Neha Kale is a widely-published writer whose work on art, culture and society has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, ArtReview, Vogue, The Guardian, Griffith Review and BBC, among many others. Her first book, Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation, a work of literary nonfiction blending memoir and art criticism, is published by NewSouth Books.

Kale is editor-at-large at Art Guide Australia and previously edited VAULT magazine from 2015 to 2018. Her reporting for The Guardian’s Broken Justice series received a mid-year Walkley nomination, and she has received a Faber Scholarship for Creative Nonfiction and residencies at Bundanon and Varuna.

She was born in Mumbai, grew up in Perth/Boorloo, and lives and works on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney.

In this edition, Neha shares words of purpose, meaning, humanity, and gardening.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word …
Dignity

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word dignity. It’s a strange, old-fashioned kind of word, that doesn’t really seem to have much of a place in contemporary life. But I’m increasingly interested as a writer and as a person in what that word means–a sense of inherent worth that you don’t have to earn, that belongs to you just because you are human. I feel like writing and reading are magical acts that respect the landscapes of the self, our inner life, our dreams and feelings in a world that is constantly trying to erode or extract or reduce them. We are shaped by forces, I think, that tell us that our interiority is made up of data, that we are first and always consumers. I hope to write in a way that preserves and recognises my dignity, and the readers’ too.

One Quote …
from James Baldwin

There are quotes by writers that I love that are imprinted in my memory. There’s the obvious: “We tell ourselves stories to live” by Joan Didion, often misinterpreted as a tribute to storytelling, when it evokes the delusions we need to sustain ourselves. But when I was writing my first book Foreign Return, I turned to James Baldwin, who shares with Didion, the kind of incantatory syntax and rhythm that you can never unhear.

Baldwin wrote, in 1962, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” During these last years of writing, I memorised this line, scribbled it down in my notebook. I’ve always been drawn to art and writing that is animated by a sense of searching, where there is a sense that the artist or writer is grappling with the unknown, with their most intensely private questions and desires rather than arriving at a conclusion fully formed. If there’s a better quote for this age of certainty, I’m yet to hear it.

One Poem …
Dead Stars

I hate the idea of literature as something rarefied. I think that anything and everything is worthy of writing, reveals something if we look at it closely enough. Lately, on deadline, I walk around our neighbourhood, past a ramshackle house with so many kittens napping in the driveway. There’s a lady that feeds pigeons across from the 7/11 and I think about what brought her to her balcony. I’m obsessed with the notion that the ordinary can be transcendent, that we are all so lucky to be here. Since I was introduced it in a workshop run by the wonderful writer Sarah Sentilles, I have become obsessed with a poem by Ada Limón from her 2018 book The carrying called Dead Stars.

There are so many lines I adore in this poem: Look, we are not unspectacular things/We’ve come this far, survived this much.

And: What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain for the safety of others, for earth

But my favourite is:

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers/ a song of suburban thunder.

I hear it on repeat in my head when I’m going about my day, doing something mundane, caught up in the muck of living. It reminds me not to focus so much on myself, on my small little life, but to look up and outwards.

One Book …
Lucy by the Sea

I never thought I would be an Elizabeth Strout fan, somehow put off by her books’ covers and marketing. But I have been delighted and absorbed by her novel about a divorced couple that relocate during the pandemic to coastal Maine, called Lucy by the Sea. There’s something about the plainspoken nature of her observations, the clarity of her language, her ability to convey the ache of psychic distance from the people you love that is so clear and precise I almost forget that I am reading. It’s the kind of experience I’ve craved from books since I was a child, that I’m happy to report is just as good.

One Other Thing …
Growing herbs from seed

So much about writing for me is about honing a certain patience and quality of attention, about tending to something over the months and years and for the first time in my life, I’ve been able to grow herbs in my balcony garden from seed. There’s something that I really enjoy about watering in the evening and checking the soil each morning. Often nothing is happening. But then, a day later, you notice movement in the dirt, and then tiny sprigs of mint or sage or parsley and although there is no dopamine involved, it feels so rewarding.

Rachel’s work has been published in international journals such as The New Yorker and kuš!, and Australian periodicals like The Age and Meanjin. Their new book, a collection of short stories in comics form titled I Ate The Whole World to Find You, is out now through Drawn and Quarterly and Scribe, and was shortlisted for an Ignatz Award.

Rachel is the winner of the 2024 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, for their short story Thalassophobia. In 2019 Rachel was the recipient of a Silver Medal from the Comic Arts Awards of Australia for their graphic novella, Swimsuit; as well as the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize (Fiction) for their comic Toot Toot, originally published by Going Down Swinging.

In this edition, Rachel shares words of motherhood, family, language, and change.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
οικογένεια

I have chosen the word οικογένεια, which is the Greek word for family. It is the root of many English words, including ecology and economy. I have been thinking a lot about this, of how words, ideas and people often share a birthplace but then diverge, drift and mutate into viewpoints that seem to be at war with one another.

One Quote:
From Andy Warhol

Many years ago I wrote down this quote from Andy Warhol, and this morning I rediscovered it: They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

It seems to me that we are being dictated to about what our present and future should look like, that it is inevitable that AI will demolish our abilities to read and think, and an inescapable fate that our world should be sundered by wars and genocides and violence. We are being cowed into a passive position of accepting these shitty realities, and I take a lot of heart and encouragement from friends around me who are organising, building, forming community and fighting for a less cruel world.

One Poem:
Small Wire

I love these lines from the last stanza of a poem by Anne Sexton called Small Wire.

As its been said:
Love and a cough
Cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.

