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.
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
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.