The first time Victoria goes into lockdown, our house is taken over by a person-like creature that is halfway hatched from what seems to be a chicken egg. It has a peach-and-cream skin tone and bright blue eyes. It yells things like ‘whey-hey-hey!’ and ‘niiiiiiiiiice work!’ over the pokies-esque sound of virtual coin-eggs accruing in a virtual money bag. As part of learning from home, my six-year-old child, who is in Prep, has been given an account for the online literacy program ABC Reading Eggs. I’m reading the website homepage: Learning to read can be easy and fun! … Children […]

The New Yorker They arrive in whacking great bundles. Each time, I think I should have remembered this from the last time I subscribed. A weekly magazine, coming from the other side of the world in a time of crippled supply lines and bigger priorities. Of course they won’t arrive in an orderly procession on a Tuesday, or a Friday, or whatever. I only read magazines over breakfast, and no, there is no good reason for this. But it means they lie about the kitchen in various stages of digestion, from unmarked, to folded-over, to coffee-stained and crumpled. If one […]

‘Isabelle is medically well and there are no concerns regarding her plans to conceive.’ ‘Isabelle is yet to experience any significant pain or bleeding.’ ‘I am still very optimistic for Isabelle’s chances of having a healthy pregnancy given that she and her partner have one live-born child.’ ‘Just a quick note to update you that Isy’s NIPT returned a high-risk result for T21.’ ‘It’s certainly pleasing to see her again so soon after her previous miscarriage.’ ‘She had an ultrasound that demonstrated the miscarriage was complete.’ ‘Suction curettage for missed abortion.’ ‘I’ll see mum and baby at the six-week postnatal […]

I wish I could say straight-up what I’ve been reading. I keep a record of titles completed. But I hesitate because, these last few months, I’m not sure how much of my habit of looking at words meets the threshold for ‘reading’. For the most part, it hasn’t summoned from me the quality of attention to make the reading material stick. Reasons? It’s been 12 weeks since I began going over the early proofs of my new novel, line by line, making adjustments. It’s been six weeks since I started again on the next-to-final proofs, and a fortnight or so […]

I’ve been finding elegant ways to procrastinate this year. Several months ago, I arranged my bookshelf according to read and unread. In a particularly sociopathic gesture, I grouped the read books by colour. A surprising number of covers are bright orange, even if you discount all the popular Penguins. The unread books huddle at the top of the bookshelf, waiting to be chosen. I look around for a way to separate the two sections. The box containing my mother’s ashes fits perfectly. It marks the threshold between past and future. As the unread pile grows smaller on the shelf, the […]

I woke up in the middle of the night feeling distressed—the book I’d been reading, The White Girl by Tony Birch, lay open on the bedside table. Odette Brown, an Indigenous woman and the protagonist of the story, must try and protect her granddaughter from the welfare authorities that threaten to remove her. Odette is no stranger to the perils of living under white rule; she has lived on the fringes of society all her life. Tony Birch’s story is set in post-war Australia, when Indigenous people were treated as less than human. Were controlled by the state. Not counted […]

A Tasmanian beach in February 2018. Unprompted, a woman I barely know recites Seamus Heaney’s Postscript to me as we stand on the sand; bodies, hair wet after a swim. It is a grey day, not cold but not warm either, the wind pushing the water towards the sand. At the dinner table a week later, she cries as she reads excerpts of her dead daughter’s diary to me. The last pieces she has of her. Her grief hides from her like the spiders in her study, creeping out from behind blinds, from under paper until you can see all […]

As soon as I began to think of what I might write here, the phrase for a long time came to me. I always have numerous books on the go, ‘open’ all at once and sometimes for a long time. This is, of course, the opening of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I imagine a thin, shimmering abstract-expressionist veil of paint between have read or reading or no longer reading or about to read. The first time I read Swann’s Way was in India in 2006, but I’ve been slowly moving through the original translation by Moncrieff and the […]

[pdf-embedder url=”https://meanjin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Dave-Drayton-WIR.pdf” title=”Dave Drayton ‘What I’m Reading’”]     Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of E, UIO, A: a feghoot (Container), A pet per ably-faced kid (Stale Objects dePress), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).

‘the fact that who needs heart shapes getting in the way all the time’ —Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann   She is lying in bed in the afternoon, reading a big thick book with lots of pages. The book prompts her to have a thought. Maybe if I have a child, I’ll make sure to take care of the both of us? When a thought is a question, is it still a thought? The book is red and blue and so hefty she used it to press down the collar on one of her shirts a week ago, because she doesn’t […]

I’m trying to find the relevance of my PhD project again. I’m sitting in the room where my editing job was made redundant over a Zoom meeting, and I’m watching the time in the corner of my screen. A million years ago, it was March. Yesterday, it was the middle of April and then somehow, somewhere, May and June happened. Finding yourself in the centre of a dystopia while concurrently trying to write a dystopia is an odd thing. The situation is both mundane and frightening. Last year, I had spent the month of November drafting an entire creative manuscript […]

Rereading Beloved Children’s Books in the Time of Coronavirus   One of the greatest joys of becoming a parent was the opportunity to share my favourite children’s books with my daughters. When my firstborn, Tiferet, was just a few days old and I was up at night nursing her by the moonlight, I read her all of my favourite childhood books in instalments—just so she could get used to the sound of my voice. By the time Tiferet was three months old, she had already ‘read’ L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and […]