One Book:
But Won’t I Miss Me

I recently read Tiffany Tsao’s new book, But Won’t I Miss Me, and it really shook me. The novel follows a new mother called Vivi through an alternate reality in which birth endows mothers with superhuman powers to withstand the challenges of the postpartum period. Sounds like a dream, but the mode through which these powers are obtained is truly macabre: pregnant women gestate not only their child but a tiny foetal version of themselves. After the baby is born, the tiny replica emerges, growing immediately into an identical woman who tears apart and consumes (!) the old husk of herself, and takes her place, her memories, her life and her newborn child. In the world of this novel, rebirth (as the process is referred to) is accepted as a normal and necessary part of parturition, an afterthought to the main event of the baby’s entrance into the world. But Vivi doesn’t want to be eaten and replaced. Her fear of rebirth is treated as unusual and unhealthy by those around her and seems to manifest in disaster: Vivi emerges from rebirth weakened rather than supercharged.

I found the first half to be an interesting and clever scifi, but then at the midway point came a twist that completely blindsided me. When Vivi learns what went wrong during rebirth, it completely rewrites her life and drives her to some extreme, perhaps insane, places. This was such a strange and gripping novel, propelled by maternal and familial love in all its dark, jagged, ugly, and glorious forms.

One Other Thing:
Children’s Books

In this season of life I’ve mainly been reading children’s books. It’s a sweet joy to encounter books alongside my child, and a great shock to return to the books of my early years and rediscover them anew, from the perspective of a parent. For example, it is a little discomfiting to revisit books like Babar, Charlotte’s Web, or Bambi, and see that the maternal figure must die, or sacrifice herself completely like The Giving Tree, in order for the boy’s story to unfold, for the child (or pig etc) to become a man. As a child I identified with the young male character and didn’t think about the mother at all. Now that I’m a mother I can see that while a little girl may identify with the main character, the morality of these kinds of stories dictates that the female characters are fungible, we simply create the environments in which the heroes move, or serve as rewards for the hero to strive towards.

It has also been humbling to witness how opinionated my kid is, how children tumble out of the womb with all kinds of sensibilities and taste intact. Sometimes I’ll dismiss a book because I think it’s ugly or the illustration style is not to my taste, but he will love it. Other times I will present him with a book I consider to be a great classic, and it is rejected out of hand. Alas, it turns out I know nothing!

Rick Morton is the author of four non-fiction books, including the critically-acclaimed bestseller One Hundred Years of Dirt (MUP) which was long listed for the Walkley Book of the Year and shortlisted for the National Biography Award. His latest book, Mean Streak (Harper Collins), is about this illegal and fake debt trap set by the Australian government, bureaucratic harm and the fight to put people back into policy. Mean Streak won three major literary prizes in 2025, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Walkley Book of the Year award.

As a Journalist, Rick is the senior reporter with The Saturday Paper and 2 x Walkley Award winner for his coverage of the Robodebt Royal Commission. Born and raised in Queensland, he now lives in Paris where he continues to investigate and write on policy and government decision-making that affects human beings.

In this edition, Rick shares words of biology, self-discovery, power, and language.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Fissiparous

I love the way this word sounds. It has a real kind of hiss and colour to it that I adore. It also just feels good in the mouth, so to speak. Fissiparous: originally from biology, specifically cellular division, it is now used to talk about the tendency of things or people to divide into groups or factions. Perhaps not the most hopeful word, but boy is it fun.

One Quote:
Jenny Diski

“My eyes were made of diamonds, not the glitzy sort that sparkled and shone, but the implacably black kind that knew the worth of concealed things (some called them ‘your coal-black eyes’). Those eyes radiated the truth of the matter to anyone who dared look at them. And the darkness drew in the world and showed me what the world could do and was doing. Those eyes picked out the lies, the faults, the vanity, the hypocrisy and put them in their mirrored compartments and twisted them like a kaleidoscope, not into shards of chaos pretending to make sense, but into the actual truth, all unknitted and unravelled into what the fuck was wrong with everything. And what was wrong with everything was people and their need to do all those things that made the world go round. The answer of course was that everyone told lies. All kinds, big, small, monumental, trivial, world-shattering, mind-shattering, hateful, loving lies. No one tells the truth – that is the privilege of 18-year-olds. No one knew it, but there was the reason for the belligerence on my face. It was the visual representation of the fact that they’d never get one over on me again”.

— Jenny Diski, London Review of Books.

I first read this piece from Jenny Diski when it was published in mid-2015, around the time I was experiencing a somewhat seismic breakdown owing to the complexities of childhood. Diski revealed something to me about myself, not necessarily anything edifying, in that I thought I had some kind of superpower of insight. I did not and it took a long time to learn otherwise. I still think about these lines a lot, however, and what it means to experience the crack of revelation in a single moment; what a gift it is.

One Poem:
Kindness

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

— From Kindness by Naomi Shihab-Nye

A gentle wallop of a poem, this has long stayed with me. The ease with which Shihab-Nye offers such a profound insight feels almost like magic. Kindness, the real version of it — that is, not performative, not shallow nor strategic — is twinned to sorrow. Those who know something of sorrow, having communed with their piece of it, develop a sense for just how vast it is, how many shapes it might take and in whom. Kindness is the natural result of this interrogation of sorrow. How could it be otherwise?

One Book:
Catch-22

Long before I started covering the various contortions of political and civil bureaucracies professionally, and certainly well before my work reached its absurd zenith in the mathematically illogical and illegal Robodebt scheme, I have been fascinated by the way large systems control people. It started in high school with Douglas Adams in the very first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when poor old Arthur Dent is told the plans to demolish his house were put on display by council in a cellar with no stairs, no lights and at the “bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.” Most of the fiction I read in my teens and early 20s spoke to the comical, devastating power of these systems — they were often bureaucracies — with Kurt Vonnegut and Kafka being notable examples.

