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 for my thesis, and I now wonder whether the entire thing needs to be scrapped. I have to start thinking about what this crisis could/would/will/should mean for a project that offers a prediction of the working lives of women in a future Melbourne; a project that is now either more relevant than ever or completely insignificant. What insights can a dystopian novel offer to a world that is collectively in the midst of a disaster? A disaster where we are unsure what the ‘end point’ will look like. The ‘new normal’.