The Good Doctor
When he asked about work, I told him I was a writer. ‘Ah ye-as,’ he said, and I took this exclamation to mean that the doctor felt there was some correlation between my problems and the general conditions of a writer’s life.
Category: Blog
The Ghosts of Eleanor Dark
I was raised in a house where inconspicuous wards were placed in every room to protect us against the threat of supernatural entities – an evil eye over the front door, rings blessed by priests hanging from boards, statuettes of saints by the windows, and precious stones with reputations for emanating positive vibes were tucked into drawers with our undies and socks.
Keep Going, Get Better || Luke Carman
Like most authors, I do almost anything for money, but the thought of engaging with a bunch of young people was cause for anxiety. If it was ever the case that I was once young, the experience was wasted on me. I don’t remember having a youth, and what I do remember about it I try to forget.
Rethinking Voss || Jonathan Dunk
To summarize violently: the transcendent, essentialist reading of White does him a great disservice. There is no meaningful opposition between the spiritual and the performative in White’s work; his characters perform their meaning, move in their own structures of feeling.
Theses on Colonial Antinomy || Jonathan Dunk
Aboriginal writing is different. Not in any innate primitivist sense, it’s just doing different things, following different rules and patterns of relation. It doesn’t follow the straight lines that wittingly or otherwise I’ve learnt, been inculcated into – from inculcāre to tread in with the heel, knowledge as wound.
Dodge Rose: Heretical Modernism by Jonathan Dunk
It’s been ubiquitously noted that the publication of Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose in 2016 bucked a number of Auslit publication trends, and some international formal ones. Beginning with the obvious, it was published by Dalkey Archive in the US before being picked up by Text.
Neurological Illness in Australian Fiction
I don’t read fiction about illness much. I know that’s not what you expected, as it goes directly against the premise of this essay. But fiction allows me to inhabit another body; it’s a luxury. I’m not sure I want to read about a body that is ill like mine. Thinking about my experience of illness takes up so much of my life already: the GP appointments, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, the neurologist I haven’t yet seen but have spent nine months on a waiting list for, imagining what it’ll be like to enter that room. I’m not as well…
Distilling Illness in ‘Shaping the Fractured Self’
Words || Katerina Bryant “Sometimes pus, sometimes a poem… but always pain.” —Yehuda Amichai, as quoted in Shaping the Fractured Self The first poem I loved was Sylvia Plath’s Tulips. I didn’t understand it; not at first. I was in the last year of high school and our teacher took us through the poem; line by line, stanza by stanza. I remember the way she would pace the room as she spoke during English and History, calling Rasputin a “weirdo” and Charles Manson “freaky”. Her hair was henna red and her excitement awoke an excitement in me, even though I…
Australian Writing and Essays on Illness || Katerina Bryant
Words || Katerina Bryant When I first became ill, I tried to find stories like mine. I needed to see myself on the page to believe I could adapt to a new life: a quieter, restrained life. I will not go into the particulars of my illness here—it is a sticky blend of mental illness and seizures that takes over the page once I begin to write about the details. But I will say that for the first few months of my illness, I left the house only for work. I did not dare live a life that could compound…
How Australian writing contributes to conversations about chronic illness || September’s blogger is Katerina Bryant
I view writing as my way to understand the complexities of lives I have and haven’t lived. So, often my writing is far-reaching—I’ve yoyo’d from writing about hunting feral pigs to mental illness to my recent obsession, women clowns. It seems the only consistency in my work is that it’s nonfiction.
Agreeable book reviewing is a dangerous, vapid “epidemic of niceness”
Words || Jack Cameron Stanton Over the weekend I visited my parent’s house for brunch with the Lebanese side of the family, and in order to cater for political differences I strolled to the service station and purchased The Weekend Australian and Sydney Morning Herald. Over a breakfast of fresh manoush and lahembajin, the Lebs scoffed at two wildly different headlines—‘SCOMO LEADS A NEW GENERATION’ vs ‘MORRISON SNATCHES TOP JOB’ (I’m sure you can guess which is which)—while I slid out the review sections of each paper to examine them. The Weekend Australian offered six pages of substantial book reviews,…
Farewell, Bourdain: why I stopped being a vegetarian
Before I tell you about how Anthony Bourdain made me question my long-standing vegetarianism, I need to get something off my chest.