Livo is dipped in a vat of Aeroplane Orange Mango jelly. The sky between the high-rise apartments housing yups coming in from the east and the little businesses owned by ‘the ethnics’ is orange. I have a good view of it all. I work on the fifth floor of an office building near the library and I sit right near metre-long glass windows. In the office, I have to use words like ‘ethnic’, ‘diverse’ and ‘multicultural communities’ just to keep my job, even if those words just lump poor brown people together and capitalise on brownness. But when I’m out […]

When my American partner is overseas, her side of the bed tends to become a bureau, an odds-and-ends bowl, and a library (sometimes also a snack cupboard). Books press against me like a body pillow, not because it’s comfortable, but because my reading habits change. They keep stranger and longer hours. They ask for greater, perhaps distracting discontinuity between genres and styles and narratives. They ask, in short, for a lot of courtesies, unsustainable courtesies, and I grant them. Omar Sakr’s first poetry collection, These Wild Houses, impressed me with the range and vulnerability of its lyric voice—at times prophetic, […]

I DON’T READ MUCH.   A friend sent me a book SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE   The Art of Edvard Munch   Knausgaard (the writer) says… ‘Munch was around 50 years old when he painted the cabbage field. There is a longing in this painting…a longing to disappear and become one with the world’. I got to page 35, I passed the pain barrier, in other words, I’m hooked. A friend sent me HEIDE Pi.O.   Pi.O. is a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene. He was born in Greece and brought up in Fitzroy. I met Pi.O. at a […]

‘This isn’t a novel, this is a film. A film is life.’ Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard   ‘I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge.’ ‘The Mystery Box’ (2007), J. J. Abrams   ‘How Can We Finish a Book, a Dream? … What happens at the end of a text?’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993), Hélène Cixous   Last night I dreamt I was touring with a vaporwave[1] musician. In the dream, I was a VJ, or more specifically my job/reason for being on this tour was to perform […]

My father taught me how to read English long before any schoolteacher could. While I was too young to remember the process and how it was that I came to read, my mother tells me that most days during my toddler years Dad would prop me up on his thigh, and with newspaper in hand, he’d point to the various newspaper headlines; slowly reading both letters and words aloud, before encouraging me to echo his voice and actions. I can imagine my father’s Black hand and his utilitarian index finger pointing to the bold letters on the crisp and creamy […]

‘The [Lockean] premise that as embodied persons we possess ourselves.’ ‘We can work “it”, we can neglect “it”, because “it” is ours to control.’ —Ed Cohen, ‘A Body Worth Having’.   I told the student dentist about my tooth hurting and my strategies for eating. He told me he could see me in 2020, or I could go to Emergency and wait for a day, or two, and pay an unspecified amount. –I’m going to Vietnam, I said. I told him the plan, the one that I had made before Public Dental called me and let me in. I told […]

I have a rare skin disease that can be only cured with amphetamines, sunlight and seawater. This is the only thing I have in common with Kim Kardashian-West. I did not inherit it from anybody. I created it on my own. The doctor said I need to eat the Sun and I need to eat a fish and I need to do one thing at a time. I like to do one thousand things because I am afraid of boredom and death. The disease painted all my limbs iridescent red strawberry fields. Every part of my body except my face […]

Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah)—Tom Nicholson   I’ve been reading Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah), a book written by the Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson. Via spare prose, research and archival photographs, it details a journey the author took to Jerusalem in 2012. But this trip was not a holiday. Nicholson traced and researched the Ma’man Allah cemetery, an important and sacred site in both ancient and recent history. One notable feature of the graveyard that catches Nicholson’s eye is the flora: 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensi, or River Red Gums. It’s hard to imagine any Australian travelling there and not being taken aback by […]

I woke up in late January, reached for my phone and opened Instagram. I saw Gemma Chan in a pale pink, one-shouldered dress. The caption read: Last looks… My heart sank. The dress signalled the end of awards season, but in other ways, it was only the beginning.   *   It all started with the Golden Globes and that dress: petrol blue, shorts, pockets, train, halter-bow neck, plunging back, pockets. Gemma wears matching heels, red lipstick and diamond earrings. Her hair is swept into a low bun. I spend weeks reading interviews, red carpet recaps and exclusive behind-the-scenes. Gemma’s […]

Recently I ran my first short fiction workshop. Over the months leading up to the event most of my spare mental time—in the shower, walking to the train station, operating a spotlight at my job—was spent remembering and rewording advice I’d received from other writers in similar workshops. And, of course, some of that time was spent trying to quash, or allowing myself to wallow in, imposter syndrome. So often a writer’s self-doubt—or self-flagellation—is not only linked to the quality of her own work, but to the quality of what she has or hasn’t read (as so many writers have […]

Moby-Dick—strange portents and leviathan obsessions I’ve been obsessed with whales since I moved to Newcastle, Australia, from Sydney two years ago. The day after moving I walked to Strzelecki Lookout, my favourite place in Newcastle, high above the sea. It was the first day of September—one of those clear Spring days when the wind is cold but the sun is shining. Just off the cliff, in the wide expanse of blue, I spotted a puff of white like a small cloud. If I’d been a whaler I might have cried out: ‘Whale Ho! Thar she blows!’ Instead I laughed with […]