Dan Dixon

Dan Dixon is a writer and academic living in Sydney. In 2021, he was awarded a Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Overland, and elsewhere.
All essays by Dan Dixon
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.