I wish I could have watched Sweet Country with Mum. How, like on the 13th of February 2008, we watched the National Apology on the television in her commission flat—me on the couch and Mum a safe distance away at the dining room table. I remember feeling proud and relieved that the government was acknowledging historical wrongs. Holding back tears, I snuck a peak at Mum to see how she was feeling. She was playing Solitaire, but her chin angled toward the television told me she was more interested in what Rudd was saying. I remember thinking that it wasn’t my […]

Learning from Garlic: My Name is Lucy Barton   When I was twenty-one, that giant of literary criticism, Roland Barthes, helped me divide the books on my shelf in a new way: into those that are writerly, and those that are readerly. He did so via an undergraduate literary theory course, which opened my eyes to how language works and allowed me to grasp some of the meanings of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, for which I will forever be grateful. I say ‘grasp some’, because Nelson’s text contains the potential for a multitude of readings and I am only equipped […]

On the recording you can hear their voices. Children. Who knows exactly how many. There is one crying hard. The exhausted, exhausting sobs of a desperate, scared little person. Another one is calling for his ‘Daddy’. Another, sounds like a girl this time, wails for ‘Mommy’. This is the US–Mexico border. These kids are in Trumpland now, and no one knows when, or if, they will see their parents again. Since April, the Trump Administration has separated almost 2000 children from their parents when the families attempted to cross into America, seeking asylum, and a better life for their children. […]

My grandmother had a hunchback. My mother made me do yoga as a kid. She would watch as I stretched into the cobra position on the kitchen tiles and wouldn’t let me watch TV until she was satisfied with the curve of my back and the length of my neck. Now, even when I don’t want to, I stand straight and stare ahead. When I walk the dogs, when I pass people I went to school with. When I’m tired. I feel my mother’s palms pressed flat across my shoulder blades and I rise like a snake.   Today, the […]