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.

2019: My Year of Writing

2019 was a much better year than 2018. I published my third book and I only got the flu once, rather than every few weeks. But geez, it was still a hectic year. Only now, in Germany, experiencing my first normal weekend in god knows how long (I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a deadline to meet), can I see how insane my life has been for the last few years. I guess it’s akin to how you don’t realise you are depressed until you’re better. Here’s a list of what happened during the year.

Publications

The highlight of my year was the publication of Hearing Maud, my hybrid memoir, after 15 years of work (I left for London to start my research in 2004). I was in Perth when it came out, and when my copies were delivered to me at the hotel I burst into tears, because I never thought the book would be finished. It took so long to get the voice right, and to harmonise the elements of research and memoir, that it was amazing that the copy in my hands was actually real. A hectic publicity schedule followed, which I will blog about as a record, & as an exemplar of what writers need to do to get their work out these days, while trying to also hold down their day jobs (and, in my case as always, deal with a disability).

I published three academic essays: a chapter on eco-memoir, eco-austerity and Isabella Tree’s Wilding in The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times; another chapter on deaf actor Emmanuelle Laborit’s autobiography The Cry of the Gull in Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and other Personal Narratives; and an essay on literature and plant blindness in Australian Humanities Review. I also published a review (on Melissa Fagan’s What Will Be Worn in the Queensland Review) and a piece of creative nonfiction on Kafka and the NDIS, which was published in a special issue on Disability in Westerly. With my colleague at University of the Sunshine Coast, Clare Archer-Lean, I edited a special issue on the interface between science and literature for the Australian Humanities Review (hence the plant blindness essay). This was my first experience of editing, although I’ve also been working on another issue due to come out shortly in Auto/Biography Studies, on Life Writing in the Anthropocene, and was pleased to find that I am accomplished at cat herding, because there are other volumes I’d like to edit.

Again, I didn’t publish any fiction, although I did manage to write and submit some, and I was successful in my application for a Griffith Review fellowship, which means that my part of my mermaid book will be published in the journal next year. The fellowship also means that I can go to the Iceland Writers Retreat to work on the book some more, which will be very helpful as I’m struggling with the plot.

Because of my perennial exhaustion from deafness, book publicity, and teaching, I missed pretty much every single deadline last year. I also wrote an essay on disability and Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Haxby’s Circus that was rejected, because I was too tired to do a decent job (my academic work is not often rejected; my creative work is). So in 2020 I have resolved to be less tired and to hand things in on time. Thus far I have managed this with about half of my January deadlines, so, I’m getting there.

Teaching

In Semester One I convened the Australian Literature course as a stop-gap between one staff member leaving and another starting. This was the first time I had convened a third year course (and a large one at that). It was bloody exhausting and, at times, terrifying. I was extremely grateful to my two tutors, James Halford & Kirril Shields, who each gave a guest lecture and were really good at their job. The timetabling was terrible, though, so I delivered the lecture & two tutorials on the same day, and there wasn’t much left of me for students in the final tutorial, though I did my best. However, having convened a big course once makes it easier for the next time, although I swear my telomeres get shorter each time I teach.

Semester Two was a bit easier in that I was tutoring, but that meant teaching three literature classes in one day (two back-to-back) and one creative writing class the next day. That took too much out of me and I don’t know how good a teacher I was for my students – the office failed to file the forms for my teaching evaluations so I have no idea. However I just loved the creative writing class – I know the craft so well that I can teach it in my sleep, and my students were good writers and they tried hard.

I also had a revelation last week, after watching a video with my colleagues at the Rachel Carson Center on Donna Haraway. In that video, Haraway said that she found it hard to think while she was teaching, and I realised that even the exceptionally bright, able-bodied people cannot write and teach at the same time, so no wonder I’ve been finding it difficult. It isn’t just having a 75% hearing loss that’s a problem (though this is obviously a major factor), it’s my desperation to write as well, and my frustration and despair when I can’t find the time or energy to do this just compounds things.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal, of late, now that I actually have energy for reflection. I’ve realised that, because of my deafness, I can’t physically work for more than a few days a week. I have one more year left of my contract when I return to Australia and although I can stick it out for another year, after that I think I’ll have to go back to the uncertainty of tutoring. Which means, in essence, that I will be penalised for my disability, but I can’t see any other way around it, at least not in these neoliberal times which demand their pound of flesh, even from a body that is disabled.

Outside of work I also, with my friend and fellow writer Amanda Niehaus, presented a workshop on ‘Writing to Save the Planet’ for the Queensland Writers Centre in which we discussed how to write about climate change through fiction and nonfiction. We had fun doing this and we work well together, so I hope we can present it again.

Amanda & I at our workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre.

 Conferences

I presented papers at three excellent conferences last year, and delivered a keynote at a fourth. The first conference was the bi-annual Association for the Study of Environment & Culture (Aust & NZ chapter), held at UNE around the theme of ‘Grounding Story.’ I always like going to UNE because I know their hearing systems work and there are always friendly and interesting people to meet and catch up with. I blogged about the conference here.

The second was the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Perth in July, the theme of which was ‘Dirt.’ I presented with two other writers with disability (Amanda Tink and Kit Kavanagh-Ryan) on eco-crip, or the intersection between disability studies and the environmental humanities (I focussed on Alan Marshall’s  I Can Jump Puddles.) My paper was a usual last-minute rush job but I think I got most of my ideas across. I also launched the Writing Disability in Australia dataset, which I put together with the help of the amazing people at Austlit, and had my first launch for Hearing Maud at this conference. It was a wonderful place to start my book publicity because I’ve presented on Rosa Praed at several ASAL conferences.

Kit, Amanda and I are meeting again to present on another panel on disability at this year’s ASAL conference in Cairns, looking at the intersection of writing, literature and disability. I have to say, after so many days below 5 degrees, I am looking forward to going to the beach!

In October I was back at UNE to present on a conference on compassion (I talked about disability and empathy) & then again at the end of November to give a keynote on Judith Wright, poetry and deafness for a symposium on ecopoesis organised by my botanical colleague John Ryan.

Driving to Armidale in the middle of drought & bushfire for the conference on compassion at UNE. We had no idea of how bad the summer would get. Our pollies sure could do with some compassion, given that a billion animals and millions of trees died.

