re conveniently dead; or in posthumously adding another conquest to the dance card of a known Don Juan. Others simplify things by maintaining that human sexual habits have always been more or less the same, the only variables being the degree of hypocrisy and cover-up.
But sex is a world in which self-deception can so easily present itself as objective fact, and ‘brutal honesty’ is no more likely to be true than shy evasiveness or sentimental melodrama as an explanation of what really took place. Oscar Wilde may have been a ‘posing sodomite’, but such evidence as we have suggests he preferred intercrural sex, and if so was not technically a ‘sodomite’ at all. We cannot know. Sara Bernhardt was a nymphomaniac. Oh, but she was also incapable of orgasm. Until she had the problem fixed by means of an ingenious surgical implant — which is reliably attested by that ‘hysterical duplicitous gossip’ Jean Lorrain, and then recorded in the [j]ournal of Edmond de Goncourt, whose views on women were old-fashioned to say the least. We cannot know. Robert de Montesquiou was a flamboyant homosexual, except that his biographer thinks he was too coldly fastidious to indulge his Hellenic urges, while [Samuel] Pozzi’s biographer thinks he may have been impotent from around 1884, and remained so. We cannot know. Pozzi had a reputation as ‘an incorrigible seducer’, a doctor who slept with his patients, who may even have used his consultations as foreplay. He also kept all the letters he had received from women over a sexual career of half a century or more. Yet after his death, Mme Pozzi instructed her son Jean to burn them all. So we cannot know a large amount … We may speculate as long as we also admit that our speculations are novelistic, and that the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

from ‘The Man in the Red Coat‘
by Julian Barnes

Many years ago, my mother and I embarked together on a reading project for a year, our own little book club before book clubs were a thing. Our reading theme was American novels, and we took it in turns to pick a novel, one by one over the course of the year, which we each then assiduously read; afterwards, we caught up over coffee to talk about it. I remember this year with great fondness as a time of shared reading and conversations, conversations that began with reading and literature but moved on, as all good conversations do, to other things. Art. Love. Life.

Knotted trunk, Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

Recently we’ve begun another reading project together, one that we hope will involve some writing further down the track. As a result, my reading choices, which usually tend to fiction only, and generally to contemporary literary fiction at that, have widened. I’m reading fiction and non-fiction, works by contemporary writers and works by long-dead ones, works by women and works by men. Hence The Man in the Red Coat, which I might not otherwise have come across.

We cannot know. I’ve quoted Barnes at length here (which I hope he will forgive me for) because I love the virtuosity of this passage, the way he begins with a simple assertion, a certain truth, and then moves on in the space of a couple of paragraphs to cover themes at once intimate and specific to the period he is writing about (the Belle Epoque) but also meta-textual, concerning the art of biography itself, that collection of holes tied together with string. (What a lovely image that is.) And then, somehow, we arrive at the end of this flight of thought with another assertion, equally simple but bold, about the essence of novels and fiction.

We cannot know. Indeed.

