journey to the bottom of the tbr pile: Nell Zink/The Wallcreeper

I’ve never been much for birds. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate their existence. And I’m aware they’re likely related to dinosaurs so that gives them some cachet. But beyond an occasional glance as one sweeps across my line of sight or flies just a little too close to my head, nothing. 

Maybe that’s why I felt compelled to know what a Wallcreeper looked like. So I googled, and began sifting through the various images, clicking from one to the next until I came across one that caught my attention. 

In it the bird is in full flight, moving through the air with a bug hanging from its beak. Its wings, spread out wide from its body, are black with splashes of red and the most arresting line of large white polka dots right at the end of the feathers. That picture snuck up on me. I wasn’t prepared for it, wasn’t prepared for the way I sat staring at the screen, soaking up the beauty of this bird. 

In a way, Nell Zink’s debut novel, The Wallcreeper, snuck up on me too. It felt a little like Zink had pulled back a curtain, letting me peek into this strange world she’d created, letting me squirm at the edges of these somewhat dubious character’s lives. I had no preconceived ideas about this novel— except for a recommendation from a friend, I’d not read or listened to a review of any kind. I went in cold. I came out feeling like I’d been unceremoniously pushed back outside the curtain. Dumped onto the cool earth. And yet, I loved it. 

The Paris Review describes The Wallcreeper as a coming of age story, and in some ways I suppose it is. Americans Tiffany and Stephen meet when he interviews for the pharmaceutical company she works for. A meeting Tiffany, the narrator of the book, says this about: ‘It was one of those moments where you think: We will definitely fuck’. They marry three weeks later and Tiffany follows Stephen and his job to Berne, a small town in northern Germany. What follows is a frankly chaotic story. 

Tiffany and Stephen's relationship is at the centre of the book—though it is Tiffany's story—and it's fascinating to watch them exist with and shift against each other. Their relationship is both marred and seemingly strengthened by their multiple affairs and after Stephen abandons his job, they move across Europe and become increasingly engaged in environmental causes—you might even call them eco-terrorists, as Keith Gessen does.

The Wallcreeper though, above all else—marriage, infidelity, birds (there are lots and lots of birds), coming of age stories—seems stridently environmental. Some kind of comment on the human impact on the environment and how the likely best thing for the planet is the cessation of mankind. Which, let’s be honest, is probably accurate. 

However, of the book, Zink says this: 

‘I wanted to communicate vital topics in nature conservation to men and women in their thirties, the leaders of tomorrow, by wrapping them up in sophisticated language and conflicted sex. It worked for the first few pages. After that I had some personal setbacks and continued it as a tortured autobiography in impenetrable code.’

Which explains a lot, really. There are no chapters in The Wallcreeper, with only line breaks to suggest at the movement of time. The story progresses at a brisk pace, which helps with the chaos. And some aspects of the character’s border on absurd. 

That said, Zink has a way with words. And, as is my custom, I found myself underlying sentences that struck me. Zink, through Tiffany (knowing Zink describes it as a tortured autobiography makes it difficult to separate Tiffany the character from Zink the writer, but then maybe she’s supposed to be Stephen or Gernot or Olaf?) makes some startlingly blunt observations in the most economical of language. Of the miscarriage that occurs within the first line of the book, Tiffany says: ‘I rolled over to my side and coughed. I wasn’t pregnant, I noticed’. Later, she will use similarly blunt language to describe another significant event (which I won’t mention here because spoilers etc.) which had me gasping, hand over mouth. 

And yet other times, her characters made remarkable observations that had me sitting back in my chair, replaying the sentences over and over in my head. At one point, after Stephen asks Tiffany to tell him about herself, she recounts her life in a series of sentence long anecdotes and ends with the line ‘I’ve never met anybody I can be entirely sure I’ve actually met’. Well, have you? 

These types of experimental novels can sometimes be hard work, the reader slogging through complicated prose, sifting the words for meaning. And while The Wallcreeper is undoubtedly experimental, I was captivated. Reading it over a single weekend in great big gulps. The characters may have, at times, had me shaking my head in disbelief, but I still found myself thoroughly absorbed in their world.

In a not particularly effusive review, Bookslut describes Zink’s debut as ‘an odd bird’, suggesting both a plot and coherent characterisations are missing. I really have to disagree. Perhaps there is no defined three-act structure here and no particularly redeeming characters, but if you’re reading fiction to find those things, maybe avoid experimental work like this—or just fiction altogether?

The Wallcreeper might refuse to abide by ‘the rules’ but there are real characters here. Complex, infuriating, predictable and unpredictable, confusing and ugly characters that push against one another as they hurtle towards something none of them seem prepared for, or even aware of. Which, when you think about it, seems less experimental and more a simple reflection of the lives we live. 

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journey to the bottom of the tbr pile: Stephanie Bishop/The Other Side of the World

Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World begins with a quote from the Russian writer, Svetlana Boym about nostalgia; Boym says that nostalgia is a ‘longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed’. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately, about what home means, about how it can and must and will inevitably change. I’ve been asking myself if coming back is harder than leaving. If the change we see in our homes is actually a reflection of the change in ourselves. I’ve been wondering if the only way you can hope to answer these questions is by cutting yourself loose from home, from the expectations and the routine and the familiarity. I’ve reached few conclusions, but then maybe that’s the point. Reading Bishops’s book was a beautiful diversion from my own convoluted thinking. 

The Other Side of the World is an emotional rumination on home, on trying to find our place within the world and on the choices we make to find that place. English born Charlotte is a painter, she is married to Henry, an English-by-way-of-British-Colonial-India poet and academic. They live in rural England, in a small house with mould growing on the walls. They have a baby, Lucie. And the novel opens with Charlotte discovering a second baby, May, is on her way. 

Charlotte is struggling with motherhood, with being a wife, with the way these things seem to disconnect her from her art. Though I hesitate to make a diagnosis and Bishop never explicitly says, I think Charlotte is depressed. And in a moment of despair she agrees to move to the other side of the world that the title alludes to. Specifically, to Perth, Australia. Henry, who hates the chill of the English air as much as Charlotte is renewed by it, is joyful to escape to what he assumes is greener pastures. What follows is a gentle unravelling, a slow realisation of self, a chain of events and a series of decisions that threaten to tear the family apart. 

Set in the early sixties, The Other Side of the World moves languidly across the page, the language soft and poetic as it shifts around you. The descriptions of the English countryside evoke feelings of greyness, of a biting cold: 

‘She could never be lost here, but she could disappear, she thinks, as she passes the slow cows chewing frozen ground, steam rising from their flanks. She passes the pond, covered now with silvery ice, the frosted edges of brambles. Above her the sky is mottle brown and grey and the air smells of dung and grass. The leaves on the hawthorns are gone, those on the horse chestnuts are still browning and falling.’

