Essays
Skin Hunger
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.

In the Catalogue
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.
Sure Ground
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.
Junk Mail
Every generation is the last to experience certain phenomena; in the case of my generation, these include five cent lollies at the school tuckshop, petrol prices below a dollar a litre, and quite possibly, the wonders and annoyances of physically delivered junk mail. The term ‘junk mail’ is now perhaps better associated with unwanted emails.
In the Time of the Manaroans
‘How did I get here, exactly? I rang my father from the red phone box on the footpath outside my grandmother’s, praying that she wouldn’t spring me inside my emergency-coloured beacon. She doesn’t, because down inside the house below street level Grandmother Margaret is also ringing my father, but from the landline.
‘Three days later my father arrives to ferry me back to live in Canvastown, Marlborough. I know I am about to fall off the grid. The grid, as I know it, comprises a circle of girlfriends from relatively stable middle-class homes, my A-student niche, my weekend prowls, life as my grandmother’s last daughter. Despite my scarlet phone call, I feel I have no real say in the abrupt termination of these things.’