The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie
I’ve been slowly reading Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side since my sister gave it to me in April – and finished it last Friday in an ecstatic frenzy.
Initially I read slowly because, as the subtitle ‘a journey’ suggests, it meanders a little, in and out of Jennifer Higgie’s own life and encounters with the artists she discusses. Like so many of the books I’m most interested in these days, it’s a mix of memoir, biography and (art) history, which can make for an unwieldy form. Higgie opens:
In 1996, I went to a Greek island to write a novel about a nineteenth-century fairy painter. Twenty-five years later, I returned to write about women artists and the spirit world.
Paying Attention: Fiona Murphy, El Gibbs, Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law, SWF 2022
On the last day of the Sydney Writers’ Festival 2022 I went to an afternoon session called ‘Paying Attention’. It was curated by Deaf poet and essayist Fiona Murphy, author of the acclaimed 2021 memoir The Shape of Sound.
I was there because I’m interested in the idea and practice of paying attention – and I love the writing of two of the panellists, Fiona Murphy and Fiona Wright. Beyond that I had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a riveting, illuminating, funny and very moving conclusion to my SWF 2022.
Murphy had invited four writers with disability and chronic illness – El Gibbs (live via video), Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law – to flip the script and speak of their conditions as superpowers, as expertise they should be charging money for.
She opened by noting that we’re living in an attention economy, but it’s unevenly distributed: people with disability and chronic illness are exposed to things they have to attend even if they don’t want to.
Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, SWF 2022
This was a thrilling session between three poets: Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa in conversation with Evelyn Araluen, who asked searching questions about their beautiful new poetry collections, Beneba Clarke’s How Decent Folk Behave and Musa’s Killernova. It was a stellar panel! Araluen’s first book of poems, Dropbear, had just won the 2022 Stella Award.
Araluen opened by asking when these books were written? Where were they at when they wrote them?
Beneba Clarke said she wrote her book in 2019 and 2020. Because most of the poems were for her weekly poetry gig at The Saturday Paper, it’s the most time-specific work she’s ever written.
Araluen said it reads like an annotation of this period – and in a sense we’re still in that moment, but also not.
On Friday 20 May 2022, the City Recital Hall at Sydney’s Angel Place was buzzing. When acclaimed, much loved New York novelist Hanya Yanagihara finally appeared, the crowd exploded.
Yanagihara and SBS journalist Anton Enus have been in conversation together before, so their talk was easy, cheeky, brilliant. First they complimented each other’s clothes: her black dress and sparkly silver slippers, his gold and red shirt. Enus reminded us that Yanagihara is not just the author of bestselling sensation A Little Life (2015) –and now To Paradise (2022) – but also has a big day job, as editor of T, the New York Times Style Magazine.
When Enus opened by asking Yanagihara about her choice to write such challenging novels, she calmly replied, Readers should be made to work. It’s a great act of vulnerability to open the book and go where the writer tells you.
At 8pm on Thursday 19 May I walked into a cavernous hall at Carriageworks to hear Brooklyn-based writer Torrey Peters talk via video from Poland to Liz Duck-Chong in Sydney.
It was an absolutely mesmerising conversation. Even via screen Peters was dazzling! She brought the house down. And Duck-Chong asked such beautifully nuanced, thoughtful and searching questions that at the end Peters praised her exceptional contribution to the evening. The questions from the audience were also excellent, including one that prompted Peters to reflect on ‘sad girl lit’ and Jean Rhys.
Peters was there to talk about her 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, her breakthrough book which became an internationally acclaimed sensation. Its three central characters are bound by the question of a child: trans woman, Reese; her former partner who’s detransitioned from Amy to Ames; and cis woman, Katrina, who suddenly finds herself pregnant with Ames’s child. Peters called Reese a trans version of Fleabag, living in Brooklyn, NYC.
Ashley Hay, Sophie Cunningham, Jazz Money + Tony Birch on eucalypts. SWF 2022
This SWF conversation took place at the Powerhouse Museum as part of its fascinating exhibition Eucalyptusdom, which traces the museum’s origins in Sydney’s ‘Garden Palace’. It runs until 28 August - and features Ashley Hay’s writing and Jazz Money’s art among many other things.
