How’s the writing going? Robbie would ask, sometimes, on the way home, and I would smile and tell him, Not bad, though as the days wore on I would imagine that pathetic, half-sketched character who was not me but who closely resembled me lying on his half-sketched bed holding his half-sketched head and that voice in my head would call me useless, a failure and, while, mostly, on the surface, I would remain enthusiastic, jovial, quietly, underneath, I had begun to occupy a space close to mental paralysis because I did not know how to tell Robbie that I did not know how to build the world that Oliver required – although, after a while, I would simply say that the writing wasn’t going, or that I did not know. Give yourself time, Robbie said, and just relax! But deep down I couldn’t relax because without the trains and without writing I knew, or I told myself, that I wasn’t anyone or anything at all.

These letters may refuse the methodological stringency of academic literary criticism, but beyond some epistolary scaffolding (an addressee, a conversational tone, questions answered or posed) they are largely close textual analyses performed by astute readers with comp lit bona fides and early-career positions at Yale, Princeton and Oxford.

For years, my emotional needs have been tended to by people on the internet who do not know me.

A good writer will stay curious, exploratory, immersed in a creative space that is ever redefining itself. A good reader will find affection in deviants, to the wonderment of speculative fiction that offers liberation from the pedantic approach: Is it science fiction? Or fantasy? Or horror?

I walked with the knowledge that inside the present-day city are many times and layers, and that writing is a way of drawing them out. A novel and a department store, a hair net, a square of corduroy fabric in a catalogue, and a photograph of women at their desks in a drafting room form a constellation within this wider network.

Martin has been extraordinarily prolific over the years, and the book is far from a full summary of his achievement – but more than any single previous volume, it offers a broad overview of the range, energy and eloquence that make him one of the living film critics most worth reading. As a personal statement, it is characteristically both discreet and heart-on-sleeve: Martin does not write his private life in more than an occasional, anecdotal manner, but the intimate intensity of his passion for cinema shines out, like a beacon, from almost everything he has ever written.

This post will be the first of many. I do not know it at the time but this form of sharing on social media becomes one of the central ways I learn about my body, and sex, and how to communicate. What I thought were experiences unique to me quickly reveal themselves to be widespread.

‘The plague archive that interests me most combines the factual and the fictional, the historical and the contemporary. Reading the stories of Australia’s early twentieth-century plague outbreak gives us insight into the emotional experience of an epidemic. Further, reading the plague archive in the contemporary moment shows that the emotional consequences of an epidemic do not stop with the abeyance of the disease. The impact of the epidemic continues, and is reworked and understood in new ways as the archive is reread.’

It turns out the answer to the problem of poetry’s secrecy is community. In a poetry community we talk about writing and share our work with each other. We collaborate on chapbooks, read poems out loud to each other occasionally. The secret is that it doesn’t need to be secret.

But when I’m hungover in the office it feels like every second is being seared into my skin, a line I used many years ago, in a short story about a woman who had suffered a great bereavement.

Fires, although not ones that flared into storms due to climate change and land mismanagement, have burned through this area before. The story of fire and country, of loss and regrowth is not, at all, my own.

Whittaker uses English as both an object of ridicule and a tool of empowerment. In subverting the conventional rules of usage, she makes it her own. In her hand, English does and says and tells a different story. Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And they won’t. But Blak writers like Whittaker use these tools to carve out their own spaces to build other story – to re-story Country with the old stories, and to create new ones.

It’s worth wondering why readers respond to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels the way they do. Which is to say that these four books haven’t just been read, enjoyed and praised: they have been devoured, adored, rhapsodised about, eagerly awaited – and now there will be no more of them, mourned. Well might we talk of ‘Ferrante Fever’, for there has hardened a core set of symptoms: neglect of responsibilities, reduced productivity, sleep disturbance, difficulty rising from a seated position. The condition is more common in women than in men but, curiously (well, at least for those people who believe that Jennifer Weiner’s ‘goldfinching’ theory holds merit), as common in critics as in readers.

What Khatun so deftly accomplishes is the almost impossible task of working from inside imperial intelligence (in all senses of the word), but thinking from traditions outside them, bringing entire repositories of knowledge from epistemes not accorded legitimacy by hegemonic codifications of colonial world-making.

Watch the sun set on the most oppressively hot days, when the western plains trap pollution over the city and the sun pulses through a fierce chemical red. The textile district lingers in cheap clothing stores and tiny back lane shops that embroider patches or sharpen scissors. Greenfields warehouse, a four-storey paradise of fabric and haberdashery, has barely changed since opening over sixty years ago. From my bedsit on the edge of Paddington ($33 pw), I walked to the Trade Union Club on Foveaux Street, alto sax slung over my shoulder.