Mentoring

Early in the year I was approach to be a mentor for a young deaf writer through WestWords. This was one of the absolute highlights of my year, as I got to work with Fiona Murphy, who is a brilliant essayist – she won the Overland Fair Australia prize for her essay ‘Reasonable Adjustments’ (which I encourage everyone to read because it describes how discrimination impacts on deaf people’s employment - I related to much of it) and now has a contract to publish a collection of essays. On a personal level, it was amazing to communicate with another deaf person and to share notes on different areas – while I focus on deaf literature and history, Fiona focuses on research relating to health. I’m so glad that Fiona has found her wings & is now flying.

Service

In academic parlance, ‘service’ is what you give to your school and scholarly community to help keep things running (for eg attending meetings, reviewing articles & theses, serving on committees), but I also see it as also contributing to our literary community, particularly as there isn’t much of a division between my academic and creative writing. So as well as the obligatory reviewing of papers & theses, my job was to be the Integrity Officer, which meant having conversations with students who had plagiarised. I found it quite disruptive as there were so many of them and they usually met me during my prime writing/research time (in the morning), so I should have scheduled things a bit better. I also ran a Literature and Environment reading group, which was fun, and judged the WordPlay Microfiction competition for the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I also produced the newsletters for ASLEC-ANZ and co-ordinated a social media team for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Beyond this, I did my final year as diversity editor for the Australian Women Writers Challenge and have now handed the baton over, as I have been doing the role for too long (seven years!) and it needed some new energy.

A pall of smoke from the fires.

 The Year Ahead

2020 is about getting my life back. I’ve stopped pushing myself, I’m trying to get fit again (a very slow process), I’m resting and reading more, and I’m only doing things that I want to do rather than because I think it’s going to get me another job (because, let’s face it, there are no jobs in academia, let alone part-time jobs). I’m focussing on writing fiction again because I think that, particularly after the horrendous summer of fire, this is a more effective way of educating people about the environment than writing scholarly articles that only three people will read.

I will be at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment for another three months (I’m writing a book on the genre of ecobiography), then I will decamp to Edinburgh and Virginia in the US to work on my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. I miss my partner painfully and perennially, but this time away is critical to my work and health, so I just endure that part of it. By the time I get back to Australia, I hope to be full of beans again.

Obligatory favourite flower (peonies) shot.

Silencing: The Decision to Close UWA Publishing

This is a letter I have written to Professor Tayyeb Shah, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, regarding his decision to close University of Western Australia Publishing. If you, too, don’t wish the press to close, I urge you to sign the Change.org petition and to express your concerns to tayyeb[dot]shah[at]uwa[dot]edu[dot]au.

Dear Professor Shah,

I am writing in relation to your recent decision to close University of Western Australia publishing. I am an academic and award-wining writer (I was shortlisted, among other prizes, for the WA Premier’s award), and my third book, Hearing Maud, was recently published by UWAP. This book is a hybrid memoir about my experiences of deafness, the history of deaf education, and the life of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed.

As a person who has been deaf since age 4, my life depends on watching watching how people communicate. I notice those who listen, those whose voices are amplified, and those who are muted. The decision to silence a press of 85 years standing, at the helm of which is a publisher who is innovative, committed to creating Australian literature of quality and who takes risks (which many major publishers are not nimble enough to do), signals to me that you do not value the way in which this press elevate the voices of several hundred writers (many of them Western Australian, including Noongar writers as well as Miles Franklin award winners) and their significant contributions to Australia’s literary landscape.

In 2016 I began an ARC DECRA at the University of Queensland to write an ecobiography of Western Australia's first female scientist, Georgiana Molloy. Although three biographies have been written on Molloy, they have not closely examined the role of science and writing in her life, nor the significant impact which the remarkable flora of south-west Western Australia had on her sense of self. Molloy is another example of a woman who, like my deaf research subject Maud Praed, was not allowed to speak as she wished because the culture into which she was born did not value her voice. Although she was a writer and a scientist, Molloy could not publish scientific papers because of her gender, and her literary and scientific skill was confined to her letters.

I have been researching this book for two decades and was planning, when it is completed next year, to submit my manuscript to UWA Publishing. This is a scholarly book, but is written in a way that makes it easy to be read by a general audience. If UWA Publishing is disbanded, I will be required to find an east coast-based publisher. As a writer I have heard often how difficult it is for Western Australian stories to find audiences in the east, and shutting down the press will, no doubt, marginalise these stories further.

The associations between deafness and colonisation are well-established (historically, deaf people have been discouraged from using their language, sign, and have been assimilated into hearing culture), and I cannot help but see the same pattern appearing in your decision to shut down UWA Publishing and the voices of its authors, particularly given the context of your relocation from Britain to Australia. I urge you to listen to those who have signed the recent Change.org petition (now approaching 7500 signatures), and statements from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the International Australian Studies Association, Westerly journal and innumerable high profile scholars and writers, and to reconsider this appalling decision.

Jessica White.

Hearing Maud

After nearly 15 years, my hybrid memoir is finally coming into being. We have a cover, typesetting is underway, and you can pre-order a copy (the book will be released in July). Here’s the blurb:

Hearing Maud: a Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.

I still don’t think it will feel real, though, until I have the physical copy in my hand. That will happen soon!

I’ll have a launch in Brisbane, and will be speaking at the Byron Bay Writers Festival - I’ll put the deets on my News & Events page as they become available.

Grounding Story

True to form, I’m writing an update for an event months after it occurred – this time it’s the Aust & NZ chapter of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (ASLEC-ANZ) biennial conference, which was held at the University of New England in Armidale. This was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, rivalling another which was also held at UNE – the 2015 Association for the Study of Australian Literature on ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. Maybe it’s because I can stay at Parental Unit’s & therefore the anxiety of conferences is mitigated, and/or maybe it’s because the folk are UNE are really nice. Below are my notes from the conference, which come with the caveat that there might be some errors because I am never 100% sure that I can hear everything properly.

The conference was from Wednesday 13th – Friday 15th February. I caught the tiny plane down from Brisbane, which I loathe because it gives me claustrophobia and the vibrations from the engine rattle through my body, but the 1980s safety card never fails to put a smile on my dial (no Gone with the Wind! It’s outrageous).

