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.
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.
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.
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.