How do you write? (Where, when, on what?)

I would not recommend my writing process to anyone. It’s not exactly lawless, but it’s very tangential, not at all efficient as far as time is concerned. There’s a lot of longhand, in notebooks as well as rogue passages scrawled on the backs of envelopes and stray hotel stationary. Of course these notes sometimes go missing and resurface later, as cryptic non-sequiturs: Sick raccoon; where is start?? I tend to trail different threads around, room to room. Different piles of research materials congregate in different corners. I can’t look at a computer screen for very long before a headache sets in, so I use the laptop as little as possible, mostly in hope of imposing some order on the chaos. But things remain chaotic until very late in the piece, cluttered with either/ors that are probably true enough to greater, overarching indecisiveness (which August to be at home in, for instance.)

Over time I’ve become very protective of my mornings—which I appreciate is made easier by living alone, but can still be difficult as writing is so infrequently treated as legitimate, time-dependant work, even by those we love. And a good (well-defended) morning can feel boundless, oceanic… though I often think of the opening lines of a Jane Hirshfield poem:

“A day is vast.

Until noon.

Then it’s over.”

From then on it’s like trying to call back the precise details, the logic, the landscape of a dream, once you’ve woken. There’s only so much you can recover before the day—the outside world—starts to press in. By about three or four the writing day is as good as dead, for me. I’ll usually run, then, to get some sky overhead, go down to the water and see what it’s doing, gain a little distance on whatever I’ve written.

“Step away and wait for the weather to change the landscape” as a good friend puts it.

What are some other Australian women and non-binary writers that you’ve recently enjoyed?

Aside from works featured on the Stella lists, I’ve loved Anna MacDonald’s essay collection, Between the Word and the World, about writing and walking (and reading and rivers and art and on). Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island is a masterclass in attention to place. I’ve also been revisiting Delia Falconer’s essays up at the Sydney Review of Books, and have just started Ruby Hamad’s White Tears/Brown Scars.

For the past few months I’ve mostly been reading for research, so my TBR pile is becoming a bit precarious. But I’m eagerly eyeing off Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals In That Country, Meg Mundell’s The Trespassers, and Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork.

What are you working on next?