In sharp contrast, those of the Australian bush are brilliant in colour and warmth, although Bishop manages to cleverly draw comparison between the two:

‘Charlotte looks out over the glassy violet water stretching on for miles, and in the back of her mind sees the silvery expanse of the damp fields she left behind. The river begins to glow as darkness falls on the land around it. The rushes and she-oaks that cluster along the water’s edge turn black as the sky shifts from orange then mauve. Beneath it, the river lies smooth as pearl and shines the colour of saffron. Golds and pinks marble its silky length.’

The Australian landscape Bishop paints is familiar to me only because it is the landscape so commonly associated with Australia in a broader cultural context. It is not my Australia. It is a dry, dusty and hot place. A place where one imagines the sky feels high and wide and impossibly blue. A place where the sun forces you to squint so often your brow is permanently furrowed.

Reading Bishop's rendering reminded me of Robyn Davidson's Tracks and the connection I forged to that red and dusty Australia, despite never having lived in, or even visited, Alice Springs. How can you have such a strong connection with somewhere you've never directly experienced?

I felt the same about the landscape Bishop wrote, a strong sense of connection and appreciation, and yet I also sympathised with the England Charlotte missed with a heartbreak I feel like I might understand. Maybe that's because my Australia is cooler and greener with more clouds and more rain; my Australia could almost be mistaken for England.  

Alongside the landscape, Bishop has constructed complex and engaging characters, and though I struggled to like Charlotte, I found myself keenly turning the pages, wanting to know what she would do. The narrative moves smoothly between the couple, and while it does feel like The Other Side of the World is Charlotte’s story, Henry’s desire to carve out a space for himself feels more visceral to me than Charlotte’s longing for home. Maybe that’s because I’m home now, perhaps if I’d read this story in London last year when it first found its way into my life, I’d have felt differently. 

While Henry's inability to really see his wife, to understand her, to meet her somewhere in the middle—while a vital tension in the story—made him frustrating, I did have some sympathy for him. And the scenes where Harry returns to India to be present for his mother’s death were some of the most interesting. 

Bishop holds a doctorate in poetry, so her ability to corral language so poetically is unsurprising. This book is beautifully written, the story engaging, the character’s complex enough to lift off the page, its underlying themes delicately mapped out. That said, it was the ending to this book that lingered, the ambiguity of it. It stayed long after the final page was turned and I still find myself wondering what happened. 

I wondered if it would be remiss of me to not mention the middlebrow discussion that hovered around this book last year, alongside Antonia Hayes’ Relativity and Susan Johnson’s The Landing. In an essay/review for the Sydney Review of Books, Beth Driscoll discussed ‘middlebrow’ fiction and its apparent association with women writers and readers. 

The word middlebrow, and its sibling highbrow, are words that I don't like. I don't like the aspersions created by their use, the way they are used to label books with no thought for what a book means outside of the intellectual sphere. I don't like the way they reduce books and writers, placing them into boxes and deciding what or who a writer, and their work, is. Positing a work as middlebrow—or as highbrow—seems lazy to me, as if deliberately missing the point of telling stories.

But mostly, I don't like the gendered use of middlebrow. And it is this specifically that that Bishop, Hayes and Johnson rejected in their smart and measured response to Driscoll, also for the Sydney Review of Books.

In light of the above, I'm not going to engage in a discussion of whether The Other Side of the World is anything more than a good story. A story that attempts to understand something of our interactions with each other, something of what home means, something of what motherhood and identity and self means in the broader context of our lives. 

If you want to label that as a type of brow, go right ahead. I’m less concerned with where this book fits on some imagined literary ladder and more with how it made me feel. 

What I felt was captivated by the beautiful language, what I felt was thoughtful about the idea of home and the choices we make to find home, what I felt was a delicious appreciation for the uncertainty of its ending. What more could I ask for?

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journey to the bottom of the tbr pile: Cheryl Strayed/Tiny Beautiful Things

Reading Cheryl Strayed feels like talking to a high school friend's wise and cool mum. I don't mean that I feel as if I've been transported back to high school, but that it feels like that kind of relationship. Where someone with mountains of life experience, who shimmers with compassion and empathy, whose words feel wrapped in understanding and patience is chatting to you over the kitchen counter, a glass of wine in hand and a conspiratorial wink at just the right moment. It feels reassuring. 

I often wonder about that desire for reassurance, for comfort. In a way, we’re conditioned to battle on, to persevere, to ignore the obstacles as we leap over them, always moving towards some inscrutable life goal whose achievement will absolve all feelings of failure and sadness and anger and regret.

The reality, of course, is far different. 

Sometimes, as the wind howls around you, as the noise of world becomes too much, as you falter, as you fall, that reassurance is the only thing that keeps you breathing.

Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of columns written by Cheryl under the pseudonym Sugar for The Rumpus website, is subtitled 'Advice on love and life from someone who's been there' which feels incredibly apt. Because having read these columns, having read Cheryl's memoir, Wild, it's fairly clear that she has been there. 

As someone who is always emotionally invested in any book I read, Tiny Beautiful Things feels like a warm hug - which is how I described the book in a Twitter conversation once. 

The pages of this book are very nearly vibrating with emotion. 

Cheryl's responses to questions about grief and fear and love and envy are all-encompassing; encouraging and understanding and forgiving and nurturing. But also unafraid to point to ugliness and fear and self-pity and ask why?

I found myself underlining so many sections of this book; sentences and paragraphs that resonated, that stuck, that helped me keep breathing. 

I considered just listing them all, one after another and calling that my review. And in some small way, I am doing that. Only, I've slashed the list from multiples of multiples to a few that I found myself coming back to again and again, reading and re-reading until the words almost lost their meaning. Almost, but not quite.

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this’ and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And ‘if your nerve deny you-,’ as Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘go above your nerve.’

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life…Whatever happens to you belongs to you.

Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay.

Go, even though there is nowhere to go.

Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.

Go, because you want to.

Because wanting to leave is enough.

In the last letter of Tiny Beautiful Things, the question is what Cheryl would tell her twenty-something self if she could talk to her. What follows is both heartbreaking and striking in its resounding simplicity. It is probably my favourite of the columns in this book, and so it makes sense to finish with it. To finish with the words I highlighted and read and re-read until they almost didn’t make sense, almost.

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

You cannot convince people to love you.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realise there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

The useless days will add up to something…These things are your becoming.

I've found a place for Tiny Beautiful Things on my bookshelf, one where I can easily reach it. Because this book is one that I'm sure I'll return to again and again, searching for a warm hug, looking for some reassuring words that will help me keep breathing.

