writer | editor | artist
Outside my office there is a beautiful, distracting swathe of native bushland. I’ve had many visitors in my office, most of them human, but occasionally some creature wanders in. A glorious green tree snake spent a few days curled up between the window and the screens, rock wallabies and koalas peer in, and every now…
Asked to consider the role of the writer, Mr. Lopez has said: I like to use the word isumatug. It’s of eastern Arctic Eskimo dialect and refers to the storyteller, meaning ‘the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.’ I think that’s the writer’s job. It’s not to be brilliant, or to…
I’ve been reading a wonderful book of poetry by the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg: The Lamplit Answer. This collection was first published in 1982, and later included as part of the collection, Supernatural Love . I discovered it when a friend advised that it included a series of poems on Simone Weil. It’s a slim…
I have an abiding affection for the humble egg. That most complete, complex and humble of foods. Firstly, because a basket or bowl or nest of eggs always looks so beautiful. The shells gently stippled, stiff but delicate. The colours simple and pure: a shell – brown or cream or blue or soft green –…
Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters is part of a series of books – Why X Matters – published by Yale University Press, and based on a lecture series of the same name. The book is slim – compact. Three of the four chapters are based on lectures Grossman gave at Yale, while the fourth is…
Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about Charlotte Wood’s novel The Submerged Cathedral. It’s not her most recent book, but I returned to it after finding a copy during one of those days when you’re trawling the bookshelf looking for something to inspire you: to remind you why you read, and write. Charlotte is a…
If Borges had had his way – and he generally did – all polysyllables would have been replaced by monosyllables, especially in the third and fourth revisions, to which he often pressed his absent collaborators. People concerned about the legitimacy of the literal might well be scandalized by his mania for dehispanization. EH: He was…
I went to see her straight from the airport. (Was I, then, a good son, or only the semblance of one, going through the motions, performing goodness because, perhaps, there was someone up in the carpark above me, watching me swim back and forth, back and forth?) I knew my mother’s health had deteriorated. I…
[this article – or, at least, some version of it, originally appeared in WQ] Every morning when I slide out of bed I put on coffee and open my notebooks, sit down at my desk, and write. It seems simple enough and, to a disinterested observer – to the birds outside my window – perhaps…
“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not — this is…