However no book has revealed the world to me quite so clearly as Heller’s Catch-22. As funny, disturbing and downright maddening as the plot may be — an airman is trying not to die during World War Two while his military commanders keep arbitrarily raising the number of dangerous bombing missions whenever he thinks himself done — Heller is writing about real life. He sees things plain. In its quotidian, modern sense, absurd is usually a word used to describe something that bears no resemblance to reality. But Heller’s gift, like Camus’, is knowing that the absurd is reality. It’s the stuff all around us; the people in charge. They are people, like us, and like us they are not psychologically contiguous. Such a fact is what makes some systems so powerful but it is also what makes them weak.

One Other Thing:
Speaking French

I have lived in Paris for the past year, and will remain here for a while it seems. After arriving with a broad enough French vocabulary for somebody who has never taken lessons — but very little in the way of conversational skills — I have taken to tutoring with my teacher Jean-Yves each week. He is very French, in that each time we meet we end up having these big philosophical discussions about totalitarian regimes and the influence of technology on the lives of people. I learned German for a decade as a school student and became almost fluent before losing it all to some dark corner of my mind when my university did not offer the language. Sometimes when I try to speak French, the German barges in. Phrases I’d thought long forgotten are suddenly escaping from me via my vocal cords. This may seem obvious to anyone raised in families from non-English speaking backgrounds, like so many in Australia, but the revelation of learning another language and how it both buttresses and disputes our own native tongue is such a gift. Of course, as the writer Alexandre Dumas realised, so much of English is just French ‘but badly pronounced’. Living on the edge of another tongue is quite thrilling, and it has expanded my own mind and writing, even as I often struggle to remember whether apartment has one ‘p’ or two.

Laura McPhee-Browne has authored three novels, Cherry Beach (2020), Little Plum (2023) and Worry Doll (2026). Cherry Beach won the 2021 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing category of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Fiction prize at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in 2022. Her latest novel, Worry Doll, published by Scribe, has been described as “a gripping, utterly embodied story of desire”.

She has also written many short stories and essays. Her essays have appeared in The Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings, Island, Meanjin and Overland. Her short stories have received high commendations: “The Surprise” in the inaugural Hope Prize awards and “The Tallest Girl in the World” in the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction.

In this edition, Laura shares words of food, memory, fertility, and aliens

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Biscuit

I choose this word because I have been living in North Carolina in the American South for the past six months, and have been able to regularly eat a favourite food of mine that is impossible to get in Melbourne: the biscuit. It’s not what we call a biscuit in Australia, but rather a wonderful version of a scone that is lighter, crispier, fluffier and more delicious, and can be served with fried chicken and gravy, or butter and jello. I love the different words we have for foods in America and Australia, and this is my favourite example.

One Quote:
Etel Adnan

I have been thinking about memory lately.

Here is Etel Adnan on memory and time, from her book NIGHT:

Memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon that head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.

One Poem:
Chanson Douce

I love this poem by Sandra Lim. I feel less alone when I tell myself that it’s about infertility and childlessness.

I hold a creamy little baby
to my chest. She assents to my embrace. I inquire
about my species: she has a look
of true, plain being.
She is need itself. Sucking. Crying.
Otherwise, her expression is basically
serious, and the devotion she summons, famously
brutal. Her mother would die for her,
the old, old story.
Part of me watches the rest of me being
anxious, superior, and invaded
by longing. These rank weeds spring up
beside a curious sense
of sequel. I remember it sharply now: a little
time ago, wishing I had something
new, and the strain of it

One Book:
American Cosmic

I am dipping in and out of a non-fiction book about extraterrestrial life at the moment, because I’m trying to write a novella about a support group for the loved ones of alien abductees, and the idea of the existence of aliens as god or as a spiritual belief system.

The book is AMERICAN COSMIC by Diana Walsh Pasulka.

One Other Thing:
Capture

In keeping with the alien theme, I recently read Amanda Lohrey’s new novel, CAPTURE, and loved it. She is the master of making my existence feel like it’s expanding — gently, like a sponge in water.

Jack Ladder is one of Australia’s most distinctive singer-songwriters, bringing a towering baritone, sardonic humour, and a gift for musical narrative that now spans almost two decades. Sentimental and surreal in equal measure, his work ranges from the mournful to the hopeful to the confessional.

He has released eight albums of original songs since 2005: Not Worth Waiting For, Love Is Gone, Hurtsville, Playmates, Blue Poles, Hijack!, Tall Pop Syndrome, and most recently Separation Rock (2025), which he describes as the album he has been waiting his whole life to make. Recorded over four days at Valentine Studios in North Hollywood with producer Zach Dawes, it features contributions from Jay Bellerose, Sharon Van Etten, Alex Cameron, and pedal steel from Nashville legend Russ Pahl.

In addition to his discography, he has toured and collaborated with Bill Callahan, Angel Olsen, John Cale, Sharon Van Etten, Father John Misty, Weyes Blood, Florence & The Machine, and The Killers, among others.

In this edition, Jack shares words of poetry, classical music, and life in the arts.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Brobdingnagian

Brought to my attention by of all people, a music publicist. Showing off, he decided to use it as the opening word for a press release for my record Tall Pop Syndrome. A bold move by music standards. I was thrilled. Worth every cent. Unfortunately, like most things in the music biz it fell on deaf ears. Meaning colossal or gigantic, it’s derived from Brobdingnag – the land of the giants in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It’s fun to say and it looks great, the 'bd' rarely seen in English rub against each other nicely.

One Quote:
Sylvia Plath

”I am both worse and better than you thought. I am not even a person. I am a collection of contradictions”.