 On Wednesday morning (and every morning thereafter) Parental Unit kindly stopped by Seesaw Coffee to service my caffeine addiction then drove me to the uni, though the organising committee also helpfully arranged car pools, bus & coffee for other participants from the Goldfish Bowl. Once I was dropped off at UNE, I located other friendly environmental folk plus my lanyard, which was the best lanyard I’ve ever had because it was compostable.

Uncle Colin Ahoy generously welcomed us to Anaiwan Country, and the Dean of HASSE, Professor Michael Whitmore, welcomed us to UNE. Then there was a brilliant plenary panel from Carolyn Briggs, Gabi Briggs & Callum Clayton-Dixon, chaired by Kate Wright, on the Reclaiming Anaiwan Language project. Here’s a vid which explains the work which the group is doing.

 As Callum pointed out, the reclamation project does not rely upon government funding to survive or progress, and nor is the group willing to use government funds, given that the government is a legacy of (and perpetuates) colonial rule, so donations are welcome. This is a really important project, as language comes from Country, as Callum explained, so the restoration of language goes some way to restoring Country. He also described how he had been out in the area a while before and it was like a dystopia, given the drought, tree clearing and the hardening of the ground from sheep’s hooves, which made me think of Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius, which I set as a text in my Oz Lit course.

One of the great things about placing this panel first in the conference was that it acknowledged Aboriginal custodianship and set the tone for the rest of the proceedings. As one conference member noted, the Acknowledgment of Country at the beginning of each subsequent paper was like a pulse through the conference.

After that was the first trio of papers, of which I was a part. I presented an update on my 2014 article on climate fiction & referenced James Bradley’s Clade and Jennifer Mills’ Dystopia by way of example, and also mentioned the impact of climate change on non-fiction by way of Delia Falconer’s brilliant essay in the Sydney Review of Books, ‘The Opposite of Glamour’. She has also published a follow up essay, which is compelling reading. I also mentioned Austlit’s soon-to-be-released dataset on Climate Change in Australian Narratives, which is spearheaded by scholar Deborah Jordan. In this panel I was alongside Fiona Utley, a philosopher at UNE, and Ian Collinson of Macquarie University, who spoke about popular music and the environmental crisis – an element I’ve never really thought of before, so it was eye (or ear?) opening. Also, my dad took a break from his renos, changed his shirt & cycled up to the uni to listen to my paper, which was lovely of him.

After that was lunch (all vegetarian!), and then a set of papers centred around Storying with Nonhuman Beings and Concepts. Grace Moore gave a fantastic paper on Trollope’s descriptions of mining, and Kay Are of Melbourne Uni drew on Vicky Kirby’s ideas in relation to biosemiotics, raising the interesting question of whether the world wants to know itself by telling its stories through us.

The next keynote was a wonderful presentation of Dan Hikuroa from the University of Auckland on ‘Te Awaroa – the Voice of the River’, which was about granting rights to the rivers in New Zealand. Dan is an Earth Systems Scientist who incorporates mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) into his work, drawing together Māori science and Western science to benefit communities with whom he works. Much of his presentation was in Māori and it was such a pleasure to hear the language tumbling into the room.

Bushfires were raging near Tingha at this time, and as we boarded the bus to go to the community gardens, the sky was an apocalyptic orange. I sat next to a poet who had grown up not far (in Australian terms) from where I’d been raised – she was from near Coonabarabran, & I from Boggabri, & I’d met her earlier in the year at a conference on postcolonialism and climate change at the UNE campus in Parramatta. It was lovely to catch up, & also nice, I reflected, to have a year book-ended by environmental conferences. 

The event at the Armidale Aboriginal Community Gardens exhibited of a series of portraits of local Aboriginal Matriarchs by local Anaiwan woman, Gabi Briggs, honouring matriarchs who played important roles within their families, clans and wider community. The images were fantastic - bold and strong - and there were lovely people to meet, speeches and a dance performance from a young woman, but I was pretty whacked after a day of trying to hear, & I knew once the sun fell I wouldn’t hear anything as I wouldn’t be able to lipread, so I had to cut my time short & head home.

Day 2 began with a keynote from Gomeroi lawyer & poet Alison Whittaker which absolutely knocked my socks off. She described the consumption of her poems at events such as the Sydney Writers Festival (where attendees touched her on the arm for being ‘brave’) alongside the injustice of deaths in custody (out of 150 referrals relating to deaths in custody, only 11 were referred for investigation, 5 went to court, 1 was convicted & then was acquitted) and asked us: where do we locate justice-seeking literature when it doesn’t locate justice? She also called for a focus on black joy, particularly given how white people absorb & adjust (to the point of ignorance) to black suffering.

The next session I attended was a panel of writers from the University of Wollongong; Joshua Lobb, who’s just released a book, The Flight of Birds, Catherine McKinnon, who published the acclaimed Storyland, and Sue Ballard, a New Zealand curator & writer. Their process was collaborative – they had written the pieces they read out together – which to me, as a writer who works predominantly on her own, was fascinating. Their writing, which was on things nuclear, was also very good.

As it was Valentine’s Day, at lunchtime I bustled off with some other folk to declare love to a gum tree. A scientist met us near said tree and told us how last year 70 trees were removed & chipped because management were worried about them dropping branches onto people, but after some protests & a campaign they stopped chopping them down. However nearly 400 trees are listed for removal in the future. The scientist read his paean to the tree, then leapt over the ground and hugged the trunk.

Arboreal love on V-Day.

Due to tree poems, I missed a bit of the next panel, but listened to poet Kate Middleton’s musings on the ghosts of people who had been exiled because of leprosy. In the next suite of papers, Alexis Harley discussed mycelium & fungal narratives, & described how if logs with fungi spores are bashed a bit, fungi sprouts more than it otherwise would (which I thought was a perfect metaphor for the stressed out, precariously placed, and brutally productive 21st C academic), much to gourmands’ delight; Emily O’Gorman presented her research on Indigenous women who weave sedges & rushes from three particular wetlands in the Murray-Darling basin, & illuminated their ongoing connection to Country; and Kate Judith presented on storying with mangroves. The writing of those three papers wended in and out of their ecosystems in lovely ways.

That evening there was a poetry reading at the Armidale Tree Group, & then the conference dinner at the Goldfish Bowl, but I had to bypass those events as I was worn out from listening all day, even though the loop systems were great and people took care to use the microphones, which was such a boon for me (usually there is no hearing equipment or it doesn’t work).

