2020: My Year of Writing

It goes without saying that 2020 was a disaster and that the aftermath will continue for some time. Here in Australia we have been insanely lucky, with a Prime Minister who managed not to repeat the mistake of going on holidays in Hawaii in the middle of a climate-induced national crisis, which is kind of amazing considering that he thought it a great joke to hold up a piece of coal in parliament. However, although he has been listening to the science on Covid-19, he refuses to listen to the science on climate change, which is showing itself to be as disruptive as the pandemic. At any rate, it was largely the states who came to the fore to manage our infection rates, while ScoMo treads water.

Readers of my blog will know that the pandemic meant that I had to come home from my year of fellowships, a traumatic experience because Emirates cancelled my flight (I could deal with these things better if I had all my hearing). I was heartbroken to leave Munich, and very sad that I didn’t get to experience Edinburgh in the summer and do field work for my ecobiography. I continued my fellowships remotely, but it wasn’t the same, particularly with the folk in Scotland. At least in Munich I knew the people I was working with, but in Scotland all I had to go on was Zoom, which was alienating. The Oak Spring Gardens fellowship in Virginia was also cancelled, but Hedgebook, with whom Oak Spring Gardens partnered, have honoured the fellowship, which means I can still go and write at Whidby Island in Washington State once things are under control. That is very good of Hedgebrook, as the year has been disruptive for them too.

Despite these disasters, there have undoubtedly been some silver linings. I got to rest, which after some 10 years of working like a maniac, I really needed. Now, for the first time in ages, I feel alert, functioning and ready to write. I also got to spend time with my parents, which is important because my mum is dying of bronchiectasis. And my unhappiness across the year meant that I started applying for permanent jobs, and I am excited to have accepted a continuing position as senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of South Australia. I am currently packing and trying to meet some deadlines and catch up with people before I leave in two weeks. It is all a bit hectic, but will be good once I get there.

After returning home, I was so stressed that it took a long time to recalibrate and get my brain working again. Once I was up to speed again I worked very hard but, frustratingly, it was academic work, when I’d wanted to spend 2020 on my ecobiography. Most of these pieces were things I said yes to at the beginning of 2020, so this year I have three book chapters and at least two articles coming out. I’m trying to say no to things more often, but that isn’t going too well so far. However, below is a list of literary things I did achieve in 2020.

Publications

One of my most exciting publications for 2020 was the edition of ‘Life Writing in the Anthropocene’ for the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. It took me and my co-editor, Emeritus Professor Gillian Whitlock, three years from conception to publication to get this volume into the world. A lot of the work was innovative and exciting, particularly its focus on the lives of plants. It’s now being turned into a book, to be published by Routledge next year. I was really pleased that we could feature the work of Anna Laurent on the cover - I’ve been following Anna’s work on seeds and plants for years.

I published my first piece for The Conversation to coincide with the International Day for People with Disability. I wrote about the importance of first person narratives, or #OwnVoices stories, by people with disability.

I published a few pieces of creative non-fiction. ‘We Are All Deaf During the Pandemic’ appeared in Griffith Review’s ‘Through the Window’ series about the pandemic. It was also published in Matthew Wengert’s edited volume Our Inside Voices, which consists of pieces by Brisbane writers affected by the pandemic, and will be republished in an anthology titled Queensland Memory put together by the State Library of Queensland and the Queensland Writers Centre. 

I published another piece related to deafness in Kill Your Darlings, about how deafness shapes my relationship with music (and a big shout out to my friend Melissa Fagan for suggesting that I write about this).

In April the Rachel Carson Center published a piece I wrote on the bushfires in the Stirling Ranges for a series some fellow Australians (and one German-Irish person - now a friend & therefore an honorary Australian!) curated on the 2019/2020 bushfires. This piece was reprinted in Australian Garden History.

In August I was awarded a Sydney Review of Books Juncture fellowship for mid-career critics. I love this publication and have followed it for nearly a decade, and I love the editor, Catriona Menzies-Pike, whom I met when writing my first SRB piece on Rosa Praed. So far I’ve written two reviews, one on Katerina Bryant’s Hysteria and Kylie Maslen’s Show Me Where it Hurts, and another on Gabrielle Carey’s Only Happiness Here and Danielle Clode’s In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World. Writing about two books requires substantial attention and rewriting to work out where the synchronicities lie, but for the most part I enjoy it. Next on my list is Sophie Cunningham’s Fire, Flood and Plague and Fiona Murphy’s The Shape of Sound.