This came up the other day and hit hard. I'm involved in a record label with my dear friend and band mate Kirin J Callinan named Worse Records and quotes involving the word worse seem to enter our orbit more and more frequently. It seemed to sum up my whole approach to music and the artists and writers that’ve inspired me. I would take it a step further and say – to be the best, one must also be the worst – to embody both things at once, that’s the goal.

One Poem:
And Suddenly it’s Evening

Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening
— Salvatore Quasimodo

I read this flicking through second hand books a lifetime ago and decided to take it home. I didn’t know anything about Quasimodo and only just now did I look up his picture. He has a mustache and I can see that now in the rough sketch on the collected poems edition. I read that he was hermetic and so I decided not to go after him. He comes to me sometimes and I’ll pick him up and have a flick through. Always relevant and revelatory.

One Book:
The Time of the Assassins

I stole the book The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Arthur Rimbaud by Henry Miller from my brother. It was sitting on his coffee table for a while untouched. I read it once and then I read it again. I think I’ve only done that twice. The other was Bill Callahan’s Letters For Emma Bowlcut. It helps if they’re short. I’m a tall man that likes short books. This book is a compare and contrast between the life of the author and the French poet Rimbaud. There are a lot of contrasts, their lives seemingly happening in reverse. The main thing is the way he talks about being a writer and lengths they must go to. I’d say it should be in the curriculum for anyone who is considering a life in the arts. Both inspiring and a warning.

One Other Thing:
The piano music of Frederic Mompou

Like just about everyone else, I enjoy listening to solo piano music. It’s big business. The trouble is a lot of it is sentimental dross that’s been overplayed and used to put babies to sleep. I was looking for the perfect kind: minimal but not Arvo Part; angular but not Shostakovich; melodic but not Chopin. And so my pal and ECM enthusiast Laurence Pike recommended Spanish composer Frederic Mompou. Maybe he’ll be right for you too. Start with Música Callada performed by Herbert Henck.

In 2023 and 2026 she was a laureate of the City of Paris, to research, write and perform in Paris in conjunction with the Centre Les Récollets. She has received fellowships and awards from La Napoule Arts Foundation, Bundanon Trust, Regional Arts Victoria and the Varuna National Writers House.

Jayne co-owns The Bookshop at Queenscliff in coastal Victoria.

In this edition, Jayne shares words of nature, dreams, travel, friendship, and the search for understanding.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Duende

I discovered this word back when I was doing theatre; it identified something in art, in people, in life, that I’d never been able to name. Lorca was the first to move the idea of ‘the duende’ - the naughty little sprite in Spanish folklore that came into your house and did mischief - to ‘having duende’, the naughty, spritely quality in theatre, dance, writing, that balances death and light, beauty and humour, making it ‘spine-chilling’. Art with duende is always on the precipice, aware that the world could explode at any second, that ‘ants could eat us, or a great arsenic lobster could fall from the sky’. It reminds us to not to take ourselves, or life, too seriously; be demonic, outrageous.

One Quote:
Knowing isn’t interesting. Seeing is interesting.

There’s this fantastic 80s video of a conversation between a very young Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Luc Godard between scenes on Sauve Qui Peut. Huppert is lost, trying to find who she is within the role, asking the director what she should do, who she should be.

Savoir n’a aucun interêt, he says. Voir a de l’interêt.

She sits uncomfortably with this. It sucks that feeling of not knowing, but that is the dreadful state of when you’re really doing the work. I wrote it on a post-it, for when I’m in the mire, which is pretty much always.

One Poem:
For The Seasons

From Beverley Farmer – For the Seasons

The wattle birds watch
each day for the next blood-red
fig to split open.

Not long after returning from overseas in 2019 to take over the bookshop, Beverley Farmer’s son Taki came in with a printout of a set of haikus his late mother had left behind. He had just discovered they existed, and wondered if I’d like to read them. I was in a state of total disorientation, something Farmer knew well from her life between Greece and this seaside town. Reading the haikus broke me from a depression that had kept my eyes closed to my surroundings, my head still elsewhere. It caused me to stop and look closely at the environment down here, the rock pools and foliage and birds, the small things. So much fragile wisdom and humility in her words.

The book is now published, and everyone reads it but it feels like it is mine. Its refusal to be read fast forced me to slow right down from years of frantic rushing. Each poem only opens to you when you are ready, and prepared to sit quietly, with time.

One Book:
Book of Dreams

Down the back of the Pompidou bookshop was this majestic book: Fellini’s Book of Dreams. I would sit on a stool and look through it with marvel: all the goddesses and lions and giant clitorises and coming dicks, the boobs and cars and alligators and shitting boys and crying men, all the shadows and colour and demons and light. I would regularly go just to open random pages; nobody minded or hassled me to buy it, surely it was way out of my league.

One day I flipped it over and noticed it was on clearance sale – 35 euros. Over the next months I bought the impressive thing for friends getting married, birthdays, imagining one day I’d have a home and buy one for myself too. That day came, but by then they were sold out and out of print. Online they were selling for $3k! A friend found me the world’s last cheap copy in Germany, grazie a dio. I use it to keep the dream life present: you can’t argue with dreams, dreams will not be judged.

One Other Thing:
L’Étranger

François Ozon’s new adaptation of L’Étranger. Hit me like a truck.

Her writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Baffler, The Believer, The White Review, Literary Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Guernica, Meanjin and The Lifted Brow, among others.

She has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University in New York, and graduated from the University of Sydney with a B.A. (Hons I) in English Literature. She has taught at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities, the Berlin Writers Workshop, Catapult, and the Center for Fiction.

