Fiona Wright

Off The Record

A Serving of Insurgency with Breakfast

Sleepers Awake

History happens to us in dreams: it is experienced and understood there as much as in our waking lives.

‘Careful Archaeology’

A biographer is tasked, after all, with interpreting a life, yet Mears deliberately did so much of this interpretation, and re-interpretation, herself. And she did so with an increasing knowledge, it seems, that her own interpretations were partia...

Mysterious Beings

‘Any child we bring into our lives will be ours’, Sentilles writes, and ‘all children – whether we give birth to them or find them some other way – are also not ours.’ They are strangers, all of them, ‘mysterious beings’ whose inner lives we can o...

On Being A Precedent

Every time I hear the words new normal I feel a recoil, swift and small and deep within my belly. I hate how normal we find the idea of normal, how many other narratives and experiences and people it excludes and elides and diminishes. I hate how

Keys to the City

Because this is the thing, I keep thinking, about being handed the keys to the city of oneself – keys are not particularly versatile tools. They may very well open up a set of gates, but they cannot help to navigate whatever lies on the other side...

‘I Need My Literature to Know About it’

What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagemen...

Someone We Adored

Ask any queer girl, I have learnt, and every single one of us had that one friend, usually in high school, whom we liked a bit too much, who we were enchanted by. Sometimes a very best friend, sometimes a girl on the periphery of a friendship circ...

Editorial Interventions

‘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 edito...

To Me They Were Treasures

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:...

An Eerie Sort of Magic: Here Until August by Josephine Rowe

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.

When The Manuals Fail Us: Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany

the manual also represents a system of knowledge, an empirical way of looking at the world, or at least one small part of it, that is rational, logical, complete. It’s a diagram and a schemata, everything accounted for and with a purpose, function...

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 7 – Eda Günaydin

'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.'

Little Heart

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

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 6 – Oliver Phommavanh

'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.'

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 5 – Luke Carman

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

To Be A Tulip: The Recovering by Leslie Jamison

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 4 – Walter Mason

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 3 – Sheila Pham

'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.'

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 2 – Felicity Castagna

'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.'

A Regular Choreography

Travel is supposed to be transformative, worldly, independent, brave. It is supposed to be a breaking free from the things that bind us to our everyday and repetitious – and by implication dull and stultifying – lives. We are supposed to value tra...

Six Degrees from the City: Episode 1 – Lachlan Brown

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.

Perhaps this one will be my last sharehouse

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: Hard Graft With The Best

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...

Back to Cronulla

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.

A world of bald white days

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.

Listen: Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

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

For love and hunger

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

Comfortable and Comforted: The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright

This is a book about the complexities of home, about being unhomed, about the body as home, and about the spaces we work to make home, our dwellings and our neighbourhoods. When life is marred by unbelonging and grief, it is the habits and routine...

Fruitful Playgrounds

The Fleshy Side of the Mind: Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright

‘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

Everyday Intimacies: An interview with Fiona Wright

‘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...