Fiona Wright

‘Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.’ It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

The word clicked something into place. Bibliomemoir: it was books that had helped me to do this, because I didn’t know any other way to do this. I didn’t think there was anything remarkable about this way of writing the self while I was doing it: it seemed self-evident, inevitable that books would help me think about myself.

Josephine Rowe’s stories are about time. Time as it is lived and as it is recounted; the way it doesn’t just progress, but speeds and slows, persists and lingers.

There’s a point in Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, Exploded View, where the teenage narrator sits in a parked car with…

‘I am really interested in the language that my family speaks, and one day, in my head, I’d like to write a book around all of the idioms I’ve been taught, because Turkish idioms are so much more complex, as well as profane, than English words.’

‘I keep thinking: when I was an adolescent, the idea of being ordinary terrified me. And now it’s all I want.’

‘I really wanted especially to have a voice for those kids who think they’re weird, think they’re strange, and there’s always going to be kids like that.’

‘When my collection, An Elegant Young Man came out, I think it virtually sent me around the bend.’

About halfway through The Recovering, Leslie Jamison writes about a conversation she has with an ex-alcoholic: ‘I listened to his…

Introduction Six Degrees from the City is a podcast about writing in Western Sydney, hosted by the writer and critic…

‘Going back and living in South-West Sydney is very much in keeping with the way I have this very fluid relationship with Bankstown, with the Western Suburbs, I’m part of it but also not part of it too.’

‘That’s how I write: from place. And it’s the place itself that drives who the characters become, and how the narrative shapes itself.’

The week after I came home from Iceland I felt despondent, so despondent that it scared me. I struggled to…

It’s a truism about suburbia that it’s defined by the distance between work and home. But that distance, for me, became a conceptual distance, and artistic distance, one that I thought I’d like to try and overcome somehow.

Every time I’ve moved house I’ve thought perhaps this one will be my last sharehouse. Every time I’ve moved I’ve realised that ‘the market’ has moved too.

Barbara Baynton’s book of short stories, Bush Studies, has fascinated me for years, because there’s so much that is deceptive, as well as utterly transgressive, about it. Written at the very end of the nineteenth century, the stories within it are mostly delivered in a deadpan narration that means the violence at their centre often builds so quietly and subtly that their eruption is as shocking as it is brutal.

‘Cronulla had changed, and the image of it I still carried was one that had set in amber, and had become as kitsch and heavy as a paperweight – not to mention as obsolete.’

Sylvia Plath was one of the first poets I read, one of the first poets I was really moved by, the first poet who I really loved. But it’s not ‘Sheep in Fog’ that started me thinking again about Plath. It’s my friend Lucy.

Speaking and writing, in Foreign Soil, are never simple acts. Both are, of course, embedded within the body, and as such are deeply personal and even instinctual; but they are, at the same time, inextricably implicated in wider social circuits of violence, of bodies politic, of privilege and power.

In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa’s hunger, and I carried it with me for years, although the rest of For Love Alone did not stir me – I was nineteen, and probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to fully understand it. But in the last two years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina Stead.

The problem for her writing, as Wright has noted when discussing the book, is one of beginnings and endings.

Three new poetry collections, three Australian women poets: Present by Elizabeth Allen (Vagabond), Domestic Interior by Fiona Wright (Giramondo) and…

‘Far from imagining hunger as an art of discarnation, Wright seeks to give it body, simultaneously remarking on the physicality, the sensuality of the experience, and objectifying it as something outside of herself, material enough to protect her from the world.’ Alys Moody on Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance.

‘It’s that wonderful mediating effect of writing, its ability to hold things clear that I’ve always been drawn to, and which is very similar to the way in which hunger works.’ Rachel Morley interviews poet, critic, editor and essayist Fiona Wright for the SRB.