In this edition, Madeleine shares words of understanding, communication, the pleasure of bookstores, and the connections between body and mind.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Genau

I moved to Berlin a couple of years ago and started learning German in preparation a year or so before that. German is known for having all sorts of long, exhausting, hyper-specific compound words, but the word I like best is ‘Genau’. It can be both adjective and adverb. It can mean something like ‘correct’ or ‘exact’ but it can also be a kind of positive affirmation in the way we might use ‘Word’ or ‘Sure’. It is a word of agreement and a word of understanding and a word of mild positivity and a word that keeps the conversation ticking over, and you can pretty much ‘Genau’ your way through most everyday German conversations. It collects up twenty or thirty different variants of words we have in English and collapses them all into one ‘Genau.’

One Quote:
Woman in a Green Mantle

“I hate writing. Writing is a sickness, a neurosis, a mania. Philip Larkin says somewhere that the urge to preserve is the basis of all art. I’ve had it up to here with rhetoric about art: but the urge to preserve – I understand that. I’ve been captive of it for most of my adult life.”

This is something Helen Garner wrote in her essay ‘Woman in a Green Mantle,’ a piece which is mostly about her lifelong tendency to keep notebooks and diaries. I have remembered it since I first underlined it when I read it at twenty-two, and I often find I mutter it to myself as I make my way towards my desk.

One Poem:
The First Body is the Water

My favourite book of poetry published in the last decade is Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem. It contains some incredibly gorgeous love poems – one of which was used as part of my wedding ceremony to my husband – but the poem I have gone back to the most often is called ‘The First Body is the Water.’ It is both about the Colorado River and Diaz’s spiritual relationship to that body of water as a Mojave woman, but also about language and the physical, desiring body. It’s a poem that sometimes reads as an essay, before breaking into lyric just when you feel it begin topull away. For instance:

“This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things—they are more than close together or side by side. They are same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine.

The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement.

Energy is a moving river moving my moving body.”

One Book:
The Years

For six years when I lived in New York I worked at the bookstore McNally Jackson, and I developed a collection of books I found myself foisting upon others and giving most often as gifts. They included Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, but the one I’m picking out here is Annie Ernaux’s The Years. It is, I think, the best of Ernaux’s books, one which tells the story of an entire generation – politically, economically, socially – by telling the story of her own life. It is an incredible feat of life writing, and it’s one of those books which I experience as consolation every time I read it, and which nearly always makes me want to get up from the chair and start working

One Other Thing:
The Second Body

For the last few years, I have taught a lot of creative writing classes centred around nature and climate change, and I always assign Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body either in excerpt or in full. ‘The Second Body’ is an incredibly useful concept, particularly for artists and writers. Hildyard talks about the ways in which we inhabit both our first bodies – the one sitting here reading this, digesting food, scratching at a hang nail – and our second bodies, which might be thought of ecosystemic bodies, which connect us to every living thing on earth. Sometimes the first body crashes into the second body, and it’s those moments that I find myself encountering more and more in the last five years. Whenever I do, I am incredibly grateful to have Daisy Hildyard’s work to think with.

Catherine Chidgey is "one of New Zealand's greatest living writers" (Radio NZ). Her debut, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South-East Asia and South Pacific region). It also won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. The Axeman’s Carnival and The Wish Child both won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction – New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. Other honours include the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Nielsen Independent New Zealand Bestseller award. Catherine also xlectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. Her latest novel is The Book of Guilt, published by Penguin in 2025.

In this edition, Catherine shares words of memory, history, and the beauty of wild places.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Vergangenheitsbewältigung

This marvellous German compound word means ‘coming to terms with the past’, most often used in relation to Germany’s reckoning with its 20th-century history. When I lived in Berlin in the 1990s I saw this process everywhere: in the overhauling of the old displays at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial that ignored post-war East German brutalities; and in the small brass plaques – Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’ – set into pavements outside the homes of those who were deported, reminding passers-by of lives erased. The fact that there is a word for this speaks, to me, of a willingness to look the past in the face. In Aotearoa we are only beginning to teach our difficult histories in schools.

One Quote:
Surrender to the sky / Your heart of anger

This line is from James K Baxter’s brief and beautiful poem ‘High Country Weather’. I used it as the epigraph for my novel The Axeman’s Carnival, set in Central Otago’s high country and narrated by a magpie observing the actions of a farmer who is volatile and violent towards his wife. The line carries an extraordinary sense of release and lightness – the possibility that anger might simply rise like a bird into the wide Otago sky and vanish. It takes on an added, uneasy resonance when you know that Baxter’s own letters reveal violence within his marriage. The poem was put to music by Jordan Reyne on the 2000 album Baxter – a brilliant, haunting interpretation.

One Poem:
The Song of Wandering Aengus

I first encountered The Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats in my teens, and it lodged itself deep. I love its mystery, its romance, its melancholy – and the way its music works like a spell to carry you forward. It was one of the first poems that made me aware of rhythm as a living force in language. I still find myself reciting it.

One Book:
An Angel at my Table

When I read Janet Frame’s 1984 autobiography as a young writer I felt something unlock: here was a New Zealand life rendered with honesty, strangeness, absolute authority. Frame’s account of her early years – of poverty and misunderstanding, but also the stubborn persistence of the imagination – made the writing life seem absolutely necessary to me.

One Other Thing:
Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary

In her newly released memoir Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, Kate Camp revisits the diary she kept at fourteen, responding to those entries with the wry, perceptive eye of the adult (and poet) she has become. The result is funny, unsettling and strangely tender – a vivid snapshot of teenage life the 1980s, complete with recklessness and longing. Reading it, I kept feeling jolts of recognition – the texture of adolescence in New Zealand as I remember it, with all its bravado and vulnerability.

