Writers at Work

The words are imperfect, flawed approximations of the knowledges we seek to share. But on a good day, with the wind blowing in the right direction, those words might nudge someone to listen to their own gut. Those words might be sparks that help fuel other gender insurrections. I await those fires with glee. For each time someone burns their gender script, and writes a new story for themselves, we all taste a little more freedom.

If this pandemic has revealed anything, it’s the fallacy of certainty: what we thought would be now might never be; what we thought could happen tomorrow probably won’t.

Maybe you already know that working minimally feels feasible when there is work, when you have, or can return to, a paid job, when you are fairly confident that, frightening though the thought might be, if you lost your paid job you could find another.

To the panicked masses running through the street, soot on their faces, smouldering koalas clawing feebly at depleted human breasts, embers hanging in the air like a jury’s verdict, we say ‘It’s going to be ok. We’ve brought criticism with us, some literature.’ The koalas miraculously stop smoking. One of the huddled masses looks at you and wells up: ‘Oh thank god you’re here.’

I am writing this essay out of frustration that few people understand the daily working lives of artists and writers and persist in dreamily thinking that our jobs are all dreamy thinking.

There was a reason, I came to understand, why the company’s marketing staff hadn’t been assigned the Great Places to Work submission; everyone needs skilled writers, but nobody wants to pay properly for them.

Instead of approaching the stage I approach Australia Post on Blacktown’s Main Street, and instead of thanking the Vice-Chancellor I thank the woman at the counter as she hands me an envelope with the certificate inside. I head out the door as the first in my family to graduate, and the first to graduate during a pandemic.

That summer seems long ago now. At the time I couldn’t write it down. I read accounts by people who experienced the fires and those in cities affected by poor air quality and had a writer’s guilt that I should be part of the conversation.

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.