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journey to the bottom of the tbr pile: Charlotte Wood/The Natural Way of Things

Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things has lived in my tbr pile for many months now, its beautifully drawn cover pretending at the story inside. I was warned that this beauty belied a truth within its pages, a story that was difficult and rough. I was warned that these words simmered, that they pushed back against a world that too often mistakes ‘woman’ for ‘empty space’. You’ll need comforts a friend said, you’ll need chocolate and tea and hugs. I felt some trepidation. What story had ever come with such warning? And yet, as if fate had placed a warm hand on my back, gently pushing me towards this book, The Natural Way of Things was exactly the story I needed; its words acting as a salve for my burnt skin.

Described as a dystopian tale, The Natural Way of Things is a story of so-called sullied women, shipped off, collected together in a brutal landscape somewhere in the Australian bush. It is a story of their shrinking, of their lives stolen from them. And yet, it felt like a 300-page metaphor for the life of women who are treated so horribly by the men who view them as less then, as disposable; and the society that expends immeasurable amounts of energy explaining to them, talking over them, judging them. Dystopian? Perhaps not. 

‘Finally, some instinct rises. She runs her tongue over her teeth, furred like her mind. She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, ‘I need to know where I am.’ 

The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, ‘Oh sweetie. You need to know what you are.’

The traumas of these women, the pieces of their worlds that are carefully sketched out for us, are so familiar. These are stories we know, stories we’ve heard and read and felt. That knowledge sits uncomfortably at the base of my spine as I read, as these careful sketches are made, each scene appears before me and I can fill in the details because I know them. That is a heavy load to bear, that knowledge. I know these women and their stories and it breaks my heart. 

‘Verla looks around the table then. Despite the shaven skulls, one by one the girls’ faces clarify for an instant - and then merge, and Verla knows that she and they are in some dreadful way connected.   

Boncer’s words return. In the days to come she will learn what she is, what they all are. They are the minister’s-little-travel-tramp and that-Skype-slut and the yuck-ugly-dog from the cruise ship; they are pig-on-a-spit and big-red-box, moll-number-twelve and bogan-gold-digger-gangbang-slut. They are what happens when you don’t keep you fucking fat slag’s mouth shut.’

But there is more than anger here, more than a sharp commentary on the none too subtle lines of gender based power that define our society, more than the flippancy with which women’s bodies are used and discarded, there is something else here that I latched onto strongly.

There is friendship.

A constant through my life has been the women in it that support and encourage, women who cheer for you, who so desperately want happiness and success and life for you. I have been blessed to have some of these women in my life, to have them now. And as I read this story, as I sunk within its pages and entwined myself with its words it was friendship, it was Yolanda and Verla, that sustained me. It was the moments their hands found each other, the moments their eyes locked, the moments they existed together, that allowed me to push aside the grime, if even just for a little while. 

‘They stand in the dark corner of the dogboxes. Verla smells Yolanda’s animal breath, feels the quick fine skeleton beneath her skin. She feels Yolanda’s speedy heart drumming in the burrow of her chest. Yolanda gathers Verla to herself one last time, then lets her go. She pulls the bulky cape of her skins about her and pads to the end of the corridor, out of the doorway and disappears into the glaring light. Verla sprints from the boxes, scrambles back up to the veranda. She turns to see the low silver flash of Yolanda’s skins only just visible, swift through the grass.’

Charlotte Wood writes this story, writes these women, with something that feels like empathy smashed onto the page with lashings of despair and frustration swirled through. Her language is raw, without pretence. She makes no attempt to smooth the edges. And it is this that makes it rough reading, that makes it feel so visceral, that makes tears pool in the corners of my eyes and forces me to sit upright, a tension wrapped around my body. 

What will happen to these women? Women who have been discarded in the most literal way, dumped in a harsh and cruel environment, stripped of their clothes, their hair, their personhood. Women who have been removed, pushed behind a closed door where their existence can no longer embarrass or confuse or insult the men whose very actions created them. Where will they go? Who will they be? 

I won’t pretend that this story didn’t affect me, that these women didn’t linger in my mind long after I’d finished reading, that they are not still there. 

I said earlier that The Natural Way of Things was like a salve for my burnt skin, I don’t mean to suggest that I was soothed by this book, more that the words on its pages emboldened me. That they recognised me, they fortified me. To live as a woman is to exist with a constant simmering resentment bubbling under your skin; to see yourself reduced, to hear yourself remarked upon, to feel yourself assessed by a gaze you never invited; to pull yourself inwards, shrinking your body and your voice as a defence mechanism against a world that is sometimes too obvious in its disdain. But it is also to survive, to resist, to refuse. This is what I hope will stay with me, this is what I hope I will carry from The Natural Way of Things: that survival, that resistance, that refusal.

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journey to the bottom of the tbr pile: Miranda July/The First Bad Man

I’m new to Miranda July. Her writing has been on my radar for a while but it wasn’t until late last year that I finally added her debut novel, The First Bad Man, to my TBR. I’m glad I did. It’s an enthralling story - and I say that mostly because of my reaction to it. At times I found myself repulsed by the characters and yet I was also intrigued by them. Often I felt unsure who I was supposed to be cheering for, or if that was even something I was supposed to do? And yet I felt drawn into the tiny world of this book, into the insular lives of its characters. I couldn’t put it down. 

Cheryl Glickman, the protagonist of The First Bad Man, is both incredibly complex and strikingly simple. Unintentionally funny, she is a thinker, tumbling her world and the people in it through multiple levels of consideration - I can relate to the overthinking, and yet I’m still not quite sure if I actually like Cheryl. 

A manager at Open Palm, a women’s self-defence non-profit, Cheryl lives a life made up of rigid systems:

‘It doesn’t have a name - I call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple: 

Fewer dishes.’

Cheryl’s adherence to these systems reads like a defence mechanism against a world she seems ill-equipped to navigate, so when her life is disrupted by a handful of situations that later reveal themselves to be loosely linked, I can’t help but feel just a little sorry for her. These disruptions include Cheryl’s crush on a man twenty-two years her senior, Phillip Bettelheim, the connection she shares with a baby from her childhood she has christened Kubelko Bondy, who she often recognises in other babies and the psychosomatic globus hystericus that forms in her throat, forcing her to spit out the saliva that pools in her mouth. But the most significant disruption comes via the overwhelming - for Cheryl at least - Clee. The daughter of her bosses, Suzanne and Carl, Clee comes to stay with Cheryl, and it is the clashing of their characters that becomes the strongest tension of the story. A tension which takes a dramatic and unexpected turn when the two women begin to re-enact the scenes of Open Palm’s self-defence DVDs. 

What I find most fascinating about July’s work is that she is unafraid to draw these seemingly disastrous characters, characters who make mistakes and terrible choices, characters who frustrate you, who you’re sure you don’t like until you read the last page and realise that actually maybe you do. Her willingness to explore the fluidity of sexuality and desire is equally as compelling as her characterisation. 