In addition to her creative work, Zoë Sadokierski is associate professor in Visual Communication at the UTS School of Design. Her practice-based research explores ways that visual communication – particularly illustrated nonfiction, data storytelling and anarchival collage – can be used to engage audiences with complex scientific and cultural issues. She is a former president and founding member of the Australian Book Designers Association. In 2015 Zoë established Page Screen Books, an independent publisher of artist’s books and visual essays. Her works on paper and artist books have been exhibited and collected internationally. Her book Father, Son and Other Animals (Cordite, 2024) explores climate change and species extinctions through the lenses of parenting and creative practice.

In this edition, Zoë shares words of nature, technology, creativity, literacy, and the importance in finding perspective.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Anarchival

For the past few years, I’ve been playing with visual material from natural history collections (illustrations, photographs, manuscripts) to think through species extinctions and other consequences of humans meddling with the natural world. I’ve been manipulating and recreating archival images from science museums, and writing about this process, to generate counternarratives: stories that challenge or extend existing historical accounts, particularly around our complicated relationships with other animals. This can be described as an ‘anarchival’ practice.

In a nutshell, those of us in positions of privilege (such as academics) need to bring more anarchy into the systems we inhabit. We need to challenge dominant narratives, by bringing marginalised perspectives into public discourse. This isn’t a solo project. Increasingly, I’m less interested in being The Author or The Designer. I’ve been doing a lot of my thinking – reading, writing and making – with people who amplify what I could do alone: Monica Monin, Andrew Burrell, Ceridwen Dovey, Timo Rissanen, Thom van Dooren, Mackenzie Cooley, to name a few. Also, my students, many of whom are significantly more anarchic than me, which I love.

I’m going to cheat and include a quote here, even though there’s one below. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway writes:

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

Collaboratively seeking out new ways to trouble, investigate, translate, story (no one word will do) the world around us, we ensure that however history plays out, there will be nuanced records of this time and the many ways we understood and resisted the multiple Troubles we’re in.

In this article, co-authored with Monica Monin, we explain what an anarchival practice means for image makers, including those attempting to critique GenAI models that produce images.

Which segways into...

One Quote:
Margaret Atwood

“People use technology to only mean digital technology.
Technology is actually everything we make”.
— Margaret Atwood

If one more person asks me whether I think creativity is about to die because of AI, I might die.

To be clear, I’m not Anti-AI – that ship has sailed. I just don’t want to engage in more uninformed banter. Technology is a tool, and how we wield that tool is what matters. How we critique who makes, owns, permits access to and is held accountable for AI tools matters.

Now is the time to read beyond headlines, forensically check credentials of writers and sources, deliberately recalibrate our algorithms to disrupt our echo chambers, seek out trusted voices. To become part of the conversation that extends beyond repeating the – often hilariously – horrifying clickbait and conspiracy fodder meme-ing around. The cluster of AI technologies is evolving at a terrifying pace, and there isn’t a short cut to keeping up. It will take careful, calibrated attention and strategic collective action, at a time when our attention spans are diminishing and we are overwhelmed by mis/information. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t relish the dark humour and schadenfreude of the fodder – the CEO who asked her AI agent to delete unnecessary emails and it trashed her entire account, the AI-only social media platform that spawned AI-religions/hacking each other/complaining about human owners – but these should be read as cautionary fables. Most, if not all, have since been revealed to as human-driven interactions. Again: those wielding the tools.

Where I see hope is a return to the valuing craft. To appreciating the relationships between the humans involved in creative work. The brief joys and longer sorrows of creative labour. Projects like this one – about sharing process and inspiration amongst communities of practice. I don’t think this is naive optimism. It’s a recalibration of how we value creative labour and the work that results from it.

To top and tail with Atwood:

‘Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.’

One Poem:
14 Breaths

“change rushing up
from deep down
where time stills”

From 14 Breaths, by Ross Gibson and Kathryn Bird and A Published Event. A limited edition publication, with 14 poems printed on thick card, presented in a box with 14 Haku-un White Cloud incense sticks in a Borosilicate tube, a clay incense holder and Tasmanian oak card stand. The box transforms into a shrine to display one card and burn one stick at a time, to remember Ross. Like many in Sydney (and beyond), I found in Ross a mentor whose influence continues to define who I am as a writer, and how I am as an academic. I’m part of the Social Glue, a collage group established by Kathryn, who once told me Ross said: “above all else, I value kindness.” I think about that all the time.

One Book:
The Art of Looking Sideways

I bought Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways as an undergraduate. I no longer own much from that time, but this book endures. Described as "a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination" it is a treasure trove for working across word and image, finding creative inspiration in the world around us, and a reminder of the importance of wit in translating thoughts into stories – written and visual – for others to enjoy. Every time I open it something new reveals itself. It's also the perfect height to elevate my laptop for a video calls, which keeps it close to hand.

One Other Thing:
Observation Apps

Seek by iNaturalist is an app that (usually) identifies plants and animals, using your phone’s camera. The spider at head-height between the washing line and bins is a Heptagonal Orb-weaver, Gea heptagon. Similarly, the SkyView app maps what's going on overhead. Directly above me right now are Pluto, the Tucana constellation (looks like a toucan), the inactive observation satellite OKEAN-3 and the SL-8 Rocket Body (a fragment of a then-USSR rocket launched in 1971). Perspective is important.

Dr. Rees (they/them) is a Senior Lecturer in History at La Trobe University, co-host of Archive Fever history podcast, and founding editor of literary journal LANTANA. They are the author of Travelling to Tomorrow: the modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America (NewSouth, 2024) and All About Yves: Notes from a Transition (Allen & Unwin, 2021), as well as co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2022) and Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History (Palgrave, 2017). Their essays and criticism have been published in the Guardian, The Age, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Crikey, and Overland, among other publications. They are also co-editor of the journal History Australia and guest curator of the 2026 Trans Book Festival.

