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 […]

The very last thing I read was a US magazine piece online about 9-11, because I was chasing a curious and allegedly true fact circulating the internet that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ by the Bee Gees was playing in a Twin Towers foyer when the planes hit. It turned out to be half-true—it was a muzak version. But still. ‘…and you come to me on a summer breeze, keep me warm in your love then you softly leave…’ The song is now rendered differently, as if it’s gone through some sort of machine that has made it more haunting than […]

Reading Susan Howe On the large table that used to be a tree I’ve set out the Susan Howe books I’ve been most thrilled by over the last four years. My engagement with her work came late. It began in 2015 when I read her essay Vagrancy In The Park during my lunch hour at the legendary and now defunct Barwon Booksellers in Geelong. Those lunch hours were not so much breaks from work as augmentations of what we in the bookshop were already immersed in: words, lines, sentences, paper, bindings, endpapers, boards and covers, the way the polytemporal community […]

I never read on trips, though I bring books and buy books. We had SRS by Earl Sweatshirt playing, which had just come out overnight, sitting on a train from Akihabara to Shinjuku. During the mornings in Japan I was overly concerned with my skin. It was still recovering from the acne I was hit with after my trip to California at the start of the year. On that first trip I brought home two books: from Amoeba, the first edition of Slaughterhouse Five for my brother, and then a poetry project called Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno […]

Last year I had the happy experience of going under general anaesthetic and coming out of it again. ‘Won’t be long,’ the orderly said, wheeling me into a dimly lit space resembling a basement, ‘they’re just finishing up on the patient before you.’ Left alone in the sterile gloom, I hauled myself onto my elbows to take note of my surroundings. The room seemed of perfectly square dimensions and covered wall-to-wall with large pale tiles, bare but for a few sinks, trolleys and storage shelves. Concluding that there was nothing interesting enough to justify the exertion of propping myself up, […]

Grammar and temporality. That’s what comes to mind when I consider this blogpost’s brief. The present continuous—the am-reading—implies some kind of vague but unspecified reach. If we’re being pedantic about things, right now, as I write this, I’m only reading my own words as they begin to accumulate on a screen. This very curtailed present, if it amounted to the extent of my graspable stretch, would be too short to make this blogpost interesting. It wouldn’t—come to think of it—be enough to make a person, or a life, interesting. Curtailed presents are political, as I see it. For a while […]

The city is shrinking now. Gaining some fiction of cohesion as it recedes into contours and right-angles, pastel-washed slopes, a matrix of shipyards. The brutalist clock tower on the port strikes the hour with an unexpected ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ jingle. I am leaving Piraeus harbour on a ferry at sunset, staking out a seat by the window, attempting to wedge my overstuffed cabin-sized suitcase somewhere out of the path of the (apparently all) more compact and more composed passengers onboard. This is typically how I travel—outsized and overburdened, with books and clothes and vitamins, whatever the mode of transport. […]

Two things have happened to me in the last six months that have affected my reading: I finished a novel that was acquired by a publisher, and my mother died. I am now working on edits of the novel and so, at the moment, ‘what I’m reading’ seems even more pointedly about my own work than usual. At the same time, and while I come to terms with doing everything for the first time in a world that no longer contains my mother, ‘what I’m reading’ feels even more pointedly about her too. The first people to read my manuscript […]

Like many, most, who contribute to this blog, I read professionally, which is to say, I read a lot of emails. Things I’m not reading: political coverage (just for a bit longer, please, a bit longer). Twitter, when I can possibly avoid it (I could certainly avoid it more). Traffic signs (I cross where I please). My open tabs (to be closed en masse, unread, in a cleansing end-of-year ritual). Downloaded early-childhood-development PDFs (kids grow quick; who can keep up?). Not as many books as you might think. More, things on the way to being books: manuscripts, proposals, inchoate musings. […]

One of my greatest joys whenever I finish writing a book is re-entering the zone of whimsical, spontaneous reading. While I am at work on a long manuscript, I am always careful about what I read, particularly during the first draft. I think of this as going on a reading diet—mainly to prevent harm coming my way, to protect my budding voice. For instance, although I love Jonathan Franzen’s fiction, reading his novels when I write is dangerous for me, because they are thick on dialogue and thin on mood, whereas my ratio is the reverse. Franzen’s powerful voice can […]