Miranda July is a controversial figure. It seems you either love her or hate her (there are websites dedicated to the latter) and yet there is simply no doubting her accomplishments. Her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She has written, directed and starred in two films, The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know, the latter of which won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. And yet her work is often described as whimsical or twee. In her review of The First Bad Man for The New York Times, Lauren Groff discusses this:

‘The word feels unfair, a pejorative masquerading as a descriptor — possibly because the word “whimsy” comes from the noun “whim-wham,” meaning a trinket; possibly also because it carries a connotation of capriciousness. But when you apply the word to any kind of art, it implies that the art is decorative and incompletely thought-through. Not serious, by Jove! Also true: In literary fiction, male writers who use lightness and humor, who spin wildly in the space between one sentence and the next, who push against what’s expected, are described as “wry” or “satirical” or just plain “funny.” Women are bestowed a tiny, glittering bless-her-heart tiara of “whimsy.” Reflexive condescension absolves us from serious engagement. Miranda July is a woman, and a very serious writer who is also very funny. She’s challenging. Feed “whimsy” to the birds.’

Groff nails my feelings about whimsical in relation to The First Bad Man (or really any art produced by women). Because this is a serious book. Despite the seeming impossibility of its characters, underneath the layers of eccentricity this is a story about love. About our desire to be loved, about our desire to love. It’s a book that challenges our ideas of love, of what it can be and how it can look. Cheryl, for all her faults, is not afraid to love, to experiment, to explore. 

I was lucky enough to see Miranda July at the Melbourne Town Hall last month and there was something she said that stuck with me:

‘Until I made space for myself in the world, I felt like I was fighting everyday to be free.’

For the longest time I’ve struggled to call myself a writer, to own the term with any real conviction. My twitter bio still says ‘person who writes things’. I’m still not comfortable with calling myself a writer and while I am carving out that space I don’t feel there yet. I’m still fighting and maybe that pushing against my inability to claim the descriptor ‘writer’ is a part of my fight. 

It feels apt for Cheryl, too. So much of her existence on these pages feels like a struggle to find that space. Maybe that’s why I don’t think this book is whimsical; because that fight is something I identify strongly with, something I feel deep within my gut. Maybe the point is that the need to create a space for yourself is an experience keenly felt and lived by women. And when you paint July and her work, this work, as whimsical, you dismiss that experience. 

There is a complexity to The First Bad Man that demands contemplation; it requires you to let the characters get under your skin, let them chip away at these ideas of love and sexuality and the lives we create for ourselves. But it also requires you laugh. That’s a damn fine combination.

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journey to the bottom of the tbr pile: Robyn Davidson/No Fixed Address

‘In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation of the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one’s way to godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulatory of the Buddhist Kora; the Hajj. What could this ritual journeying be but symbolic, idealised versions of the foraging life? By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves,’ - Robyn Davidson

Last year, while laying on a beach in Spain, I devoured Robyn Davidson’s Tracks. The story of Davidson’s time in Alice Springs and her trek from the centre of the outback to the West Australian coast in the company of four camels and a dog, Tracks is beautifully composed and compelling. I’d been away from home for a few months by then, and despite the fact that the Australian outback is a completely unknown quantity for me, it served to both foster and sooth the feelings of homesickness that filled so much of my life at that moment.

I’m home now. Surrounded by the people that are the puzzle pieces of my life, but my appreciation for Davidson’s words hasn’t waned. So, when I saw her essay, No Fixed Address, it was a quick purchase. Originally published in the Quarterly Essay, it has been reproduced as part of a collection from Black Inc called short blacks. No Fixed Address is the type of essay you read quickly, consuming it on, say, a train ride - as I did. It’s the type of essay that leaves you wondering about things bigger and greater than what you do on a day-to-day level, it’s the type of essay that encourages you to think about the world we’ve created for ourselves and if maybe, just maybe, there are better ways of doing things, of living, of existing. 

No Fixed Address is a rumination on the nomadic lifestyle, its disappearance and what modern society can learn from a less settled existence. Davidson herself lives a somewhat nomadic life, travelling all over the world and having homes in London, Sydney and India. And while she accepts that a return to truly nomadic lifestyles is simply not possible:

‘There can be no return to previous modes of living, no retreat to the traditional as a way of shoring up identity, or denying rationality and the benefits of science. Such retrogression only lands us in kitsch.’ 

Davidson argues that our settling, our rejection of traditional nomadic lifestyles and embracing of agriculture profoundly changed us, that we became, ‘strangers in a strange land,’ and the act of wandering - the central idea of the nomadic lifestyle - ‘took on the quality of banishment.’

Wandering as banishment seems incredibly apt. Too often embracing travel over establishing a career is derided as irresponsible, as wasteful. Throwing in decent jobs, packing up lives, disappearing over the horizon - these are things we’re discouraged from doing outside the socially accepted window for youthful adventure.

Last year as I attempted to create something of a life for myself on the other side of the world, my thoughts often drifted to the idea of home, of who we were outside of the familiar, of what it is that identifies us or that we identify with. Davidson argues that: 

‘The political constructs of homeland, nationhood, patriotism came into being because of a yearning to belong to a spiritual geography.’

It’s sentence that struck me as profoundly true, I stopped reading for a moment to digest it. And I wonder if what ails our society so much is the lack of spiritual geography. 

‘We move through the world faster and faster, looking at it, but not being in it. And the more mobile we become, the less sense we have of being sensually enmeshed with our world and interdependent with, responsible for, others.’

Davidson attempts to flesh out the spiritual geography as felt and experienced by Indigenous Australians, she ventures a definition of the Dreaming, but acknowledges her own failings:

‘No matter how much I read about the Dreaming, the confidence that I understand it never quite takes root in my mind…Each time I attempt it (to explain it), I have to feel my way into it again, and I am never sure of my ground.’

It is here, in Davidson’s discussion of the Dreaming and of the dispossession of Indigenous Australians that the essay grated slightly. There is language that, while part of the lexicon in Davidson’s youth, is offensive today. And I must admit to feeling uncomfortable with a white Australian explaining and using the culture of Aboriginal people to further a concept, even if I agree with many of her ideas and points about the nomadic life and our modern world. It’s an issue I personally wrestle with. I’m adamant that the responsibility to learn rests with non-Indigenous Australians, and yet I’m concerned that these stories are too often told by non-Indigenous Australians. 

That said, the story of the nomadic life is Davidson’s. It’s a life she lives, has lived - her 2700km trek across the Australian desert, her time with the Rabari people in India - and yet her thoughts on the many ways we have veered away from this life are not romanticised, she is not an idealist (she acknowledges her detractors will undoubtedly label her as such), instead she is mostly pragmatic, though certainly optimistic for world in which the there could be some symbiosis between the nomad and the modern society:

‘But there might be ways into previous kinds of thinking. Pilgrimages, let’s says, to newly imagined territories where, instead of arrogantly dismissing the traditional as useless to modernity, the best of each might be integrated.’