In this edition, Yves shares words of resistance, empowerment, and the search for hope and community in times of despair.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Ungovernable

In recent years, I’ve chosen a ‘word of the year’ in lieu of new year’s resolutions. In 2024 it was community, in 2025 it was unhinged, and in 2026 it’s ungovernable. I landed on this word after hearing Evelyn Araluen read the poem ‘Change Agent’ from her incendiary new collection The Rot. About halfway through, the poem reads: “Be ungovernable and / aligned with orcas. The work is / relational and forever”.

For me, the directive ‘be ungovernable’ evoked the twofold project of resisting external oppression but also refusing the anticipatory compliance that oppressive powers rely upon to do their work. It’s a word and a concept that reminds me to kill the cop and the coloniser in my head. I’m not there yet, not by any means, but it’s a beautiful thing to be reaching towards.

One Quote:
Rebecca Solnit

Over the last decade, as I’ve grappled with the implications of polycrisis and collapse, American essayist Rebecca Solnit has been a guiding light. In particular, I often return to her words from the 2004 collection Hope in the Dark: “Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories’, with the consequence that ‘the change that counts in revolution takes place first in the imagination”.

As a historian and as a writer, I believe in those statements with every fibre of my being, and they articulate why I’ve chosen to dedicate my life to the work of storytelling. It’s the quote I come back to on days when playing with words on a screen feels the most indulgent and trivial thing imaginable.

One Poem:
Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson, a nonbinary poet who died of cancer in 2025, was one of those wordsmiths whose deceptive simplicity helps you see the world anew. In November 2024, on the day after Trump was re-elected, Gibson posted some words that dragged me up from the the abyss:

“If we have nothing / but each other / we have so much”.

That vision of abundance kept me going that dark day, and it continues to provide succour whenever I fall into the deficit mindset encouraged by our capitalist overlords.

One Book:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This is a howl against the genocide in Gaza that rearranged my soul. With devastating precision, El Akkad diagnoses the world’s failure to stop (or even acknowledge) this live-streamed slaughter as a larger indictment of Western liberalism. ‘This is an account of a fracture,’ he writes, ‘a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.’

One Other Thing:
Love in a Fucked Up World

For me, as for so many of us, the question of the moment is: how to build a viable left? Or, in other words, how to stop the left eating itself? Increasingly, I’m drawn to thinkers who approach this question through the lens of interpersonal relationships and relational skills, with the logic that we need to get better at handling conflict and managing difference if we are going to work together.

One of my favourite thinkers here is trans lawyer and activist Dean Spade, who has been exploring these ideas in his new podcast Love in a Fucked Up World (based on the eponymous book). Spade is a serious intellectual and veteran organiser, but never takes himself (or anyone else too) seriously. His work gives me hope that we can shift away from cultures of cancellation and lateral violence, and instead build unstoppable coalitions.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Parhelion

A parhelion is a bright spot in the sky appearing on either side of the sun, formed by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals high in the atmosphere. Also known as a 'mock sun' or 'sun dog'. I've never had the chance/confidence to use this word in real life, but I love the way it looks and sounds (and the thing it refers to).

One Quote:
My Husband

"A house isn't a home without a cat"
— My husband
Feb-July 2025 (while living overseas without our cat).

One Lyric:
The Past Is A Grotesque Animal

“I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met
Who could appreciate Georges Bataille
Standing at a Swedish festival
Discussing Story of the Eye.“
— Of Montreal

I heard this 11:53-minute song from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007) for the first time when I was about 16 and it totally blew my mind. As well as teaching me the word ‘parhelion’, it made me want to be a cute girl who appreciated Georges Bataille, so I got myself a copy of Story of the Eye (which also blew my mind). It’s a special thing when a work of art makes me ravenous to consume all the other art that it references.

One Book:
L’Amante Anglaise

I recently made the mistake of putting my copy of this out-of-print novella by Marguerite Duras (best known for The Lover and Hiroshima Mon Amour) in a pile of books to donate while moving house. It was this yellowy Pantheon edition from the 80s, picked up from a used book store in San Diego. Anyway, I immediately felt the loss, and stooped to shopping for a replacement on Amazon. Revolving around a woman’s murder of her disabled cousin, it’s written in the form of police interviews so is pretty much all dialogue (and was eventually adapted for stage). I always adore Duras’ writing, but I have a particular love for experiments in perspective and empathetic fictionalisations of true crime. This is such a troubling, intimate exploration of human darkness and our mundane capacity for violence.

One Other Thing:
Rehash Podcast

Hosted by Canadian best friends Hannah Raine and Maia Wyman (a.k.a., @broey_deschanel, who's also a fabulous film critic), this podcast is all about social media and internet phenomena. They've done several seasons, each about a broad topic (sex on the internet, beauty on the internet, subcultures), with Hannah and Maia alternately presenting episode topics to one another. They're both incredible researchers who bring so much cultural savviness and critical acumen to what they do, while also bringing chemistry and humour. Often with podcasts, it's a toss-up between dry and informative or hosts cackling over their own banter to the point of being unlistenable - but Hannah and Maia are pros (and know how to edit). The 'Murderinos' episode is a personal highlight for me.

Patrick is the author of the book of short stories A Man Made Entirely of Bats (2015), the book of comedic essays Uncle Hercules and Other Lies (2019), and the full length short story collection Sexy Tales of Paleontology (2021). His debut novel, a rom-com called In Spite of You, was published August 2025. He is a regular arts and culture commentator in the media, having appeared on The Project, ABC’s The Mix, ABC Breakfast and more. He is also the editor of the independent publication Nonsense, a newsletter which covers comedy, queer news and culture.