The AGM was held the next morning at 8.30am. I’m not a good morning person, but staggered in on time with a coffee. Usually I avoid AGMs they’re too hard to follow, but this was a small group which meant I could hear, which I appreciated. And then it was time for a series of plenaries and keynotes. The first was a video conference with ecofeminist Greta Gaard on air, which was apposite given that the sky was still smoky from the fires, although by the time her presentation finished (apparently canned smog was a thing in the 60s!) I realised how lucky we are in Oz to have largely clean air. This was followed by a plenary on the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, which was superb in the way that it drew together artists, scientists & farmers. One of the things I loved about this conference was that it went beyond the academy & engaged with communities and organisations, which is so important in terms of getting knowledge out of the ivory tower. This was followed by a keynote from Thom van Dooren on moving & growing a population of Nihoa Millerbirds to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, as a way of creating an insurance population in the face of climate change, and the implications of such assisted colonisation in the context of the ongoing history of dispossession of Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people. The final plenary was a rountable on remembering Deborah Bird Rose, who sadly passed late last year. It was very emotional and I felt for the presenters, who had been friends with Debbie. They created a moving tribute to her amazing and world-changing life and work, and it was a fitting and poignant end to the conference that was, as a fellow attendee said to me over coffee, full of people who thoughtful and well-intentioned. I agreed with that wholeheartedly, as I’ve never felt so well cared-for as a deaf person at a conference.

There was a final event, a screening of Terror Nullius at the Belgrave Twin Cinema. The movie looked really good but I had pretty much used up all my powers of concentration and, from past experience, the loop system at the Belgrave doesn’t work. So I said my farewells, went home & drank wine in front of the TV with Parental Unit & their dogs.

April.

2018: My Year of Writing

2018 was a bit of a bastard, I have to say. The stress of the past seven years – it’s been accumulating since I decided to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, & has been exacerbated by teaching – caught up with me, bowling me over with an ear infection in May. The eardrum in my good ear ruptured and for a few weeks I was left completely deaf, even with my hearing aid turned to its maximum. So last year was mostly about trying to keep it together & get better, rather than doing half marathons as I had imagined (god knows what I was thinking). I dropped to 0.7FTE in July – something that took six months to be processed, even as I got sicker and sicker with repeated colds & flu & the infection. Much of last year was also spent wondering if I could even be an academic, particularly given that most positions are teaching and research, and I’m currently research-focussed. However, reducing my load really helped; I’m seeing a specialist for chronic fatigue; and I’m trying to stop working on the weekends. And on the plus side, due to needing to rest I’ve been reading much more, which has been such a pleasure.

Publications

The big highlight of last year was getting a contract for Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, which will be published by University of Western Australia press on 1st July this year. I’ll be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and am lining up some ducks for appearances in Perth, Armidale, Tamworth & Brisbane, & hopefully also Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra. The editor for the book also edited A Curious Intimacy & she loved Hearing Maud & said that my craft had really improved, so that made me extremely happy.

In terms of scholarly publications, I published an essay on Annamaria Weldon’s ecobiography The Lake’s Apprentice in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Donna Lee Brien & Quinn Eades. This was my first publication on ecobiography & it will be part of a critical monograph that I’m writing on the form next year. I also had a piece of creative nonfiction published in one of my favourite outlets, the Sydney Review of Books, on Georgiana Molloy & my decision not to have children. This was part of their New Nature series & I was delighted to be featured among other Oz environmental writers. I worry about being typecast as a writer on disability, & while this is an issue that’s important to me, my writing life has always ranged widely across genres and subjects, & at the moment it’s my driving force to educate people about what we’re doing to the planet.

As with 2017, I didn’t publish any fiction, although that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I wrote a 12,000 word novella for the Griffith Review novella prize on tree clearing in Queensland and the mythic salting of Carthage in the Punic Wars, & I’m now going to turn this into a book.

Teaching

Due to physical collapse last year, I didn’t take on any teaching. I wrote and presented two lectures for a third-year Australian literature course, one on Tim Winton’s Island Home (which I hope I never have to read again in my lifetime) and the other on James Bradley’s Clade. I also delivered a lecture on the Environmental Humanities to a group of advanced students at the Australian Catholic University in Banyo. This year I’m convening that third year Australian literature course & tutoring two of the four classes.

King’s Park. So gorgeous.

Conferences

2018 was the year of overkill when it came to conferences – I went to seven of them and was on the organising committee for one – never again! The first, in February in Parramatta, was on postcolonial literature and climate change. It was a small and very enjoyable conference, but I was struck forcefully by how few young people were there. It’s part of the hollowing out of the humanities, & young people thinking that the humanities won’t help them find a job (I think studying humanities is one of the best things you can do in a coming world of automation but that’s a blog for another time). In the middle of the year I headed south to Canberra for two conferences – The Literary Interface, for which I organised two panels on science and literature with Dr Clare Archer-Lean of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the Australian Historical Association conference. The latter was only the second history conference I’d been to and it was absolutely huge. I had a ball & met some cool people. I also caught up with my good friends in Canbez which is always a bonus.

Then, although I was still not feeling great & had depleted my reserves of energy with a week of listening, I flew up to Sydney for the Deaf History International conference. I was a bit nervous about this – I never know whether Deaf people are going to accept me or not because I wasn’t raised Deaf, even though I’ve lost 75% of my hearing – but they turned out to all be lovely. And the most wonderful thing, aside from the people, was that the equipment worked beautifully. All I had to do was turn up at the conference, put my hearing aid on its T-switch to access the loop system and I heard everything so clearly. I even had the luxury of being late one day, when usually I have to panic about getting places early so that I can check that equipment is working & that I can hear. I was inspired to start learning sign again, but after I looked into it with Deaf Services Queensland I realised I have no time this year because of my exhausting job. It’s either nearly a full day of lessons or two nights a week, and the day classes were full and I’m too tired in the evenings to function. So learning sign is on hold again.

At the end of the year I flew to Perth for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference. This was my first ever creative writing conference and I’m always glad of a reason to go to Perth. I met some great people, caught up with others who I knew, met my publisher for coffee and went for walks in Kings Park. Gosh I love Perth! I would move over there in a heartbeat, except that I know I would miss my family terribly.