It’s a sentiment that I can wholeheartedly agree with. There is much for us to learn from the past. No Fixed Address provides some fuel for, at least, more significant thinking on these ideas.

---

Read about my journey to the bottom of the tbr pile here

two months, failure, etc.

Today marks two months since I left home. Since I boarded a plane and shifted myself to the other side of the world. For what? For something I couldn't find at home. For an adventure, one that felt so incredibly necessary. And yet, if I'm honest, the past two months have been characterised by intense emotional experiences that have tested everything I thought I knew about myself and this decision that I made.

Nothing good is easy. We appreciate things more when it takes a little something of us to get where we want to be. Only, sometimes you underestimate how much you have to give, how much of yourself you have to open up to get to that good. And sometimes, as you find these little pieces of yourself falling away, you wonder if the sacrifice is worth it. If the good is enough to compensate you for the loss.

They're questions I can't answer yet. They're questions I may never be able to answer. Maybe the point is in asking them at all, with no promise of an answer. Like moving to the other side of the world, with no promise of anything at all.

It's early summer in London right now and the sun rises before 5am. I lay in the single bed of my temporary home and stare our the window, thinking thoughts. I find myself musing like that quite often, moments when I'm alone and the city is spinning past me and I can stare out a window or across a street or straight ahead and just let my mind go. And often, more often than not, I find myself circling back to one theme. Failure.

I found the following quote on Brainpickings, my go-to site for, well, just about everything. And it feels quite pertinent right now. 

'The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else - a learning experience a trial, a reinvention - no longer the static concept of failure' - Arts Advocate Sarah Lewis, in her book The Ride: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Before I left for London, a work colleague told me not to be afraid of failure. But, it's difficult to be afraid of something that you can't quantify. Something you cannot accurately describe. After all, what is failure? I've never been able to articulate exactly why I'm here, so what exactly does it mean to fail?

And if Sarah Lewis is right, it doesn't matter anyway. Because what might feel like a failure today, will be an experience tomorrow. 

kb xx

a week, a roller coaster

A week is a long time. And yet, no time at all. I've been in London for a week now. And I've found myself cycling through some intense emotional experiences. I'm calling it my emotional roller coaster. Up and down and up again. It's a strange thing, but not an unexpected thing. 

Moving your life halfway around the world, far far away from family and friends, from the people that are significant pieces in the puzzle of your life, how can that not be an intense emotional experience? How can that not split you open, spilling nagging feelings of doubt and fear and sadness into the world around you? 

The very act of separation feels like the end of something. Like something irreversibly changed. And yet being in London feels like a beginning, an important and real beginning. I wrote about beginnings here. I thought that one thing had to end for another to begin, but now I'm not so sure. Why can't things go on simultaneously? Why can't I be here and there, too? 

And so I ride my roller coaster and I feel myself splitting open, spilling those feelings of doubt and fear and sadness - and hope and desire and something that might be happiness - onto the page. I'm scrawling the thoughts as they come to the surface with a blue pen on the lined pages of my composition book. 

I wonder if it is there, amongst the scratchings of my pen, the loops of my letters, the messy and seemingly unintelligible scrawl that is my handwriting, that I can find a balance to the wildness and unpredictability of this space I'm in. If, in amongst the words, I can find what I'm here for. 

kb xx

endings and beginnings

One of my cacti is dead. Well, dying at least. Its stem has lost the vibrant green of its youth and is now dried and twisted. I noticed it this morning as I pulled my bedroom curtains open for what will be the second last time. It caught me a little by surprise, as death is wont to do. And yet, the sadness is permeated by something else. Something that feels just a little hopeful. 

Does one thing have to end before another can begin? Maybe. In a way it feels almost necessary. If nothing ever ended, how would we ever begin something else? 

A little over twenty-four hours from now I’ll be boarding a plane for perhaps the biggest beginning of my life - save the initial one perhaps - and the cactus and its untimely demise feels strangle poetic. 

The past few months I’ve had a handful of dreams that featured snakes quite prominently. The dreams were vivid and I would wake from them and instantly push a mental rewind button to play them back as I lay in bed. Some cursory research revealed dreams about snakes can indicate change or transition.

The demise of the cactus, the appearance of the transition snakes - strange indicators of fate?

Relying on fate is nothing new for me. It’s the basis of my wardrobe and it’s served me well. Perhaps that’s why I’m comfortable taking the cactus and the dreams of snakes as signs from the universe that this decision to take my life from its comfortable space right here and drop it into one of the biggest cities in the world is the right one. That getting on that plane tomorrow night is the best choice for me right now. 

I am of course overflowing with feels that I cannot quite reconcile. Happiness and sadness, excitement and fear. Doubt, great big doubt. And yet, in part I know because of the snakes and now because of the cactus, I must get on that plane. I must do this. I can’t stay here. 

This part of my life is ending, this chapter in this safe and warm and comfortable environment is coming to a close. But there will be more chapters. Tomorrow marks the opening sentences of the newest, and so despite (or perhaps because of) the chaos of my current emotional state I will get on that plane tomorrow night and I will begin my new chapter. 

Wish me luck!

kb xx

comfort is a double edged sword

I’ve been trying to narrow down a list of possible suburbs to live in using a tube map from 2008 - the first time and only time I’ve been to London. On the back of the map is an advertisement for Ikea: ‘Travel is a means to an end. Home.’

I wonder if that’s really why we travel. If the reason we take ourselves out of the comfortable and force ourselves into the uncomfortable is to attempt to discover what home really is. 

For most of us home is more accident than careful planning. Home for me right now is the house my parents built in a smallish country town about an hour from Melbourne. It’s the place I feel most comfortable in the world. It’s the place I’ve lived most of my days in. It’s the place I’m leaving in a  bit under two months. 

Comfort is a double edge sword. Being comfortable equates to feeling safe, secure, generally happy. It’s a nice feeling, a warm one. One many of us spend years trying to find. But it’s also the reason why I find myself distracted, the reason why I leave projects untouched for months, why I don’t send pitches, why I wile away hours watching old episodes of Grand Designs or downloading old books from Project Gutenberg. Being comfortable can often be more of a hindrance than a help. Being comfortable makes it easy to not move, to not challenge yourself, to sit yourself in the safe, secure and generally happy space and just be. 

When I try to peer under my own skin, to scrape away at my desire to take myself out of this comfortable space I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in, the truth feels a little like freshly squeezed lemon juice on a paper cut. It stings. 

The truth is, it’s easy for me to not do the work, it’s easy for me to not challenge myself, to not put myself in positions that guarantee nothing but an almost certain failure. It’s easy to not do those things when you’re comfortable. 

I don’t think that Ikea advertisement is true for me. I’m not travelling to find home. Home is already established. But home is too comfortable, too easy. I’m travelling to find those hard, uncomfortable spaces. I’m travelling to fall over an edge not knowing what lays beneath me. 

