Close Reading with Laura McPhee-Browne
Edition Ten
You are about to read the tenth edition of Close Reading, a dispatch of literary obsessions, published by Woolgather. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and “one other thing”. This edition is by Laura McPhee-Browne, a writer and social worker living in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land.
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.