Mangrove tree at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

The photographs in this post, like the ones in my previous post, come from a recent trip I took to Darwin. I’d never been to Darwin before and was only there fleetingly on this occasion, but I fell in love with it, all of it. Darwin in the dry season: place of sunny days, rainforest-lined beaches, mangroves and vines and bush-stone curlews. When you visit somewhere new, you see things through a stranger’s eyes, which is to say that you don’t see its inner workings, its inner truth. Does that mean that you see its truth or something else, your own hypothesis of the place? We cannot know. But oh, the privilege of having the opportunity to see it anyway.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- From then on, [Hannah} Whetzel ate exactly 40 cheerios before every run, which became a team joke: Christine Yu on negative coaching and toxic team cultures and how they affect female athletes.
- As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel: Omer Bartov, Israeli-born academic and former IDF soldier, on Gaza and what he calls the logic of endless violence. In this nuanced essay, Bartov explores why, despite his deep connection to Israel, he is adamant that the war in Gaza must stop.
- I knew I was signing up for the isolation of being the only vegan at a family cookout or party, but I didn’t expect to rarely interact with other Black vegans at plant-based restaurant meetups, food festivals, and Facebook groups. I’m not alone in feeling that way: Noella Williams on why we need to decolonise veganism.
- In two days, on 6 June, I’d be forty. My head was sore with two things: a vain dread of getting older and the work I needed to do to cure the problems in my third novel. I wasn’t worried about seeing the neurologist. Not one bit. Whatever this inflammation was, medicine would wipe it out. I was glad to know the symptoms weren’t phantoms. They were glitches and they’d be cured: M J Hyland, in a piece dating back to 2012, on living with Multiple Sclerosis.
- It has been a peculiar and exasperating five years. I’m a writer. I do other things but writing feels like my main reason for being on the planet: Another writer, Mark Haddon, also on the theme of illness, this time on writing and not writing, running, heart surgery. long Covid and brain fog.
- The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose: Cat Williams explores nature and the non-binary.

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?

How do you know?

March 30, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, writingTagged Brandon Taylor, The, The Late Americans1 Comment

Other people’s words about … writing

Seamus went into the hall after Oliver, and they kicked the snow off their boots. Their professor had just come back from the bathroom. He put a hand on Seamus’s arm and said, ‘Great work, Seamus. It’s a good poem.’
‘Was it?’ Seamus asked. The professor’s expression opened just slightly. Oliver patted Seamus on his lower back and returned to the seminar room. It was Seamus and the professor alone in the hall. Seamus could feel himself dripping cold water on the rug.
‘Is that what you need? For someone to tell you that your work is good?’
Seamus flushed.
‘I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m wasting my time.’
‘Oh, Seamus,’ the professor said, and Seamus looked at him.
‘How do you know?’ Seamus asked.
‘How do you know what?’ the professor retorted, his head jostling a little, like it was a game or a riddle.
‘How do you know you’re not just wasting your time?’
‘If you don’t know the answer to that, then I can’t do anything for you,’ the professor said with a chastening laugh.
Seamus felt that he had been slapped on the nose and called childish. The world grew deep and saturated. It felt as if something vast and Godlike had peeled back the veil of his life and peered in at him. He had gone around giving away all his power, seeking certainty, approval. But that’s what children did. Seamus had been a child, selfish and stubborn in his ways.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

I’ve been thinking again about the process of writing fiction — how a writer takes the story they hear inside their head and puts it into written words. That’s what the process involves for me, at least, most of the time. I hear a story in my mind, a story with a very distinct voice, and I try to translate that story into one that other people can read — a story on paper, a story on a screen. A story, I was going to say, that is tangible. Tangible is the wrong word, though. Perhaps what I mean is, a story that exists in a form that other people can access.

The strange, sad part of this process is that mostly, while the story is still inside my mind, it feels like a very beautiful thing, whereas once it becomes something I can share with other people, it often turns out not to be a beautiful thing at all.

Lizzie in a pool of sunshine (and a room with a view), Easter 2024.

Unlike Brandon Taylor’s character Seamus in the passage above, I have never studied writing. One of the reasons I haven’t is that I don’t think that studying writing will answer the question that I always have about my own writing, which is the same question that Seamus has, How do you know you’re not just wasting your time? The truth is that you can’t know, which is what (I think) the professor is trying to say to Seamus without actually spelling it out for him. You will never know. If you try to find out, you’re going down the wrong track, asking yourself the wrong question.

A better question, I think, would be, How do you sit with the fact that you don’t know whether you are wasting your time or not? But I don’t know the answer to that, either.

The other side of the jetty from the photo in my last post, Easter 2024.

Since my novella Ravenous Girls came out late last year, I’ve been working on a story centred around the same characters, a sequel of sorts — the next instalment. I don’t know whether it will ever get published; I don’t know whether what I’m writing is any good; I don’t know whether anyone will want to read it. Like Seamus, I keep wanting to ask someone whether I’m wasting my time, but there is no-one who can tell me.

