Category: writing

A thousand ways

Posted 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 , , , , , , , , Leave 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!

Soar

Posted 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 , , , , , , , , , Leave 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 …

The soft clatter of keyboards

Posted 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 , , , , , , , , , 1 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 …

Decoded

Posted 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 , , , , , , , , Leave 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 …

Mirror

Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, writingTagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Other people’s words about … hunger

I aligned my body with Tomasz’s in the early days, when we first met. When he would move his body, ride his bike, commute to work, I would join him. If he slept in, then I would try to do the same, even though I’ve never been able to sleep through any morning. And I aligned my body to his hunger. Hunger as perhaps our original pain. Though conscious of participating in clichés of gender, I would not say I wanted to eat, was embarrassed, needing too much, was sure of it. And so we would have coffee first thing and only later, hours towards lunch, would we eat. Often I didn’t know if I was hungry and yet I ate at the designated times. Hunger by the minute hand’s salivation. There was some murky shame behind this, some inkling that our capacity to eat when we are not hungry is our greater hunger, our great undoing, danger and sadness, our signifier. Only some animals do this, become gluttons when they live with us. The birds who cannot stop pecking, pecking at their seed because it’s there, all there in front of them. The cats who eat until they vomit. They need us to stop them eating and they need us to feed them. We are the same but we are the hand that feeds us.

Perhaps I aligned myself with Tomasz’s body because his seemed to me to be good. As though I wanted to find another body to live by, because mine could only do wrong. Doctors were surprised at the tenacity of [my] illness. ‘It’s aggressive,’ they would say, and then they’d write the same in my file: ‘a severe and aggressive manifestation’.

From ‘Body Friend‘
By Katherine Brabon

The narrator in the passage I’ve quoted above from Katherine Brabon’s novel Body Friend isn’t anorexic — her illness is of another kind, some kind of autoimmune illness that Brabon leaves unnamed throughout the novel. Still, I’m fascinated by the way the narrator’s thinking in this passage aligns itself with a kind of anorexic thinking pattern, a pattern that Brabon identifies instead as a cliché of gender. The thoughts the narrator expresses here, the murky shame she feels, remind me of the way I used to think about my body, my hunger, my appetites, my eating patterns when I was still experiencing the symptoms of anorexia (both before and after treatment — indeed, for years after treatment).

My first boyfriend, when I was in my early twenties, was a tall, naturally thin guy (very thin) whose appetite waxed and waned; he would eat nothing for hours, opting to smoke cigarettes instead, and then he’d suddenly become ravenous and eat his way through what seemed to me vast quantities of food, the equivalent of several meals at once. He didn’t exercise much, perhaps because he wasn’t a natural athlete.

My second boyfriend, meanwhile, whom I met in my late twenties, was a slow eater, someone who put his fork down between bites, to talk, to smoke, to drink. He didn’t always finish what was on his plate; if he’d had enough, he stopped eating, which seemed miraculous to me, evidence that he felt a freedom from compulsion around food and eating that I couldn’t imagine ever feeling myself. He loved exercising — he had been a runner in his twenties, until injury forced him to stop, and he shaped his days instead around surfing and cycling and swimming.

With both of them, doubting my own hunger, suspicious of my own greed, I would, like Brabon’s narrator, mirror their eating patterns. I would skip breakfast, even though doing so made me feel faint within a couple of hours. I would try to leave some food on my plate, even if I wanted to eat it all. I would try to slow down the speed at which I ate. When I was with my first boyfriend, I didn’t exercise much at all. Moving in with my second boyfriend, though, I took up cycling and swimming. I did these things because I knew instinctively that they, my boyfriends — the habits they had formed that determined the way they lived their lives — were right, whereas I was inherently wrong.

Native pelargoniums on the beach path, Taperoo, January 2025.

What drives this kind of thinking — or what drove it for me, anyway — is self-hatred and fear. I had believed for years that my appetites were out of proportion, that they needed curbing, taming; it was this belief that had led me into an eating disorder in the first place. I didn’t yet understand that appetite is a tricky word (a signifier, to borrow Brabon’s word), and that it can refer to things beyond food, things like desire and longing and hope, so that in trying to tame my appetite for food, I was also trying to tame those other appetites, the ones that truly frightened me.

