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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