I also published a few reviews in academic journals – one on Cathy Perkins’ excellent The Shelf Life of Zora Cross in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and another on New Zealander Diane Comer’s work on the braided essay, The Braided River, in an issue of TEXT, the Australian journal of writing and writing courses.

Not everything I submit is accepted. I submitted a piece on deafness to Growing Up With a Disability in Australia that didn’t make it through, and my story on a deaf beekeeper didn’t get anywhere in the Elizabeth Jolley prize. Sometimes this simply comes down to the constraints and subjectiveness of the editor or judges (as drilled into me by a father who has entered watercolour competitions all his life), but at other times it means the story or essay isn’t working. I’ve worked out how to fix the bee story, although I’m not sure where I’m going to send it next, and I’m refurbishing the deafness piece to send out somewhere else too.

Teaching

In 2020 there was no teaching! Which meant that I got my body back on track, and now I am full of beans again. In last year’s write-up I thought that I could only teach a few days a week, due to exhaustion, however in my new role I will be teaching creative writing, which I know really well, and thus it will be less anxiety-inducing (anxiety makes me tired too). I have also resolved to get fitter, so that I have more endurance, to stop working in the evenings and weekends, and to stop fretting about my writing while I’m teaching. Easier said than done, at least at first, but I’m planning to go to go back to the hobbies I used to have – dancing, life drawing, and sewing. Keeping busy with these things will stop me from working.

From a walk at Katoomba, which was free of tourists, while on a residency at Varuna (see below).

Editing

In June 2020, my friend Amanda Niehaus (author of The Breeding Season and fellow DECRA awardee) and I were successful in our application to the Australia Council for the Arts’ Covid-19 funding to create an online journal of creative writing inspired by science, Science Write Now. This meant that I became an editor (gulp). It was a bit hairy at times, but Amanda and I are a good team, and if one of us is busy (as we are both juggling other writing projects), the other steps in. Being sociable and having quite a few flaws (for eg chronic last-minutedness), I really like working with other people, and find it makes me creative and generative.

Thus far we have published three issues: ‘Women and Science’, ‘Extinction’, and ‘Lyric, Poetic, Scientific’. We have two more planned so far, on ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Illustration and Illumination’, but we are running low on funds and will start a fundraising drive towards the end of January. If you’re interested in learning more about our journal, check it out here. You can also sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page to hear all our news.

Service

As I took a year of leave without pay, I didn’t do service in 2020 for UQ, instead I did it for my literary and academic communities. I continued to produce the newsletter for ASLEC-ANZ (somewhat sporadically, given the vagaries of the year) and helped organise our symposium, on the wonderful theme of ‘Strange/Letters’, which will be in February.

I did two virtual author interviews for my local bookstore Avid Reader, one with Jacqueline Kent on Vida, and another with Gabrielle Carey on Only Happiness Here (both wonderful books!). I was a bit nervous about these interviews, as well as the ones that I do for Science Write Now, because I detest Zoom. I can never be certain that the sound quality is good enough to hear, and I have to concentrate so hard to catch everything. However, I found a reliable captioner, which helped, and after a while I got the hang of interviewing.

I also continued with the social media for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, which meant an awful lot of tweeting during the annual conference in June. Again, as this was on Zoom, it required much concentration, and I was so knackered afterwards that I ruled out any more online conferences for the rest of the year (this included a creative writing conference at Griffith University). Sometimes you can’t do everything.

Prizes

Signing my book for the National Library of Australia (where I spent hours in the archives) at the PMLAs.

The other silver lining for 2020 was that Hearing Maud did amazingly on the prize circuit. It was shortlisted for the National Biography Award, and ended up winning the Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Biography, which was delightful. It was shortlisted for The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance (won, perhaps unsurprisingly, by a book about the history of rugby in Queensland) and, very excitingly, it was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in the Nonfiction category (more about this in another post, because it was intense!). I never dreamed, when I set out, that the book would do so well, but it is absolutely lovely to get such recognition.

In the middle of the year I was awarded a Scribe/Varuna fellowship to undertake a week-long residency at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, to work on my ecobiography. This was a gorgeous place in which to work, and I met some lovely people, but I had to go to Canberra in the middle of it for the PM’s Literary Awards which was massively disruptive, so I didn’t get as much written as I’d liked.