I was on the organising panel for the International Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was held at UQ in December. I arranged an event on sexuality and sport with writer Inga Simpson, scholar Rebecca Olive and artist Eric Bridgeman, which was prompted by the current exhibition of the UQ Art Museum, Play On. Following that conference I flew to Melbourne for a conference on colonialism and archives, which also went well, but by that stage I was pretty dead from my massive year & I just wanted to be back home again. I organised a panel on collecting with Anna Johnstone, a colleague from UQ, and Deidre Coleman from the University of Melbourne who does fabulous work on entomologists, and that worked out really well. However, fewer conferences this year are in order.

Supervision

Nearly all of my 4 students have submitted their work now. One passed with flying colours, two are being examined and one more has yet to submit. I’m always impressed with how well their work scrubs up, particularly when I consider my own paltry efforts with my PhD 10 years ago. Along the way they have done really well, with one winning a fellowship for creating digital art biographies, and another winning a Griffith Review fellowship which led to this fantastic publication.

Research

September saw me heading to Perth for the Cape to Cape trek. This gave me a fantastic sense of the environment through which Molloy moved, and the time and distance it took for Noongar people and colonists to move through the area. A blog post on this in the pipeline - I have to get my photos up at least because the environment was just extraordinary. I also made contact with some wonderful scholars working in botanical history - Alex George in Perth, and Sarah Maroske at the Herbarium in Melbourne. Sara and I will be presenting at a conference at Baltimore next year with my pin-up scholar Ann Shteir - I was pretty over teh moon when I received their invitation. Other than this, I was very much stymied in the writing of my ecobiography, which is starting to drive me quite mad.

The Year Ahead

At the end of April I’m moving onto a new contract which is teaching and research, rather than the research-focussed contract which I’m on now. This means that I won’t get much more research or writing done, although I’m certainly going to try. I’m sure able-bodied people can do both teaching and research, but the impact of teaching on my body is so severe that I need a much longer recovery time. However, my options are pretty limited at the moment so I don’t really have a choice. The rest of this year will be about writing what I can, when I can, amidst lecture preparation, tutoring, marking & publicity for Hearing Maud. My consolation is that I ever was, & will be, a tortoise rather than a hare, and I always get there in the end.

2017: My Year of Writing

Even workaholics need to have fallow years if they are to continue functioning well. 2017 was such a year for me, as I needed to pull back after nearly killing myself in 2016 (when I hadn’t even properly recovered from 2015). I finally finished my memoir while I was on hols in Croatia, and while I might still have to do one more draft, it’s been a huge load off my shoulders. I was still unwell for most of the year, but the colds & flu weren’t as intense. And now, after a few weeks off over Xmas, I’m full of beans again. Long may it last! Below is a list of my literary doings over the past year.

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

I had more academic work than creative pieces published this year, which makes sense as all my time is taken up by being an academic. If I do write fiction, it’s on the weekends, or bashed out the night before my writing group’s deadline.

At the beginning of the year, my essay on the craft of Georgiana Molloy’s writing was published in Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing. I started writing this essay in Rome at the end of 2014! This was followed in October by an essay on eco-memoir in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, in which I compared Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me with Tim Winton’s Island Home.

Just before Christmas, the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies published my essay on John Molloy’s (Georgiana’s husband) involvement in a massacre against Wardandi Noongars, and the subsequent papering over of this in later accounts. Writing this paper was hard work: it took hours to piece together a timeline of what had happened, as well as the debate over the events that resurfaced in later histories, and to attend to the language that was used in covering up what had happened. I was glad when it was finished.

In each of these volumes or issues, my work sat alongside that of other wonderful scholars, and I am really grateful to the editors for publishing my work.

In August I was Southerly journal’s monthly blogger, publishing four posts (one each week) about writing, deafness and environment. You can read them all via the links on this page. In October my eight-word story was featured on a billboard courtesy of the Queensland Writers Centre. That was pretty exciting!

I was pretty dismayed, once I got to the end of the year, to realise I hadn’t published any creative work (aside from said billboard), but then I remembered I’d finished my memoir. Fingers crossed that it gets somewhere this year.

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

I was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize again, this time for ‘Depths Exceeded’, which is a small part of my mermaid book. I’m still trying to find a home for it; I’ll get there eventually.

I continued with my study on vernacular criticism, for which I received funding at the end of last year, and will have this written up by March. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated and is eating up a bit of time. While it’s something that engages me intellectually, it isn’t a topic I’m downright passionate about, which is problematic. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that when you choose a PhD topic, it has to be something you’re obsessed with if your interest is going to carry you over three years. The same holds, it seems, for any kind of project. Still, it’s a good short-term study, and I’m finding I’m applying some of the research methods I learnt as a research assistant at Autism Queensland, which is a boon.

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

In the second half of the year, I was course convener for Women Writers, the subject I tutored in last year. This was a very steep learning curve – a little hairy at times – but it was ultimately very rewarding. The books I set were: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Joyce Carol Oate’s Foxfire, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Gillian Mear’s Foal’s Bread, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Helen Oyeymi’s White is for Witching. The students responded well to all these books except for The Golden Notebook (and some were a bit mystified by The Lesbian Body). Although The Golden Notebook was revolutionary when it came out, it held little meaning for them now. I wonder how or why that matters; Jane Eyre is poles apart from the experience of women in the 21st century but readers are still enraptured by it. Perhaps it was the form of the novel, which made it hard to digest, whereas Jane Eyre is a fairly conventional romance. Aside from this it was really heartening when students told me they enjoyed the books because they were works they wouldn’t usually encounter.

I tutored a class alongside the lectures, and as with last year I loved my students – they were confident, intelligent and outspoken. But by the end of the year I was in my usual haze of fatigue because of the toll of straining to listen and to lecture (every lecture is a performance). I think most people are knackered by the end of the year anyway, and the holidays straightened me out.

As well as the lectures for Women Writers, I also delivered one on Position Doubtful for the third-year Australian studies course. This year I’ll be lecturing on James Bradley’s Clade and Tim Winton’s Island Home for this same course, but I won’t be doing any other teaching as I need to devote myself to finishing my ecobiography.

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

In February I presented on Liptrot’s The Outrun at a conference on excess and desire at The University of Queensland. In London in June, I presented on a digital example of ecobiography, Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s ground trothing. In retrospect this was not a great example of ecobiography but I was trying to align it with the conference’s focus on digital life writing narratives. Still, I enjoyed being back in London, thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and met some great Aussie writers and academics, including Ellena Savage and Nicole Matthews, who presented a very memorable paper on hearing air reviews.