Here are some brief notes I took from this wide ranging conversation about gum trees, their knowledge and wisdom, and our ever-changing relationship with trees over thousands of years. Below that I’ve added an overview of Eucalyptusdom, including images of Jazz Money’s video projection Garrandarang and Damien Wright’s art piece that Tony Birch refers to.
Ashley opened by asking Jazz Money what inspired her kinetic light poem Garrandarang.
Jazz said the first book she read to prepare for her installation was Ashley’s Gum … and here she was in conversation with Ashley, meeting her for the first time.
Sydney Writers’ Festival 2022: opening address - and Marcia Langton + Julianne Schultz on ‘Australia’
It’s been a while! - nine months to be precise - since I last blogged here. I spent the summer working on my essay My mother’s silence, my nation’s shame, which was published in Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning last month. The first bookish thing I did after that was head straight to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was the first time I’d been able to go since 2018.
The opening night address in the Town Hall with its wildly applauding crowd and standing ovation set the tone for this excellent festival. That night three acclaimed First Nations artists - Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins and Nardi Simpson - spoke to the festival’s theme ‘change my mind’, reflecting on the changed, changing and changeable nature of their minds.
It was dark in the Town Hall, I didn’t have a notebook and pen, and I was so stunned and excited to be at the SWF for the first time since 2018, it didn’t occur to me to take notes. But here’s my recollection of the opening night, followed by the notes I took from a brilliant conversation two days later between Professor Marcia Langton and Professor Julianne Schultz, chaired by acclaimed historian Clare Wright.
Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)
In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:
Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.
After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?
Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:
‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’
Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …
‘You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.’
So writes Olivia Laing at the opening of The Lonely City, which I came to at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney’s Covid-19 lockdown regulations.
Laing’s opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need I found them almost too distressing to read. But I was soon swallowed by her mesmerising prose and fluid meditations on being shockingly alone in the streets and sublets of New York City.
With its themes of climate change in the immediate present and the mostly thankless emotional labour of women, Jenny Offill’s Weather feels uncomfortably close to home in 2020, a year when the domestic realm has become newly prominent – and Covid 19 has thrown the most urgent issue of our time, climate change, into the background of the news cycle and conversation.
Weather quietly animates these questions – the ungraspable heft of climate change, the weight of caring for others – through the daily round of its narrator, Lizzie Benson, in her demanding roles as university librarian, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour and paid email correspondent for her former professor turned futurologist. Her only release from the pressure of these many competing demands is the prospect of an affair.
Any discussion of abortion must start with those capable of becoming pregnant, and our bodies. These days this is rarely the case. Such conversations, often conducted by cisgender men, usually start with religion or morality, and the vicissitudes of eggs recently fertilized by sperm, when in fact abortion is a matter of our human right to reproductive health and safe, affordable medical procedures.
Writing about abortion in 2018 is for me fraught with emotion – not with regret and loss, but with the charged history of my heart, so closely connected to my womb. It raised two of my great and sometimes conflicting passions: my love for my vocation, writing, and my love for the man who eventually became the father of my children. And yes, there was some fear there as well – palpable, bodily fear.
Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?
That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.
How different this year looks from the one I sketched onto the calendar on the wall above my desk in January. I was supposed to be giving a keynote in Oslo in March and speaking at a sustainability conference at Yale the following week, as well as speaking at various local writers’ festivals about the new edition of Six Capitals. Needless to say, all conferences and festivals have been postponed indefinitely.
The best thing about the cancelled Oslo-Yale trip was that in preparing for Oslo I read my first Norwegian novel in at least a decade: Vigdis Hjorth’s A House in Norway (2014).
I’m happy to say that a new, fully revised and updated paperback edition of Six Capitals is being published in May 2020 by Allen & Unwin. It seems very timely.
As I write we’re getting stark lessons in how important our communities and beautiful green and blue places are. We must value them in our economic, accounting, financial and legal systems. The new edition of Six Capitals updates the story of four movements that are designed to do just that - to value people and the planet.
