Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, Sydney Writers' Festival 2022

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.

Torrey Peters talking to Liz Duck-Chong about Detransition, Baby - SWF 2022

Torrey Peters on Detransition, Baby. SWF 2022

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.

See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill

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 …

My womb is not terra nullius

MY WOMB IS NOT TERRA NULLIUS

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.

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