The Year Ahead

2021 will mean a lot of change, but I’m looking forward to it. In Semester 1 I’ll settle in and work out how the system at the University of South Australia works and what they expect in terms of teaching style. While I’m doing this, I’m going to work hard on my ecobiography, as I want to publish it in 2022 (it’s already been 20 years in the making …). I’ll put a couple of research applications together, and Amanda and I will continue to work on Science Write Now, pending our funding situation.

At the end of 2019 I said that 2020 would be about having a break. I certainly had one of those, although not in circumstances I would ever have anticipated. I’m looking forward to 2021, even though my other half and I will have to live apart (it’s like this for many academics, especially when jobs are few and far between). I’ll meet new people, see new places and think new things. It’s going to be good.

I spent a lot of time writing at Parental Unit’s this year, which was a good thing. Here is their lovely garden, invigorated by La Nina. In 2019, during the drought, Mum was trying to decide which plants she should keep and which she would have to leave to die.

2020: My Year of Reading

Last year, in that weirdest of years, I didn’t quite make it to 100 books, despite binge reading over Christmas and generally lying supine for most of the year – I was 5 short. C’est la vie.

My proportions changes slightly compared to other years - 42% Australian women writers (up from 36% in 2019, 39% in 2018); 13% Australian Male writers (pretty much the same at 14% in 2019 and 13% in 2018); 37% international women writers (up from 33% in 2019) and 8% international male writers (down from 20% in 2019 and 15% in 2018).

I finally made good on my intention to read more poetry (I read 7 titles which, while not huge, is an improvement on zero), and I got back into the habit of reading work by First Nations Writers (6 titles from Australia, and one from Canada). Of these I really liked Muninjali writer Ellen van Neerven’s Throat and Metis Nation writer Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.

The highlight of my year was reading Madeline Miller’s work. I gave my brother The Song of Achilles for Christmas a few years back, but only read it this year, burning through it at the hairdresser’s in Munich. Then I picked up Circe and fell in love with the language and Circe’s character and desires. Another favourite was Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog, about two brothers on a ranch whose relationship changes when one of them marries. The book was both subtle and masterful in its use of structure, voice and character – a very clever piece of work. My other great love was Emmanuelle Pagano’s One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, about a trans school bus driver in the mountains of France. I adored the descriptions of the dangerous, freezing environment and the protagonist Adèle’s relationships with the children whom she drove to and from school, and how her changing gender inflected her responses to her family and people around her. I loved too the localism of the book, that Adèle was drawn back to her home town despite having left it a different person.

I discovered this book through the High Noon Bookclub at Avid Reader, which also introduced me to a slew of other interesting titles, including Japanese author Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs and US author Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, which uses the motif of a family’s house to explore racism in New Orleans, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I also enjoyed a number of other books by non-Australian authors – Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Bernadine Evaristo’s Woman, Girl, Other, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love (at least until she killed off her protagonist, which was stupid decision – authors should know better these days than to indulge in the cliché of dispensing with a marginalised character) and Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary. All of these books articulate women’s lives and desires in realistic and interesting ways, although to buck the trend I also really enjoyed Daniel Mason’s collection of stories, A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, because they canvassed nineteenth century science with a very interesting style. And, because I am desperate for a dog, I loved Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, and chortled much over its sly digs at egocentric writers (the majority of us, I would say).

Of Australian authors, I laughed all the way through Gabrielle Carey’s droll Only Happiness Here and was completely sucked into Rick Morton’s account of the latent violence of rural Australian in 100 Years of Dirt, while Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron was just gorgeous. Fiona Murphy’s memoir about deafness, The Shape of Sound, is a beautifully crafted book coming out at the end of March. Reading it was like holding a mirror up to myself and seeing things that I hadn’t seen before. I’m writing a review of this for the Sydney Review of Books, so you can read my thoughts on the book in a few months. And after listening to an interview by Brigitta Olubus, who is writing a biography of Shirley Hazzard, I picked up Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon and loved the sparse, evocative writing and setting, though that also has much to do with my enduring love affair with Italy.

I found that many works that critics fawned over didn’t do much for me at all – Where the Crawdads Sing (cheesy), Overstory (Powers didn’t have control over his material), Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (anthropocentric and inconsistent) and Trent Dalton’s All Our Shimmering Skies (shallow characters and a ludicrous plot, although I did enjoy his descriptions of the natural world).

