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.

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