And so, like Seamus, all I can do is sit with the unknowing. There’s nothing else you can do. There’s no other way through.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I thought I needed to know where I was heading with the book, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that so much of the pleasure of writing for me is about following a trail of not knowing: While we are on the subject of writing and not knowing, here is Stephanie Bishop, whose book The Anniversary has been long listed for the 2024 Stella Prize, on writing a book without knowing what kind of book she was writing (or where it would take her.)
- I do, however, believe that writing advice usually says more about the person giving it than the person receiving it: On a similar theme, here is Maura Lammers on how to incorporate other people’s advice about your writing into your writing (or how not to take their advice at all).
- As the world undergoes dramatic environmental shifts, so too does our neurological landscape. Fossil-fuel-induced changes – from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide – are altering our brain health, influencing everything from memory and executive function to language, the formation of identity, and even the structure of the brain. The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward: When I saw the headline of this article, I thought it was going to be about climate crisis grief and its psychological effects. It’s not, though. In this article, Clayton Page Aldern explores the neurological effects of climate change — that is to say, the biological effects on the brain. What he writes is, frankly, scary.
- The occasional bout of food poisoning was a job hazard, yet it was long-term overconsumption that took the real toll: Corin Hirsch on the stress of being a food critic, and what happened when she quit.

All grown up

March 21, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, work, writingTagged Johanna Herman, The Trio2 Comments

Other people’s words about … becoming an adult

When he got his first office job, he got dressed each morning with a certain ironic remove. It was a game that everyone had to play to make a living. To be an adult is to sell out, but as long as there’s someone to recognise the irony you bring to this game it’s easier to maintain a sense of self-respect. These days there’s nobody in his life who would understand that irony, and he suspects that he’s transmitting his signal on a wavelength only he can hear. He knows that the outside observer will think of him as at one with his blazer and button-down shirt; there’s no crack for the irony to push through and unhitch the image of an indifferent, middle-aged man. When [his] students look at him, what do they see? A hypocrite? [His old friends] Thora and August would have laughed about it.

from ‘The Trio‘
by Johanna Herman (translated by Kira Josefsson)

I ran into an acquaintance the other day whose daughter had told me many years ago, when she was around twenty years, that she wanted to be a writer, like me. To that end, she’d enrolled in a Creative Writing degree. She wasn’t going to compromise, she said. Why do a vocational degree when what she wanted to be was a writer?

I hemmed and hawed and said quietly, ‘It’s useful to have a vocational skill as a back-up, though.’

I haven’t seen this man or his daughter for many years, and so when I ran into him the other day, I asked after him and his wife and then after his daughter.

‘What’s she doing now?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘she got her creative writing degree and now she’s working in the tax office.’

And then we shrugged at each other.

So it is.

Largs Bay Jetty, March 2024.

I still feel, when I’m getting ready for work, getting changed into my office clothes, that I’m taking on an identity that doesn’t match the ‘real’ me, though I’m not sure that I see the irony in this, as Johanna Hedman’s protagonist Hugo does. It feels more like a charade to me, a performance that isn’t very convincing. I doubt that I’m alone in this, though. As Hugo himself says: To be an adult is to sell out.

Indeed. Perhaps it’s unavoidable. In any case, here we all are.

Under the jetty, March 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Every dog is a rescue dog: Sara Bader on losing a pet.
- Reading near-perfectly executed shorter books is naturally making me wonder ever more so, as both reader and writer, if less is, perhaps, more: Call me biased as the author of a novella, but I loved this article by Paul Daley, which came out late last year, in praise of short novels. (Full disclosure: Paul Daley later wrote some very favourable comments about my novella Ravenous Girls, which you can read here.)
- I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people: Devin Kelly on learning (how to live). People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence, Kelly writes. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. Lots to think about here.

