Orange
Finding Our Shelters
Fiona Wright, author of The World was Whole, discusses her writing journey with Fiona Sweet.
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize. Her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior, and her most recent essay collection is The World Was Whole. She is currently the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre.
Fiona Sweet is the Creative Director and CEO of Stella. She is the past Artistic Director and CEO of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale and the inaugural Director of the National Centre for Photography. Fiona is an influential and in-demand public speaker, industry judge, photographic portfolio reviewer and assessor in Australia and internationally. She was the director and founder of Sweet Creative and is recognised for her inspiring and intelligent delivery of uniquely crafted festivals and arts events. She is also a former Board Director of the Australian Graphic Design Association, the Melbourne Fringe, and co-founded Melbourne’s Acland Street Projection Festival. Fiona currently sits on the LCI University Photographic Advisory Committee, and the Advisory Committee for the Discipline of Photography at RMIT. She was the recipient of an Ian Potter Travel Grant in 2018 for her research on international art festival best practice.
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Further Reading
Reviews
“These interwoven stories come together seamlessly to form beautiful memoir that connects all of these lives in time and space, between Odessa and St Kilda, forming a matrix of empathy, of love, and of healing.” Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader
“The parade of lyrical fragments – sensual moments, family stories, ethical inquiries and daily records – that makes up The Swift Dark Tide isn’t easy to categorise, so author Katia Ariel does it for us.” Linda Javin, The Saturday Paper
Links
The hosts of Creative Criticism, Greg and Robert, discuss The Swift Dark Tide with Katia Ariel.
Judges’ Report
In delicate and delicious strokes, Katia Ariel’s The Swift Dark Tide renders the discovery and release of the “hidden self” in middle age. It is no mid-life crisis. Rather, it is a mid-life realising of desire and possibility; of queer becoming.
Ariel’s memoir reads as an unabashed re-telling of meticulous diary entries, kept to provide a constant during her love affair with a woman, a period of welcome change. There are other constants: a husband who has carefully soldered their love at its many seams; and their children. It would have been easy to square both life and the memoir on that obvious binary –family or the love of “another woman”. Ariel instead follows the scent of her unquiet body, and what she herself describes as its “animal” intent on triumph.
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