Writers at Work

What do people think they’re doing when they’re writing novels? I’ve never found an answer that feels completely satisfying.

… King Lear in quarantine, I found myself thinking, trying to ignore the fridge and keep an eye on the younger child building Lego structures and smashing them, trying to make notes on my phone for that article about reading in quarantine, reminding myself to finish another essay about libraries, trying to imagine how it would make sense now that all the libraries were closed.

How long does academic work take? How long should it take? Even more troubling, who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?

I take it as self-evident that meta-memoir must be avoided at almost all costs – and, correlatively, that my pass here is the word ‘almost’.

I wanted to talk to you about writing and publishing because when you write, you must write a lot, but that does not mean you will publish a lot, which means that when you are writing, or when you have finished writing, it might be that no one knows that you are, or have been, writing. It might be that no one particularly cares that you are, or have been, writing. Or not.

‘How long does it take to become a local?’ I ask the local bartender.

If the narrating consciousness of my non-fiction is a ‘what’ not a ‘who’ then I am not worried about the voice sounding clever nor the ‘narrator’ being ‘interesting’ and worthy of ‘story / opinion’.

It was at that moment that I knew the newsletter had crossed over from a curious experiment into a practice that was integral to who I was as a writer.

When I tell my publisher I might be late on delivering the last essay of the book, the real book, the one I have under deadline, she is understanding and commiserative.

Despite the patchiness of my career, I have tried to maintain a writing practice in regional Australia over a substantial period – through many rejections for poetry, manuscripts, and funding applications for writing projects. Undeterred, I am still trying to carve out a place in the rich writing ecosystem for my very diverse practice.