Writers at Work

The lyric’s charge always catalyses new arrangements: it crackles not only through the recording, but across forms and bodies in elaborate, improvised, staged and/or filmic choreographies. Similarly, I tend to think not only of the charge of my language, but about how this charge might propel the poem into distributions across an open field, or how it might slip through the crevices between words into arrays of diacritical marks—dashes, brackets, loops, shapes, even photographs.

The me that writes the first fragment of a piece is different in significant ways from the me who decides, at some more or less arbitrary point months or years later, that the collection of scrawls and scribbles across multiple notebooks constitutes a first draft, and sets the whole thing aside to mellow and ferment in the cool of a desk drawer

Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project – an initiative funded by the Works Project Administration under the New Deal – provided employment for some 6000 jobless writers. Today, as stunned authors in Australia and around the world come to terms with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, that experiment deserves reconsideration.

Later, well into my twenties, I put myself through design school where I learned to think, an experience that would eventually compel me to write.

All the loss, all the longing, all the pain, and with it this time, at least, an understanding of this compulsion to write, this refuge in writing. When I am writing, I am always writing to my mother.

The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives. The fires are writing new stories into the very rocks and soil of our land, this land that has always had stories engraved in rocks and soil, this always-was-always-will-be Aboriginal land. Our newest story is pyrogenic. Born of fire, it will throw green shoots out from blackness. It must.

The gym is seen as antithetical to writing and intellect. The body doesn’t write, or if it does, it does so in another language. I don’t relate. I do most of my good writing at the gym, feeding off the extremities and horniness that gym contains.

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.

At my desk, surrounded by its objects, I can slip into a feeling that I am a thing amid other things, a vessel inside which words gather and disperse.

Middle Eastern writers occupy a particularly jeopardised position on the peripheries of this imaginary, where to exist as a writer presupposes inventing palatable difference in ways that make readers feel special and accepting.