Solace

April 9, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, walking, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged Katherine Brabon, The Memory Artist4 Comments

Other people’s words about … stepping outside

I went outside. Often I walked till the late hours. The sky’s was a darkness I could deal with. I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else: before and after, death and life, sea and self. Being out there — in towns where I spoke to no-one, in green deserted parks, along the edge of the gulf’s water — allowed me to turn inwards. It reflected the silence I felt in me. I wanted to be outdoors for good. Yes, I went outside.

from ‘The Memory Artist‘
by Katherine Brabon

Pasha, the narrator of Katherine Brabon’s novel The Memory Artist, is a Russian man in his mid-thirties, a writer trying to make sense of his life post-glasnost, post-perestroika. While the story in Brabon’s novel is about the effect of political repression on people, and particularly on artists, I found uncanny echoes in Pasha’s voice of my own thoughts and feelings (although not, clearly, in response to any political repression or trauma, neither of which I have experienced).

Sky and Sea, Snapper Point, April 2023.

I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else, Pasha writes, by which he means not that he wants to stop living, but that he wants to accord his own values to this life he is living. Where he finds it most possible to do this is outside, under the great arch of the sky.

It’s a similar impulse, I think, that makes running so appealing to me — running through the scrub, running on the beach, running beside the sea. It’s outside where I find some of the things I most long for in life: silence, neutrality, the sense that I could (if I went on running long enough, if I stayed outdoors long enough) dissolve.

Sometimes, when I’m inside going about my day — working, sleeping, eating, showering — I remind myself that the sky is just a few steps away, literally at my feet. It feels to me like the very definition of solace.

Sun and shadow, Aldinga Beach, April 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

An apology of sorts: today’s list is lengthy, I know, but it’s been a while since I last posted here, and meanwhile I’ve been enjoying my online reading! I hope you will dip in and out of the list below and find something that you enjoy.

- The life of a writer is a life of rejection, but that’s OK. It’s the process that I love. I get so much joy from the work of creation, immersing myself in the craft and the research and the interesting things you discover, that publication often feels somewhat incidental: Claire Egan, on why we write even when no-one reads what we write.
- No man in my lifetime has ever done nonchalant beauty better than Pitt, certainly none of his immediate peers: Lucas Mann in an astonishing piece about Brad Pitt, peanut butter, fame, masculinity, beauty, grief for a lost sibling and what it feels like as a man to hate the body you live in.
- I bleached my conversations of Chinese: Angie Kang, in a graphic essay for the now defunct wing of Catapult magazine about the experience of growing up in the Chinese diaspora, and on how you can’t boil down Chinese culture — or indeed any culture not our own — to food, however harmless and appealing and even, yes, inclusive it may feel to do so.
- There is a woman I sometimes see at the gym. She is in her eighties and has regular private lessons with a coach, working on her press handstands. I don’t know her story, but I know her secret. There is no age limit to defying gravity. I plan to keep at it forever: Writer Rae Meadows, on finding a new passion in her fifties.
- I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post: Poet Maggie Smith on the age-old division of labour in marriages.

Roar

September 2, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, blogging, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, What I love about ..., WinterTagged Jennifer Down, Pulse Points2 Comments

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.