From England I flew to Croatia and presented at the European Society for Environmental History conference in Zagreb (preceded by a field trip to Kornati National Park near Zadar). This was the first history conference I had ever been to. I presented a similar paper to that which I’d delivered in Perth the year before, on ecotones, but my paper, I found after some rather harrowing comments from the audience, was not up to scratch (no one likes getting criticism, but having to receive it in a public forum is way worse). Once I recovered from that experience and was able to examine the comments with equanimity, I realised they were constructive. I’m intending to present at the environmental history conference in Canberra this year and to do a better job.

As soon as I arrived back in Brisbane I turned around and went down to the Gold Coast to present on Molloy and ecobiography at a conference on Literary Environments. This was not a very smart move as I was shattered from jetlag, but I couldn’t bear to miss it because Ursuala Heise gave a keynote and a workshop, both of which were amazing.

I capped off the year with a paper on Georgiana Molloy’s participation in botanical connoisseurship – the rage for exotics collected by Europeans and grown in their gardens – for a conference on the Nature and Spaces of Enlightenment. I really enjoyed this conference as well but I was completely wrung out from the year, so I couldn’t make it to all the sessions.

Throughout the year I also took on the supervision of four creative writing students, three doing MPhils and one a PhD. I found this unexpectedly rewarding, as I could chat to them about their ideas and help them with their critical essays. I also supervised a wonderful third-year student who wrote a brilliant essay on young adult novels and their representation of deafness. Aside from my research, supervision is one of the satisfying parts of my job.

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

I used my funding to fly to the UK and comb through the archives relating to Mangles and his contemporaries. This was a great trip but it was jam-packed and involved zig-zagging up the country from south to north. I like travelling and the distances didn’t faze me, but I could have done with a more leisurely pace. My next big task over this month and next is to collate and transcribe everything so that I’m ready to write in March, as well as writing up the rest of my trip (it's happening, but v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y).

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I put the ball for AWW on the shelf last year as I had too much going on, but managed to co-ordinate guest posts from lesbian/queer authors (Kelly Gardiner; Eden S. French; Jess Davidson; and my own thoughts on the themes that have appeared in guest posts by lesbian/queer women writers), and authors with disability (Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, editors of Defying Doomsday; and Anna Spargo-Ryan). This year I’m picking up the baton from Marisa Wikramanayake and am going back to bi-monthly roundups, as well as the usual guest posts. This year, the theme for NAIDOC is ‘Because of her, we can!’ so I really want to feature more posts from Indigenous women writers.

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

I have tried not to take on too much this year as I need to focus on finishing my ecobiography, but already there are quite a few pots on the stove. Aside from the two lectures which I need to write and present, and my vernacular criticism study to complete and write up, I’m co-ordinating, with Clare-Archer Lean from the University of the Sunshine Coast, two panels on the interface between science and literature at the annual literature conference in Canberra in July, as well as subsequent publication of these papers in the Australian Humanities Review. I'm also giving a workshop on Writing Animals and Their Worlds for the Queensland Writers Centre on Saturday 28th April.

On top of this I need to prepare a fellowship application for gainful employment next year, as my contract ends in January 2019. I think I had pretty much better say ‘no’ to anything else that comes into my inbox this year.

Health-wise I am determined to start running again, with the aim of doing a half-marathon in August, and of getting out of the city into bush more often. Exercise and the environment will help ameliorate my stress. I’m also casting about for some kind of hobby, instead of working all through the weekend. I think dancing, drawing and going to the movies are back on the cards. Well, time to dive into 2018!

Everything is going to be ok if there are peonies in the world.

On Deafness & Creating a Living

Yesterday I gave my last lecture for the year, on Position Doubtful, a marvelous book about author Kim Mahood’s attempts to reconcile white and Indigenous modes of representing the Australian desert. We are also in the National Week of Deaf People, so I thought it worthwhile to pen some thoughts on teaching and writing as a deaf person.

This was the fifth lecture I had written in as many months. I always underestimate how long they take to put together, and how long they need to be – about 6,000 words, because I speak fast. As I walked to the ferry after work I did the calculations and realised that, instead of those lectures, I could have had a third of a book written by now. I put that thought out of my head, because I enjoy teaching. It forces me to explore new ideas, I like the buzz of interacting with students in my tutorials, and it makes me a better scholar and writer because I’m studying texts in detail and examining how they are put together. This course, which was on Women Writers, also gave me an opportunity to discuss topics that are meaningful to me: feminism, the environment and disability, among others. I also organised a series of marvellous guest lecturers - Melissa Fagan, Marianne de Pierres, Shamara Ransirini, Marg Henderson and Caitlin Francis - who were passionate thinkers and writers about female authorship and the conditions that shape it.

Speculative fiction author Marianne de Pierres giving a lecture on Octavia Butler's Fledgling, with a poltergeist overhead.

However, for someone like me with little hearing, who is conducting lessons through speaking and listening rather than sign language, teaching is much more demanding than for someone with all their hearing. Giving a lecture is a performance which takes physical and mental energy, and tutorials are even more difficult. I need to use all my energy to listen, lipread, and work out where voices are coming from, although my students are very good and raise their hands to get my attention. My FM is helpful, but I still need to be on my toes to get everything. If the class had been any larger I might have been able to ask for additional help through an aide, but as it was I was able to get by.

I knew teaching would wear me out, but I agreed to convene the course this semester because I need the experience – if I can’t find another research-focussed job when my contract ends, I’ll need to get a regular academic job which does involve teaching. It’s not the best option, but it might be the only one. Besides, academia is a nice way of paying the bills and satisfying my craving for new ideas, and if exhaustion comes with that, it’s just a price I pay. I could find a job that doesn’t need much hearing & which bores me, but for someone who finds boredom stressful, this is not a good option.

Lecturer & tutor Shamara Ransirini (far right) chairing a panel on intersectionality at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I’ve been thinking about these things, and the kind of options available to me and other deaf folk in terms of creating a living, because a while ago I was approached by Connect Hearing to describe my career path into writing and academia. I became a writer because I loved reading and I was good at English, and I needed some way of expressing the frustration and loneliness of being deaf in a hearing world. Being a writer never brings in enough cash, though, so I needed another job to survive, and academia allows me to continue to write, although in different forms.