I’m travelling because sometimes the only way to see if you’re good enough is to throw yourself into a deep pool, fully clothed, and see if you sink or swim. 

kb xx

forever a rookie

I stopped being a teenager nearly a decade ago. I am currently very much ensconced in the late-twenties age bracket. Which feels increasingly odd. It is a space in which I sometimes I feel like an outsider, removed from a life and lifestyle that doesn't fit. This feeling becomes stronger when I glance around at many of my contemporaries: long-term relationships, marriage, children, houses and mortgages dominate their landscapes. 

Society tells us that as we get older we're supposed to possess a greater understanding of who we are. We're supposed to know what it is we want and where we want to be, we're supposed to be confident and assured and articulate. We're supposed to be all these things we associate with adulthood. We're not supposed to be brimming with self-doubt, we're not supposed to be unsure of our place in the world, we're not supposed to be still figuring stuff out as we look down the barrel of thirty. But you know what, some of us are. 

I am. And I think it's why I love Rookie so much. 

Ostensibly aimed at teenage girls, there is something about the ethos of the site and the associated yearbook that feels like a welcoming embrace, despite the fact that I fall so far outside the intended audience. 

It's a space where it's ok to be unsure, to have doubts, to have questions. 

Perhaps a lot of that comes down to its founder, Tavi Gevinson, who while surely the most articulate and considered teenager you've ever encountered is still just that: a teenager. And with that teenage-hood comes the wrestling of the self as you attempt to find a place for yourself in a world that sometimes doesn't want to let you in. 

Much is made of the desire to describe something as serious writing, to place it above all other work, to point to it as the peak of the human consciousness poured out onto the page - or a website, it is 2015 after all. Generally we, to our own detriment, posit the work of adults, particularly white cis male ones, as this beacon, this peak, we must all aim for. But in doing so, we miss brilliance and vigour and enthusiastic interpretations of the world, we miss places like Rookie. 

We miss pieces like this one 'How To Deal When You're Caught Masturbating' and this on making friends, pertinent given my impending move. And we miss all of these videos, touching, heartfelt and brimming with actual real world advice, Ask A Grown Woman/Man is Rookie gold. And Tavi's monthly editors letters, a curious mix of personal and cultural that often just say shit that is kind of perfect, take this tidbit from this months letter: 

'I am wary of coming off as obnoxious or opinionated or in possession of any personality whatsoever. I don’t want to make other people feel uncomfortable or suffocated or imposed upon. But a full realization of this goal looks like: a chunk of air in a human-shaped outline formed by dust particles. It feels like: sinking into a La-Z-Boy that is not even that comfortable, then slowly folding into its brown flannel buttcrack and dispensing the occasional self-deprecating joke until I have vanished completely.'

The thing is, this writing is serious, in the way that serious means different things to different people. I think talking about sex and masturbation, particularly to young girls, is serious and something that doesn't happen enough. I think adults contemplating friendship, like teenagers do, is serious and something that doesn't happen often enough. I think young women too often become that chunk of air, too often sink into that La-Z-Boy, and we don't take that seriously enough. But serious doesn't have to mean staid, serious doesn't have to mean devoid of humour, serious doesn't have to mean without feeling and emotion. 

As I approach thirty, I don't see my appreciation for Rookie waning. Perhaps, if anything, as I'm about to throw myself headlong into some serious life upheaval, a safe and warm and reassuring space will be what I'll need more than ever. 

kb xx

one day, one sentence

Sleep in.

Wake up, finally. Curse yourself for sleeping in. Get up, have a shower and get dressed.

Make breakfast. Make a mug of tea. Eat and drink.

Sit outside to enjoy morning sunshine, ensuring daily does of vitamin D.

Sit down at desk.

Get up to make another cup of tea.

Sit back down at desk.

Check email.

Check Twitter.

And Facebook.

And Instagram.

Fine yourself typing youtube into browser. Watch episode of Grand Designs.

Open current project. Fiddle with pens. Realise desk is atrocious. Spend half an hour cleaning and tidying.

Open project. Decide you need tea, go make a cup of tea.

Check email.

Stare out the window for five minutes.

Google tips to counter procrastination. Read article on procrastination.

Wander down the rabbit hole of the internet. Lose an hour.

Watch another episode of Grand Designs.

Make lunch. And a fresh mug of tea. Eat. And drink.

Check Twitter.

And Facebook.

And Instagram.

Check email.

Open current project. Make some notes, write three sentences. Delete two.

Stare out the window.

Wonder if you can get those travel bags you want on eBay. Go to eBay.

Open project. Close project.

Sit at desk pondering direction of life.

Decide you need exercise: healthy body, healthy mind. Go for a walk.

Get home. Have a shower.

Check Twitter.

Check email.

Make a fresh mug of tea.

Sit at desk. Open project. Write one sentence. Delete it.

Stare into mug, watch the tea leaves floating at the bottom.

Google reading tea leaves. Discover it's called Tasseography. Wonder if you could write something about that.

Check Twitter.

Check email.

Look at open project. Feel guilty.

Close project.

Make dinner. And a fresh mug of tea. Eat. And drink.

Watch an episode of Grand Designs. Wonder if you could write something about that.

Read three short stories.

Check Twitter.

Check email.

Scroll through Instagram. Lose one hour of your life.

Sleep.


Total written for the day: One sentence. (And this, I guess)

kb xx

the pursuit of perfection

Two years ago I bought the most delicious fabric. A shiny burgundy with a gold and white paisley design swirling across it. Delicious. My plans for it involved a simple bomber jacket, something easy and casual wrought in the most detailed and intricate fabric I could find - it felt like the perfect reflection of my sartorial leanings. Last weekend I finally cut that fabric. I pinned the deftly trimmed pattern to it and carefully snipped out the pieces for the jacket it had always been intended for. As I cut, first the pattern pieces and then the fabric, it occurred to me how similar my sewing is to my writing. 

In a conversation with a writer friend recently we mused on the pursuit of perfection, the fear that filled us both that our words could not fall perfectly from our pens. And how this fear stopped us from writing. We were filled with ideas, with ways we wanted to tell our stories and yet this pursuit of some idealised version of perfection acted like a obstacle we lacked the skills to pass. If it cannot be perfect, it cannot be written. Madness, folly; and yet, surely we are not alone?

Sewing, like writing, is an art. The only difference is that the pieces that must come together, the ones that must be joined by careful stitch after careful stitch, are clearly identified. Unlike writing, sewing provides instructions, pictures, clearly outlined courses of action; pin this to here, stitch that to this, trim here and press that. But, still, this pursuit of perfection permeates my sewing, too.