This year I will pootle on as usual, although I do need to read more writing about the environment to get a sense of how to place my next book, my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. While I know how I will write it (with an emphasis on plants and their agency), I need to get a stronger sense of what is happening in the field, and how it is changing. And I am still planning (for the Xth year in a row) to get to a book of 19th C fiction!

Australian Women Writers

1.     The Shape of Sound, Fiona Murphy

2.     Fiona Wood: Inventor of Spray-On Skin, Christy Burne

3.     Georgia Ward-Fear: Reptile Biologist and Explorer, Claire Saxby

4.     Munjed Al Muderis: From Refugee to Surgical Inventor, Dianne Wolfer

5.     In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World, Danielle Clode

6.     Nobody, Nowhere, Donna Williams

7.     Only Happiness Here, Gabrielle Carey

8.     Vida, Jacqueline Kent

9.     Tell Me Where it Hurts, Kylie Maslen

10.  Hysteria, Katerina Bryant

11.  Night Fishing, Vicki Hastrich

12.  Darkfall, Indigo Perry

13.  Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin

14.  The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, Cathy Perkins

15.  Accidental Feminists, Jane Caro

16.  None Shall Sleep, Ellie Marney

17.  Bloody Blockies, Rosie Abbott

18.  Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings

19.  The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard

20.  Where the Fruit Falls, Karen Wyld

21.  Dreams They Forgot, Emma Ashmere

22.  Ghost Bird, Lisa Fuller

23.  Future Girl, Asphyxia

24.  Our Shadows, Gail Jones

25.  Dark Harvest, Cat Sparks

26.  Ordinary Matter, Laura Elvery

27.  The Yield, Tara June Winch

28.  The Salt Madonna, Catherine Noske

29.  There Was Still Love, Favel Parrett

30.  The Animals in that Country, Laura Jean McKay

31.  Stone Sky Gold Mountain, Mirandi Riwoe

32.  Almost a Mirror, Kirsten Krauth

33.  Fauna, Donna Mazza

34.  Ask Me About the Future, Rebecca Jessen

35.  Breathing Plural, Em König

36.  Lake, Claire Nashar

37.  Throat, Ellen van Neerven

38.  Ruby Moonlight, Ali Cobby Eckermann

39.  Autobiochemistry, Tricia Dearborn

40.  Nganajungu Yagu, Charmaine Papertalk Green

Australian Male Writers

41.  All Our Shimmering Skies, Trent Dalton

42.  Flames, Robbie Arnott

43.  Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, Benjamin Dodds

44.  The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan

45.  The Burning Island, Jock Serong

46.  One Hundred Years of Dirt, Rick Morton

47.  Our Inside Voices, Matthew Wengert (ed.)

48.  Mammoth, Chris Flynn

49.  The Rain Heron, Robbie Arnott

50.  Pig City, Andrew Stafford

51.  Ghost Species, James Bradley

52.  The Windy Season, Sam Carmody

Non-Australian Women Writers

53.  The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

54.  A Tall History of Sugar, Curdella Forbes

55.  Always Coming Home, Ursula le Guin

56.  Three Women, Lisa Taddeo

57.  Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

58.  One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, Emmanuelle Pagano

59.  Love After Love, Ingrid Persaud

60.  Woman, Girl, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

61.  Inferno, Catherine Cho

62.  Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss

63.  The Braided River, Diane Comer

64.  The Illness Lesson, Claire Beams

65.  The Dutch House, Ann Patchett

66.  The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline

67.  Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala

68.  Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami

69.  Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

70.  Flash Count Diary, Darcey Steinke

71.  Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

72.  The Yellow House, Sarah Broom

73.  Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica Lee

74.  The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

75.  Circe, Madeline Miller

76.  The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

77.  Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

78.  Just Kids, Patti Smith

79.  Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler

80.  A God in Every Stone, Kamila Shamsie

81.  Stay with Me, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

82.  Sudden Traveller, Sarah Hall

83.  My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Otessa Mossfegh

84.  Dreamquake, Elizabeth Knox

85.  Dreamhunter, Elizabeth Knox

86.  Tanglewreck, Jeanette Winterson

87.  War, So Much War, Merce Rodoreda

Non-Australian Male Writers

88.  A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, Daniel Mason

89.  Overstorey, Richard Powers

90.  On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

91.  The Power of the Dog, Thomas Savage

92.  Pauliska, or, Modern Perversity, Jacques-Antoine Révéroni

93.  Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman

94.  Blindsight, Peter Watts

95.  The Plague, Albert Camus