In this edition, Patrick shares words of humour, nostalgia, cocktails, work ethics, and flailing bodies.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Akimbo

For someone who desires control, if not stability in their life, but who has chosen a lifestyle almost the polar opposite of this, the word “akimbo” has always delighted me. I think because I’m tall and ungainly, I’ve felt a connection to the word over a synonym like “askew”. Often I find myself stumbling through life akimbo, arms and legs wild, desperately trying to get some form of balance.

One Quote:
Kurt Vonnegut Jr

There is a Kurt Vonnegut Jr quote that I’ve managed to lose - it’s in his essays somewhere, and is hard to find compared to his much more famous ones, but it’s paraphrased as something like “we’re all in the same leaking boat, rowing furiously”.

I love this quote because it captures my attitude to being an author and an artist, and helps me to not compare myself to my peers or get jealous. We’re all rowing furiously and the boat is sinking! No time for that.

One Poem:
Animals

I love Frank O’Hara, and this poem of his “Animals” captures this gorgeous sense of nostalgia that never stops hitting me right in my emotions:

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

One Book:
Martini

The Australian author Frank Moorhouse released a book of essays called “Martini”, which is just a lot of thoughts he’s had about martinis. Somehow it’s become a blueprint of how I want to live my life (full of martinis).

One Other Thing:
How to Eat a Tire in a Year by David Sedaris

My favourite essay writer in the world is David Sedaris, and I would literally read a shopping list by him. That’s not an accident - he has set himself up to become a humorous writer on the mundane, spinning suburban moments into deeply funny and strangely affecting brilliance. This essay in the New Yorker about walking with an old friend DESTROYED me.

Illustration by Lachlan Conn

One Word:
Life

As a writer and a reader I am attuned to how literature and art of all kinds expands our sense of life and our understandings of it. Life is what we fundamentally share with all beings and the planet itself, and I often reflect on the relationships between living and writing, especially as much of my writing is autobiographical. Writing one’s own life can be a method of ‘living twice’, to use a phrase from Eileen Myles. Writing captures and transforms the lived moment, extending it to readers, making connections across lives and times.

One Quote:
Agua Viva

There are many ways to approach writing life. A spectrum extends between writing the present moment and writing the story of a whole life from start to finish. Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva (1973) is right at one end of the spectrum, an experiment in writing the instant, the ever-escaping moment of the present. A short, febrile and enigmatic novel, it has a line in it which gave me so much inspiration for my recent book Calendar that I used it as the epigraph:

‘Are objects halted time?’

This question, asking what of our lives and memories can be preserved and held within objects, suggests the potential of time to be paused, stretched, returned to and recovered, all of which are some of the greatest powers of writing.

One Poem:
Instability (Weather)

Recently a new edition of one of Bernadette Mayer’s early collections of poetry, The Golden Book of Words (1978), was republished by New Directions. Mayer was a prolific, generous and much-loved American poet, perhaps best known for her epic day-poem Midwinter Day, which records a specific day (the winter solstice in 1978) in close poetic detail. The Golden Book of Words shares with all Mayer’s work her attention to the daily and momentary, the documentation of her life through her poetic transformation of it.

My favourite poem in the collection ‘Instability (Weather)’ describes moving out of a rented house, observing its garden as winter turns to spring (‘We get the lilacs but have to abandon the rhubarb’). It is a nature poem that captures the turn of the seasons and the experience of leaving a familiar place, through describing planning to cut the last of the lilacs. But I love it for its last two lines, which come as a surprise:

For some strange reason I’ll never say

I’ll never have lived a more exciting day

It makes me feel as if every day might have this potential.

One Book:
Maud Martha

As much as I love writing that stretches out a moment, lingering on an hour or a day, I also love books that compress a wide span of life into a short, deft form. One of these is Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, her only novel. Brooks was a celebrated poet, and the first Black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize. Maud Martha is a more obscure work in her oeuvre, first published in 1953 and recently republished in 2022 by Faber (as with the Bernadette Mayer book, I am often attracted to lesser-known, minor and experimental works of writers that are rediscovered/republished).

The novel follows the life of a young woman from childhood into adulthood. Over 34 short, episodic chapters, Brooks reveals the world of Maud Martha, a working-class Black woman in America in the first half of the 20th century. Even as a child, Maud Martha has a strong sense of self and a resolution to make the best of her life. In the final chapter she asks ‘What, what, am I to do with all of this life?’ Each chapter is a vivid, emotionally-rich vignette, and by reading Maud Martha’s life, we consider the shape of our own.

One Other Thing:
Life, A User’s Manual

I can’t theme a series of readings around life without mentioning what is probably my favourite novel (if I had to pick only one): Life a User’s Manual by Georges Perec. Perec was a key member of the Oulipo, the literary group founded on the application of mathematical constraints to the production of literature. Life a User’s Manual is bound by a complex series of constraints, most notably in how its structure is determined by a ‘Knight’s Tour’ of the chess board. This structure is applied to a space and its inhabitants: a Parisian apartment building and its residents, in a novel of detail, humour and playfulness. In Life a User’s Manual life is equally determined by plans and by chance; it suggests to me the limitless interconnections between life and writing.

Welcome to Close Reading, a fortnightly dispatch of literary obsessions.

Each chapter will feature a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem (or lyric), one book, and one other thing.

I’m Heath Killen and I created this newsletter in response to the challenges being faced by Australian and New Zealand literary arts. Recent budget cuts, festival closures, government censorship, and the existential thread of AI have all had a profoundly negative effect on the industry. Close Reading is a small but direct response, a celebration of words, curation, and the connection between writer and reader.

For those who do not know me, I have worked for many years helping brands and organisations craft and tell their stories. I am the former managing editor of creative industries magazine Desktop, and was the founding editor of cult newsletter In Wild Air. Close Reading is the first project to be made under my new imprint Woolgather, a hybrid publisher and creative studio.

I’m happy you’re here and excited about where this can go.

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