So I take it – with a caveat. I am not the Road Warrior – neither Mad Max himself, nor my mate from Caba. But I am a Road Warrior. It’s how I live and where I feel most like myself. On the road, alone, living by the sun and stars, with no waged labour or clocks in sight.

Before there were call centres, help desks, delivery bikes and Uber, before labour hire firms and all the rest started offering young people new ways of working long and hard for doubtful return, before the term ‘gig economy’ had come into being – before all that the one way to make a quick, modest dollar was to drive cabs on the night shift. It was a Sydney thing.

And I think this is where I was previously mistaken. I thought Strout’s books are about class, and they are, but in a much more specific sense – they are really about social mobility.

There is something about weaving, creative nonfiction writing, and, I will say this last – coding – that overlap with each other. Sometimes when I’m coding, the way I pay attention to some of these lines of code, it really reminds me of sitting at the loom and trying to figure things out. Like, I see something in my head, and I’m just trying to make it happen on my screen.

The main counter-manoeuvre is to become the new weather god; to establish a climate in which characters who have not mattered, matter, and are safe, even if they don’t know it…

After writing the last three sentences, I find myself at a crossroads. Do I continue or do I pause here to ask the reader, ‘any questions?’ What does the writer do when he comes from the periphery? This question might upset some Singaporeans, who believe that Singapore is an international hub connecting important air lanes and sea routes.

Curiously, I remain me, Sreedhevi Iyer, through all of these kaleidoscopic labels. The way I see it, this need to label me – to categorise and put in a neat box – has more to do with other people’s needs than mine.

For those of us on the left who want to shift how we do politics, we have to get clearer on what liberalism looks like, how it is rationalised, and how everyone is implicated, to differing degrees and effects. More than just ‘clarifying misconceptions’, we have to identify and unlearn the liberalism that runs through our lives.

In the week before the May 2022 general election, decks of playing cards depicting a boat in distress were distributed…

Sydney Review of Books has been online for almost ten years. We need your support to help us into the next decade.

Friday 9 September 2022

Amani Haydar, Eloise Brook, Mykaela Saunders, Eda Gunaydin and Donna Abela will be in conversation about how writing plays a significant role in making visible acts of cultural, physical and gendered violence against women and trans and gender diverse people, through both the telling of stories, and the re-witnessing of trauma.

The lives of writers are a topic of perennial fascination to readers – and indeed to other writers. And yet the writer at work is often a mythologised figure, distant from the cares of the day. In Open Secrets Australian writers reflect upon the material conditions that give rise to their writing practice.

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

A biographer is tasked, after all, with interpreting a life, yet Mears deliberately did so much of this interpretation, and re-interpretation, herself. And she did so with an increasing knowledge, it seems, that her own interpretations were partial and fallible and liable to change shape over time.

As Alethea Hunt matures, the question of her personal fate becomes increasingly bound up with those of potential, agency and attitude within her environment. The novel, then, is an anti-bildungsroman (in which Alethea’s adulthood is replaced with radical biological ‘change’) and an anti-kunstleroman (in which her change renders her unable to continue writing).

There is no single solution to the climate crisis. But neither is there an inevitable outcome. Both assumptions are forms of magical thinking that obscure much more complicated realities. Coming decades are going to be unimaginably difficult, and as societies and cultures struggle to transform themselves some will succeed better than others. There is no question there will be loss, and pain, and fear, or that there will be mistakes and defeats as well as successes. But fixating on collapse, and assuming the story can have only one ending elides not just the possibility of future change, but also the change that is already taking place. We need libraries and lifeboats, but we also need to recognise that history keeps happening, and that in the middle of transformative change and upheaval it is often difficult to see what lies on the other side.

What I remember is my grandmother teaching me how to draw the wind.