I was really interested to read of the other pathways for creative deaf people mentioned in Connect Hearing’s interviews. Many of these are physical, focusing on the body and its expression, such as Vulcana Women’s Circus, Riverside Theatres and Bust a Move. QArt Studio in Kew, Melbourne, offers support and training to artists, while HoneyBee Creations enables deaf people to explore and participate in creative arts. I identified with many of these options and the comments made by their representatives – I love dance and moving my body; I like making art with my hands because I don’t have to listen and I can focus entirely on what’s before me; and, as I have written many times before, deafness is inherently creative because it forces you to problem-solve and think laterally. So I identified, too, with Lisa Miller of HoneyBee Creations when she described herself as someone who thinks outside the box. I particularly appreciated her comments on staying positive, and focusing on what you are good at. I think this would apply to anyone, whether with a disability or not.

I have a lull next week before my marking comes in, during which I’m going to catch up on my research, and then I’m going to Melbourne to see the Dior exhibition. After all that hard work, surely some frocks must be on the agenda!  

Days in the Life of a Deaf Woman

A little while back I went to a play at La Boite Theatre at QUT which a friend had written. I really wanted to see the play because I knew she’d been working on it for a long time and it had received rave reviews. However, I’d previously been to The Wizard of Oz at La Boite in 2013 and hadn’t been able to hear it because the loop system wasn’t working. My experience with loop systems is that they’re rarely fixed and my complaints go unheeded. Nonetheless, I really wanted to see the play.

So I bought a ticket for myself and my b/f and phoned the theatre beforehand to check that the loop system was working.

‘Yes, it’s working,’ I was told.

My b/f & I went to La Boite, had a drink and located the theatre manager, who said we needed to sit in a particular spot and that she would reserve those seats for us. She mentioned she had also reserved seats for another deaf person and her friend. Inside we found the seats. I put my hearing aid on its T switch, which picks up sound from the loop system and cuts out background noise. It wasn’t working.

I introduced myself to the lady who was sitting next to me and asked if she was deaf.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I’m deaf too. Is your hearing aid working with the loop? Mine isn’t.’

She tried her T switch. ‘No, it’s not working.’

We consulted the manager, but she couldn’t get the technicians to fix it before the play started. Nor could she sort it out at half-time. At least I had a nice chat to the lady next to me, who signed and worked as a translator.

Meanwhile my b/f laughing uproariously throughout the performance and I felt left out.

At the end of it, the manager was hugely apologetic and offered for me and the other lady to come back and watch the play again, but I knew it was pretty much booked out and I wanted other people to have the chance to see it, and I was flat out at work. Besides, a similar situation had happened some 15 years before at the Sydney Opera House, when I was invited to see a play again after the staticky loop system made hearing anything impossible. However the magic had gone. The manager with whom I was dealing was so terrible that I never went back to the Opera House again, except to see dance performances that didn’t need hearing.

The manager at La Boite also asked - and I could see she was trying to be tactful - how deaf I was. I don’t have a speech impediment so people don’t always believe me when I tell them I’m deaf, or forget very quickly how little hearing I have. I guess she was checking that I wasn’t faking it, but I was annoyed. My b/f reassured me it was just that I challenge the idea of what a conventional deaf person is, which is precisely why I tell people that I’m deaf. I also had the sense that, if the lady who was also deaf hadn’t been with me, I would have been disregarded (which has happened frequently before).

However, the manager’s response was certainly a damn sight better than of the staff at the South Bank Cineplex around the same time, when I went to watch La La Land. The last time I’d tried this cinema was in 2006, when I watched Happy Feet with my sister and her kids. I figured that, in eleven years they would have worked out that it was discriminatory not to have any means of helping deaf or hearing impaired people at their cinema.

I approached the counter. ‘Do you have a loop system that will help me to hear the film?’

‘No, sorry, we don’t.’

I was too tired to be surprised or to put up any kind of a fight. I walked out. They didn’t deserve my money.

A few weeks later I went to a World Science Festival talk at the Queensland Conservatorium a few weeks later and found the loop system was too faint to hear (despite have called beforehand and mentioned this to them, as it was quiet the last time I used it when I went to listen to Elizabeth Gilbert). The nice man on the door offered to seat me down the front but I was totally disheartened.

‘Forget it, I can’t be bothered,’ I told him.

I was sick of having to stand up for myself, and tired of the consistent message I was getting: that people simply don’t care. Later that week, I emailed the World Science folk to see they had made a recording of the talk that I might be able to listen to with headphones, but I didn’t receive a reply.

It’s sometimes hard to feel relevant to a society that, for all of your life, has shown that it doesn’t really give a damn about deaf people. However, I doubt that I’m alone. Australia has become meaner and harder and nastier and more small-minded since John Howard. I'm sure refugees, people of colour and Indigenous Australians feel like me a lot of the time.

If more places made more of an effort for their patrons with disabilities, they’d probably sell more tickets – not just to the folk with disabilities, but to the family and friends they bring with them. It makes economic sense to try harder.

At the end of the evening at La Boite, before my b/f and I walked away, I said to the manager, ‘Thank you for caring, because no one else ever has.’ She had tried, and that alone made me feel like it was worth coming back to listen to another play.

2015: My Year of Writing

Last year was pretty tiring, but thankfully much less hectic than the year before. As soon as I came home from Rome, I hit the ground running and put together an application for a Discovery Early Career Research Award through the University of Queensland, a process that just about killed me. Happily, the hard work paid off and in a few weeks I’ll begin writing and researching an ecobiography of 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

For the rest of the year, I was teaching and writing. Below is a list of my literary happenings.

Publications

In February, my short story ‘When the World Shivered’ was published in the Review of Australian Fiction, together with Nike Sulway’s ‘The Nature of Things’. I loved doing this collaboration with Nike, especially as I was moving into a new genre and was a bit uncertain of myself. You can buy both stories for less than the price of a cup of coffee!

In March my essay on Georgiana Molloy was published in the ‘Looking West’ edition of Griffith Review. This was the first time my writing had appeared in this Queensland journal and I was very proud, and even more so when I did a reading from my essay at Avid Reader for the Griffith Review Christmas party at the end of the year.

