Tag: Katerina Bryant

Neurological Illness in Australian Fiction

4 October 2018 SoutherlyBlog

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’

24 September 2018 SoutherlyBlog

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

13 September 2018 SoutherlyBlog

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

6 September 2018 SoutherlyBlog

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.

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