My sewing, like my writing, is constantly second guessed. I question my own skills, my ability to sew through a problem, to fix a mistake, my comprehension of a pattern and its instructions. I wonder every time I reach for my pins and my scissors and my sewing machine if it is all a pointless exercise in nothingness; if the time spent head bent over a machine, pins held in my mouth with pursed lips, eyes focussed intently on the task at hand, is time wasted because surely I will never be able to create anything like the picture in my head. Surely I will never be able to create something perfect. 

And yet, I still sew. I still write (as evidenced by this space). Aristotle said that taking pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. So perhaps the point is to want to sew, to want to write, more than that to thoroughly enjoy the process. To take pleasure in a nicely stitched and pressed seam or a handful of words that smoothly push against one another.

Perhaps the how in overcoming the fear is simply doing. With every stitch, with every word, with every project that nears its end, we realise that the mistakes we so desperately do not want to make, are only visible to ourselves. And not just that, but that it is these very mistakes that makes our work uniquely ours.

Perhaps it's both? 

I've decided that the jacket I imagined two years ago in that delicious burgundy paisley fabric must come overseas with me. I've decided that despite my doubts, despite the hopeless pursuit of perfection, this jacket will get on the plane with me in April. I'm sure there will be mistakes, stitches in the wrong place, problems masked with the adeptness of a sewer accustomed to doing so; but, like the sentences I write, they will be noticeable only to me and they will be exactly what makes it unique to me.

kb xx

89 days

3.17 months

12.71 weeks

89 days

The closer I get to leaving, the further I feel from ready. What is that about? The abstract is most certainly a landscape now. The details become clearer every day, the reality more potent.

I wondered about cold feet. And turned to the internet. And Italian proverb? American writer Stephen Crane's 1896 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets? Change is daunting, not least because routine is comforting, but it's also really ridiculously exciting, too. Well, at least when it's planned. 

2136 hours

128,160 minutes

Too many seconds

Time seems like such an arbitrary measurement sometimes. Because it feels so strange sometimes, it doesn't make sense: too quick, too slow, too much, not enough. 

There is so much I have to do before I go. And yet I want to really enjoy these last few weeks. I want to soak up the warm Australian sun as summer rolls on. I want to imprint the sound of the cockies as they settle in for the night in the pine trees the border the boundary of my backyard. I want to lay in my bed and watch the sky change colour as the sun rises. I want to create new memories with the people that matter, ones that will stick. 

And yet it's not like I'm going away forever; like I'm catching that one-way flight to Mars and will never return. It's a strange contradiction of thought and feelings that are running through my mind. 

89 days. It's nothing and everything. 

kb xx

goals, not resolutions

I've never been one to make new years resolutions. They've always felt arbitrary and pointless - their timing probably contributes to most of that. Why do we wait for this one specific day to make change? Or, at least, to resolve to make change. 

Goals, however, I like. 

Especially ones that are in some way measurable, ones that are specific enough that they don't allow any wiggle room. Next year is going to be a significant year for me. I'll be finalising my dual citizenship and not long after that taking my shiny new EU passport overseas. I'll be moving halfway across the world, thousands of miles away from everything that is familiar and comfortable and easy. I'll be stepping far outside my comfort zone, a concept that is simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. Seems as good a time as any to set myself some goals that also push me outside that comfort zone. 

As any good goal-setter knows, writing yourself a list and tacking it to your wall is one thing. Publicly announcing said goals is a whole other kettle of fish. Hence, I wasn't sure I wanted to actually publish this. I mean, what if I fail miserably and achieve nothing next year? What if all my abstract non-concrete plans disintegrate around me and I find myself slinking home with my theoretical tail between me legs?

Sylvia Plath said the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt, so I guess it's all fodder for the work, right?

In that, somewhat, optimistic spirit, on this the last day in 2014, I'm going to list a couple of my writerly goals for 2015.

- Finish my tbr pile before I leave for London: there are probably about twenty physical books to be read before I hop that plane for Europe. Maybe it's about tying up loose ends, I'm not sure but this feels like a really important thing to do. It's doable - I'm sure.

- Work on some strategies for organising my work: that is organising my completed work, in progress work and random snippets of thoughts and ideas into a system that at least looks tidy from the outside. (Open to ideas and suggestions from far more organised folk than me!)

- Experiment more with form: lyrical essays, the merging of creative narrative and journalism, poetry, micro and flash fiction. If you're going to push yourself, push yourself as far as you can, right? There are so many styles and genres that I feel I've yet to fully explore. And considering my impending adventure, it feels like exactly the right time to do it.

- Submit my work to journals/magazines/sites: if a writer writes and no-one sees their words, are they still a writer? Maybe. For me, part of the joy of writing is sharing it with others and to do that I need to put my work into the world. I need to open my work, and myself, up to critique and questioning and criticism. And that is a scary proposition. Rejection is a real, and sometimes horrible, thing. But rejection is countered by just one person, just one, telling you they liked or loved or understood or appreciated what you wrote.

I published my first piece outside of this blog only a few short weeks ago (this on the idea of two literary families in light of my soon-to-be dual citizenship for Writers Bloc, in case you were wondering) and there is no doubt there is some connection between that moment and my growing feeling that I'm ready to be more open with my work. In an email to a good friend a few weeks ago I wrote about how the publication of that piece felt like a thumbs up from the universe; like fate giving me a not-so-subtle shove towards my future. 

As real as rejection is, doubt is much more tangible (in that way something completely intangible can be tangible) for me. But the only way to counter that doubt is by pushing my work into the world. I guess I'm starting that not only with the Writers Bloc piece but also with pushing these goals into the world.  

I have more writerly goals than those listed above, but I'm going to keep those to myself. Sometimes it's good to keep a little something under wraps, close to your skin and secret from the big, bad world.

So here's to a new year, to reading that tbr pile, getting organised, experimenting and pushing back against the self-doubt. Here's to 2015. 

kb xx

my favourite words of 2014

I wasn't going to do one of these posts. Mostly because they are so ubiquitous this time of year. And you know I lean away from the zeitgeist more often that I lean in. 

But, I guess start - or in this case end - as you mean to go on and seeing as I intend for 2015 to be the year of words, specifically my own, I figure ending this year with some of my favourite words from others is apt. 

I don't think I read an especially inordinate amount of books this year. But when I started compiling this list it occurred to me that I'd read a number of books that I genuinely loved for so many different reasons. Books that I feel will stay with me. I've written before about my disparate style of reading: from fiction to non-fiction across genres and separated sometimes by decades. And as I worked on this post it became clear that the books that stood out for me this year don't fit into a style. They aren't of a type or a specific literary area. They are different, in some cases remarkably so. Nonetheless, I loved them.

In no particular order, except maybe for the order I spotted them in my bookshelf, my favourite words of 2014:

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

A dystopian novel set in a United States that has been taken over by a totalitarian Christian theocracy in which women and their rights are severely oppressed. Does this one need explanation? Probably only why it took me so long to read it. 2014 really has been the year of Margaret Atwood for me, I've read a little of her work, added much more to my list of books to read, and fell more in love with the way she writes. 