Brabon’s narrator is experiencing other fears than the fears I experienced, and yet I think her fear has a similar source to the fear that I felt — fear of her own body, of what it can do if left to itself. Fear of its inherent faultiness. Its inherent gluttony. Fear that, if left to our own resources, we are like the cat that eats until it vomits, no better than that, equally repulsive.

Even today, I still feel those same fears sometimes (perhaps, after all, that’s where the gender cliché comes in), but I no longer feel the compulsion to mirror myself in someone else’s habits. And I am deeply grateful for this.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Disappear

Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Other people’s words about … identity

Ed is never sure if he is a man anyway. Sometimes, he’s certain he’s a woman. Other times, he feels like nothing at all. When it comes down to it, Ed isn’t sure if he wants to belong, not to gay clubs, or queer spaces, or straight bars. He doesn’t want to decide on his pronouns with confidence and clarity, and he doesn’t want to announce them to the world via his Twitter bio or email signature or when introducing himself at parties. He doesn’t want his identity to be valid. He doesn’t want his feelings to matter. He doesn’t want to change his name, or his life, and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all. He doesn’t want to be seen as a man, or a woman, or a non-binary person. What Ed wants is to be invisible. What Ed wants is to disappear entirely. He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.

He can feel himself start to wheeze again. He struggles to catch his breath.

From ‘Evenings and Weekends‘
By Oisin McKenna

I grew up as a member of a generation that didn’t recognise people who have the kinds of feelings that Ed expresses in the passage I’ve quoted above, a generation that didn’t have the words that a person like Ed — a person who feels that the body they were born into doesn’t reflect their true gender — might need to reach for. That is to say, the vocabulary that Ed and his friends use in Oisin McKenna’s novel, Evenings and Weekends, isn’t a vocabulary that I or my contemporaries used or even had access to. As a corollary of this, the space that Ed and his friends occupy in the world isn’t a space that many people knew how to occupy when I was in my teens and early twenties.

This isn’t to say that people didn’t question their gender identity in those years, only that the conversation around gender identity barely existed. As a consequence, many people — many, many people — didn’t recognise that it might be a conversation they wanted to have, either with themselves or with others.

And yet when I read the passage above, I am moved less by Ed’s uncertainty about his gender than by his unwillingness to be labelled. In theory, the language of gender identification that’s available to him, which wasn’t available to people of previous generations, should free him to articulate his identity, but in practice he finds the labels as constraining as they are freeing.

For better or for worse, this is the power of language. It gives us the tools to express ourselves, but in doing so it determines the way we experience the world. I’m no discourse analyst but this, I think, is what Ed is struggling most deeply with. Kudos to McKenna for finding a way to put it so succinctly and movingly in fiction.

Still, for me the most devastating thing about this passage is that even though Ed has the language to express the way he feels, he remains ultimately so unhappy, so desperate, that his deepest, truest, most instinctive response is to wish to be obliterated. 

The language may have changed, but the sadness, the desperation, hasn’t. What Ed wants is to be invisible. Indeed. I don’t have any answers, but I’m glad that novelists like McKenna are brave enough to explore these ideas, because they matter. As language changes, so does the world, and if fiction can help us to explore the consequences, then fiction, too, matters.

Lizzie, January 2025. (Okay, so, unlike Ed, she may not have words or language to express herself … but she is still a very effective communicator!)

Lately I’ve been reading …

Freeze

Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged , , Leave a comment

Other people’s words about … how to write

Why does the talented student of writing stop? It is usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure, and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve feared you are. You can imagine the story you might tell, or you can imagine this other story — both will be extraordinarily detailed, but only one will be something you can publish. The other will freeze you in place, in a private theatre of pain that seats one. These writers were — are, in many cases — people who know how to write. What they don’t know is how to become unstuck. How to leave that theatre they made for themselves, how to stop telling themselves the story that freezes them.

I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write, but how to keep writing. How to face up to who you think is listening. Is the person listening more important than you? Or is the story you would tell more important than you? I was teaching how to stand up and leave that room in your mind so you can go and write — and live. But the question after that, always, is, Live with what?

From ‘On Becoming an American Writer’
in ‘How to Write an Autobiographical Novel‘
By Alexander Chee

I’ve read a few how-to write-a-book guides, and in doing so I’ve found some useful tips along the way, although I’ve never found anything that really sustained me in them. When I read Alexander Chee’s essay, ‘On Becoming an American Writer’, I realised why.

