The Sydney Review of Books invites applications for the 2021 CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowships. Each Fellow will receive a stipend of $3000 to write three 2000-word essays on new Australian books over an eight-month period for publication in the SRB. Fellows will work closely with SRB editorial staff and receive mentoring and editorial support as they write their essays.

There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning.

But Latour’s version of politics means not treating non-human agents as mere externalities, as in, we used to think that the weather had nothing to do with politics. But now the changing weather, reacting to what we have done with carbon, is a revolutionary agent. It is arguably the most important political actor of the last few decades, in that we can’t afford not to calculate its effects: bringing down national leaders, changing voting patterns, defunding scientific expertise and the arts, everything.

Amid the detours and the fragments, the sky-blue grip of life holds its own against the centrifugal force of illness and death. Which is why I describe these books, in some odd, indefinable way, as invigorating.

Later this trip will take on a mythical quality. It will become a reference point. Her birth country and her mythical country will be available to her as landmarks for her to understand her life. She will mention this trip when she identifies as a writer. She is selective with her words. She chooses the term formative.

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The Animals in that Country was published in March 2020. It might be tempting to see the timing of publication as serendipitous, or portentous, depending on your perspective. A novel about a ‘zoanthropathic’ super-flu precipitating wholesale social breakdown, published in the panicked first months of a zooanotic global pandemic. But Laura McKay’s novel, despite its timeliness, is not so intimately tied to the current moment – its vision is broader, and far more interesting. In this particular apocalypse, the foundational threat to human social structures is the emergence of unprecedented insight into the non-human world.

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.

To closely examine a writing process is to make writing seem possible where it often seems impossible. The impossibility of writing is the impossibility of the apartment I live in, that I am writing these words in, part of a building that was decades ago conceived, designed, constructed. I cannot think of this building as anything but inevitable, whereas this analogy, as I write it, seems unstable, weak. I deleted and rewrote it several times, unsure of its quality. But as you read this paragraph, secured on the published page, even if you agree that it leaves something to be desired, you will still read it as if it had been sealed with lacquer, my hesitations smoothed away.

Trapped inside my house, I exist in multiple worlds at once: the shocked writer with the shortlisted first book; the absent academic with the unfinished manuscript; the aunty who reads her latest manuscript to her nieces and nephews every night, and revels in their excitement. I feel trapped in a waved-tossed dinghy: Can I write? No, I can’t! Maybe I can? No wonder I feel nauseous.

That the unit of the individual is too small to enact political transformation is the simple wager that Jodi Dean uses to open Comrade. It is a work of political theory that is well-timed, as neoliberal states have failed their citizens en masse and ideas such as solidarity and mutual aid have threatened to go mainstream in the West.

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?

It’s no easy task to render a sprawling archive into a narrative that captures the significance of Paula Modersohn-Becker for a readership a century later – a figure not only of her time but also for ours. A trace, she calls it, and yes, it is her trace and with it she achieves – more than existing studies have – the aim Hermione Lee posits for all forms of biographical and life-writing: ‘a living person in a body, not a smoothed-over figure’.

‘We belong to people, we belong to places, we belong to ourselves. When you uproot yourself, when you decide to permanently leave somewhere, you are saying to your family, your friends, I no longer belong here. This is not the place where I can become who I want to become. You aren’t the people who I can belong to. So you go and live somewhere else, hoping that’s where you can belong. When you leave, no matter how amicable the terms of separation, you hurt those who you belonged to, and you hurt yourself.’

The dull fact bears repeating: routines of denial are so powerful and widespread in Australia because they are habituated; generation after generation, knowing-but-not-acknowledging gets re-inscribed in almost everyone’s cognition every single day that we live under the charring sun, on the taken ground. The fact is, we are habituated to denial. Denial comes easily, almost automatically, because we have been rigorously trained in the rubber-necked routine of seeing and looking away since the inception of the nation.