Men Explain Things To Me, Rebecca Solnit (2014)

After only discovering Rebecca Solnit, the creator of the term 'mansplain', in the latter half of the year, I found myself searching out her work online and bought this collection of essays as a starting point. Featuring seven distinct essays, from the title essay to pieces on Virginia Woolf, doubt and ambiguity, violence against women and marriage equality, Men Explain Things to Me has quickly become a feminist touchstone. Which is undoubtably due to Solnit's writing, a style that merges narrative and journalistic reporting incredibly successfully. 

I Heard The Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven (1967)

A young vicar, with a terminal illness, is sent to an Indigenous parish in British Columbia where he forges genuine trusting and loving relationships with the residents. One of my university tutors recommended this book to me. While it's not an overly long story, I read it from cover to cover in one night and as I closed the last page I was crying. Margaret Craven writes in such a beautiful way, I only wish she'd written a hundred novels. I could read this story constantly for the rest of my days and be perfectly happy. 

Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline (2012)

Fashion has always been an important subject for me. But in the last couple of years the sustainability of the industry and its impact on people and the environment has become a larger part of the story. I read this book very early in the year and it more than likely had some impact on the changes I've made in my sartorial habits. Cline investigates the fast fashion industry from the high street retailers to the manufacturers in China and Bangladesh, to the impact of cheap fashion on the second hand clothing industry. The subtitle is The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, which is fairly self-explanatory. 

I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith (1949)
A coming-of-age story of a young woman from an eccentric English family living in gentile poverty in a broken down castle. I discovered this lovely gem of a story though a blog I read somewhat semi regularly. If it was published today it would be unashamedly marketed as YA, a genre that didn't exist in 1949 when it was originally published. Regardless, it's a wonderful read with complicated, and often humorous, characters. 

The Journalist and The Murderer, Janet Malcolm (1989)

After doing a lot of dry journalistic ethics study this year, Janet Malcolm's seminal work on the subject was a refreshing and thought provoking read. The journalist in the title is Joe McGinniss and the murderer Dr. Jeffrey McDonald and the book examines their relationship, McGinniss's resulting book and where the morals and ethics of journalism lie.

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)

As an entry to the work of Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking is so good. An account of the year following the death of Didion's husband, a year in which her daughter faced her own serious medical issues, there is much in the way Didion works through the death of her husband that was at times confronting and at others so tender. 

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

I bought this book after seeing Elizabeth Kolbert at the Melbourne Writers Festival. And it floored me so many times. The book covers the phenomena of mass extinctions and posits that we are in the middle of a sixth extinction. Kolbert knows the science, that is clear, and has a way of putting it together that makes a potentially difficult subject digestible for the layperson. 

A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride (2013)

I'm ending with A Girl because it is the book of 2014 for me. I wrote about it a few weeks ago and it continues to linger. It was difficult to read, hard and rough and almost like it was pushing you away, but it was and is beautiful, too. I borrowed it from the library, so I'll be buying myself a copy in the new year. This one needs to come overseas with me. 

So, that's my list. All women, which I've only just realised and wasn't something I'd planned, but I'll embrace it anyway. 

kb xx

a hundred days

It is a hundred days until I fly out to London. A hundred days until whatever this is that I’m doing begins. 

I wanted to write a post about it. About my move overseas and about the plethora of emotions that are along for the ride: the excitement, the sadness, the fear. About how all these things are spinning around me and crashing into each other and how strange it all is. 

But all I can think about is how a hundred days is really not a long time. 

It’s a hundred sunrises and a hundred sunsets. At least as many hot showers in my own shower with the water pressure and temperature set perfectly (is it strange to think you’ll miss a shower?). A hundred nights in my own bed. A hundred nights in my family home. A hundred nights in my home town. A hundred nights laying awake at night wondering if I'm doing the right thing. 

A hundred days is nothing. Two thousand four hundred hours. One hundred and forty-four thousand minutes. Eight million, six hundred and forty thousand seconds. Nothing. 

Amongst the excitement and the fear is a restlessness that has only reared its head in the last few days. Which I guess makes sense, this is generally a time when people feel restless for something different, something new. A new year, a fresh start. A chance to get right what we’ve been getting wrong. 

Except my restlessness feels a little different. It’s almost like these last hundred days are a test. A test of my will to do this, my desire for exploration and change and a life I cannot find here, my strength to do this even when I’m not sure I can. Because as the day draws closer it becomes clearer exactly what I’m leaving by going. Of all the things that form the kaleidoscope of my life, a great many are here in this wide brown land. And in a hundred days I’ll be very very far away from them. 

They say that familiarity breeds contempt and I’m sure there is truth in that. But familiarity breeds other things too. And sometimes the familiar is the closest thing you can have to knowing who you are. 

Despite the restlessness I find myself trying to savour moments. Trying to capture things and fold them up and put them somewhere where I’m sure I won’t lose them. 

Those warm Australian summer nights that are just beginning to appear in my part of the world. Listening to the sounds of the cockies that live in the pine trees that mark the back border of my parents property as they settle in for the evening. The smile that dances across my nieces face, the laughter that spills from my nephew, the smell of home, the noise of my family - smells and sights and sounds I'm trying to burn into my memory. All these pieces of my life that are so familiar will, in a few short months, be replaced with so much that is not. 

A friend told me recently that many of these things, and even some of the people in them, will recede once I leave. And that this happens more easily that one could anticipate. I’m just not sure I’m ready for that. Yes, there are parts of my life that I would happily see recede, to a point where they become ornaments in a past not worthy of examination. But there are parts of my life that I feel the urge to hold on to tightly. Things I don’t want to recede. 

I wasn’t sure I was ready to write this. The past few hours have been spent writing and deleting and writing and deleting. And thinking about those familiar things receding, even when I don’t want them too. And wondering if maybe the restlessness is a way to ignore the sadness that is increasingly a part of my emotional response to moving. Sadness for the people that mean the most and the way I won’t be a part of the landscape of their everyday existence. The way I will recede from them. 

And then I think about spending time in Ireland and seeing family in England and friends in Scotland and being so close to Berlin and Barcelona and Prague. And all the newness and exploration and adventure that awaits. I think about how important this is to me, how so much of the past few years feels like preparation for this. And suddenly a hundred days feels like forever. 

Someone asked me the other day what my plan was. I haven’t really figured that out. I have some abstract notions, some ideas about the first few weeks and maybe some possibilities about the months that follow. But it’s really quite fluid. There is every chance I’ll be back in a few months, that I’ll fail miserably at whatever it is I’m trying to do and come home. And there is every chance this is it. I don't know and I think that's a big part of both the excitement and the fear. I just don't know. 

What I do know is tomorrow will be ninety-nine days.

kb xx