What I was looking for when I picked up those books, what I’ve been looking for all along, is advice not on how to write, but on how to keep writing. By which I mean, how to sustain yourself, how to live with yourself — as a writer, yes, but also as a human. Because if you are a writer, or if you see yourself as someone who could be a writer, or if you see yourself as someone who has written something and wants to write something else (and these are not the same things, though they are on a continuum) — if you are any or all of these things, anyway, then the two things are wrapped up in each other, impossible to disentangle, writing and being human. Writing and living. Writing and keeping going.

Front garden tree, Christmas Day, 2024

I am not particularly good at sustaining myself, either as a writer or as a human. I tend to be plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing — to such a degree, in fact, that I would call this tendency both instinctive and self-destructive. It certainly doesn’t make me very productive. I find myself often frozen in place, as Chee puts it, in that private theatre of pain that seats one.

What sustains me when nothing else does is that writing, the very process itself, feels meaningful to me. Maybe this wouldn’t be enough to keep another writer going, but for me at least, it is what I always return to in times of doubt and frozenness.

I don’t know why writing feels meaningful to me; if pressed, I couldn’t even articulate what its meaning is to me. But still — beyond the search for happiness or wealth, neither of which things I have ever lastingly found through writing — there is this: writing feels meaningful to me. That is what sustains me.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Begin again

Posted 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 , 2 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) …

How do you see the world?

Posted in a thought, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., writingTagged , 2 Comments

Other people’s words about … the deeper truth

At dinner, my mother had asked about my own life. I had said that Laurie and I were wondering about whether or not to have children. My mother said that we should, that children were a good thing. At the time, I had agreed. But what I really wanted to say was that we talked about it often, while cooking dinner or walking to the shops or making coffee. We talked about every aspect over and over, each of us adding tiny life-like details, or going over hundreds of different possibilities, like physicists in endless conjecture. How hurtful would we be when we were both exhausted and sleep-deprived? How would we go for money? How would we stay fulfilled while at the same time caring so completely for another? We asked our friends, all of whom were frank and honest. Some of them said that it was possible to find a way through, especially as their children got older. Others said that all the weakest points of our relationship would be laid bare. Others still said that it was a euphoric experience, if only you surrendered yourself to it. And yet really, these thoughtful offerings meant nothing, because it was impossible, ultimately, to compare one life to another, and we always ended up essentially in the same place where we had begun. I wondered if my mother had ever asked these questions, if she’d ever had the luxury of them. I had never particularly wanted children, but somehow I felt the possibility of it now, as lovely and elusive as a poem. Another part of me wondered if it was okay either way, not to know, not be sure. That I could let life happen to me in a sense, and that perhaps this was the deeper truth all along, that we control nothing and no-one, though really I didn’t know that either.

from ‘Cold Enough For Snow‘
by Jessica Au

If you are someone who loves books, who loves reading — if you are someone to whom reading is fundamental to your life — you will know what I mean when I say that there are certain books, a handful of books, that, when you read them, change your life. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow is one of those books for me. It made me feel, when I reached the end of it, that I was seeing the world differently: its textures, its colours, the way I breathed the world in. There is a quality to Au’s writing, to the story she is telling, that is as lovely and elusive as a poem — and this is the kind of writing that changes the world for me.

Other books that have had the same effect on me? As I say, there are just a handful. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You is one: Greenwell, with his layered sentences built of clause piled upon clause, writes about shame in a way that, for me, no other writer comes close to. Also: Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Katherine Brabon’s The Shut Ins, Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh.

Everlasting Daisies, Morialta Falls, November 2024.

Each of the books I’ve named above is different from the others, but what they all share, I think, is a certain interiority. Whether through Rooney’s flat, prosaic narrative and dialogue or Washington’s choppy, plain sentences, we see the world through the eyes of their characters — and in doing so, we see the world anew.

I can think of no higher praise for a writer than to say of their writing: This has changed my world. So, I’m curious. What are the books that have changed your world? Drop a comment below — I’d love to know.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve gone back through some of my oldest bookmarks for some of the pieces listed below. Even now, years after bookmarking them, these pieces still resonate with me in some way. I hope they do for you, too.

Like breath

Posted 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 , 1 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 …