Close Reading with Vanessa Berry
Edition One
Welcome to the first edition of Close Reading, a dispatch of literary obsessions. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and “one other thing”. This edition features Vanessa Berry, a Sydney-based writer, artist, and zinemaker.
Vanessa is the author of Calendar (2025), Gentle and Fierce (2021), and Mirror Sydney (2017), a collection of essays and hand-drawn maps that investigate the city’s marginal places and undercurrents. She is also the creator of long-running zine series I Am a Camera (2000–present). Vanessa lives and works, with respect and gratitude, on the never-ceded sovereign lands of the Gadigal people.
In this edition, Vanessa shares words of life, weather, writing, and time.
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.