- There is an extremely pale woman with purple-black stains on her fingertips, and one poor soul who is writhing in agony with abdominal pain but nobody can understand the language he is speaking: Maggie O’Farrell on the unexpected long-term side effects of Covid.
- I’m shocked by how quickly people have normalized the pandemic and our governments’ response to it—how easily they write off those lockdown months as a period when ‘nothing happened’, when in fact the unthinkable happened: Claire Pollard, also writing about Covid-19, in her case about bearing witness, or why we should write about what is happening now.
- Publisher’s Marketplace, the industry website that logs book deals, is doing away with the women’s fiction category, finally. Fiction will be commercial, or it will be literary, or it will reside in a genre category that doesn’t make such explicit assumptions about gender: Cara Blue Adams on Melissa Banks, women’s fiction, and why it’s not all chick lit. I haven’t read Banks yet, but I will, now I’ve read Adams’s article.
- Writing is an attempt to keep it together: Ella Risbridger, in a wonderful, thoughtful piece on memoir, fiction, love, loss, pain and writing.
- In the ocean’s shadowy twilight zone, between 600 and 800 metres beneath the surface, there are fish that gaze upwards through their transparent heads with eyes like mesmerising emerald orbs: Helen Scales on the wonderful barreleye fish.
- I take it for granted that books are good for us: David L Ulin on the virtues and joys of reading.

Only [dis]connect

August 4, 2022September 2, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, WinterTagged Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl5 Comments

Other people’s words about … beauty

I wondered if a more complex language like [my mother’s native language] Korean had a singular word to describe the feeling of getting off a long shift of a physically demanding job and finding that, for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.

Jenny asked the question so simply — ‘Okay, what do you want to talk about?’ — and I nearly reached across the table and grabbed her hands back, whispered thanks against each of her knuckles. I was about to ask her opinion on lakes and oceans — which did she prefer, contained and musty, or vast and salty? — when she suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide. ‘So — what did you think of that meeting today? Hold nothing back.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, it was fine.’

from Pizza Girl
by Jean Kyoung Frazier

I thought of Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? when I read the passage above. In Beautiful World, Rooney’s characters variously mourn the loss of the sense they used to have that they were moving through a beautiful world, or they lament the ugliness of the everyday world, or they remark upon what Rooney calls a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world.

Sunset, early July 2022.

I think this is what Kyuoung Frazier’s narrator is getting at. She wants to tell Jenny about the beautiful world she sees all around her — but Jenny, like everyone else in the narrator’s life, either doesn’t want to hear what she has to say or doesn’t know how to hear it.

Some years ago when I was going through a difficult patch, a friend of mine offered to exchange a daily photograph with me via text message. ‘We’ll just send each other a picture of something we see,’ she said. ‘Something we like. Something that makes us smile. We’ll share our pictures, and it’ll be a way to reach out. To say hello.’

Dune flowers, early July 2022.

We ended up exchanging daily photographs for over a year, and it was a way to say hello, but it was also so much more. What I loved most about our exchange, beyond the sense of connection it gave me with another human being, was the knowledge that we were each finding something beautiful in our day and then sharing it with someone else. Passing the beauty on.

Maybe we should all share more beauty. Maybe it doesn’t matter if beauty is fleeting and makes us feel fragile. Maybe that’s exactly why we should keep on sharing it.

Before sunset, early July 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I feel like I’m 22 again. Just absolutely and utterly lost: Carmen Maria Machado on writing, loss, depression, anxiety … and being older than twenty-two.
- James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which was initially ridiculed as ‘New Age’ nonsense, now makes up the basis of much of climate science: Helena Horton on the life of Lovelock, who died recently at the age of 103.
- In The Last Walk, Jessica Pierce writes, ‘When we commit to owning an animal, we must commit all the way to the bitter end, as in a marriage’: Keshia Naran Badalge on seeing her beloved dog Shandi through to her death. I have to confess that ultimately I found Badalge’s piece troubling, and I would love to know what you think about it. Badalge says she thought of Shandi as her sister, but this was a ‘sister’ whom Badalge abandoned for ten years while she went off to live her own life in another country. Is that love? How much does one old dog have to forgive? What do you think?
- Part of our confusion today is tied to a belief that happiness and personal growth should organise all of our decisions about relationships, which is a relatively recent disposition in Western societies: Joshua Coleman on why the pursuit of happiness above all else is not always the best resolution when you feel you are struggling in a relationship, why our fervour for ‘happiness hacks’ (my term, not his) may be misplaced, and why Durkheim had a point.