When I recall my past experiences, it’s unsurprising that the memories of my early-age migration come to mind. I was five years old when my family moved permanently from China to Hurstville—a predominantly Chinese suburb in the south of Sydney. In spite of how jarring it was to encounter different physical surroundings and social practices in Australia, the community here was also reminiscent of China. I was surrounded by faces like mine everywhere I went; by people speaking a variety of Chinese dialects; by a primary school population, which was majority Chinese and from a non-English speaking background. At that […]

It is mid-afternoon on a Tuesday in May, and I am sitting at my desk in my study, writing. My study is a tiny space on a mezzanine floor in a one-bedroom apartment. There are double-height windows at one end of the apartment, which are also the only windows into the home. The apartment is on the ground floor of the block, and set into the side of a slope. From where I am sitting, I have a view of the red-brick back of the building next door, its rooftop dotted with laundry. I can also see the crowns of […]

In truth, self-isolation has been more of a challenge than I would have anticipated. As a classic Myers Briggs introvert, I was convinced that this would be a cinch, giving me time to find a home for my novels and to polish up all the half-baked short stories I’ve never gotten around to revisiting. But more often than not, I’ve simply wanted to lie on the sofa and read. I’ve been thinking a lot about representations of isolation in literature. What is the intersection between isolation, solitude, aloneness and loneliness? And how is this depicted in books? What wisdom or […]

Over the summer, while watching apocalyptic scenes of Australia burning, I did what I was beginning to think I might never actually do—submit my PhD thesis. A week later I started a sessional teaching job, which three weeks after that migrated online due to an apocalyptic global pandemic. One of the subjects I’m teaching is on Decadent literature, which considers not only Decadence, but also a host of related ‘isms’ (aestheticism, symbolism, naturalism, etc.) of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle. As a result, for the past nine weeks I have inhabited, in my reading and non-reading lives, two distinct and […]

My housemate plants sunflowers for the summer and they all bloom in a row and all die in a row and then a few months later, in late autumn, a single sunflower shoots up all alone. One day, late May, he finds me in the kitchen, spilling an early coffee. He gestures outside, points down low.   Here is the last one, he says.   We watch it wobble in the wind, unseasonably warm.   *   It begins maybe like this. In fourth grade, when my father is diagnosed with cancer, something pulls me inward, holds me in place. […]

I read between stretches of work, and I also love to procrastinate by reading. I just read The Walk by Robert Walser, which, after a gloomy day, had a soothing affect on me, and felt like an afternoon-long procrastinator’s daydream—beguiling and infuriating—full of surprises. With regards to my reading, I have no system so I’m sharing a few things here I’ve read this year in no order. Earlier this year I read Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. It’s a school text in Russia but I’d never gotten around to reading it. Some time later I had a dream where Pushkin was […]

When I was twelve years younger and searching for the right combination of words by which to define myself, I used to rip poems out of library books and Blu-Tack them to objects and surfaces in my daily orbit. Tacked to my laptop was a quote by Konstantin Batyushkov, taken from a poem by David Kirby:   O heart’s memory, you are stronger than reason’s sad memory   And on the inside of a desk drawer, immediately visible whenever the drawer was opened, was a tanka by Yosano Akiko:   writes poetry that hand of hers now stealing grapes her […]

I am reading male writers now. It’s for research. Cis men who are gay, bi, queer or straight. I’m trying to understand what literature can tell me about the performance of masculinity, or rather, how men think they are performing masculinity. On Twitter I love to read tweets by Stephen Pham and Khalid Warsame. They take the excruciating minutiae of their daily experiences and turn it into beautiful prose exercises. Khalid once tweeted about all his memories of rabbits. Stephen moves seamlessly from growing plants to the injustices of capitalism. They write about driving, drawing lessons and leisure. They extrapolate […]

1. Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility by Jonathan Goldberg It arrived on Twitter: a screenshot of a note from the longstanding gay bookstore around the corner from my house, offering a 20% full store discount, making a request for the neighbourhood and the world to visit, browse and purchase, to help keep them open during this difficult time. Though I’ve passed it many times, I don’t think I’d ever bought anything from here—the shopfront display I mostly remember for its Bel Ami and Sean Cody calendars—but somehow I felt the need to support. I have a complicated relationship with gay […]

I love talking about ideas. It’s a huge part of what makes academia a good place to be. There are so many demands on our time in the neoliberal university, from meeting increasingly strict publishing standards to rising class sizes, that the very thing we love gets pushed to the sidelines. I have long wanted more space for ideas, outside the formality of the conference, and what better way than to build a conversation around reading? In academia, our writing is always part of a conversation, built on a longer trajectory of scholarship, and extending that work outwards, to new […]