Writers at Work

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.

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.