In May, my essay ‘“Can I Do My Words?” On the Poetics of Deafness’ was published in Cordite Poetry Review. This essay was about how deafness lends itself to creativity. It was a new area for me and one that I liked exploring. I was also grateful that the editor published one of my poems, as I’m slowly moving back into this field and feel a bit rusty as a poet.

I also had two more academic papers published, one on Rosa Pread in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature titled ‘“I actually hear you think of me”: Voices, Mediums and Deafness in the Writing of Rosa Praed’. This looks at Praed’s use of sound in her novels, and how her attitudes towards listening and deafness influenced the trajectory of her daughter Maud’s life.

An essay on Georgiana Molloy and the implications of the naming system she used for the plants she collected appeared in the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. This was for an issue titled ‘Encountering Australia, Confronting Catastrophe’ which came out of the conference at Prato, Italy in 2014 (you might have to create a login if you want to read the essay).

‘Hearing Maud’, a piece on how I found Maud Praed’s’s medical records and a letter she wrote to her doctor, and the implications of writing as a deaf person, was published online at Meanjin in December.

In January, Arts Queensland used me as a case study to show how I had used their funding for this research on Maud.

I also penned an article for Writing Queensland, the magazine for the Queensland Writers’ Centre, on opening lines and chapters. I also recently had one on endings published in the same outlet. It’s cheating a bit to include it in this summary but I like how they go together!

Awards/Funding

I taught creative writing at the University of Queensland for the first six months of last year, and just when I thought I would have to take my begging bowl back to the beleaguered coordinators for more work, I received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Hooray! This bought me six months of writing time to write a young adult novel based on my short story ‘When the World Shivered’.

That process was both a blessing and a curse. While it was heavenly to have time to write, I realised that the project wasn’t going to be just one book, but three, as it was too complex to be contained in just the one book. So now I have added these books to my pipeline of novels to be written.

Getting these grants has absolutely saved my bacon financially and allowed me to progress and evolve as a writer. I was absolutely horrified when George Brandis butchered the Australia Council by taking away $104.8 million to create a new program, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts. Due to an outcry and a senate inquiry, this program never got off the ground (and Brandis was removed when Turnbull became PM). A third of the money has been returned and the rest siphoned off for a new program (still similar to the NPEA) retitled Catalyst. The money taken from the Australia Council to establish the Book Council of Australia has not been returned and there has still not been any word of what's happening with this council. Needless to say, my disgust with politics is complete, but at least Tony Abbott is no longer with us. You can read my submission to the senate inquiry here.

In April, I found out that my story ‘Old Honey’, which was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley prize last year, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This totally knocked my socks off as there were 22 shortlistees out of 4000 entries. Although I didn’t make it to the regional shortlisting, the story that won the Asia/Pacific region was published in Granta and I thought it was absolutely lovely (you can read it here).

Conferences

My conference circuit was not quite as hectic as last year’s, thankfully. In February, shortly after I stepped off the plane from Rome, I headed to Armidale and presented a paper on writing about the Great Barrier Reef at the University of New England. The conference theme was ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. This was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to – it was intimate, the weather was gorgeous, we travelled to Judith Wright’s homestead and I met Helen Garner. It was also good because I got to catch up with Parental Unit & their fur children.

In the middle of the year I was invited to present at a workshop on Amateur Knowledges at the University of Wollongong. This was prior to the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was combined with two other literary organisations to make a Literary Studies Convention. I presented on vernacular criticism in the context of online blogging and the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I did my undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at Wollongong and it was odd to be back on campus again. I also stayed with a wonderful writer, Cat Sparks, who with her partner took me out to dinner with Richard Harland, who had been one of my lecturers for Forms of the Imagination (and whose delivery I still vividly remember!).

In September I travelled to Sydney for the National Writers Congress, which was a wonderful opportunity to meet other writers and see what's happening in the industry. I wrote up my observations of the congress in this post.

Later in the year I made a jaunt to Noosa to present on Rosa Praed and mourning at a one-day Death Studies conference organised by the University of the Sunshine Coast. I loved all of the papers that I heard and wished that I’d been able to stay to hear all of them, but I had to leave early to get home to finish some work.

Research

My research this year revolved mostly around my young adult novel (well, now series) When the World Shivered. As I moved into a new genre – young adult – I needed to read up on young adult fiction. I realised how important plot and action are, and when I read Veronica Roth’s Divergent series I also realised that I wanted a strong female protagonist – not just mentally strong, but also physically strong. I want to show that people with disabilities are physically capable, but not necessarily in the ways we expect them to be.

Teaching and Workshops

The course that I taught at the University of Queensland was on Narrative. I really enjoyed teaching and my students were great. In classes I showed them how to take apart texts to see how the author had created particular effects with character or language, and facilitated workshopping that was (I hope!) sensitive and constructive.

I also presented a workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre at Goondiwindi on Writing Historical Fiction, which went very well. I was surprised though that there weren’t more participants, and I realised that I could have helped the QWC with their marketing, which I will do in future. The life of a writer is always a learning curve.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I continued with my rewarding role as contributing editor in the area of diversity for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which was established in 2012 to redress the bias in gender reviewing and raise awareness of Australian women’s writing.

I organised a spotlight on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage in May, which featured guest posts by author and graphic novelist Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Then in October I arranged a focus on lesbian/queer women writers, with posts by Francesca Rendle-Short, Lee Winter, Tricia Dearborn and Inga Simpson.

I was also pleased to feature a guest post by Gayle Kennedy, author of the wonderful and funny Me, Antman and Fleabag.

This year I’m planning to arrange a spotlight on writers with disability, as well as more posts by Indigenous writers.

The Year Ahead

My creative writing will probably slow down dramatically this year, as I’ll only be working on that for one day a week, on Sundays. However, from experience I’ll be a more efficient writer, as the less time I have, the more I do (which is why I like to keep myself under pressure!).

I’m planning to get back to my poems and to write a novella based on my experiences in Rome. I’m currently rewriting my memoir on Rosa and Maud Praed (it wasn’t working as it was too academic). That will be finished by Easter, and then I’ll return to The Sea Creatures. Frankly I can’t wait; I’ve missed that novel terribly. The draft for that should be finished by the end of 2016, and in 2017 I’ll return to When the World Shivered.

2016 is going to be busy and fabulous!